The Building Committee for the Exhibition, in a classic demonstration of the broth-destroying propensity of too many cooks, consisted of three highly celebrated architects (Charles Barry, Charles Robert Cockerell, and Thomas Leverton Donaldson) and three highly celebrated engineers (Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and William Cubitt), as well as two nobles (the Duke of Buccleuch and the Earl of Ellesmere). These eight held a competition for the design of the Exhibition building and netted 245 plans. They scrutinized these, rejected the lot, and produced a plan of their own, for which they “freely”—in both senses of the term—“availed themselves of the most valuable suggestions” of the rejected plans. The committee’s design was largely Brunel’s, and might have showed his genius as an engineer, but as a work of architecture, it was an ugly mess: a sheet-iron dome 200 feet in diameter and 150 feet high (“a monster balloon in the process of inflation,” according to one angry letter-writer) rising above a squat and sprawling warehouse that would take an estimated 19 million bricks to build: a decidedly permanent solution for a building supposed to be temporary.
Attacks upon the site flooded the papers: the building was an eyesore and an impractical and destructive imposition upon Hyde Park. The Times took up the chorus, its attacks reaching a crescendo on this very day, 27 June 1850, when the paper contained not one but two letters railing against the committee’s design, as well as an editorial proclaiming the plan an “insanity,” and threatening Albert personally that his reputation would suffer irreparably if the Commission went ahead with these plans: he “would become associated in the minds of the people not with a benefit, but with an injury; not with an extension of our industry, but with a curtailment of the recreation and an injury to the health of the metropolis.”
The outrage was at its height in Parliament as well, and moves were afoot there to scuttle the Exhibition altogether. In the House of Lords, the quixotic Whig-Radical Lord Brougham had for months railed against the Hyde Park site: any building there would be a “tubercle” on “the lungs of this huge metropolis.” Brougham found in the House of Commons an unlikely ally in the arch-reactionary and xenophobic Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorpe, who warred against anything with the slightest whiff of the modern with such sputtering virulence that he had become Punch magazine’s favorite figure of fun. He had opposed the 1832 Reform Bill; he was dead set against the railways; he despised Free Trade: and therefore he was naturally opposed to the Exhibition, which he claimed was “one of the greatest humbugs, one of the greatest frauds, one of the greatest absurdities ever known”—a magnet to attract to London the dregs of foreign lands: Papists, thieves, anarchists, and secret societies bent on assassinating the Queen. Usually a strident voice in the wilderness, Sibthorpe must have been amazed to find himself at the spearhead of a popular movement. Both he and Brougham made clear that they intended to have Parliament reconsider the whole idea of the Exhibition.
Albert was frantic. “The Exhibition is now attacked furiously by The Times,” he wrote to Stockmar, “and the House of Commons is going to drive us out of the Park. There is immense excitement on the subject. If we are driven out of the Park the work is done for!!” He could rely upon only one man to set things right—his one friend in England and his champion in Parliament: Robert Peel.
* The 10th Hussars, known as the “Prince of Wales’s Own,” was the regiment of Victoria’s uncle George, and would be that of her son the Prince of Wales.
* The Startins’ Savile Row home became, over a century later, Apple Studios, its rooftop the site of the Beatles’ final concert.
* Peel, Russell, Stanley (that is, Lord Derby), Aberdeen, Palmerston, Disraeli, and Gladstone.
* That is, “I am a citizen of Rome.”
seventeen
THE MOST DISGRACEFUL AND COWARDLY THING THAT HAS EVER BEEN DONE
Robert Pate had jostled his way nearly to the front of the excited crowd awaiting the Queen’s departure; only one man stood between him and the gate, and that man had refused to give way, throwing out his arm every time Pate tried to pass him. No matter; Pate was close enough to the gate to see that the courtyard of Cambridge House had sprung to life, and a small parade was forming to convey Victoria back to the Palace. Two footmen assisted the Queen, Fanny Jocelyn, and the three royal children into the open carriage. Victoria sat at the right rear, and Fanny sat directly across from her. The footmen then clambered up to the rumble seat in the back, Victoria’s sergeant-footman Robert Renwick taking his seat directly behind the Queen, where he had been when he had witnessed Hamilton’s attempt the year before. Two mounted outriders took up their position before the carriage’s four horses. Colonel Charles Grey, who would usually position himself by the Queen’s side, realizing that the gate was simply too narrow to allow his horse to pass through with the carriage, instead took up the rear.*
Grey could not be comfortable in this position, and he must have viewed the sizeable crowd on the other side of the gate apprehensively. Usually, one or two policemen assigned to Palace duty would be on hand to control the situation: when alerted that the Queen would be going out, they were under orders to get there first and patrol the area. The Queen had not planned this visit to her ailing uncle, however; no one had alerted the police; he, the outriders, and the footmen were the Queen’s only security.
The little procession clattered out of the courtyard, the outriders bisecting the crowd into two cheering clusters. They trotted to the edge of the street and then stopped, awaiting their opportunity to make the turn onto busy Piccadilly. Victoria’s carriage halted on the pavement side of the gate, trapping Colonel Grey in the courtyard and leaving the Queen unprotected, and close enough to the nearest in the crowd to touch them. Proximity and immobility rendered her instantly nervous: such a situation, she later wrote, “always makes me think more than usually of the possibility of an attempt being made on me.” She surveyed those beside her, and recognized a man she had often seen in the parks: fair hair, a military moustache—and a small stick in his hand: the man who was always bowing so deeply to her.
He did not bow this time. Stepping forward a pace or two, he raised his cane and brought it slashing down on the right side of the Queen’s head, bending the wire of her light summer bonnet, the metal ferrule at the cane’s tip audibly smacking her forehead. Victoria instinctively raised her hand to her bonnet and recoiled away from Pate, falling into the laps of her alarmed children. For a few moments she was completely disoriented.
Robert Renwick leapt up, leaned forward, and seized Pate by the collar. Those around him grabbed hold of him as well. All had seen him strike the Queen, and their outrage was instant. “They have got the man,” Fanny Jocelyn told Victoria as she sat up and touched her forehead: the wound was beginning to swell. To the crowd, it seemed as if the Queen was simply adjusting her bonnet. To reassure them, Victoria stood up and announced “I am not hurt.”
Her words did nothing to prevent the crowd from manhandling Pate. One man threw a vicious punch at Pate’s face and blood gushed from his nose. Lady Jocelyn burst into tears, and the Prince of Wales’s face went red. Unlike Bertie, the other two children, Alice and Alfred, had seen their mother attacked a year before. But none of the three had seen anything like this.
The postilions, looking back and seeing Pate in Renwick’s grasp, had kept the horses still. The Queen ordered them to move on. Renwick released his hold on Pate, the postilions spurred their horses, and the carriage sped up Piccadilly, to turn down Constitution Hill and into the Palace. When a space had cleared, Colonel Grey galloped to Victoria’s side, catching behind him the sight of the crowd to the left rushing upon Pate. Voices began to call for a lynching.
Across Piccadilly, patrolling the edge of Green Park, Sergeant James Silver of A Division—the same James Silver who had tripped up, disarmed, and captured Daniel McNaughtan seven years before—noticed the seething crowd and heard a voice: “The villain has struck the Queen!” He instantly ran to the spot, plunged into the cr
owd, and, with some difficulty and with the help of other constables drawn by the commotion, rescued him from the chaotic assault.
In crossing Piccadilly, Sergeant Silver had crossed the border between A and C Police Divisions, and so once he relieved the bloody and disoriented Pate of his cane, he and the other constables hustled their prisoner not to Gardiner Lane but to C Division’s headquarters on Vine Street, east up Piccadilly. On the way, they passed Messrs. Fortnum and Mason’s emporium, and Pate could steal a look at his elegant rooms above them. He would never enter them again.
Back at Buckingham Palace, Victoria directed her visibly mortified equerry Charles Grey to ride through the parks and find Albert, who upon his return from the Royal Commission meeting had set out on horseback with their guest, the Prince of Prussia. She sent Fanny Jocelyn back to Cambridge House to inform the Duchess what had just happened. She sent for her physician, James Clark, to tend to her wound—which was by now throbbing so painfully that she retired upstairs to treat it herself with arnica.
The news of the attack spread quickly, and crowds as usual began to assemble about the Palace while the nobility and gentry began to call to inquire. Although by this time the all-important debate on Palmerston’s foreign policy had recommenced in the House of Commons, Lord John Russell rushed away from there to have an audience with Victoria. Home Secretary George Grey, “greatly distressed and in tears,” came to her later that evening—and managed to compose himself enough to return to the Commons and make his own contribution to the debate, defending his colleague Palmerston. After a surprising delay, Sir James Clark arrived and examined the Queen: he found a “considerable tumor” on her brow: Pate’s cane had drawn blood. He concluded that Pate’s blow had been an extremely violent one.
Victoria, Albert, and Prince Wilhelm of Prussia had made plans to attend the opera that night, Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète at Covent Garden. As usual, Victoria refused to change her plans in the wake of an attack. When her ladies-in-waiting begged her to stay at home, she told them “Certainly not: if I do not go, it will be thought I am seriously hurt, and people will be distressed and alarmed.”
“But you are hurt, ma’am.”
“Then everyone shall see how little I mind it.”
At 9:20, then, the royal party set out. Victoria was by now familiar with the social afterglow that followed attacks upon her: London united in a spontaneous burst of loyalty and concern for her welfare. She savored the enthusiastically cheering crowds lining the streets between the Palace and Covent Garden. “The feeling of all classes [is] admirable,” she wrote that night in her journal, “the lowest of the low being most indignant.”
The scene at the opera itself was, according to one reporter, “one of the most magnificent demonstrations of loyalty it has ever been our fortune to witness.” The Queen herself had much to do with the depth of the response, playing the crowd with consummate ability. When her party entered the royal box, Albert and the Prince held back and she walked to the front of the box alone and triumphantly acknowledged the deafening cheers, “the mark of the ruffian’s violence plainly visible on her forehead.” A writer for Punch describes the rapturous reception:
I never heard such shouting. It was the very madness of affection. It was a deafening tumult of love, in which a thousand voices were trying to outvie one another in giving the loudest expression to their sympathy. It was a loyal competition of sound, in which a thousand hearts were thrown, like so many hats, simultaneously into the air, every one of them struggling which could be thrown the highest. Then came God Save the Queen, and soothed the angry waters into something like a calm regularity of flow, until the surging voices rose musically together, and formed one loud swelling wave of devotion and enthusiasm.
Albert, the Prince of Prussia, and Fanny Jocelyn advanced to join Victoria as the company’s star mezzo and two star sopranos each sang a verse of the national anthem. When Madame Viardot reached the line “Frustrate their knavish tricks,” the crowd roared its approval.
The fact that the Queen could appear in public less than three hours after Pate hit her suggested to press and public that he could not have injured her. While the very first reports of his attack, in papers that evening, claimed Victoria had indeed been injured, those of the next morning “corrected” these reports. “The small stick with which the prisoner struck the blow was not thicker than an ordinary goosequill,” noted the Times; “it measured only two feet two inches in length and weighed less than three ounces. Of course such a weapon as this could not under any circumstances occasion very serious injury.” The Times was wrong. Pate’s cane—a type known as a partridge cane—was longer, heavier, and much thicker than the newspaper claimed, and was stiff, hard, and tipped with a brass or silver ferrule—quite capable of striking a formidable blow. Victoria long remembered the injury Pate had given her: a walnut-sized welt and a scar that lasted ten years. For Victoria, however, the psychological wound was worse than the physical one; she had been deeply insulted, as a woman and as a monarch. “Certainly,” she wrote,
… it is very hard and very horrid that I a woman—a defenceless young woman and surrounded by my children—should be exposed to insults of this kind and be unable to go out quietly for a drive. This is by far the most disgraceful and cowardly thing that has ever been done; for a man to strike any woman is most brutal…
Of the many attacks upon her, the Queen until the end of her life considered this one the meanest and most ignoble—“far worse,” she wrote, “than an attempt to shoot which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.”* Unlike her previous assailants, Pate had succeeded in breaking through the invisible barrier between Queen and subject, and in actually hurting her. He shook her until-now unshakeable trust in the public. The effect was immediate; she wrote to Uncle Leopold, days after the attack, “I own it makes me nervous out driving, and I start at any person coming near the carriage.” In the short term, she absolutely refused to succumb to this fear: indeed, she, Albert, and the Prince of Prussia rode through the parks in an open carriage and four the very next day. But from her childhood—from her Conroy-planned tours of England, as Princess—Victoria had always struggled between her desire for seclusion and her sense of duty, maintaining the prestige of the monarchy with regular forays among her subjects. Pate’s attack served to make that duty more onerous and the temptation to seclude herself that much stronger.
At Vine Street station, Pate was searched: nothing found but two keys and a handkerchief. The several witnesses to the assault who came with him to the station were questioned, and Pate was charged with assaulting the Queen. Whether that charge amounted to a High Misdemeanour or to High Treason was for Home Secretary George Grey to decide; an examination before him was scheduled at Whitehall for the next day. Pate, responding to the charge, asserted emphatically “those men cannot prove whether I struck her head or her bonnet,” as if a little wire and woven horsehair on the Queen’s head somehow prevented him from touching her, and mitigated his offense.
When he learned about Pate, Superintendent Charles Otway must surely have had the uncanny feeling that Victoria’s assailants were following him. Ten years before, as Sergeant in A Division and special assistant to Inspector Pearce, he had worked on Oxford’s case. As Inspector a year before, he was the one who searched Hamilton’s rooms. All of the Queen’s assailants had struck in A Division—until now. Otway had just been promoted to Superintendent of C Division, and the offense of queen-attacking seemed to cross Piccadilly just as he did.
Otway obviously took this case very seriously, and he decided to use to the full the resources of the Metropolitan Police. He therefore turned the investigation over not to his own officers in C Division, but rather to Scotland Yard, and to the top officer there: the chief of the Detective Branch, Inspector Charles Frederick Field. Field, already a legend, was very soon to become an even greater one, as his friend and admirer Charles Dickens would make him the most celebrated and recognizable off
icer of the Metropolitan Police. Within the next year, Dickens would write and publish in his Household Words three adulatory essays about the Detective Branch, especially worshipful of Fields, and in 1852 Dickens would accord Field a literary immortality of sorts as his chief model for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Field was known for his roving eye, which caught all in a glance. The detective made the short walk from Scotland Yard to St. James’s and 27 Duke Street, and up three floors to Pate’s lodgings. He made note of Pate’s obsessive neatness. He also confiscated a number of Pate’s papers, but what these revealed about Pate Field ultimately kept to himself: he brought them to the Home Office examination the next day, but did not bring them forward.
At some point while he was held at C Division, Pate recognized a familiar face: one of the inspectors there had grown up in Wisbech, Pate’s home town. The two talked. Pate could offer no motive for striking the Queen besides claiming “felt very low for some time past,” but he did show regret.
“I wish to Heaven I had been at your right hand yesterday, and then this should not have happened,” the inspector said to Pate.
Shooting Victoria Page 33