Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Lord Abinger.—If you saw the prisoner for ten minutes, standing amongst the crowd with a pistol in his hand, waiting to see the result, and knowing that Her Majesty was coming, why did you not take him into custody? Now explain that to the jury.

  I can only say that I merely waited to watch the result.

  In summing up, Abinger pointed out that if Vosper had acted as he said he had, he was guilty of misprision of treason. His testimony indeed contradicted Charles Dassett’s—but the jury could decide how much credence to accord a criminal by his own admission.

  Horry’s other witnesses—Bean’s former employers and family acquaintances—testified to his good character. When his father took the stand to plead to his son’s “mild, peaceable, and inoffensive” conduct, Bean wept bitterly.

  By the time of his summing up, Judge Abinger had greatly assisted the prosecution in puncturing the basis of Horry’s defense. As for his claim that any assault on the Queen must be High Treason, he responded that this was not so: persons might insult or behave rudely to her. He cited as evidence the curious case where a man had once been indicted for grinning at George III. And in response to Horry’s claim that an assault cannot be said to take place if the victim is unaware of it, he noted “Is it not an assault to point a loaded gun at a man when he is asleep? I think it is, but Mr. Horry contends the contrary.”

  It was in the end a simple case for the jury. They consulted for a moment, and gave their verdict: guilty on the second count—harassing and alarming the Queen and the public. Bean heard the verdict without emotion.

  Abinger found himself in a frustrating position. He wanted to impose a harsh sentence upon the boy—wanted, indeed, to follow the public consensus and humiliate him. But the old law made no provision for whipping. After consulting briefly with his fellow judges, he tore into Bean: “I know of no misdemeanour more affecting the public peace of the kingdom, of greater magnitude or deserving more serious punishment, than that of which you have just been pronounced guilty.” He wished that the punishment he could impose was equal to the offense, but he knew it was not. He thus satisfied himself with a warning to any future miscreants: if they aren’t convicted of High Treason and thus forfeit their lives, they will “gain another species of notoriety, by being publicly whipped at a cart’s tail through any street in the metropolis.” As it was, Abinger imposed the harshest sentence he thought he could: eighteen months at hard labor at Millbank Penitentiary.

  John William Bean, tired of his life and by now surely tired to death of the scornful scrutiny of the public, was taken from the bar.

  * On the other hand, he might have been unnaturally short even without the spinal curvature. Estimates of John Bean’s height varied considerably—from 3’6” to 5’6”. The most careful estimate may have been by an eyewitness to Bean’s naked body, who claimed Bean’s scoliosis rendered his height 3’6” when he would otherwise stand at 4’6”, making him a hunchback and a dwarf, in the cruel vernacular of the day.

  * Interestingly, The Old Curiosity Shop may be the one work of literature to contain a portrait of one of Victoria’s would–be assassins: in chapter 28 the illustrator of that novel, Hablôt K. Browne—”Phiz”—anachronistically but unmistakably places a beerpot-and flintlock-toting Edward Oxford among Mrs. Jarley’s waxwork figures (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 284).

  * Partridge was the officer on duty two years before when Edward Oxford was brought to A Division station house.

  * Three thousand, according to the Times.

  * The inclusion in the 1851 census of a 27-year-old cabman by the name of John Oxman suggests that this seeming alias was nothing of the kind.

  * Fieschi is usually considered the first of Louis-Philippe’s would-be assassins. But three years before, in November 1832, the King was shot at and the shooter never found.

  * It was under this Act in 1981 that Marcus Sergeant was prosecuted for firing six blanks at Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth.

  * Horry was Thomas Cooper’s attorney as well.

  * “Bospher” in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey.

  thirteen

  TORY SPIES

  Four days after John William Bean’s trial, on Monday 29 August, the Royal George set out of Woolwich in the pouring rain, towed by two steamships. Victoria and Albert were off to Scotland in spite of—and now in part because of—the disturbances across Britain. Besides a short visit by George IV in 1822, no British monarch had set foot in Scotland since the mid-1600s; indeed, Victoria would be the first reigning Queen of Scotland to be there since Mary Queen of Scots. The royal couple planned to put into practice the lessons John Conroy had taught Princess Victoria, enhancing the Queen’s prestige through two grueling weeks of processionals between and within the cities of southern Scotland, mingling with all social classes: with cheering crowds by day, and with the elite by night as they stayed at their castles and estates.

  The voyage began inauspiciously as bad weather forced the steamships to tow the yacht most of the way up the coast, the royal couple spending much of the time belowdecks, ill. (The fact that Victoria was unknowingly three weeks pregnant with her third child could not have helped.) They arrived off Edinburgh a day after they were expected, letting down the thousands who had the day before trooped from miles around into the city, cramming the scaffolding along the planned procession route in vain expectation of seeing the Queen. Early the next morning, the royal procession shot through the city on the way to Dalkeith Palace, without sufficient warning to the public and before city dignitaries had assembled. Edinburgh’s enthusiasm soured into disappointment. The town council and the royal party quickly improvised another procession through the city the next day. It was a rousing success—the first of many. “Scotland has rarely seen a prouder day—perhaps never,” wrote the Times. Massive crowds showered adulation upon the royal couple. Robert Peel rode in the carriage behind, fretting about the complete lack of security. “The crowds of persons were beyond description,” he wrote to his wife. “The mob was close to the carriage, from the narrowness of the streets, and every window in every house looking down into the carriages.” The Chartists who ran hooting and groaning beside him added to his anxiety.

  Peel had every reason to worry. Somewhere on this route—or in the crowd for one or more of the next fortnight’s processions—a man with an overwhelming urge to kill was watching and awaiting his opportunity. He had been for much of the last two years living in London, but he was a native of Glasgow, and had returned home ahead of the royal visit. At the beginning of August, in Paisley—incidentally one of Britain’s worst-suffering towns, that hungry summer—he had bought two mismatched percussion-cap pistols. His target would be prominent within the royal processions. But the first carriage, the open phaeton behind the six mounted Royal Dragoons clearing the path, the one carrying Victoria and Albert, was only a distraction to him. It was a carriage further behind this that he was looking for—one clearly marked with the crest of two lions holding a shield marked “Industria”: Robert Peel’s carriage. Daniel McNaughtan saw the carriage, saw one man in it—and committed that man’s face to memory.

  The face, however, did not belong to Robert Peel. During the Edinburgh procession, and on many more during the next fortnight, Peel rode directly behind the royal couple in the carriage of his Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen. He left his secretary, Edward Drummond, to ride by himself in the Peel family carriage. Drummond later joked about his being taken for “a great man” in Scotland. He didn’t look like Peel, but the two were roughly the same age. Because the illustrated press was in its infancy, images of even highly public figures such as Peel were rare. It was an easy mistake to make. Daniel McNaughtan made it.

  Daniel McNaughtan knew that he could find release from his torment only by destroying Peel. The oppressive persecution he suffered had grown for years. It began, he was sure, with the priests of the local Catholic chapel, who tormented him with the assistance of a parcel of Jesuits. But then, he kn
ew, the Tories joined in and soon became his chief tormentors. Their enmity toward him should perhaps not have been surprising, given his enmity toward them. Until 1841, he had been a very successful craftsman, amassing a small fortune as a wood-turner in Glasgow, and politics were a part of his life; as it happens, one of Glasgow’s leading Chartists worked as a journeyman in his shop. But at some point—after he voted publicly against them, he claimed—the personal enmity that the Tories of Glasgow bore toward him alone grew to cosmic proportions. Day and night, Tory spies followed him. On the street, they glowered and laughed at him, furiously shaking their fists and their walking sticks in his face. One man repeatedly threw straw at him. His enemies never talked to him, instead communicating with signs. He knew what the straw meant: they intended to reduce him to sleeping on straw in an asylum. They inserted beastly, atrocious libels about him in the Glasgow Herald and the London Times; they poisoned his food. When he went to bed, they followed him and would not let him sleep. They intended to destroy his peace of mind, drive him to consumption; they would not stop until he was dead.

  His enemies were inhabitants of Glasgow, and so he repeatedly sought relief from the authorities of that city. When his father could not help him, he went in turn to the sheriff, the Procurator-Fiscal (or Glasgow’s public prosecutor), the Commissioner of Police, the Lord Provost, and even to his Member of Parliament. All of them considered him delusional—and could do nothing to help him. When McNaughtan tracked down his M.P., Alexander Johnson, in London, Johnson fended him off with a curt note sent from the Reform Club: “I can do nothing for you. I fear you are labouring under an aberration of mind.” When civil authority failed him, he looked to the divine, begging his father’s minister Rev. Mr. Turner for help. The Reverend could do nothing except what the Lord Provost had done—call upon McNaughtan’s father and advise him to put his lunatic son in restraints. But Daniel McNaughtan Senior refused, thinking that his son’s delusions would pass.

  McNaughtan realized that he would have to act for himself. He fled Scotland for London, but to his great dismay his persecutors followed him. He twice fled abroad, but it was no use: the instant he set foot on the quay at Boulogne, he could see one of them scowling at him from behind the custom-house watchbox. Flight was impossible. He would have to stop his tormentors by killing their leader. And so he returned to Scotland and waited for his opportunity to kill the man as he toured the country with the Queen. For some reason, he did not shoot at the man in Peel’s carriage. Accordingly, two or three weeks after the Queen’s Scottish tour, McNaughtan followed Peel to London, taking the steamship Fire King from Glasgow to Liverpool—where the ubiquitous spies beset him particularly mercilessly. In London, McNaughtan tried for a couple months to find a living in spite of the Tories, seeking work and seeking a partner with whom to invest the £750 he had earned from his wood-turning business. At the beginning of 1843, however, the oppression reached the breaking point; he gave up all else in order to stalk his arch-oppressor, Peel.

  He took up his post in the heart of Tory darkness: the streets outside of Whitehall, standing all day for two weeks on the steps leading to the Privy Council office. Two recruiters from the army saw him there and asked if he’d like to enlist. No, he told them: he was simply waiting to see a gentleman. Two policemen from A Division—including P.C. Partridge*—took note of him; one told him that those inside the Privy Council office did not like his loitering there. “Tell them their property is quite safe,” he replied.

  His obsessive urge to kill was matched by an obsessive need to kill the right man. The Prime Minister’s official residence was, then as now, 10 Downing Street, but Robert Peel actually resided in his London mansion, Whitehall Gardens, conveniently located directly across from Downing Street, and observable from McNaughtan’s position. Edward Drummond had rooms at 10 Downing Street, and his business took him back and forth between the residences, often several times a day. McNaughtan watched him come and go—the man had to be Peel. To be absolutely sure, he twice pointed Drummond out to a police constable, asking if that man was Robert Peel. Both times, the constable said yes, thinking McNaughtan was pointing to the man then walking next to Drummond: Robert Peel.

  On the twentieth of January, McNaughtan, aware of the growing alarm he was causing the Tories and the police around him, came down the steps and shadowed Drummond, who walked from Downing Street to Charing Cross and entered Drummond’s bank. (It belonged to his brother.) A few minutes later, Drummond emerged and walked back toward Downing Street. McNaughtan followed. Between the Admiralty and the Horse Guards, McNaughtan walked up to Drummond’s back, pulled one of his pistols from the breast of his coat and fired, so close to his victim that Drummond’s jacket caught fire. He thrust the pistol back into his coat and reached for the other one. Constable James Silver, standing next to the two, was upon McNaughtan an instant after the first shot. The two struggled violently before Silver knocked up McNaughtan’s arm and kicked his legs from beneath him. McNaughtan fired the second pistol into the air.

  Drummond, clutching at his back, staggered back into his brother’s bank. Although the bullet had nearly traveled through his body, he seemed relatively uninjured; initial reports of his condition were extremely optimistic. An apothecary was sent for and deemed him fit to travel to the family house on Grosvenor Street, where doctors were called in, and the bullet was removed. Drummond lingered for five days, while the best doctors in town finished what the bullet had started, leeching and bleeding him relentlessly as his wound grew more infected. On 25 January, he died.

  P.C. Silver marched McNaughtan to the Gardiner Lane station house. On the way there McNaughtan muttered that “he” or “she” (Silver could not tell which) “shall not break my peace of mind any longer.” Placed in the same cell that Oxford, Francis, and Bean had occupied before him, he spent several hours certain that he had wounded if not killed Sir Robert Peel. It was not until eight or nine the next morning that Inspector John Tierney, interviewing him, realized that McNaughtan had shot the wrong man. “I suppose you are aware who the gentleman is you shot at?” Tierney asked him. “It is Sir Robert Peel, is it not?” McNaughtan replied, growing agitated. “No,” the inspector at first replied, but then, not wanting to force a confession, said “we don’t exactly know who the gentleman is yet.” Later that day, at his examination at Bow Street, McNaughtan learned the truth: to his great horror, his persecutors had triumphed.

  “The evidence of his mental delusion is strong,” Peel wrote to Victoria of McNaughtan on the day Drummond died, and it soon became clear that he would plead insanity. The prospect of an acquittal for insanity pleased no one, certainly not the Queen. McNaughtan, like Edward Oxford, had acted with such deliberation: how could he not be held responsible for his act? “There is and should be,” she wrote to Peel, “a difference between that madness which is such that a man knows not what he does, and madness which does not prevent a man from purposely buying pistols, and then with determined purpose watching and shooting a person.” Deliberation, in other words, demonstrates awareness, and awareness implies guilt.

  More than this, an acquittal of any kind would completely remove any deterrent value from the sentence. The connection between the three attempts upon the Queen and the murder of Drummond was by now obvious to all. “Who can doubt but that Bellingham was as insane as Oxford?” exclaimed a writer in the Times, thinking back to the quick execution of Spencer Perceval’s assassin in 1812. “But, after the execution of the former, he had no imitators: would that we could say as much after the pardon of the latter!” An insanity acquittal would only perpetuate the outrages and the Queen would remain in danger. Home Secretary Graham, preparing the case against McNaughtan, was adamant that he be convicted. “Every preparation is in progress to meet this vague and dangerous excuse,” he wrote Victoria. He had grounds for hope: word had reached him from Scotland that a case could be made that he was a coldhearted, violent Chartist. That lead petered out, however, and no evidence of this kind
was presented at McNaughtan’s trial.

  On the second of February, McNaughtan was brought to the bar of the Old Bailey to enter his plea. His counsel pleaded for more time to set up an insanity defense: McNaughten’s attorneys planned to call witnesses from Scotland, and perhaps France. The Attorney General did not object—the government did not want another Bellingham on its hands, found guilty and executed before witnesses to his insanity could be brought forward. The judge, Baron Abinger, gave the defense a month to prepare. Moreover, he granted counsel’s request that McNaughtan be allowed access to his bank account: £750 to fund his defense. And if McNaughtan’s trial was to prove nothing else, it certainly proved that in 1843, £750 could buy a defense nothing short of magnificent.

  It bought the services of Alexander Cockburn, Q.C., for one thing—a highly paid, high-profile attorney (and later Lord Chief Justice). Cockburn was assisted by three other attorneys, including William Clarkson, who had defended Francis, and William Henry Bodkin, who assisted in Oxford’s defense. Moreover, McNaughtan’s money bought the expertise of no fewer than five medical experts, including Edward Monro, Principal Physician at Bethlem, and two doctors brought down from Glasgow. The three London doctors examined McNaughtan several times in company with two doctors retained by the prosecution. When those last two doctors concluded with the others that McNaughtan was indeed insane, the government knew that their case was in trouble before it began.

  At 10:00 on 3 March 1843, an excited Daniel McNaughtan was again brought to the bar of the Old Bailey, before Chief Justice Tindal, Justice Williams, and Justice Coleridge. He pleaded not guilty; a chair was brought for him, and he instantly seemed to doze off, ignoring Solicitor General Follett’s opening. (He would perk up when the witnesses testified.) The Solicitor General rather than Attorney General Pollock led the prosecution because Pollock was on this day in Lancaster, conducting the government’s case against Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor and fifty-eight others for their roles in the Plug Plot Riots. Follett was assisted by the same attorneys who had prosecuted Francis and Bean. They faced the unenviable task of fighting an insanity acquittal while offering nothing to counter the overwhelming evidence that McNaughtan was delusive. Their strategy was to set the legal bar for an insanity acquittal as high as possible, arguing that while McNaughtan might be partially mad, he was still morally aware and thus criminally responsible.