For six months, the two would inhabit the criminal lunatics ward together. It is not known if Oxford’s natural glibness returned to him in time, and triumphed over Hadfield’s world-weariness. But it is tempting to think that the two looked into each other’s eyes, and spoke, driven by professional curiosity, perhaps—or because they were the only living members of that most exclusive group: would-be British regicides: Oxford with the fresher memory, and yet relating it in a way that made him out to be the hero, and Had-field, more bewildered, haltingly remembering that violent night in the Drury Lane Theatre, forty years before.
Hadfield died on 23 January 1841. Oxford lived on, a resident of the criminal lunatics’ wing for over two decades, until that wing closed down upon the opening of Broadmoor Asylum, an entire hospital devoted to the confinement and care of the criminally insane. Oxford happened to be one of the very last male patients to make the trip, by train, from London to Crowthorne (and Broadmoor). Soon after, Bethlem’s criminal buildings were demolished. Between them, then, Hadfield and Oxford witnessed the entire history of Bethlem’s criminal lunatics’ wing.
Confined to Bethlem, Oxford was soon largely forgotten as a living being, remaining forever the pitiful potboy, recalled to public consciousness every time one of Oxford’s six successors made his attempt at the Queen. Nevertheless, the tableau vivant he had burned into the British consciousness, of a young man shooting point-blank at the young, pregnant Queen and her even younger husband—the incident Oxford had instigated with his startling action, and the royal couple had completed with their sublime reaction—had long-lasting consequences for the British monarchy. In that instant, the Queen was, politically, born again, the embarrassing and partisan fits and starts of her early reign suddenly forgotten. Mrs. Melbourne, the royal Whig, was a creature of the past. Now Victoria was Queen of all, and Albert’s wife. Albert became, with the shooting, more than the adventurer with the foreign accent, but a hero worthy of his cousin’s hand. By seeking their safety among their people, and not within the safety of Buckingham Palace, the royal couple had demonstrated to the nation the Queen’s fitness to rule, and the Prince’s fitness to assist. The House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha gained, after Oxford’s shooting, a permanent ascendancy over the House of Hanover. That bugbear King Ernest, and Victoria’s other uncles Suffolk and Cambridge, were suddenly just a part of the extended royal family, peripheral in the public eye to the Queen, her Consort, and their children to come. Oxford had unwittingly ushered in the Victorian age.
A week before Oxford’s trial, Melbourne approached the Queen with the delicate issue that had been on the minds of everyone since the shooting: it was quite possible that the Queen could die, leaving an infant child as her heir. A Regency Bill was in order, such as the one created ten years before, when Victoria became heir apparent, and which held her mother, the Duchess of Kent, sole regent in the event of her King William’s death. In the present situation, the only question was whether Albert would be sole regent if Victoria died, or whether he would serve in a Council of Regency with others—Victoria’s royal uncles. Baron Stockmar was convinced that Albert as sole Regent would be by far the superior arrangement. Seeking to ensure that a Regency bill to that effect would pass with overwhelming bipartisan support, he set out to negotiate with Tory leaders. He feared that Albert would face great obstacles: “I don’t hide from myself that there will be all manner of objections, such as his youth, his want of acquaintance with the country and its institutions, &c., and that the Dukes of Cumberland, Cambridge, and Sussex, not wishing to be passed over, will endeavour to put a spoke in the wheel, the former by means of the ultra-Tories, the latter by means of the ultra-Liberals.”
Stockmar needn’t have worried. He was able to ensure that the Tory opposition would side with Melbourne’s government in overwhelmingly supporting the Bill, but Albert had already laid the groundwork, making it clear from before the marriage that he preferred that the monarch (and her Consort) be above party, and culture positive relationships with both sides. He had done his best since the marriage to do exactly that. Stockmar and Melbourne had no problems convincing both Peel and Wellington that Albert should be sole Regent; both claimed that this was their position exactly. In the end, there was only a single dissenter in all of Parliament to the Bill—Victoria’s Uncle Augustus, the Duke of Sussex. Sussex stood before the House of Lords on 21 July, proclaiming himself to be personally disinterested in the Bill, but to have questions about it: it did not, for one thing, make provision for the possible incapacity of the Regent. Moreover, it did not impose any restriction upon the possible alienation of the regent from the best interests of Britain: Albert could marry again, and might marry a foreigner! Indeed, Albert was a foreigner himself, and not as bound to the nation’s interests as a native would be. Sussex suggested Parliament make provision for a successor-regent in the contingency of Albert’s incapacity or inadequacy. He was not, he proclaimed, attempting to elevate himself in any way: the country was well aware of his complete lack of self-interest or ambition. But he was very careful to point out to the Peers that he was the closest heir to the throne actually residing in England.
His self-interest and ambition were palpable to all. Baron Cottenham, the Lord Chancellor, in responding to his speech, reassured him that he had every right to be concerned about the Regency, as a member of the royal family; then, he quickly demolished his concerns. Provision for a successor to Albert as Regent could easily be made once Albert became Regent. And the fear of Albert’s marrying a foreigner who could unduly influence the monarchy was simply not justified, as it had been with the Duchess of Kent (which was why in the 1830 Regency Bill, she had been forbidden from marrying a foreign prince without the consent of Parliament): Albert would be a male regent and was thus—an irony, given his current situation—above the undue influence of a spouse. The bill quickly sailed through both houses without further objection and became law before Oxford was three weeks in Bethlem. Lord Melbourne attributed the great success of the bill to Albert alone, and certainly Albert’s endearing himself to the Tories had everything to do with the Bill’s easy passage. “Three months ago,” Melbourne told Victoria, “they would not have done it for him. It is entirely his own character.”
Albert was jubilant, seeing the bill as “an affair of the greatest importance to me” and writing to his brother Ernest “I am to be Regent—alone—Regent, without a Council.” As designated Regent, Albert had not gained a whit of actual power: all was Victoria’s, until her death. But symbolically, everything had changed. As King Leopold wrote to Albert’s private secretary, George Anson, the bill “had helped the Prince immensely, the country thereby demonstrating the great confidence they placed in the uprightness of his character.” While in the public eye he ranked second only to Victoria, he still faced a battle with Victoria’s uncles and aunts for precedence within the Kingdom. And he still faced a long wrangle with Baroness Lehzen and her cabal for political and domestic influence with his wife. But now, time was entirely on his side.
Charles Dickens took an obvious interest in the Oxford case. He was in 1840 mulling over what became his 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge, a novel centered upon three troubled young men, at least one of which—the vainglorious apprentice Sim Tappertit—bears more than a slight resemblance to Oxford. Within two days of Oxford’s attempt, Dickens realized that the mischief that the boy had caused would not end with his sentencing. He wrote to his friend John Forster “It’s a great pity they couldn’t suffocate that boy, master Oxford, and say no more about it. To have put him quietly between two featherbeds would have stopped his heroic speeches, and dulled the sound of his glory very much. As it is, she will have to run the gauntlet of many a fool and madman, some of whom may perchance be better shots and use other than Brummagem firearms.”
The fools and madmen would not be long in coming.
* But it did not. An inquiry to the curator of the Museum by the author, listing specific descriptive details about the pistols Oxf
ord used, resulted in the hasty removal of a pistol exhibited for decades as Oxford’s, since that pistol clearly did not resemble either of Oxford’s.
Part Two
THE GAUNTLET
eight
MOST DESPERATE OFFENDERS
Well over twenty thousand Londoners had gathered outside Newgate on Monday morning, 23 May 1842, again to see a man hanged. Eager to get a view, the crowd began forming on Sunday night; as usual, the best seats in the windows and rooftops surrounding houses had been snapped up by the wealthy: the Times reported one nobleman, a true connoisseur of hangings, who had attended the last four or five of them (including Courvoisier’s) and who paid a high premium of £14 for a window seat this time. At six in the morning, this nobleman would have seen seething below him the largest crowd to gather outside of Newgate for decades—larger than the crowd that had seen Courvoisier die two years before—a solid mass stretching out of sight down the four streets that formed a cross, with the scaffold at the crux. Somewhere among that mass stood a swarthy, good-looking, twenty-year-old man by the name of John Francis.
The police, well aware that this hanging would attract crowds, were taking no chances: two hundred City and Metropolitan police were stationed between scaffold and spectators. If they were concerned that the audience might rush the scaffold out of sympathy with the condemned man, they need not have worried. Crowds at public executions could be fickle, capable of awe-stricken silence in the face of imminent death, as they were with Courvoisier, or, when they considered the death sentence unfair, hostile to the state—or to the state’s most visible representative, the executioner. But John Francis and the suffocating mass all around him were of one mind about this monster: they were ready to welcome his death with howls of execration, or with grim satisfaction and genuine relief. For Daniel Good had, for the last six weeks, captivated and affronted them, both by committing one of the goriest murders of the nineteenth century, and by escaping for ten days the detection of an increasingly anxious metropolis and of an increasingly embarrassed Metropolitan Police force. Lord Chief Justice Denman anticipated the mood of this crowd when in sentencing Good to death, ten days before, he had told him “you will leave the world unrespected and unpitied by any one.” This crowd had come to see, in Denman’s words, “a good deed done.”
It was a pair of trousers that had done Good in. He was a coachman when he wasn’t engaging in his dual passions of larceny and bigamy. He worked at the southwestern edge of the metropolis, in Putney, near Richmond, out of the stables of the expansive estate of Queely (or Quelaz) Shiell, who had made his fortune as the largest slaveholder on the West Indian island of Montserrat. On the evening of a fine day, 6 April 1842, Good and his ten-year-old son, Daniel, were returning to Putney on Shiell’s pony-chaise from Woolwich, where Good had been courting Susan Butcher, his latest romantic interest. An hour after sunset, father and son pulled up to Collingbourne’s pawnshop on Wandsworth High Street. There, Good bought on credit a pair of breeches, and there, on exiting, according to vigilant shopboy Samuel Dagnall, Good snatched up a pair of trousers, secreted them beneath the flaps of his greatcoat, hurried to the carriage, and slipped both breeches and trousers beneath the chaise-seat upon which his son sat. When Collingbourne, alerted to the theft, confronted Good, Good denied the charge indignantly and drove off. Collingbourne quickly fetched a local policeman, PC William Gardiner, who enlisted the aid of Dagnall and a boy from the shop next door, Robert Speed, and proceeded to Shiell’s stables. There, they found Good more conciliatory; he was more than willing to return to Wandsworth to pay Collingbourne for the breeches—but the trousers, he would not admit to taking. Gardiner insisted upon searching the chaise. Good had no objection. Gardiner found nothing there, and extended his search to the chaise-house and its stables and harness room. When Gardiner moved to search another stable, Good planted his back against the door and refused entry: he would, he said, rather return to Wandsworth and settle the matter.
The commotion attracted Thomas Houghton, Shiell’s bailiff and head gardener, who had an antipathy for Good (which Good heartily returned) and authority over him: Houghton agreed to the search. The six (Gardiner, Houghton, Dagnall, Speed, Good, and Good’s son) entered the stables. Gardiner asked Speed to keep a close watch on Good, and asked Dagnall to hold a lantern while he scrutinized every stall, hayrick, and cornbin. Good’s anxiety grew as the search continued, and he pleaded that they return to Wandsworth. As Gardiner searched a cornbin, he saw Good enter the fourth stall and begin to move hay. Snarling that he did not need Good’s assistance, Gardiner shooed him away to the doorway of the stable and the scrutiny of Speed, while he, and Dagnall with the lantern, entered the stall. Gardiner moved two hay-bales and some loose straw underneath, when he saw what he thought was a plucked goose and cried out “My God, what’s this?”
Speed, across the room, turned away from Good to see what Gardiner saw—and Daniel Good bolted, slamming the stable door to, locking it, throwing the key and a lantern into a hedge, and lighting out across the fields, trapping Gardiner, Houghton, the shopboys, and his own son. Robert Speed picked up a two-pronged hayfork and attempted unsuccessfully to force the door. The group then went back to the fourth stable, to see exactly what they had found. It was flesh—a human being, Gardiner cried.
Robert Speed denied this, reached out, and turned the thing over. It was the trunk of a woman, head and limbs partially sliced and partially hacked off. It had been gutted—sliced in a ghastly cross vertically from sternum to pubes, and horizontally around the top of the pelvis, in a single cut from one side of the backbone around to the other. All of the lower organs were removed, including the uterus, which made it impossible for surgeons later examining the body to say for certain whether this woman had been pregnant—though they speculated that she had been, from the size and condition of her breasts.
With an energy redoubled by horror, the party made another attempt to force the door, and succeeded. Good was now fifteen minutes gone. Gardiner sent Samuel Dagnall to the station house in Wandsworth to fetch help, give a description of Good, and raise the alarm, sending him any policemen he met along the way. A policeman arrived in twenty minutes; Gardiner sent him to Putney to fetch more police. Another arrived in half an hour; Gardiner sent him, as well, to Wandsworth, to fetch the Superintendent of V Division, Thomas Bicknell. When Bicknell arrived to take command, it was past 11:30, the stable was filled with police, and Good was two and a half hours away from Putney Park Lane. The police made little attempt to pursue him beyond the neighborhood, focusing instead upon the crime scene. There, they found an abundance of evidence. One officer, Sergeant Palmer, opened the door to the adjoining harness room and was nearly knocked over by the overpowering stench: in the fireplace, beneath an abundance of coal and wood set to create an intense fire, he and others after him found a number of charred, and recognizably human, bone fragments. Others found a bloody knife and axe, and two bloody fragments of a woman’s petticoat, “violently torn asunder.”
In a very short time, the police had all the evidence they needed to convict Good. Within two days, they had identified the victim. They had connected Good—and only Good—to the murder. They had recovered the woman’s many belongings—including the clothing she had been wearing on the day she disappeared—and were able to trace all of it to Good. They had a solid case—but they had let their man slip away.
What the police did not realize this night is that they had with them on Shiell’s estate the key to apprehending Good quickly. Ten-year-old Daniel Good had been with his father for the last three days, and before that had lived for over two years with Jane Jones—known to all as Jane Good—in a basement kitchen on South Street, Manchester Square, in Marylebone. At his father’s wishes—and from genuine affection—the boy faithfully called this woman “mother,” while his father referred to the woman as the boy’s aunt. The Sunday before, on Good’s orders, an anxious Jane Jones had left the boy to sleep with a neighbor while she went to v
isit Good in Putney. She never returned. The next day, Good fetched the boy out of his school and told him that his aunt had found employment in the country—the boy wouldn’t see her for another six months. He then took the boy to Putney, and gave him over to the supervision of others while he disappeared for long hours, night and day. On the day of the discovery in the stables, the boy had traveled with his father in Shiell’s chaise across the south of London to Woolwich, where he met the woman his father had recently proposed to, Susan Butcher. He saw his father make a gift to the young woman: a gown, a shawl, a fur tippet, a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, and, in a hatbox, a blue bonnet. The boy recognized the clothing: it was what “mother” had been wearing on the day she disappeared. The Goods then took Susan Butcher for a ride in the chaise through Greenwich to a public house in New Cross: at his father’s request, Butcher wore mother’s bonnet. Aunt was gone, his father told him at that time. He was now to call Susan Butcher “mother.” The boy waited outside the pub while father and Susan drank gin and water. Leaving Susan Butcher to catch a train, father and son and drove across southern London in the growing darkness to the pawnshop on Wandsworth High Street. From there they returned to Shiell’s stables, and to the search for the trousers—which were never found, and which the boy swore his father never took. Young Daniel Good then witnessed his father’s flight, and the discovery of the trunk—which he first thought was the body of a pig. Knowing all that he knew, young Daniel Good’s confusion must have been short-lived—he must have come, before anyone else, to the horrifying conclusion that this body was mother’s. Moreover, he knew the address where his father was most likely to be found.
Young Daniel apparently disclosed that address to one of the policemen investigating the stables. And the police discovered that Good was headed in the direction of the city: Sergeant Palmer, investigating the fields around the stable, found a broken paling on a fence, and beyond this, footsteps headed northeast. The Metropolitan Police were adept, through an established system of “route-papers,” at communicating information about breaking crimes and fleeing criminals to all metropolitan station houses and to all active officers in a matter of hours. And Superintendent Bicknell indeed ordered a description of Good sent to every division: “V division, April 6,1842.—Absconded, about half-past 9 o’clock, from Mr. Shiell’s, Putney-park-lane, Daniel Good, the coachman, an Irishman, about 40 years of age, 5 feet 6 inches high, very dark complexion, dressed in a dark frock-coat, drab breeches and gaiters, and a black hat. He is suspected of having murdered a female, the body having been found in the stable.” If Bicknell had heard of the South Street address from young Daniel Good, he did not think it fit to include it.
Shooting Victoria Page 14