Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  And so now in 1882, that horrible Mr. Gladstone was her Prime Minister, and she could only look back wistfully to the days of Disraeli’s poetry, romance, and chivalry. Her nostalgia was rendered that much more poignant by the fact that Disraeli had died a year before, on 19 April 1881. Now Victoria could not help but feel both a prisoner and an enemy of her own government. Gladstone was no longer a liberal, as far as she was concerned; he had embraced a democratic radicalism that she was certain would bring ruin upon her nation. She kept him, as he noted, at “arm’s length,” preferring when possible to work with the other ministers in his Cabinet. And Gladstone, in spite of his immense personal respect for the Queen and the institution of monarchy, generally assumed she would be opposed to his policies and would need to be dealt with as a necessary evil, someone to be handled, not served. He spoke to her, she said, as if she were a public meeting. Victoria had feared that the coming Liberal government would be a “calamity for the country and the peace of Europe,” and Gladstone had done little to change her mind. Of all her governments, she told Vicky two years later, this one was “the worst I have ever had to do with.” Her political life had become largely a matter of bracing herself: waiting for her own government to mess up, and ready to pounce when they did.

  The Queen’s insecurity with her own government only heightened the general insecurity she felt in 1882. Life in the 1880s, it seemed, had become that much more difficult for rulers. Not one, but two dramatic assassinations that had occurred a year before had forced her to wonder whether she might be next.

  Alexander II, Tsar of the Russians—and incidentally her son Alfred’s father-in-law—had been the first to die, the victim of an implacable and highly organized band of Nihilists who called themselves the People’s Will and who had dedicated themselves exclusively to killing their Tsar. But even before People’s Will, Alexander’s life had been threatened—three times, always by men with pistols. The first two attempts—the first in a park in St. Petersburg in 1866, and the second on a state visit to Paris in 1867—were thwarted when bystanders jostled the would-be assassins’ arms. Alexander himself thwarted the third would-be assassin, a man named Alexander Soloviev, when in 1879 he got within arm’s length of the Tsar and drew on him a high-caliber American pistol nicknamed the “Bear Hunter.” Alexander saw the pistol, dodged the first shot, and then turned and fled, serpentining to avoid four more, before Soloviev was captured.

  Soon after Soloviev’s attempt, People’s Will formed, holding as its central belief that destroying the autocrat Alexander would spark a national uprising and thus destroy the Russian autocracy. Their weapon of choice was dynamite—a relatively new technology, more easily transportable, more versatile, and much more powerful than gunpowder. And while People’s Will targeted only the Tsar, they were not over-particular about injuring or killing the innocent to achieve their goal. They attempted three times in 1879 to blow up the Tsar’s train, succeeding, on the third try, of blowing up the wrong train altogether—the one holding Alexander’s baggage and entourage. In 1880, using an agent who had infiltrated the Palace as a servant, they tried to kill the royal family as they ate, secreting a good three hundred pounds of dynamite in a trunk below the dining room of the Winter Palace. The explosion destroyed the room and killed or wounded fifty of the palace guard, but the Tsar and his family arrived at dinner late and were unharmed.

  A fourth attempt, to mine a bridge over which the Tsar crossed, failed when the conspirators who were to set off the explosion arrived after the Tsar had come and gone.

  Finally, People’s Will planned an apocalypse from which Alexander would never escape. Sundays in St. Petersburg, Alexander would usually drive a mile from the Winter Palace and back in order to review his troops, and the group plotted to kill him as he traveled the usual route. They rented out a shop, dug a mine under the road, and filled it with explosives. If this did not kill the Tsar, they equipped five agents to finish the job—four with hand-held dynamite and kerosene bombs, and one with a knife. (In the event, the knife-wielder was arrested before the attempt, and one cold-footed bomber did not show up). On Sunday 1 March 1881,* Alexander unknowingly avoided the mine by choosing to return to the Palace by another route, via the Catherine Canal. Learning of this, the three waiting bombers rushed to the canal. There, the first threw his bomb under the Tsar’s carriage, and the street erupted in a deafening explosion. The Tsar was unhurt, but one of his Cossacks as well as a passing boy were killed. Alexander stepped out of his carriage to confront the captured bomber, wagging a finger in his face and berating him: “A fine one!” His aide twice pleaded with Alexander to get back into his carriage and move on, but the Tsar wished to survey the damage at the scene. There, a man suddenly turned, raised his arms, and threw his bomb at the Tsar’s feet. When the smoke cleared, twenty people lay wounded on the street. The bomber was dead. And Alexander was a mass of wounds from the head down, his legs virtually blown away. He was carried to an open sleigh. The third bomber realized that the Tsar was dying and his bomb was unnecessary, and so with one arm he helped carry Alexander’s body while with the other he held the briefcase containing the explosive.

  “Feel quite shaken and stunned by this awful news,” Victoria wrote in her journal on the day Alexander died. Soon afterwards, she sent her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, to the Home Office to discuss increased security for Buckingham Palace. On the face of it, it seemed absurd that the Queen would see in the danger to the Tsar any danger to herself; Alexander was an autocrat who despite liberating the serfs in 1861 met dissent with repression. The nation was a police state where expectations for reform had been raised and crushed, ensuring widespread social discontent. Russia’s jails and cities were full of men and women dedicated to killing the Tsar. Surely nothing like People’s Will could exist in Britain?

  Surely, Victoria knew, something like People’s Will did exist in Britain. There was only one other country on earth in which a disciplined organization, using dynamite as its weapon of choice, had in the early 1880s committed itself to terror-bombing, targeting centers of power to effect revolutionary change. And that country was Victoria’s own.

  The very first true terror-bombing in the modern world—in other words, the first bombing intended to effect political change by destroying for the sake of destruction, thereby spreading terror through the population, rather than a bombing intended to serve another purpose, such as freeing a prisoner or even killing another human being—had taken place the year before, at 5:20 P.M. on 14 January 1881, when a bomb erupted at the army barracks at Salford near Manchester.* The bombers had obviously chosen the site for its symbolic value: Salford was where the Manchester Martyrs had been hanged fourteen years before. While the explosion was intended to destroy property and not people, it nevertheless drew blood: a butcher’s shop was destroyed; three adults were injured, and a seven-year-old boy was killed.

  That the explosion was a Fenian attack and the manifestation of Irish rage was obvious, but who exactly was culpable was less so. In actuality, the immense majority of Fenians, both in Ireland and the United States, had nothing to do with the attack, nor did any of the Irish Nationalists in Parliament or their leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Both the motivation and the money for the attack came from one man: Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Rossa’s hatred of the British had been born when his fatherless family was evicted during the worst of the Great Famine and had been hardened by years of rough treatment in British prisons, to which he was sentenced under a treason-felony charge. Exiled to New York, he openly established a “skirmishing fund” for terrorist attacks upon Britain. The British government might protest, but the U.S. government—hungry for Irish votes—did nothing to stop him. Rossa’s politics—his refusal in particular to work with Parnell and the parliamentary nationalists—proved too militant for the largest body of the Fenians in the United States, the Clan-na-Gael, and in 1880 Rossa broke with them, formed his own organization, and founded the extremist newspaper United Irishma
n, which redoubled his calls for a terrorist fund. Though the Clan-na-Gael would also eventually enter the dynamite war against the British, the attacks so far had all been by Rossa’s agents.

  Two months later, Rossa’s bombers targeted London, placing a cruder device—fifteen pounds of blasting powder lit by a fuse—in a niche outside Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. An alert constable discovered the package, snuffed out the fuse, and carried the bomb to Bow Street Station. Mansion House was quiet that night: a planned grand dinner had been called off because Alexander II had been assassinated three days before. (It was this would-be outrage, as well as Alexander’s death, that heightened Victoria’s concerns about the safety of Buckingham Palace.) In May 1881 the skirmishers hit Liverpool—a badly constructed pipe bomb well-placed at Liverpool’s main police station exploded but did little damage. A month later, two bombers were captured lighting the fuse of a far more dangerous dynamite bomb outside Liverpool Town Hall. And the discovery by police, three weeks after this, of eight more “infernal machines”—slabs of dynamite with clockwork detonators, shipped from New York in barrels marked “cement”—made it clear that Irish terror had only just begun.

  Since last summer, the bombers had been quiescent. But Ireland itself seethed with unrest. Gladstone’s government had passed its own Coercion Act, meeting Irish agitation with repression. And under it, in October, three Irish nationalist leaders—Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, and James J. O’Kelly, had been arrested for their agitation for the Land League; they remained imprisoned in Dublin’s Kilmainham prison. It was more than likely that Irish frustration would again re-erupt in a dynamite campaign. So far, the royal family had been clearly placed off limits as a target. But Alexander’s death had shown the world the dramatic effect of a dynamite bomb upon a world leader, and Victoria now took greater precautions when traveling than ever before. (On her train journey this day, as on all her train journeys nowadays, a pilot train to guard against derailment of the royal train had been sent ahead of her.) How long would Irish terrorists refrain making a target of her—the living monument to British power, British Empire, and British domination of Ireland?

  The second victim of assassination in 1881 could hardly have been further removed from Alexander, in terms both of distance and of ideology. Autocrats, it became clear, weren’t the only targets for assassination. On 2 July 1881, President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a man who thought that by killing the President he was saving the Union. Guiteau, a failed lawyer, evangelist preacher, newspaper editor, lecturer, writer, and insurance salesman—but a moderately successful con artist—decided in 1880 that he would make his fortune in politics, supporting Garfield in that year’s presidential election. He made himself a fixture at New York Republican Party headquarters, relentlessly buttonholing party leaders and offering to give a speech he had written, and actually giving a part of it once. When Garfield won by a razor-thin popular majority, his winning in New York state proving pivotal in his electoral college victory, Guiteau leapt to the conclusion that his speech alone was responsible for Garfield’s election, and that he deserved great reward. He preferred to become Minister to Austria; he would be happy with the consul-generalship in Paris; at the very least, he would accept a consulship in Liverpool. Soon after Garfield’s inauguration, Guiteau arrived in Washington, D.C. with a single shirt and $5. Flitting from one upscale boarding house to another as the rent became due, Guiteau joined the many other job-seekers in the capital, haunting the White House and the State Department and barraging Garfield and his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, with righteous demands for his appointment. He managed once to thrust a copy of his speech into Garfield’s hands and once to speak to him; another time he slipped into a White House reception and had a conversation with Mrs. Garfield. When he was finally denied access to the White House altogether, and when Secretary Blaine at the State Department shouted at him “Never speak to me again on the Paris consulship as long as you live,” Guiteau understood that his due reward would be denied him. As absurd as his expectations and sense of self were, Guiteau had spent enough time in Republican politics to form an accurate assessment of the state of that party after the election. He realized that the Republicans were split deeply into two factions—the Stalwarts, who supported ex-president Ulysses S. Grant, and the Half-breeds, who did not, and who had been largely responsible for Garfield’s election. Those factions, Guiteau knew as he pursued his own appointment, were locked in their own battles over a number of political appointments. As he lay in bed one night, the disappointed office-seeker had a burst of inspiration: if he killed Garfield, all would be well: vice-president Chester Arthur—a true Stalwart—would become president and all party factionalism would come to an end. He would be a hero.

  Guiteau’s certainty over this course grew quickly. Within two weeks, he realized that his inspiration was divinely inspired. God was speaking to him personally, telling him to kill the president. Suddenly, the entire erratic course of his life made sense: he had been born to perform this patriotic act.

  And so Guiteau abruptly shifted from job-seeker to stalker. He borrowed $15 from a distant relative and made his way to a gun shop in downtown Washington, where he found a choice of weapons. He favored a $10 pearl-handled revolver, thinking that it would look best on display in a museum after the shooting. But in the end he opted for economy, choosing a $9 wood-handled, .44-caliber five-shot snub-nosed revolver with a powerful kick, stamped “British Bulldog.” A novice with a gun, Guiteau spent time the next day practicing shooting on the banks of the Potomac. He followed the president (who eschewed all security), considered shooting him at church and then outside the White House, and finally decided to shoot him in the Washington terminal of the Baltimore and Potomac Railway. On the morning of 2 July 1881, he wrote one of several letters justifying his conduct. This one was addressed to the White House and began:

  The President’s tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican Party and save the Republic. Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little where one goes. A human life is of small value. During the war thousands of brave boys went down without a tear. I presume the President is a Christian, and that he will be happier in Paradise than here.

  “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts,” he wrote. At 8:30 that morning, he took up a position in the ladies’ waiting room of the station, through which he knew Garfield would have to pass to get to the platform and his private Pullman coach. Just before 9:30, Garfield entered with Secretary of State Blaine. When they were a few steps from the doorway to the main waiting room, Guiteau shot twice, the first bullet grazing Garfield’s arm and the second plunging into his back, above his waist and four inches from his spine, shattering a rib and passing through a vertebra, and finally lodging below his pancreas. The wound was serious, but not fatal. The fifteen or so doctors who examined him, however, ensured that he would die, searching in vain for the bullet over the next few days by plunging their unwashed fingers into the wound. Garfield lingered in agony until the nineteenth of September before his body, then a 130-pound mass of putrefaction, succumbed. Victoria, who had sent at least six messages expressing her concern during Garfield’s long decline and death, immediately ordered her Court to go into mourning for a week—an unprecedented token of respect for an American president.

  Guiteau’s trial was a sensation in Washington, and it was widely reported in Britain. He mounted an insanity defense: God had directed him, he claimed; the shooting was a divinely inspired uncontrollable impulse. Insanity in Washington, as in Britain, was defined by the MacNaughtan Rules, and Guiteau’s defense (in which he acted as co-counsel) roughly followed Hadfield’s, Oxford’s, and MacNaughtan’s, with a number of lay witnesses to his bizarre behavior and a number of doctors to testify to his insanity. The trial was notable for Guiteau’s relentless outbursts against the judge and all the attorneys, including his own. He was found guilty, and awaited execution on 30 June, two days before the fir
st anniversary of his shooting.

  Guiteau was obviously insane. His extreme grandiosity, his inability to maintain any grip on reality, and his Maclean-like personal connection with God all made that abundantly clear. But Guiteau’s act was undoubtedly political as well. He spent months scheming to elect Garfield. He sought recompense, as thousands of others had done, for his political labors. And he genuinely believed that his shooting Garfield would have positive political consequences, healing a party rift and putting into office a more capable man. Guiteau showed that there can be no clear line drawn between the political and the lunatic assassin.

  Nevertheless, after this cold day in March, many Britons would try again to draw that line.

  The royal train, having flashed through the station at Slough and turned sharply left to rattle through the playing fields of Eton, slowed to cross Brunel’s bowstring bridge over the River Thames and slid to a halt at Windsor Station. It was exactly 5:25. Roderick Maclean heard the train come; he watched the door of the royal waiting room, waiting for Victoria to emerge.

  * Sweet spirit of nitre—ethyl nitrite suspended in alcohol—was a common medicine at the time as a diuretic, antispasmodic, and soothing agent; it would indeed thus likely have been beneficial to Maclean.

  * Actually, there had been a response, after Maclean left—not from the Queen, who almost certainly did not see the poem, but from the wife of her keeper of the privy purse, who returned the poem with a curt note: “Lady Biddulph is obliged to return to Mr. Maclean his verses. The Queen never accepts manuscript poetry” (Surrey Advertiser and County Times 11 March 1882, 5; Times 6 March 1882, 6).