Maclean had originally intended to remain in Southsea for three weeks, but by the end of the first one he gave Mrs. Sorrell notice. He told her that while he was out he had seen someone he didn’t like: his enemies were closing in on him again, and Portsmouth suddenly seemed too big for him. More than this, he had to resolve his money problems. He had come up with another idea for dealing with these: one of his brothers had married the sister of Augustus Harris, the lessee of the Drury Lane Theatre. Maclean knew himself to be a brilliant actor. He would leave on Thursday morning, the twenty-third, to go to London and find employment in Harris’s troupe.
On the day before he left, he received another letter from his sister Annie. She was responding to a letter he had written her from Brighton—a letter that convinced her that her brother had again reached a breaking point. She sent him another postoffice order, and pleaded with him to stay where he was and take on any job he could—even take up a broom and sweep street-crossings. Mrs. Sorrell and Mr. Hucker agreed with Annie and advised Maclean to stay. But he was adamant: he would go to London. To provide him with some pocket money for his journey, Mrs. Sorrell gave him a couple of shillings in return for his concertina and a scarf he owned. That day, Maclean returned to the pawnbroker’s, paid what he owed for the pistol, and took it away wrapped in an old piece of white linen. He returned as well to the gunsmith’s and bought as many pin-fire bullets as he could for a shilling—eighteen or nineteen in all. The proprietor, who later claimed “it occurred to me that a beefsteak would do him more good than cartridges,” asked him what he wanted them for: he was going abroad, he replied.
At seven the next morning, he set out. Mrs. Sorrell gave him a final gift of a better hat and pair of shoes than his own. He told them he would walk from Petersfield to Guildford, and from there to London. At first he faithfully kept to that course. The next morning, five miles north of Petersfield in Newton Valence, he was spotted by a clergyman, Archibald Maclachlan, who saw a shabbily dressed man clutching a battered carpetbag staggering up the road, apparently in great pain. Maclean collapsed outside of Maclachlan’s garden gate in what Maclachlan was certain was an epileptic fit. Maclachlan ran to assist him: he was pale, half-starved, unconscious. With Maclachlan’s help Maclean came to, wild-eyed. The clergyman offered to let him stay, but Maclean refused: he had to go on. So Maclachlan fed him some bread and butter, and when Maclean tottered off down the road, Maclachlan sent one of his servants to accompany him part of the way. Maclean made it to Guildford that night. The next morning, Maclean changed course. He did not head to London and dramatic fame, as he had assured Sorrell and Hucker. Instead he struck out due north, and at 3:00 on that afternoon—Saturday 25 February—he arrived in Windsor. The Queen was in residence.
Maclean found accommodation at 84 Victoria Cottages—again, in the poorer part of town. He told his landlord, a man named Knight, that he had just been hired as a grocer’s assistant in the neighboring town of Eton and would begin work Monday. He also told him that he received a weekly allowance by mail—and that this should arrive on Wednesday. When Mrs. Knight asked him for a week’s rent in advance, Maclean balked, since he did not have enough; could he pay a shilling now and the rest later? Mrs. Knight agreed. He proved to be a quiet lodger, leaving the house after breakfast and returning at teatime. He did by one account have a single eccentricity: he refused to remove his overcoat indoors, even when it was very warm, and he had a constant habit of smoothing down its front. With hindsight, the Knights thought that this might have something to do with his pistol, which they never saw.
On Tuesday, the last day of February, Maclean went to the central railway station, to join the crowds who came to see Queen Victoria off on the royal train for a short visit to London, where she was to hold a drawing room. Maclean was too late and missed her, though he did tell Mr. Knight that he saw “Jock Brown” there. The next day, Wednesday, Maclean asked his landlord if he could remain at home during the day. He had a toothache, he claimed. Also he was waiting for his allowance to arrive in the mail. It never came.
That day of wait was the first of March. The next day—the gloomy wet day of 2 March 1882—Roderick Maclean had made sure that he arrived at Windsor Station long before the Queen did—a good forty-five minutes before, at least. No one took much notice of him as he slipped into the station, came slouching around the platform, and sneaked into the first-class waiting room. He sat at a writing desk, fished out of his pockets a stub of a pencil, tore a scrap of paper out of his little notebook, and wrote his note.
I should not have done this crime had you, as you should have done, paid the 10s. per week instead of offering me the insulting small sum of 6s. per week, and expecting me to live on it. So you perceive the great good a little money would have done, had you not treated me as a fool, and set me more than ever against those bloated aristocrats, led by that old lady Mrs. Vic., who is an accursed robber in all senses.
—Roderick Maclean March 2, 1882,
Waiting-room, Great Western Railway.
Back went the pencil and the note into his pocket. Inside the waiting room it was quiet, but Maclean could hear growing commotion outside; the 4:50 train was loading and about to leave the station. The stationmaster, John George Smythe, was on the platform to signal an all-clear to the engineer. Smythe glanced into the first-class waiting room, and the sight of the seedy black-bewhiskered tramp arrested his steps. He burst in and accosted Maclean: “Did you know this is a first-class waiting room—not the place for you? What are you doing here?”
“I am waiting for a train.”
“What train?”
“The next train from London; what time does it arrive?”
“5 5 [5:05]: you had better go into the other room and not here.” Roderick Maclean sheepishly complied, walking past Smythe, out the door and back onto the cold platform. He made his way through the bustle and out of the station, skirting on his way the sumptuous little waiting room reserved exclusively for Victoria’s use. It was now 4:50 P.M. At 5:25, the Queen’s train was scheduled to steam into the station; Victoria would disembark and pass through her little waiting room to the front of the station, where a closed carriage awaited to take her the short drive to the Castle. On the road outside, Maclean turned left and walked to a set of palings marking the station’s verge. He stopped there, within a few feet of the road across which Victoria’s carriage would pass as it moved out of the station.
He would wait there. In his pocket, readily accessible, was his pistol. While he carried enough cartridges to fill all the pistol’s chambers, he had been careful to ensure his good fortune by loading only four of them. One bullet, somewhere, somehow, he had already discharged. That left him with three live rounds for the Queen.
As Maclean waited in the cold, that old lady—that accursed robber Mrs. Vic—sat in the saloon car of her royal train as it gained speed out of Paddington Station, clattered through the northwest suburbs of London and shot into the countryside. By the Queen’s side—always by her side, these days—sat her youngest daughter Beatrice. Since Albert’s death twenty-one years before, one of her daughters had always served as her companion. First had been Alice, but Alice had married Prince Louis of Hesse and moved away to Darmstadt. (She had since died, the first of Victoria’s children to predecease her, of diphtheria in 1878, on 14 December, the terrible anniversary of Albert’s death.) Then, Helena became her companion until she too married, in 1866. The daughter next in age, Louise, was far too free a spirit for Victoria to consider as a companion, so the position fell to Beatrice: shy, capable, loyal Beatrice. Beatrice, Victoria expected, would never marry as long as she had her mother to care for.*
Both Victoria and her daughter were tired, and they surely looked forward to their return to Windsor, as well as their upcoming retreat to the French Riviera. London had been, as usual, exhausting, as Victoria again had crammed their schedule in order to be in and out of the metropolis in little more than two days. There had been the upcoming royal weddin
g to plan for, between her youngest son Leopold and Princess Helen of Waldeck. Princess Helen was in town with her father, and they had to be entertained and introduced to London society; Beatrice had done much of the chaperoning. There had been for the Queen visits to the Duchess of Cambridge and the widowed ex-Empress of France, Eugènie, as well as the obligatory but to Victoria mildly nerve-racking rides in an open carriage through the Parks. And yesterday there had been a Queen’s drawing room, where the Queen, with her daughters Helena and Beatrice, as well as her daughters-in-law Alexandra and Maria (Prince Alfred’s wife), welcomed the usual enormous queue of young ladies into high society. Victoria dressed for the occasion, as usual, in a black dress trimmed with white. But she wore another color as well, as was also usual on state occasions: the deep blue sash of the Order of the Garter. And she also wore the gem-encrusted star of that Order, with its sapphire-blue garter and its diamond-studded rays—four major ones, and four minor ones. Roderick Maclean, in following the Queen’s movements, surely knew that Victoria was tormenting him as everyone else did, appropriating his color and his number.
For two days straight, then, Victoria had performed the role she had learned by 1882 to play to perfection. Her popularity and prestige had never been higher, and would not diminish for the rest of her life. Her annual schedule had changed little over the past decade; she still spent most of the year apart from her people, secluded at Balmoral, Osborne, and Windsor. She still avoided London as much as she possibly could. But the grumbling about her absences, which grew in the 1860s and reached a peak in 1871, no longer existed. London had the grandeur and glitter of a court without her, centered on the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House. Much had changed in the way the public viewed her: then she was a Queen, subject to public standards of behavior for monarchs. Now she was an institution: an Empress and a ruler unlike and surpassing any previous one. The old rules and expectations no longer applied. Before, the Queen’s popularity stemmed from her doing; now, it stemmed from her simply being.
Victoria was sixty-two, now—old, or at least growing old. She was however more vital and healthy at sixty-two than she had been at fifty-two or even forty-two, during that dark decade after Albert’s death when she continually wished her own death and continually pleaded broken health to avoid appearing in public. In the years after the thanksgiving she had regained a zest for life, and had taken up her duties with renewed energy: “What nerve! What muscle! What energy!” her Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had said of her in 1880. But while she might have a greater vigor, she had become venerable in the public eye. She had ruled now for forty-five years, and was therefore the only monarch that most of her subjects could remember having. Through time, fertility, and royal precedence, she had become the grandmother of Europe. When Oxford had shot at her four decades before, she was pregnant with her first child; now she was a great-grandmother. Her own children had married into the royal houses of Russia, Denmark, and Germany, and her many grandchildren were now beginning to marry, carrying her and Albert’s bloodline across the continent. Foreign policy, to Victoria, was a family matter; wars were family squabbles. And her own seniority over European royalty reflected and signified her nation’s precedence as a world superpower.
For her subjects, life without Victoria was unthinkable. Victoria had given their era its name: they were all Victorians. Every part of their lives—the great scientific discoveries and technological innovations, the abundance of objects with which they surrounded themselves and cluttered their homes, the great and growing cities in which they lived, and the constantly expanding empire over which they had domain: all of it was Victorian, all of it was connected with her, embodied by her. Victoria had become a living monument to her age, and in Victoria Britons saw their own greatness. Even her appearance was monumental. She had with age exchanged her earlier defining characteristic—her diminutive stature—with another: stoutness. She used her weight to her advantage in public appearances, in photographs, and in portraits, always presenting herself with solidity and calmness, as the central, placid, and unshakeable image of Britain. Her public face, too—recreated through lithographic and photographic mass production and hung on millions of walls, public and private, across the nation—radiated zen-like calmness, with a quiet pride and forward-looking confidence. Hers was the face of Empire.
Much of the credit for Victoria’s immense popularity was due to the man who literally made her an Empress, and more than this had made her fit that role, by making her feel every inch an Empress: Benjamin Disraeli, or the Earl of Beaconsfield, as she elevated him soon after he elevated her. From the moment Disraeli kissed her hand upon taking office in 1874, dropping to one knee and declaring “I plight my troth to the kindest of Mistresses,” the tenor of their relationship was clear: he would be her zealous devotee, best serving his country by serving his Queen. His merits as a prime minister might be open to debate, but he was without doubt the best courtier Victoria ever had. And in the style of a master courtier, he flattered the Queen ceaselessly and shamelessly, laying it on, as he famously observed, “with a trowel.” Victoria, no fool, was well aware of his hyperbole, though she preferred to see him as “full of poetry, romance and chivalry,” commodities which her previous and present Prime Minister, William Gladstone, completely lacked. And Disraeli backed up his honeyed words with genuine service. He was a master at converting policy triumphs into personal gifts to his monarch. When the government succeeded in buying up a substantial number of shares in the Suez Canal, he presented the news to the Queen as if he were Sir Francis Drake presenting Spanish gold to Elizabeth the First: “You have it, Madam,” he declared to her. More than once he favored and sponsored legislation that she wanted and that his Cabinet did not. In a thousand ways he succeeded in rendering himself the paragon of prime ministers in Victoria’s eyes—and in reminding her by contrast that his predecessor and successor, Gladstone, was the worst of them. He was assisted greatly in this project because the Queen was politically on his side from the start, for by the 1870s and in complete disregard of the beloved Albert’s prime directive that the monarch must remain above party politics, Victoria had become a diehard conservative. Disraeli, according to Victoria, had “right feelings,” and “very large ideas, and very lofty views of the position this country should hold.” The two agreed that the endless turbulence in Ireland should be met by coercion, not concession. And they believed in the inherent glory of their ever-expanding empire. With Melbourne, Victoria had been a Melbournian; with Peel, she had been a Peelite; with Disraeli she was, and afterwards forever would be, a Disraelite. And with Disraeli’s encouragement, Victoria developed the confident sense that her interests were the interests of the nation. She for once experienced the exhilarating sensation of being a ruler who actually ruled, with the assistance of a government that actually served her.
That dream had to have an end, of course; William Gladstone killed it. Victoria’s loathing for Gladstone—a sentiment Disraeli did his best to encourage—grew in tandem with her attachment for Disraeli. Disraeli touched on that truth when he noted that Victoria’s concern for his own health was dictated “not so much from love of me as dread of somebody else.” Victoria had thought when Disraeli became Prime Minister that she had gotten rid of Gladstone for good. After the Liberals were defeated soundly in the 1874 general election, Gladstone retired, ceding leadership to Lord Hartington and retiring to his study of the classics and theology at Hawarden. In two years, however, he was back: a righteous rage against Turkish atrocities in the Balkans reanimated him, forcing him once again into the political spotlight. Disraeli, more concerned with the threat of Russian hegemony over eastern Europe than with the excesses of the weak Ottoman empire, played down the atrocities, and Gladstone’s fervent campaign grew into a crusade against “Beaconsfieldism”—against Disraeli, in other words, and all that his government stood for. And in a dramatic departure from tradition, Gladstone made his case against Disraeli not to Parliament,
but to the people directly, in rousing orations at mass meetings. Once re-engaged, Gladstone never relented. Fighting for a new Parliamentary seat in Midlothian, he brought unprecedented fire to his campaign, stumping the district in a “pilgrimage of Passion”: appearing in his popular appeal to be conducting an American campaign, not a British one. Victoria was disgusted by his attacks on her beloved Prime Minister, and disgusted by Gladstone’s destructively democratic behavior: “like an American stumping orator, making most violent speeches.” Her anger was mixed with more than a hint of jealousy, for Gladstone gained an immense national popularity by his appeal to the masses, his procession resembling a royal progress: everywhere he went, he was welcomed with addresses and found fireworks, triumphal arches, and eager crowds. He had stolen a play from the Queen’s own book.
And worst of all, he won: he converted the election for his own seat into a national campaign, thanks to full newspaper coverage, and the “People’s William” sparked a Liberal surge in the polls; he and his party trounced Disraeli and the Conservatives in the 1880 general election. Victoria at first refused outright to have Gladstone back as her prime minister. She would rather abdicate, she wrote her private secretary, “rather than send for or have any communication with that half-mad firebrand who wd soon ruin everything & be a Dictator. Others but herself may submit to his democratic rule, but not the Queen.” Disraeli recommended that she attempt to form a government under the nominal leader of the Liberals, Lord Hartington. But Hartington could only give Victoria a painful reminder of the constitutional limits of her power: Gladstone, he told her, would refuse to serve under anyone else, and a Liberal government without him would be impossible. With a reluctance that amounted to abhorrence, she called on Gladstone to form a ministry.
Shooting Victoria Page 45