Arthur O’Connor returned home that evening. His mother asked him where he had been. To St. Paul’s, he said—but he “had not gained his object.” He would not tell her what that object was. He slept until the next morning, and, again arming himself with declaration, pistol, and knife, walked across town to the front of Buckingham Palace, joining the crowd assembled there hoping the Queen would emerge. She did emerge that day—twice, for a ride in the parks and for a visit to a sculptor’s studio—but somehow O’Connor missed her. He returned home. His chances, he knew, were running out: the Queen left for Windsor in two days, on the first of March.
That night, O’Connor took a break from stalking Victoria and instead celebrated her; he took his nine-year-old brother out to gaze at the brilliant thanksgiving illuminations that stretched from St. Paul’s to the Palace.
The next day, Thursday 29 February—Leap Day—he awoke weary and jaded, according to his father. He complained of having no rest, and pains in his head. Equipping himself with declaration, pistol, and knife, but leaving pen and ink behind, he returned to the Palace in the afternoon, arriving after four to hear the cheering and see the Queen’s carriage heading up Constitution Hill. Victoria had that afternoon held Court at the Palace, and, as she had done so many times in the past, she afterwards set out for a ride through the parks. She sat on the right side of the carriage, facing the horses. Next to her sat one of her favorite ladies-in-waiting, Lady Jane Churchill, and across from them were Victoria’s two youngest sons: on the Queen’s side sat twenty-year-old Arthur and next to him Leopold, who at eighteen was barely older than O’Connor. For Prince Arthur, this was a farewell ride with his mother; he would be returning to army service in Dover that evening. Leopold, on the other hand, had nothing to do with the military. He could not: he was a hemophiliac and had suffered from early childhood his mother’s stifling overprotection.
Accompanying her on either side were her equerries—she had two now, since Albert’s death—Lord Fitzroy and General Hardinge riding on either side of the carriage. Two outriders rode before, two grooms behind. And John Brown sat at the Queen’s back.
O’Connor asked a policeman when she would return. Soon, he was told. He succeeded, this time, in pushing himself to the front of the crowd waiting near the northeast gate of the Palace—the gate though which Victoria had emerged and through which she would return. And he waited, while Victoria circumnavigated Hyde and Regents Parks.
By the time the noise at the top of Constitution Hill signaled the Queen’s return, the crowd had grown and had spilled onto the road. The police began to push them back and clear a space for the carriage. At that moment, with the crowd focused upon the Queen, the police focused on the crowd, and the sentry at the gate staring forward, poised to present arms, O’Connor bolted. Running unperceived to the point where the edge of the Palace’s eastern fence meets the northern wall, he removed his overcoat and gingerly hung it over a rail. Then, with a litheness and energy that must have surprised him, he scrambled up and over the twelve-foot fence, tumbling into the corner of the Palace forecourt. Somehow, he managed to keep his low-crowned, wide-brimmed wideawake hat on his head. The carriage was approaching now, the gates being opened. O’Connor took cover behind a pillar near the gatekeeper’s lodge.
He saw the carriage enter and pass. The gatekeeper, an old man “rather past work,” spied him and shouted “what mischief do you want here?” O’Connor simply raced past the sputtering and helpless man and through the gateway the carriage had just entered. It had stopped and the equerries and outriders were dismounting; John Brown had leapt off the rumble and come to the left side to let down the carriage stairs. O’Connor ran around to that side. His presence alarmed no one, but perplexed all who noticed him: they imagined him to be a gardener’s boy, not quite in the right place. He ran up to the side of the carriage, brushing against Brown, who pushed him back. One of the equerries, Lord Fitzroy, told him to go away. Instead, he stepped up to the rear panel of the carriage, peered over the edge, raised his pistol, and timidly muttered something about the Fenian prisoners.
Suddenly confused, he fell silent. He was not looking at the Queen but at Lady Jane Churchill. Lady Jane was oblivious to him; the queen sat equally unconscious of him on the other side of the carriage. He ran around the back of the carriage, raised his face over that side—and stared directly into his Queen’s eyes. Victoria thought at first that he was a footman come to remove her blanket. O’Connor said something the Queen could not make out; she noticed only the strangeness of his voice. (Arthur heard his words: “Take that from a Fenian.”) She then noticed his uplifted hand, but did not see the pistol it held. Leopold and Arthur, however, did see it, Arthur stretching forward to push it away. It clattered to the ground. Victoria then panicked. “Involuntarily, in a terrible fright, I threw myself over Jane C. calling out, ‘Save me …!’” she later wrote. At that moment John Brown, who had chased O’Connor around the carriage, with one hand grabbed O’Connor’s body and with the other clamped the scruff of his neck. Now everyone was alarmed, and the equerries and outriders converged upon Brown’s prize, pushing the boy to the ground. Prince Arthur vaulted over the side of the carriage and joined the scrum. (Leopold, wisely, stayed put.) A vague sense that the boy had actually touched the royal person likely encouraged them all to handle him more roughly than simple capture demanded: they yanked off the boy’s necktie and gave him a violent throttling. One of the outriders asked O’Connor if he was hiding anything, and O’Connor admitted to having the knife and the declaration. The two equerries, meanwhile, called out for the police. Police Sergeant Jackson—who had closed the gate with O’Connor inside—and several constables came running. Sergeant Jackson removed knife and declaration from O’Connor’s pockets. (He handed the latter to one of the equerries, who soon showed it to Victoria: “an extraordinary document,” she called it.)
They stood the boy up. O’Connor was more affronted than shaken. He complained about the damage done to his necktie, and demanded his hat be returned to him before he would answer any questions. He was led off. The Queen, standing up in the carriage for a better view, saw him go, and then suffered another shock. Her attendants asked if she had been hurt: “Not at all,” she replied. The equerries and Arthur then told her they thought the boy had dropped something. “We looked,” Victoria wrote, “but could find nothing, when Canon, the postilion, called out, ‘There it is,’ and looking down I then did see shining on the ground a small pistol! This filled us with horror. All were white as sheets, Jane C. almost crying, and Leopold looked as if he were going to faint.”
Of all of the attempts upon her, O’Connor’s—violating the security of her home as well as her personal space—was the one that frightened her the most. Her worst fears about Fenians, the Irish, and the growing dangers that lurked in the metropolis were all confirmed in the puny boy. At the same time, however, what had just happened confirmed all of her best thoughts about her devoted Highland servant. Once again, she was certain she had been saved by providence from death;* and to her mind, one man alone was responsible for saving her life. “It is entirely owing to good Brown’s great presence of mind and quickness that he was seized,” she wrote to Vicky; “Brown alone saw him spring round and suspected him.” Her hero, she quickly decided, deserved a medal.
Safe in the palace, Victoria quickly took steps to disseminate an accurate account of the attempt, and of her safety, to scotch the wild rumors that were already spreading. She sent her two young sons to take the news to Bertie; the two strolled arm in arm, out of the front gates of the Palace, through the crowd, and to Marlborough House. The Prince of Wales, bedridden with the bad leg that was a byproduct of his typhoid and that had been aggravated by his activity on the thanksgiving, could not rush to the palace, but his wife could, and Princess Alix, showing full trust in the public, rode there in an open carriage. Victoria sent royal officers to the police station and the Home Office, and sent as well her equerry Arthur Hardinge to Parlia
ment, to speak with Gladstone personally. Hardinge was delayed for some reason, and for the better part of an hour rumors flew in the lobby of the House of Commons, consternation growing to panic, the excitement overwhelming the debate on the Ballot then proceeding in the House. Finally, Hardinge arrived and closeted himself with Gladstone, who, emerging, hurried into the House, interrupted the debate, and, to relieved cheering, set out a generally accurate account of the attempt. In one particular, however, he stretched the truth: the Queen, he claimed, “was not in the slightest degree flurried or alarmed.”* (Similarly in the House of Lords, Lord Granville announced that “the Queen showed the greatest courage and composure.”) Since no one but the Queen, her family, and her household had seen the attempt, there was nothing to prevent the witnesses to the attempt to preserve and promote an idealized image of the Queen. Victoria might admit her all-too-human, terrified reaction to her private journal, but there was little need to share this with her subjects. Every newspaper account of the attempt dutifully noted Victoria’s unflinching coolness and bravery.
O’Connor, meanwhile, was hurried out of the Palace gates, pushed into a cab with Sergeant Jackson, and brought to the destination of all his predecessors but one*—A Division headquarters, now remodeled and known as King Street station. On the way, he repeatedly proclaimed to Jackson his willingness to die in his great cause: “I wish to God I had succeeded; then they could have done with me as they pleased.” He acknowledged his gun had been broken, and that he only wished to intimidate Victoria, not kill her. At the station he gave the Superintendent, Mott, a full account of his abortive attempts to threaten the Queen two days before at the thanksgiving. He was then placed in a cell, Superintendent Mott ordering that he be allowed absolutely no visitors. A number of curious Members of Parliament who came to interview the boy were thus turned away; only the Commissioner of Police, Richard Mayne’s replacement Sir Edmund Henderson, saw him that night.
That evening, London reacted to O’Connor’s attempt as it had acted toward the others—the fashionable flocking to enquire about the Queen’s health and to sign the visitor’s book at the Palace; addresses and toasts to the Queen across town. Arthur O’Connor’s timing could not have been better, as far as killing off republican sentiment in the metropolis went. Those who until recently had avidly promoted an English republic now hastened to denounce the attempt and protest their devotion to Victoria. At a crowded meeting of working men in the Surrey Chapel Mission Hall, in Southwark, a resolution was moved to express indignation about the attempt and affection for the Queen’s person; prayers were said for Victoria’s “long-continued life and happiness.” Across town at the White Horse Tavern off Oxford Street, George Odger, working-class leader and heretofore outspoken republican, declared himself sure “that every man in that room … would denounce in the most indignant manner such a dastardly proceeding.”
The next morning, A Division’s police surgeon and another doctor examined O’Connor in his cell. Both concluded that while he might be a political fanatic with lousy grammar and a shaky hold on current events, he was decidedly sane. Gladstone visited Victoria in the Palace that morning—“dreadfully shocked at what [had] happened”—she noted, and particularly annoyed that the boy had apparently marred the “splendid effect” of the thanksgiving. He reminded her of Peel’s 1842 Act, which he thought fit the crime. If it did not, he told her, then the law must be changed. Victoria was not nearly as sure that a misdemeanor charge—and a possible lenient sentence—was appropriate. In any case, she was sure that when O’Connor’s sentence had expired, “he ought not to be allowed to remain in the country.”
O’Connor’s examination, it was decided after some confusion, was to be held not at Whitehall, as all previous such examinations, but in the more down-to-earth setting of the police court at Bow Street. From 11:00, throngs largely composed of the dregs of the nearby slums of St. Giles and Seven Dials besieged the court and packed the tiny courtroom. Soon after 1:00, Arthur O’Connor was brought in and held for an hour in a jailer’s room. When he was brought before the bar, hisses ran through the back benches. Harry Bodkin Poland, Solicitor to the Treasury, quickly both established the charge and demolished Arthur O’Connor’s fragile ego by demonstrating to the boy that he was a fool and his action an absurdity. Poland read out in full O’Connor’s declaration, and the courtroom met his would-be patriotism with howls of laughter, which peaked as Poland read out the codicil giving O’Connor a hero’s death: “that death which is due to him as a Christian, a Republican—(laughter), 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 (Laughter).” The blood rushed to O’Connor’s face, and, according to a reporter, “out of the eye there blazed the light of fanaticism.” Poland then twisted the knife: crimes such as O’Connor’s hardly deserved death, he proclaimed, but rather imprisonment—accompanied by the degradation of flogging. O’Connor’s flush immediately disappeared, he hung his head, his lip trembled, and he began to cry. Poland then called forward witnesses to the assault. Of these, John Brown, with his broad Scottish accent and the “grim jocularity” with which he recounted his easy capture and drubbing of the boy, provided the most entertainment. Prince Leopold also took the stand; Victoria, as protective of him as ever, was loath to let him come at all, and only agreed if he went under the close watch of an equerry and of his tutor. He testified to the important fact that O’Connor had held his pistol less than a foot from the queen’s face, and was cheered by the crowd on both arriving and departing. O’Connor was given the opportunity to speak after the witnesses had testified; he could do nothing besides correct them on a couple of trivial details. He was then committed for trial and led through the hissing and hooting multitude into a waiting police van, which set off down Bow Street to the Strand, following the route of Tuesday’s procession, and deposited O’Connor at Newgate prison.
At roughly the same time—4:00 in the afternoon—Victoria went forth triumphantly in her carriage amongst the cheering and shouting people of London. This long-planned journey—from Buckingham Palace to Paddington Station, from whence the queen would escape London for the greater privacy of Windsor—was supposed to be routine; O’Connor’s attempt guaranteed it was nothing but. A number of MPs and Peers had assembled in the Palace forecourt that O’Connor had penetrated the day before; with the express permission of the Queen, they formed a phalanx of symbolic protection. Victoria stood in her carriage to acknowledge them. In the carriage with her were her children Leopold and Beatrice, and a fresh lady-in-waiting, Fanny Gainsborough.* Outside the gates, the crowds nearly matched those of the thanksgiving day in volume and energy. “Immense enthusiasm,” Victoria wrote after she arrived at Windsor Castle. “All along the Serpentine, up to Prince’s gate, the carriages were two deep, and we could hardly pass along.” She was delighted with the people of London who, with a nudge from O’Connor, had turned a one-day thanksgiving into a delirious four-day celebration of the monarch and her monarchy. Nevertheless, she was relieved to be back in Windsor. And although it seemed as if every obstacle to London’s adoration of the Queen had been removed, her own reservations about the people of London remained. “Strange to say my head and health have not suffered from this dreadful fright,” she wrote to Vicky, “but I know I shall feel it when I go out as I always have done in London.”
Arthur O’Connor had hoped and expected, in thrusting his pistol into the Queen’s face, to become an instant hero to the Irish. This of course never happened. From the start, the newspapers presented him as an imbecile, a “crack-brained youth,” the mind-boggling absurdity of his plan demonstrating the boy’s folly. And despite his stated intention to free the Fenians, no one was fooled that his attempt was a rational political act. The Irish, and in particular Irish nationalists, quickly and vociferously dissociated themselves from O’Connor, claiming his mad act worked against Irish interests. The Dublin Iris
hman, clearly forgetting about William Hamilton’s attack in claiming that Victoria had never been attacked by an Irishman, argued that “nothing could be more repugnant, nothing more odious, nothing more loathsome to the spirit of the Irish people than a cowardly assault on a defenceless lady.” This article concluded with the less-than-comforting assertion that “Queen Victoria may rest assured that if she ever fell a victim to unhallowed hate it shall not be by the hand of an Irishman.” Besides, Irish newspapers noted, Arthur O’Connor was not Irish at all, but born and bred in London. Nor were his forebears truly Irish: a letter-writer to the Dublin Freeman’s Journal pointed out quite accurately that O’Connor’s ancestors were Conners, not O’Connors, English settlers in Ireland who changed their name desiring “to become more Irish than the Irish themselves.”
Press and the government agreed that the best punishment for this over-imaginative halfwit was the one prescribed under Peel’s Act: the “ridiculous and slightly degrading” punishment of a flogging, the shame of which would purge him and any would-be imitators of thoughts of vainglory. Gladstone quickly concluded that O’Connor was more a fool than a Fenian, writing to the Queen the evening of the attempt that “folly seems to have been so mixed with depravity in this attempt that Mr. Gladstone is inclined to hope this young man may perhaps not have been wholly master of his senses”; Peel’s Act should suit such a “contemptible” crime. Home Secretary Henry Bruce agreed, writing the Queen that O’Connor’s palpable terror on being told he might be flogged demonstrated the “wisdom” of Peel’s Act: he had looked forward to a trial as a state prisoner, but “shrunk from a degrading punishment, which would make him ridiculous and contemptible.”
Shooting Victoria Page 40
