He was as good as his word. Oxford took up as a painter and grainer and became fully engaged in Melbourne’s literary community. He was amused to discover that people in Melbourne thought him “cosmopolitan” because of his London origins. He joined and became vice president of the West Melbourne Mutual Improvement Society. He undertook investigative forays into the Melbourne underworld—sometimes in disguise—and published his observations in Melbourne’s leading newspaper. He joined the congregation of Melbourne’s oldest Anglican church and served for several years as its churchwarden. In 1881 he married a well-off widow and became a stepfather. And in 1888, the year of an International Exhibition in Melbourne, he found a publisher in London for his sketches, Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life. He sent a copy of the book to Haydon, hoping with Haydon’s help to pursue a full-blown literary career with the publications of stories and his memoirs. “There are many old friends … in England,” he wrote to Haydon, “who would be pleased to hear of me again; and I should like a certain illustrious lady to know that one who was a foolish boy half a century ago, is now a respectable, & respected, member of society.” Nothing, however, came of his plans, and the true identity of John Freeman remained a secret shared only between Oxford and Haydon. “Even my wife,” Oxford told Haydon, “the sharer of my joys, and sorrows, is no wiser than the rest of the world.” He took his secret to the grave, dying on 23 April 1900, sixty years after his attempt and seventy-eight years of age.
If Edward Oxford’s life demonstrates the rehabilitative effects of Bethlem and Broadmoor, John Francis’s later life demonstrates the similar effect of years at the hardest of hard labor in Van Die-men’s Land. Francis was sent, soon after his arrival in 1842, to the remote penal colony offering the severest level of punishment on the island: Port Arthur. Convicts there experienced eternal vigilance and unceasing, crushing labor. The place was a “purgatorial grinding mill rather than a torture chamber,” in the words of the foremost historian of Australian transportation, a preparation for a higher, less demanding, and more trusted position. Francis emerged after four years from that purgatorial fire a better man. Indeed, he emerged triumphantly, earning a six-month remission of his stay there by raising the alarm when a fire broke out. He was transferred to Launceston, and clearly impressed everyone with whom he came in contact there by his good character. Two years later, in 1848, he fell in love with a free sixteen-year-old girl, Martha Clarke, and married her. While still a convict he fathered several children, eventually fathering ten in all. (Francis’s descendants in the antipodes are now numerous.) Eight years into his sentence he obtained his ticket of leave, allowing him to seek private employment; he found it with a Launceston builder who was impressed with his industry and sobriety. After ten years, he sought a conditional pardon—the condition, of course, being his never returning to England. Lord Palmerston, Home Secretary at the time, refused to give it. Three years afterwards, Francis tried again, this time supported by the leading citizens of Tasmania; a petition in his support was signed by the mayors of Hobart and Launceston, Launceston’s Catholic bishop, and other notables. Palmerston’s successor in the Home Office, George Grey, agreed, and in August 1856 Francis was free to travel about Australia and to operate his own business. During the next decade he moved with wife and some of his children across Bass Strait to Melbourne, where he worked as a contractor. Except for an episode in 1869 in Melbourne’s insolvency court—his debts, Francis claimed, caused by an illness in the family—he, like Oxford, apparently lived the life of a well-adjusted, productive, fairly-well-off Melbournian. He died in 1885, aged sixty-three.
John William Bean was the only one of the seven whose attempt did not in the end result in his expulsion from London: he lived there his entire life. He served his eighteen months’ imprisonment in Millbank penitentiary, on the bank of the Thames and not too far from Buckingham Palace. Because of his weak constitution, his hard-labor sentence was modified to work at tailoring. During his last month of imprisonment, his father died, and so he returned home as the eldest, if the least respected, male in his family. He attempted to take up his father’s profession as a jeweler, and listed that as his profession when in 1846 he married a woman by the name of Esther Martin. That marriage did not last, but lasted long enough to produce a son, Samuel Bean. (Samuel Bean predeceased his father—but before he died produced a son, who in turn had children of his own; Bean and John Francis are the only two assailants who are known to have living descendants.)*
By 1851 John William Bean had given up his father’s profession, and taken up the one he had earlier found more fitting for his health and talents: he again became a newsvendor. When Hamilton, Pate, and O’Connor made their attempts, therefore, Bean probably sold newspapers reporting on them. Bean was the only one of the seven who had the opportunity to celebrate with other Londoners the Queen’s escape from every one of his successors. Considering his deeply depressed nature, which apparently only worsened with age, it is unlikely that he did so. He did, however, manage to marry again, in 1863. His depression, likely mixed with thoughts of suicide, led to confinement in an asylum sometime around 1876. The entry in the 1881 Census shows that life had not improved; he is listed there as a “newsagent out of work.” When in February 1882 Maclean made his attempt, Bean was likely in a depressive torpor. Five months later, he gave up altogether. A snippet in Lloyd’s Weekly reveals his state of mind at the end:
OPIUM POISONING AT CAMBERWELL.—On Friday Mr. Carter concluded an inquiry at St. Thomas’s hospital, relative to the death of John William Bean, aged 58, a retired newsvendor, lately residing at 3, The Crescent, Southampton-street, Camberwell, who expired from the effects of poison, alleged to have been self-administered, on Wednesday, the 19th July. The deceased was discovered in bed, with a bottle labelled “Poison” near him, on the day mentioned, and died the same evening. A letter was found, in which the deceased, who five years ago was confined in a lunatic asylum, stated that he was an incumbrance [sic] to his wife, and was only too glad to die. To admit of an analysis of the stomach, and an examination of the contents of the bottle, the inquiry was adjourned till Friday. It was now shown by the evidence of Mr. Sutton that the stomach contained a large quantity of opium, and it was to this poison that the death of the deceased was attributable. The jury returned a verdict of “Temporary insanity.”
The jury was being merciful, of course; a verdict of insanity rather than suicide allowed Bean a Christian burial.
Of the seven assailants, William Hamilton was the one who most shunned notoriety, wanting only the security of life in prison and the preservation of his anonymity. For better or worse, he got exactly what he wanted. He was sentenced to seven years’ transportation just as the concept of that penalty was altering, so that Australia became not the first stage on the road to rehabilitation, as it was for Francis, but the last—freedom in Australia becoming the reward for years of penal servitude and slow rehabilitation elsewhere. Into this new system Hamilton was thrown, and thus experienced the full range of mid-Victorian penal life. He was taken from Newgate to Millbank and then quickly on to Pentonville, the usual first stage for most prisoners sentenced to transportation in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Pentonville was the “model” prison for the many others that practiced the “separate” system—an imprisonment in which prisoners were doomed to unceasing solitude. Each was confined to his own cell and prohibited from speaking with fellow prisoners, or even looking at them: when together, prisoners were compelled to wear caps with masking visors to hide their individuality from one another. This harrowing system—another Victorian purgatory—was intended to cleanse prisoners morally by forcing them to reflect upon their past moral failings; critics, backed by statistics, claimed it was more likely to lead to madness than moral improvement. After six months at Pentonville—a stay shorter than the usual, gestational, nine months—Hamilton moved to the next rehabilitative step, shipping to the public works at the small penal colony at Gibraltar, where prisoners toil
ed at constructing and strengthening the harborworks and fortifications. In a colony in which unskilled labor was the norm, Hamilton’s masonry skills set him apart. He spent four and a half years at Gibraltar, and finally embarked in May 1854 on the Ramillies for Australia. By that year, transportation had been restricted to the point that only one colony—Western Australia—still accepted transported convicts. Accordingly, Hamilton, having served the bulk of his sentence, landed at Fremantle and was placed in prison there. After less than a month, in August 1854, he was granted his ticket of leave. His conditional pardon followed a year and a half later. Hamilton walked out of Fremantle prison and into complete obscurity—a position surely very much to his liking. He might have come to the attention of the authorities one more time, nearly twenty years later, when an ex-convict by his name was up before a magistrate in Perth for neglecting to report his arrival to that city, as conditional pardon-holders were required to do. That might have been William Hamilton, but it might not have been—there were other ex-convict William Hamiltons in Western Australia at the time. Where and when he died remains a mystery.
Robert Pate’s effrontery in actually touching Victoria, as well perhaps as his military past and his father’s wealth, called for a swifter removal from England than Hamilton experienced. Pate bypassed the revised system altogether, shipping less than a month after his conviction on the William Jardine to Van Diemen’s Land, to serve his entire sentence there. Life aboard ship seems to have had a remarkably positive psychological effect upon the man, a reporter at Hobart noting at his arrival there “we understand that he has shown no symptoms of insanity upon the passage.” He was quickly shipped down-island to the remote Cascades Punishment Station, scheduled to work a full year at hard labor on a chain gang. He set to the task with the determination of an ex-officer of the 10th Royal Hussars. His hard work earned him an eighty-day remission of his sentence, so that in just over nine months, in June 1881, he returned to Hobart and was employed at the milder task of clerking for John Abbott, the registrar of births, marriages, and deaths for Van Diemen’s Land. Pate acquitted himself well enough to earn Abbott’s recommendation for a Conditional Pardon. He obtained his ticket of leave in September 1853, leaving him free to seek private employment. But apparently he sought none: his father’s money now allowed him to live as a gentleman, and that is exactly how he designated himself when he applied for a conditional pardon. That pardon was granted at the end of 1855, and a year and a half later his sentence expired, leaving him free to return home. He was, however, in no hurry to do so. As if in celebration of his complete freedom, he got married just as his sentence ended. Announcements of the wedding said nothing of his being a convict and much about being an ex-officer of the 10th Royal Hussars. He and his wife Mary Elizabeth resided among the elite of Hobart, in an eleven-room mansion complete with stables, coach house, and a brewery. Clearly Robert Pate Sr. had been generous—or, more likely, his legacy had been, as the old man had died in 1856, leaving the bulk of his £70,000 fortune to his only son. Pate was a jealous guardian of his property, as was demonstrated in 1858 when he and his wife hauled an eleven-year-old girl into police court for stealing a sixpenny flowerpot from the front of their house.*
In April 1865, the Pates, having sold their mansion, embarked on the Robert Morrison for London. Pate traveled to Wisbech to take care of his father’s estate and his servants, to whom he was said to be “remarkably kind,” setting up each a pension. He then took up life as a country gentleman not in Cambridgeshire but in Croydon, Surrey, in a home ironically not very distant from the building which had been so much in the news at the time of Pate’s assault—Paxton’s Crystal Palace, dismantled in Hyde Park after the exhibition, remodeled, and rebuilt in Sydenham. Robert Pate lived, apparently happily and free from his previous obsessions, with Mrs. Pate until he died in 1895, leaving his wife over £22,000—a generous amount, but one that suggests that his gentleman’s lifestyle chipped away at the bulk of his father’s estate.
Four years after Pate’s death, and two years before Victoria’s, an object reputed to be the cane with which Robert Pate had struck the Queen went up for auction in London. Word of the proposed sale soon reached Osborne, where the queen was staying, and an official communication soon went out from there to the owner of the cane, who immediately withdrew the cane from sale. It was never seen again.
Although Victoria seemed safely protected from Arthur O’Connor after he was arrested in 1875 and committed to Hanwell Asylum, his stay there turned out to be a brief one, and for a time he continued to be a problem to the police and to the government. He was discharged eighteen months after he was committed to Hanwell as fully cured. Because he was not confined at the Queen’s pleasure, the government could do nothing to keep him there or keep him from returning to his family in London, which is exactly what he did. For two years he worked as a copying clerk. His father having died, he claimed that his income was the principal support of his entire family. But he lost that job and as his mother slipped deeper into alcoholism, his family sank deeper into penury. By the end of 1880, O’Connor had grown sick of that life; he approached the police to make an offer to the government much like the one he had brokered eight years before: he would be willing to travel to Australia if the government paid his expenses and found him employment. The government agreed. In January, he shipped to Sydney on the Helenslea, disembarking on 20 April, again adopting his Australian alias of George Morton. Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales, had taken a personal interest in his case and had procured him a clerkship with a prominent Sydney solicitor. But O’Connor never took the position. Soon after his arrival, the Inspector General of Police reported to Augustus Loftus, the Governor, that O’Connor had been arrested for being drunk, that he had lashed out violently while at the police court—that he was insane and belonged in an asylum. “On his first visit he was a thoughtless youth,” Parkes told Loftus; “he has now become an unmitigated ruffian.” After assaulting a policeman, O’Connor was restrained, examined, and sent to the lunatic asylum at Callan Park.
He spent the rest of his life in a variety of Sydney asylums, his mind cycling between lucidity and confusion. At times he was considered well enough for short furloughs from his hospitals. At other times he was compelled to escape, only to be returned by the police after a day or two, or to return himself. His psychological state deteriorated; certainly, no doctor ever saw fit to recommend his release. The assigned cause of O’Connor’s illness—a diagnosis which never changed as he was transferred from one asylum to another over the years—must surely have galled him, the most ambitious and imaginative of Victoria’s would-be assassins. The doctors never considered his illness hereditary—something that may have linked him with his heroic great-uncle Feargus. They never saw poetic, or political, or religious overimagination at the heart of his illness: any of these he would have understood and perhaps would have been proud of. Rather, the doctors all believed his illness was caused by what the Inspector General of the Sydney Police first termed in 1881 “habits of self-indulgence.” The Inspector General of the New South Wales Lunacy Department quickly concurred, concluding that Morton was “suffering from considerable mental irritation which is fostered by his debased habits.” The Callan Park casebook is blunter: the disorder was melancholia, the cause “masturbation.” As late as 1912, when O’Connor was fifty-eight years old and his hair was graying, the cause of his madness was listed as “Onanism.”
O’Connor’s asylum casebooks record instances of voices in his head, delusions of persecution, and wild hallucinations. Once he refused to drink anything for fear of drowning the Virgin Mary inside him. In 1882, soon after Roderick Maclean’s attempt, he hallucinated that he saw his own brother point a pistol at the Queen.* At times he was a quiet and cooperative patient; at others hyper-inflated with self-importance; at others sullen and paranoid. In later years he took to writing persons of importance in New South Wales, pleading for a discharge. No one, of course, listened. O�
��Connor over the years was shifted from hospital to hospital, from Callan Park, to Parramatta, to Rydalmere, to Morriset, and then back to Rydalmere.
Roderick Maclean lived a similar long life, half a world away. He entered Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane fifteen years after Edward Oxford had left it, and the doctors knew from the start that he was a different patient altogether than Oxford had been. Not one of them considered Maclean sane or requested that the Home Office consider releasing him. Maclean, who had while free been hell-bent on finding a place in an asylum, was quickly discontented with his confinement at Broadmoor, and within twenty months of his committal he sent out the first of many petitions for his release. Lest Victoria think he was asking too soon, he assured her “you, I am sure are aware in questions of presumed insanity, duration of time of incarceration should not be considered.” The petitions flowed from his pen for years, and he adopted several strategies to persuade Victoria to let him go. He tried aggressive innocence: “I am innocent of any guilty intentions toward the Queen”—his innocence requiring freedom and recompense, the government supporting him as his family once did: “I should require at least one hundred per annum and I should not accept a farthing less whether from relations or strangers. Any arrangements which did not include such an allowance or more would be entirely useless and would be sternly rejected.” He tried abject contrition: “No language could express my sorrow for the past.” He attempted the strategy that had worked for Oxford and O’Connor, promising to exile himself to a distant place—to Australia, where a brother lived, or, in one petition, to remote Scotland: “If Her Most Gracious Majesty will allow me to go and reside in the isle of my ancestors Mull on the west coast of Scotland as I intend to live a Christians life in sobriety and in quiet retirement from the Madding crowd and the hurly burly of the World hope to find a balm to my troubles and the troubles of those interested in my affairs.” None of this had the slightest effect upon the Queen’s pleasure. As the years passed, the petitions slowed. In 1894 Maclean made another attempt to reengage with the world, communicating with the editor of The Sun about publishing his poetry, or his memoirs. As the years passed, the voices in his head and the paranoia never left him. Victoria died and the Queen’s pleasure became her son’s; Edward VII died in 1910 and his pleasure became that of his son, George V.
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