Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  * She was right. Most press retrospectives of the attempts written in the wake of O’Connor’s attempt neglected to mention Hamilton’s.

  * This was his weight as taken at Newgate upon his admission. Other accounts suggest he was heavier.

  * Whicher was one of the first eight officers appointed to the original Detective Branch in 1842.

  * On the other hand, well over a hundred silver “Faithful Service Medals” have been awarded by Victoria and her successors; they are still awarded today (Cullen 158-59n.).

  * The two who voted for the motion were not Dilke and Herbert, who acted as tellers, or vote-counters, and did not vote.

  twenty–one

  OUT OF THE COUNTRY

  According to one of the doctors who examined him in Newgate, Arthur O’Connor’s great object was “truth at all times.” He was known to quarrel with his siblings because they simply could not understand truth as he did. He absolutely refused to understand his assault upon the Queen as anything less than heroic. His parents visited him as often as they could. His mother Catherine’s understanding of his plight differed greatly from his father George’s. To Catherine, Arthur was still to her a “good lad” and the “best of boys” who had made a horrible mistake; now he had to endure what he had brought upon himself. Her husband George disagreed; the good lad that he had known was gone. Arthur, he believed, had changed greatly since the day in late 1866 when a cab in Chancery Lane had knocked him down, split his head open, and sent him to the hospital. He had never been the same since—had become increasingly irritable and frequently burst out in fits of irrational passion. George O’Connor began telling his friends that his son’s brain was affected. The attack on the Queen simply confirmed his worst fears.

  George O’Connor had seen insanity in his family before. Back in 1853, two years before his son Arthur was born, he became deeply involved in the care of his uncle Feargus. Feargus O’Connor’s behavior had by then been increasingly eccentric for years. When in June 1852 he struck two members in the House of Commons in as many days, he was arrested and examined by four doctors, all of whom deemed him insane—three of them diagnosing his illness as “general paralysis of the insane”—soon (but not yet) understood to result from syphilis. One of these doctors was the celebrated John Conolly; another was his son-in-law, Thomas Harrington Tuke, who agreed to take O’Connor in at his asylum at Chiswick. When in 1853 George’s aunt Harriet petitioned to gain control of her brother Feargus’s estate and remove him from Tuke’s care, citing ill-treatment, George staunchly defended Tuke, successfully applying to have his uncle placed under the protection of the Lord Chancellor, in order to keep his uncle safe at Chiswick and safe from the designs of his aunt. The commission, examining him, found him frantic and incoherent, but able to sing out all of “The Lion of Freedom,” the song written in his honor. Feargus O’Connor lived on for another two years in pitiful physical decline, suffering severe epileptic seizures and losing control of his bodily functions. In August 1855, his sister—in opposition to George’s wishes—applied successfully to the Court of Chancery for her brother’s removal to her house. He died there in agony ten days later. George O’Connor knew what madness looked like; he knew that madness ran in his family; he was sure that physical injury to his son had brought that madness to the fore. And he trusted Dr. Thomas Harrington Tuke.

  Therefore, George O’Connor turned not to a solicitor to help Arthur, but to Tuke. A week after his son’s imprisonment, he met Tuke in his consulting room and explained his son’s case. Tuke cautioned him: if Arthur were deemed insane at his trial, he would be confined at the Queen’s pleasure—in effect a harsher sentence than the seven years’ imprisonment and two floggings that he incorrectly thought to be the maximum sentence under Peel’s Act. George O’Connor understood that. He still wished that Tuke examine his son.

  Five days later, on 12 April, Tuke examined Arthur in the company of J. Rowland Gibson, the surgeon of Newgate. The boy’s pupils were dilated; his eyes glistened. His head was asymmetrical, with phrenological indications of insanity. He described his many illnesses—spitting blood, bone disease—all of which indicated to Tuke “a fanciful and hypochondriacal state of mind.” O’Connor spoke at length of his abortive attempt at St. Paul’s and his attempt at the Palace, his narrative clearly indicating that “an occasion of great national excitement had developed in this poor boy a paroxysm of insanity.” Tuke could only confirm Arthur’s father’s fears. He recommended to George that other doctors examine his son. Four others did; three concurred with Tuke. Tuke then advised the O’Connors that Arthur should indeed plead insanity, reasoning that any number of years of medical care at Broadmoor would serve the boy better than any number of years in prison as a convicted criminal. Besides, he suggested, in the event of the boy’s recovery, both his previous good character, and the Queen’s well-known propensity to clemency, would surely both work to free the boy.

  Tuke offered his services to the penurious O’Connors for free. No solicitor would do the same, but a band of George O’Connor’s friends contributed enough to hire the firm of Dickson and Lucas, who in turn engaged J. W. Hume-Williams as defending counsel. All agreed that Arthur would plead not guilty by reason of insanity at the coming sessions.

  On Tuesday the ninth of April, the grand jury at the Central Criminal Court briefly heard the testimony of two witnesses—Prince Leopold and John Brown—and quickly returned a true bill against O’Connor, for a misdemeanor under Peel’s Act. Later that afternoon, O’Connor was brought before the bar. It was known that he now had legal representation, and his trial was scheduled for Thursday. His attorney was not, however, in the room, nor were his parents. The boy appeared at first sheepish before the trappings of the law, but quickly regained his confidence. The Clerk of Arraigns asked him how he pleaded. O’Connor paused. Earlier that day, he had spoken with his mother in his cell. The scales had been removed from his eyes, he told her: he “saw the effects of what he had done.” She understood this to mean that he had been mad when he committed the act—the scales were before his eyes—and now was sane, and contrite. Most likely, neither madness nor contrition had anything to do with it. He knew what he had done; he knew that he had broken the law—and as a devoted adherent to the truth, he knew what he had to do.

  He pleaded guilty.

  Those in the courtroom were visibly startled by the boy’s plea, aware that his family, solicitor, and attorney had for some time been working upon a defense; all were expecting a trial on Thursday. Instead, the verdict was recorded, the Deputy Recorder directed that O’Connor be brought up that day for his sentencing, and he was taken away.

  George O’Connor, who had been consulting with Dr. Tuke about his son’s defense when his son pleaded, did not learn about the plea until the next day, when he read about it in a newspaper. He, Tuke, and O’Connor’s attorney J. W. Hume-Williams agreed that the plea must be withdrawn: O’Connor’s insanity prevented him from understanding what he was doing. Hume-Williams thus stood before the presiding judge, Baron Cleasby, on Wednesday, claiming he had a “startling amount of evidence” to support the claim of O’Connor’s derangement. Cleasby seemed surprised: he had not heard that there was any hint of madness in the boy when he pleaded. Nevertheless, he allowed Hume-Williams to bring up the matter at O’Connor’s sentencing the next day.

  O’Connor thus had a trial. The courtroom was crowded, particularly with bewigged barristers expecting the setting of new legal precedents. O’Connor was brought to the dock, now neatly dressed and very much aware of his own importance: “he bowed neither to judge nor jury,” noted a reporter, “but posed himself as if sitting for his photograph.” His legal position was an odd one, for both his attorney and Attorney General Coleridge, appearing for the Crown, claimed to be his true advocate. Hume-Williams adopted Dr. Tuke’s argument that if O’Connor were truly insane, medical care at the Queen’s pleasure would better suit him than any number of years in an English prison. Coleridge, on the
other hand, argued that an acquittal on the grounds of insanity would in effect ensure a worse punishment—a lifetime of confinement. Though a jury was empaneled to consider the question, it was more limited in scope than a full-blown criminal trial, for—as Baron Cleasby, a judge known to be a niggler on points of law, and never quite comfortable in a criminal courtroom, repeatedly made it clear, the hearing focused upon a single question: was Arthur O’Connor sane at the moment he pled guilty? Whether he was insane when he assaulted the Queen was not relevant. O’Connor’s attorney J. W. Hume-Williams argued that O’Connor’s state of mind at the time of the assault was indeed relevant and admissible, since it pointed to a long-term mental illness which endured until the moment O’Connor pled. But Cleasby would have none of it, interrupting Hume-Williams after the second sentence of his opening speech, and relentlessly afterwards, cautioning him to keep to the single question at issue.

  Braving Cleasby’s objections, Hume-Williams laid out the evidence for insanity—the life of unceasing illness, the head injury, the family predisposition to insanity, the growing “paroxysm of insanity,” which peaked during the week of the thanksgiving. He crafted his case in the now well-tried pattern of Hadfield’s and Oxford’s defenses, bringing forward witnesses to O’Connor’s eccentricities, and then calling a number of medical witnesses, in the hopes of demonstrating to the jury that the overwhelming medical consensus was that O’Connor was insane. But despite Hume-Williams’s promise of a “startling” amount of evidence, his witness list was small: he brought forth only O’Connor’s parents and four doctors. And only half of these witnesses actually helped his case. George O’Connor, Thomas Harrington Tuke, and another doctor, James Thompson Sabben, did testify to the boy’s insanity. But the third doctor—Henry Smith, who had amputated O’Connor’s toe years before—claimed that the boy’s intelligence was above average. And J. Rowland Gibson, surgeon of Newgate, stated that after observing the boy daily since the first of March, he was certain that O’Connor was of sound mind.

  Catherine O’Connor proved to harm more than help the defense, testifying that her son was not only sane, but perfectly correct, in pleading guilty: “I had always told him to tell the truth, and I believe he has done so.” If Hume-Williams had any reason to call O’Connor’s mother to the stand, it was because she was the one most familiar with her son’s writings—writings she never could make sense of, but which her son assured her would make him famous someday. O’Connor burned his papers before his attempt at St. Paul’s, but had missed some, and Hume-Williams, employing the time-honored tactic of connecting bad poetry with a diseased brain, took advantage of Catherine’s testimony to read some of her son’s “incoherent” work, until Baron Cleasby interrupted, dismissing the evidence as irrelevant.

  Attorney General Coleridge, having recently made his name with his bitter cross-examination of the Tichborne Claimant, seemed to carry his rage into this case, genuinely affronted that George O’Connor, Dr. Tuke, and Hume-Williams sought to impose a worse punishment upon the boy in defending him. He cross-examined George O’Connor with caustic fervor. He revealed O’Connor Senior’s deep concern about his son’s “paroxysm of madness” as a lie—what else would explain the fact that the man allowed Arthur to take his nine-year-old brother out to view the illuminations the next day? More than this, Coleridge showed O’Connor to be a fool unable to understand his son’s best interests:

  Is it your desire that your son should be imprisoned for life in a lunatic asylum?—Certainly not.

  But you wish that he should be found not guilty on the ground of insanity?—Excuse me, but it is rather a difficult question.

  I want to know whether you are aware of what you are about. Is that your wish that he should be kept for life in a lunatic asylum?—Certainly not.

  Do you know that follows?—Yes.

  Is that what you wish?—It is not what I wish.

  Fully understanding that, you elect that the question of his sanity should be tried?—Yes; as regards his sanity when he did the act.

  Coleridge’s most bitter attack, however, he reserved for Dr. Tuke, whom he presented as the prime mover of this idiotic defense, whose intrusion, if successful, would only make things worse for the boy. Arthur O’Connor was deeply amused by Coleridge’s brutal cross-examination, bursting into laughter as he ran rings around Tuke in attacking the logic of Tuke’s diagnosis of “reasoning insanity.” Coleridge reduced Tuke to silence when he asked him how O’Connor’s getting shut up in Broadmoor for life because of Tuke’s testimony was more sensible than the boy’s throwing himself upon the mercy of the court. And he forced Tuke to admit that O’Connor’s pleading guilty was actually a sign that O’Connor’s sanity had returned. Tuke stepped from the witness box smarting, and later considered himself to be victim of poor timing, suffering more greatly in Coleridge’s cross-examination because “I was his first subject since he had showered vituperation upon the Tichborne Claimant.”

  After Dr. Gibson testified to O’Connor’s complete sanity, the jury had had enough. They stopped the trial and announced through their foreman “that the prisoner was a perfectly sane man when he pleaded to the indictment, and that he was perfectly sane now.” Baron Cleasby agreed immediately. Coleridge, in asking for a sentence, could not help but snipe one more time at “the unfortunate course which Dr. Tuke had thought fit to take in the case,” but did note that some good had come from the trial: Tuke had forced him to present O’Connor’s character in a better light than he otherwise would have. He requested that the judge take this into account in his sentencing.

  And Baron Cleasby apparently did just that. In sentencing O’Connor, he weighed the aggravating factors—O’Connor’s evil intention, the cunning and manner of the crime, and the occasion on which it was committed—against the mitigating ones: his age, his unfortunate “enthusiasm,” which got the better of his mind, and the absurdity of the attempt itself, which suggested that he was not fully in his right mind at the time. His sentence: one year’s imprisonment at hard labor. And during that time, one whipping: twenty strokes with a birch rod.

  The courtroom was rent with a shriek at the mention of whipping: Arthur’s mother Catherine cried out, apparently devastated by two equally unbearable thoughts: that of the rod on her son’s tender back, and of the lost honor of the great O’Connors.

  Queen Victoria was told of the sentence that evening at Windsor, and immediately lashed out at her prime minister, dividing her anger between O’Connor, the judge who sentenced him so leniently, and the government that could allow this to happen:

  The Queen’s object in writing to Mr. Gladstone today is to express her surprise & annoyance at the extreme leniency of O’Connor’s Sentence (wh she has just learnt) especially as regards the length of imprisonment, & to remind Mr. Gladstone of his having said to her that if there was not sufficient protection from the Law, as it stood at present it must be amended… .

  Her safety & her peace of mind will be in constant danger & constantly disturbed—thereby making it almost impossible for her to go about in public,—or at all in London, if she has no security that such miscreants will NOT be allowed to go about in this country—ready at any moment to alarm & insult her again. And the Queen does demand from the Govt that protection wh as a Queen & as a Woman she feels she has a right to expect.—It ought to be in the Power of the law to have such a man sent out of the country & not to allow him to return except under surveillance.

  The effect of this short imprisonment will be vy bad—both abroad & at home.

  Gladstone did his best to placate her, agreeing with her in deploring the leniency of Cleasby’s sentence, which had astonished his entire Cabinet as well as himself. (Dr. Tuke, he noted, had caused “much mischief” through his “gratuitous intervention,” but that offered no excuse for Cleasby’s dereliction of duty.) As far as changing the law went—it was the judge and not the law at fault, for the law did allow for the harsher penalties of seven years’ penal servitude, or thre
e years’ imprisonment with three whippings. Still, he offered to do all he could to create a future for the boy more in accordance with the Queen’s wishes. The government, of course, could ensure that after he was released, “the eye of the police should continue to rest upon O’Connor.” But he believed the government could do more, and in the convoluted and overcautious style he generally adopted in communicating with the Queen, told her

  … it may be found practicable, even under present circumstances, to do what will be far preferable, namely by commutation, and voluntary inducement to get him out of the country for good. This arrangement would probably be the most satisfactory to Your Majesty under the circumstances and Mr. Gladstone feels himself safe in saying that the government will be most desirous to give effect to any wishes which Your Majesty is likely to entertain upon the subject.

  In other words, the government hoped, by offering to remove the penalty of whipping from O’Connor’s sentence, to induce him to stay out of Britain for the rest of Victoria’s life.

  The Queen declared herself through her Private Secretary to be placated—almost. She still wished that Judge Cleasby suffer some sort of censure at the hands of the Lord Chancellor. (Gladstone suggested in return that the “animadversions of the press” would more effectively “repress these strange aberrations.”) And she begged to differ with Gladstone about the law as it presently stood: it did need changing, for it lacked a provision expatriating offenders. Surely, in the course of time, Gladstone could consider amending the law to do that?