Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Almost certainly against Cooper’s wishes, his mother drew up a petition for her son as well, pleading for a delay in the execution to further examine her son for evidence of insanity. Thirty neighbors signed the petition, claiming that they were willing to testify to Cooper’s insanity, but were not able to attend the trial. She delivered this to the Home Secretary on Thursday the twenty-third; two days later, she had her answer from the undersecretary: “I am directed to express to you [Graham’s] regret that there is no sufficient ground to justify him consistently with his public duty in advising her Majesty to comply with the prayer thereof.”

  Cooper’s fate, then, was sealed, but the fact that there was no response yet to any of the petitions for Francis augured well for him. Still, nothing was decided for another week, and on the last day of June, when Francis met with his family for the last time before the execution date, it might have been the last time ever. It was a scene of “a most distressing character,” according to a witness.

  Unbeknownst to them, however, his fate had been decided. Two days earlier, the judges in his case had met, made their decision, and sent it on to the cabinet, which made theirs. On Saturday 1 July, Peel reported the decision to Prince Albert: Francis’s sentence would be commuted to transportation for life, at hard labor. He was to serve in the colony’s harshest penal colony. It was all the Francises could hope for. Others wondered whether the commutation was a mercy at all. The young poet Elizabeth Barrett, for one, thought not. “Norfolk Island is scarcely safety*—prolonged agony it certainly is,” she wrote to a friend.

  Victoria and Albert had softened their attitude toward Francis in the month since the shooting, coming to the conclusion that his pistols were not loaded: “the feeling that he is to be executed is very painful to me,” Victoria wrote in her journal. And when she learned of the commutation she wrote “I of course am glad.” But, she added, “Albert & I are of the same opinion, that the law ought to be changed, & more security afforded to me.” The death penalty seemed an excessive punishment for Oxford’s or Francis’s assaults—and transportation for life (or, for that matter, commitment to Bethlem) had dubious deterrent value. What they needed was a new law, specifically designed for Oxford’s and Francis’s crime—with a penalty befitting the crime, one that would shame the offender, not give him the dubious elevation of national notoriety.

  Robert Peel agreed, and set out to create such a law.

  Peel and his cabinet resolved to remove Francis from England as quickly as possible. A convict ship, the Marquis of Hastings, had arrived in Portsmouth on 24 June to take on convicts for the voyage around Cape Hope and to Van Diemen’s Land. Francis would be on that ship. He remained in Newgate long enough to hear the ominous sermon in the prison chapel on the eve of Cooper’s execution. He remained in his cell on Monday 4 July while Cooper was hanged. Two days later, on the sixth, he was clapped in heavy irons and one of Newgate’s chief jailers conveyed him by the Southwestern Railway to Gosport. On the eighteenth, he embarked. “The opinion is that he will not long survive the hardships consequent on the fulfillment of his sentence,” wrote a writer in the Examiner. Francis was to prove that writer wrong.

  The authorities had removed him as quickly as they could. But Francis had not even left Newgate before he learned that another had eclipsed his notoriety as the Queen’s latest assailant.

  * It was perhaps Hunt’s most celebrated case, and within a week he was advertising his success in the Times, to drum up business.

  * Bodkin had, two years before, helped prosecute Courvoisier and helped defend Oxford.

  * Francis actually was transported to Port Arthur, Van Diemen’s Land, and not to Norfolk Island.

  twelve

  HUNCHBACKED LITTLE MISCREANT

  The young man—the boy—stood under the elms close to where John Francis had stood five weeks before. It was around noontime on the hot sunny Sunday of 3 July 1842, and he had positioned himself behind and apart from the crowd of high-spirited Londoners who had assembled on either side of the Mall, two or three deep, to view the Queen’s cortège make its usual Sunday trip from Buckingham Palace to St. James’s and the Chapel Royal. He must have looked like a fool in his dark, oversized coat, but he had to keep it on for two reasons: he was homeless, carrying all his possessions on his back; and he needed it to conceal the small flintlock pistol at his breast. He was sweating, he was dirty; he smelled. He hardly saw himself as a human being. John William Bean Junior was seventeen and tired to death of his life.

  The world found him repulsive. His vertebrae, devastated by disease—perhaps extrapulmonary tuberculosis—curved in an S and slumped into a conspicuous hump over his right shoulder. His head hung at little more than four feet off the ground—if that. His arms were atrophied sticks, his hands those of a young child. When he walked, his twisted body lurched in the direction of his hump. His eyes sunk into his head. His expression was permanently careworn and weary. As a final indignity, God or happenstance had marred his face with a scar or a blotch about his nose.

  It is possible that but for his scoliotic spine, he would not be a dwarf at all.* The world did not make such fine distinctions; to anyone who stared at him, he was a hunchbacked dwarf and a freak. Literary hunchbacks and dwarves were prevalent in the popular culture of the early 1840s, shaping and reflecting popular attitudes toward people like him. First, there was Quasimodo, the pitiful and repulsive Pope of Fools out of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, a book as popular with the British as with the French since its first English translation came out nine years before. Quasimodo’s greatest folly was to believe that others could love him in spite of his deformity; he paid with his life for that belief. More recently—just last year, in fact—Charles Dickens had endowed the villain of his The Old Curiosity Shop, the dwarf Daniel Quilp, with every imaginable evil: he is a bitter, wife-beating, pedophiliac sociopath. Quilp’s supernatural vitality, crammed into a too-small body, curdles into ceaseless misanthropic rage. He is antithetical in every way besides size to the virtuous, loving and beloved heroine of the book, Little Nell.* And then there was that timeless comic monstrosity, that mixture of clownishness, viciousness, and irrepressible energy—Punch. The hunchbacked puppet had been the king of British street performance for nearly two hundred years, but less than a year before, he had been resurrected and revitalized as the acerbic star of the extremely popular humor magazine Punch, always laughing at British society from his perspective as an outsider. Hunchbacks, dwarves—hunchbacked dwarves: they were laughable, or pitiful, or repulsive as freaks—but in any case they were other, never quite human. John William Bean was physically and mentally debilitated by his differences. “I shall never be otherwise than I am,” the seventeen-year-old had said more than once in despair to his father. “I shall resemble no man, and yet I am fast approaching to manhood.”

  He had lived in the neighborhood of Clerkenwell. His father, John William Bean Senior, was (as Edward Oxford’s father had been) a gold-chaser, and he encouraged his son to become his apprentice. John Bean tried and kept trying to succeed at that profession, but the painstaking work was simply too exhausting for his pitiful limbs. He sought easier occupations, but his apprenticeship to a cheesemonger resulted in failure, as did a job as an errand boy at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Most recently, he had been working Sundays for a news vendor, Mr. Hilton. That job had suited him the best, for, besides the short hours, Hilton allowed him to read in the afternoon the Sunday papers he sold in the morning. Two months before, he had come across in this way several articles on Edward Oxford, exposing his life of ease in Bethlem: a pint of wine to drink a day! A personal tutor to teach him German and French! He had spoken both to Mr. Hilton and his father about these stories. They were nonsense, both men rightly told him. But Bean could not shake the belief that Oxford’s catered confinement was a great improvement over his own wearisome freedom.

  Life at home was an ever-increasing torment to him. He knew that his parents loved him in spite
of his deformity. But he suffered greatly from the insults and disrespect of his younger brothers. Their five healthy bodies alone were a reproach to him. As his own torso continued to collapse into itself, they grew taller and stronger; by now, even nine-year-old Henry likely looked down on him in every way. John Bean’s eighteenth birthday was days away. He was sure now that he would not mark that day at home: not in the face of their derision.

  And so he had run away from home three weeks before this Sunday, two weeks after Francis’s attempt. His mother fell ill with worry; his father frantically took a full description of the boy to Clerkenwell police station and pressed them to find him. They did nothing. Four days later, Bean’s employer Mr. Hilton spotted the boy lurking outside his business and persuaded him to return home. He went, knowing that his return was a temporary one, an opportunity to plan more carefully his escape from this miserable life.

  The newspapers that came out on the day he returned home were filled with news of Francis’s trial and condemnation. Bean then could not but realize that if he followed through with the plan he was now formulating, he might face the gallows rather than a comfortable bed at Bethlem. This did little to deter him. Three days later, he bought his pistol from a neighbor, Mr. Bird. His father was later surprised that he had found the money, but discovered that he had sold off his meager collection of books, including his Bible, to get it. It was an old and rusty pocket flintlock, probably not worth the three shillings he paid. Mr. Bird assumed that the boy had bought it as a toy and was surprised when Bean came back to his shop three times, complaining that it did not work. After fending the boy off twice, Bird charged him a penny to replace the useless flint that Bean had thrown away. Bird noticed Bean’s “childish glee” upon seeing the new flint strike sparks, and the flash in the pan when Bird instructed him how to fire it. Bean then brought the pistol to a neighbor to clean it, but he was unable to unscrew the pistol’s rusty barrel and returned it to Bean unfixed. Later, when Bean had primed the gun, loaded it with coarse powder he had bought elsewhere, rammed down with wadding and, inexplicably, a few fragments of a clay smoking-pipe, he could not get the pistol to work. He would have to hope for better results when they mattered. The next day, he ran away again.

  That had been a week ago. He again lived on the streets, sleeping where he could—in abandoned houses, in fields—on the outskirts of Islington, and spending his days roaming the metropolis, earning a pittance at street errands: a few pennies for holding two horses for one gentleman, and a few more on Hungerford Pier fetching a glass of ale for another. He was as unsuccessful at street work as at any other occupation; he had survived last week on only eight pence. One of those pennies he used, the day after he absconded, to post a letter to his parents:

  June 28, 1842

  Dear Father and Mother,

  Thinking you may feel surprised at my prolonged absence, I write these few lines to acquaint you I am seeking employment, which if I do not obtain I will not be dishonest though I may be desperate. It is useless to seek for me. Please give my love to [my] brothers, though they never used me as such. I have very little more to say, except remember me to my aunt and uncle; thank them for what they have done for me. I should have written sooner, but I did not like. Hoping you will excuse this scribbling, and think no more of me. I am your unhappy, but disobedient son, J. B.

  For the last three days he haunted the parks around Buckingham Palace, waiting for his opportunity to present his pistol at the Queen. Somehow, she managed to elude him. She and Albert had not taken an airing in all that time; both were busy entertaining their guests, Victoria’s favorite Uncle Leopold and his wife Louise, King and Queen of the Belgians. The four had come and gone from the palace: to visit the Duchess of Gloucester Thursday for an evening of tableaux vivants, to visit Adelaide the Queen Dowager Friday afternoon. And Albert had managed to get out for a ride without his wife on Saturday. All these comings and goings were unpredictable and Bean had missed them. Today would be different.

  Given the examples of Oxford and Francis, Bean had a good idea about the possible consequences of his act. He was ready for anything. Death—suicide by Queen—either at the gallows or at the hands of an angry crowd: that would be welcome, as would be confinement at the Queen’s pleasure, with Oxford, wine, and tutors. Last night, a new possibility had become apparent when the evening papers reported the commutation of Francis’s sentence. Transportation and a lifetime of hard labor would likely have seemed the worst possible outcome to Bean, well aware of his pitiful lack of stamina. Even that did not deter him; anything was better than the life he lived.

  The crowd quickened; heads turned left to watch two scarlet-liveried outriders and then three carriages and two equerries clatter out of the gates of the Palace. The carriages were all covered landaus, as was usually the case when Victoria and Albert rode to the Chapel Royal. The Queen and Albert, Bean and everyone else knew, were in the third carriage. Leopold rode with them. (The Queen of the Belgians, a Roman Catholic, remained behind at the Palace, taking visitors.) As the outriders approached, Bean elbowed his way through the crowd to the edge of the Mall, coming up against a boy to his right. If he had looked in that direction, he would have been disgusted. The boy was a year younger than Bean, “genteel-looking,” of normal size and stature, and very nattily dressed: a dark frock coat, white trousers with Wellington boots, a blue silk waistcoat and crimson silk neckerchief, his collar, by one account, “turned down à la Byron”: in other words a swell, a toff, everything that John William Bean was not and never would be. His name was Charles Edward Dassett; he was a shopboy in his father’s art-supply business. He had come through the parks from his home in Portman Square with his brother and his uncle to see the Queen.

  The crowd cheered the passing carriages. Their windows were down because of the heat, allowing just a glimpse of the royal party—some could see the light blue or maybe pale green bonnet of the Queen. As the rear wheels of the last carriage rushed past, John Bean pulled his cocked flintlock from his coat, held it at arm’s length, and pulled the trigger.

  The hammer snapped down but the explosion did not come, and the royal party rode on, oblivious, toward the stable yard of St. James’s. Suddenly Bean felt a pull, felt pain, and lurched right. He turned to see Dassett’s large hand clutching his small wrist, and looked up to see the boy’s eyes. They displayed an odd combination of shock—and amusement.

  While the rest of the crowd had focused only upon the royal carriages, Charles Dassett had watched Bean push his way through the crowd, present his pistol, and pull the trigger. He clearly saw the hammer drop and heard the click. In an instant he grabbed Bean’s shooting hand and in the same instant deduced Bean’s motivation. He turned to his brother. “Look here, Fred,” he exclaimed, “this chap is going to have a pop at the Queen—I think he wants to be provided for for life.” He then turned back to Bean and relieved him of his pistol. People began to gather around the boys. Dassett pondered the pistol with amusement, turning it over and over, almost playfully, exhibiting it to the growing group of onlookers. It seemed to them to be some sort of joke; Dassett laughed, and so did they.

  Dassett looked around to find a policeman to take charge of Bean and his pistol. There were plenty about. Perhaps in official response to Francis’s first attempt while the Queen rode to the chapel, a number of A Division officers were stationed along the route to protect the Queen’s cortège. Across the Mall and in front of St. James’s, Dassett saw two of them. With his brother and uncle and the ever-growing crowd, he crossed over, tugging at a slightly resisting Bean. (“He did not walk so fast as my brother wished,” said Frederick Dassett: “he is a cripple.”) Dassett “certainly appeared to me,” one member of the crowd later said, “to be disposed to excite the mob as he walked for a considerable distance laughing with a Pistol in his hand.” And indeed the crowd was amused by it all, thinking that the poor deformed lad had acted in fun—and thinking that the boy Dassett was taking the game too far. It was a ho
ax, some shouted—the gun wasn’t loaded! Others called out to Dassett to give the boy back his pistol, and to let him go. One helpfully suggested that Bean take his pistol back: “put it into your pocket and run away with it.”

  At the gate leading to the Chapel Royal, Dassett presented pistol and Bean to P.C. Thomas Hearn, explaining what had happened. Hearn—who had been on the force for only three months—laughed out loud: this did not amount to a charge, he said. He walked away. Behind Hearn was another officer, P.C. William Claxton—who also refused to take Bean in charge. “Pooh, pooh, it’s all nonsense,” he laughed, following Hearn and disappearing.

  Meanwhile, up Constitution Hill, P.C. James Partridge, an officer with much more experience on the force and particularly with guarding the Queen,* spotted the growing crowd outside St. James’s Palace with alarm—and immediately ran toward it. Dassett was moving in the opposite direction, looking for yet another officer, with Bean still in his grasp. The crowd numbered at least three hundred people and was growing fast; the word that another attempt had been made was spreading, and “large numbers actually clambered the sharp-pointed railings” of St. James’s Park to catch a glimpse of the perpetrator. Confusion and hostility grew as well: wasn’t the boy holding the gun the assailant? Who was the poor hunchback he was holding? John William Bean, sensing opportunity, politely asked Dassett whether he might have his gun back. Dassett ignored him. The crowd roiled as the curious pushed toward the center and as the angry pushed to separate Dassett and Bean. Dassett was forced to let go of Bean—“otherwise my arm would have been broken.” Since he held the gun, the crowd stayed with him. Bean slipped away, past the running P.C. Partridge and into Green Park, heading north—heading homewards.