Shooting Victoria (31 page)

He was thus bundled off in a cab with Inspector Hughes to the Bridewell. On the way out, he helpfully told Inspector Martin where he had bought the gun; that evening, Martin, accompanied by Bean's father, confirmed the sale from Mr. Bird. At Tothill Fields, Hughes placed him in the charge of Governor Tracy. He was stripped and bathed, a process open to reporters, who the next day shared with the world the intimate details of the hunchbacked dwarf's twisted body.

While the crowds on the Mall erupted into confusion and hostility, the Queen, Albert, and Leopold heard the service in the Chapel Royal in peace, learning about the attempt only when they returned to the Palace. Victoria was not alarmed or even surprised, writing in her journal “Odd enough to say, only two days ago I remarked to Albert, I felt sure an attempt on us would be shortly repeated.” She had basis for this presentiment. She was now certain that the law as it stood would only encourage more attacks. Any desperate and overambitious boy in the kingdom might now attain with a cheap pistol an instant worldwide notoriety granted by the elevated charge of High Treason. Her Prime Minister, she knew, agreed with her. Peel had rushed to London from Kent upon hearing of the attempt, arriving late Sunday night. Early Monday afternoon, he visited Buckingham Palace before Bean's Privy Council examination to consult with Albert about the steps to be taken in the wake of the assault. During this conversation, the Queen entered the room. Peel—according to Albert's first biographer “in public so cold and self-commanding, in reality so full of genuine feeling”—burst into tears. It was a cathartic moment for both Queen and Prime Minister: any sense of a chill between them—a chill that
had, three years before, led to a constitutional crisis—was gone, and gone forever.

The public as usual responded to the Queen's preservation with jubilation. Once again, the very thought of losing this monarch drove home to everyone the unprecedented emotional bond between the people and their queen, a bond that seemed to grow stronger with each attempt. “The Queen and People,” a commentator in the
Spectator
declared after the attempt, “were drawn into more intimate communion. Compassion for the woman—young, a mother, present to the view in all the most engaging relations of life—thus exposed to senseless perils, from which no general loyalty, no guards, and scarcely any precautions might be able to shield her … all these considerations prompted a display of popular feeling that had a deeper seat than mere ‘loyalty' or attachment to the office of the Sovereign.”

On Sunday and on Monday, crowds of Londoners of every social stripe flocked to the Palace, expecting the usual impromptu royal celebration in the parks. This time, however, Victoria disappointed her public. Her staying in on Sunday could hardly be a surprise, given her earlier excursion to the Chapel Royal. On Monday, however, all of London, it seemed, were certain she would come out: thousands filled Hyde Park, and thousands more gathered before and around the Palace and lined Constitution Hill. While they waited, Victoria and
Albert walked privately behind the walls of the palace gardens. Many conjectured about her absence. One rumor held that her ministers commanded her to remain while they gathered more information. But Francis's attempts had made clear that Victoria's ministers did not have that power over her; besides, Bean had already been captured and presented no threat to her. Another rumor was that the Queen was “deeply affected” by the news of the attempt. Perhaps. But Victoria had shown before that she simply refused to give in to that fear. While it is true she did not ride this Monday, the Duchess of Kent did, accompanied by her brother Leopold and his wife. Even more tellingly, Victoria and Albert allowed the 1½-year-old Princess Royal and the 8-month-old Prince of Wales to take an airing in the parks in an open carriage with Lady Lyttelton. The royal couple's restraint was much more likely rational than emotional, borne of concern that any attention given to the attacks might encourage copycat assailants—as Francis's attempt, it seemed, only encouraged Bean's. Whatever the reason, the royal couple remained at Buckingham Palace while outside it the public thronged until late Monday evening, when carriages arriving for a royal dinner party finally convinced the crowd that the Queen would not be coming out, and they dispersed.

The newspapers and the public excoriated young John Bean, finding in his physical deformity evidence of moral ugliness. He was a “deformed, decrepit, miserable looking dwarf,” “that crooked piece of malignity,” a “hunchbacked little miscreant,” and a “miserable and contemptible-looking wretch.” In a letter to his father, Prince Albert referred to him as a “hunchbacked wretch,” Home Secretary Graham described him as “an hump-backed boy of an idiotic appearance,” and Peel told the Queen that Bean was “the most miserable object he ever saw.”

But while Bean might be unique, his crime was not: three young men had now assailed the Queen, and it would seem that the evidence of three attempts should provide ample material to discern some sense of a motivation. Some commentators remained as baffled as ever. The
Morning Chronicle
held that “these repeated attempts on the life of our beloved Sovereign are utterly incomprehensible. We do not know what to make of this union of itiotcy [sic], depravity, and crime. Intelligible motive there is none.” Others, however, began to make connections.

Victoria had not been alone these last few years in facing would–be assassins. Across the channel, Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King of France, had already faced five attempts since coming to the throne after the revolution of 1830, and would face two more before his deposition in the revolution of 1848. Immediately after
Bean's attempt, one French newspaper deplored that “the savage and impotent monomania, which has emigrated from France to England, is one of the gravest symptoms of the profound disorders which agitated modern societies.” Elizabeth Barrett, writing to a friend, noted the connection as well, but was perplexed as to cause or cure: “What is this strange mania of queen-shooting? What is the motive? & what end? In the meanwhile the despots of the earth sit safe … & nobody thinks of even smoking a tobacco pipe at them, much less of shooting it. It is only citizen Kings, & liberal queens that their people address themselves to shooting. I am very angry—angry & sorry & ashamed.”

The comparison between Victoria's assailants and Louis-Philippe's, however, only went so far. Men, not boys, shot at Louis-Philippe. While all of them, it seems, were, like Oxford, Francis, and Bean, tormented by their own inner demons, they all—unlike those three—were avowedly political, either active in the republican movement that thrived throughout Louis-Philippe's reign, or politically driven lone wolves. There was no question whatsoever that their weapons were loaded, and that they shot to kill, expecting to effect a revolution with a bullet. Many in France believed that the French monarchy would disappear if Louis-Philippe died. The King's most recent assailant, Marius Darmés, might have best articulated the ideological fanaticism of Louis-Philippe's assailants (mixed in his case with more than a
soupçon
of madness). “If I had killed the tyrant,” he maintained after his attempt in 1840, “we would have conquered the universe and all the despots.” The King's third assailant, Louis Alibaud, went to his execution in 1836 crying “I die for Liberty!” He meant it. Victoria never was to experience anything like the terror and carnage caused by Louis-Philippe's second would-be assassin,
*
Giuseppe Fieschi, who
on 28 July 1835 unleashed his “infernal machine” on Louis-Philippe as the King was riding through Paris to review the National Guard. The hail of bullets from this primitive machine-gun—twenty-five loaded gun barrels on a wooden frame—instantly created “a void around the King,” killing eighteen, seriously wounding twenty-two, and blowing half of Fieschi's own face off. Remarkably, the King and his sons were able to escape this bloodbath safely, the King proving himself Victoria's equal for courage under fire, continuing along the route and reviewing the troops at the Place Vendôme as scheduled.

Fieschi was a republican conspirator who went to the guillotine with two others, all of them believing they would have brought down a king and a political system if one of their twenty-five bullets had found its mark. No sane person in Britain in the early 1840s—and certainly not Oxford, Francis, or Bean—believed the monarchy would collapse if the Queen died. Whatever motives the Queen's assailants had, political fanaticism was not among them. This did not prevent partisan commentators from seeing the attempts as indirectly political, speculating that these boys were unwitting tools of the opposing political faction, imbibing from the newspapers of the other side a disrespect for the Queen that gave them license to shoot at her. The Whigs and the Chartists blamed the Tories; the Tories blamed the Chartists. The essayist and Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, always one to spy a cosmic significance in any human action, understood the three attempts to be symptoms of an inarticulate working-class discontent with their government, writing to his mother “Are not these strange times? The people are sick of their misgovernment, and the blackguards among them shoot at the poor Queen: as a man that wanted the steeple pulled down might at least fling a stone at the gilt weathercock.”

But given what the public learned and was learning about these three boys, these political explanations were drowned out by a growing groundswell of opinion that the attempts had little to do with the Queen's stature and everything to do with the boys' own.
Variations on a phrase first coined after Francis's attempt became ubiquitous in press and public after Bean's: they were all driven by a “morbid craving after notoriety.” And the law as it stood gave them that notoriety: a quick trip from the streets to Whitehall's corridors of power and a widely reported examination by the great men of the Privy Council, while huge crowds gathered outside, hoping to catch just a glimpse of them; the newspapers scrambling to scoop one another with new details about their lives; a starring role in a state trial for High Treason, and, if it came to that, a glorious execution before thousands.

With a growing awareness of the disease came a new certainty about the cure. These attempts would not stop until their perpetrators were degraded rather than elevated. The charge of High Treason only encouraged them; another charge would have to be created to deal with them. And the incentive of the scaffold had to go as well, to be replaced by a punishment that would appeal to their sense of shame rather than vainglory. Two days after Bean's attempt,
the
Times
led the charge for a new punishment for the miscreants. If “we would make up our minds to flog them in the sight of their companions, as heartily and as often as should be judged appropriate to the gravity of the offence, these coxcombs would leave off their villainous anglings for notoriety.” The Queen's assailants were errant children; let them be treated as such.

Robert Peel and his Home Secretary, James Graham, needed no persuading; they had already come to the same conclusion. John William Bean would not be charged with High Treason. On the day after Bean's first Privy Council examination, Graham met with the two commissioners of the police and with George Maule, who as Treasury Solicitor was for the third time responsible for putting together a case for the prosecution against an assailant of the Queen. Bean, Graham made clear, would be charged not with High Treason but with common assault. It would mean that he would, if convicted, face a shorter sentence than Oxford and Francis. And while the government surely concurred with the writer for the
Times
and a host of other commentators that Bean deserved a good whipping, that was out of the question: the law for assault as it stood did not provide for corporal punishment. A new law would need to be created to humiliate the Queen's assailants. That is the task that Robert Peel immediately took upon himself.

On the next day—6 July—John Bean, discernibly sunk into a depressed torpor, was brought from Tothill Fields for a final examination before Peel and the Privy Council. It would be the last time any of Victoria's assailants came before that body. He was charged with a misdemeanor and sent back to Tothill Fields for the night, to be brought to Newgate the next day to await trial. The lesser charge meant that Bean could return home if he could make bail—but that bail, two sureties of 250 pounds each, was far too much for his family to raise. Only a small crowd had assembled outside the Home Office to see him back to prison, and their “contempt and ridicule,” according to a reporter, “was quite enough to act as an effectual antidote against the morbid craving after notoriety to which alone such an insane attempt could be attributed.”

Bean's examination took place on the same day that John Francis, having tearfully taken leave of his family forever on Monday the fourth (the day of Cooper's execution), was removed to Gosport outside Portsmouth and to the convict ship
Marquis of Hastings
. The two would-be regicides missed meeting in Newgate by one day.

In less than a week, Peel had created his Act Providing for the Further Security and Protection of Her Majesty's Person. On 12 July, as John William Bean in Newgate observed his eighteenth birthday, the Prime Minister submitted his bill to Commons. Peel had no intention of modifying existing laws of treason, he made clear: rather, he was introducing a new charge altogether to deal with what amounted to a new offense: not attempts to kill the Queen, but attempts to disturb her—and by disturbing her, to disturb the public peace. Any threatening of the Queen, with guns, explosives, or any projectile, was prosecutable as a
High Misdemeanor. The charge skirted the nagging issue of both Oxford's and Francis's trials—whether the pistols were loaded or not—by making threatening the monarch with either loaded or unloaded weapons a prosecutable offense.
*
Offenders under the Act could be sentenced to as much as seven years' transportation, or three years' imprisonment at hard labor. Moreover, they could expect to face repeated humiliation by being “publicly or privately whipped, as often and in such Manner and Form as the said Court shall order and direct, not exceeding Thrice.”