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Shooting Victoria

Page 20

by Paul Thomas Murphy


  After the examination, Francis was bundled out the back entrance and conveyed to Tothill Fields for the night. At the prison, he divulged his name and address, and grew socially indignant when someone asked whether it was true that his father was a “scene-shifter” at Covent Garden. “Scene-shifter! No, he’s a stage carpenter.” He was, as policy dictated, stripped naked and bathed.

  The next day, he was brought back to Whitehall at noon to finish his examination. There, young, stuttering George Pearson, brought by the police to Tothill Fields to pick Francis out from among a crowd of prisoners, was able to positively identify Francis as the Queen’s assailant on Sunday. The Council charged Francis with High Treason and sent him in a hackney cab to Newgate. His night in jail, and the capital charge leveled against him, had apparently had a sobering effect: the crowd assembled outside the Home Office saw him lean back in the vehicle and pull his hat over his brow, seeming to “wish to shrink from public gaze.”

  The news of Francis’s attempt spread quickly to become “the all engrossing topic of conversation amongst all classes”—a “ferment … not to be done justice to in description.” As they had two years before, the population of the metropolis erupted into a celebration of the monarchy and of Victoria: a celebration completely spontaneous, and yet now beginning to take on the sanctity of tradition. Victoria did not ride to her mother’s home this time, instead sending her Uncle Mensdorff to inform her about the attempt; the Duchess hurried back with her brother-in-law to the Palace, where, bursting into tears, she fell upon Victoria, who calmly caressed and reassured her. Again, her relatives, leading politicians and diplomats, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all rushed to the Palace while the crowds swelled outside. Robert Peel belied his usual coolness in an emotional meeting with the Queen. Many of the gentry, in full evening dress, stopped at the palace on their way to parties and the theatres to sign the registry and tender their congratulations. At all the theatres, patrons and performers alike gave vent to tumultuous cheering and displays of “unmixed joy.” At Covent Garden—Francis’s theatre—the German Opera was performing; Madame Schodel and the sublimely voiced bass, Herr Staudigl, sang every verse of the national anthem to “loud plaudits”—an excellent rendition, according to a reporter for the Morning Chronicle—“making allowance for the foreign accent of the vocalists.”

  The next day was an impromptu holiday for Londoners of every class. The crowds began to form anew by 8:00—around the Palace, and at Whitehall, where Francis was to return to complete his examination by the Privy Council. At the more polite hour of ten, the carriages of the elite began arriving at the Palace, in a throng that continued all morning and into the late afternoon. By that time, the crowd lining Constitution Hill and assembled in Hyde Park had grown to a crushing volume, thousands of the Queen’s subjects certain that she and Albert would ride and all desiring to be a part of that triumphal procession. That she would ride again was never a question to the Queen. It was inconceivable to her that Francis, like Oxford, was anything but an aberration. “When her Majesty goes abroad among the people for the purpose of taking recreation or exercise,” John Russell said in Parliament that afternoon, “there is not one among her subjects who has less reason to fear an enemy in any single individual of the millions who constitute her subjects.” That Victoria and Albert agreed with him without reservation was demonstrated by the fact that they had allowed Lady Lyttelton to take the Princess Royal and the infant Prince of Wales on an airing that morning in a coach and four.

  And at around 4:30, the gates opened; several outriders in scarlet livery trotted out, and, with their guest the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, followed by the five Counts Mensdorff, Victoria and Albert rode triumphantly into their public. They rode into an increasingly thicker crowd as they approached the Wellington Arch: “the crowd of spectators was so great,” wrote one anxious reporter, “that it was miraculous that some serious accidents did not occur.” In Hyde Park, they were slowed to a near standstill by the horses and carriages of the nobility. Again, the royal couple witnessed the completely spontaneous and yet entirely ordered jubilation and homage of all classes; the Queen was said to be overcome by the sight.

  That evening, the Queen returned to her favorite theatre—the Italian Opera at Her Majesty’s—with Albert and the ubiquitous Mensdorffs. They arrived just after the national anthem was sung and the opera had begun. The full house greeted Victoria with thunderous huzzahs, waving hats and handkerchiefs, refusing to let the opera proceed until they had sung the anthem again, bursting into applause at the end of every line, and screaming “deafening acclamations” at the song’s command “Scatter her enemies.” The crowd, unfortunately, were unable to transfer an iota of their enthusiasm for the Queen to the opera itself, a production of Mercadante’s Elena da Feltre, called by a critic an “abortion” and “utterly worthless and common-place.” The crowd responded to the opera with apathy, when not actually hissing. Again, the royal couple were the star performers at Her Majesty’s.

  In the House of Commons earlier that afternoon, Robert Peel, in agreeing to a joint Parliamentary address to the Queen, revealed for the first time news of Francis’s first attack on Sunday, and that the Queen—in Peel’s words, “relying with confidence in the generous loyalty of her people with a determination not to be confined as a prisoner in her own palace”—had ridden on Monday with a full awareness of the threat against her. Peel also praised the Queen’s consideration for her ladies, in refusing to subject them to the danger that she willingly faced. (Lady Portman’s brother in the House of Commons, and her husband in the House of Lords, emotionally concurred.) With the dissemination of that news, the spontaneous celebration took on a different tenor. Albert’s secretary Anson noted the difference, writing in his journal that “the feeling now was of a deeper cast” than it had been after Oxford’s attempt. Over the next days, newspaper editors and speakers at hundreds of congratulatory meetings across the country waxed enthusiastically about Victoria’s chivalric heroism: her calmness and resolution; her “kindness … consideration … generosity.” A poem in Wednesday’s Times held Victoria “A King in courage, though by sex a Queen/Our lion-hearted monarch. …” A writer in the Morning Chronicle wrote “we feel sure that it is no flattery to say that a finer instance of mingled heroism and generosity than this would be difficult to find; and it will deepen, if possible, the affection and the admiration so universally felt for her Majesty’s character by her subjects.”

  The Queen, it seemed, could do no wrong. Few considered (publicly, anyway) the Queen’s facing the bullet of an assailant with no more than the bodies of her equerry and his horse to protect her to be an astoundingly foolhardy risk. The clearheaded Charles Greville, writing privately in his diary, was one of the few at the time to see it that way: her action he thought “very brave, but imprudent. It would have been better to stay at home, or go to Claremont, and let the police look for the man, or to have taken some precautionary measures.”

  Commissioner Charles Rowan could not have agreed more with Greville: it was his understanding that the queen would be prudent and stay at home, while the police went about weeding out the shooter. He was well aware of how close a call this attempt had been, and knew that if Francis had succeeded, his police would have suffered the opprobrium of the public and the wrath of the government. Trounce’s nearly fatal salute demonstrated the danger of trusting royal protection to officers untrained for the job. But more than this, the miscommunication between the Palace, the Home Office, and Scotland Yard made it clear to Rowan that threats against the Queen could not be dealt with on the spur of the moment. The newspapers were not slow to take to task the police and the government for offering the Queen so little protection. The Globe, for instance, held that “the Queen’s bravery is more impressive when contrasted with the ministers’ apathy” and thundered in particular at Home Secretary Graham’s “unaccountable disregard” for the Queen’s safety, given that he knew about the threat the day before she rode on M
onday: no precautions seem to have been taken, such as the posting of extra police on the Queen’s route. This was not completely fair, but Rowan was well aware that the police should have and could have done better. First Good, then Cooper, and now Francis: three high-profile cases that exposed all the weaknesses of a police force committed to prevention and not detection of crime. The department had to change. For years Rowan’s younger and in effect junior co-commissioner Richard Mayne had favored a detective branch, and had quietly been acting unofficially in creating one, setting aside one officer in each division, for example, to trace stolen goods, and creating “special officers” whose duties included plainclothes work and detection. But Waterloo veteran Charles Rowan, the prime mover behind the military structure of the police when the department was formed in 1829, had long resisted any official action. No longer. Rowan now threw his influence and energy behind its official establishment.

  Within two weeks of Francis’s attempt, on 14 June, the Commissioners forwarded a memorandum to Graham at the Home Office. Their proposal was a modest one, calling for two detective inspectors and eight detective sergeants, all to be stationed at Scotland Yard and to be paid slightly more than their uniformed counterparts. Two days later, Graham replied through his permanent undersecretary. He was interested. But he had some questions. What was the cost to be—and where was the money to come from? And how were the ten detectives (in a city, by the way, of two million) to keep themselves busy when their detective services were not needed?

  Rowan and Mayne responded quickly. The cost was to be less than £1,000 a year, to be drawn out of the general police funds. And, when they were not actively pursuing a case, detectives would keep busy by penetrating and exploring the criminal underworld—gaining that omniscient knowledge of crime and criminals that Charles Dickens, who later became the most enthusiastic and vocal fan of the detective branch, declared to be one of their strongest assets.

  On the twentieth, Graham agreed to their proposal, but reduced the number of sergeants from eight to six. The commissioners had created a detective branch in all of six days.

  Filling the positions was quickly done, as well; Mayne had probably long had a list in mind for this occasion. The experienced Pearce was to take charge as Senior Inspector; his junior colleague was to be John Haynes from P Division. Pearce’s aide, Sgt. Thornton, was to take the lead among the six sergeants.

  * According to another witness, the youth did pull the trigger, but the pistol misfired; see page 175.

  eleven

  POWDER AND WADDING

  John Francis’s family was devastated by the news that their son and brother had shot at the Queen. His delicate mother, Elizabeth, “was seized with the most alarming illness” upon hearing the news, her husband fearing for her life. Her precarious state did not prevent the police from searching their Tottenham Court lodgings the night of and day after Francis’s capture, searching for evidence of an accomplice. (They found nothing.) It was up to John Francis Senior to follow his son from the Home Office to prison, and to hire a solicitor.

  Francis himself attempted in Newgate to project the sense that his act had been little more than a frolic, but the persistence with which he repeatedly claimed “there was no ball in the pistol; it only flashed in the pan” to warders, to the governor, to reporters, belied his anxiety about the enormity of the penalty he faced, if not of the crime itself. Still, he was hopeful: surely, everyone knew he could not have harmed the Queen, since his gun was not loaded?

  The fact that this was the second attempt on the Queen’s life in as many years made the motivation of these young assailants an urgent question. Many were completely perplexed: Victoria’s youth, her virtue, her gender should guarantee her freedom from any attempt on her life. But a consensus was building. The reports of Oxford’s comfortable confinement were well known, and appeared to most to be a reward of sorts, as freedom from the hardship of poverty and “the disagreeable condition of perpetually collecting pewter pots.” It seemed obvious that Francis wished for what Oxford had—a life of ease at the Queen’s pleasure. The crowd that formed outside Buckingham Palace on the night of the attempt agreed, claiming (according to an eavesdropping policeman) that “his only motive could be like Oxford to ensure a situation for life.” On hearing of Francis’s attempt, Oxford himself claimed that “If they had hanged me, there would have been nothing of the kind again.” But there was more to it than this. The instant fame he gained from the attempt was just as important to Oxford as it was to his imitator, Francis. A writer in the Examiner described the thrill that these boys experienced in being charged and tried for High Treason. The procedure “flatters the diseased appetite for éclat and notoriety which prompted Oxford’s attempt, and has probably also been one of the motives of Francis—messengers hurrying hither and thither in search of Ministers—the pomp and circumstance of examination before the Privy Council, instead of the quiet undramatic course of an examination in the nearest dingy police-office before the sort of magistrate who is the habitual terror of the sort of prisoner.” As long as assailants were treated as the chief players in “State pageants,” this sort of crime would happen again; the law as it stood was an encouragement, not a deterrent, to the crime.

  But that was the law; the government had no other option than to try Francis for High Treason. His trial was scheduled for Friday 17 June. Thomas Cooper, now in Newgate’s infirmary suffering from the effects of the poison he had taken, would face trial the next day, the eighteenth.

  Both Francis’s defense and his prosecution prepared their cases with Oxford’s trial in mind. Francis’s barrister William Clarkson, a hardheaded, “rough, bluff, testy personage,” had no intention of mounting an insanity defense. Public anger at Oxford’s sentence, rekindled by Francis’s attempt, made it unlikely that any jury would acquit Francis for that reason, even if the defense could succeed at the difficult task of finding witnesses to testify to mad behavior on Francis’s part. Moreover, Oxford’s acquittal for insanity had ironically resulted in what amounted to imprisonment for life. If Sydney Taylor had forgone an insanity plea and simply argued that Oxford’s pistols were not loaded, Oxford would almost certainly have walked from the Old Bailey a free man. Taylor’s two-pronged defense only confused the jury and resulted in a muddled verdict. In Francis’s case, there was no substantial evidence that his flintlock was loaded. Clarkson would concede that Francis bought a gun, that he pulled it out on the Mall on Sunday, and that he presented it and fired it, without ball, on Constitution Hill on Monday. He would produce no witnesses to counter these facts; rather, he would oppose the prosecution’s attempts to suggest that the gun was loaded. If Francis had no bullets in his gun, Clarkson would argue, he could not have intended to harm the Queen. Therefore, Francis’s public disturbance was certainly illegal, and prosecutable as a lesser charge, but it did not amount to High Treason. His entire case, then, would hinge upon the claim that Francis had had only powder and wadding in his pistol.

  The prosecution was formidable, composed of Attorney General Frederick Pollock (who had helped prosecute Oxford), Solicitor General William Webb Follett, and three others. They must have been delighted to learn that Clarkson had no intention of arguing insanity. Two years before, an insanity verdict and detention at the Queen’s pleasure seemed a victory of sorts for the government. But the general sense that Oxford had improved his life by committal to Bethlem, and the prevailing belief that his committal positively incited malcontents to attack the Queen, would now render that outcome the worst of defeats.

  They were well aware that the weak link to their case was a lack of hard proof that Francis’s gun had been loaded. Despite their strenuous efforts, the police had not found any shopkeeper in London who had sold Francis bullets. No spent bullet was found after the attempt, and even though Francis had fired at the Queen from seven feet away, no bullet had done damage to her, her equerry, his horse, or her carriage. They planned two strategies to deal with this weak link. First they
would introduce evidence that the sound of Francis’s shot suggested that his gun was loaded. Second, they would argue that it was not at all necessary to prove that Francis’s gun was loaded: even if it wasn’t, he was still guilty of High Treason.

  To this end, the government very carefully articulated the indictment against Francis, breaking it down into eight counts. Four held that Francis did “compass, imagine, devise, and intend” to kill the Queen; four held that he endangered her life. And each of these charges consisted of four counts—differing in degree, but still amounting to High Treason. Count 1 held that Francis’s gun contained gunpowder and a bullet; count 2 held that it contained gunpowder and “certain other destructive materials and substances unknown”; count 3 held that Francis fired a loaded pistol; and count 4 held that Francis simply fired a pistol. Arguably, by that last count, Francis could be found guilty for High Treason simply by firing an unloaded weapon at the Queen. Clarkson’s strategy was to argue that the evidence did not reach the high bar set for High Treason. The prosecution’s strategy was to lower the bar.

  John Francis was placed in the dock of the Old Bailey on the morning of 18 June, well dressed in a black suit, to viewers discernibly handsome—and deeply anxious. Two weeks of jailers’ and visitors’ disappointingly impassive responses to his claims that his gun was unloaded, and that he had no intention to harm the Queen, had destroyed the “most perfect sang froid” with which he had entered Newgate. And since there was to be no insanity defense, he knew he would not be sharing Oxford’s enviable fate, whatever happened. Outside, huge crowds pressed to enter the courtroom. But the sheriffs only admitted those with written orders: the room was full but not uncomfortably so. Francis was far less concerned than Oxford had been at the quality of his audience: his attention from the start was fixed on his own barrister, William Clarkson, on the three judges above him, led by Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and upon the five prosecutors who sought his life. He bowed respectfully to the court, and was read the elaborate charges against him. “Not Guilty,” he said, in a low voice.

 

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