Shooting Victoria (26 page)

He crossed over to Whitehall and to the Home Office, where a number of Privy Councilors—most, but not all, with the Government—were assembling for an immediate examination of Francis. Francis, like Oxford, would have his moment when the highest of the land focused their attention upon him exclusively. Besides the Prime Minister himself, the Duke of Wellington was there, as well as the Home, Foreign, and Colonial Secretaries and the Chancellor
of the Exchequer. Also in attendance was Prince Albert (who had been made a member of the Privy Council just before his marriage to Victoria), who thus was able to take a closer and longer look at the youth who aimed a pistol at his head. He was not impressed: “He is not out of his mind, but a thorough scamp. His answers are coarse and witty. He tries to make fun of his judges … a wretched creature. I hope his trial will be conducted with the greatest strictness.”

Francis was examined from eight to ten that evening; witnesses quickly established that he had indeed pointed a gun at the royal carriage on two occasions. As Albert observed, Francis acted during his examination to some extent as Oxford had—with a braggadocio borne of the sense of importance the Privy Council gave him simply by paying attention to him: a coolness, calmness, and firmness that astonished the Council. But in another way, he acted very differently than Oxford: there was little madness, and much method, in the questions he was allowed to make in cross-examining the witnesses. He was already looking forward to his trial and attempting to minimize his actions to something less than High Treason. To Colonel Arbuthnot, he asked “whether he thought he intended to shoot the queen, or whether it was done in a frolic.” (“I cannot say,” Arbuthnot answered.)

After the examination, Francis was bundled out the back entrance and conveyed to Tothill Fields for the night. At the prison, he divulged his name and address, and grew socially indignant when someone asked whether it was true that his father was a “scene-shifter” at Covent Garden. “Scene-shifter! No, he's a stage carpenter.” He was, as policy dictated, stripped naked and bathed.

The next day, he was brought back to Whitehall at noon to finish his examination. There, young, stuttering George Pearson, brought by the police to Tothill Fields to pick Francis out from among a crowd of prisoners, was able to positively identify Francis as the Queen's assailant on Sunday. The Council charged Francis
with High Treason and sent him in a hackney cab to Newgate. His night in jail, and the capital charge leveled against him, had apparently had a sobering effect: the crowd assembled outside the Home Office saw him lean back in the vehicle and pull his hat over his brow, seeming to “wish to shrink from public gaze.”

The news of Francis's attempt spread quickly to become “the all engrossing topic of conversation amongst all classes”—a “ferment … not to be done justice to in description.” As they had two years before, the population of the metropolis erupted into a celebration of the monarchy and of Victoria: a celebration completely spontaneous, and yet now beginning to take on the sanctity of tradition. Victoria did not ride to her mother's home this time, instead sending her Uncle Mensdorff to inform her about the attempt; the Duchess hurried back with her brother-in-law to the Palace, where, bursting into tears, she fell upon Victoria, who calmly caressed and reassured her. Again, her relatives, leading politicians and diplomats, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all rushed to the Palace while the crowds swelled outside. Robert Peel belied his usual coolness in an emotional meeting with the Queen. Many of the gentry, in full evening dress, stopped at the palace on their way to parties and the theatres to sign the registry and tender their congratulations. At all the theatres, patrons and performers alike gave vent to tumultuous cheering and displays of “unmixed joy.” At Covent Garden—Francis's theatre—the German Opera was performing; Madame Schodel and the sublimely voiced bass, Herr Staudigl, sang every verse of the national anthem to “loud plaudits”—an excellent rendition, according to a reporter for the
Morning Chronicle
—“making allowance for the foreign accent of the vocalists.”

The next day was an impromptu holiday for Londoners of every class. The crowds began to form anew by 8:00—around the Palace, and at Whitehall, where Francis was to return to complete his examination by the Privy Council. At the more polite hour of ten, the carriages of the elite began arriving at the Palace, in a
throng that continued all morning and into the late afternoon. By that time, the crowd lining Constitution Hill and assembled in Hyde Park had grown to a crushing volume, thousands of the Queen's subjects certain that she and Albert would ride and all desiring to be a part of that triumphal procession. That she would ride again was never a question to the Queen. It was inconceivable to her that Francis, like Oxford, was anything but an aberration. “When her Majesty goes abroad among the people for the purpose of taking recreation or exercise,” John Russell said in Parliament that afternoon, “there is not one among her subjects who has less reason to fear an enemy in any single individual of the millions who constitute her subjects.” That Victoria and Albert agreed with him without reservation was demonstrated by the fact that they had allowed Lady Lyttelton to take the Princess Royal and the infant Prince of Wales on an airing that morning in a coach and four.

And at around 4:30, the gates opened; several outriders in scarlet livery trotted out, and, with their guest the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, followed by the five Counts Mensdorff, Victoria and Albert rode triumphantly into their public. They rode into an increasingly thicker crowd as they approached the Wellington Arch: “the crowd of spectators was so great,” wrote one anxious reporter, “that it was miraculous that some serious accidents did not occur.” In Hyde Park, they were slowed to a near standstill by the horses and carriages of the nobility. Again, the royal couple witnessed the completely spontaneous and yet entirely ordered jubilation and homage of all classes; the Queen was said to be overcome by the sight.

That evening, the Queen returned to her favorite theatre—the Italian Opera at Her Majesty's—with Albert and the ubiquitous Mensdorffs. They arrived just after the national anthem was sung and the opera had begun. The full house greeted Victoria with thunderous huzzahs, waving hats and handkerchiefs, refusing to let the opera proceed until they had sung the anthem again, bursting
into applause at the end of every line, and screaming “deafening acclamations” at the song's command “Scatter her enemies.” The crowd, unfortunately, were unable to transfer an iota of their enthusiasm for the Queen to the opera itself, a production of Mercadante's
Elena da Feltre
, called by a critic an “abortion” and “utterly worthless and common-place.” The crowd responded to the opera with apathy, when not actually hissing. Again, the royal couple were the star performers at Her Majesty's.

In the House of Commons earlier that afternoon, Robert Peel, in agreeing to a joint Parliamentary address to the Queen, revealed for the first time news of Francis's first attack on Sunday, and that the Queen—in Peel's words, “relying with confidence in the generous loyalty of her people with a determination not to be confined as a prisoner in her own palace”—had ridden on Monday with a full awareness of the threat against her. Peel also praised the Queen's consideration for her ladies, in refusing to subject them to the danger that she willingly faced. (Lady Portman's brother in the House of Commons, and her husband in the House of Lords, emotionally concurred.) With the dissemination of that news, the spontaneous celebration took on a different tenor. Albert's secretary Anson noted the difference, writing in his journal that “the feeling now was of a deeper cast” than it had been after Oxford's attempt. Over the next days, newspaper editors and speakers at hundreds of congratulatory meetings across the country waxed enthusiastically about Victoria's chivalric heroism: her calmness and resolution; her “kindness … consideration … generosity.” A poem in Wednesday's
Times
held Victoria “A King in courage, though by sex a Queen/Our lion-hearted monarch. …” A writer in the
Morning Chronicle
wrote “we feel sure that it is no flattery to say that a finer instance of mingled heroism and generosity than this would be difficult to find; and it will deepen, if possible, the affection and the admiration so universally felt for her Majesty's character by her subjects.”

The Queen, it seemed, could do no wrong. Few considered (publicly, anyway) the Queen's facing the bullet of an assailant with no more than the bodies of her equerry and his horse to protect her to be an astoundingly foolhardy risk. The clearheaded Charles Greville, writing privately in his diary, was one of the few at the time to see it that way: her action he thought “very brave, but imprudent. It would have been better to stay at home, or go to Claremont, and let the police look for the man, or to have taken some precautionary measures.”

Commissioner Charles Rowan could not have agreed more with Greville: it was his understanding that the queen
would
be prudent and stay at home, while the police went about weeding out the shooter. He was well aware of how close a call this attempt had been, and knew that if Francis had succeeded, his police would have suffered the opprobrium of the public and the wrath of the government. Trounce's nearly fatal salute demonstrated the danger of trusting royal protection to officers untrained for the job. But more than this, the miscommunication between the Palace, the Home Office, and Scotland Yard made it clear to Rowan that threats against the Queen could not be dealt with on the spur of the moment. The newspapers were not slow to take to task the police and the government for offering the Queen so little protection. The
Globe
, for instance, held that “the Queen's bravery is more impressive when contrasted with the ministers' apathy” and thundered in particular at Home Secretary Graham's “unaccountable disregard” for the Queen's safety, given that he knew about the threat the day before she rode on Monday: no precautions seem to have been taken, such as the posting of extra police on the Queen's route. This was not completely fair, but Rowan was well aware that the police should have and could have done better. First Good, then Cooper, and now Francis: three high-profile cases that exposed all the weaknesses of a police force committed to prevention and not detection of crime. The department had to change. For years Rowan's younger
and in effect junior co-commissioner Richard Mayne had favored a detective branch, and had quietly been acting unofficially in creating one, setting aside one officer in each division, for example, to trace stolen goods, and creating “special officers” whose duties included plainclothes work and detection. But Waterloo veteran Charles Rowan, the prime mover behind the military structure of the police when the department was formed in 1829, had long resisted any official action. No longer. Rowan now threw his influence and energy behind its official establishment.

Within two weeks of Francis's attempt, on 14 June, the Commissioners forwarded a memorandum to Graham at the Home Office. Their proposal was a modest one, calling for two detective inspectors and eight detective sergeants, all to be stationed at Scotland Yard and to be paid slightly more than their uniformed counterparts. Two days later, Graham replied through his permanent undersecretary. He was interested. But he had some questions. What was the cost to be—and where was the money to come from? And how were the ten detectives (in a city, by the way, of two million) to keep themselves busy when their detective services were not needed?

Rowan and Mayne responded quickly. The cost was to be less than £1,000 a year, to be drawn out of the general police funds. And, when they were not actively pursuing a case, detectives would keep busy by penetrating and exploring the criminal underworld—gaining that omniscient knowledge of crime and criminals that Charles Dickens, who later became the most enthusiastic and vocal fan of the detective branch, declared to be one of their strongest assets.

On the twentieth, Graham agreed to their proposal, but reduced the number of sergeants from eight to six. The commissioners had created a detective branch in all of six days.

Filling the positions was quickly done, as well; Mayne had probably long had a list in mind for this occasion. The experienced Pearce was to take charge as Senior Inspector; his junior colleague was to be John Haynes from P Division. Pearce's aide, Sgt. Thornton, was to take the lead among the six sergeants.

*
According to another witness, the youth did pull the trigger, but the pistol misfired; see page 175.

eleven

P
OWDER AND
W
ADDING

J
ohn Francis's family was devastated by the news that their son and brother had shot at the Queen. His delicate mother, Elizabeth, “was seized with the most alarming illness” upon hearing the news, her husband fearing for her life. Her precarious state did not prevent the police from searching their Tottenham Court lodgings the night of and day after Francis's capture, searching for evidence of an accomplice. (They found nothing.) It was up to John Francis Senior to follow his son from the Home Office to prison, and to hire a solicitor.