Shooting Victoria (93 page)

501:   Monro appeared personally at the inquest and used the occasion to expose the dynamite plot to the public:
Times
27 October 1887, 12.

501:   The detonators he threw into a local pond: TNA PRO HO 144/209/ A48131.

501:   … he dragged the slabs into the back garden and into the lodging house's water closet: TNA PRO HO 144/209/A48131.

501:   On the evening of the seventeenth, a stranger came to his lodgings: TNA PRO CRIM 1/27/3.

502:   … for some time he remained in Monro's mind as a potentially dangerous loose end of the Jubilee Plot: HO 144/1537/2.

502:   … a letter had arrived from Lowell with a draft for more money—and a prepaid passage to Boston on the Cunard Line: TNA PRO CRIM 1/27/3.

502:   From the back garden of Callan's lodgings, the police were able to collect over twenty-five pounds of sodden dynamite, which police chemists were able to determine to be of American make: TNA PRO CRIM 1/27/3; “Thomas Callan, Michael Harkins.”

502:   He was released in 1892: TNA PRO HO 144/209/A48131.

502:   … “the most harmless of all the dynamiters with whom I have been brought into contact”: TNA PRO HO 144/209/A48131.

502:   “Poor Tommy Callan”: “Poor Tommy Callan.”

503:   … he was thrown from a cart, smashed his leg, and died: “Poor Tommy Callan.”

503:   His assassination inspired Leon Czolgosz to kill American President William McKinley a year later: Laucella 85.

503:   Bertie and Princess Alexandra chose to forgo their usual trip to Biarritz: St. Aubyn,
Edward VII
302.

503:   … a boy jumped upon the carriage footboard, thrust a pistol through the window, and from six feet away fired two shots at the Prince:
Times
5 April 1900, 6.

503:   Bertie later enjoyed joking in letters to his friends about the “pauvre fou”: St. Aubyn,
Edward VII
302.

503:   he was already a fanatical member of an anarchist club: Magnus 265; Brust 49.

504:   The Prince of Wales asked Belgian authorities not to treat Sipido too severely: Brust 50.

504:   He was later extradited to Belgium, where he was confined in a penitentiary until he reached the age of twenty-one:
Times
22 November 1900, 5; 30 December 1905, 5.

504:   … “there were crowds out, we could not understand why, and thought something must be going [on], but it turned out it was only to see me”: Weintraub,
Queen Victoria
514.

505:   The second, under the direction of the Queen's imperialist Minister for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, celebrated the greatness of the British Empire: Lant 219.

505:   … the Queen, in 1897 no longer able to walk into St. Paul's for the Thanksgiving Service, refused to be carried inside, and instead viewed from her carriage a short
Te Deum
on the cathedral steps: Lant 223–24, 244–45; Matthew and Reynolds.

505:   “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets”: Hibbert,
Queen Victoria
457.

506:   “Everywhere,” Victoria wrote, “the same enormous crowds and incessant demonstrations of enthusiasm”: Hibbert, ed. 343.

506:   “I saw your Majesty three times in the streets and in the Park”: Rennell 41.

506:   Victoria lived for eight months after that: For Victoria's last days, see Tony Rennell's
Last Days of Glory: The Death of Queen Victoria
.

506:   “Another year begun, and I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly”: Rennell 57.

507:   She died in the arms of her grandson Kaiser William, “a look of radiance on her face”: Rennell 137–38.

507:   … past a million of her subjects in the metropolis: Rennell 247.

508:   “Reported sane since his reception,” his Bethlem case notes state, that opinion restated emphatically with the same entry repeated through the years: “no change”: Bethlehem Royal Hospital. The statement that Oxford was perfectly sane was repeated, and reasserted, in his Broadmoor records held in the Berkshire Record Office, BRO D/H14/D2/1/1/1.

509:   He deserved a horse-whipping for his actions: Warren 571.

509:   Bethlem became his university: Oxford's achievements are set out in both his Bethlem and his Broadmoor case notes.

509:   He was from the start “the most orderly, most useful, and most trusted of all the inmates” there:
Times
13 January 1865, 10.

509:   … his painting skills were in constant demand and allowed him in time to accumulate £50 or £60:
Times
13 January 1865,10.

509:   … in 1876 Home Secretary Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy reviewed Oxford's record and made him a deal: BRO D/H14/D2/2/1/96.

509:   24 years earlier, George Henry Haydon had come to Bethlem as steward, and Oxford quickly discovered in him a friend: F. B. Smith 467.

510:   … the
Suffolk
, which the next March landed at Melbourne:
Assisted and Unassisted Passenger Lists
.

510:   … “in the future no man shall say I am unworthy of the name of an Englishman”: Freeman.

510:   Oxford took up as a painter and grainer:
Argus
28 January 1870, 1.

510:   He was amused to discover that people in Melbourne thought him “cosmopolitan” because of his London origins: Freeman.

510:   He joined and became vice president of the West Melbourne Mutual Improvement Society:
Argus
28 February 1887, 4.

510:   He … published his observations in Melbourne's leading newspaper:
Argus
28 March 1874, 4; 4 July 1874, 4; 22 May 1875, 9.

510:   He joined the congregation of Melbourne's oldest Anglican church and served for several years as its churchwarden:
Argus
3 January 1889, 10; 22 February 1896, 8.

510:   In 1881 he married a well-off widow and became a stepfather:
Argus
21 March 1881, 1.

510:   “There are many old friends … in England,” he wrote to Haydon, “who would be pleased to hear of me again”: Freeman.

510:   “Even my wife,” Oxford told Haydon, “the sharer of my joys, and sorrows, is no wiser than the rest of the world”: Freeman.

510:   He took his secret to a grave, dying on 23 April 1900: F. B. Smith 472.

511:   The place was a “purgatorial grinding mill rather than a torture chamber”: Hughes 400.

511:   … he emerged triumphantly, earning a six-month remission of his stay there by raising the alarm when a fire broke out: TNA PRO HO 45/3079.

511:   Two years later … he fell in love with a free sixteen-year-old girl, Martha Clarke, and married her: Archives Office of Tasmania CON 51/1/3.

511:   … he found it with a Launceston builder who was impressed with his industry and sobriety: TNA PRO HO 45/3079.

511:   … a petition in his support was signed by the mayors of Hobart and Launceston, Launceston's Catholic bishop, and other notables: TNA PRO HO 45/3079.

512:   … an episode in 1869 in Melbourne's insolvency court:
Argus
21 January 1869, 5; 29 May 1869, 6.

512:   He died in 1885, aged sixty-three:
Australia Death Index
.

512:   … his hard-labor sentence was modified to work at tailoring:
Examiner
15 October 1842.

512:   During his last month of imprisonment, his father died:
London, England, Deaths and Burials
.

512:   He attempted to take up his father's profession as a jeweler: London Metropolitan Archives, St. James, Clerkenwell,
Register of Banns of marriage
.

512:   By 1851 John William Bean had given up his father's profession: 1851
England Census
. 512:   He did, however, manage to marry again, in 1863:
England & Wales, Free BMD Marriage Index
.

513:   … he is listed there as a “newsagent out of work”: 1881
England Census
.

513:   OPIUM POISONING AT CAMBERWELL:
Lloyd's Weekly
30 July 1882.

514:   He was taken from Newgate to Millbank and then quickly on to Pentonville: TNA PRO PCOM 2/211; TNA PRO HO 24/16.

514:   … critics, backed by statistics, claimed it was more likely to lead to madness than moral improvement: Mayhew and Binny 102–04n.

514:   … Hamilton moved to the next rehabilitative step, shipping to the public works at the small penal colony at Gibraltar: TNA PRO HO 8/102; TNA PRO HO PCOM 2/137.

514:   … in August 1854, he was granted his ticket of leave: “Convict Database.”

515:   He might have come to the attention of the authorities one more time, nearly twenty years later:
West Australian Chronicle
8 September 1885, 3.

515:   “… we understand that he has shown no symptoms of insanity upon the passage”:
Cornwall Chronicle
16 November 1850, 808.

515:   His hard work earned him an eighty-day remission of his sentence: Bolam 14.

515:   Pate acquitted himself well enough to earn Abbott's recommendation for a Conditional Pardon: TNA HO 45/3079.

515:   He obtained his ticket of leave in September 1853: Archives Office of Tasmania CON 33/1/98.

515:   That pardon was granted at the end of 1855: Bolam 14.

515:   Announcements of the wedding said nothing of his being a convict and much about being an ex-officer of the 10th Royal Hussars:
Courier
, 26 August 1852, 2.

515:   He and his wife Mary Elizabeth resided among the elite of Hobart, in an eleven-room mansion:
Mercury
11 April 1863, 4.

516:   … the old man had died in 1856, leaving the bulk of his £70,000 fortune to his only son:
Times
12 August 1856, 1;
Morning Chronicle
12 November 1856, 3.

516:   In April 1865, the Pates, having sold their mansion, embarked on the
Robert Morrison
for London:
Launceston Examiner
29 April 1865, 4.

516:   Pate traveled to Wisbech to take care of his father's estate and his servants, to whom he was said to be “remarkably kind”: Gardiner 330.

516:   … he died in 1895, leaving his wife over £22,000:
England & Wales, National Probate Calendar
.

516:   … an object reputed to be the cane with which Robert Pate struck the Queen went up for auction in London:
Lloyd's Weekly
1 January 1899, 17;
Times
(New York) 15 January 1899.

517:   He was discharged eighteen months after he was committed to Hanwell as fully cured: Geary 142.

517:   His father having died, he claimed that his income was the principal support of his entire family: TNA HO 144/3/10963.

517:   … he would be willing to travel to Australia if the government paid his expenses and found him employment: TNA HO 144/3/10963.

517:   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: TNA HO 144/3/10963.

517:   O'Connor had been arrested for being drunk: TNA HO 144/3/10963.

517:   “On his first visit he was a thoughtless youth”: TNA HO 144/3/10963.

517:   At other times he was compelled to escape: Callan Park Hospital, Medical case book.

518:   … 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”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

518:   … Morton was “suffering from considerable mental irritation which is fostered by his debased habits”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

518:   … the disorder was melancholia, the cause “masturbation”: Callan Park, Medical case book.

518:   … the cause of his madness was listed as “Onanism”: Rydalmere Hospital Medical File.

518:   O'Connor's asylum casebooks record instances of voices in his head, delusions of persecution, and wild hallucinations: Callan Park, Medical Case Book; Rydalmere Hospital Medical file.

518:   In later years he took to writing persons of importance in New South Wales, pleading for a discharge: Rydalmere Hospital Legal Files.

519:   … “you, I am sure are aware in questions of presumed insanity, duration of time of incarceration should not be considered”: TNA PRO HO 144/95/A14281.

519:   “
I am innocent
of any guilty
intentions toward
the Queen”: BRO D/H14/D2/2/1/1905—in an undated petition, but dateable by internal evidence to c. April 1886.

519:   “I should require at least one hundred per annum and I should not accept a farthing less whether from relations or strangers”: BRO D/ H14/D2/2/1/1905.

519:   “No language could express my sorrow for the past”: BRO D/H14/D2/2/1/1905, petition dated 18 June 1885.

519:   “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”: BRO D/H14/D2/2/1/1905, petition dated 4 December 1885.

519:   In 1894 Maclean made another attempt to reengage with the world: BRO D/H14/D2/2/1/1905, letter dated 5 August 1894.

520:   Roderick Maclean died on 9 May 1921, apoplexy stated as the cause: BRO D/H14/D2/2/1/1905.

520:   The news was reported as a sort of barely remembered bad dream:
Times
10 June 1921, 7.

520:   … the cause of death listed as a painful abdominal ailment, tubercular peritonitis: Rydalmere Hospital Medical File.

W
ORKS
C
ITED

ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Archives Office of Tasmania. CON 33/1/98 (Conduct Record for convicts).

Archives Office of Tasmania. CON 51/1/3 (Convict Applications for Permissions to Marry 1829-1857).

Bethlem Royal Hospital.
Criminal Lunatics 1816-1850
.

BRO D/H14/A1/2/4/1. Berkshire Record Office, letters from the board and doctors of Broadmoor Hospital requesting release of Edward Oxford.