Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Victoria disagreed with every one of these judgments about the boy. She was sure he would have murdered her if his ignorance had not prevented him. He was certainly not mad, and the Queen pointedly sent Gladstone an article from the Lancet which she thought proved his sanity. And while he may never have set foot in Ireland, he was still an Irishman—and worse, a Fenian. As soon as she arrived in Windsor the day after the attack, Victoria delved into her journals, found her account of William Hamilton’s attempt—which, she realized, “no one seems to recollect”*—and sent a copy to Gladstone as a reminder of Irish perfidy. Hamilton was bad, she explained to Gladstone, but O’Connor was worse: Hamilton “was also an Irishman but Fenianism did not exist then.” O’Connor’s assault upon her had been truly threatening, and should be treated seriously, not contemptuously. “He meant to frighten & this may be tried again & again & end badly some day,” she told Gladstone. She had lost confidence in the efficacy of Peel’s Act. “The Queen feels sure that too gt leniency or treating it as totally contemptible wld not do—& if the Act is not strong enough it had better be amended.” Peel’s Act, she thought, did not treat the assaults upon her as seriously as she considered them to be. Indeed, over time the Act had become more lenient: since transportation had come to an end five years before, replaced as a penalty with penal servitude in a British prison, exiling O’Connor, as Francis, Hamilton, and Pate had been exiled, was no longer a legal option. If a judge could not remove the boy from the country, Victoria considered that her government could: speaking to Gladstone the day after the attack, she insisted that O’Connor be forced to leave England after serving his sentence, whatever that might be.

  The genuine fear the Queen felt during O’Connor’s attack had quickly morphed to anger. She was angry at the police, who she thought were neither vigilant or numerous enough to protect her—a conclusion with which the police tacitly agreed by adding three officers to the Palace detail. She was angry as well at her government, which from the start saw O’Connor’s crime as the contemptible act of a fool, not the serious attempt of a Fenian to do her harm. From Windsor she telegraphed Gladstone commanding that the result of O’Connor’s examination be sent her, as well as “all details respecting this man.” She had from the start a premonition that Gladstone and the Liberals were going to fail her, and if they did she would be ready to respond.

  The “Boy O’Connor,” as the press dubbed him, was reportedly an exemplary prisoner at Newgate, accepting with good grace the many visits of medical examiners, including the near-daily visits of the prison surgeon. His parents, too, visited him as often as they were allowed. Significantly, however, no solicitor attended to him during his first days in prison. He remained cooperative but unrepentant—stating that he was fully justified in his act, though he remained tight-lipped about his motive.

  For a week after his arrest, he was the undisputed celebrity criminal of Newgate. On the afternoon of 6 March, however, he was eclipsed completely, when a man instantly recognizable by his enormous size of 26 stone (or 364 pounds)* drove his own brougham up to the door of Newgate, the Superintendent of the Scotland Yard’s Detective Branch by his side. A crowd had gathered outside the door of the prison, and he jovially acknowledged their cheers as he passed by them. Some shouted “Wagga Wagga!” after the town in New South Wales from which he had come. Others called out “Arthur Orton!” and still others “Sir Roger!” Upon entering the prison, he gave his name as Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. The warrant for his arrest named him as Thomas Castro, and he was entered in the prison books under that name. Exactly who the man was had been the basis of a debate that had raged for the past five years: for that long the Tichborne Claimant, as he is known to history, had riveted and riven the nation.

  The overwhelming love of a grieving mother had drawn the Claimant from Australia to England. In 1853, Lady Henriette Felicité Tichborne’s restless son Roger had fled England for South America; the next year he boarded a ship, the Bella, which sailed out of Rio de Janeiro and was never seen again; all passengers were thought lost. Lady Tichborne could never quite accept that her eldest son had died. When Roger’s father died in 1862, Lady Tichborne was free to indulge her fantasy of reuniting with her son and began to search for him, publishing at first advertisements in the Times, and then in 1865 in a number of Australian newspapers, as rumors surfaced that survivors of the Bella might have been picked up and deposited in Melbourne. As the advertisements promised a generous reward for information about Roger’s fate, it is surprising that only one claimant came forward, but only one did: a Wagga Wagga butcher who went by the name Thomas Castro, and had been known to boast about his aristocratic connections. An attorney acquaintance of Castro who had seen the advertisement and was certain that the butcher was the baronet, persuaded him to reveal himself. Castro did so, quickly gathering supporters to his claim, including several in Australia who had known Roger Tichborne years before. He brought himself and his claim to England in 1866. Early the next year, he traveled to Paris, his mother’s original and present home, to meet Lady Tichborne. She immediately acknowledged him as her son.

  The rest of the Tichbornes, with few exceptions, were far less welcoming. They had long doubted the sanity of their French in-law and gave little weight to her acknowledgment. The obese and dour Claimant hardly resembled the scrawny and sensitive Roger they remembered. Roger Tichborne had lived the first sixteen years of his life in France, with French his first language; the Claimant’s French was limited to “oui, madame” in an atrocious accent. The Claimant’s knowledge of Tichborne’s childhood was a mystifying mixture of intimate knowledge and profound gaps. That mystery was perhaps solved by the Claimant himself in a confession he wrote in 1895 and quickly repudiated; in it he claimed that he was a superb listener, able to “suck the brains” of those who knew Sir Roger, collecting the information he used to convince others that he was Tichborne. The Tichbornes, however, would have none of it, fiercely resisting the Claimant’s attempt to usurp the present “infant baronet,” Roger Titchborne’s nephew Henry, the son of Roger’s deceased younger brother Alfred. To contest the Claimant, one of the Titchbornes engaged the services of the famous private detective Jonathan Whicher.* Whicher soon uncovered enough evidence to convince him that the Claimant was not Roger Tichborne at all, but Arthur Orton, the youngest son of a poor family from the east London district of Wapping.

  The Claimant eventually sued for possession of the Tichborne estates, in what became one of the longest civil trials of the century, lasting with some breaks from May 1871 until March 1872. The trial became a national obsession, the courtroom always packed and readers of all classes avidly poring over newspaper accounts of byzantine evidence gathered from three continents. Public attention was split during November and December, when the bulletins charting the near-demise and recovery of the Prince of Wales similarly enthralled the nation. Sir John Duke Coleridge, a friend of William Gladstone, Solicitor General at the beginning of the trial and Attorney General at its end, became with the Claimant a star of the trial. Coleridge was a passionate orator who used his skills both to catch out the Claimant in cross-examination, and to deliver a month-long opening speech that demolished the Claimant’s case. After that opening, Coleridge was prepared to call forward a host of corroborating witnesses. He did not need to; after a few came forward—several of these testifying to a tattoo they had seen on Roger Tichborne’s arm, and which did not exist on the Claimant’s—the jury announced that they had heard enough. The next day, 6 March 1872, the Claimant’s counsel, knowing the case was lost, abandoned it in a non-suit—an automatic decision in favor of the Tichbornes. The Lord Chief Justice immediately ordered that the Claimant be arrested for perjury. The Claimant had not come to court; he was arrested at the Waterloo Hotel on Jermyn Street and allowed to make his semi-triumphal entrance into Newgate. His bail was fixed at £10,000.

  The Claimant proved like O’Connor to be a model prisoner, “cheerful and far from reserved,” spending most
of his time reading books. He was because of his weight specially provided with a bed, rather than the hammock that O’Connor and the rest of those in Newgate slept on. He largely kept apart from the rest of the prisoners, electing as a Roman Catholic to avoid the Anglican services on Sundays—something that O’Connor, a Protestant, could not do—and exercising in solitude in the yard, since authorities decided his weight would make it impossible for him to keep up with others. It is therefore more than possible that O’Connor never met the man. But he was certainly aware of the Claimant’s proximity—and he could not help but be jealous. For the Claimant had achieved with his acts something that Arthur O’Connor (and, for that matter, Edward Oxford before him) had yearned for, but never achieved: true popularity. He had become the darling of the masses, who saw in his struggles a reflection of their own: he was a true underdog, courageously standing up to the powerful. First the aristocratic Tichbornes, and now the government itself, exerted their immense resources in order to keep a poor man down. The working classes saw the Claimant as one of them—as one who had chosen the ways of common men over those of the titled snobs. The higher classes sneered at the Claimant’s uncouth and ignorant ways; to those that valorized him, they were marks of honor.

  The Claimant was to remain in Newgate until the end of April, when he posted bail. His trajectory of popular acclaim was to rise before it fell, as he set out on a triumphant, wildly popular speaking tour. At his criminal trial, which began a year later and was another ten-month legal marathon, the Claimant was found guilty and imprisoned for over ten years. When he emerged from prison in 1884, the popular support he had enjoyed a decade before had passed; he spent the rest of his life in poverty and humiliation, forlornly promoting his claims in music halls, circuses, and pubs. With a single lapse in 1895, he never stopped claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne; when he died in 1898, he was buried with that name inscribed upon his coffin.

  When the Claimant’s life intersected with O’Connor’s, however, he was nearing the height of his fame. Arthur O’Connor, throttled by John Brown, hooted at by the riffraff at Bow Street, despised by the press and denounced by all classes, both in Ireland and in England, could not help but contrast his great unpopularity with the Claimant’s great popularity. Something had clearly gone wrong with his grand plan. What could he do to make things right?

  Within a week, John Brown had his medal. For the last five months, at least, Victoria had been contemplating instituting a medal for the most faithful and long-serving of her servants, and she had written last October on the subject to her prime minister. Medals are given to Arctic explorers, she told Gladstone; why shouldn’t her servants be given them as well? “What in fact can be more important … than the faithfulness & discretion & independent unselfishess of those personal servants …?” Gladstone approved of the idea, but cautioned the Queen against applying on the subject to the House of Commons, which would only interfere with her personal choice of recipients. He was sure the Treasury could afford the small expense. Thus, by Victoria’s own design, the silver “Victoria Faithful Service Medal” came into being. By the day John Brown tackled O’Connor, the die was quite literally cast.

  As far as the Queen was concerned, however, the Faithful Service Medal was not enough: John Brown’s action had, she thought, saved her life, and he deserved recognition above that given any of her other servants. She quickly devised a higher award for him: the “Victoria Devoted Service Medal,” struck from the same die as the other medal but in gold rather than silver. On 5 March, she presented Brown with a £25 annuity and the medal “in recognition of his presence of mind and devotion.” It was the only Devoted Service Medal she—or any other monarch—was ever to give.*

  Not surprisingly, the Prince of Wales, Brown’s inveterate enemy, thought the reward excessive, especially since several others had taken a hand in restraining O’Connor, including his brother Prince Arthur. But Bertie held his tongue—for a time. When, a week later, he discovered that for his pains, Arthur had received a paltry tie-pin, however, he could no longer be contained. He wrote a letter to his mother from France—where he was recovering from his illness—blasting her for the discrepancy. Victoria was baffled: obviously, Brown deserved more than her son had. Arthur “could not do, for his very position, what Brown did, who was deservedly rewarded for his presence of mind, and devotion.”

  No one could tell her that her ghillie was not the paragon among men—living men, that was. Besides, she wrote, “Arthur was very amiable and wore his pin continuously and repeatedly said how much he liked it.”

  Nineteen days after Arthur O’Connor had pounded the last nail into the coffin of republicanism, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke stood up in the House of Commons to defend its corpse. The public, eager to witness his comeuppance, filled the galleries. Dilke knew very well that he would lose this debate. But he had repeatedly called for a parliamentary investigation into the Queen’s expenditures, and he was now bound by honor to do the same in Parliament. He thus approached his task with a wincing desire to get it over with. Speaking for an hour and a half, he offered none of the fireworks he had in Newcastle, seeking instead to take cover in sheer boredom, larding his speech with innumerable and questionable facts and figures; he was, he admitted, “unutterably dull.” Gone were the crowd-pleasing lists of comically useless court officers. Gone was the rousing welcome to the coming republic. Instead was an interminable list of precedents for parliamentary oversight of the Queen’s finance, and a dispassionate analysis of the growth in the royal fortune, the impropriety of that fortune reverting to the Privy Purse rather than to the nation, and a vague foreboding about the risk of the great accumulation of wealth in the hands of the monarch. It was a speech calculated to change no one’s opinion.

  William Gladstone then stood to champion the Queen; in the words of Punch, he “went smashingly into the Chelsea baronet as if he had been Chelsea china.” Dilke had tried to strip his argument of every vestige of republicanism, presenting the motion as one of economy alone. The stink of his Newcastle speech was still upon him, however, and Gladstone refused to let him forget it. Because of the Newcastle speech, Gladstone angrily charged Dilke, the whole country understood his motion to be both a personal attack on the Queen and a call for a republic. Dilke was in every particular wrong: wrong about the Queen’s wealth, wrong that she cost more than her uncles or her grandfather had, wrong that the annuities for her children were unprecedented and improper. Duty toward the Queen “who reigns in the hearts of her people” impelled him to exhort the House to reject Dilke’s motion. Gladstone sat down to universal cheering.

  The demolition done, the House was ready to vote. But Dilke’s courageous if foolhardy colleague, Auberon Herbert, jumped up, seconded Dilke’s motion, and prepared to give his own speech in its defense. “A perfect storm,” as Gladstone put it, ensued. The House—and particularly the Conservatives—assailed Herbert with cries of “Divide! Divide!” which degenerated into a menagerie of catcalls, cock-crows, and howls. Large groups walked out, hoping to force an adjournment by lack of a quorum. One member only made things worse by demanding that press and strangers in the gallery be expelled, suggesting that the government wished to stifle free discussion. The anarchy continued until Herbert finally surrendered to the bellowing and sat down. After a couple short speeches by Dilke’s fellow radicals, explaining why they could not possibly support this motion, the House divided. Two voted for Dilke’s motion; 276 voted against it.* All in all, concluded Punch, Dilke’s attack on the Queen “was about as contemptible as that by the lad who presented the flintless and empty pistol the other day.”

  Dilke was mightily relieved his short tenure as republican leader was over for good. It took some time for him to cease to be a social pariah, and in the eyes of the Queen, the damage was permanent; she could not forget the injury he had done her when her popularity was at its nadir. Ten years later, when he was offered a place in Gladstone’s ministry, the Queen insisted that he not be given a
ny office that would place him close to her, and that he publicly renounce his “earlier crude opinions.” And so he did, leaving no doubt that in the battle of ideologies, Victoria had triumphed completely over him, Odger, Bradlaugh, and O’Connor: republicanism was dead.

  * Actually, there were two monuments to Feargus O’Connor: a Gothic spire at his gravesite at Kensal Green, and a statue in Nottingham, the city he served as a Member of Parliament (Read and Glasgow 144).

  * The fact that O’Connor’s pistol was obviously unloaded made little difference to her; she wrote that day in her journal “The pistol had not been loaded, but it easily might have been!” (Victoria Letters second series 2:218).

  * Later, Gladstone ordered O’Connor’s pistol brought to the lobby of the House, to show what a harmless relic it was. The swarm of members around the curiosity grew so great that the detective in charge of it had to reclaim the weapon forcibly and flee Parliament (Glasgow Daily Herald 1 March 1872, 5).

  * Pate.

  * Victoria changed her lady-in-waiting at the beginning of every month. Lady Jane Churchill, however, obviously shaken by the attempt, wished not to leave the Queen the day after, and with the Queen’s permission followed her to Windsor, riding with the equerries in the carriage behind.