Shooting Victoria (14 page)

If Oxford was not awoken early that morning by the clankings of cell doors or the fervency of prayer, then his sleep would certainly have been disrupted by the growing activity outside the prison. Crowds had been assembling since the night before, to reserve the best vantage point to see Courvoisier hanged: these were a celebratory bunch, mostly rowdy youths, and the local gin shops remained open all night to cater to them. In the early hours of the morning, the scaffold was wheeled into place outside Newgate's debtor's door and hammered into place. The bulk of the crowd began arriving after dawn. Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, apart from one another, were among this crowd. Both were, in 1840, staunch opponents of the death penalty, and both were to find their views strengthened considerably by what they were about to witness. Thackeray, recording his impressions of the event in his essay “Going to See a Man Hanged,” noted the great social and moral diversity of the spectators: from the immoral—the young blackguards and their prostitute girlfriends at the front of the crowd, as well as the upper-class dandies and “Mohawks” who had retained window seats above the mass and who entertained themselves by spraying those below with brandy-and-water—to the respectable: the tradesmen and tradesmen's families, and the bulk of the working-class spectators, whom Thackeray, standing squeezed among them, deemed “extraordinarily gentle and good-humoured.” Pickpockets were at work, as were broadsheet-sellers: Courvoisier was a popular subject for these; as many as 1.6 million would be sold. The crowds, as the hour of execution approached, filled Old Bailey and Giltspur streets and overflowed to Ludgate Hill to the south and Smithfield to the north. The
Times
conservatively estimated 20,000 were there; Thackeray reported 40,000. Places in the windows of the houses surrounding the scaffold were going for three guineas, and for two sovereigns one could obtain treacherous places on the house-roofs: places for those “with less money to spare, but more nerve.”

After Courvoisier had taken communion, William Calcraft entered the cell. Calcraft had been Newgate's executioner since 1829, and was to continue in that position until 1874: a long if not illustrious career. Calcraft was well aware that this was bound to be a highly profitable day for him. For his earliest hangings he was paid a guinea per hanging; in time, he would earn £10 a body. He would also be given Courvoisier's hanging-rope and his effects, including his clothing. He could sell the former, cut into little pieces, as souvenirs—and Courvoisier's notoriety would guarantee a high selling price for these. He could also sell the clothes to Madame Tussaud's waxworks; Courvoisier would soon be a star attraction in Madame's Chamber of Horrors.

Calcraft drew from a black bag a rope with which he pinioned Courvoisier's arms before him. At a few minutes before eight, the procession left the condemned cell, Carver in front, reading the burial service.

The procession stopped in Newgate's press yard—so-called not because of any journalistic connection, but because this was the area in which, until as late as 1772, prisoners who refused to plead were crushed with stones until they spoke or died. On this day, a number of esteemed guests had assembled in the yard; they had paid for the privilege of watching Courvoisier in his last moments, as his leg-irons were stricken off and he was led to the scaffold. (Afterwards, they would have a hearty breakfast with Governor Cope.) Among this group was the celebrated actor Charles Kean. Kean's father Edmund, the even more celebrated actor, had come to Newgate twenty years before to witness the ultimate moments of Arthur Thistlewood and his fellow conspirators, sentenced to hanging and decapitation for plotting to assassinate the cabinet: Kean wished to broaden his education as an actor. His son, one assumes, was at Newgate on this day for the same reason.

At 7:55, the prison bell tolled; with an “immense sway and movement,” the entire crowd uncovered their heads, and, according to Thackeray, “a great murmur arose, more awful,
bizarre
, and
indescribable than any sound I had ever before heard.” After a suspenseful pause, Courvoisier emerged, with the sheriffs and the hangman. He showed, by all accounts, a preternatural calmness; his only agitation, beyond an imploring look around at the immense crowd, was a clasping and unclasping of his bound hands. The crowd replied in kind to him: after a few yells of execration, they remained silent. He strode to the middle of the platform, under the beam, where Calcraft quickly slipped a hood over his head, adjusted the noose, stepped back, and pulled the lever that shot back the bolt. Courvoisier dropped.

William Calcraft was renowned as a bungler famous for his “short drops,” in which the hanged man, only dropping a few inches, would not suffer a broken neck and would thus slowly strangle to death, Calcraft often helping with this process by racing under the scaffolding and pulling on the legs of the dangling man. To be fair to Calcraft, however, the short drop was the norm in 1840. Long drops of several feet, designed to break the neck—drops which could go horribly wrong in their own way—were not a feature of Newgate hangings until the 1880s; and broken necks and quick, painless deaths were not considered by all at the time to be good hangings. According to the
Times
, however, Courvoisier's death—perhaps with Calcraft's help under the scaffolding—was relatively benign: “He died without any violent struggle. In two minutes after he had fallen, his legs were twice slightly convulsed, but no further motion was observable, excepting that his raised arms, gradually losing their vitality, sank down from their own lifeless weight.”

Both Dickens and Thackeray were sickened by the scene. Dickens saw the only the lowest form of humanity: “nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious.” Thackeray couldn't watch. For weeks after the hanging, however, he suffered, and he wrote eloquently upon the human degradation
effected by public hanging, not the degradation of the masses, as Dickens saw it, but the degradation of himself:

I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for
the murder I saw done
.… I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood.

After hanging for an hour, Courvoisier's body was placed in the coffin, and brought back into the prison. A medical officer examined the body and proclaimed it lifeless. A death mask was taken of his face. One cast from that mask remained at the Governor's office; another was exhibited at Madame Tussaud's: a hauntingly angelic-looking 23-year-old, displayed until well into the twentieth century.

In the afternoon, Courvoisier's body was buried in a passageway to the Old Bailey.

Of Courvoisier, Gould, and Oxford, only Oxford remained, and in the relative silence of his condemned cell he must, on this day, have given some thought to his own possible fate: a guilty verdict for High Treason entailed hanging, decapitation, and quartering. If there was any vainglory left in the boy, after his committal to Newgate, the events of this day must have eradicated it.

Not long before his trial, Oxford was visited by an Italian artist from Manchester; he had come to take a plaster cast of his head and face. The operation was conducted as quietly as possible; Governor Cope later denied knowing about it, as did the aldermen, who found the situation disgraceful. Nor was his family consulted: Hannah, on learning of this visit, became hysterical. Knowing that Newgate made and kept plaster casts of condemned felons
like Courvoisier after their deaths, she assumed that the Home Secretary had ordered the cast of her son, and that his execution was thus inevitable.

It was not Normanby's power at work here, but Madame Tussaud's, and by September she was able to advertise proudly in the newspapers:

The LUNATIC EDWARD OXFORD.—Madame TUSSAUD and SONS respectfully announce that they have added a full-length model of OXFORD (taken from life) to their Exhibition, representing him in the act of attempting the life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Likewise the Models of Gould and Courvoisier.

Madame Tussaud was not the only one fascinated by Oxford's head. At one o'clock the afternoon before the trial, James Fernandez Clarke and two of his hand-picked team of medical experts—Chowne and Conolly, accompanied by Oxford's solicitor, Pelham—took a carriage to Newgate with an order from the Home Secretary in hand, to examine Oxford and decide whether he was insane. Actually, they all had for the most part made up their minds. From their later testimony, it is clear that the newspaper reports had convinced them that his motiveless act, his inviting capture, and his statements after the fact all pointed to insanity. When Clarke went to Hanwell to speak with Conolly, Conolly said “I cannot believe that the prisoner is responsible for his actions. There is an entire want of motive, and, from what I have heard of his conduct since his committal, I feel convinced that a plea of insanity can be maintained.” “Of course,” he added, “I can only satisfy myself on this point by seeing and carefully examining him.” Conolly came to Newgate to reinforce his conclusion, not to draw one.

At the prison, Governor Cope, still taking his position of gatekeeper very seriously, at first refused the doctors admittance.
George Maule,
*
who as Solicitor of the Treasury was responsible for putting together the prosecution's case in the trial, was with Cope when the doctors arrived, and it was likely Maule who ordered Cope not to admit the medical experts for the defense unless they were accompanied by the prosecution's expert. That expert, Charles Aston Key, a highly reputed surgeon at Guy's Hospital, was not called as a witness at Oxford's trial, but he attended, and advised the prosecution in cross-examining the defense's expert witnesses. Cope immediately sent a messenger to Key's house, but he was out, and no one knew when he would return. After nearly two hours in the governor's office, Clarke pointed out the obvious to Cope: the doctors had a government order to see Oxford; the trial was the next day; if Cope continued to deny them access, he would be denying Oxford a fair trial. Cope and Maule relented, Maule accompanying the doctors in Key's place.

Oxford exhibited to his guests the same clear and straightforward method of answering questions he had shown to the police when he was captured. While this manner had then impressed the police with a firm sense of his sanity, the doctors drew the opposite conclusion. To them, Oxford's demonstration of cool, rational behavior, when he was caught apparently red-handed, imprisoned for High Treason, and faced a possible death sentence, was in itself a sure sign of the deepest insanity. Showing no agitation whatsoever convinced at least Dr. Chowne that the boy was missing normal brain function: was, in a word, an imbecile.

John Conolly was a true believer in what was, at the time, considered by many to be the reputable study of phrenology—the sub-science which held to the oversimple premise that brain size and brain shape determined human behavior, and that the skull, conforming to the size and shape of the brain, could thus be examined to provide clues to an individual's psychological makeup.
After Clarke introduced Conolly to Oxford, then, he was soon probing the boy's skull and, not surprisingly, he quickly found the evidence he needed to support his diagnosis: a sunken spot at the upper part of Oxford's forehead that suggested to him a missing part of the brain: a sure sign of idiocy. “This youth,” Conolly told Clarke, “cannot with such a configuration be entirely right.”

While Oxford seemed eager to answer the doctors' questions, Conolly and the others found his answers unsound in more than one respect. For one thing, Oxford consistently demonstrated a lack of affect. When they reminded him that his family would suffer if he were convicted, he seemed not to care. When told he had committed a great crime, in shooting at the Queen, he seemed not to understand, replying “that he might as well shoot her as any one else.” Moreover, in some of his answers he demonstrated illogic. It is hard, though, not to get a sense that he was trying too hard to appear insane with some of his replies. For instance, when Chowne, obviously hoping for an agitated reaction, reminded Oxford that he'd be decapitated if found guilty, Oxford, perhaps with Courvoisier's execution fresh in his mind, and certainly remembering the Italian artist from Manchester, replied calmly that “he had been decapitated in fact a week before, for he had a cast taken of his head.” The doctors, concerned that Oxford might be faking madness, sought evidence besides his speech for insanity. For Conolly, it was the abnormal shape of his skull. For Chowne, it was his walk: “I told him to get up and walk about the room, and the brisk manner in which he walked proved to me he was not acting a part, for I think if he had been he would not have walked so much at his ease.”

One question that Oxford did answer clearly directly demonstrates that he was aware of what his defense was to be, and that he fully intended to cooperate: there had been no bullets in his pistols, he stubbornly maintained, even when the doctors suggested to him that there had been.

The doctors walked away resolved to testify that he was insane. “We held a consultation after the interview,” Clarke states, “and we all felt convinced that we could justly uphold the plea of insanity, notwithstanding the opposition we contemplated from the Government.” They expected a fight.

They got one.