Shooting Victoria (40 page)

Her talent lay not in awing the Irish with regal splendor, but in eliminating the distance between herself and the people, in finding ways to establish a human connection with each and every one who came to see her. Her children were invaluable to her in this respect, never failing to charm the people of Dublin. At Kingstown, an old woman cried out “Ah, Queen dear, make one of them Prince Patrick and Ireland will die for you.” Within a year, as it happens, Victoria would comply, naming her next son Arthur William Patrick Albert. She traveled among the crowds without fear, not braving them at all, but enjoying them, with an absolute sense of safety in their honesty and good will. She wrote in her journal, with emphasis, “I never saw more
real
enthusiasm.” When she and Albert went out on private rides, they went without an escort, a gesture that did much to win Dubliners over: of one such ride, a reporter for the
Illustrated London News
wrote, “no escort of dragoons followed—no troops of any kind were seen—she trusted herself, almost alone, among the people; and this proof of entire confidence was well bestowed, and warmly repaid.” When, for example, on one of her tours of the city, a man roared out as loudly as he could “Arrah! Victoria, will you stand up, and let us have a look at you?” She immediately rose and displayed herself. “God bless you for that, my darling,” the man cried out. Even Albert, generally more aloof in public, warmed to Irish familiarity, enjoying the calls of a “brawny wag” outside Trinity College, who with “enthusiastic attachment” shouted “Bravo, Albert!”—the crowd then taking up the chant.

The Queen's ease among the Irish crowds appears nothing short of remarkable given the recent rebellion, as well as the fact that an Irishman had shot at her six weeks before. But Hamilton was by now a distant memory, and her enthusiastic reception convinced her that Ireland's troubles were in the past. True, Ireland's poverty
was still a fact, and Victoria was too astute an observer not to notice it. “You see more ragged and wretched people here than I ever saw anywhere else,” she wrote to Leopold. But to her, the ending of the rebellion and the million evidences of loyalty to the crown were signs of a promising future for the Irish. Her first procession through Dublin was “a never to be forgotten scene, particularly when one reflects on what state the country was in quite lately, in open revolt and under martial law.” The one occasion during her visit when the past intruded upon the present hardly marred the sense of amity. While her carriage was driving slowly through the center of town, a workhouse official approached the carriage and respectfully pleaded “Mighty Monarch, pardon Smith O'Brien.”
*

Amidst the overwhelming and mutual goodwill between Victoria and the Irish, there was apparently a genuine threat to her safety during her stay in Dublin. Members of Dublin secret societies—remnants of the clubs promoted by Young Ireland—came up with a desperate plot to kidnap Victoria, spirit her to a hideout in the Wicklow Mountains, and hold her hostage to the freedom of Smith O'Brien and the State prisoners. One night as the royal family slept in the vice-regal lodge, two hundred men armed with pistols and daggers assembled on the banks of the Grand Canal. They quickly realized that their force was far outnumbered by Dublin's military garrison, and dispersed. Victoria never learned of this feeble attempt, which only highlighted the nadir to which militant Irish nationalism had fallen.

By the time she left on the tenth of August, she had conquered Dublin utterly. Even the shadowy conspirators might have been won over, Lord Lieutenant Clarendon concluding from police reports that “even the ex-Clubbists, who threatened broken heads and windows before the Queen came, are now among the most
loyal of her subjects.” The nationalist and Tory press, relentlessly hostile to the Queen during the early part of her visit, finally gave in,
Freeman's Journal
noting “the more the citizens of Dublin see Queen Victoria, the more she wins their affections.”

The queen sealed the compact with an astounding act of impromptu theatre in Kingstown Harbor. Everyone, it seemed, had turned out to see her go: every possible surface around the harbor occupied by human beings, right down to the edge of the piers, “swarming around their queen like bees.” Victoria was on board the royal yacht, chatting with two ladies in waiting, when she suddenly looked up and gazed upon the immense crowd. She then “ran along the deck with the sprightliness of a young girl, and, with the agility of a sailor, ascended the paddle-box, which … is a tolerably high one, and was almost at its top before she was observed by Prince Albert.” Albert joined her there and Victoria, clutching his arm, vigorously waved her hand, and then her handkerchief, to the cheering multitude. To extend her farewell, she ordered the paddlewheels stopped, so that she drifted slowly out of Kingstown harbor to “the pealing of cannon and the loudest concert of human voices that ever ascended from a people in praise of any Monarch.” When she was too far away to be seen, she ordered the ship's royal standard lowered and raised in salute, three, four, five times—a completely unprecedented gesture from a monarch to her subjects. The crowd was ecstatic, the effect electric—and deeply personal. John Bright, the radical MP from Birmingham, was there, and was overcome. “There is not an individual in Dublin that does not take as a personal compliment to himself the Queen's having gone upon the paddle-box and order the royal standard to be lowered,” noted Lord Clarendon.

Victoria's popularity in Ireland exceeded the wildest expectations, and raised great hopes within the government and the public that she had turned the tide and that the previously unquiet union between Ireland and Britain would henceforth be peaceful and prosperous. The
Times
declared that the Queen had put an end to
Irish faction and civil discord. “It may very safely be predicted,” the
Illustrated London News
trumpeted, “that as long as Queen Victoria lives (may she live to see her great-grandchildren!) there will be no disaffection—no disloyalty in Ireland.”

It was not to be. In spite of the wishes of future ministers, Victoria did little to maintain the bond with the Irish that she had so magnificently created on this trip. She did revisit Ireland with Albert in 1853 and 1861, and made the trip alone in 1900. But she never came close to re-establishing the intimacy she felt for them, and they felt for her, during this trip. Moreover, her success, as great as it was, was personal, not national. Victoria did nothing whatsoever to deal with the root causes of Irish resentment against the British. She did little to popularize her government, with its relentless, insensitive practice of treating the Irish like children and responding to Irish anger and agitation with coercion. Irish nationalism, in August 1849 supine with hunger and defeat, would rise again—and would grow, over the next few decades, to a literally explosive intensity.

William Hamilton, the poor, sullen Irishman who lashed out, embodied the spirit of his nation in its defeat. Perhaps Queen and country should not have been so quick to forget the man.

*
The statue was placed there with great fanfare in 1846, positioned adjacent to Apsley House so that the Duke of Wellington could have the honor of seeing his gargantuan self outside his own windows. Many (including the Queen) regarded the statue as an eyesore completely out of proportion to its setting, and it was removed in 1883 to the military garrison at Aldershot.

*
In the first accounts, he is named as
John
Hamilton; in time, William was the clear consensus.

*
With Ireland's independence, officials far less smitten by the Queen renamed the town
Cobh
.

*
Smith O'Brien was at that moment on a convict ship bound for Australia. Before the Queen could reply, Lord Lieutenant Clarendon rode up and pushed the man away.

sixteen

C
UT AND
T
HRUST

R
obert Francis Pate had no need to seek notoriety. He had already found it.

The gentry and aristocracy of London, promenading in the gardens outside Kensington Palace, and riding to see and be seen along Rotten Row, could set their watches by him. The cabmen and tradesmen on the fringe of the Westminster parks, as well as the policemen of A Division, all knew him by sight, though very few knew his name.

At midday, seven days a week, he would leave his well-appointed apartments on the corner of Piccadilly and Duke Street St. James, directly above Fortnum and Mason's emporium, for a circuit around Green Park, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens. He always followed the same path, passing each point on it at exactly the same time. He always wore the same impeccable suit of clothing, regardless of the weather: blue frock coat, always open; white double-breasted waistcoat, buttoned to the throat; blue neckerchief;
tweed trousers; buttoned boots; stylish top hat and cane. The bright colors—so different from the conservative grays, blacks, and browns that more and more men were wearing in 1850—marked him as a dandy; Prince Albert described him that way to Baron Stockmar. But it wasn't Pate's natty clothing that drew double-takes and backward stares from everyone he passed. It was his startling, frenetic manner. He marched through the West End as a man possessed: in step with invisible phalanxes, battling invisible demons. His gait seemed to defy gravity: with his back unnaturally arched so that his open coat draped and sailed behind him, and glaring straight ahead or toward the skies with hat impossibly horizontal, he would kick out each heel as high as he could: a goose-step so extreme that “it was astonishing how he preserved his equilibrium.” At the same time, he would flail his arms about and, in his right hand, wield his cane as a sword, lunging and slashing forwards and backwards at the air. An inspector from A Division who saw his performances regularly nicknamed him “cut and thrust.”

At times he would break off from his marching and act out pantomimes of fear and estrangement: abruptly stopping in his tracks, gazing about him, and then, as if suddenly aware he was being watched, running off as fast as he could. At other times—on those days when the Queen took an airing in a carriage and four in the parks—he would grovel with an exaggerated obeisance. “I meet him often in the parks,” Victoria would later tell her Prime Minster, John Russell, “and he makes a point of bowing more frequently and lower to me than any one else.”

Most would pretend not to see him. Husbands would caution their wives not to draw his attention, for fear of violent consequences. Those few that acknowledged him earned from him an angry glare and a spasmodic shake of his stick.

For years, obsessive and eccentric routine was essential to Robert Pate's being. Not long after he first moved to London, he began to follow another ritual, which he followed without fail for a year and a half. When the clock in the nearby tower of St. James's Palace
chimed quarter past three, Pate stopped whatever he was doing to take up two piles of coins that his manservant had carefully laid out on the mantel. In the first pile were nine shillings, each queen's head up and each one turned so that every queen gazed in exactly the same direction. In the second pile were a sixpence and an older, larger penny: his servant was well aware that a newer, smaller penny, or two halfpence, would never do. Carefully pocketing these coins, Pate stepped outside to meet the same cabman and climb into the same cab, which set off southeastward, through the town, across the Thames at Putney Bridge, to Putney Heath. There, at exactly the same spot, Pate would descend from the cab, jump over a ditch, and disappear through thick gorse bushes. The cabman would drive to a spot further up the road, from where he could see Pate standing still and staring into a pond. Inevitably, Pate would start up and dash madly back to the cab, often dripping wet. He would shout conflicting commands to the driver: gallop quickly!—slow down to a walking pace!—as they made their way two miles northwest up Roehampton Lane to Barnes Common. The cabman, mystified by his daily customer, would spy on Pate through the trap at his feet, and would see him either in catatonic stupor or in frantic motion: hurling his body from one wall of the cab to the other or leaning out the front of the cab, slashing his cane in a frenzy from side to side. “I did not know what performance it was,” the cabman would later testify. “He seemed to be thoughtless, or something of that kind. I suppose some sudden thought caused him to jump and start, as if he did not know what he was about.” Passers-by would stop the cabman to ask about the strange man inside: was he mad? The cabman certainly thought so. As deeply alarmed as he was by Pate's mysterious behavior, however, he did nothing to stop it: as far as he was concerned, the steady income was well worth the bother. At Barnes Common, Pate would again leap out and shun every path, plunging instead into the deepest undergrowth. When he had finished whatever he was doing there, he would return to the cab and be driven back to St. James via Hammersmith Bridge.
The sixpence and penny were for tolls at the bridges; the nine shillings were for the cabman—always given to him, he noticed, with Victoria's heads upward, all gazing toward the same point.