Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  The revolutionary tenth of April turned out to be a complete bust. Though estimates of the crowd differ widely, nowhere near the 400,000 which Feargus O’Connor expected to come actually showed up. O’Connor, alarmed by the military preparations, lost his own fire on this day. Upon his arrival at Kennington Common, he was called into a pub by Commissioner Mayne and told that he could hold his meeting, but that a monster procession to Parliament was out of the question. O’Connor meekly agreed, mounted the rostrum to ask the crowd to disperse, and took the petition to Parliament himself in a cab. The petition itself only earned ridicule as it was found (after a suspiciously quick count) to have less than a third of the six million signatures claimed, and many of those signatures were found to be fraudulent, including the Queen’s as “Victoria Rex.” Though the movement percolated on through the summer, the threat had passed. “We had our revolution yesterday, and it went up in smoke,” Albert wrote to Stockmar.

  He added, however, “in Ireland things look still more serious.” There, revolution fermented as spring turned to summer. Daniel O’Connell had died in 1847, and his non-violent movement to repeal the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland had been eclipsed by that of Young Ireland, a group who differed from the O’Connellites in their willingness to use physical force to repeal the union. The February revolution in France electrified Young Ireland as it had the Chartists. “The shock awakened mankind,” proclaimed the movement’s leader, William Smith O’Brien. “Those who believed themselves to be weak now felt themselves to be strong.”

  Young Ireland began to promote rebellion openly, and formed the Irish Confederation—clubs across the island with the avowed aim of preparing for insurrection. Lord Clarendon, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was deeply alarmed by all this activity, sending Cassandra cries to the government, pleading for a suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland. When Parliament did just that at the end of July, the leaders of Young Ireland were faced with a stark decision: passivity and arrest, or outright rebellion. Smith O’Brien feared the worst, but felt bound by honor to raise an insurrection. Dublin was a British armed camp; the south was more auspicious for rebellion. Smith O’Brien thus tramped through the southern towns and countryside, finding large crowds of poorly armed but ardent adherents at every turn—and demonstrating at every turn his utter inability to lead a revolution, tenaciously holding to his belief in the sanctity of private property before would-be rebels who had none. When an excited crowd of six thousand began to build barricades in the village of Mullinahone, Smith O’Brien forbade them to fell trees without the permission of the owners of the nearby estates. To another crowd, hungry and ready to despoil in order to eat, Smith O’Brien ordered them instead to return home, provide four days’ provisions for themselves, and return the next day. “This announcement gave a death-blow to the entire movement,” stated a witness. The crowds melted away as fast as they formed.

  Having thus gathered up and dispersed several armies of the poor, on 29 July in the town of Ballingarry, Smith O’Brien and a ragtag group of about 120 men and women confronted fifty or so policemen who, fleeing the crowd, commandeered a widow’s house on the edge of town. The widow was out, but her five or six children were there, and the police took them hostage. Smith O’Brien attempted to secure the children’s release and was nearly shot for his pains when gunfire erupted on both sides and he was caught in the crossfire. The police were better armed, and after the rebels expended all of their bullets and stones on the house, hurting no police but losing two of their own, the crowd scattered before police reinforcements arrived. Smith O’Brien fled alone. The Irish revolution of 1848 ended with an Irish whimper and a British snicker, the Times dismissively immortalizing the event as the “cabbage-patch revolt.” Smith O’Brien was arrested within a week, tried, and sentenced with three others to death for Treason. On this day of the Queen’s thirtieth birthday, Smith O’Brien was in Richmond Bridewell in Dublin, the sounds of the festivities outside likely echoing through the prison.

  The worst of the European revolutionary fervor was over by May 1849. The hemorrhaging of monarchies had stopped with the June 1848 insurrection in France, during which hundreds of radicals died on the barricades and the conservatives took control. After this, the tide in Europe shifted from revolution to reaction. Victoria’s aristocratic refugees (save Louis-Philippe and his family) went home. Die-hard Chartists still met and tried to convince each other that they had significance, but their popular support was gone: they certainly would never send the royal family running again. The economy was surging. Ireland was tamed—tamed enough for Victoria and Albert to consider visiting the country, as Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, had been begging them to do for some time.

  There was every reason for Victoria to celebrate—every reason to go among her public. She’d taken few rides in London this year. But for the last four days, and with the fine May weather, she’d toured the parks in an open carriage with various combinations of her children, Albert and his equerry riding on horseback beside them. She would ride again today, bringing Alice, Affie, and Lenchen with her.

  Outside the Palace gates and up Constitution Hill the crowd grew larger, as the presence of the royal landau at the Palace steps signaled silently and almost supernaturally the Queen’s intent to ride. At half past five, nursemaids and footmen helped the children, and then Victoria and her maid of honor Flora MacDonald, into the carriage. Victoria sat at the left rear. Her sergeant-footman, Robert Renwick, clambered up into the rumble seat behind her, and her equerry, Major General William Wemyss, took up his position on horseback, very close to the left side of the carriage. Albert swung onto his horse, and he and his equerry led the carriage out of the gate and into the shouting and cheering public.

  * Not £5, as a particularly nasty and long-lived myth would have it (Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger 169).

  fifteen

  THE MAN FROM ADARE

  As Victoria and Albert held court that afternoon at the Queen’s birthday drawing room, William Hamilton sat in a yard at Eccleston Place, Pimlico—a literal stone’s throw from the Palace Gardens—manufacturing his own present for the Queen’s birthday. He was an Irishman, having left Ireland for London at around the beginning of the famine, one of the first of what became a wave of Irish immigrants who were seen as taking English jobs and ruining good English wages. He was a working man, as his corduroy trousers, fustian jacket, and greasy cap made clear at a glance. He was a working man, that is, when he was employed, but he had seen precious little employment over the last few months and was virtually penniless. His burliness falsely hinted at comfort; only charity had kept him from starvation. He had once been to France, and possibly dabbled with radical politics there. He was deeply discontented, his face a fixed sullen mask.

  In short, he epitomized the British fears of the 1840s.

  He had been whittling for some time, shaping a chunk of wood into something like the stock of a pistol. He had scavenged the tin spout of a teapot, which—if one ignored the spout’s absurd curvature—might look a bit like a pistol barrel. And he had tied the two together with string, creating a primitive dummy of a gun. With some performance on his part, and if the crowd already assembling along Constitution Hill proved to be the right sort of crowd, he might succeed in alarming the Queen and getting himself arrested.

  Imprisonment was all he sought: a bed and regular meals at Millbank or Pentonville or Coldbath Fields. That would be better than this dubious life as a free man, owing his life to the kindness of two women. He had actually encouraged his long-suffering landlord, Daniel O’Keefe, upon whom he sponged, to arrest him for debt so that he could “get a billet for the winter season in prison.” But O’Keefe refused to do that, millstone around his neck that Hamilton was. Instead, with a touching if misplaced hope, he preferred to farm Hamilton out to work for others, periodically requesting that he repay his debt. It was a strategy that paid poorly, for Hamilton’s work was sporadic and consistently awful; O’Keefe had
not recouped the bulk of what he was owed.

  Daniel O’Keefe would certainly have expelled Hamilton years before—but O’Keefe’s wife, Bridget, had influence over him, and she was captivated by Hamilton, who had an odd and compelling charm over women and children. Bridget saw to it that Hamilton had not only shelter but regular nourishment. In this she was assisted by a lodger at Eccleston Place, a woman whose name is lost to history: this woman was in the “milk line,” according to Bridget, delivering milk to London’s basement kitchens and receiving at times in return “a deal of broken victuals”—leftovers of leftovers that the servants passed on. These she shared with Hamilton. “Between the two of us,” said Bridget O’Keefe, “we managed to keep him.”

  William Hamilton was a stranger in a strange land from the day he was born, and spent his life drifting from one failure to another. He likely never knew his birthday, and never did know his parents, taking from them only his name and his religion when around 1826 they died or simply abandoned the infant to the Protestant Orphan Society at Cork. He was a real-life Irish Oliver Twist, learning rudimentary skills at the orphanage school until he reached the age at which he could be contracted as an apprentice to whoever would pay for him. In Hamilton’s case, this was a Protestant farmer outside of Adare, near Limerick, who put the boy to work in the fields and set him to building walls and digging ditches. Hamilton would always claim Adare to be his home, though few from Adare would admit to knowing him.

  When Hamilton was about thirteen, he was again abandoned: his employer sold the farm and emigrated to Canada with his family. Hamilton found a place in Adare, as assistant to a shopkeeper named John Barkman. Hamilton was working there in 1840 when Edward Oxford shot at the Queen. Barkman’s wife recalled that the boy approved of the attempt: “it was not right to serve under petticoat government,” Hamilton told her. Afterwards, she would often tease him that he still lived under Victoria’s—and her own—petticoat government. Keeping shop did not last: Hamilton abandoned the Barkmans, or they abandoned him, and perhaps the Great Famine forced the issue: in 1845 Hamilton left Ireland forever, coming to London hoping, on the strength of the walls he had built as a farmboy, to find a future as a bricklayer’s assistant. A mutual acquaintance had given him an introduction to Daniel O’Keefe, himself a bricklayer and originally from Adare, and Hamilton settled in at Eccleston Place.

  From that moment on, Daniel O’Keefe was Hamilton’s reluctant protector, as Hamilton repeatedly tried and failed to make a living as a bricklayer’s assistant. In 1846, he did attempt to set out on his own, joining the armies of workingmen who had spread out across the country and across Europe to build the burgeoning railways. He became, in other words, a navvy, one of that hard-drinking, reckless, and depraved clan who spread terror across the countryside while they laid tracks: they were the ubiquitous bogeymen of the railway boom. Hamilton’s limited expertise was with the masonry of bridges, tunnels, and cuttings. He somehow found employment in France, arriving there in May 1846—or, as Hamilton later put it to a policeman, the time “of Prince Louis Napoleon’s escape from Ham.” His curious method of dating, as well as the fact that Hamilton was actually imprisoned in Paris, led some to suspect that he had political proclivities. But his arrest was not political, but for being out too late one night. And Louis Napoleon’s escape to England was hardly the signal for any insurrectionary activity in France. Hamilton came to France to make money, not trouble.

  But he did not make money, and by November he was back with the O’Keefes. His natural indolence and second-rate skills meant that in spite of Daniel O’Keefe’s best efforts, Hamilton was only a drain on his own earnings. By the time of the Queen’s birthday, Hamilton hadn’t “worked seven weeks since Christmas,” according to Bridget. The shoddy facsimile of a pistol he carved on this day might have been the hardest work he’d done for some time.

  Bridget O’Keefe came upon him that afternoon in the back garden. She was mystified by the pitiful-looking object, and mystified when Hamilton told her he was making an actual pistol, and planned “to fire a shot or two” with it. She pointed out the folly of his plan, and he seemed suddenly to have a thought. “Why, Dan has got an old pistol,” he said to her. “Lend me it.”

  And without hesitation she did, returning to her bedroom to ferret it out, and handing it to him through the window. It was a pocket-sized, with a three-inch brass screw-barrel—extremely old, rusty from disuse. Hamilton complained about that rust to Bridget. “It is of no account,” she told him: the pistol was only a toy to her, and, she thought, to him.

  Soon afterwards, Hamilton sought out the O’Keefe’s ten-year-old son Edward, a child as charmed by the man as his mother Bridget was. Giving boy one of his few halfpennies, Hamilton asked him to fetch as much powder as that would buy. Edward rushed off to a shop nearby on Elizabeth Street to procure a quantity of what was “not the best sort of powder.” In the meantime, Hamilton worried that the pistol might not work at all. When the boy returned, Hamilton asked him if he happened to have any squibs (a sort of hissing explosive) or crackers. Those, Edward told him, could be obtained from a nearby shop. He’d like a ha’p’orth of them as well, Hamilton told the boy: he wanted to have some fun firing them through the trees. Edward never bought these for him; no fireworks were later found among Hamilton’s few possessions. He soon found he didn’t need them: his landlord’s rusty flintlock served his purpose well. With the head broken from a clay pipe Hamilton poured gunpowder into the barrel and onto the pan. He shot once, twice, three times successfully, pretending to take aim at something: practicing his stance. Bridget O’Keefe could hear the loud blasts from inside the house.

  Shortly after this, Hamilton left the house, the pistol secreted in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. Young Edward O’Keefe had asked him if he could come too, and play, but Hamilton told him no: “you must stop at home.” Hamilton gave—or, rather, sold—the boy another toy to play with: his contraption of rudely carved wood, tea spout, and string. The boy had only the halfpenny that Hamilton had given him, but promised to pay a full penny when he had it. All in all, it had been a productive day for Hamilton: he had a working gun and a decent supply of gunpowder—and was a halfpenny ahead on the deal.

  Hamilton disappeared into the city for a couple of hours. By six, he was standing near the bottom of Constitution Hill, not far from the Palace gates, joining a now-swelling crowd, all gazing uphill, waiting for the Queen’s carriage to return. He stood slightly downhill from where Oxford had made his attempt, and stood behind the palings separating the park from the road. He paced nervously, his left hand jammed in his trousers pocket, his right at the ready—glancing with the crowd to the top of the hill but seeing nothing—nothing, that is, but the monstrous, bulky, and oddly sedentary statue of the Duke of Wellington, which then topped the triumphal arch through which the Queen’s carriage would soon pass.*

  At around twenty minutes past six, a cheer rose and rippled down the hill. Albert and his equerry were returning from their ride—alone. The Prince had accompanied Victoria and the children through Hyde and into Regent’s Park—but from there he decided to spur on his horse and return ahead of them. The two men quickly disappeared through the Palace gate. Hamilton, confused by seeing the Prince without the Queen, asked a woman beside him if Victoria had yet passed. “No,” the woman told him, “she has not come yet; but if you wait a little you will see her.”

  The royal carriage was not far behind. Cheering recommenced up the road, and the Queen’s outriders trotted into view. Then, the carriage. Hamilton strode up to the palings and spoke to both the woman and to a muscular man on the other side of the fence. “Is that the Queen?” Both assented and turned to watch the carriage rush past. “All right,” Hamilton muttered. He immediately reached into his coat for the pistol, thrust it through the palings alongside the muscular man’s face—and fired with a loud roar and a plume of smoke. The man, deafened, felt something whizz past his ear and realized his face was scorched.
He believed Hamilton’s gun had been loaded with a bullet.

  Sergeant-footman Robert Renwick, sitting in a rumble seat behind the Queen, saw Hamilton point the gun—and immediately called out to the postilions to stop the carriage—giving Hamilton a clearer target. Amazingly, they were obeying just as Hamilton fired. Victoria stood up and gazed in the direction of the shot. “Renwick,” she said, “what is that?”

  “Your Majesty has been shot at.”

  Victoria sat down and ordered the carriage to move on. Her equerry Wemyss excitedly did the same thing, and then reeled his horse about and trotted into the Park to supervise Hamilton’s arrest. Victoria, seemingly unperturbed, pacified Alfred, Alice, and Helena—who, from their position, had had an excellent view of the shooting. Within seconds, the carriage disappeared through the palace gates. Albert, who had heard the pistol-crack, agitatedly met his family at the steps of the Palace: “Thank God,” he said to Victoria, “you are safe.”