Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Fieschi was a republican conspirator who went to the guillotine with two others, all of them believing they would have brought down a king and a political system if one of their twenty-five bullets had found its mark. No sane person in Britain in the early 1840s—and certainly not Oxford, Francis, or Bean—believed the monarchy would collapse if the Queen died. Whatever motives the Queen’s assailants had, political fanaticism was not among them. This did not prevent partisan commentators from seeing the attempts as indirectly political, speculating that these boys were unwitting tools of the opposing political faction, imbibing from the newspapers of the other side a disrespect for the Queen that gave them license to shoot at her. The Whigs and the Chartists blamed the Tories; the Tories blamed the Chartists. The essayist and Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, always one to spy a cosmic significance in any human action, understood the three attempts to be symptoms of an inarticulate working-class discontent with their government, writing to his mother “Are not these strange times? The people are sick of their misgovernment, and the blackguards among them shoot at the poor Queen: as a man that wanted the steeple pulled down might at least fling a stone at the gilt weathercock.”

  But given what the public learned and was learning about these three boys, these political explanations were drowned out by a growing groundswell of opinion that the attempts had little to do with the Queen’s stature and everything to do with the boys’ own. Variations on a phrase first coined after Francis’s attempt became ubiquitous in press and public after Bean’s: they were all driven by a “morbid craving after notoriety.” And the law as it stood gave them that notoriety: a quick trip from the streets to Whitehall’s corridors of power and a widely reported examination by the great men of the Privy Council, while huge crowds gathered outside, hoping to catch just a glimpse of them; the newspapers scrambling to scoop one another with new details about their lives; a starring role in a state trial for High Treason, and, if it came to that, a glorious execution before thousands.

  With a growing awareness of the disease came a new certainty about the cure. These attempts would not stop until their perpetrators were degraded rather than elevated. The charge of High Treason only encouraged them; another charge would have to be created to deal with them. And the incentive of the scaffold had to go as well, to be replaced by a punishment that would appeal to their sense of shame rather than vainglory. Two days after Bean’s attempt, the Times led the charge for a new punishment for the miscreants. If “we would make up our minds to flog them in the sight of their companions, as heartily and as often as should be judged appropriate to the gravity of the offence, these coxcombs would leave off their villainous anglings for notoriety.” The Queen’s assailants were errant children; let them be treated as such.

  Robert Peel and his Home Secretary, James Graham, needed no persuading; they had already come to the same conclusion. John William Bean would not be charged with High Treason. On the day after Bean’s first Privy Council examination, Graham met with the two commissioners of the police and with George Maule, who as Treasury Solicitor was for the third time responsible for putting together a case for the prosecution against an assailant of the Queen. Bean, Graham made clear, would be charged not with High Treason but with common assault. It would mean that he would, if convicted, face a shorter sentence than Oxford and Francis. And while the government surely concurred with the writer for the Times and a host of other commentators that Bean deserved a good whipping, that was out of the question: the law for assault as it stood did not provide for corporal punishment. A new law would need to be created to humiliate the Queen’s assailants. That is the task that Robert Peel immediately took upon himself.

  On the next day—6 July—John Bean, discernibly sunk into a depressed torpor, was brought from Tothill Fields for a final examination before Peel and the Privy Council. It would be the last time any of Victoria’s assailants came before that body. He was charged with a misdemeanor and sent back to Tothill Fields for the night, to be brought to Newgate the next day to await trial. The lesser charge meant that Bean could return home if he could make bail—but that bail, two sureties of 250 pounds each, was far too much for his family to raise. Only a small crowd had assembled outside the Home Office to see him back to prison, and their “contempt and ridicule,” according to a reporter, “was quite enough to act as an effectual antidote against the morbid craving after notoriety to which alone such an insane attempt could be attributed.”

  Bean’s examination took place on the same day that John Francis, having tearfully taken leave of his family forever on Monday the fourth (the day of Cooper’s execution), was removed to Gosport outside Portsmouth and to the convict ship Marquis of Hastings. The two would-be regicides missed meeting in Newgate by one day.

  In less than a week, Peel had created his Act Providing for the Further Security and Protection of Her Majesty’s Person. On 12 July, as John William Bean in Newgate observed his eighteenth birthday, the Prime Minister submitted his bill to Commons. Peel had no intention of modifying existing laws of treason, he made clear: rather, he was introducing a new charge altogether to deal with what amounted to a new offense: not attempts to kill the Queen, but attempts to disturb her—and by disturbing her, to disturb the public peace. Any threatening of the Queen, with guns, explosives, or any projectile, was prosecutable as a High Misdemeanor. The charge skirted the nagging issue of both Oxford’s and Francis’s trials—whether the pistols were loaded or not—by making threatening the monarch with either loaded or unloaded weapons a prosecutable offense.* Offenders under the Act could be sentenced to as much as seven years’ transportation, or three years’ imprisonment at hard labor. Moreover, they could expect to face repeated humiliation by being “publicly or privately whipped, as often and in such Manner and Form as the said Court shall order and direct, not exceeding Thrice.”

  It was the promise of a good whipping for the next miscreant who dared assault the Queen that roused the entire House into enthusiastic cheering. Every single member was for this measure and was zealous to demonstrate his absolute loyalty to Victoria. “These are the offences of base and degraded beings,” Lord John Russell claimed in assenting to the measure. “It is right that a degrading species of punishment should be applied to them.” Daniel O’Connell agreed, holding that the Irish people in particular would be grateful for a law to “brand … with contemptuous execration” any future assailant.

  Only one member disturbed the spirit of unanimity. The next day, before the third reading of the Bill, Joseph Hume, radical member for Montrose, decided to use the occasion to contrast the Queen’s welfare with the welfare of her poorest subjects. Industrial distress and sheer hunger had only increased as the summer of 1842 progressed; spontaneous disturbances were erupting throughout the countryside north of London. Before Peel presented this bill, debate in Commons had been consumed with the issue of growing popular distress and discontent. And yet, Hume maintained—echoing the complaint of the Chartist petition—while the people’s sufferings increased, the Queen and her court lived in comfort: obscene comfort, by contrast. A civil expenditure of £325,000 was wasted on the “useless parade” of court life. “If anything could be more dissatisfactory to the great mass of the people than another,” Hume declaimed, “it was to see outside of the palace squalid poverty, misery, and wretchedness, in all their painful variety, and to behold with inside the palace nothing but extravagance, gorgeous grandeur, and expensive finery.” Peel, Hume insisted, should without hesitation recommend to the Queen to drop half of her “monstrous expenditure.” His speech could not have been more badly timed. Only one other member cheered him—and was berated for it, by a member who lambasted Hume for his obvious slight on the Queen. Peel joked that Hume must be mistaken about the nature of the motion before the House: this was a bill to protect the Queen, not an economic measure. Hume quickly realized his mistake. “There was no individual in that House who had more regard for the Sovereign than himself,” he said, chastened
, “or would be more happy to see her Majesty protected.” The bill passed without a dissenting vote. On Thursday and Friday, Wellington steered it unanimously through the Lords, and on Saturday Victoria gave the bill her royal assent. It was too late to apply the law to John William Bean. Peel wished instead to reach the would-be Beans or Francises or Oxfords contemplating their own turn at having a “pop” at the Queen. “Let it be known to the world,” Peel told an enthusiastic House, that “for these contemptible acts they shall receive the degrading punishment of personal chastisement.” If the prospect of death or transportation would not deter them, perhaps a healthy dose of shame would.

  In spite of the lesser charge, John William Bean was a celebrity in Newgate, visited by the Lord Mayor, the sheriffs, and a number of aldermen. He was placed in a cell near Reverend Carver, and was attended day and night by a turnkey who surely saw part of his task as guarding the unshakably melancholy boy from killing himself. His trial was set for 25 August—seven weeks, and a long time by Central Criminal Court standards—and he spent his time sadly and studiously poring over the religious material provided him: tracts, the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress. He repeated the same story to all his visitors: he never intended harm to the Queen, pointing his pistol at the ground and not her carriage; his only intention was to be arrested and free himself from his miserable freedom. He was tired of life.

  Outside Newgate, there was a great deal happening to distract public attention from the hunchbacked dwarf. The summer of 1842 saw the most widespread and sustained civil disturbance of the Queen’s long reign. To extend Thomas Carlyle’s analogy, if Francis and Bean were throwing stones at the gilt weathercocks, it seemed that the masses were attempting to tear the building down. Drastic reductions of wages, and industrial slowdowns, led to a rash of strikes and demonstrations, beginning in June in the collieries of Staffordshire, spreading throughout the Midlands and the North, and intensifying as June became July and July became August. The enlightened Luddism of the strikers—removing the plugs from industrial machines, draining their boilers, and thus disabling without destroying them—gave the disturbances a name: the Plug Plot Riots. By the second week in August, the disturbances reached a crescendo, as strikers and rioters refused to relent until the People’s Charter was law. Two policemen were killed in Manchester; two rioters were shot dead by soldiers in Preston. Parliament was prorogued on 12 August, but neither Prime Minister Peel nor Home Secretary Graham were allowed a moment’s respite: the next day, Peel called the Privy Council to meet and issue a royal proclamation warning all subjects to avoid any riotous meetings and disruptive acts, and the cabinet agreed to dispatch a battalion of troops north by train that evening. “I have not had a spare moment since the close of the session,” Graham wrote four days before Bean’s trial. “My time has been occupied with odious business arising from the mad insurrection of the working classes.…” Peel worked closely with Graham as the growing disorder began to threaten him personally. His country home in Drayton, Staffordshire, lay in a particularly disturbed area, and his wife readied their home for a siege, writing to him on 21 August “our arrangements were quickly and vigorously made and should have been equal to an attack from two or three hundred till assistance had come. But then we expected three or four thousand. I am confident, however, that no men actually attacking doors and windows here would have left this place alive.” A week before, Peel had been able to travel to Drayton for a couple days, only to be terrified by rumors that the violence had reached the Queen at Windsor: he got word that Victoria had been assassinated. He was not disabused of the rumor until the next train came through. He promptly ordered Graham to step up the Queen’s security.

  In the meantime, Victoria and Albert were planning a state visit to Scotland, the beginning of what would become a great love affair between the royal couple and that country. The prospect of royal travel during this summer of disruption—disruption in Scotland as well as England—did not please Peel, but he did acknowledge to Graham (on the day of Bean’s trial) that the Queen would face no more danger there than in England. To avoid traveling through the riotous north, the couple would go by sea on the yacht Royal George. In Edinburgh, expectation for the visit had “superseded all other topics of the day,” and in London the public scrambled to obtain choice seats on steamers to see the royal party escorted by the navy from Woolwich to the Channel.

  Not surprisingly, then, John William Bean’s trial on 25 August did not attract the crowds that Oxford’s or Francis’s had, and the Old Bailey was no busier than usual when Bean was placed in the dock. His head just cleared the bar, and so he could just see the three judges looking sternly upon him: Baron Abinger presiding, with Mr. Justice Williams and Baron Rolfe. Lord Abinger in his younger days (when he was James Scarlett) had been the most successful advocate in England, with a single-minded partisanship that won cases. His greatest strength as an attorney, however, became his greatest weakness as a judge. He was not to take Bean’s side.

  Bean was charged on four counts: the first, third, and fourth accused him of various forms of assault; the second accused him of attempting to fire a pistol with the intent of harassing and alarming the Queen and terrorizing her subjects. The prosecution team consisted of the same formidable five who had established Francis’s guilt two months before, led by Attorney General Pollock and Solicitor General Follett. Their strategy to prove Bean’s guilt was diametrically opposed to their strategy to prove Francis’s. To convict Francis of High Treason, they took great pains to convince the jury that he intended to kill Victoria, and that the contents of his pistol—even if they consisted only of wadding and powder—were lethal. This time, to establish the lesser charge of assault, they would attempt to demonstrate that the contents of the pistol were not lethal: that Bean intended to annoy and alarm the Queen and the public, not to kill her. Thus they ignored the curious bits of clay pipe that Inspector Martin found in the pistol, maintaining that only a minute amount of coarse gunpowder was in the pistol, with wadding—wadding that this time could not do the Queen serious harm. They brought forward witnesses—including the Dassett brothers and their uncle—to establish Bean’s actions on the Sunday, as well as his connection with the pistol, and his apprehension at home that night.

  In his cross-examinations, Bean’s defense attorney Sidney Calder Horry* attempted to present the incident as benign—a few minutes’ harmless amusement, with Charles Dassett playing the clown. “Was not there a good deal of laughing going on?” he asked Charles Dassett. “No,” Dassett replied. “The people did not laugh that I remember—some might have laughed, I cannot say—there was a great noise after it happened.…” Horry’s defense of Bean was two-pronged. First, in a breathtakingly risky maneuver, he argued that if Bean had indeed assaulted the Queen, he was chargeable with High Treason. And since he was not charged with that crime, he risked being tried a second time for the same offense, “contrary to all the principles of English law.” The first, third, and fourth counts (which accused Bean of assault) thus could not stand. As for the second count—harassing and alarming the Queen and the public: Horry held that Bean had harassed and alarmed no one. Only Charles Dassett had seen Bean present the pistol, and Charles Dassett was wrong; the defense had two witnesses to testify that Bean had never pointed the gun. Moreover, the Queen experienced no alarm, being completely unaware of Bean’s act, and the public were amused, certainly not alarmed, by the situation, their amusement strengthened by Charles Dassett’s clowning with the pistol: even the police on the scene had thought the whole thing a joke.

  The two witnesses Horry brought forward to contradict Das-sett’s testimony that Bean had presented his pistol at the Queen turned out to be of dubious value. The first, Henry Hawkes, testified that if anyone had presented a pistol, “it is probable I must have seen it,” but then admitted that he was unaware of the existence of either Bean or Dassett until after the carriages had passed and Dassett was heading across the Mall with Bean in tow. The second witness,
Thomas Vosper,* startled the court by claiming that he had stood behind Bean for at least fifteen minutes until the Queen approached, staring at the pistol Bean held by his side—but never lifted. Baron Abinger was mystified by this testimony, asking Vosper several times how he could have simply stood there while Bean waited with a gun for the Queen. Vosper only repeated the same answer: “I wanted to see the result.”