Shooting Victoria (46 page)

On the morning of 2 July, Peel felt better. He ate a little and even walked around the room with assistance. In the afternoon, however, his condition worsened considerably. He began to drift in and out of consciousness. In the evening, the doctors gave up all hope. An old friend, the Bishop of Gibraltar, administered extreme unction. Weakening but largely past feeling pain, he held each of his children's hands in turn, and whispered his good-byes to them, the words “God bless you!” scarcely audible. His wife Julia, overwhelmed, was led from the room. At nine he slipped into unconsciousness, and never woke again. Two hours later, he died.

Peel's death, in the words of the diarist Charles Greville, “absorbed every other subject of interest,” as everyone, it seemed, rich and poor, conservative, liberal, and radical—”on every side and in all quarters”—felt the loss deeply—surprisingly deeply, given that Peel was in life hated by the bulk of the conservatives and disliked by the Whigs; he had few genuine friends and was famous for his
coldness. In death, sectarian bitterness evaporated and his limitations of personality were forgotten: he was remembered as the great man who transcended political party, guided only by the best interests of the British people. All suddenly realized they had lost a statesman without equal. “All persons agree that there has never been an instance of such general gloom and regret,” wrote Baroness Bunsen.

Albert was devastated by Peel's death. “He has felt, and feels, Sir Robert's loss
dreadfully
,” Victoria wrote Leopold; “he feels he has lost a second father.” And he never needed Peel's advice or advocacy more than at that very moment, as the great project which was now inextricably linked with his name, and upon which his reputation now rested, seemed doomed to failure. The crucial vote was to take place on 4 July—two days after Peel's death: Colonel Sibthorp's motion that the Commission's choice of site be referred to a Parliamentary Committee. If the motion passed, the resulting delay would kill the Exhibition. On the morning of the vote, Albert wrote to his brother in despair:

Now our Exhibition is to be driven from London; the patrons who are afraid, the Radicals who want to show their power over the crown property (the Parks),
The Times
, whose solicitor bought a house near Hyde Park, are abusing and insulting. This evening the decision is to be made. Peel, who had undertaken the defence, is no more, so we shall probably be defeated and have to give up the whole exhibition.

Colonel Sibthorp was in rare bombastic form during the debate that afternoon; if his energy was any indication, the Exhibition was as good as dead. Sibthorp laid into the greatest trash, fraud, and imposition “palmed upon” the people of Britain. The Exhibition would surely flood the country with “cheap and nasty trash” and
attract the nation's criminal element to Hyde Park: “That being the case, he would advise persons residing near the park to keep a sharp look out after their silver forks and spoons and serving maids.” But while Sibthorp had heretofore spoken for a growing movement, Robert Peel's death had changed everything. Before the debate began, Sir John Russell, his voice choking with emotion, paid tribute to Peel and to the deep love of country that had informed his every action. And in mid-debate Henry Labouchère, a member of the Royal Commission, reminded the House that assenting to the site was the very last public duty performed by Peel, “that eminent man, who never neglected any duty … which he considered conducive to the public good.” Member after member deplored Sibthorp's fanatical opposition to the very idea of an Exhibition, and in the end Sibthorp's motion was crushed, 46 for and 166 against.
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“The feeling of the house was completely altered,” Lord John wrote to Albert the next day, “and all parties seemed to agree that Hyde Park was the best site. So it is to be hoped that no further interruption is to take place.” Peel had won the day for Albert after all.

But Albert and the Royal Commission were not yet out of the woods. Money to guarantee the Exhibition was slow in coming, and the Building Committee's design was as unpopular as ever. Within days, however, Joseph Paxton succeeded in overcoming all obstacles. His iron-and-glass design had received a cold reception from the Exhibition's Building Committee, especially from Isam-bard Kingdom Brunel, who jealously defended his own design. And so on 6 July, Paxton went over their heads, appealing to the public by publishing his plan in the
Illustrated London News
. They loved his design as much as they reviled Brunel's. Still the Building Committee resisted, noting in their meeting of 11 July that Paxton's “peculiar” design would cost 10% more than a variation of their
own stripped of Brunel's beloved dome. The next day the matter was all but resolved when Morton Peto, the wealthy building and railway contractor, in a single act put an end to the Exhibition's money troubles by putting up a £50,000 guarantee. That sizeable donation quickly opened the floodgates to others: in days, there was more than enough to guarantee the erection of an exhibition building. As a codicil to his offer, Peto wrote: “Perhaps I might take the liberty of saying that I consider the success of the Exhibition would be considerably increased by the adoption of Mr. Paxton's plan if it is not too costly.” His suggestion was too weighty to ignore. On the sixteenth, the Building Committee met with the Royal Commission. Brunel's design was discarded, Paxton's embraced. “In all the matters which I had in hand,” Albert was able to write Stockmar four days later from Osborne, “I had triumphant success.”

Palmerston's triumph, Peel's death, the squabble about the site of the Exhibition: all had stolen attention from Pate, so that when he returned to complete his Home Office examination on Friday morning, the fifth of July, there was no large crowd outside to hoot or hiss him. Pate came in the company of Otway and Scotland Yard Detective Stephen Thornton. Pate was, as always, well dressed, but looked paler than he had before. His only complaint about his imprisonment—indeed, his only recorded utterance that day—was that his health suffered from lack of walking; cut off from his obsessive perambulations, he had instead spent most of the last week absorbed in his books. For the most part Pate sat with a vacant stare, drawn deeply into himself, largely oblivious to the questioning of the Attorney General or the maneuvers of his own counsel, with whom he hadn't spoken since his arrest.

The examination began at noon, and was largely a reprise of the first examination—several old and new witnesses to reestablish the fact that the Queen was hit, and that Pate was the one hitting her. Only the Queen's physician, James Clark, had anything new to add, speaking to the extent of the Queen's injury: Pate had indeed
done damage to the royal forehead, causing swelling and a severe bruise and breaking the skin, causing royal blood to flow. Such an injury was technically enough for a charge of High Treason, but at this point, Attorney General Jervis and the Home Secretary had agreed that Pate would stand trial under Peel's act, for a high misdemeanour. Huddleston, Pate's attorney, said little, remarking that he would reserve his defense for Pate until another time. Given the charge, Pate could have obtained bail—but he did not apply for it. Commitment papers were drawn up, and Otway and Thornton led Pate to a cab bound for Newgate.

Pate's defense was extremely active during this time, setting up—if not quite an insanity defense, then a defense in which insanity would play a role. Hardisty and Huddleston had already procured for expert testimony the two most noted professional witnesses to insanity of the day: Edward Thomas Monro, still chief physician at Bethlem, as he was when he testified at McNaughtan's trial, and John Conolly, who had testified at Oxford's. Monro visited Pate twice at Clerkenwell and three times in Newgate; Conolly likely accompanied him on some of these visits. Both became convinced that Pate was insane.

And during this time it became clear that Robert Pate Senior, had indeed obtained the best legal representation for his son that money could buy: Alexander Cockburn, Q.C., architect of McNaughtan's insanity defense. Cockburn had indeed by this time been offered the position of Solicitor General by a grateful government. As it happens, all three principal attorneys in the Pate case looked forward to impending promotion. Because the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cottenham, had retired, a ladder of legal appointments had opened up; Cockburn was to become Solicitor General, Solicitor General John Romilly was to become Attorney General, and Attorney General John Jervis was to become Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. The promotions all around complicated the timing of Pate's trial: in order for Cockburn to be eligible to defend him, or Jervis to prosecute him, they would
need to finish before the promotions took effect. Attorney General Jervis, then, was compelled to hurry the trial along, requesting the presiding judge, Baron Alderson, to schedule Pate's trial for the next morning, 11 July. Pate thus came before the bar less than a week after he was charged.

Expecting Pate's trial to be as overcrowded as those of some of his predecessors, the sheriffs instituted the usual ticket system. They needn't have bothered: the courtroom on that morning was full but not crowded.
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At 10:00 Pate entered the dock every bit a gentleman, in dress and in manner. With perfect composure he bowed slightly to the justices Alderson, Patteson, and Talfourd. The charge was read, and Pate loudly pleaded not guilty.

For the prosecution—Attorney General Jervis, Solicitor General Romilly, and three others
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—the task was an easy one. That Pate had struck the Queen was hardly in question; the only true question was whether Pate was legally insane at the moment of the attack. But an acquittal on the grounds of insanity would in effect net Pate the virtual life sentence of confinement in Bethlem at the Queen's pleasure, a worse penalty on the face of it than the maximum sentence allowed under Peel's 1842 law, seven years' transportation. While confinement for an insanity acquittal might originally have been intended as therapeutic care, not punishment, neither the judges, nor the defense, nor the prosecution looked at it that way, the Attorney General noting to the jury during the trial that the effect of such an acquittal “would be that he would be imprisoned for the rest of his life.” The prosecution's strategy, then, was simply to bring forth a few witnesses to connect Pate with the cane, and the cane with the blow to the Queen's forehead, and to do little to contest any evidence that Pate was insane. They had sent
no medical experts to interview Pate or counterbalance Monro's or Conolly's testimony. The defense witnesses and their testimony, therefore, were all familiar from the Home Office examination: the equerry Grey, Sergeant-Footman Renwick, Sgt. Silver, Samuel Cowling (a bystander when Pate attacked), and James Clark.

Alexander Cockburn and John Huddleston for the defense, on the other hand, were in a fiendishly difficult position. Since they could not contest the fact that Pate had struck Victoria, they could not in effect win their case. If Pate were found guilty, they lost. And if he were found not guilty by reason of insanity, they lost, as he would face what amounted to a life sentence in Bethlem. As they could not win, they could only hope to make the loss as slight as possible. Therefore, Cockburn could not hope to recreate his triumph in McNaughtan's case. In 1843 he had secured McNaughtan's acquittal brilliantly, by redefining the legal definition of insanity altogether and then demonstrating that McNaughtan's state of mind fit that definition. Since McNaughtan faced the death penalty, a lifetime in Bethlem was indeed a victory. For Pate's trial, the legal definition of insanity had been set by the Law Lords in the wake of McNaughtan's trial: if Pate was aware that what he did was wrong, he could not be considered legally insane. Cockburn now did nothing to challenge that definition, and little to establish that Pate was unaware of the morality of his action. Indeed, Cockburn in his opening admitted to the jury that he simply could not prove “that there were certain and safe grounds for believing that the prisoner at the bar was not enabled to discriminate between right and wrong”—and that “he did not entertain very sanguine expectations as to the result” of the coming testimony as to Pate's insanity. Cockburn's hesitation must have confused the jury—and indeed would confuse anyone who did not realize that Cockburn and Huddleston had no intention of obtaining an insanity acquittal for Pate. They
wanted
to lose the case. Cockburn's oratory, the string of witnesses to Pate's bizarre actions, the medical experts—were all for the benefit of the judges and not the jury—not to gain an
acquittal, but to gain the lightest sentence possible after a conviction. While the testimony, Cockburn argued,

… might fall short of that degree of proof of insanity which would be necessary to give [Pate] immunity from the penalties of law, still the jury ought to be satisfied and their lordships who tried the case ought to be satisfied of this, that though some degree of intelligence remained to the prisoner, still it was clear that his mind was in a great degree deranged; and that if responsible at all, he was not responsible in the same degree as if he were of perfect sanity.

Under the 1842 law, judges had a great deal of leeway in their sentencing—from a maximum seven years' transportation, to the minimum of the briefest of prison sentences, with or without a whipping. Cockburn and Huddleston attempted to take advantage of this with an extremely risky strategy, appealing to the judges' sense of pity: Pate was not vicious, but “unfortunate,” and did not deserve to be visited with the full severity of the law.

The defense presented a host of witnesses to Pate's traumas and idiosyncrasies while in the army: his morbid reaction to the death of his dog and his horses, his growing paranoia about the army cook and messman leagued to poison him, the bricks and stones in his stomach. Several testified as to his obsessive perambulations first at Putney Heath and Barnes Common, and then through the Parks. Pate's valet, Charles Dodman, enumerated what he considered Pate's many personal eccentricities at home: plunging his head into a four-gallon basin of water upon rising; bathing in a mixture of whiskey, camphor, and water; reading nursery rhymes; constantly singing badly and loudly enough to irritate his neighbors (and to amuse their servants). Visitors who met him at Dr. Startin's house testified to his maniacal and antisocial behavior there. Finally, Conolly and Monro agreed that Pate was of unsound mind.