Shooting Victoria (89 page)

408:   Coleridge reduced Tuke to silence:
Times 12
April 1872, 11.

408:   “I was his first subject since he had showered vituperation upon the Tichborne Claimant”: Tuke 672.

408:   They stopped the trial and announced through their foreman “that the prisoner was a perfectly sane man when he pleaded to the indictment, and that he was perfectly sane now”:
Times 12
April 1872, 11.

409:   “The Queen's object in writing to Mr. Gladstone today is to express her surprise & annoyance at the
extreme leniency
of O'Connor's Sentence”: Guedalla 1:344–45.

410:   … “the eye of the police should continue to rest upon O'Connor”: Guedalla 1:346.

411:   Gladstone suggested in return that the “animadversions of the press” would more effectively “repress these strange aberrations”: Guedalla 1:348.

411:   The day after the boy's sentencing he wrote the governor of Newgate to suspend the sentence of whipping: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

412:   “I was not mad, nor was I perfectly sensible”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

412:   “I can never agree to a condition which would condemn me to almost perpetual exile”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

413:   … if O'Connor ever returned “it wd be as an altered man”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

413:   “This is vexatious”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

413:   Tasmania … where the children of George's uncle Roderic—Feargus's half-brother—were prosperous landowners: Hughes 394; Read and Glasgow 14.

413:   … “he seems to take a higher tone, and to consider himself a person of some importance”: TNA HO 144/3.

414:   … “the people being very loyal,” he later wrote, “I might suffer some annoyance were I to be known”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

414:   He had a poet's mind, and that mind “stands alone, and lives in a glorious solitude, apart from the world”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

415:   “The man must be mad”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

415:   “I had no legal power to detain the youth”: TNA PRO HO 140/3/10963.

416:   … “he is of a romantic turn of mind, he has no employment, and spends most of his time at home reading and writing what he calls poetry”: TNA PRO HO 140/3/10963.

416:   Gull had experience working with the insane: Hervey.

417:   “I was thinking what a wonderful calm reigned in London, and that it was owing to the perfection of government”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

417:   “Thought continually revolving upon religion”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.

418:   … committed to Hanwell Asylum as an “imbecile”: Tuke 673.

418:   “… surprised & annoyed” by O'Connor's return: RA VIC/ MAIN/L/13/191, May 1875.

418:   “He is evidentially quite unfit to be at large”: RA VIC/MAIN/28/10, 22 May 1875.

418:   “… but he must surely now deeply deplore his share in a proceeding which consigned a sick and insane boy to degrading punishment”: Tuke 673.

419:   “If only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me!”: Victoria and Victoria,
Darling Child
47.

Chapter 22: Blue

420:   Roderick Maclean was filthy, either unwilling or unable to wash off the dust of the many roads upon which he had tramped:
Glasgow Daily Herald
4 March 1882, 5.

420:   … his twenty-eight years:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

421:   God read his thoughts:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 1 summarizes Maclean's autobiography on this subject; see also the psychological evidence given at his trial, in
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

421:   God had given him eternal life:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

421:   He was certain that his own claim to the British throne was at least as great as George IV's had been:
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

421:   The number was four:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882,1.

421:   “The Fourth Path, a novel by Roderick Maclean”:
Daily News 5
March 1882, 5.

422:   The color—
his
color—was blue:
Times
20 April 1882,11;
Daily News
20 April 1882, 3.

422:   Maclean knew that wearing blue was forbidden to anyone besides himself alone:
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

422:   Occurrences of four were now more likely ominous than auspicious to him: “He had, he said, a mysterious connection with no. 4, and this numeral in any combination of figures was always disastrous to him”: testimony of Dr. Sheppard at Maclean's trial,
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

422:   … they wore blue to cause him “perplexity and agony,” to “injure, annoy, and vex me on every opportunity”: From a letter Maclean sent to his sister Annie,
Times
20 April 1882,11.

423:    His childhood, he would later recall, was “as happy as any youthful days could be”: Maclean wrote this in his (now lost) autobiography; rpt.
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 1.

423:   His father Charles Maclean had earned a fortune as master-carver and master-guilder to the gentry and nobility. He had employed—auspiciously—forty people: 1851
England Census
[database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA:
Ancestry.com
Operations Inc., 2005.

423:   … a massive console table and mirror that he manufactured had been given pride of place in the nave of the Crystal Palace: Auerbach 96–7.

423:   Roderick Maclean was born three years after the Exhibition:
Daily News 4
March 1882, 5, notes “He gave his age as 28, and his birthday occurred during his stay at Southsea”; if this is true, Maclean was born sometime between 9 February and 23 February 1854; the Berkshire Records Office (Broadmoor Hospital) file (BRO D/H14/02/2/1/1095) gives Maclean's exact birth date as 10 February 1854.

423:   … an estate in the suburbs that he remembered as an Eden: Maclean's lost autobiography, qtd. Sims 69.

423:   He was educated to be a gentleman at a school on Harley Street:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 1.

423:   Roderick's father was a literary gentleman of sorts, taking up in 1861 the proprietorship of a new humor magazine,
Fun
: Lauterbach 4.

423:   Roderick recalled mingling among George Augustus Sala, Tom Hood (son of the great comic poet), and W. S. Gilbert in his pre-Sullivan days, and others: Lauterbach 5, Sims 69.

423:   … he sold it in 1865: Lauterbach 11.

423:    … Charles apparently lost much of his fortune in the spectacular collapse of the banking firm of Overend and Gurney: White 66n.;
Leeds Mercury
7 March 1882, 8; a classified advertisement in
The Times
, 23 January 1868, notes “late Charles Maclean” about what had once been his operation, the Commercial Plate Glass Company.

423:   … Roderick suffered his own fall, literally, slipping in the doorway of his Gloucester Road house, smashing his head and gashing his scalp open:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882,1;
Times
20 April 1882,11.

424:   His head continued to give off the sensation of a “slight shock from a galvanic battery”:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882,1.

424:    He developed morbid fears that his siblings, his mother, and especially his father were trying to kill him:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

424:   He lashed back, threatening to kill his family and at one time vowing to blow up St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

424:    Twice he booked Roderick passage for America:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

424:   In 1874, when Roderick was twenty, Charles Maclean took steps to have him committed to an asylum:
Daily News
20 April 1882, 3.

424:    … the renowned psychologist Henry Maudsley … was happy to comply, and declared Roderick insane:
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

424:   The other doctor, Alfred Godrich, found Roderick highly excitable but not a lunatic:
Daily News
20 April 1882, 3.

424:   … Maclean's father instead exiled Roderick as an apprentice on a farm near Dover:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8. According to the dates given by the attorney Wollaston Knocker, Maclean could have been at this farm earlier, at age eighteen (or about 1872). Newspaper reports of his trial make clear that he left the farm in August 1874.

424:   … Maclean offered a young boy sixpence to derail a coming train with a beam of wood:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

425:    Maclean and the boy were acquitted:
Dover, Folkestone, and Deal Guide
.

425:   … his father claimed that he attempted to derail trains at least twice more:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

425:    … his brother Charles tried to place him in the home of a family friend, the artist Samuel Stanesby:
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

425:   … one of his sisters would mail him, wherever he was, a postal order for a few shillings:
Hampshire Telegraph
4 March 1882, 8.

425:   Once, denied admission to one of these in Somerset, he deliberately smashed a window so that he would spend the night in jail:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

425:   Occasionally he was able to gain temporary admission to the local lunatic asylum, as he had once done in Dublin:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5;
Bristol Mercury
4 March 1882, 8.

425:   “On your thrown you set and rule us all”:
Surrey Advertiser and County Times
11 March 1882, 5.

426:    … Maclean showed her a dagger he carried in his sleeve to “take care of himself”:
Surrey Advertiser and County Times
11 March 1882, 5.

426:   … to Boulogne, France; throughout Germany: even perhaps to Jamaica, where according to one report he passed as Roderigues Maclean:
Times
6 March 1882, 6; 20 April 1882, 11;
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5. A long list of his residences between 1874 and 1882, which Maclean submitted at Broadmoor in an attempt to ascertain which parish should support his stay there, lists Boulogne—but not Germany or Jamaica.

427:    “Dear Annie,—I have no doubt but that you will be somewhat surprised to receive another letter from me”: The first of two letters to Annie introduced at Maclean's trial:
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

428:   … quickly arranged for a local surgeon to examine him, sign a certificate of lunacy, and commit him to the Bath and Somerset Lunatic Asylum:
Times
20 April 1882, 11;
Bristol Mercury
6 March 1882, 8;
British Medical Journal
11 March 1882, 355.

428:    He remained there for fourteen months, happier to be in an asylum than anywhere else—but even there fearing contact with perfidious attendants and visitors:
Times
20 April 1882, 11.

428:   … the massive population there, he wrote Annie, made things “a thousand times worse”:
Times
20 April 1882, 11. Some reports did, however, place Maclean in London at this time: for example,
Manchester Times
18 March 1882, 6.

428:    … Brighton, where he spent a month in the local workhouse:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

428:   While there, he wrote a letter to Annie:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 1.

428:   … he got a deeply disturbing letter from his brother Hector:
Daily News 4
March 1882, 5, which does not name the brother who sent this letter; that it was Hector Maclean is suggested by the entry for Hector Maclean (with three children) in the 1881 census:
1881 England Census
[database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA:
Ancestry.com
Operations Inc., 2004.

428:   … the workhouse authorities at Brighton threatened to transfer Maclean to Kensington, his home parish workhouse:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

428:   There he found a room in the poorer part of town, in the home of Mrs. Sorrell: The
Hampshire Telegraph
4 March 1882, 8, published in Portsmouth, has the clearest and fullest account of Maclean's stay in Southsea. See also
Times
4 March 1882, 10, which like most accounts mistakes Mrs. Sorrell for “Mrs. Hucker.”

429:   … he claimed to be a writer and poet employed by the
West Sussex Gazette: Daily News
4 March 1882, 5;
Birmingham Daily Post
4 March 1882, 5.

429:   It was not long before his landlady concluded he was a man “with a tile loose”:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

429:   By night he entertained Sorrell and Hucker with a little concertina that he had obtained in Brighton, and with a little ventriloquist routine:
Hampshire Telegraph
4 March 1882, 8; Bayes.

429:   He would lecture them on political economy until they could take it no more. He was a great admirer of Prime Minister Gladstone:
Hampshire Telegraph
4 March 1882, 8.

429:   And he was a passionate supporter of the ultra-radical politician Charles Bradlaugh:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

429:   … his atheism, his republicanism, and his scandalous advocacy of birth control ensured that a majority of the Commons supported a measure each time to refuse to let him take the oath or his seat: Royle; Tribe 197, 210.

429:   … since no one would give him the oath, he decided to take it himself: Tribe 214–15.

430:   … his older sister Caroline having very recently died:
Lloyd's Weekly
19 March 1882, 8.

430:   Annie wrote to warn him that his family's support of him would soon diminish:
Birmingham Daily Post
4 March 1882, 5;
Hampshire Telegraph
4 March 1882, 8.