Shooting Victoria (32 page)

It was the promise of a good whipping for the next miscreant who dared assault the Queen that roused the entire House into enthusiastic cheering. Every single member was for this measure and was zealous to demonstrate his absolute loyalty to Victoria. “These are the offences of base and degraded beings,” Lord John Russell claimed in assenting to the measure. “It is right that a degrading species of punishment should be applied to them.” Daniel O'Connell agreed, holding that the Irish people in particular would be grateful for a law to “brand … with contemptuous execration” any future assailant.

Only one member disturbed the spirit of unanimity. The next day, before the third reading of the Bill, Joseph Hume, radical member for Montrose, decided to use the occasion to contrast the Queen's welfare with the welfare of her poorest subjects. Industrial distress and sheer hunger had only increased as the summer of 1842 progressed; spontaneous disturbances were erupting throughout the countryside north of London. Before Peel presented this bill, debate in Commons had been consumed with the issue of growing popular distress and discontent. And yet, Hume maintained—echoing the complaint of the Chartist petition—while the people's sufferings increased, the Queen and her court lived in comfort: obscene comfort, by contrast. A civil expenditure of £325,000 was
wasted on the “useless parade” of court life. “If anything could be more dissatisfactory to the great mass of the people than another,” Hume declaimed, “it was to see outside of the palace squalid poverty, misery, and wretchedness, in all their painful variety, and to behold with inside the palace nothing but extravagance, gorgeous grandeur, and expensive finery.” Peel, Hume insisted, should without hesitation recommend to the Queen to drop half of her “monstrous expenditure.” His speech could not have been more badly timed. Only one other member cheered him—and was berated for it, by a member who lambasted Hume for his obvious slight on the Queen. Peel joked that Hume must be mistaken about the nature of the motion before the House: this was a bill to protect the Queen, not an economic measure. Hume quickly realized his mistake. “There was no individual in that House who had more regard for the Sovereign than himself,” he said, chastened, “or would be more happy to see her Majesty protected.” The bill passed without a dissenting vote. On Thursday and Friday, Wellington steered it unanimously through the Lords, and on Saturday Victoria gave the bill her royal assent. It was too late to apply the law to John William Bean. Peel wished instead to reach the would-be Beans or Francises or Oxfords contemplating their own turn at having a “pop” at the Queen. “Let it be known to the world,” Peel told an enthusiastic House, that “for these contemptible acts they shall receive the degrading punishment of personal chastisement.” If the prospect of death or transportation would not deter them, perhaps a healthy dose of shame would.

In spite of the lesser charge, John William Bean was a celebrity in Newgate, visited by the Lord Mayor, the sheriffs, and a number of aldermen. He was placed in a cell near Reverend Carver, and was attended day and night by a turnkey who surely saw part of his task as guarding the unshakably melancholy boy from killing himself. His trial was set for 25 August—seven weeks, and a long time by Central Criminal Court standards—and he spent his time sadly
and studiously poring over the religious material provided him: tracts, the Bible,
Pilgrim's Progress
. He repeated the same story to all his visitors: he never intended harm to the Queen, pointing his pistol at the ground and not her carriage; his only intention was to be arrested and free himself from his miserable freedom. He was tired of life.

Outside Newgate, there was a great deal happening to distract public attention from the hunchbacked dwarf. The summer of 1842 saw the most widespread and sustained civil disturbance of the Queen's long reign. To extend Thomas Carlyle's analogy, if Francis and Bean were throwing stones at the gilt weathercocks, it seemed that the masses were attempting to tear the building down. Drastic reductions of wages, and industrial slowdowns, led to a rash of strikes and demonstrations, beginning in June in the collieries of Staffordshire, spreading throughout the Midlands and the North, and intensifying as June became July and July became August. The enlightened Luddism of the strikers—removing the plugs from industrial machines, draining their boilers, and thus disabling without destroying them—gave the disturbances a name: the Plug Plot Riots. By the second week in August, the disturbances reached a crescendo, as strikers and rioters refused to relent until the People's Charter was law. Two policemen were killed in Manchester; two rioters were shot dead by soldiers in Preston. Parliament was prorogued on 12 August, but neither Prime Minister Peel nor Home Secretary Graham were allowed a moment's respite: the next day, Peel called the Privy Council to meet and issue a royal proclamation warning all subjects to avoid any riotous meetings and disruptive acts, and the cabinet agreed to dispatch a battalion of troops north by train that evening. “I have not had a spare moment since the close of the session,” Graham wrote four days before Bean's trial. “My time has been occupied with odious business arising from the mad insurrection of the working classes.…” Peel worked closely with Graham as the growing disorder began to threaten him personally. His country home in Drayton, Staffordshire, lay
in a particularly disturbed area, and his wife readied their home for a siege, writing to him on 21 August “our arrangements were quickly and vigorously made and should have been equal to an attack from two or three hundred till assistance had come. But then we expected three or four thousand. I am confident, however, that no men actually attacking doors and windows here would have left this place alive.” A week before, Peel had been able to travel to Drayton for a couple days, only to be terrified by rumors that the violence had reached the Queen at Windsor: he got word that Victoria had been assassinated. He was not disabused of the rumor until the next train came through. He promptly ordered Graham to step up the Queen's security.

In the meantime, Victoria and Albert were planning a state visit to Scotland, the beginning of what would become a great love affair between the royal couple and that country. The prospect of royal travel during this summer of disruption—disruption in Scotland as well as England—did not please Peel, but he did acknowledge to Graham (on the day of Bean's trial) that the Queen would face no more danger there than in England. To avoid traveling through the riotous north, the couple would go by sea on the yacht
Royal George
. In Edinburgh, expectation for the visit had “superseded all other topics of the day,” and in London the public scrambled to obtain choice seats on steamers to see the royal party escorted by the navy from Woolwich to the Channel.

Not surprisingly, then, John William Bean's trial on 25 August did not attract the crowds that Oxford's or Francis's had, and the Old Bailey was no busier than usual when Bean was placed in the dock. His head just cleared the bar, and so he could just see the three judges looking sternly upon him: Baron Abinger presiding, with Mr. Justice Williams and Baron Rolfe. Lord Abinger in his younger days (when he was James Scarlett) had been the most successful advocate in England, with a single-minded partisanship that won cases. His greatest strength as an attorney, however, became his greatest weakness as a judge. He was not to take Bean's side.

Bean was charged on four counts: the first, third, and fourth accused him of various forms of assault; the second accused him of attempting to fire a pistol with the intent of harassing and alarming the Queen and terrorizing her subjects. The prosecution team consisted of the same formidable five who had established Francis's guilt two months before, led by Attorney General Pollock and Solicitor General Follett. Their strategy to prove Bean's guilt was diametrically opposed to their strategy to prove Francis's. To convict Francis of High Treason, they took great pains to convince the jury that he intended to kill Victoria, and that the contents of his pistol—even if they consisted only of wadding and powder—were lethal. This time, to establish the lesser charge of assault, they would attempt to demonstrate that the contents of the pistol were
not
lethal: that Bean intended to annoy and alarm the Queen and the public, not to kill her. Thus they ignored the curious bits of clay pipe that Inspector Martin found in the pistol, maintaining that only a minute amount of coarse gunpowder was in the pistol, with wadding—wadding that this time could not do the Queen serious harm. They brought forward witnesses—including the Dassett brothers and their uncle—to establish Bean's actions on the Sunday, as well as his connection with the pistol, and his apprehension at home that night.

In his cross-examinations, Bean's defense attorney Sidney Calder Horry
*
attempted to present the incident as benign—a few minutes' harmless amusement, with Charles Dassett playing the clown. “Was not there a good deal of laughing going on?” he asked Charles Dassett. “No,” Dassett replied. “The people did not laugh that I remember—some might have laughed, I cannot say—there was a great noise after it happened.…” Horry's defense of Bean was two-pronged. First, in a breathtakingly risky maneuver, he argued that if Bean had indeed assaulted the Queen, he was chargeable with High Treason. And since he was not charged with that crime, he risked being tried a second time for the same offense,
“contrary to all the principles of English law.” The first, third, and fourth counts (which accused Bean of assault) thus could not stand. As for the second count—harassing and alarming the Queen and the public: Horry held that Bean had harassed and alarmed no one. Only Charles Dassett had seen Bean present the pistol, and Charles Dassett was wrong; the defense had two witnesses to testify that Bean had never pointed the gun. Moreover, the Queen experienced no alarm, being completely unaware of Bean's act, and the public were amused, certainly not alarmed, by the situation, their amusement strengthened by Charles Dassett's clowning with the pistol: even the police on the scene had thought the whole thing a joke.

The two witnesses Horry brought forward to contradict Das-sett's testimony that Bean had presented his pistol at the Queen turned out to be of dubious value. The first, Henry Hawkes, testified that if anyone had presented a pistol, “it is probable I must have seen it,” but then admitted that he was unaware of the existence of either Bean or Dassett until after the carriages had passed and Dassett was heading across the Mall with Bean in tow. The second witness, Thomas Vosper,
*
startled the court by claiming that he had stood behind Bean for at least fifteen minutes until the Queen approached, staring at the pistol Bean held by his side—but never lifted. Baron Abinger was mystified by this testimony, asking Vosper several times how he could have simply stood there while Bean waited with a gun for the Queen. Vosper only repeated the same answer: “I wanted to see the result.”

Lord Abinger.—If you saw the prisoner for ten minutes, standing amongst the crowd with a pistol in his hand, waiting to see the result, and knowing that Her Majesty was coming, why did you not take him into custody? Now explain that to the jury.

I can only say that I merely waited to watch the result.

In summing up, Abinger pointed out that if Vosper had acted as he said he had, he was guilty of misprision of treason. His testimony indeed contradicted Charles Dassett's—but the jury could decide how much credence to accord a criminal by his own admission.

Horry's other witnesses—Bean's former employers and family acquaintances—testified to his good character. When his father took the stand to plead to his son's “mild, peaceable, and inoffensive” conduct, Bean wept bitterly.

By the time of his summing up, Judge Abinger had greatly assisted the prosecution in puncturing the basis of Horry's defense. As for his claim that any assault on the Queen must be High Treason, he responded that this was not so: persons might insult or behave rudely to her. He cited as evidence the curious case where a man had once been indicted for
grinning
at George III. And in response to Horry's claim that an assault cannot be said to take place if the victim is unaware of it, he noted “Is it not an assault to point a loaded gun at a man when he is asleep? I think it is, but Mr. Horry contends the contrary.”

It was in the end a simple case for the jury. They consulted for a moment, and gave their verdict: guilty on the second count—harassing and alarming the Queen and the public. Bean heard the verdict without emotion.

Abinger found himself in a frustrating position. He wanted to impose a harsh sentence upon the boy—wanted, indeed, to follow the public consensus and humiliate him. But the old law made no provision for whipping. After consulting briefly with his fellow judges, he tore into Bean: “I know of no misdemeanour more affecting the public peace of the kingdom, of greater magnitude or deserving more serious punishment, than that of which you have just been pronounced guilty.” He wished that the punishment he could impose was equal to the
offense, but he knew it was not. He thus satisfied himself with a warning to any future miscreants: if they aren't convicted of High Treason and thus forfeit their lives, they will “gain another species of notoriety, by being publicly whipped at a cart's tail through any street in the metropolis.” As it was, Abinger imposed the harshest sentence he thought he could: eighteen months at hard labor at Millbank Penitentiary.

John William Bean, tired of his life and by now surely tired to death of the scornful scrutiny of the public, was taken from the bar.