Shooting Victoria

On 19 May 1849—the official day of celebration of Queen Victoria’s 30^th birthday—William Hamilton became the fourth person to “have a pop at the Queen.” The above image of the attack—from the Illustrated London News—captures the scene, as Hamilton stood just beyond the palings of Green Park and shot at Victoria as she returned to Buckingham Palace from a carriage ride.

Of course the Illustrated London News artist was not an eyewitness to the shooting, and had to rely on others’ accounts to reconstruct the scene. The one detail that interests me most about this illustration, however, is one that likely came from no source beyond the artist’s own imagination. He has Hamilton holding his broken flintlock pistol sideways, adopting a stance I have not seen in any other image dating before the late twentieth century.  

Early Victorian gangsta style?

     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.