Shooting Victoria (28 page)

The Clerk of the Arraigns spoke. “John Francis, you stand convicted of high treason: what have you to say why the court should not give you judgment to die according to the law?” Pale and quivering, Francis said nothing. He waited in agonized silence for a few minutes while black caps were fetched and placed on the judges' heads. Tindal then pronounced Francis's guilt, and passed sentence: “
…
that you, John Francis, be taken hence to the place
from whence you came, and that you be drawn from thence on a hurdle to the place of execution, and there hanged by the neck until you are dead; that afterwards your head be severed from your body, and your body divided into four quarters, and be disposed of as Her Majesty may think fit, and may the Lord God Almighty have mercy on your soul!”

The usher's “Amen” rang out like a death knell.

Francis sobbed convulsively, fell back in a faint into the arms of his jailers, and was dragged from the court.

The next morning was Thomas Cooper's turn at the bar. This time, there was no clamor to obtain a seat, the public seemingly sated with sensational trials. Or, perhaps, this one did not promise to be quite as sensational as Good's or Francis's. To a reporter for the
Morning Chronicle
, the relatively empty courtroom presented a clear sign of a jaded population, which “seems to require stimulants of an extraordinary nature to arouse it.… Poor Daly was only shot.
He was not cut up
!”

At ten, Judges Patteson and Gurney, who had assisted Judge Tindal the day before, took their places on the bench. Cooper was immediately brought into the dock. Still suffering the effects of his self-administered arsenic and laudanum, he was allowed to sit in a chair. He appeared at the same time ferocious, brutal, and idiotic: unable or unwilling to follow the events of the next thirteen hours.

His defense attorney, Sidney Calder Horry, held a bad hand, and he knew it. The prosecution—led by Mr. Bodkin
*
—would be offering up a host of eyewitnesses to the shootings of Moss and Mott and the killing of Daly. As far as he could see, the only way to avoid the death penalty was with a desperate attempt to prove Cooper insane. Hadfield's and Oxford's trials, which Horry was to cite often this day, would provide the model; he would make use of
medical witnesses to suggest insanity, and introduce family members, neighbors, and acquaintances to testify to Cooper's lifetime of odd behavior. But Cooper was no Hadfield or Oxford. This trial played out as a ludicrous parody of those two.

The prosecution's witnesses methodically established all of Cooper's actions on the fifth of May, from his confrontation with Moss to his eventual apprehension, bringing forth no fewer than seven eyewitnesses to establish that he wounded Mott and killed Daly. Horry largely refrained from challenging any of this evidence. When, however, Edward Drury, the surgeon who examined Daly's body at the scene of his death, came to the stand, Horry launched into an energetic cross-examination—concerning not the state of Daly's body, but rather the state of his client's mind. Would a person who exhibited continual wakefulness have an affected brain? Or a person who showed no pain when his arm was scalded with boiling water? What about a person with a ravenous appetite, or filthy habits—or who claimed he was King Richard at times, and Dick Turpin at others—or who claimed he “should have his father up out of his grave, as there was no use in his lying there”: was such a person mad? Drury resisted stating that any of these symptoms signified insanity, but did concede that all of them together might suggest unsoundness. Nevertheless, his unshakeable opinion was that Cooper was sane.

Having thus used Drury to lay the groundwork for his plea as best he could, Horry sought to establish that everything about Cooper—his actions of shooting policemen and refusing to give up when cornered on the day Daly died, his lack of empathy for his mother, his love of pistols, as well as his insomnia, ravenousness, and filthiness—pointed to his derangement. Cooper's odd behavior had all begun with a bout of “putrid fever” at twenty months old, after which he was never the same. Cooper's mother Isabella was the central witness to her son's insanity: under questioning, she dutifully and suspiciously ticked off every single symptom that Horry had brought out in questioning Drury. Neighbors, and
Cooper's two brothers, were brought forward apparently to corroborate Isabella Cooper's testimony. They could do little more than establish that Cooper was pathologically suicidal, and that he had the economically questionable habit of taking apart and putting together clocks and watches—his brother James claiming that “he once bought a silver watch for 14
s
., and picked it to pieces. He then sold it for 7
s
., which he gave for a metal one. He picked that to pieces also, put it together again, and sold it for 1
s.
”

The prosecution was well prepared to respond to the claim of insanity by establishing that Cooper's behavior was simply criminal, not lunatic. They called forth a number of witnesses to establish Cooper's brutal criminal acts, and called a number of policemen, all well acquainted with Cooper, and including the hated Inspector Penny, to vouch for his sanity. The parish beadle, the jailer at Clerkenwell Police Court, and Governor Cope of Newgate did the same. Two medical witnesses who had examined Cooper in Newgate took the stand; both judged him perfectly sane. The first of these witnesses, Mr. Fisher, revealed that he examined Cooper in the presence of two other medical gentlemen, obviously specialists that the defense had asked examine Cooper. They were tellingly absent at this trial, and Horry was left without a specialist to advocate the insanity plea. He was thus forced, in his closing statement, to discredit the medical gentlemen. They did not examine Cooper long enough, he argued. They neglected to speak with members of Cooper's family. Most remarkable of all: the “regimen and restraint” of Newgate had had a deeply therapeutic effect on his client,
restoring
Cooper's sanity by the time he was examined.

Justice Patteson, summing up, claimed that the facts of the shootings were established beyond dispute, and so restricted his comments to the insanity defense. He reminded the jury that in the case of that plea, the burden of proof lay with the defense: “every person who had arrived at the age of discretion must be considered sane until he was proved to be otherwise.” The question in this case was simply whether at the time of the shooting Cooper knew that
he was doing wrong. If he did, the jury must find him guilty; if he did not, they must acquit him.

The jury had little to discuss. They huddled for a moment in the jury box and then pronounced Cooper guilty. The two judges put on their black caps (this time, apparently, close at hand). Debilitated or not, Cooper was ordered to stand while Patteson pronounced the sentence, and he rose with a “savage scowl.” While Patteson catalogued his crimes, Cooper's mind wandered; he turned to look at his nemesis, Inspector Penny, sitting with other witnesses tantalizingly close to the dock. He suddenly lunged at Penny, and shook his fist at the officer as the jailers on either side pulled him back.

“You had better listen to me. You had better listen to me, prisoner, instead of shaking your fist at any one there,” Justice Patteson said. He then exhorted him to use his little time remaining to come to a better state of mind, and pronounced sentence: to be taken to the place of public execution, hung by the neck until dead, and buried, as Courvoisier and Good had been, in the bowels of Newgate. “And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

With the usher's “Amen,” Cooper burst into a frenzied rage and tried to tear an inkwell out of the bar of the dock. Failing in this, he instead again shook his fist and hurled threats of vengeance against all the witnesses; the two turnkeys dragged him toward the underground passage and to his death watch at Newgate.

Francis and Cooper thus faced a similar fate—but in different ways. John Francis was ruined; his grand plans to make something of himself had come to this: absolute disgrace, almost certain death, and the possible mutilation of his corpse, if that was the pleasure of the Queen and her advisers. When returned to his cell after his trial, he collapsed into a seat, moaning and weeping, wailing once again that he had not meant to kill or injure the Queen: he just wanted the notoriety that Oxford had gotten by seeming to shoot at her. James Carver, the prison chaplain, attended to him, helpfully exhorting Francis to prepare for death: the public was “exasperated
against him,” and the newspapers accurately trumpeted that opinion. As if in concurrence, the
Times
on the next day ran an editorial that predicted, based on Justice Tindal's “grave and solemn” way of passing verdict, that Francis would indeed be executed. He deserved it, for his “cold-blooded cruelty” in attacking the Queen. Even if his pistol was unloaded, he deserved to die, as an example to others, and for the “shock to all good” in his act.

And yet, reports about Francis and his behavior that trickled out of Newgate over the next few days portrayed a pitiful boy rather than a depraved would-be killer. When—covering his face with shame—he spoke with his father the day after the trial, he claimed he never meant to harm the Queen, that he knew “there could be no pretence for entertaining a single thought to her prejudice or against her sacred person.” The reporter for the
Morning Chronicle
reporting this scene held that Francis was weak-minded and impressionable: the “noise” of Oxford's attempt, the “ridiculous sympathy” many had for Oxford, and the recent reports of his comfortable life at Bethlem were simply too much for Francis to resist.

He reportedly became a model prisoner after the trial, remarkable for his mildness and humility and his attentiveness to Rev. Mr. Carver's ministrations.

Thomas Cooper's behavior, on the other hand, acted as a foil to Francis's. Cooper expected no reprieve; he wished death to come as soon as possible. After all, he had wanted to die many times before this. Like Francis, Cooper was meekly attentive to the chaplain. In his absence, however, Cooper generally reverted to his natural state of rage, sputtering curses and threats of violence against the Metropolitan Police. His only regret was that he could not hurt them or the witnesses against him. He would go to his unmarked grave hating life and hating them. The public, reading reports of the two, were clearly getting the sense that there was a good thief and a bad one in Newgate.

On the Thursday after the trials, the sheriffs announced the date for both executions: 4 July—eleven days away. Francis received the
news with “heart-rending despair.” His family, in the meantime, worked to save his life. John Francis Senior sent his petition for clemency to the Queen via Home Secretary Graham, protesting his utter devotion and loyalty, noting his years of servitude to Victoria at Covent Garden, hinting that his wife's tenuous hold on life depended completely upon the survival of her son, and arguing—in the face of the verdict in his son's trial—that the pistol was not loaded, and that his son had no intention of hurting the Queen. Francis's sister Jane wrote her own petition, and sought a different avenue to the Queen: poignantly, but with no knowledge of the recent seismic shifts in influence at the Palace, she sent hers through Baroness Lehzen. In it she repeatedly begged the Queen to consider Francis's afflicted family, and humbly submitted that Francis had never intended to harm the Queen. At least three other groups drew up petitions to Graham or the Queen. The Queen sent the ones she received to the Home Office: her government would decide Francis's fate.

Almost certainly against Cooper's wishes, his mother drew up a petition for her son as well, pleading for a delay in the execution to further examine her son for evidence of insanity. Thirty neighbors signed the petition, claiming that they were willing to testify to Cooper's insanity, but were not able to attend the trial. She delivered this to the Home Secretary on Thursday the twenty-third; two days later, she had her answer from the undersecretary: “I am directed to express to you [Graham's] regret that there is no sufficient ground to justify him consistently with his public duty in advising her Majesty to comply with the prayer thereof.”

Cooper's fate, then, was sealed, but the fact that there was no response yet to any of the petitions for Francis augured well for him. Still, nothing was decided for another week, and on the last day of June, when Francis met with his family for the last time before the execution date, it might have been the last time ever. It was a scene of “a most distressing character,” according to a witness.

Unbeknownst to them, however, his fate had been decided. Two days earlier, the judges in his case had met, made their decision, and sent it on to the cabinet, which made theirs. On Saturday 1 July, Peel reported the decision to Prince Albert: Francis's sentence would be commuted to transportation for life, at hard labor. He was to serve in the colony's harshest penal colony. It was all the Francises could hope for. Others wondered whether the commutation was a mercy at all. The young poet Elizabeth Barrett, for one, thought not. “Norfolk Island is scarcely safety
*
—prolonged agony it certainly is,” she wrote to a friend.

Victoria and Albert had softened their attitude toward Francis in the month since the shooting, coming to the conclusion that his pistols were not loaded: “the feeling that he is to be executed is very painful to me,” Victoria wrote in her journal. And when she learned of the commutation she wrote “I of course am glad.” But, she added, “Albert & I are of the same opinion, that the law ought to be changed, & more security afforded to me.” The death penalty seemed an excessive punishment for Oxford's or Francis's assaults—and transportation for life (or, for that matter, commitment to Bethlem) had dubious deterrent value. What they needed was a new law, specifically designed for Oxford's and Francis's crime—with a penalty befitting the crime, one that would shame the offender, not give him the dubious elevation of national notoriety.