Shooting Victoria (69 page)

Before both Jubilees, Victoria underwent the same emotional turbulence she had before the 1872 thanksgiving procession: with an apprehension growing to trepidation at the prospect of plunging into the enormous crowds drew near. And then she experienced them with an ecstatic joy and a great sense of oneness with her people. “A never-to-be-forgotten day,” she wrote on Diamond Jubilee Day, 22 June 1897. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets.… The crowds were quite undescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching. The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.”

She was right: no one in London had ever met with such an ovation. Certainly no monarch before her had experienced anything like the sheer popular jubilation of 1851, or 1872, 1887, 1897—and in 1900, the last year of her life, when in March Victoria went forth
in her carriage to celebrate the relief of the South African city of Ladysmith. “Everywhere,” Victoria wrote, “the same enormous crowds and incessant demonstrations of enthusiasm; if possible, even beyond that of the two Jubilees.” That night, she stood before a window in Buckingham Palace with a light placed behind her, so the crowds could see and cheer her. Lord Rosebery, her Prime Minister five years before, was deeply impressed by her actions, writing to her:

I saw your Majesty three times in the streets and in the Park; and my overpowering feeling was “What a glorious privilege to be able to make millions so happy!” No one who saw London then will ever forget it, or will cease to pray for the prolongation of your Majesty's life, and of your Majesty's priceless and unceasing exertions for your Empire.

Victoria lived for eight months after that. In those months, her eldest son was shot at, and her second son, Alfred, died. In December she was able to make the trip by train and royal yacht one more time to Osborne; there, she lived through one more Christmas, made miserable by the death of one of her favorite ladies, Jane Churchill; there she saw in the new century, dictating to a granddaughter one of her last journal entries: “Another year begun, and I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly.” And there she weakened and took to her deathbed, flickering in and out of consciousness, and probably never realizing on 19 January that she had become the oldest as well as the longest-reigning monarch of Britain.
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Her family gathered around her, in a tableau similar to Albert's death nearly forty years before. On the evening of 22 January it was clear that the end was coming. Her
children each stood before her, identifying themselves and giving their good-byes. She died in the arms of her grandson Kaiser Wil-helm, “a look of radiance on her face.” Her oldest son, now King Edward, closed her eyes, and broke down.

She made one more procession—more subdued than any, but also more fully attended: the journey of her body, across the Solent and to London, past a million of her subjects in the metropolis, all of them, for once, eerily silent, to Paddington Station and Windsor and the funeral at St. George's Chapel—and then to Frogmore, and to silence by the side of her husband.

To Victoria's successors, and to the British people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the popular bond between monarch and public, and the primacy of that popular bond to the legitimacy of the monarchy, seems natural and timeless, a part of the very definition of monarchy, codified and sanctified by royal ceremonies that themselves seem timeless. But these ceremonies are not at all timeless. The royal weddings, the Jubilees, the walkabouts and openings, the triumphal appearances upon the royal balcony, are Victorian creations. And the concept that underlies them, the yoking of royal legitimacy and popular will, is a Victorian concept as well—or, to put it more clearly, is Queen Victoria's concept—a redefinition of monarchy that became her life's work. Though Victoria throughout her life feared public appearances, she steeled herself to make them. Though as she grew older she grew more anxious about the hubbub of London and the shot of the next assailant, she continued to ride out, in open carriages, to accept and to return the goodwill of the people. She was helped in redefining the monarchy by John Conroy, who while hateful to her in every other way, did teach her the valuable lesson: the fundamental importance of popular acclaim. She was helped greatly by her beloved Albert, a foreigner who nevertheless understood instinctively and intellectually the importance of his wife's bond with the people, and devoted his life to promoting it, subsuming himself in her elevation. She was helped by her prime ministers—by Peel
and Russell and Disraeli and Salisbury and Gladstone—especially by Gladstone—all of whom did their part to answer “the royalty question” in a way beneficial to the institution. And she was greatly helped—more greatly than they would ever know, and than she would ever admit—by her seven assailants, who in deciding to take a pop at the Queen had no intention whatsoever to strengthen the British monarchy, but who nevertheless gave Victoria seven golden opportunities to do exactly that.

All seven of Victoria's assailants, once they had satisfied their “diseased craving” for notoriety and had their few days in the public spotlight, quickly faded from public attention. Of the seven, only one—Arthur O'Connor—made any sort of attempt to return to it. O'Connor's arrest at Buckingham Palace in 1874, after two years' dissatisfaction in Sydney and obscurity in London, went unnoticed by most, and was less an attempt to regain notoriety and more a successful cry for medical help. With this qualified exception, Victoria's seven assailants shunned public attention; they scattered across England and Australia, or more accurately, were scattered by her Majesty's government, which used every means it could to distance them from their queen. All seven lived on for many years after their attempts. Several lived lives of quiet contentment, suggesting that the harsh psychiatric and penal regimens they endured had a therapeutic and rehabilitative effect. Others, however, suffered until the ends of their lives, in confinement, and in quiet—or not so quiet—desperation.

Edward Oxford, though deemed insane by the court, was considered sane by the doctors at Bethlem from the moment he entered the place, and every medical professional with whom he came in contact over the next twenty-seven years concurred. “Reported sane since his reception,” his Bethlem case notes state, that opinion restated emphatically with the same entry repeated through the years: “no change.” Contrary to the public perception that Oxford had beat the system and procured himself a life of ease
and contentment, Oxford found Bethlem excruciating. He deserved a horse-whipping for his actions, he told a reporter in 1850, not indefinite imprisonment. Nevertheless, no one ever put sane confinement in an insane asylum to better use. Bethlem became his university, and in an obsessive course of study he became fluent in French, German, and Italian. He learned some Spanish, Latin, and Greek as well. He drew; he wrote poetry, his one surviving poem consoling Victoria on the death of the Prince Consort. He outshone his fellow patients in everything he undertook: at knitting gloves, at chess and draughts—and as a painter. He developed in particular great skill in graining, or in simulating wood-grain and marble-lines with paint. When, in 1864, Broadmoor Hospital replaced Bethlem as the national repository for the criminally insane, Oxford was one of the very last to make the trip there. He was from the start “the most orderly, most useful, and most trusted of all the inmates” there; his painting skills were in constant demand and allowed him in time to accumulate £50 or £60. Soon after he arrived at Broadmoor, his doctors attempted to correct the anomaly of a sane man in a lunatic asylum, pleading with the government that he be released. In 1864 the government refused to listen, but in 1867 Home Secretary Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy reviewed Oxford's record and made him a deal: Oxford could go free if he moved to one of her Majesty's colonies and agreed never to return to England. Oxford agreed, knowing exactly where he wanted to go—Melburne, Victoria, Australia. His decision was motivated not because the place yoked together the names of the queen he had shot at and her prime minister at the time, but because the place had over the years become familiar to him. Twenty-four years earlier, George Henry Haydon had come to Bethlem as steward, and Oxford quickly discovered in him a friend. Haydon was Oxford's own age, and as a young man had explored and then published an account of that part of southeast Australia then known as
Australia Felix
, happy Australia, and later known as the area about Melbourne, Victoria. He often lectured to the patients and spoke to Oxford
about the place;
Australia Felix
became symbolic to Oxford as a place of free men.

In November 1867, then, Oxford, adopting the simple and telling alias of John Freeman,
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left Broadmoor in the company of an attendant, took a train to Plymouth, and alone boarded the
Suffolk
, which the next March landed at Melbourne. “Whatever has occurred in the past,” he wrote to Haydon in leaving England, “in the future no man shall say I am unworthy of the name of an Englishman.”

He was as good as his word. Oxford took up as a painter and grainer and became fully engaged in Melbourne's literary community. He was amused to discover that people in Melbourne thought him “cosmopolitan” because of his London origins. He joined and became vice president of the West Melbourne Mutual Improvement Society. He undertook investigative forays into the Melbourne underworld—sometimes in disguise—and published his observations in Melbourne's leading newspaper. He joined the congregation of Melbourne's oldest Anglican church and served for several years as its churchwarden. In 1881 he married a well-off widow and became a stepfather. And in 1888, the year of an International Exhibition in Melbourne, he found a publisher in London for his sketches,
Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life
. He sent a copy of the book to Haydon, hoping with Haydon's help to pursue a full-blown literary career with the publications of stories and his memoirs. “There are many old friends … in England,” he wrote to Haydon, “who would be pleased to hear of me again; and I should like a certain illustrious lady to know that one who was a foolish boy half a century ago, is now a respectable, & respected, member of society.” Nothing, however, came of his plans, and the true identity of John Freeman remained a secret shared only between Oxford
and Haydon. “Even my wife,” Oxford told Haydon, “the sharer of my joys, and sorrows, is no wiser than the rest of the world.” He took his secret to the grave, dying on 23 April 1900, sixty years after his attempt and seventy-eight years of age.

If Edward Oxford's life demonstrates the rehabilitative effects of Bethlem and Broadmoor, John Francis's later life demonstrates the similar effect of years at the hardest of hard labor in Van Die-men's Land. Francis was sent, soon after his arrival in 1842, to the remote penal colony offering the severest level of punishment on the island: Port Arthur. Convicts there experienced eternal vigilance and unceasing, crushing labor. The place was a “purgatorial grinding mill rather than a torture chamber,” in the words of the foremost historian of Australian transportation, a preparation for a higher, less demanding, and more trusted position. Francis emerged after four years from that purgatorial fire a better man. Indeed, he emerged triumphantly, earning a six-month remission of his stay there by raising the alarm when a fire broke out. He was transferred to Launceston, and clearly impressed everyone with whom he came in contact there by his good character. Two years later, in 1848, he fell in love with a free sixteen-year-old girl, Martha Clarke, and married her. While still a convict he fathered several children, eventually fathering ten in all. (Francis's descendants in the antipodes are now numerous.) Eight years into his sentence he obtained his ticket of leave, allowing him to seek private employment; he found it with a Launceston builder who was impressed with his industry and sobriety. After ten years, he sought a conditional pardon—the condition, of course, being his never returning to England. Lord Palmerston, Home Secretary at the time, refused to give it. Three years afterwards, Francis tried again, this time supported by the leading citizens of Tasmania; a petition in his support was signed by the mayors of Hobart and Launceston, Launceston's Catholic bishop, and other notables. Palmerston's successor in the Home Office, George Grey, agreed, and in August 1856 Francis was free to travel about Australia and to operate his own business. During
the next decade he moved with wife and some of his children across Bass Strait to Melbourne, where he worked as a contractor. Except for an episode in 1869 in Melbourne's insolvency court—his debts, Francis claimed, caused by an illness in the family—he, like Oxford, apparently lived the life of a well-adjusted, productive, fairly-well-off Melbournian. He died in 1885, aged sixty-three.

John William Bean was the only one of the seven whose attempt did not in the end result in his expulsion from London: he lived there his entire life. He served his eighteen months' imprisonment in Millbank penitentiary, on the bank of the Thames and not too far from Buckingham Palace. Because of his weak constitution, his hard-labor sentence was modified to work at tailoring. During his last month of imprisonment, his father died, and so he returned home as the eldest, if the least respected, male in his family. He attempted to take up his father's profession as a jeweler, and listed that as his profession when in 1846 he married a woman by the name of Esther Martin. That marriage did not last, but lasted long enough to produce a son, Samuel Bean. (Samuel Bean predeceased his father—but before he died produced a son, who in turn had children of his own; Bean and John Francis are the only two assailants who are known to have living descendants.)
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By 1851 John William Bean had given up his father's profession, and taken up the one he had earlier found more fitting for his health and talents: he again became a newsvendor. When Hamilton, Pate, and O'Connor made their attempts, therefore, Bean probably sold newspapers reporting on them. Bean was the only one of the seven who had the opportunity to celebrate with other Londoners the Queen's escape from every one of his successors. Considering his deeply depressed nature, which apparently only worsened with
age, it is unlikely that he did so. He did, however, manage to marry again, in 1863. His depression, likely mixed with thoughts of suicide, led to confinement in an asylum sometime around 1876. The entry in the 1881 Census shows that life had not improved; he is listed there as a “newsagent out of work.” When in February 1882 Maclean made his attempt, Bean was likely in a depressive torpor. Five months later, he gave up altogether. A snippet in
Lloyd's Weekly
reveals his state of mind at the end: