But the show went on: the scaffolding and flags and bunting and illuminations and flower-decked triumphal arches went up all along the route. London prepared to welcome the Queen home.
At noon on 27 February, a cold, clear day, Napoleon III, ex-emperor of the French, stood with his wife Eugénie at an eastern window of Buckingham Palace; they were special guests of the Queen, their state of exile preventing their attendance at St. Paul’s. The two gazed—wistfully, one assumes—upon the ocean of human beings roiling on the other side of the palace gates and stretching down the Mall. Out of the northeast gate of the Palace, a cortège of ten carriages—the last one carrying the Queen and the Prince of Wales*—was slowly plunging into that cheering, seething, screaming mass. It was the greatest gathering on the streets of London in a generation.
Victoria was ecstatic as she passed through what she estimated to be millions, with their “wonderful enthusiasm and astounding affectionate loyalty.” The white detailing of her black dress—miniver on her gown, white flowers on her bonnet—suggested the slightest thaw in her decade of mourning. The cheering seemed never to stop, nor did her enthusiastic response. Bertie, sitting across from her and still pale from his illness, felt it too: the energy of the crowd energized them, their reception “so gratifying that one could not feel tired.” At Temple Bar, the traditional entry to the City, they stopped for the Lord Mayor’s welcome. Victoria took her son’s hand, pressed it, and held it up for the crowd. People cried, the Queen said; Bertie cried. Victoria admitted to a lump in her own throat. The service at St. Paul’s, attended by the upper ten thousand,* was far less exciting for the Queen; it was stiflingly hot, and—though Victoria had won the argument with Gladstone and the service was shortened—still too long. Then there was the triumphant return to the palace by a northern route, past Newgate (“very dreary-looking,” wrote the Queen), up Holborn, down Oxford Street, through Hyde Park, where men and boys perched perilously on every available tree branch, as they had twenty years before at the opening of the Great Exhibition—down Constitution Hill—“the deafening cheering never ceasing for a minute”—and again through the northeast gate. Bertie, Alix, and their two sons then took their leave, but Victoria, with her youngest daughter Beatrice and her three other sons, climbed the stairs and stepped out onto the balcony for another round of vociferous cheers. “Could think and talk of little else,” she wrote in her journal, “but to-day’s wonderful demonstration of loyalty and affection, from the very highest to the lowest. Felt tired by all the emotion, but it is a day that can never be forgotten.” What she had forgotten completely was her own abhorrence to ride in the first place, and the strenuous efforts of her prime minister to get her to show herself. She did afterwards write him, glowing about her reception and asking him to convey her gratitude to her subjects. But she could manage not a word of gratitude to Gladstone himself.
Victoria’s triumph seemed complete. But there was more to come. The bacillus had done its work; now, it was the unruly boy’s turn.
*As it happens, Dickens’s Great Expectations had just completed its serial publication in August 1861.
*John McCafferty demonstrates that some among the Fenians indeed considered members of the British Royal family to be legitimate targets in achieving political ends: it was he who proposed in 1874 kidnapping the Prince of Wales in order to compel the British government to release all Fenian prisoners (Quinlivan and Rose 24).
*The Metropolitan Police had been warned in detail about the attack the day before, and the then-sole commissioner Richard Mayne, now an old man of seventy-one, did little in response. Mortified by the blast, he offered his resignation. It was refused, but he likely never recovered from the shock and died in 1868. Jeremiah O’Sullivan escaped to the United States, and only one man, Michael Barrett, was found guilty for the explosion. Barrett was hanged outside Newgate on 26 May 1868, the last public execution in England. The elderly William Calcraft was executioner.
*And carrying as well the Princess of Wales, Princess Beatrice, Albert Victor (Bertie’s oldest son), and of course, on the rumble seat, John Brown in full highland dress.
*The upper 11,876, to be exact, judging from the number of tickets issued. (Kuhn 155n.)
twenty
LEAP DAY
Nine days before the thanksgiving, Arthur O’Connor in a flash of insight realized what he had to do. On that cold mid-February Sunday, the seventeen-year-old was taking his favorite walk in Hyde Park along the banks of the Serpentine—far from his depressing home in the East London slums of Aldgate. His walk skirted that part of the park where the Crystal Palace had once stood—past, in other words, that part of London which had over the past decade become known as Albertopolis—the evergrowing collection of establishments endowed by the proceeds of the Exhibition of 1851, all of them sacred to the memory of the dead Prince Consort. Just south of the boy and visible through the winter trees were the hoardings surrounding what would become the grand, high-neogothic Albert Memorial—scheduled for unveiling in July. Across the road from that was the distinctively elliptical and domed Royal Albert Hall, which Victoria, overwhelmed with emotion, had opened on a bitterly cold day last March. Adjoining the Hall were the gardens of the Horticultural Society, the southern limit of which was laid out for a new museum of natural history. And across from that was the South Kensington Museum, which would one day be known as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Albertopolis was far from the only monument to the memory of the Prince Consort. Since his death, monuments to him had been erected through the length and breadth of the kingdom; even Dublin had its Albert statue. By Victoria’s wishes, her husband had achieved something close to deification.
The boy had every reason to be infuriated by this cult: what, after all, had that German prince done to deserve this worship? Little more, it seems, than to sire nine royal burdens upon the state, and to put on a fair on this spot in 1851. Monuments to the great men of the boy’s own family were surely better-deserved: where were they? The boy was convinced, as were his father and grandfather before him, that the blood of the great Kings of Connaught flowed through his veins: hadn’t his great-grandfather changed his name from Conner to O’Connor to proclaim that lineage to the world? Where were the monuments to them? And where was the monument to his great-great-uncle and his namesake, Arthur, a diehard Irish republican and a leader of the United Irishmen? Arthur O’Connor went to France in 1796 to negotiate the landing in Ireland of a French army of liberation. After that invasion failed, Arthur and his brother, young Arthur’s great-grandfather Roger—another United Irishman—were arrested, imprisoned, and then exiled by the British to France, where Arthur O’Connor had been appointed a general of the French army by the great Napoleon himself: surely he deserved his monument? Where, for that matter, was the monument to the young Arthur’s great-uncle, Francis Burdett O’Connor, who in 1819 set out with two hundred Irish volunteers to liberate South America from the imperial Spanish yoke? Did he not become General Francisco Burdett O’Connor, the great Simon Bolívar’s chief of staff, and engage in battles for freedom from Peru to Panama?
And where was the recognition due the greatest O’Connor of all—his great-uncle Feargus O’Connor, the great champion of the working-man—the man still remembered as the “Lion of Freedom”? By virtue of his fiery oratory, his unstoppable energy, his undying love for the “fustian jackets, the blistered hands, the unshorn chins,” Feargus O’Connor became for fifteen years the sole and undisputed popular leader of Chartism, repeatedly braving the rich and powerful in Parliament: three times he brought before them the people’s demand for a Charter establishing their political rights. At Feargus O’Connor’s funeral in 1855, people showed up at Kensal Green in numbers too great for that cemetery to contain. They carried banners declaring him to be their savior: “He lived and died for us.” Never had the English proletariat had a stronger champion. His enemies—and he had many—might say that Feargus O’Connor died a raving lunatic. Young Arthur O’Connor refused
to believe it—committing him to Dr. Tuke’s asylum was simply a trick to deny him the reputation he deserved. Where then was the “Feargus Memorial”? Where was the “Royal Feargus Hall”?*
How unfair it must have seemed to young Arthur O’Connor that Albert was covered in glory while his own family had sunk into obscurity and squalor. Just fifty years before, his family had owned substantial lands in Ireland, but that fortune had now dissipated completely. Arthur lived with his family—nine in all—on the verge of starvation in a single room of a dilapidated Aldgate tenement, at the edge of Seven-Step Alley, one of the worst Irish rookeries in London. His father made just enough money taking tickets for the London and Waterman’s Steamboat Company to provide his family with the thinnest veneer of respectability. Arthur was their third child, but perhaps the one upon whom the parents pinned their greatest hopes. While their eldest son had enlisted in the army and their eldest daughter had trained as a teacher, Arthur, as a clerk, was on the bottom rung of the ladder to middle-class respectability. He had worked for a firm of printers for four years, then for a lawyer. Now, at seventeen, he worked as a junior accountant across the river in Southwark for Livett Franks and Son, a paint manufacturer. He acquitted himself well in all of these positions. But he had since birth been cursed with ill health—a pigeon-breasted, scrofulous rail of a boy; later, a reporter would see in his pitiful body nothing less than evidence of the degeneration of Western civilization: O’Connor was “of the order from whose plentifulness some physiologists forbode a deterioration of the human race in our great towns.” Ill health stifled his advancement: raging scrofula had ended his job with the printers’, sending him to King’s College Hospital, where he had a toe amputated.
His body was a miserable container for what he knew to be a great soul. He could feel within himself the blood and the spirit of the great O’Connors. He was a scholar, a dreamer, a writer—spending night after night in a corner of his crowded room, studying, and composing great works of poetic genius, which he had assured his parents were destined for publication and fame. He was Johnnie Keats and Lord Byron combined: a hypersensitive romantic soul, aching to live and die for a great cause.
And indeed, he had a cause. Though he had lived his entire life in London, he was “passionately Irish,” as he later wrote, and devoted to the struggle for Irish freedom. He had likely never even met a Fenian, but his blood and the acts of his forefathers connected him deeply with them. The flower of the movement, he knew, continued to rot in English and Irish jails, and he knew as well that the greatest act of an Irish patriot would be to free those prisoners. And, as he walked the periphery of the Serpentine, Arthur O’Connor understood his destiny in a flash. He would be that man. He would in one act free the Fenian prisoners, restore the reputation of the O’Connors, and join the pantheon of great Irish heroes.
He would kill Queen Victoria.
There would never be a better opportunity to kill the Queen than during the thanksgiving to be held in two weeks, when she would emerge from her long seclusion and show herself at St. Paul’s, where England’s rich and powerful would all be witnesses to the shooting.
He mulled over the plan for rest of the day. Something about it was not quite right, and he finally acknowledged the flaw. If he killed the Queen, the now-recovering Prince of Wales would replace her: the new king certainly would not free the Fenians. He would have to modify his plan. He would not kill the Queen, but would terrify her: putting a pistol to her head, he would frighten her into signing a declaration freeing the Irish prisoners. If he could succeed in getting close enough to her, he was sure that all around her would be “paralyzed with horror”—powerless to intervene. He knew he would never escape from his assault. He expected he would be bayoneted on the spot; if not, he would certainly be executed for High Treason. So be it: he cared little for his life and knew that with his death would come everlasting fame. But if he was to sacrifice his life for Ireland, he wished to die a hero—not hanged like a common criminal, but shot by a firing squad. He would include a codicil to that effect in his declaration.
During the next fortnight, then, while Victoria bickered with her prime minister about the coming thanksgiving and the minutiae of her role, Arthur O’Connor prepared to play his own. He somehow managed to obtain a clean parchment; carefully lining it with a pencil, he set out the Queen’s declaration in his best clerk’s hand and best legalese: “I, Victoria, Queen by the grace of God, do make the following declaration.…” With an astonishing over-estimation of the power of the monarch, he had Victoria declare that she would “grant a free pardon to each and every one of the said men known and celebrated as the Fenian prisoners,” “with the consent of my Parliament”—as if her saying it was so would make it so. He then set out carefully, in four clauses, the conditions of absolute freedom she granted the prisoners. In a fifth clause, he tackled the tricky problem of coercion, attempting to head off any attempt to nullify an Act the Queen had been forced to sign:
… notwithstanding the fact of my agreeing to the above conditions only through fear of my life, I will not attempt to depart from any of them on that account, nor upon any other reason, cause, or pretext whatever will I depart, or attempt to depart, from any of them; neither will I listen to any advice which my Ministers may wish to give toward causing me to depart from my word, or toward the violation of anything above stated, but shall adhere strictly to everything. So help me God.
He left there a space for the Queen’s signature and, underneath, inserted the codicil which would, he hoped, guarantee him a hero’s execution:
Now I, the said Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, do solemnly pledge my Royal word to the effect that if the said Arthur O’Connor be found guilty of death by my judges, after a just and fair trial, he the said Arthur O’Connor shall not be strangled like a common felon, but shall receive that death which is due to him as a Christian, a Republican, and as one who has never harmed a human being—that is to say, he shall be shot, and after death his body shall be delivered to his friends to be buried wheresoever they may choose.
In order to allay the suspicions of his family or his employers, Arthur O’Connor kept to his daily routine until Monday 26 February, the day before the thanksgiving. On that afternoon, after leaving work in Southwark, he obtained his pistol—the cheapest he could find. He had spotted it in the window of a jeweler’s near his workplace—a flintlock, a small, decrepit relic of another age. It was missing its flint, and flints were not easy to come by in 1872; the clerk told him he would have to pick up a piece of flint from the road and cut it to proper shape. (And he did.) O’Connor had never handled a gun in his life, and had to ask how it worked. The clerk told him about powder, bullet, and wad. But there is no evidence that Arthur O’Connor bought any of these things; he paid four shillings for the pistol alone, and left. The pistol was intact when he bought it, but did not remain so for long; the same evening, while practicing his shooting style, he broke off the pan and ruined the lock. At some point a greasy red rag found its way into the barrel; inexplicably, for the next few days it would remain there, broadcasting the worthlessness of the weapon.
That night, O’Connor filled his pockets. He helpfully brought pen and ink, thinking to avoid the awkward wait for one of the ten thousand to produce them while he held his pistol to Victoria’s temple. He pocketed the pistol, the petition, and, just in case, a long, thin, open knife of his father’s. He slipped out of his house for the short walk due west to St. Paul’s. It was 11:00 P.M., and the cathedral was abuzz with activity: workmen were preparing seating; seamstresses were decorating the temporary chambers set aside for the refreshment of the Queen and the Princess of Wales—and police were guarding the entrances. When he attempted to slip in, an officer promptly challenged him and turned him away. Nevertheless, somehow he got in—“by a stratagem,” he later claimed. He took cover underneath some benches, hoping to hide until the morning.
He was soon found. He had tracked mud on the otherw
ise clean carpets to his hiding place; a verger discovered him and turned him out. He then tried to hide in a cold, dark space on the cathedral’s porch. A police sergeant caught him there with the glaring spotlight of his bull’s-eye lantern and ordered him off the property. O’Connor then wandered the streets of the City until 5:30 the next morning, ruminating upon how he could get close to the Queen. He decided to give up entering the cathedral altogether. Instead, he would confront the Queen somewhere on her procession to or from the service. He returned home, put the pistol, the knife, and the declaration under his pillow, and slept until 8:00, when he rose, rearmed himself, and set out again for St. Paul’s and the route of the procession. He quickly realized that he had made a serious mistake. The crowds were already massing along the route in numbers too thick to penetrate. He spent hours wandering the route, looking for a place where he could push his way to the front—but could find none. The Queen had her thanksgiving without him, her subjects—as the newspapers had been saying ever since Oxford’s attempt upon her—providing her best protection.
Shooting Victoria Page 39
