Shooting Victoria (67 page)

Maclean aimed at her head;

And he felt very angry

Because he didn't shoot her dead.

There's a divinity that hedges a king,

And so it does seem,

And my opinion is, it has hedged

Our most gracious Queen.

Maclean must be a madman,

Which is obvious to be seen,

Or else he wouldn't have tried to shoot

Our most beloved Queen.

Victoria is a good Queen,

Which all her subjects know,

And for that God has protected her

From all her deadly foes.

She is noble and generous,

Her subjects must confess;

There hasn't been her equal

Since the days of good Queen Bess.

Long may she be spared to roam

Among the bonnie Highland floral,

And spend many a happy day

In the palace of Balmoral.

Because she is very kind

To the old women there,

And allows them bread, tea, and sugar,

And each one get a share.

And when they know of her coming,

Their hearts feel overjoy'd,

Because, in general, she finds work

For men that's unemploy'd.

And she also gives the gipsies money

While at Balmoral, I've been told,

And, mind ye, seldom silver,

But very often gold.

I hope God will protect her

By night and by day,

At home and abroad,

When she's far away.

May He be as a hedge around her,

As he's been all along,

And let her live and die in peace

Is the end of my song.
*

McGonagall died in 1902, a year after Victoria. He thus lived long enough to see every wish he had for her come true. God indeed hedged her; after Maclean, she lived, and died, in peace.

*
Both judges, as attorneys, had had experience with previous assailants: Coleridge, as Attorney General, was the one who browbeat Dr. Tuke and demolished his attempt to establish Arthur O'Connor's insanity; Huddleston had assisted Alexander Cockburn in defending Robert Pate.

*
Besides being a year to the day after Disraeli's death, 19 April 1882 also happened to be the day that Charles Darwin died.

**
By amazing coincidence, Disraeli's estate at Hughenden had been sold after his death to Samuel Wilson, the father of Victoria's Etonian defender, Gordon Chesney Wilson. Samuel Wilson later ordered a stained-glass window for Hughenden Church commemorating Victoria's escape from Maclean.

*
See pp. 454-455, above.

*
Culverwell, as it happens, was prosecuted by Roderick Maclean's defense attorney, Montagu Williams.

*
Yet another poem connected with Maclean's case, and undoubtedly the best of them, made the rounds of the newspapers in the wake of the verdict:

“Two Pronunciations.”

Roderick Maclean

He shot at the Queen.

The jury took “reason”

Out of his treason;

So Rod'rick Maclean

Was pronouncéd insane.

(
Manchester Times
29 April 1882, 8.)

epilogue

J
UBILEE

F
or the last nineteen years of her life, Victoria never again confronted a would-be assassin.

But because of the lethal power of dynamite and the evergrowing belief among terrorists—Fenian and otherwise—that monarchs and heads of state were legitimate political targets, the threat of assassination only increased during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Victoria's security detail grew; greater and greater precautions were taken when she traveled between her homes or went among her subjects. And in 1887, the year of Victoria's Golden Jubilee, that increased security proved its worth, when the Metropolitan police shut down what could have been the most serious threat against her.

Since their first dynamite campaign in 1881, Irish-American dynamitards had chosen as their targets ever greater symbols of British power. Between 1883 and 1885, they had hit Whitehall and Victoria Railway Station, the London Underground, Scotland Yard,
the Tower of London, and the House of Commons. An unexploded bomb had been found in Trafalgar Square next to one of Landseer's lions, at the base of Nelson's Column. One dynamitard was caught with brass cylinder grenades, planning to throw them from the Strangers' Gallery at the full government bench at the House of Commons. But dynamiting ceased altogether in 1885 when some measure of freedom for Ireland seemed achievable by Parliamentary means, and the Clan-na-Gael, now the most popular group of militant Irish nationalists in the United States, agreed to refrain from violence to give Parnell and the nationalist MPs their chance. Hopes soared at the end of the year when William Gladstone converted publicly to the cause of Irish Home Rule. But those hopes were crushed six months later when Gladstone's Home Rule Bill failed and his Liberal party split irrevocably. Those opposed to Home Rule, calling themselves the Liberal Unionists, shifted their allegiance to the Conservatives—permanently, as it turned out. After the general election of July 1886, much to Victoria's delight, Lord Salisbury's conservative government was in—and Gladstone and any possibility of Irish Home Rule were out. A month later, at a conference in Pittsburgh, the extremists of the Clan-na-Gael resolved to recommence terror-bombing with a “display of fireworks” to disrupt the Queen's Jubilee celebrations.

There exists no evidence that Clan-na-Gael leaders specified a target for the renewed campaign. Quite likely they never did. But in that year, one target was feared above all others: Westminster Abbey on 21 June 1887, Jubilee Day, when Victoria, her children and grandchildren, and a critical mass of the royalty of Europe and the world were to gather to give thanks for the Queen's fifty years on the throne. A strategically placed cache of dynamite could destroy them all; no greater blow against monarchy could have been struck anywhere in the world at any time during Victoria's reign.

And yet it all came to nothing. Thanks largely to the efforts of one man—James Monro, Assistant Commissioner and head of the
Criminal Investigations Department—the “Jubilee Plot” was the attempt on Victoria's life that never was.

The threat, however, was certainly real. On 11 June 1887, the ship
City of Chester
steamed out of New York Harbor and past the newly erected Statue of Liberty, bound for Liverpool. On the ship were three men well equipped for a serious sortie in the dynamite war. All carried portmanteaus containing new Smith & Wesson revolvers and fifteen bullets. Also in their bags—or perhaps sewn into their coats—were over a hundred pounds of American-made Atlas A dynamite in slabs, as well as a number of detonators. The three men all traveled under aliases. The dapper and garrulous one of the three—obviously their leader—called himself Joseph Melville. He was actually John J. Moroney, one of the more militant members of the Clan-na-Gael, and a close friend of the Clan's most powerful leader in America, Alexander Sullivan; Sullivan had obviously hand-picked him for this mission. Moroney had himself almost certainly picked the others. Both traveled under the alias of Scott: brothers, supposedly, though they hardly looked it. The youngest, “Harry Scott,” was actually Michael Harkins, a sandy-haired thirty-year-old, his broad shoulders muscular from years of labor on the Reading Railroad. He had been a Philadelphia grocer until Moroney enlisted him, and he left behind a pregnant wife and four young children. He had met Moroney when both were loyal members of the Philadelphia branch of the Clan-na-Gael. How Moroney met and recruited the other man for this mission, however, is more of a mystery. For Thomas Callan, who travelled as “Thomas Scott,” had little experience of Moroney's usual stomping grounds of New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago; he had lived a quiet life in the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, operating stocking-making machinery. He was unmarried, and at forty-seven his hair was already graying. Moroney likely sought him out because of his military skills; when Callan was twenty-two, in 1862, he had enlisted in the Massachusetts 33rd infantry of the Union Army. He had fought at the Civil War battles of
Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Lookout Mountain, and marched with General Sherman from Atlanta to the Atlantic. “No better or braver soldier than he served in that noble old regiment,” declared one of his officers. Callan, however, like Harkins, was an extremely mild-mannered man; neither fitted the role of a fiery dynamitard. The skills that must have attracted them to Moroney were loyalty and deference: they took orders well. The “Scott brothers” were the foot soldiers in an operation top-heavy with commanders.

All three men had been born in Ireland; all three had brought with them to the United States a hatred of British oppression so deep it was as natural to them as breathing, a hatred created by centuries of Irish subordination and humiliation, amplified by the starvation of the great famine; indeed, Thomas Callan personally experienced the horrors of the famine before emigrating as a child to Lowell. Their hatred was fostered in America by family memories, by nationalist newspapers, and by regular meetings of their Clan-na-Gael camps. And now the three made for London to translate their lifelong hatred into explosive violence. They were supported financially, materially, and morally by thousands of Irish-Americans.

Three conspirators in the Jubilee Plot had preceded Moroney, Harkins, and Callan across the Atlantic. In March, “General” Francis Millen, a twenty-year Fenian veteran, was commissioned by the Clan-na-Gael to sail to France and to take from there overall command of the operation. And in May two other conspirators—one with the now-impenetrable alias of Joseph Cohen, and the other not now known by either alias or actual name—shipped to London, probably with their own supply of dynamite, to settle in and await the coming of their three co-conspirators.

Before the
City of Chester
docked in Liverpool, however, the Metropolitan police knew that the dynamitards were coming and were already taking steps to scotch the conspiracy. By 1887, the detective force of the Metropolitan Police had grown since 1842 from a force of eight to one of over six hundred and had become
much more specialized. Assistant Commissioner James Monro, head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), commanded in 1887 a Special anti-terrorist Branch, formed in 1883 specifically to track down Fenian dynamiters. He commanded as well a separate division called (among other things) Section D: a highly secret national security service established to surveil anarchists and Fenians. Monro, in other words, oversaw both detectives and spies. He used both to destroy the Jubilee Plot.

The secret of the Jubilee Plot was an open one in the United States since at least the beginning of May, when the
New York Times
reported that Irish nationalists planned to disrupt the Queen's Jubilee. On the first day of June, the London
Times
warned of “a pyrotechnic display in honour of the Queen's Jubilee or in other words a series of dynamite and incendiary outrages to startle the nation amid the peaceful rejoicings of the month which opens today.” As it happens, the then-anonymous writer of that article knew what he was talking about: he was Assistant Commissioner James Monro's second-in-command, Robert Anderson. Anderson controlled the Metropolitan Police's most valuable asset in the war against Irish-American terror—a British spy by the name of Thomas Beach, who, posing as a Frenchman, Henri Le Caron, had for twenty years penetrated the highest ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood and the Clan-na-Gael. Thanks to Beach, Monro and his detectives knew that Alexander Sullivan and his branch of the Clan were behind the campaign. They knew that Millen had been sent to France to command the operation. But they knew nothing about Moroney, Harkins, or Callan. Indeed, for all they knew, the dynamitards were already in London, plotting their attack.

Monro therefore acted to cut the known conspirator, Millen, away from the unknown ones. He sent several detectives across the Channel to shadow Millen's every move and prevent him from crossing to England; he then sent the Chief Superintendent of the CID to confront him and inform him that they knew about the plot and his role in it. Millen, duly intimidated, only acted in
one way that seemed to support the plot: he wrote three letters of introduction for Moroney to three Irish Nationalist members of Parliament, thus providing Moroney with an entry into the House of Commons. While those letters seemed to help Moroney, they more than likely actually helped the police. For there was another reason why Millen proved to be a weak link in the plot: for over twenty years, off and on, Millen had been an informer to the British government. As a double-agent, it is more than likely that he never intended to assist the Jubilee plotters. Copies of the letters of introduction had reached Monro before the originals were given to Moroney, suggesting that Millen almost certainly betrayed his fellows. Those letters of introduction proved crucial in discovering the bombers.