On the 3rd of July 1842, exactly 170 years ago today, John William Bean—a diminutive, hunchbacked, deeply depressed 17-year old boy—pointed a flintlock pistol at Queen Victoria and pulled the trigger. His pistol misfired; he was seized by the boy standing next to him, but in the subsequent excitement, he escaped—only to be captured that evening, when the Metropolitan Police rounded up virtually every male hunchbacked dwarf in London.
Bean’s was the third attempt upon Victoria in two years, and it was his attempt that allegedly caused the Queen’s vexed Prime Minister, Robert Peel, to burst into tears when he met the Queen soon afterwards.
