Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Lord DENMAN.—Do you consider that a medical man has more means of judging with respect to such a subject than other persons?

  Witness.—I do; because I think that medical men have better opportunities for judging with respect to the disease of insanity than others.

  Hodgkin’s testimony stood.

  Testifying immediately after Hodgkin, John Conolly—the only one of the doctors testifying who was renowned for his work with the insane—offered a diagnosis of Oxford which made clear his opinion that specialists have a superior ability to judge moral and mental aberration: “I am a physician to the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, and have at present 850 patients under my care, and I have considerable experience in disorders of the mind. I had some conversation with the prisoner at the bar, and, in my opinion, he is a person of unsound mind.” Neither the prosecution nor the bench, in their questions to him, suggested any reservations about his authority.

  Dr. Chowne, next to testify, further created precedent for the physician’s authority by combining the specific knowledge of the case exhibited by Conolly with the technical knowledge of mental illness shown by Hodgkin. The facts of the crime convinced Chowne that Oxford was insane, and his short interview with the boy confirmed him in his opinion. He diagnosed a “lesion of the will,” or moral insanity, combined with imbecility. According to Chowne, lesion of the will is often a partial insanity, in the sense that sufferers can “perform the duties of life with accuracy.” He thus challenged Campbell’s claim that an insanity defense depended upon proof of complete derangement.

  Oxford family doctor James Fernandez Clarke was the defense’s last witness. He had nothing to say about lesion of the will; Oxford, he claimed, based upon his longstanding experience with the family, was an imbecile, the son of an unsound father. Oxford’s madness manifested itself most apparently in his “involuntary laughter, which is seldom found in sane persons,” and, as is typical of hereditary insanity, “which breaks out in open acts of violence and disease generally exhibits itself at the period of puberty, between fourteen and twenty years of age, according to the French writer Esquirol.”

  The prosecution sought to chip away at the claims of the defense witnesses, attempting to establish that Oxford’s grandfather and father were not as demented as Taylor and Bodkin tried to make them out to be, that Oxford had occupied a number of positions of responsibility, and that no one had ever as much as considered restraining or committing him for insanity. Solicitor General Sir Thomas Wilde, summing up the prosecution’s case, reiterated these claims, and attempted again to define insanity in a case of High Treason as entailing total derangement—something that Oxford simply did not suffer. Indeed, Wilde alone argued that Oxford was actually quite intelligent. Oxford was not at all insane, according to Wilde—he was driven instead by the quite rational desire to be someone: to attain notoriety. His actions culminating in the shooting demonstrated a concerted and clever effort to attain that desire. Considered in this light, the Young England papers demonstrate not Oxford’s delusion, but the products of his canny and methodical plot to delude the nation: “There was nothing of imbecility about them; they were written probably, he might say certainly, to produce deception, not that the writer himself was deceived, but that he wished to deceive others.”

  Wilde questioned the doctors’ conclusions, claiming that the grounds for their pronouncements that the boy was insane were thin, based on a hasty examination which gave them nothing that allowed them a solid conclusion of insanity. The doctors, he claimed—quite correctly, at least in the cases of Clarke and Conolly—“went to Newgate with minds prepared to see a madman, with the previous statements of the prisoner’s mother and friends incorporated in their minds, and racking their brains to find some rash or inconsistent act in the prisoner’s conduct during a period of eighteen years.” Significantly, however, Wilde did not question the doctors’ sense of special expertise in testifying directly upon Oxford’s mental state.

  After Wilde spoke, Lord Chief Justice Denman instructed the jury, emphatically reiterating Sydney Taylor’s point about the specific sequence of decisions they had to make: first, decide whether the pistols were loaded—and then, only if they were, decide whether Oxford was responsible for his actions: “These questions,” he told the jury, “are perfectly separate in themselves.” In speaking of the testimony of the doctors, he made it clear that the expert medical witness occupied a legitimate place in English jurisprudence. Dr. Conolly, he said, “a gentleman who it must be presumed was familiar with the treatment in cases of insanity, and must be an extremely good judge, has given his opinion, and the jury would give that weight they think due to it.” He similarly commended the testimony of Chowne and Clarke.

  When he finished, it was evening: Oxford had endured two days of depressing testimony from both sides. As far as his drive for notoriety went, he must have realized that no matter what the verdict, he had lost: after this trial, if he were to be remembered at all, it would be as a pitiful, unsound potboy. A sentence of death might redeem him somewhat. But he was terrified at the prospect of a guilty verdict and Courvoisier’s fate. He nervously turned to Governor Cope, who stood beside the dock, watching over him, and said, of the jury, “they are against me, all of them … I didn’t like that Solicitor General’s speech at all; he pitched it very strong against me, and I think they’ll hang me.”

  The jury retired, and in their deliberations obviously made little attempt to separate the two major questions of the trial. When an hour later they returned to the court, their verdict was a hopeless muddle: “We find the prisoner, Edward Oxford, guilty of discharging the contents of the two pistols, but whether or not they were loaded with ball has not been satisfactorily proved to us, he being of unsound state of mind at the time.”

  There was an immediate uproar. Attorney General Campbell recognized immediately that the jury had in essence acquitted Oxford twice—by not actually committing the crime, and by reason of insanity; it was very much in the government’s interest to have Oxford adjudged acquitted for the second reason. He therefore jumped up “with prompt dexterity” and shouted that as the jury had declared Oxford insane, he was subject to the provisions of the Safe Custody of Insane Persons Act*—passed after the Hadfield trial, and responsible for Hadfield’s forty years’ confinement. Oxford was, in other words, to be detained at the Queen’s pleasure.

  Taylor objected to this. The jury had clearly decided that reasonable doubt existed that the guns were loaded; therefore, Oxford was acquitted outright—on lack of evidence, not because of insanity—and was a free man.

  But, Campbell rejoined, Oxford was found guilty of discharging his pistols, and that, compounded with his insanity, was enough for the government to detain him.

  This Taylor “strenuously denied.” The indictment clearly held that Oxford had fired “leaden bullets.” The jury declared that this fact was not proved. Oxford was therefore free.

  Not quite, claimed Campbell. The jury showed confusion about the first part of the verdict; but they were perfectly clear about the second: Oxford was insane. Moreover, the jury had been called upon to answer two questions, and surely their answer to the second was germane to the sentence.

  Taylor angrily accused Campbell of rewording an act of Parliament in order to suit the purposes of the Crown. The jury had not found Oxford guilty of any offense, “and in a prosecution of this kind, where the prisoner’s life was at stake, it was not fitting on the part of the Attorney-general to stand up and endeavour to visit the prisoner with perpetual imprisonment when the jury found him not guilty.”

  At this point, Taylor and Bodkin were the ones legally on solid ground: no matter what else the jury claimed, it was clear that they were not convinced that Oxford’s guns had been loaded. Dr. Clarke, commenting on the trial, considered that if Taylor had pressed the issue, he could have won a full acquittal for his client. But, claimed Clarke, Taylor was a sick man, and, at this crucial moment of the trial, lacked the stamina to defe
nd Oxford adequately.*

  Chief Justice Denman intervened. “The jury,” he said, “were in a mistake.” They had muddled the verdict: they did not state clearly whether the guns were loaded at the time of the crime. Apparently Denman made a liberal interpretation of the very first part of the jury’s verdict, seeing in the fact that Oxford “was guilty of discharging the contents of two pistols” the conclusion that he had fired bullets, a conclusion contradicted by the subsequent words of the verdict. They hadn’t made up their minds, and the only thing to be done was for the jury to return to deliberation and decide that point.

  But they had made up their minds. They could not say whether Oxford fired ammunition, claimed the jury’s foreman, “because there was no satisfactory evidence produced before them to show that the pistols were loaded with bullets.”

  A spirited discussion followed, the specifics of which are lost to history because not one of the stenographers in court (and there were several) recorded it. One imagines Taylor and Bodkin passionately arguing that the jury could not say with certainty that the guns were loaded—a clear verdict of “not guilty” in an English courtroom; Campbell and Wilde, equally strenuously noting that the jury had made its verdict of insanity clear; and Denman and the other justices maintaining that the jury simply had not returned a clear verdict, and therefore needed to go back and get it right. In the end, of course, the justices prevailed, and the jury again left the courtroom.

  In their absence, the defense, the prosecution, and the bench argued about what would happen to Oxford if the jury acquitted him on the evidence, as it seemed to be doing. Campbell thought the prospect “monstrous” that Oxford might be “let loose upon society to endanger the life of Her Majesty or her subjects,” and asked that Oxford’s insanity be taken into consideration regardless of the rest of the verdict; he wanted, in other words, the state to have power over him even if he didn’t actually shoot bullets at the Queen. Taylor and Bodkin were of course dead set against this, and found support from all three justices, Baron Alderson pointing out the obvious flaw to Campbell’s argument—“The construction you contend for would lead to this, that if a man were charged with an offence, and the jury thought that no offence had been committed at all, yet he must be handed over to the mercy of the Crown perhaps for his life.” Campbell persevered: “If no evidence of insanity had been given, then the prisoner would have been entitled to his discharge; but if a prisoner sets up the defence of insanity he does it at the peril of the finding of the jury.” In other words, Taylor and Bodkin had indeed argued their case too well: their case for insanity was too successful to be ignored.

  The jury returned after an hour with a verdict at least as muddled as their first one: “Guilty, he being at the time insane.” But by law no one could be simultaneously found insane and guilty of a crime. This time, however, the judges did not send the jury back, but asked them to revise their verdict on the spot:

  Mr. Baron ALDERSON.—Then, you find the prisoner guilty but for his insanity.

  The Foreman.—We do, my Lord.

  Lord DENMAN.—The Court asked you this question—“Do you acquit the prisoner on the ground of insanity?

  The Foreman.—Yes, my Lord, that is our intention.

  Lord DENMAN.—Then the verdict will stand thus—“Not guilty on the ground of insanity.”

  By this verdict, Oxford was liable to a lifetime of confinement. Campbell quickly proclaimed that Oxford should “be confined in strict custody during Her Majesty’s pleasure.” Lord Denman agreed—“That is a matter of course.” Taylor and Bodkin said nothing.

  As his fate was being decided—and relieved of any fear of execution—Oxford returned to a state of complacent vacancy. He likely did not care whether he was freed or sent to Bethlem. But he was very likely unaware of one detail of the Safe Custody of Insane Persons Act: it made no provision whatsoever for a release in the event of a cure. Oxford was to be held at the Queen’s pleasure, and if all the mad-doctors in the world were to claim the boy perfectly sane, it just might please the Queen and her government to keep him confined—forever. Time, Oxford was soon to discover, had become his enemy.

  * Nicholson spent 42 years in Bethlem, first in its Moorfield location, where she was a star attraction when Bethlem was itself a major tourist destination, and then, more secluded, in the women’s criminal wing of the Southwark location. She died on 14 May 1828 (Andrews et al. 390-91;Eigen).

  * 40 Geo. 3. c. 94.

  * Clarke says nothing about Bodkin’s efforts, and indeed seems to have forgotten Bodkin’s existence in the trial.

  seven

  BEDLAM

  Oxford remained in custody at Newgate for a week, until an order arrived from the Home Office for his transfer to Bethlem. Now that the threat of death was removed, he was visibly more cheerful. Keeping watch over him now was a single jailer, who had been released from the order to limit his conversation; both he and Oxford lost their reserve, and talked. Oxford’s mother, his sister, and his uncles Edward and Charles visited him, and he now spoke at length about his attempt, regaling his hearers with the details of the shooting as if it were a great adventure story, a bravo’s exploit.

  On 18 July, Governor Cope received the order from the Home Office for an immediate transfer. He personally went to Oxford’s cell and told him to get ready; the two would go to Bethlem together. Oxford “did not betray the slightest emotion” upon hearing that the time had come, apparently accepting the possibility of a lifetime of confinement at the asylum, even if he hadn’t accepted the possibility of his own insanity.

  Cope and Oxford climbed into a hackney-coach for the trip south of the Thames. The coach traveled toward Ludgate Hill, away from the looming walls of Newgate, and then down to the Thames on Bridge Street, and over Blackfriars Bridge, leaving behind the London of the Queen—of Whitehall and St. James, Buckingham Palace and the expansive parks—as Oxford returned to the neighborhoods of his childhood: gritty Southwark and Lambeth. He would never again cross the river. As he passed down bustling Blackfriars Road, if he wasn’t too absorbed in friendly chatter with Governor Cope, he might have noticed in passing Hayes’s general goods store, where he had bought his “Brummagem” pistols. (The pistols were now the property of the state. Albert would show them to the Queen, and for decades it was thought that one of them ended up in Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum.*) The coach continued to St. George’s Fields, past the ornate charitable institutions there, and down Lambeth Road. If Oxford had any sense of nostalgia about the few last weeks he spent with his family, he very likely craned his neck there, looking back as the coach passed St. George’s Road; he could just catch a glimpse of West Square. The carriage then pulled up before Bethlem.

  Governor and prisoner ascended the stairs and passed the tall Ionic columns of the portico, topped by a small cupola. (The distinctive towering dome of the hospital, still visible today in the truncated building’s present incarnation as the Imperial War Museum, was added four years after this.) Inside, Cope relinquished authority over Oxford to those at the hospital. No record was made of his admittance, but certainly he was examined as to the nature of his illness, and then likely bathed. Though during his trial the medical witnesses had diagnosed Oxford with everything from congenital imbecility to “moral insanity” and “lesion of the will,” the doctor at Bethlem very likely concluded none of these things, but rather concluded he was about to send a sane man into indefinite confinement in the male criminal lunatics’ wing. A medical record from 1864 when Oxford was transferred from Bethlem to Broadmoor notes that the medical staff “had always considered him sane.”

  Oxford was taken into the wards, escorted down a long corridor to the right—the male patients’ wing—and further escorted down another corridor, a darker one, in which signs of confinement—cells and heavily barred windows—were much more evident: he was now in the ward for male criminal lunatics. He was shown his cell. He would be locked in there at eight o’clock every night, until eight the next
morning. He would spend the coming years largely cut off from the outside world. Visitation with relatives was allowed once a month, and his mother could only see him behind bars, several yards away from her, so far away she could hardly hear him. And for the first years of his confinement, he was prohibited from reading newspapers. Oxford’s social world, then, was almost entirely restricted to his fellow lunatics, and during the day, he could interact with them as much as he liked. For a time, he chose not to, at all: Sir Peter Laurie, an alderman as well as a governor of Bethlem, informed his mother that he had a “repugnance to mingle” with them and refused to leave his room. Later accounts of his commitment, however, note his gregariousness. One other inmate was notorious for his aloofness, one who had no friends, and “could not be prevailed upon for some years to walk about with or join the other patients”: an old man with a very discernible wound to the head. James Hadfield, whose own shooting resulted in the Act of Parliament that led to Oxford’s own indefinite detainment at Bethlem, was now sixty-eight or sixty-nine years old. He had, according to a witness seventeen years before, long since stopped showing any symptoms of insanity. He was sick with tuberculosis, and he was desperately tired of his confinement for the last forty years at the pleasure of three kings and a queen: “the loss of liberty,” he claimed, “was worse than death.”