Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Oxford clearly found true inspiration in the other book he read while at West Place. The Bravo of Venice, a German novella written nearly fifty years before, anticipates Newgate novels in its obsession with criminals. The protagonist begins as a nobody and rises to become one of the “two greatest men in Venice”—the other being the Doge. He rises by becoming King of Assassins—though at the end of the story we learn he has actually killed no one. The Bravo of Venice, in other words, valorizes the fake assassin. At the heart of the novel is a scene eerily similar to the one that Edward Oxford would publicly enact in a few weeks, when the Bravo presents a gun loaded with powder, but without bullets, to the face of his ruler. The novel features a secret society of assassins which has its secret meeting place, its own weaponry, its disguises, and its regalia, similar to that which Oxford delineates in his rules for Young England.

  Oxford spent his time at home writing, as well. Indulging, perhaps, a quickly developing millennial obsession, he copied, according to his sister, passages from the Bible. And at some point three letters addressed to Edward Oxford became a part of his secret collection of documents, regalia, and weapons. The letters are dated and signed, each one appearing to have been sent to Oxford at his three previous places of employment during the past year. None of the letters appears to have been sent, however: none is postmarked. And each of the letters, though signed by “A. W. Smith,” the fictitious secretary to the fictitious Young England, is almost certainly written in Oxford’s own hand. He could have written them at any time over the past year—could even have written them on or around the dates written on each one. It is, on the other hand, quite possible that he composed them, as he composed his rules and regulations for Young England during his five weeks of leisure, as a part of his endeavor to recreate himself and to present himself to the world, when the time came, as a man with a history of covert political involvement, with a bona fide political motive for assassination.

  The first letter is dated from a year before, May 16th, 1839, addressed to Oxford at Mr. Minton’s Shepherd and Flock public house in Marylebone. It depicts Oxford as a new but promising member of the organization, beginning to learn the ropes:

  Young England—Sir,—Our commander-in-chief was very glad to find that you answered his questions in such a straight-forward manner. You will be wanted to attend on the 21st of this month, as we expect one of the country agents to town on business of importance. Be sure and attend. A. W. Smith, Secretary. P.S.—You must not take any notice of the boy, nor ask him any questions.

  The detail about the boy is a nice poetic touch, stressing the cloak-and-dagger nature of Young England, and suggesting an intersection between Oxford’s mundane, cover existence as a barman, and his secret existence as a Captain (or soon-to-be Captain) in Young England.

  The second letter, addressed to Oxford at Mr. Parr’s Hat and Feathers, and dated 14 November, suggests Oxford, through his great talents, is rising to stardom in his secret society. It also demonstrates Oxford’s literary side, as he—with a novelist’s touch—invents a melodramatic scene in an attempt to root his imaginary organization in the real world:

  Young England—Sir, I am very glad to hear that you improve so much in your speeches. Your speech the last time you were here was beautiful. There was another one introduced last night, by Lieutenant Mars, a fine, tall, gentlemanly-looking fellow, and it is said that he is a military officer; but his name has not yet transpired. Soon after he was introduced, we were alarmed by a violent knocking at the door. In an instant our faces were covered, we cocked our pistols, and with drawn swords stood waiting to receive the enemy. While one stood over the fire with the papers, another stood with lighted torch to fire the house. We then sent the old woman to open the door, and it proved to be some little boys who knocked at the door and ran away. You must attend on Wednesday next. A. W. Smith, Secretary.

  Oxford’s third letter connected his virtual secret society with actual political currents of 1840, and with actual political fears. This is the letter that Oxford surely expected would strike terror into millions of hearts once it became public. Dated a month before (3 April 1840) and addressed to Mr. Robinson’s Hog in the Pound, it makes clear that things are quickly building to a climax among the conspirators, to the point that Oxford would have to risk his position as barman to play the role of conspirator:

  Young England—Sir,—You are requested to attend to night, as there is an extraordinary meeting to be holden, in consequence of having received some communications of an important nature from Hanover. You must attend; and if your master will not give you leave, you must come in defiance of him. A. W. Smith, Secretary.

  It is the reference to Hanover that would have been chilling to any British reader in the spring of 1840. Hanover suggested Queen Victoria’s Uncle Ernest, without question the most wicked, the most feared, and the most reviled of George III’s sons. He was, in the minds of many, a murderer, thought to have slit the throat in 1810 of his servant. (In reality the servant attacked Cumberland before killing himself.) In politics, he was an ultra-Tory reactionary, the enemy, in a progressive age, to every progressive cause, and a particularly virulent enemy to the Reform Bill of 1832. In religion he was an extremist as well: the Grand Master of the ultra-protestant Orange Lodges, the fiercely anti-Catholic Protestant fraternal organizations. He had a following—of the distinctly conspiratorial kind—and in the minds of many he had ambition and an agenda that could not be contained by the lesser throne of Hanover. And now only the young Queen and her unborn child stood between him and the throne. Upon the death of William IV in 1837, many feared that Ernest and his Orange supporters would rise up and declare for him rather than his niece. That did not happen. But what didn’t happen in 1837 could happen in 1840, with an assassin’s bullet.

  While Oxford spent much of his time over these few weeks in quiet seclusion, his explosive side frequently needed an outlet as well. Thus his aggression toward his mother and sister. Besides this, Susannah was a frequent witness to his habit of firing his pistols—loaded with powder, but most likely without ball—into the garden from out of the back windows of his lodgings. His family later claimed that he never fired out his own windows in the front of the house, into the Square—but Oxford himself later claimed that he fired to scare old women on the street. (Apparently, his landlady, Mrs. Packman, being extremely hard of hearing, was not disturbed by the shooting.) The explosive crack of his pistols certainly startled the inhabitants of number 6, and many others in the environs of West Square, and quite likely carried beyond the square, beyond the home for Indigent Children, past the grounds of Bethlem Hospital, and into the various airing yards of the asylum’s inmates. It is an intriguing possibility, then, that the echoes of Oxford’s shots might have further disturbed the thoughts of one of Bethlem’s oldest and longest-detained residents, and might have reminded that man of two shots that he had fired from his own pistols, forty years before.

  James Hadfield was, as a young man, a soldier in King George III’s army, who in 1793 had fought in the war against France that erupted after the execution of Louis XVI. At the battle of Lincelles* that year while serving in the bodyguard of the George III’s second son, the Duke of York, Hadfield suffered severe saber-wounds to the head. The damage was apparently psychological as well as physical, and Hadfield was soon discharged from the army because of insanity. He moved to London, became a maker of silver spoons, and brooded about the special role he felt destined to play in what he knew was an imminent cosmic struggle. His apocalyptic beliefs intensified when he by chance fell in with a messianic shoemaker and religious ranter, Bannister Truelock, who convinced Hadfield that the assassination of George III would bring about the end of kings and the end of time. Hadfield by this time considered himself a latter-day messiah who must sacrifice himself to save mankind. He bought a brace of pistols in May 1800 and wandered through London, wondering whether to kill himself to hasten the apocalypse, but held back, fearing eternal damnation. He then
hit upon a plan that would bring about the end of kings and bring about the self-sacrifice he needed: he would shoot George III in a public place, and would then happily be torn apart by the crowd. On 15 May, then, Hadfield bought a second-row seat for a performance of Colley Cibber’s She Would and She Would Not, a performance at Drury Lane Theatre which he knew the Royal Family would be attending. When the King entered and came to the front of the box to acknowledge the cheering of the audience, Hadfield stood upon his seat, leveled one of his pistols at the King, and fired. The pistol’s two slugs missed the King’s head by inches, lodging in a pillar near the ceiling of the box. George reacted with notable calm, displaying, according to the Times, “that serenity and firmness of character which belong to a virtuous mind”; he put his family at ease, and they stayed to watch the entire performance. Hadfield, meanwhile, was seized and taken to a music room adjoining the stage, where he was questioned by the police, by the proprietor of the theatre (and the great dramatist) Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and—in an emotional reunion, on Hadfield’s part—by his former commanding officer, the Duke of York. He claimed that he had missed the King on purpose, wanting only to be torn apart himself, and darkly hinted at the coming chaos: “it was not over yet—there was a great deal more and worse to be done.”

  Hadfield was tried a month later. He was charged with High Treason, and by the law of the time that meant that he was entitled to the best counsel in the land, at the expense of the state. And he got just that in Thomas Erskine. Erskine mounted an insanity defense, in the face of the contemporary legal concept of that defense which held insanity to be complete derangement, and an insane man thus unable to plan a criminal act or understand its consequences. Hadfield had planned his attempt carefully—buying the gun, manufacturing his own slugs, choosing a seat at the theatre with an ideal vantage from which to shoot the King. And he arguably knew very well the consequences of his action; he hoped he could cause enough of an uproar in order to bring about his own death. Erskine argued that a man suffering from a powerful delusion might appear sane in most ways, and yet still commit an insane act. He brought forth a number of witnesses to testify to the eccentricity of Hadfield’s behavior—behavior that included an attempt to kill his infant son days before the attempt on the King. And he brought forth medical witnesses to testify both to the severity of Hadfield’s head wounds, and to the obvious insanity he demonstrated in his behavior. Chief Justice Kenyon, long before Erskine called all of his witnesses, stopped the trial, persuaded the Attorney-General, John Mitford, to agree that Hadfield was obviously deranged, and directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty on the grounds of insanity, which they dutifully did.

  Hadfield, however, was not free. The Chief Justice, the Attorney General, and Hadfield’s own counsel agreed that Hadfield must be further confined, Erskine stating “most undoubtedly the safety of the community, and of all mankind, requires that this unfortunate man should be taken care of.” He was returned to Newgate. Four days after his trial, Mitford introduced a bill in Parliament to deal with Hadfield and those like him. The Safe Custody of Insane Persons Charged with Offences Bill empowered courts to detain those acquitted of a crime on the grounds of insanity at the pleasure of the monarch. The act was retroactive; Hadfield’s legal acquittal resulted in a lifetime of mental confinement. He was conveyed to Bethlem Hospital, which in 1800 was located not in Southwark, but in Moorfields, north of the river. He escaped in 1802, but was quickly caught in Dover, attempting to flee to France, and sent not back to Bethlem but to Newgate Prison for fourteen years. When arrangements were being made to move Bethlem from Moorfields to Southwark, the government requested that Bethlem establish special sections for female and male criminal lunatics; the governors of the Hospital agreed, and Hadfield was one of the first sent to the new building, in 1816. There he grew old, “grumbling and discontented,” clearly chafing under a lifetime of imprisonment, and petitioning repeatedly for release. He had renewed hopes for his freedom when Victoria came to the throne, and he asked her to recognize his sanity and his service to the nation and make him a Chelsea Pensioner. But it was Victoria’s pleasure, as it had been her grandfather’s and her uncles’, to detain him.

  By the time, then, that Oxford was disturbing the neighborhood and the lunatics, both criminal and non-criminal, with his pistol-shots, Hadfield was old, hopeless, and ill of tuberculosis, having “no desire to again mix with the world.”

  Within weeks, Oxford would meet the old man.

  For more than a month after buying his pistols, Oxford invariably spent the early part of his days at home, leaving the house in mid- or late afternoons, returning in the evening. His first destination was usually Lovett’s coffee shop on the London Road, two blocks away from West Square, between the obelisk at St. George’s Circus and the snarl of streets leading from Elephant and Castle. At Lovett’s, Oxford had access to London’s newspapers. He scanned the employment columns of the Morning Advertiser, apparently having not given up the possibility of seeking employment in yet another public house. He could follow the movements of the Queen, set out in the Court Circular, published in a number of newspapers. He also was able to follow the latest news, and therefore, with the rest of the nation, he must have been captivated by the breaking news of one of the most sensational murders to occur during Victoria’s reign.

  In the very early morning of 6 May 1840 (two days after Oxford bought his pistols), sounds of alarm burst out in the aristocratic neighborhood of 14 Norfolk Street, tucked between Park Lane and Park Street, within sight of the northeast corner of Hyde Park. It was the home of 72-year-old Lord William Russell, great-uncle of Lord John Russell, who was at the time the Colonial Secretary in Her Majesty’s government. Upon rising that morning, Lord Russell’s housemaid had discovered signs of disorder throughout the house. In the drawing room, Lord William’s writing desk had been smashed open. By the street door, several of his possessions were found wrapped in cloth. In the kitchen, drawers were forced open and plate was missing. The housemaid hurried to the attic to wake the cook, who, in turn, sent her to wake the valet, in the next room; she did so, oddly finding the man almost fully dressed. Housemaid and valet—a man by the name of François Benjamin Courvoisier—surveyed the kitchen, concluded that a burglary had occurred, and rushed upstairs to check upon their master. They discovered Russell’s corpse, his throat slit from ear to ear: his carotid artery and jugular vein severed. Russell’s right thumb, as well, was nearly cut away from the rest of his hand. Though his blood had not spurted widely, as might be expected with a wound of this kind, he had bled copiously: blood was pooled deeply around his head, and had dripped through in a puddle under the bed. The servants sent immediately for the police.

  While the scene pointed at first to a botched and somehow interrupted burglary, the police quickly began to doubt that this was the case. No one had seen or heard any intruders the night before (though a neighbor did claim to hear groans emanating from Lord Williams’s room, during the night). Marks on the back door suggested that it had been violently forced open. But it became clear to the police that the door had been forced from the inside, where several bolts had already been drawn. Moreover, any intruders exiting from this door would have to scale a high wall to escape the property, a wall thoroughly whitewashed, which would have shown marks of intrusion; it did not. A careful search showed no marks of forced entry whatsoever outside the back door. It was highly unlikely that anyone had used this door for entry or escape, and much more likely that someone had doctored the door to create the appearance of a burglary. By the time of the inquest, the police had concluded that this was an inside job, with particular suspicion falling on Cour-voisier, a native of Switzerland who had only been in service with Russell for five weeks. Courvoisier’s odd behavior had attracted attention: besides the fact that he was inexplicably nearly dressed upon being woken, he displayed a great deal of anxiety during the search, and continually “kept running and drinking water.” His reaction to the c
rime, as well, demonstrated a shocking lack of empathy for the victim. One of the police on the case, Inspector John Tedman—the same John Tedman, incidentally, who had witnessed Oxford’s odd behavior at the Shepherd and Flock—was from the start suspicious of the valet, noting Courvoisier’s self-centered reaction to the crime: “this is a shocking job; I shall lose my place and lose my character.” And then there was Courvoisier’s suspicious wealth: he had in his room a banknote and change amounting to six sovereigns; asked where he obtained the note, he claimed he got it in making change for his master. Most damning at all, a chisel had been found among Courvoisier’s possessions, and the chisel exactly fit marks left when the kitchen drawers had been forced.

  The police hoped that the murderer had not yet removed the stolen items from the house. The items actually stolen were few, and were small—larger items of far greater value in Russell’s room were, surprisingly, left alone. Besides the plate from which Russell had eaten the night of his death, and various items of cutlery, there were banknotes, coins, and rings taken from the fingers of the dead man. The police tore up floorboards and baseboards. On Friday, they made the discovery that led to Courvoisier’s arrest: behind the skirting-board in the butler’s pantry, a room that was for Courvoisier’s use alone, workmen found two banknotes—for £5 and £10—and much of Russell’s stolen jewelry. Courvoisier was held in his room under close observation until Sunday, when he was conveyed to Tothill Fields prison. After repeated examination of the crime at Bow Street, he was at the end of May committed to Newgate, to be tried at the Old Bailey on the 18th of June.