Shooting Victoria (71 page)

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Moroney later married Miss Kennedy, and within a year he was implicated in what was called “the Crime of the Century” in the United States: the assassination of Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin, a Clan-na-Gael rival of his friend Alexander Sullivan.

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The attempt became the occasion for a mythic and mythical moment in the history of swearing. A multitude of sites on the Internet today state as fact that the Prince of Wales, when shot at, cried out “Fuck it, I've taken a bullet!” No contemporary account of the shooting, however, mentions this utterance. And the fact that the Prince of Wales did
not
take a bullet strongly suggests that this colorful response is apocryphal.

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Victoria lived longer than her grandfather George III by all of five days. Elizabeth II has since exceeded her great-great grandmother's longevity.

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Perhaps his choice of name was simple symbolism; perhaps it was sentimental: the marriage register of a church in Lambeth shows that on 21 May 1833, one Hannah Oxford married a man named Edward Freeman. Oxford might have been commemorating a long-lost and short-lived stepfather by taking his surname.

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Although there is no record of a divorce (which would have been extremely difficult to obtain at the time), the marriage most certainly ended in separation and not with a death: Esther Bean lived on, dying in 1898 in Greenwich Workhouse. When Bean remarried in 1863, then, he likely became a bigamist.

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To be fair to the Pates, Robert did ask the magistrates to be lenient to the girl, and stated he had only brought her in because they had recently experienced a spate of unsolved thefts.

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One of O'Connor's brothers was named Roderick.

The Marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 10 February 1840
, by George Hayter. Three months after the wedding, as Victoria posed for this painting, Edward Oxford bought the pistols with which he shot at the royal couple. Courtesy of The Royal Collection © 2012, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

A portrait of Edward Oxford from
Bell's New Weekly Messenger
, 12 July 1840. As crude as it is, the illustration well captures Oxford's pretensions to a higher status and his desperate resolve to “make a noise” in the world by whatever means.

Buckingham Palace as it appeared in 1842. The now-familiar east façade had not yet been built, and the Marble Arch, not yet moved to the corner of Hyde Park, still served as the main gate. All but one of the attempts on the Queen took place near Buckingham Palace. From the
Illustrated London News
.

Oxford's attempt, 10 June 1840, on Constitution Hill: Oxford was a “little mean looking man,” according to Prince Albert.

The execution of François Benjamin Courvoisier for the murder of Lord William Russell, 6 July 1840. While Courvoisier was hanged outside Newgate Prison, Edward Oxford occupied a cell within, awaiting his trial for treason. The print conveys some idea of the many thousands who came to watch Courvoisier die. Two years later, John Francis would stand in an even larger crowd to witness the execution of Daniel Good. From
Tom Spring's Life in London
.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842
, by Edwin Landseer. The royal couple held the ball during that impoverished year in order to ameliorate poverty, but many found their conspicuous display of wealth disturbing. Less than three weeks after the Ball, John Francis made his two attempts. Courtesy of The Royal Collection ©2012, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

John Francis's second attempt and capture, 30 May 1842, from
Illustrated London News
. Grabbing him is P.C. Trounce (wearing the Metropolitan Police uniform of the day). Trounce's decision to salute the Queen allowed Francis the opportunity to get off a shot—although whether he fired a bullet or just wadding became a central question at his trial.

The police roundup of hunchbacked dwarves in the wake of John William Bean's attempt of 3 July 1842, as depicted in
Punch
magazine, in which Punch himself is among those captured.

Victoria's first Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, with whom she shared a close bond at the time of Edward Oxford's attempt. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London