Shooting Victoria

Last month in Newtown, Connecticut, another disturbed and enraged young man joined the dark fraternity: the boys and men who have converted their personal rage and disappointment into unspeakable violence, each one seemingly trying to outdo his predecessors in achieving greater and greater depths of evil, and in spreading the greatest amount of pain across one community, across the nation—across the world.

This fraternity, with its sickeningly regular attack on all of our souls, seems particularly modern—and particularly American. Mass murders in other countries, such as the killing of 69 youth on the island of Utøya in Norway, do happen, but nowhere but here do they happen with such a sickening regularity, so that in this country we have come to expect them—have indeed come to expect worse and worse.

In writing and then speaking about Shooting Victoria during the last five years, I could not help but consider, with each massacre, how these dark killers compared with the men and boys in my book, who after all made their own notorious attempts to kill.

There are striking similarities. Edward Oxford, John Francis, John William Bean, Arthur O’Connor: all were loners, young men with troubled family lives; all were deeply discontented with the world they lived in and their place in that world. All of them aspired to be somebody, and all were thwarted in that desire. And all decided to translate their rage and frustration into a single evil act, which they believed and wished would gain them world attention: they all suffered, as the newspapers at the time put it, from a “diseased craving for notoriety.” And so they bought their guns, and shot at Queen Victoria.

Their impulse to shoot at the Queen, I believe, came from the same place of unfathomable anger and frustration that has motivated our own Klebolds and Harrises to lash out. The dark fraternity, in other words, has been with us—with us all—as long as boys and young men have been capable of feeling anxiety and rage, anomie and loneliness. 

But if the impulse has been there always, the ways that the dark young men of our place and our time act upon those impulses has changed: our own mass-murderers inflict death and spread pain to a degree unthinkable a hundred years ago.

Our mass killers, for one thing, have at their disposal a mindboggling amount of firepower. Victoria’s assailants were satisfied with cheap and often barely-functional flintlock and percussion-cap pistols. The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary came equipped with an assault rifle and two semi-automatic pistols each capable of firing 5 rounds per second. He also carried more than enough ammunition to kill every child in the school, bullets in a number of high-capacity, quick-loading clips. His guns were all legally obtained—by his mother, whom he killed with her own weapons. He came to kill with an arsenal a thousand times more lethal than anyone would need to hunt, or for home protection.

That we allow one another—as a right—the ability to amass the power to kill to this degree is a national obscenity. And as long as we do, the horror of these shootings will continue—with a sickening regularity.

There’s another difference between the loners who haunted Queen Victoria and our darker loners today. Edward Oxford’s diseased craving was satisfied with confronting the Queen. He did not kill her; and, when he was freed after spending more than a quarter-century in Bethlem and Broadmoor asylums, he never lashed out again. And John Francis, and after him John William Bean, were perfectly content to emulate Oxford, perhaps hoping for his fate. Neither made any attempt to do Oxford one better, to intensify the horror, to spread the pain more ingeniously and more widely. But that is exactly what today’s members of the dark fraternity wish to do—each one set upon exceeding their predecessors in the quality and quantity of their dark acts. Simply to be noticed by the media, they must create horror at a level that will set them apart from their predecessors. And so these dark boys and men study their predecessors, adopting methods guaranteed to ensure greater horror and a greater body count, and contributing their own innovations. Thus the care with which the killer at Virginia Tech University took to chain all of the exits of the building in which he killed 32 people. Thus, the gas-mask and goggles, the smoke-bombs, the Kevlar vest which a murderer used to kill 12 and wound 58 in a theatee in Aurora, Colorado. And last Friday, the killer at Sandy Hook Elementary surely chose his victims in order to maximize horror and pain: 20 innocent six and seven-year olds, and 6 adults who cared for them. Our mass murderers are continually upping the ante; and until we can recognize and treat their madness before they strike, they will succeed in hurting us all, more and more.

Ghosts of Edward Oxford are without question among us now, studying Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and now Sandy Hook, and contemplating new depths of unspeakable horror. After Oxford and then Francis and then Bean shot at Victoria, her government acted: Prime Minster Robert Peel enacted a law intended to shame would-be Oxfords rather than glorify them, and the attacks on the Queen by disturbed young men stopped—for a time. We face a far greater threat, and we, too must act. We need more effective mental health screening and treatment so that we can prevent the violence rather than mourn it. And we need to act—immediately—to reform our horrible gun laws in order to keep near-unlimited power from those who will use it to create acts of ever-greater pain and horror.

     On 21 May 1842—just over a week before Victoria’s second assailant, John Francis, made his two attempts upon the Queen—the Illustrated London News  published, in its second-ever issue, a portrait of the murderer Daniel Good, whose execution John Francis witnessed, right before he began his own downward spiral into crime—ending up on the front page of the Illustrated London News.  The conflicted copy attached to Good’s portrait makes clear that, from the very start, modern newsmagazines wrestled with the idea of publicizing the acts of evildoers:

It is not our intention to disfigure the pages of the “Illustrated London News” with engravings, especially connected with crime and its consequences; we do not profess to be of the “raw head and bloody-bones” school, nor do we desire to encourage the tastes of such as are only gratified with pictorial representations murders and murderers; but in the case of the man, now counting the last few hours that separate him from eternity, the crime for which he will suffer, as well as the revolting circumstances attending it, give a more general interest in the affair than ordinary offences of this character possess…. We are assured the likeness is a correct one, and as such we give it, though not quite sure if we ought not to apologize for its appearance in this paper.

     On 30 May 1842, Constable William Trounce of the London Metropolitan Police put Queen Victoria in grave danger—by saluting her.

     He had been posted to watch for suspicious activity outside Buckingham Palace in Green Park. He had been observing a nervous and furtive-looking young man for some time, when the royal carriage approached, returning from a ride around the parks. Trounce turned away from the man and saluted his Queen. That man was John Francis, Victoria’s second would-be assassin, who drew a flintlock from his coat and got off a shot at the queen.

      In a statement taken the next day, shown above, Trounce betrayed his confusion, and hinted at some feelings of guilt. “…if I had known at the first moment who fired the Pistol, I could have laid hold of him sooner it was not as if I had seen him fire the Pistol I could have then laid hold of him sooner, or if I had known he was going to fire it, I seized him instantly on seeing the Pistol in his hand.”

     As the Superintendent of A Division testified to Trounce’s good character, Trounce kept his job. Queen Victoria was unhurt. John Francis was tried and sentenced to death for his shot—a sentence commuted to transportation for life.

     Sometime in the early 1840s, most likely after John Francis’s two attempts upon her life, Queen Victoria obtained this most unusual fashion accessory: a parasol two layers of silk, concealing close-linked chain mail. At three and a quarter pounds, the parasol was far too heavy for everyday use, but was, rather, likely intended for the Queen’s use when she faced a known threat, as she did on 30 May 1842, the day of Francis’s second attempt.

     The parasol was reputedly Prince Albert’s idea. There is no evidence that Victoria actually used it, and in time, she would not have, as parasols—chainmail or otherwise—pass out of style. Somehow, it is easier to imagine Victoria braving public danger unshielded than to imagine her on an outing with an unfashionable parasol….

     One of the great challenges in writing Shooting Victoria was in resurrecting the dead: in digging up and presenting the sort of information about Queen Victoria’s seven assailants that would allow readers to understand them as living creatures. And among the most helpful tools in doing that, I found, were the English censuses, taken on the first year of every decade during the 19^th century. From 1841 on, the census offered specific names, ages, family relationships, and occupations for every member of every household in England. Tracking down the entries for the seven and their contemporaries provided me with many eureka! moments. And no other source provided me, as quickly and effectively, with the sense that these people once breathed, and interacted with one another. They worked and played, gained and lost: they lived.

      The image above, from the 1841 England Census, captures a moment in the life of Victoria’s second assailant, John Francis, about a year before he made his two attempts. He lived with his mother, a sister, and his father John, who is listed as a 45-year old carpenter: he was actually a stage carpenter at Covent Garden Theatre. Young John—19 at the time—was listed as an ap[prentice] carpenter; he assisted his father at the theatre, and by all accounts showed great promise. The four Francises lived on Tottenham Court Road, at the heart of the metropolis and not too far from the theatre, living among—the census makes clear—shopkeepers and craftsmen, living in apparent comfort. 

     Within a year, it all fell apart for John Francis, Jr. He quit his job at the theatre and ran away from home. He struggled to make his own way in the world—and he failed. And then he bought a pistol. 

     This was John Francis’s first and last appearance in an English census: a year later he was condemned to death, reprieved, and transported: by the time of the next English census, in 1851, he had served the bulk of his sentence, and lived half a world away, in Tasmania, Australia.

     Today, to coincide with Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee, a monumental work has become widely available for the first time. The Royal Archives has published online every single page of Queen Victoria’s Journals: 69 years’ and 43,000 pages’ worth of detailed observations by the very observant Queen, spanning from the 13-year old Princess’s first entry in 1832 (“This book, Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it”) to the last, nine days before her death at 81 in 1901 (“I had a fair night, but was a little wakeful….”) The first volumes of the Journal are in Victoria’s own handwriting; the rest—all of the entries Victoria wrote as Queen of England—are, for better and for worse, in the hand of her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice: better, because Beatrice’s writing is much, much easier to read than her mother’s often notoriously undecipherable scrawl, and worse, because Beatrice transcribed her mother’s journals after Victoria’s death, and we’ll never be sure what she might have changed from or even left out of the originals. What remains, however, is copious and revealing, a unique record of history in the making: truly a British national treasure.

     Until today, Victoria’s journals were only accessible to those few scholars, who, after thorough vetting by the Queen’s security, made the long walk up the majestic stairs of the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, to the very cozy chambers of the Royal Archives. I made that walk last September, and there I was honestly given the royal treatment; every possible document connected with the attempts upon Victoria’s life was set before me—including several volumes of the journals. Victoria’s Journals were an invaluable source for Shooting Victoria; in them the Queen set down her eyewitness observations of six of the eight attempts. (The two she didn’t describe—John Francis’s first attempt, and John William Bean’s—she didn’t actually see.) Often, the Queen got right details that the newspapers got wrong. She knew, for example, which of her children were with her when William Hamilton made his attempt—Alice, Helena, and Alfred—while the papers claimed otherwise. And while the papers reported that Robert Pate hit her lightly with his cane on 27 June 1850, Victoria knew differently, and said so in her entry for that date:

A little in front of the crowd, stood a young gentleman whom I have often seen in the Park, pale, fair, with a fair moustache, with a small stick in his hand. Before I knew where I was, or what had happened, he stepped forward, & I felt myself violently thrown by a blow to the left of the carriage. My impulse had been to throw myself that way, not knowing what was coming next—till I was roused the moment afterwards by poor Fanny, who was dreadfully frightened, saying “They have got the man.” My bonnet was crushed, & on putting my head up to my forehead, I felt an immense bruise on the right side, fortunately well above the temple & eyes! The man was instantly caught by the collar, & then I got up in the carriage, having quite recovered myself, & telling the good people who anxiously surrounded me “I am not hurt,” I saw him violently pulled about by the people. 

       Victoria’s Journals can be found at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do.

One of the most intriguing aspects of my research for Shooting Victoria, I found, was that in delving deeper and deeper into the public records of the eight attempts, I found myself delving deeper and deeper, as well, into the minds of the Queen’s seven assailants—curious, complex, disturbed worlds, every one of them. And while I chose to avoid applying modern psychological science to their Victorian world in the book (finding that Victorian psychological science, with its entirely different nomenclature and its distinct underlying assumptions suited the task of attempting to explain their behavior quite well enough), I did find that some of them did present textbook cases of mental illnesses defined in twenty-first century terms. Young Edward Oxford (#1 of the seven), for example, would surely be diagnosed as bipolar if he were a teenager today. John William Bean (#3) clearly suffered what would in 2012 be diagnosed as clinical depression: he lived under that dark cloud his entire life, and in the end it killed him. Robert Pate (#5) would today be treated for his extreme obsessive-compulsive behavior. And Roderick Maclean —who conversed with God and believed the world leagued in a plot against him—would today certainly be medicated as a schizophrenic.

Of the seven, Arthur O’Connor—#6—presents the most complex case of mental aberration of all; the nature of his illness is much more difficult to label accurately in modern terms than any of the others. Symptoms, certainly, are apparent, and indeed O’Connor himself at various times attempted to set out the symptoms of his own illness. But accurately summing him up as falling into one specific category of insanity, modern or Victorian, is to my mind impossible. One obvious symptom of his illness was an extreme grandiosity, a need to be—often shifting to a belief that he was—the greatest of the great O’Connors. And once he made contact with Queen Victoria, he dared to believe that she would recognize his greatness, and, through her, the world would finally accord him the recognition he knew he deserved. On 11 June 1873, O’Connor, more than a year after his attempt and then in exile in Morpeth, New South Wales, Australia, wrote a long, personal—and excruciatingly poetic—letter to the Queen. The excerpt from this letter, above, shows O’Connor laying bare to his monarch his ambition: the Queen, he expected, would dismiss that half-poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from the poet laureateship, and appoint O’Connor in his place.   

The letter never reached the Queen; her Home Secretary at the time, Henry Bruce, made sure of that. In noting his reception of O’Connor’s letter, Bruce made his own diagnosis of the boy: “The man must be mad,” he wrote; “his self-conceit is intolerable.” O’Connor would spend nearly 50 years in a variety of asylums, his illness in almost all of them reduced simply to the effects of self-abuse. A closer study of his life (and his very few works)—a study at least begun in Shooting Victoria—suggests a much more complicated and interesting mind than that.