On 10 June, 1840, outside Buckingham Palace, Edward Oxford was the first man to shoot at Queen Victoria. The Queen was at the time four months pregnant with her eldest child. Had she died, there would have been no Victorian era to speak of (since she would have reigned for only three years), and no progeny to succeed her: rather, her reactionary and generally unpleasant uncle Ernest would have happily returned from his little kingdom of Hanover to take the British throne. Edward Oxford’s greatest achievement, then, was to give the expression “God Save the Queen” a new and deeper meaning in the minds of virtually every Briton alive in 1840.
