Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Two weeks later, he met privately with Henry Cole to discuss a permanent home for the exhibitions, proposed to take place in 1851 and every five years thereafter. Cole had suggested, a year before, Leicester Square as a site: central, accessible, and, if seedy, affordable. But before they chose a site, they needed to agree on the scope of the coming exhibition. “I asked the Prince,” Cole later wrote, “if he had considered if the Exhibition should be a National or an International Exhibition.”

  Albert thought for a moment. “It must embrace foreign productions,” he said, adding emphatically “international, certainly.”

  In that case, any building in Leicester Square would not be large enough, and the two agreed on another site: Hyde Park.

  With his decision, Albert transformed the Exhibition into something unique and truly great: “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851,” as Albert later devised the title, a celebration of free trade and the material benefits of industrialization: the first world’s fair. With the opening of the Great Exhibition, Britain would symbolically take its place as the greatest nation of all, host to the world and the main exhibitor of ten thousand modern marvels, all of them housed in a building that itself was the greatest modern marvel of all. After his meeting with Cole, Albert never looked back: he embraced this project as if it were his life’s great work, which is exactly what it turned out to be. In Victoria’s eyes, this project would complete her husband’s apotheosis.

  At ten in the morning of 14 June, William Hamilton, still dressed as a bricklayer in the only clothes he owned—white fustian jacket and trousers—was brought before the bar of the Old Bailey before Chief Justice Wilde and Justices Patteson and Rolfe, to suffer his final moments in the public eye. He was without legal representation. Unlike every other one of Victoria’s assailants, William Hamilton had no family to support him, no one to obtain counsel for him. And the fact that he was Irish did not help him at all. His nation had disowned him; no one sought clemency for him. Nor would he have wanted the Queen’s mercy, which would only give him the impoverished freedom from which he only wished to escape. He needed no encouragement whatsoever to plead guilty. The government, nevertheless, was taking no chances: Attorney General Jervis was accompanied by four other attorneys, more than ready to establish his guilt under Peel’s law.

  The clerk read the charges, and Hamilton quietly pled guilty. He was then asked whether he could see any reason whether the court should not pass judgment upon him. He did not reply.

  Chief Justice Wilde then passed sentence, first reviewing Hamilton’s life—noting with disgust the fact that he was fully supported by two women—and then the circumstances of the crime, noting especially that all evidence pointed to the fact that Hamilton’s pistol was unloaded: Hamilton had obviously not intended to kill the Queen. His true crime, nevertheless, was heinous: not simply alarming the Queen, or her subjects. Worse than this, in shooting at the Queen in public, Hamilton threatened to damage the relationship between the Queen and her subjects. “The Queen might be perfectly assured of her personal safety,” Wilde told Hamilton, “from the feelings entertained by her subjects toward her; but it was necessary that her laudable desire to show herself to her people should not be at all interfered with by such acts of insult as that to which you have pleaded guilty, and that the public should also not be deprived of the wholesome and pleasing enjoyment of seeing their Sovereign in public by such proceedings as these.”

  He then sentenced Hamilton to seven years’ transportation. As if to compensate for the fact that this heavier sentence could not include a public whipping or two, Wilde noted that this sentence involved “a very considerable amount of degradation and suffering.” Hamilton was removed from the bar, to embark upon on what could accurately be termed a penal odyssey. He had avowedly shot at the Queen to experience prison life, and he got his wish in spades. Two years before, Colonial Secretary Henry Gray had completely reconsidered and revised the government’s policy on transportation. Australia was no longer to be the dumping-ground for felons as much as it was a final destination for the reformed and rehabilitated—the place where criminals, after long, grueling years of confinement and hard labor in England, were shipped, no longer convicts but “exiles,” given tickets of leave and dispersed as laborers across the countryside and in the outback. The voyage to Australia, then, became to Hamilton more a reward than a punishment; the punishment he would suffer under the grim discipline and with the backbreaking labour in English prisons, and the hulks of Woolwich. After that—after five years of that—Hamilton was finally shipped aboard the convict ship Ramillies to Fremantle, Western Australia, the shores of which he surely greeted as the promised land.

  In the afternoon after Hamilton was tried, his landlord, Daniel O’Keefe, appeared before the judges at the Old Bailey, requesting to be heard. William Hamilton, he claimed, had taken his pistol from him; he wanted it back. It had become a precious commodity: he had been offered £40 for it. The courtroom exploded in laughter. Punch in its next issue ridiculed this profitable trade in criminal artifacts, “this idolatry of the martyrs of crime and saints of the Newgate Calendar”: “A bit of Courvoisier’s drop would probably fetch more than St. Katherine’s own wheel, or one of the veritable arrows that shot St. Sebastian.” The court did order O’Keefe’s pistol returned to him, and thus O’Keefe had the last laugh; the £40 repaid William Hamilton’s debt to him several times over.

  On the night of the second of August 1849, the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, accompanied by a flotilla of vessels, steamed into Cove Harbor, the first stop on the Queen’s tour of Ireland. Victoria, Albert, and their four eldest children had traveled straight from Osborne the day before without stopping, surprising the town’s inhabitants, who expected them to arrive the next day. Nonetheless, they set to welcoming the Queen with zeal, setting off fireworks, firing guns in a feu de joie, lighting bonfires: the servants of one landowner lost control of their bonfire, and the resulting wildfire consumed fourteen acres and set the harbor alight with a bright orange glow. Victoria was delighted with the effect. The warm glow at Cove was emblematic of her entire visit, which was an unqualified, stunning success. For nine days the Irish fell in love with the Queen—and Victoria returned their feelings in equal measure. As Victoria progressed through the country, the cheering, shrieking crowds growing ever larger, ever more vociferous, ever more captivated by the little woman with the tall husband and the beautiful children. Victoria’s charming of the people of Ireland was the greatest test of her genius as a political performer—and was her greatest coup.

  She landed in Cove the next day, and at the request of local officials, she ordered it renamed Queenstown, as her Uncle George IV had renamed Dublin’s harbor town Kingstown twenty-eight years before.* That afternoon, after steaming up the River Lee, the royal family made their first procession, a two-hour ride through Cork. Victoria was delighted with the enthusiasm of her reception: “the crowd is a noisy, excitable, but very good humored one, running and pushing about, and laughing, talking, and shrieking.” She was particularly struck by the beauty of Irish women: “such beautiful dark eyes and hair, such fine teeth, nearly every 3rd woman was pretty, some remarkably so.”

  The raucous but good-willed crowds of Cork were only a prelude to the enormous and seemingly ubiquitous crowds of Dublin, attending to every movement of the royal family, masses that formed instantly even on Victoria’s and Albert’s improvised trips, when, according to the Illustrated London News, “balconies were filled as if by magic—groups were formed instantaneously—and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and the loud huzzas that arose ever and anon, testified that at every new point of her progress there was a new burst of feeling.” From the moment the Queen, and then the Prince, and then the royal children showed themselves to the roars of the “thousands and thousands” crowding ships and the shores of Kingstown Harbor, the crowds never abated and the excitement of the public grew to a crescendo. The trip was or
chestrated carefully so that the Queen could alternatively show herself to the elite, in a levée, a drawing room, a concert, a visit to the Duke of Leinster—and to the masses, in processions, in a review of the troops attended by a hundred thousand people, in her public comings and goings.

  Her talent lay not in awing the Irish with regal splendor, but in eliminating the distance between herself and the people, in finding ways to establish a human connection with each and every one who came to see her. Her children were invaluable to her in this respect, never failing to charm the people of Dublin. At Kingstown, an old woman cried out “Ah, Queen dear, make one of them Prince Patrick and Ireland will die for you.” Within a year, as it happens, Victoria would comply, naming her next son Arthur William Patrick Albert. She traveled among the crowds without fear, not braving them at all, but enjoying them, with an absolute sense of safety in their honesty and good will. She wrote in her journal, with emphasis, “I never saw more real enthusiasm.” When she and Albert went out on private rides, they went without an escort, a gesture that did much to win Dubliners over: of one such ride, a reporter for the Illustrated London News wrote, “no escort of dragoons followed—no troops of any kind were seen—she trusted herself, almost alone, among the people; and this proof of entire confidence was well bestowed, and warmly repaid.” When, for example, on one of her tours of the city, a man roared out as loudly as he could “Arrah! Victoria, will you stand up, and let us have a look at you?” She immediately rose and displayed herself. “God bless you for that, my darling,” the man cried out. Even Albert, generally more aloof in public, warmed to Irish familiarity, enjoying the calls of a “brawny wag” outside Trinity College, who with “enthusiastic attachment” shouted “Bravo, Albert!”—the crowd then taking up the chant.

  The Queen’s ease among the Irish crowds appears nothing short of remarkable given the recent rebellion, as well as the fact that an Irishman had shot at her six weeks before. But Hamilton was by now a distant memory, and her enthusiastic reception convinced her that Ireland’s troubles were in the past. True, Ireland’s poverty was still a fact, and Victoria was too astute an observer not to notice it. “You see more ragged and wretched people here than I ever saw anywhere else,” she wrote to Leopold. But to her, the ending of the rebellion and the million evidences of loyalty to the crown were signs of a promising future for the Irish. Her first procession through Dublin was “a never to be forgotten scene, particularly when one reflects on what state the country was in quite lately, in open revolt and under martial law.” The one occasion during her visit when the past intruded upon the present hardly marred the sense of amity. While her carriage was driving slowly through the center of town, a workhouse official approached the carriage and respectfully pleaded “Mighty Monarch, pardon Smith O’Brien.”*

  Amidst the overwhelming and mutual goodwill between Victoria and the Irish, there was apparently a genuine threat to her safety during her stay in Dublin. Members of Dublin secret societies—remnants of the clubs promoted by Young Ireland—came up with a desperate plot to kidnap Victoria, spirit her to a hideout in the Wicklow Mountains, and hold her hostage to the freedom of Smith O’Brien and the State prisoners. One night as the royal family slept in the vice-regal lodge, two hundred men armed with pistols and daggers assembled on the banks of the Grand Canal. They quickly realized that their force was far outnumbered by Dublin’s military garrison, and dispersed. Victoria never learned of this feeble attempt, which only highlighted the nadir to which militant Irish nationalism had fallen.

  By the time she left on the tenth of August, she had conquered Dublin utterly. Even the shadowy conspirators might have been won over, Lord Lieutenant Clarendon concluding from police reports that “even the ex-Clubbists, who threatened broken heads and windows before the Queen came, are now among the most loyal of her subjects.” The nationalist and Tory press, relentlessly hostile to the Queen during the early part of her visit, finally gave in, Freeman’s Journal noting “the more the citizens of Dublin see Queen Victoria, the more she wins their affections.”

  The queen sealed the compact with an astounding act of impromptu theatre in Kingstown Harbor. Everyone, it seemed, had turned out to see her go: every possible surface around the harbor occupied by human beings, right down to the edge of the piers, “swarming around their queen like bees.” Victoria was on board the royal yacht, chatting with two ladies in waiting, when she suddenly looked up and gazed upon the immense crowd. She then “ran along the deck with the sprightliness of a young girl, and, with the agility of a sailor, ascended the paddle-box, which … is a tolerably high one, and was almost at its top before she was observed by Prince Albert.” Albert joined her there and Victoria, clutching his arm, vigorously waved her hand, and then her handkerchief, to the cheering multitude. To extend her farewell, she ordered the paddlewheels stopped, so that she drifted slowly out of Kingstown harbor to “the pealing of cannon and the loudest concert of human voices that ever ascended from a people in praise of any Monarch.” When she was too far away to be seen, she ordered the ship’s royal standard lowered and raised in salute, three, four, five times—a completely unprecedented gesture from a monarch to her subjects. The crowd was ecstatic, the effect electric—and deeply personal. John Bright, the radical MP from Birmingham, was there, and was overcome. “There is not an individual in Dublin that does not take as a personal compliment to himself the Queen’s having gone upon the paddle-box and order the royal standard to be lowered,” noted Lord Clarendon.

  Victoria’s popularity in Ireland exceeded the wildest expectations, and raised great hopes within the government and the public that she had turned the tide and that the previously unquiet union between Ireland and Britain would henceforth be peaceful and prosperous. The Times declared that the Queen had put an end to Irish faction and civil discord. “It may very safely be predicted,” the Illustrated London News trumpeted, “that as long as Queen Victoria lives (may she live to see her great-grandchildren!) there will be no disaffection—no disloyalty in Ireland.”

  It was not to be. In spite of the wishes of future ministers, Victoria did little to maintain the bond with the Irish that she had so magnificently created on this trip. She did revisit Ireland with Albert in 1853 and 1861, and made the trip alone in 1900. But she never came close to re-establishing the intimacy she felt for them, and they felt for her, during this trip. Moreover, her success, as great as it was, was personal, not national. Victoria did nothing whatsoever to deal with the root causes of Irish resentment against the British. She did little to popularize her government, with its relentless, insensitive practice of treating the Irish like children and responding to Irish anger and agitation with coercion. Irish nationalism, in August 1849 supine with hunger and defeat, would rise again—and would grow, over the next few decades, to a literally explosive intensity.

  William Hamilton, the poor, sullen Irishman who lashed out, embodied the spirit of his nation in its defeat. Perhaps Queen and country should not have been so quick to forget the man.

  * The statue was placed there with great fanfare in 1846, positioned adjacent to Apsley House so that the Duke of Wellington could have the honor of seeing his gargantuan self outside his own windows. Many (including the Queen) regarded the statue as an eyesore completely out of proportion to its setting, and it was removed in 1883 to the military garrison at Aldershot.

  * In the first accounts, he is named as John Hamilton; in time, William was the clear consensus.

  * With Ireland’s independence, officials far less smitten by the Queen renamed the town Cobh.

  * Smith O’Brien was at that moment on a convict ship bound for Australia. Before the Queen could reply, Lord Lieutenant Clarendon rode up and pushed the man away.

  sixteen

  CUT AND THRUST

  Robert Francis Pate had no need to seek notoriety. He had already found it.

  The gentry and aristocracy of London, promenading in the gardens outside Kensington Palace, and riding to see and b
e seen along Rotten Row, could set their watches by him. The cabmen and tradesmen on the fringe of the Westminster parks, as well as the policemen of A Division, all knew him by sight, though very few knew his name.

  At midday, seven days a week, he would leave his well-appointed apartments on the corner of Piccadilly and Duke Street St. James, directly above Fortnum and Mason’s emporium, for a circuit around Green Park, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens. He always followed the same path, passing each point on it at exactly the same time. He always wore the same impeccable suit of clothing, regardless of the weather: blue frock coat, always open; white double-breasted waistcoat, buttoned to the throat; blue neckerchief; tweed trousers; buttoned boots; stylish top hat and cane. The bright colors—so different from the conservative grays, blacks, and browns that more and more men were wearing in 1850—marked him as a dandy; Prince Albert described him that way to Baron Stockmar. But it wasn’t Pate’s natty clothing that drew double-takes and backward stares from everyone he passed. It was his startling, frenetic manner. He marched through the West End as a man possessed: in step with invisible phalanxes, battling invisible demons. His gait seemed to defy gravity: with his back unnaturally arched so that his open coat draped and sailed behind him, and glaring straight ahead or toward the skies with hat impossibly horizontal, he would kick out each heel as high as he could: a goose-step so extreme that “it was astonishing how he preserved his equilibrium.” At the same time, he would flail his arms about and, in his right hand, wield his cane as a sword, lunging and slashing forwards and backwards at the air. An inspector from A Division who saw his performances regularly nicknamed him “cut and thrust.”