The mob now had at its gravitational center a confused boy with a gun—his gun, obviously. Bean was quickly forgotten and the crowd turned on Dassett as the Queen’s assailant. Partridge forced his way to the center of the now-ugly mass, saw the boy with the gun outside the Chapel, and drew the obvious conclusion. Dassett attempted to explain, but Partridge dismissed Dassett’s story of the hunchbacked dwarf as “shamming,” relieved him of the pistol (which he wisely slipped into his pocket) and took the boy into custody.
While John William Bean escaped, then, a noisy mass proceeded up the Mall, across the Horse Guards Parade outside Whitehall, and to Gardiner Street station: Partridge (joined by Inspector George Martin, who took custody of the pistol), Charles Dassett, his brother and his uncle, and at least six hundred of the Queen’s loyal subjects,* heaping angry execrations upon the perplexed sixteen-year-old.
Robert Peel was out of town on this day, at the estate of his Secretary of War, Henry Hardinge. Home Secretary James Graham, who had learned from Commissioner Rowan of the attempt within minutes of Bean’s arrival at the station, headed the government examination of the incident. After the experience of the two previous attempts on the Queen, Graham like Peel was convinced that the elevated process of a Privy Council examination served if anything as an incentive to miscreants like Oxford, Francis, and Bean. But Bean’s attempt on the Queen could still be construed as High Treason, and therefore Graham summoned the Privy Council (or at least what there was of it in or near town on this summer Sunday) at 4:30 that afternoon. In the intervening hours, the station house was again besieged by the curious and the concerned. One of the first there was Daniel O’Connell, who, though he led the charge in 1842 to repeal the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain, was second to none in demonstrations of personal loyalty to the Queen. Inside the station, meanwhile, a clearer sense of what had happened on the Mall emerged. A number of witnesses—the Dassetts, their uncle John Janes, and several who had seen Charles Dassett seize Bean, as well as the embarrassed constables Hearn and Claxton—convinced the police that Dassett’s tale of a hunchbacked dwarf was not an invention, and that the true perpetrator was at large. By the time that the Council examined witnesses, then, Charles Edward Dassett had become the hero of the day; Graham personally complimented him after his testimony for his meritorious behavior. Hearn and Claxton, on the other hand, were severely reprimanded, and told to consider themselves suspended. (Within a day, they were to be dismissed from the force.)
The inquiry concluded at 8:00, to be resumed upon the capture of the assailant. By this time, the police—suffering yet another public embarrassment, thanks to Hearn and Claxton—were eager to find the culprit quickly. In this, they were assisted greatly by Bean’s unusual appearance: a hunchback should be easy to find. A Division quickly broadcast to all the station houses in the metropolis by route paper a description to be read to all officers before they began their shifts, one that more accurately caught Bean’s spinal deformity than his limited height:
A Station, Gardener’s Lane, Sunday, July 3, Quarter-past 6 P.M.
Description of a boy who presented a pistol at the Queen’s carriage in the mall of St. James’s park this morning.
He is about 16 or 18 years of age, five feet six inches high, thin made, short neck, and humped back, walks a little on one side, long sickly pale face, light hair, and dressed in a very long surtout coat, of a dark brown or dark colour, which appeared much too large for him, a dark cloth cap, his nose marked with a scar or a black patch, and he has altogether a dirty appearance.
The police will make every exertion to apprehend this boy, and convey him immediately to this station.
William Haining, Inspector.
The description led to one of the most ludicrous episodes in the history of police profiling. Suddenly, it was open season on London’s hunchbacks. Constables fanned out across their districts and hauled into their station houses every person who remotely matched the route-paper description, zealously competing with one another for the coup of bringing in the Queen’s assailant. One of the first to be taken was a cabman in Somers Town, whom somebody someplace remembered had been outspoken in his admiration for John Francis. This young cabman, a hunchback with a splotch on his face, and the oddly near-familiar name of John Oxman,* was tricked by an officer of S Division to come to that station house; a reporter there who had never seen the suspect but had heard witness descriptions of him identified the “exceedingly agitated and flushed” boy as the assailant. Oxman was bundled off to A Division early enough so that some newspapers the next day were able to report the certain capture of the assailant. At Smithfield, an inspector was particularly enthusiastic, rounding up two brothers with severe spinal deformity, and then an entire afflicted family. In another instance, a hunchbacked man was walking down the road dividing E and F Divisions, when he was spotted simultaneously by two officers on either side of the street; both rushed to grab him, each crying that he had seen the man first. They finally negotiated a settlement, together hauling the man to A Division station house, where he was quickly let go. Scores, at least, of hunchbacks spent that Sunday evening in a police cell. The Illustrated London News noted that “during the twelve hours for which the majesty of British justice was distanced by that crooked piece of malignity … the number of little deformed men ‘detained,’ to use a mild phrase, was astonishing. Before one station-house, a whole regiment of these unfortunate individuals was paraded.” Punch caught the absurdity of the moment with a cartoon depicting a parade of stalwart policemen collaring in both hands a scowling set of hunchbacked dwarves, among them a sorry-looking Punch himself.
It was G Division in Clerkenwell, and Thomas Cooper’s nemesis Inspector Penny, who took the prize. When Penny read the route paper to officers just beginning evening duty, one of them, P.C. Henry Webb, lingered after muster and reminded Penny that the description in the route paper matched the description a distraught John William Bean Senior had given the police nearly three weeks before of his son. Penny then sent Webb to 14 St. James’s buildings, Rosamon Street, to find out whether Bean’s parents had heard any news of the runaway. At ten that evening, Webb knocked on the Beans’ door; John Bean Junior, to his surprise, opened the door himself. His state of undress, in Victorian terms—no coat, waistcoat, or cap—suggested he had settled back in some time before. Webb asked him where his father and mother were; he did not know, he said—father might be at the public house. Webb duped Bean into putting on coat and cap and following him, either by asking his help in finding his father, or in telling him he had to come to the station house because he had run away. When Webb touched Bean’s shoulder, he realized the boy was trembling uncontrollably. As they left the house, Bean’s alarmed mother, Sally, came upon them. Webb allayed her fears by telling her that he was taking her son to the station for a dressing-down by the magistrate for running away from home; a little scare might have a beneficial effect upon the boy’s future conduct.
At the station, Bean was questioned by Inspector Penny. Why had he returned home so suspiciously soon after the attempt? He was driven home by hunger, he replied. Penny, convinced that Bean was the assailant, shipped him with Officer Webb in a cab to Gardiner Street. They arrived at midnight. Bean’s doppelganger, John Oxman, was still in custody: the resemblance between the two was striking. The Dassetts had to be called in to exonerate Oxman and identify Bean as the one who assaulted the Queen. Charles Dassett and Webb then had the honor of signing the sheet charging Bean with “attempting to shoot at Her Majesty on the Mall in St. James’s Park.” With an officer to accompany him, then, Bean was placed for the night in the same cell and same bed in which Oxford and Francis had slept.
He awoke Tuesday morning, 4 July, a few minutes after eight, thinking not of his own sorry plight, but of the sorrier one of the neighbor he had seen two or three times around Clerkenwell. “I suppose Cooper is hanging now,” he said to his jailer. He was right: William Calcraft had pulled the drop on Thomas
Cooper minutes before. Cooper’s sullen passivity about his fate had vanished two days before the end, and he quaked as he walked to his death. The last days he had spent in relative privacy, largely freed from the sense of being a public spectacle that his predecessor at the noose, Daniel Good, had endured. The overattended and overexcited last sermon for Good had drawn criticism in both houses of Parliament, so the Court of Aldermen, who had charge of Newgate procedures, had decided to bar outsiders from both Cooper’s condemned sermon and his procession to the scaffold. Few inside Newgate, then, were able to witness the helplessness Cooper suffered on the morning of the execution. The poison he had taken on the day of the crime, two months before, had by now paralyzed his hands as well as his feet. Jailers had to dress him; one had to hold a teacup to his lips so that he could drink. His end was quick: he seemed unconscious of the crowd that yelled and groaned at him as he emerged from Newgate, and within a minute he was up the scaffold, hooded and launched, dying, it seems, without pain.
An hour later, while yards away inside Newgate prison John Francis awaited his transportation—and while across town at Gardiner Street John William Bean ate his hearty breakfast—Cooper was cut down, to be buried with Courvoisier and Good inside the prison. At eleven that morning, Bean heard from his cell the patter of one of the many broadsheet sellers hawking the (fictitious) last speech and dying declaration of Thomas Cooper. “So then,” Bean observed, “they have hanged Cooper.”
Just before two that afternoon, to avoid the curious crowds outside the Home Office, Bean was run at a trot within a phalanx of A Division officers through side streets and into a side entrance of Whitehall for his Privy Council examination. Attendance at this examination was fuller and more formidable than the day before: Peel had returned, and a number of members of the government, including the Duke of Wellington, had been recalled from Cambridge, where the Duke of Northumberland was being installed as Chancellor. While both Oxford and Francis had displayed arrogant cockiness during their Privy Council examinations, their exhilaration yet untempered by the dispiriting experience of prison life, Bean came before his august examiners already defeated: he collapsed with agitation on entering the room; after that, he could only watch his accusers sullenly and silently as they connected him with the pistol and positively identified him as the Queen’s assailant. Within two hours, Bean was remanded to Tothill Fields Bridewell, to be brought back two days later to the Home Office to be charged. Peel had consulted with his Home Secretary before the examination, and both absolutely refused to grant Bean the elevated charge of High Treason—which both were now certain was a positive incentive to imitators. They needed some time to decide exactly what to do with the boy. Newgate would have to wait.
He was thus bundled off in a cab with Inspector Hughes to the Bridewell. On the way out, he helpfully told Inspector Martin where he had bought the gun; that evening, Martin, accompanied by Bean’s father, confirmed the sale from Mr. Bird. At Tothill Fields, Hughes placed him in the charge of Governor Tracy. He was stripped and bathed, a process open to reporters, who the next day shared with the world the intimate details of the hunchbacked dwarf’s twisted body.
While the crowds on the Mall erupted into confusion and hostility, the Queen, Albert, and Leopold heard the service in the Chapel Royal in peace, learning about the attempt only when they returned to the Palace. Victoria was not alarmed or even surprised, writing in her journal “Odd enough to say, only two days ago I remarked to Albert, I felt sure an attempt on us would be shortly repeated.” She had basis for this presentiment. She was now certain that the law as it stood would only encourage more attacks. Any desperate and overambitious boy in the kingdom might now attain with a cheap pistol an instant worldwide notoriety granted by the elevated charge of High Treason. Her Prime Minister, she knew, agreed with her. Peel had rushed to London from Kent upon hearing of the attempt, arriving late Sunday night. Early Monday afternoon, he visited Buckingham Palace before Bean’s Privy Council examination to consult with Albert about the steps to be taken in the wake of the assault. During this conversation, the Queen entered the room. Peel—according to Albert’s first biographer “in public so cold and self-commanding, in reality so full of genuine feeling”—burst into tears. It was a cathartic moment for both Queen and Prime Minister: any sense of a chill between them—a chill that had, three years before, led to a constitutional crisis—was gone, and gone forever.
The public as usual responded to the Queen’s preservation with jubilation. Once again, the very thought of losing this monarch drove home to everyone the unprecedented emotional bond between the people and their queen, a bond that seemed to grow stronger with each attempt. “The Queen and People,” a commentator in the Spectator declared after the attempt, “were drawn into more intimate communion. Compassion for the woman—young, a mother, present to the view in all the most engaging relations of life—thus exposed to senseless perils, from which no general loyalty, no guards, and scarcely any precautions might be able to shield her … all these considerations prompted a display of popular feeling that had a deeper seat than mere ‘loyalty’ or attachment to the office of the Sovereign.”
On Sunday and on Monday, crowds of Londoners of every social stripe flocked to the Palace, expecting the usual impromptu royal celebration in the parks. This time, however, Victoria disappointed her public. Her staying in on Sunday could hardly be a surprise, given her earlier excursion to the Chapel Royal. On Monday, however, all of London, it seemed, were certain she would come out: thousands filled Hyde Park, and thousands more gathered before and around the Palace and lined Constitution Hill. While they waited, Victoria and Albert walked privately behind the walls of the palace gardens. Many conjectured about her absence. One rumor held that her ministers commanded her to remain while they gathered more information. But Francis’s attempts had made clear that Victoria’s ministers did not have that power over her; besides, Bean had already been captured and presented no threat to her. Another rumor was that the Queen was “deeply affected” by the news of the attempt. Perhaps. But Victoria had shown before that she simply refused to give in to that fear. While it is true she did not ride this Monday, the Duchess of Kent did, accompanied by her brother Leopold and his wife. Even more tellingly, Victoria and Albert allowed the 1½-year-old Princess Royal and the 8-month-old Prince of Wales to take an airing in the parks in an open carriage with Lady Lyttelton. The royal couple’s restraint was much more likely rational than emotional, borne of concern that any attention given to the attacks might encourage copycat assailants—as Francis’s attempt, it seemed, only encouraged Bean’s. Whatever the reason, the royal couple remained at Buckingham Palace while outside it the public thronged until late Monday evening, when carriages arriving for a royal dinner party finally convinced the crowd that the Queen would not be coming out, and they dispersed.
The newspapers and the public excoriated young John Bean, finding in his physical deformity evidence of moral ugliness. He was a “deformed, decrepit, miserable looking dwarf,” “that crooked piece of malignity,” a “hunchbacked little miscreant,” and a “miserable and contemptible-looking wretch.” In a letter to his father, Prince Albert referred to him as a “hunchbacked wretch,” Home Secretary Graham described him as “an hump-backed boy of an idiotic appearance,” and Peel told the Queen that Bean was “the most miserable object he ever saw.”
But while Bean might be unique, his crime was not: three young men had now assailed the Queen, and it would seem that the evidence of three attempts should provide ample material to discern some sense of a motivation. Some commentators remained as baffled as ever. The Morning Chronicle held that “these repeated attempts on the life of our beloved Sovereign are utterly incomprehensible. We do not know what to make of this union of itiotcy [sic], depravity, and crime. Intelligible motive there is none.” Others, however, began to make connections.
Victoria had not been alone these last few years in facing would–be assassins. Across the channel, Loui
s-Philippe, the Citizen King of France, had already faced five attempts since coming to the throne after the revolution of 1830, and would face two more before his deposition in the revolution of 1848. Immediately after Bean’s attempt, one French newspaper deplored that “the savage and impotent monomania, which has emigrated from France to England, is one of the gravest symptoms of the profound disorders which agitated modern societies.” Elizabeth Barrett, writing to a friend, noted the connection as well, but was perplexed as to cause or cure: “What is this strange mania of queen-shooting? What is the motive? & what end? In the meanwhile the despots of the earth sit safe … & nobody thinks of even smoking a tobacco pipe at them, much less of shooting it. It is only citizen Kings, & liberal queens that their people address themselves to shooting. I am very angry—angry & sorry & ashamed.”
The comparison between Victoria’s assailants and Louis-Philippe’s, however, only went so far. Men, not boys, shot at Louis-Philippe. While all of them, it seems, were, like Oxford, Francis, and Bean, tormented by their own inner demons, they all—unlike those three—were avowedly political, either active in the republican movement that thrived throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign, or politically driven lone wolves. There was no question whatsoever that their weapons were loaded, and that they shot to kill, expecting to effect a revolution with a bullet. Many in France believed that the French monarchy would disappear if Louis-Philippe died. The King’s most recent assailant, Marius Darmés, might have best articulated the ideological fanaticism of Louis-Philippe’s assailants (mixed in his case with more than a soupçon of madness). “If I had killed the tyrant,” he maintained after his attempt in 1840, “we would have conquered the universe and all the despots.” The King’s third assailant, Louis Alibaud, went to his execution in 1836 crying “I die for Liberty!” He meant it. Victoria never was to experience anything like the terror and carnage caused by Louis-Philippe’s second would-be assassin,* Giuseppe Fieschi, who on 28 July 1835 unleashed his “infernal machine” on Louis-Philippe as the King was riding through Paris to review the National Guard. The hail of bullets from this primitive machine-gun—twenty-five loaded gun barrels on a wooden frame—instantly created “a void around the King,” killing eighteen, seriously wounding twenty-two, and blowing half of Fieschi’s own face off. Remarkably, the King and his sons were able to escape this bloodbath safely, the King proving himself Victoria’s equal for courage under fire, continuing along the route and reviewing the troops at the Place Vendôme as scheduled.
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