Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  *

  Victoria’s seven would-be assassins were all shooting stars: they came from nowhere, burst into the light of public attention for a short time following their attempts, and disappeared back into obscurity, all of them living on, anonymously, for years after their attempts. Penetrating the obscurity of their lives before and after their attempts, therefore, presented quite a challenge and involved a great deal of digging through records in England, Australia, and in the United States. Without a great deal of help with these, I could not have written this book. Much of my research I conducted in Colorado, and I am greatly indebted to the staff at Norlin Library, University of Colorado—and especially Norlin’s Interlibrary Loan department—for bringing the world of the seven to me in Boulder. I am grateful as well to the amazingly efficient staffs of the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, and the Public Record Office at Kew. Thanks to Colin Gale at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum, and Mark Stevens at the Berkshire Record Office, who enthusiastically provided insight about the Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospital records for Edward Oxford and Roderick Maclean. Thank you to Ruth Roberts, who provided valuable information on Robert Pate, and to Beatrice Behlen, archivist at the Museum of London, who allowed me the wonderful opportunity to hold and examine Victoria’s curious chain-mail parasol.

  I’m grateful as well to Pam Clark and the diligent and efficient archival staff at Windsor, and for the kind permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to quote material from the Royal Archives. I cannot let this acknowledgement pass, by the way, without noting that Queen Elizabeth showed a great deal of her great-great-grandmother’s pluck, and her own instinctive faith in the goodwill of her subjects, when on 13 June 1981 seventeen-year-old Marcus Sergeant fired six blanks at her while she was Trooping the Colour on the Mall, not far from Buckingham Palace. The Queen stopped to calm her horse, and, as Victoria would have done, rode on, refusing absolutely to seek safety or curtail her participation in the ceremony.

  I owe thanks as well to those in Australia who assisted me in fleshing out the antipodean afterlives of the five of the seven who were transported—or transported themselves—to Australia in the wake of their attempts. Jenny Sinclair freely shared her abundant knowledge of Edward Oxford’s fascinating later life in Melbourne under the alias of John Freeman—knowledge that she is putting to good use in a forthcoming book on the subject. And Carole Riley did a truly amazing job at uncovering the story of Arthur O’Connor’s decades in Sydney asylums under the alias George Morton.

  I cannot adequately express my gratitude to my good friends in London, who made each research journey to England a joy, and who have been the strongest supporters of this project from the very start. Thanks to Peter Burgess, Tracy Ward, Steve Terrey, Michael Guilfoyle, Nana Anto-Awuakye, John Watts, and—especially—Steve and Nina Button and Linda Gough. Thanks to Charlie Olsen, my agent at Inkwell; his unflagging enthusiasm sustained mine. Claiborne Hancock and the folks at Pegasus have been a pleasure to work with. Thank you Paul Levitt and Elissa Guralnick for giving me whatever ability to write I now have. And thank you Lawrence Goldman for teaching me to think about history. Finally, I am infinitely grateful to my wife Tory Tuttle, who read and commented upon every page of this book before anyone else did, and who for years now has patiently put up with my freeform articulations of the undigested results of my research—enduring all of that chaos before it was wrestled into some kind of order. Thank you. Love you.

  Part 1

  Young England

  1

  Wedding Portrait

  On the morning of 4 May 1840, Edward Oxford stepped out of his lodgings in West Place, West Square, at the Lambeth (border of Southwark, and set off eastwards into the heart of that densely populated, proletarian district south of the Thames. He was eighteen, though his diminutive stature and baby face made him look much younger. He was—unusually for him—) suddenly prosperous, with £5 in his pocket. And, for the first time in ages, he was free: unemployed by choice, and finally able to pursue the ambition that had been driving him for some time. He set off into what Charles Dickens called the “ganglion” of Southwark’s twisted streets, his destination a small general goods store on Blackfriars Road.

  Behind him lay one of the very rare green expanses within the gritty boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. West Square, where Oxford, quitting his job in the West End, had moved four days before to be with his mother, his sister, and her husband, was one of the very few gardened squares on that side of the river. The square was meticulously maintained and gave this neighborhood an unusual air of gentility. And directly to the west of the square, a stone’s throw away, a bucolic English-style garden relieved the area from the surrounding urban sprawl. This greenery, however, was not part of a public park—no such thing existed in Southwark at the time—but rather the connected grounds of two institutions. Directly adjacent to West Square stood the Bridewell House of Occupation, a home and school to indigent children. And behind this rose the cupola of an immense neoclassical building: Bethlem Hospital for the Insane.

  Southwark had been for the last twenty-five years the latest location of Bedlam, or Bethlem Hospital, which had held many of London’s insane since the fourteenth century. Behind Bethlem’s walls operated a carefully structured world within a world designed to deal with different degrees and classifications of insanity. And, at the extremities of the hospital, segregated from the rest of the hospital and, with high walls, from the world outside, lay the feature that made Bethlem unique: it housed England’s only purpose-built facility for the criminally insane. Communication between the worlds inside and outside the asylum was largely restricted to sound: the occasional shrieks of the patients might have carried as far as West Square; the clanking and clattering of industrial South London must have intruded upon the disturbed thoughts of the patients.

  But on this day, if Edward Oxford was even aware of Bethlem’s world within a world, he was headed away from it, literally and figuratively. He had his entire life largely kept himself—his dreams and his plans—to himself. Today, however, that would change. Today, Oxford would take a major step toward recognition by all of London—by the world. Today, he would buy his guns.

  Back in his room at West Square, Oxford kept a locked box. When, five weeks later, the police smashed its lock and opened it, they found the cache of a secret society: a uniform of sorts—a crepe cap tied off with two red bows—and, neatly written on two sheets of foolscap, a document listing the rules and regulations of an organization optimistically named “Young England.”*1 The documents revealed Young England to be a highly disciplined insurrectionary body. All members were expected to adopt an alias and to be well armed and prepared for covert military action: “every member shall be provided with a brace of pistols, a sword, a rifle, and a dagger; the two latter to be kept at the committee room.” Every member, as well, was expected when necessary to be a master of disguise—ready to play “the labourer, the mechanic, and the gentleman.” And, apparently for mutual recognition on the day of the insurrection, every member was to keep “a black crape cap, to cover his face, with the marks of distinction outside.” These marks of distinction denoted rank in the organization, and the two red bows on Oxford’s cap made him a captain, a position of true command, as captains were members “who can procure an hundred men.” Oxford had chosen the rather transparent alias of “Oxonian,” one of the four captains named in this document.

  It was, on paper, an organization of over four hundred armed members. And when this document became public, many believed Oxford to be a part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to overthrow the Queen’s government. But Young England was entirely Oxford’s own creation, and this manifesto, though signed by a fictitious secretary Smith, was in Oxford’s own handwriting. His hundred troops and the generals existed only in his own mind. This fantasy was to Oxford a compelling—now, controlling—one, for that fantasy gave him a stature wholly denied him in everyday life, as well as a profound sense of self-w
orth and purpose in a life that heretofore lacked both.

  He was in the process of creating and collecting the props with which to support this fantasy. He had the cap. The sword would come. Today he would buy what he needed most to perform fully the role of a Captain of Young England: a matching brace of pistols. The shop selling the pistols was a short walk through Southwark, up the London Road, past the obelisk at St. George’s Circle and the philanthropic institutions for the blind and for repentant prostitutes. Oxford likely knew nothing of what went on inside these places, but he did know the streets and the shops of Southwark well. Although he had just moved in with his family, he had lived here as a child, attending school in Lambeth; and, until the age of fourteen, he assisted his mother with a coffee shop she had run on the Waterloo Road. Oxford slipped into the human press traveling up Blackfriars Road, the bustling thoroughfare leading to Blackfriars Bridge and to the City, and ducked into Hayes’s general goods store.

  He wanted guns that would make an impression, that befit the important plans of Captain Oxford. Style was everything to Oxford, accuracy secondary. Hayes had exactly what he needed: a pair of dueling pistols with handsomely carved stocks. These pistols incorporated the very latest advance in firearms—the percussive cap. For the past two hundred years, most firearms had been flintlocks, on which a snapping, grinding flint would ignite loose powder, which ignited the powder in the barrel of the gun, firing the ball. By the 1830s, and because of refinements in percussive gunpowder—that is, gunpowder that would explode not upon ignition, but upon impact—flintlocks became increasingly obsolete, more and more likely to be found in pawnshops. Newer, flintless pistols fired when a cocked hammer engaged and struck a percussive cap. Like flintlocks, however, these percussive pistols were muzzle-loaded. The pistols Oxford was buying could each be fired only once; to fire again, he would have to reload powder, wadding, and ball through the front of the gun, and replace the percussive cap.

  Although dueling was technically illegal, the practice was carried on, Wimbledon Common being a favorite venue. Indeed, just two months before, Prince Louis Napoleon, then in exile in London, was involved in a duel there with his cousin, the Comte Léon—a contest broken up before it started by Inspector Pearce of the Metropolitan Police (whom Oxford would soon meet). Dueling pistols, then, were still available for purchase. But these particular pistols hardly suited the purpose of the duelist, unless that purpose was to miss: they were not weapons of quality. They were priced at two guineas, or 42 shillings—overpriced, according to one gunmaker, who later valued them at less than 30 shillings. Certainly, there were cheaper pistols to be had, but a guinea apiece hardly suggested fine workmanship. Experts would later describe them as “coarsely and roughly finished,” designed more for show than effect. They were manufactured in Birmingham, the center of the British firearms industry at the time, but they bore no maker’s mark—an obvious sign of their shoddiness. When Charles Dickens later described Oxford’s pistols as “Brummagem firearms,” he intended to emphasize their utter worthlessness as weapons, virtually guaranteed to miss their targets. Oxford was certainly no expert on firearms, but he must have had some sense of the limitations of these pistols when he asked the young clerk assisting him how far a bullet would carry from them: twenty or thirty yards, he was told.

  That was enough for his purpose. What was important was that he look the part: Captain Oxonian, standing steadily as he took one shot, and then another; like a duelist, a highwayman, a bravo—a dashing, handsome, romantic figure, a gentleman worthy of the world’s attention. The guns were perfect for that effect. And they were guns that he could afford. With typical Victorian haggling, he bargained down the price of the pistols from 2 guineas (or £2 and 2 shillings) to £2. With the two shillings he saved, he bought a powder-flask and two bags for the pistols. The clerk took Oxford’s money and entered the transaction on a slate, which his employer, Mr. Hayes, logged into his account book the next day.

  Oxford made his way back past the obelisk and through the warren of side streets, to 6 West Square. Though the lodgings, kept by Mrs. Packman, were new to Oxford, his mother, his sister, and his brother-in-law had been living there for some time. Their choice of residence suggests a position of some comfort in the upper ranks of the working class, at least. A clergyman lived there, as did some of the professionals who staffed Bethlem. Oxford’s mother, Hannah, had attempted a number of businesses of her own—a public house, a coffee shop—but all had eventually failed. Others in her family were more successful, however, and helpful to her: she apparently supported herself with a legacy. Oxford’s brother-in-law, William Phelps, husband of his older sister, Susannah, was a baker who worked at a local soda-water factory but was on the verge of a major career change: he was days away from joining the Metropolitan Police. Oxford’s family, then, fit the upscale proletarian precincts of West Street. Oxford himself, however, was far less comfortably situated. He had engaged with Mrs. Packman for a separate room, and for a separate rent. Oxford had no legacy, and no employment. The rent would quickly prove too much for him to pay, and he would very soon fall into arrears.

  Oxford found his mother Hannah at home and lost no time showing her his pistols. While she knew nothing of his locked box of secrets, she did know of his childhood obsession with gunpowder and weaponry, remembering his fascination with toy cannons and remembering the arm injury he suffered as a boy, nearly blowing himself up while playing with fire and gunpowder, burning his eyebrows off and keeping him up for two nights screaming with pain. She knew, as well, that her child ached to be somebody. He had often spun out for her grandiose plans to rise in the world. A favorite dream of his came straight out of Captain Marryat’s then-popular novels—the very sort of fiction Oxford loved to read. He would join the Royal Navy and move quickly up the ranks. “He said he would allow me half his pay,” Hannah would later say in court, “and how proud I should be of my son when I saw his name in the papers, Admiral Sir Edward Oxford!” All he needed to realize that ambition, he told her, would be a midshipman’s place, which he could obtain for £50. He had begged her to return to her family in Birmingham to get it for him. On this day, he proudly showed her his pistols as a sign of his higher stature and a promise of his coming renown.

  She was not pleased. Her son had just given up his job as a barman at the Hog in the Pound, a popular public house on Oxford Street across the river. Hannah had been exhorting him to find a job since he moved in, but he made it clear to her that he was in no hurry to do that: “He said nothing was stirring, and he should rather wait till a good place offered itself than answer advertisements.” And now he had wasted a huge portion of his £5—a full quarter’s pay for a barman—on these pistols. “How could you think of laying your money out in such folly!” she cried out, exasperated. Oxford, humiliated, lied to her. He had not paid for these new pistols, he explained; he was simply holding them for a friend.

  And then, as often happened, the shame and inadequacy he felt turned to a blind rage, the sort of rage that had previously manifested itself in his breaking anything that he could grab hold of. His mother simply could not understand how important these pistols were to him, could not understand that he was not just a barman and was not destined to live a barman’s life. He was not a servant; he was Oxonian, Captain of Young England!

  He raised one of the pistols and pointed it, cocked, at his mother’s face.

  *

  That same day—4 May 1840—a diminutive young woman sat quietly a mile and a half across the River Thames in her home in the very greenest part of London, while an artist sketched her face. Queen Victoria was only two years older than Edward Oxford, a few weeks away from her twenty-first birthday. For the last three years she had sat on the British throne. The artist was her current favorite, George Hayter, who, as her official portrait painter, had depicted many of the important events in her short life. He had, at the request of her Uncle Leopold, painted her when she was a thirteen-year-old princess and heir appare
nt. He had painted her with her court in full pomp at her 1838 coronation. And, most famously, he had in 1838 depicted her as every inch a queen, yet very much an innocent, in her state portrait: she sits, enthroned and crowned, in a flowing, virginal white dress bedecked with the heavy robes of state, gazing to the side and upwards beyond her scepter with a hint of a wide-eyed surprise interrupting her placidity, as if she contemplated the many coming years of her reign with wonder and confidence.