At times he would break off from his marching and act out pantomimes of fear and estrangement: abruptly stopping in his tracks, gazing about him, and then, as if suddenly aware he was being watched, running off as fast as he could. At other times—on those days when the Queen took an airing in a carriage and four in the parks—he would grovel with an exaggerated obeisance. “I meet him often in the parks,” Victoria would later tell her Prime Minster, John Russell, “and he makes a point of bowing more frequently and lower to me than any one else.”
Most would pretend not to see him. Husbands would caution their wives not to draw his attention, for fear of violent consequences. Those few that acknowledged him earned from him an angry glare and a spasmodic shake of his stick.
For years, obsessive and eccentric routine was essential to Robert Pate’s being. Not long after he first moved to London, he began to follow another ritual, which he followed without fail for a year and a half. When the clock in the nearby tower of St. James’s Palace chimed quarter past three, Pate stopped whatever he was doing to take up two piles of coins that his manservant had carefully laid out on the mantel. In the first pile were nine shillings, each queen’s head up and each one turned so that every queen gazed in exactly the same direction. In the second pile were a sixpence and an older, larger penny: his servant was well aware that a newer, smaller penny, or two halfpence, would never do. Carefully pocketing these coins, Pate stepped outside to meet the same cabman and climb into the same cab, which set off southeastward, through the town, across the Thames at Putney Bridge, to Putney Heath. There, at exactly the same spot, Pate would descend from the cab, jump over a ditch, and disappear through thick gorse bushes. The cabman would drive to a spot further up the road, from where he could see Pate standing still and staring into a pond. Inevitably, Pate would start up and dash madly back to the cab, often dripping wet. He would shout conflicting commands to the driver: gallop quickly!—slow down to a walking pace!—as they made their way two miles northwest up Roehampton Lane to Barnes Common. The cabman, mystified by his daily customer, would spy on Pate through the trap at his feet, and would see him either in catatonic stupor or in frantic motion: hurling his body from one wall of the cab to the other or leaning out the front of the cab, slashing his cane in a frenzy from side to side. “I did not know what performance it was,” the cabman would later testify. “He seemed to be thoughtless, or something of that kind. I suppose some sudden thought caused him to jump and start, as if he did not know what he was about.” Passers-by would stop the cabman to ask about the strange man inside: was he mad? The cabman certainly thought so. As deeply alarmed as he was by Pate’s mysterious behavior, however, he did nothing to stop it: as far as he was concerned, the steady income was well worth the bother. At Barnes Common, Pate would again leap out and shun every path, plunging instead into the deepest undergrowth. When he had finished whatever he was doing there, he would return to the cab and be driven back to St. James via Hammersmith Bridge. The sixpence and penny were for tolls at the bridges; the nine shillings were for the cabman—always given to him, he noticed, with Victoria’s heads upward, all gazing toward the same point.
After thus providing this cabman with employment every single day from November 1847 to the summer of 1849, Pate abruptly dispensed with his services. One day the cabman arrived to pick him up and met his manservant instead. “Mr. Pate did not want me,” he was told, “and if he wanted me he would send for me.” Pate never did. Perhaps the expense had become too great. Perhaps Pate aimed to march among higher society: London’s elite, after all, did not go to see and be seen on Putney Heath and Barnes Common. To be among that elite—to come in contact with the Queen herself—he would have to change his route; and so, for the next few months, he brought his obsessions to the parks of Westminster.
In a way, Robert Pate was in his element walking in fashionable London. He was the son of an immensely wealthy and self-made man who had groomed his son to take his place among the upper crust. His father, Robert Francis Pate Senior, made his fortune as a corn factor, or grain dealer, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire—the breadbasket of England—during those heady days for corn factors when the Corn Laws guaranteed high prices. Growing social recognition accompanied Pate’s growing wealth. In 1847 he reached his social zenith, appointed by the Queen and her Privy Council High Sheriff of the counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon. It was an appointment that brought him face to face with Victoria and Albert on a memorable, brilliantly hot and sunny day, 5 July 1847, when Pate Senior looked on as Albert was installed as Chancellor of Cambridge University.
The Chancellorship of Cambridge was a position to which Albert was excellently suited—a position that gave him both public recognition and the opportunity to apply his considerable administrative talents. (He never accepted that the position was supposed to be a ceremonial one.) He accepted nomination eagerly, provided the invitation was “the unanimous desire of the University.” He soon found out that it was not. A rival, the Second Earl of Powis, had been proposed, and refused to drop out. Albert thus was in the unusual and uncomfortable position of running for election to the position. He consulted Sir Robert Peel—now out of office, but still Albert’s closest political confidant—about withdrawing. Peel persuaded him to stay in. He did, refraining completely from campaigning. He won—but it was close: close enough so that he consulted Peel again, about refusing the office. Peel encouraged him to take it. By July 1847, two months later, when Victoria and Albert traveled to Cambridge for his installation, the sour taste of politicking had passed. Cambridge welcomed the two deliriously. Victoria—never happier than when Albert’s virtues and talents were recognized by a larger audience—fought breaking into a smile of mingled joy and embarrassment at the “almost absurd” position she found herself in when Albert, speaking for the university, welcomed her. She replied, assuring the university “of my entire approbation” of Cambridge’s choice of Chancellor, laying particular emphasis on that last word. Albert turned out to be the one of the best Chancellors Cambridge ever had, guiding the university’s curriculum into the modern age, strengthening its emphasis on science and technology. And Robert Francis Pate Senior was there to see the beginning, and was on that day introduced to both Prince and Queen. Robert Francis Pate Junior, of course, could not make it, having a more pressing engagement that day on Putney Heath and Barnes Common.
Early on, Pate Senior paid so that his son could assume his place in higher society, sending him to be trained as a gentleman at a school in Norwich. When Pate came of age, Pate Senior bought him rank, literally: in 1841, a commission in the British army could be obtained for several hundred pounds, and Pate set his son up in the Queen’s service as a cornet in the prestigious 10th Hussars,* then quartered in Ireland. In a little over a year, Pate was promoted to lieutenant. He was odd from the start, but was at first tolerated and even liked by his fellows. A couple years after his promotion, however, Pate’s military colleagues agreed that something terrible had happened, something that changed Pate’s behavior irrevocably. Pate was a cavalryman, and his father had fitted him out with three handsome horses; he also owned a Newfoundland dog to which he was very much attached. All four were bitten by a fellow officer’s rabid dog. After one horse had become ill, Pate threatened to “make a hole in the river” if his favorite horse died. Eventually all four animals had to be destroyed, and after that Pate sank into an abyss of depression. He avoided mess with his fellows and instead took long and solitary walks. In time he developed a fear of the mess: the cook and the messman, he convinced himself, were trying to poison him.
In 1845, while his regiment marched to Dublin, Pate fled instead to London with little more than the clothes he wore. His friends there persuaded him to go home to his father at Wisbech. To his astonished father, he explained that he was a hunted man: his pursuers followed him around the streets of Dublin; they were at the barracks; they even lurked about London’s hotels. His father persuaded Pate to return to Ireland. He was arre
sted upon his return, but his attempts at explaining himself were so incoherent that his commanding officers refused to prosecute him. Pate returned to duty, more morose and paranoid than ever. The 10th Hussars were preparing to ship out to India, and his colonel, certain that Pate was insane, wanted to be rid of him; he wrote to Pate Senior a letter asking “in as delicate a manner as I could” for him to take his son away. At around the same time, in March 1846, he granted Pate a leave of absence, and Pate hastened not to Wisbech but to London, where for £1800 he quickly sold his lieutenant’s commission and set himself up in comfortable apartments in Jermyn Street, St. James—the center of London society. His father visited him there soon after his arrival. By this point, however, a strong feeling of estrangement had arisen between the two, and the elder Pate kept himself largely at Wisbech while his son kept to his own confused affairs.
At the beginning of 1848, however, Pate Senior was forced to assist his son. Though all who knew him agreed that the younger Pate was a man of extremely temperate habits, and obsessively regular in paying his bills, he had somehow run up a debt of hundreds of pounds, and creditors began to apply to his father for payment. When his father showed up in London to handle the matter, he was alarmed by the change that had come over his son: he was now wild, haunted—clearly insane, his father thought. He began to consider committing his son to an asylum and sought medical advice. A doctor in Brighton recommended that he see the most celebrated mad-doctor of all at the time: John Conolly. After a year and a half of unease and confusion about his son—a time about which Pate Senior admitted “I had no control over him,” the father met with Conolly.
In the meantime, the younger Robert Pate had managed, awkwardly and reluctantly, to enter London society. His younger sister had moved from Wisbech to London to live with a family friend, the eminent surgeon James Startin; while there, she soon became engaged to Startin’s brother William. From the first, Robert would visit his sister there, and it did not take long before James Startin realized that the wild man whose eccentricities in the parks he had often witnessed was his future sister-in-law’s brother. The Startins were hosts to a lively circle of literary, political, clerical, and medical friends, and during his several visits to their home at Savile Row* Pate attempted to interact with them. He generally failed: he spoke in a “short choking manner,” with wild eyes and expression, and then would lapse into sullen silence. One visitor, the Irish nationalist journalist and then M.P., The O’Gorman Mahon, though he understood Pate to be a maniac from their first conversation, was nevertheless quite happy to speak with him several times more, each interaction simply confirming his original opinion. Startin kept the elder Pate apprised about his son’s dire condition.
That is when Pate Senior consulted with Conolly. After hearing of Pate’s history since joining the army, Conolly acknowledged that the man was certainly mad—but advised his father to do nothing. His sister now exerted a positive influence upon him; surely with her help he would improve. It would be better, Conolly thought, if he were not introduced to Pate at all: that might irritate the man, he thought, causing him to relapse. Pate Senior followed his advice.
And so, although his family, two of London’s leading medical men, and virtually everyone whose path he crossed knew Robert Francis Pate to be mentally ill, nothing was done to treat him, and he continued with his daily marches through the West End. By the twenty-seventh of June 1850—the last day that Pate made this walk—it was clear to those who observed him regularly that Conolly’s diagnosis that he was improving was entirely wrong: he was getting worse. James Startin began to fear that he would commit a violent act upon himself or his relatives. The keeper of a livery stable where Pate had once rented horses, and by which Pate passed regularly, noticed that he had changed greatly since the previous May—where he was once friendly, he was now growing ever more irritable. “I told my foreman I had great apprehensions that Captain Pate, as I always called him, was losing his senses,” he later testified. A colleague from the army saw him at 3:00 on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh; “I had never seen him so excited as on this day,” he claimed. Three hours later, a cleric, Charles Driscoll, who had known Pate from the Startins, happened to catch sight of him on that day from an omnibus trundling down Piccadilly. Pate was standing outside a mansion, across from Green Park. For a moment, Pate was still. Then he abruptly spun about and marched down the street. “There was something peculiar in the manner in which he turned about and walked away, that made me look through the window after him, and take particular notice of him.” His gestures—particularly his heel-kicking—were even more excited than usual.
Driscoll rode on to a dinner engagement. He did not realize it, but he had witnessed a sudden and complete breakdown in Pate’s daily routine. For Pate had been as usual completing his circuit, heading eastwards at 6:00 to Duke Street—to his apartment, to dinner, and to an early bedtime. A gathering crowd outside the mansion on Piccadilly had compelled him to halt, to turn, to walk westwards—and then to spin around, to return excitedly to the crowd, and to push his way to the front. The mansion was Cambridge House, home of Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cambridge. Just inside the gates was the royal carriage: the Queen was inside, and there would never be a better time to see her, close up, than when her carriage emerged from the gates and made its slow, tight turn onto Piccadilly.
Pate stopped to await her.
It was a time of troubles for the Queen, this last week of June 1850, and she had come to Cambridge House to deal with one of these: her Uncle Aldolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, was dying. The Queen had come accompanied by her Lady in Waiting, Frances Jocelyn, and three of her children—the eight-year-old Prince of Wales, seven-year-old Alice, and five-year-old Alfred. The Duke of Cambridge was seriously ill with “gastric fever”—most likely typhoid. He had little more than a week to live, and his family were already bracing for the worst. Victoria and Albert would feel the loss keenly. The Queen hardly knew Uncle Adolphus as a child, because until she became Queen he had served as Governor-General and Viceroy in Hanover. When he did return (and Uncle Ernest took the throne of Hanover), the relationship between his family and the Queen was at first rocky: there had been, for one thing, the Duke’s and Duchess’s attempt to foist their son George upon her as a husband—something that neither she nor George desired. And after she married Albert, the Cambridges seemed remarkably reluctant to cede precedence to the young Prince. In 1840 Victoria was mortified to discover that the Duchess had refused to rise at a dinner where a toast to Albert was given, and got her revenge by crossing the entire family off the guest list to her next ball—a very public rebuke. The turbulence passed, however. Adolphus was George III’s youngest and mildest son, a true friend to a host of charities. Moreover, unlike his brothers, Cambridge managed to get to the end of his long life without ensnaring himself in party politics and thus without annoying at least some sector of the public. Both Victoria and Albert had come to respect and to love the man.
With his death, only two of George III’s fifteen children would remain. Ernest, the most virulently partisan and the least popular of all George’s sons, still lived, but lived, fortunately, in faraway Hanover. Time and, more significantly, distance, had dispelled much of his unpopularity. Closer to home and closer to their hearts was Aunt Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, living down the street in Gloucester House. She would be to Victoria a “link with bygone times and generations … we all looked upon her as a sort of grandmother.”
The Queen had suffered another wrenching loss six months before, when the Queen Dowager Adelaide, widow of William IV, died after a long and painful illness. Adelaide had around the time of the Victoria’s birth done her best to displace her from the throne by producing an heir of her own, but when all of her children were stillborn or died in infancy, she never allowed disappointment to come between herself and her niece. Rather she was always one of Victoria’s warmest supporters, especially so during the dark days of the Conroy ascendancy, when
the Princess and young Queen was desperate for support, finding so little at home. All of society understood the significance of Victoria’s actions at her wedding, in 1840: embracing and kissing Aunt Adelaide—but only shaking hands with her mother. The Duchess of Kent and the Queen Dowager were enemies then, thanks to Conroy, and Victoria remembered his machinations bitterly, writing, soon after Aunt Adelaide died, “Much was done to set Mamma against her, but the dear Queen ever forgave this, ever showed love and affection, and for the last eight years their friendship was as great as ever.”
Adelaide thus left her friend the Duchess of Kent as one of the last of her generation. With Conroy exiled, and with the influence of Albert, who was both the Duchess’s son-in-law and her nephew, and who had a genuine regard for her, the Duchess had regained her position in the family; she had long before subsumed her ambitions into her daughter’s, and found her greatest pleasure in being grandmama to her daughter’s growing family.
Ten years before, the term “royal family” would have conjured up in British minds the fat, old, generally vicious and usually penurious children of George III. Now, the term brought to mind Victoria’s and Albert’s bonny boys and girls, reported every day in the “Court Circular” as taking their usual walking and pony exercises in Buckingham Palace Gardens, or on the Slopes at Windsor, or in the park at Osborne. There were seven now; Victoria had borne her third son—her favorite son, as it turned out—just six weeks ago, on the first of May. That day auspiciously was the birthday of the Duke of Wellington, and so Albert and Victoria gave the boy his name, Arthur, and asked the Iron Duke to stand as his godfather. Last Saturday had been the boy’s Christening, the 81-year-old Duke standing alongside the infant, a tableau vivant of the older generation giving way to the younger.
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