Shooting Victoria (70 page)

OPIUM POISONING AT CAMBERWELL.—On Friday Mr. Carter concluded an inquiry at St. Thomas's hospital, relative to the death of John William Bean, aged 58, a retired newsvendor, lately residing at 3, The Crescent, Southampton-street, Camberwell, who expired from the effects of poison, alleged to have been self-administered, on Wednesday, the 19th July. The deceased was discovered in bed, with a bottle labelled “Poison” near him, on the day mentioned, and died the same evening. A letter was found, in which the deceased, who five years ago was confined in a lunatic asylum, stated that he was an incumbrance
[sic]
to his wife, and was only too glad to die. To admit of an analysis of the stomach, and an examination of the contents of the bottle, the inquiry was adjourned till Friday. It was now shown by the evidence of Mr. Sutton that the stomach contained a large quantity of opium, and it was to this poison that the death of the deceased was attributable. The jury returned a verdict of “Temporary insanity.”

The jury was being merciful, of course; a verdict of insanity rather than suicide allowed Bean a Christian burial.

Of the seven assailants, William Hamilton was the one who most shunned notoriety, wanting only the security of life in prison and the preservation of his anonymity. For better or worse, he got
exactly what he wanted. He was sentenced to seven years' transportation just as the concept of that penalty was altering, so that Australia became not the first stage on the road to rehabilitation, as it was for Francis, but the last—freedom in Australia becoming the reward for years of penal servitude and slow rehabilitation elsewhere. Into this new system Hamilton was thrown, and thus experienced the full range of mid-Victorian penal life. He was taken from Newgate to Millbank and then quickly on to Pentonville, the usual first stage for most prisoners sentenced to transportation in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Pentonville was the “model” prison for the many others that practiced the “separate” system—an imprisonment in which prisoners were doomed to unceasing solitude. Each was confined to his own cell and prohibited from speaking with fellow prisoners, or even looking at them: when together, prisoners were compelled to wear caps with masking visors to hide their individuality from one another. This harrowing system—another Victorian purgatory—was intended to cleanse prisoners morally by forcing them to reflect upon their past moral failings; critics, backed by statistics, claimed it was more likely to lead to madness than moral improvement. After six months at Pentonville—a stay shorter than the usual, gestational, nine months—Hamilton moved to the next rehabilitative step, shipping to the public works at the small penal colony at Gibraltar, where prisoners toiled at constructing and strengthening the harborworks and fortifications. In a colony in which unskilled labor was the norm, Hamilton's masonry skills set him apart. He spent four and a half years at Gibraltar, and finally embarked in May 1854 on the
Ramillies
for Australia. By that year, transportation had been restricted to the point that only one colony—Western Australia—still accepted transported convicts. Accordingly, Hamilton, having served the bulk of his sentence, landed at Fremantle and was placed in prison there. After less than a month, in August 1854, he was granted his ticket of leave. His conditional pardon followed a year and a half later. Hamilton walked out of Fremantle prison and into
complete obscurity—a position surely very much to his liking. He might have come to the attention of the authorities one more time, nearly twenty years later, when an ex-convict by his name was up before a magistrate in Perth for neglecting to report his arrival to that city, as conditional pardon-holders were required to do. That might have been William Hamilton, but it might not have been—there were other ex-convict William Hamiltons in Western Australia at the time. Where and when he died remains a mystery.

Robert Pate's effrontery in actually touching Victoria, as well perhaps as his military past and his father's wealth, called for a swifter removal from England than Hamilton experienced. Pate bypassed the revised system altogether, shipping less than a month after his conviction on the
William Jardine
to Van Diemen's Land, to serve his entire sentence there. Life aboard ship seems to have had a remarkably positive psychological effect upon the man, a reporter at Hobart noting at his arrival there “we understand that he has shown no symptoms of insanity upon the passage.” He was quickly shipped down-island to the remote Cascades Punishment Station, scheduled to work a full year at hard labor on a chain gang. He set to the task with the determination of an ex-officer of the 10th Royal Hussars. His hard work earned him an eighty-day remission of his sentence, so that in just over nine months, in June 1881, he returned to Hobart and was employed at the milder task of clerking for John Abbott, the registrar of births, marriages, and deaths for Van Diemen's Land. Pate acquitted himself well enough to earn Abbott's recommendation for a Conditional Pardon. He obtained his ticket of leave in September 1853, leaving him free to seek private employment. But apparently he sought none: his father's money now allowed him to live as a gentleman, and that is exactly how he designated himself when he applied for a conditional pardon. That pardon was granted at the end of 1855, and a year and a half later his sentence expired, leaving him free to return home. He was, however, in no hurry to do so. As if in celebration of his complete freedom, he got married just as his
sentence ended. Announcements of the wedding said nothing of his being a convict and much about being an ex-officer of the 10th Royal Hussars. He and his wife Mary Elizabeth resided among the elite of Hobart, in an eleven-room mansion complete with stables, coach house, and a brewery. Clearly Robert Pate Sr. had been generous—or, more likely, his legacy had been, as the old man had died in 1856, leaving the bulk of his £70,000 fortune to his only son. Pate was a jealous guardian of his property, as was demonstrated in 1858 when he and his wife hauled an eleven-year-old girl into police court for stealing a sixpenny flowerpot from the front of their house.
*

In April 1865, the Pates, having sold their mansion, embarked on the
Robert Morrison
for London. Pate traveled to Wisbech to take care of his father's estate and his servants, to whom he was said to be “remarkably kind,” setting up each a pension. He then took up life as a country gentleman not in Cambridgeshire but in Croydon, Surrey, in a home ironically not very distant from the building which had been so much in the news at the time of Pate's assault—Paxton's Crystal Palace, dismantled in Hyde Park after the exhibition, remodeled, and rebuilt in Sydenham. Robert Pate lived, apparently happily and free from his previous obsessions, with Mrs. Pate until he died in 1895, leaving his wife over £22,000—a generous amount, but one that suggests that his gentleman's lifestyle chipped away at the bulk of his father's estate.

Four years after Pate's death, and two years before Victoria's, an object reputed to be the cane with which Robert Pate had struck the Queen went up for auction in London. Word of the proposed sale soon reached Osborne, where the queen was staying, and an official communication soon went out from there to the owner of
the cane, who immediately withdrew the cane from sale. It was never seen again.

Although Victoria seemed safely protected from Arthur O'Connor after he was arrested in 1875 and committed to Hanwell Asylum, his stay there turned out to be a brief one, and for a time he continued to be a problem to the police and to the government. He was discharged eighteen months after he was committed to Hanwell as fully cured. Because he was not confined at the Queen's pleasure, the government could do nothing to keep him there or keep him from returning to his family in London, which is exactly what he did. For two years he worked as a copying clerk. His father having died, he claimed that his income was the principal support of his entire family. But he lost that job and as his mother slipped deeper into alcoholism, his family sank deeper into penury. By the end of 1880, O'Connor had grown sick of that life; he approached the police to make an offer to the government much like the one he had brokered eight years before: he would be willing to travel to Australia if the government paid his expenses and found him employment. The government agreed. In January, he shipped to Sydney on the
Helenslea
, disembarking on 20 April, again adopting his Australian alias of George Morton. Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales, had taken a personal interest in his case and had procured him a clerkship with a prominent Sydney solicitor. But O'Connor never took the position. Soon after his arrival, the Inspector General of Police reported to Augustus Loftus, the Governor, that O'Connor had been arrested for being drunk, that he had lashed out violently while at the police court—that he was insane and belonged in an asylum. “On his first visit he was a thoughtless youth,” Parkes told Loftus; “he has now become an unmitigated ruffian.” After assaulting a policeman, O'Connor was restrained, examined, and sent to the lunatic asylum at Callan Park.

He spent the rest of his life in a variety of Sydney asylums, his mind cycling between lucidity and confusion. At times he was considered well enough for short furloughs from his hospitals. At
other times he was compelled to escape, only to be returned by the police after a day or two, or to return himself. His psychological state deteriorated; certainly, no doctor ever saw fit to recommend his release. The assigned cause of O'Connor's illness—a diagnosis which never changed as he was transferred from one asylum to another over the years—must surely have galled him, the most ambitious and imaginative of Victoria's would-be assassins. The doctors never considered his illness hereditary—something that may have linked him with his heroic great-uncle Feargus. They never saw poetic, or political, or religious overimagination at the heart of his illness: any of these he would have understood and perhaps would have been proud of. Rather, the doctors all believed his illness was caused by what the Inspector General of the Sydney Police first termed in 1881 “habits of self-indulgence.” The Inspector General of the New South Wales Lunacy Department quickly concurred, concluding that Morton was “suffering from considerable mental irritation which is fostered by his debased habits.” The Callan Park casebook is blunter: the disorder was melancholia, the cause “masturbation.” As late as 1912, when O'Connor was fifty-eight years old and his hair was graying, the cause of his madness was listed as “Onanism.”

O'Connor's asylum casebooks record instances of voices in his head, delusions of persecution, and wild hallucinations. Once he refused to drink anything for fear of drowning the Virgin Mary inside him. In 1882, soon after Roderick Maclean's attempt, he hallucinated that he saw his own brother point a pistol at the Queen.
*
At times he was a quiet and cooperative patient; at others hyper-inflated with self-importance; at others sullen and paranoid. In later years he took to writing persons of importance in New South Wales, pleading for a discharge. No one, of course, listened. O'Connor over the years was shifted from hospital to hospital, from Callan Park, to Parramatta, to Rydalmere, to Morriset, and then back to Rydalmere.

Roderick Maclean lived a similar long life, half a world away. He entered Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane fifteen years after Edward Oxford had left it, and the doctors knew from the start that he was a different patient altogether than Oxford had been. Not one of them considered Maclean sane or requested that the Home Office consider releasing him. Maclean, who had while free been hell-bent on finding a place in an asylum, was quickly discontented with his confinement at Broadmoor, and within twenty months of his committal he sent out the first of many petitions for his release. Lest Victoria think he was asking too soon, he assured her “you, I am sure are aware in questions of presumed insanity, duration of time of incarceration should not be considered.” The petitions flowed from his pen for years, and he adopted several strategies to persuade Victoria to let him go. He tried aggressive innocence: “I am
innocent
of any guilty
intentions toward
the Queen”—his innocence requiring freedom and recompense, the government supporting him as his family once did: “I should require at least one hundred per annum and I should not accept a farthing less whether from relations or strangers. Any arrangements which did not include such an allowance or more would be entirely useless and would be sternly rejected.” He tried abject contrition: “No language could express my sorrow for the past.” He attempted the strategy that had worked for Oxford and O'Connor, promising to exile himself to a distant place—to Australia, where a brother lived, or, in one petition, to remote Scotland: “If Her Most Gracious Majesty will allow me to go and reside in the isle of my ancestors Mull on the west coast of Scotland as I intend to live a Christians life in sobriety and in quiet retirement from the Madding crowd and the hurly burly of the World hope to find a balm to my troubles and the troubles of those interested in my affairs.” None of this had the slightest effect upon the Queen's pleasure. As the years passed, the petitions slowed. In 1894 Maclean made another attempt to reengage with the world, communicating with the editor of
The Sun
about publishing his poetry, or his memoirs. As the years passed,
the voices in his head and the paranoia never left him. Victoria died and the Queen's pleasure became her son's; Edward VII died in 1910 and his pleasure became that of his son, George V.

Roderick Maclean and, half a world away, Arthur O'Connor lived on discontentedly while the world outside changed beyond recognition. Outside, the First World War came and went, taking with it the major monarchies of Europe—all except for the one that Victoria had done so much to preserve. The Victorian age passed; O'Connor and Maclean lived on into the age of the airplane, of radio—the age of Einstein, Eisenstein, and Gertrude Stein, of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, jazz and
surréalisme
. Mussolini's fascism was ascendant in Italy; Hitler's fascism was slowly ascending in Germany. To both Maclean and O'Connor, the world outside would likely have seemed as mad as the world within. Roderick Maclean died on 9 May 1921, apoplexy stated as the cause. The news was reported as a sort of barely remembered bad dream. Arthur O'Connor—or George Morton, as no one called him Arthur O'Connor for the last forty-two years of his life—outlived Maclean by 4½ years, dying 6 December 1925 at the age of seventy, the cause of death listed as a painful abdominal ailment, tubercular peritonitis. O'Connor was buried in Rook-wood Anglican Cemetery in Sydney, under his false name. There would be no monument to the last of the great O'Connors.