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SPECIAL VERDICT
Roderick Maclean’s trial was set for the next assizes in Reading—set, specifically, for 19 April, more than five weeks after his second examination. It was to be by Special Commission, so that the Lord Chief Justice, John Coleridge, could preside in company with the judge of the Assize, Baron Huddleston.* In the interim Maclean, the Queen, and the public found their own ways to divert themselves.
Maclean, when his time wasn’t occupied by the several alienists that both the Crown and his solicitor sent to interview him, wrote an autobiography, which he titled Yestern: or The Story of My Life and Reminiscences. He apparently wished this narrative of his idyllic childhood, his disturbed adulthood, and his special relationship with God to help with his defense, as he argued in it both that he had no intention of whatsoever of shooting the Queen, and that he had long been, and still was, insane. He wished more than this, however, if his overblown prose and his later repeated but unsuccessful attempts to get the manuscript published are any indication: he apparently sought to gain with it the literary fame he knew he so greatly deserved.
Victoria’s diversion was her first visit to the French Riviera. She left her subjects with a letter published in the newspapers on 14 March “to express from her heart how very deeply touched she is by the outburst of enthusiastic loyalty, affection, and devotion which the painful event of the 2d. inst. has called forth from all classes and from all parts of her vast Empire.” The same morning, she and Beatrice rode to the station under greatly increased security, constables sent from London lining the route, and the station itself closed altogether to the public. Similar precautions were taken at Portsmouth. Two days later, Queen and Princess were in Mentone, where security was lighter, and in which the Queen delighted in riding in an open carriage about the countryside, writing to Vicky of “the bright sunshine and the sea, mountains, vegetation and lightness of the air and the brightness and gaiety of everything.” Only John Brown marred the otherwise entirely relaxing journey. Rumors that three Fenian terrorists were on their way from Paris to assassinate Victoria had reached the ears of the police who accompanied her, but they dismissed these rumors as spurious. John Brown did not, and drove everyone to distraction by his frantic attempts to discover the assassins. Victoria attributed his hypervigilance not to any actual threat, but to “his increasing hatred of being ‘abroad’ which blinds his admiration of the country even.” Victoria and Beatrice returned to Windsor amidst the same heightened security, four days before Maclean’s trial.
In the meantime, public attention was absolutely captivated by a drama that had been building for some time, which competed for column inches in the newspapers with Maclean’s attempt, and which in the days before Maclean’s trial grew into London’s cause célèbre of 1882: the Jumbo craze. That the simple transfer of an elephant from Regent’s Park Zoo to a circus in New York became a sensational international incident should come as no surprise, for Jumbo had a great publicist—the greatest publicist that ever lived: P. T. Barnum. Barnum and his associates, having the year before merged to create a greater “Greatest Show on Earth,” had sent agents across America and Europe in search of new, bigger and better exhibits. Their agent in London had negotiated with the Zoological Society of London for a £2,000 sale of the largest living exhibit he found—Jumbo, reputedly the largest African elephant then in captivity. The Zoological Society was relieved to see Jumbo go, for the elephant had reached the age of sexual maturity and had already experienced musth, a condition common to adult male elephants caused by copious hormonal release, and manifesting itself in violently destructive rages; last August, Jumbo had destroyed the zoo’s elephant house. A return of that condition—and the possible need to destroy the elephant—was only a matter of time.
Jumbo, however, apparently had his own opinion about leaving the zoo. When in mid-February he was led from his paddock to the crate especially designed to wheel him across London and aboard ship, he balked and refused to enter. When led out the next day to walk the eight miles to Millwall Docks, Jumbo similarly refused, uttering loud cries of distress, sinking to the ground and laying upon his side, grunting. “Shame,” onlookers cried out. The press and the public began to take note. At the same time that Roderick Maclean made his way to Windsor and bided his time there, London focused on the elephant’s plight, and visits to the zoo skyrocketed. Members of the Society sued to keep Jumbo in London—and many pleaded with Barnum to let Jumbo stay. Barnum did his best to stoke the flames of publicity, on both sides of the Atlantic, making public all of his correspondence, spreading rumors about the elephant, perhaps even manufacturing letters supposedly from British children, pleading with him to relent. The resulting furor both increased revenues at the zoo and created a fever of anticipation in the United States ensuring for Barnum’s circus a wildly successful season. In mid-March, Jumbo fever peaked, as on one day 24,007 people packed the zoo—a dozenfold more than had come on the same day the previous year. Finally, on 22 March, Jumbo deigned to enter the box; with difficulty he was chained, crated, slowly trundled across the metropolis to St. Katharine’s Dock, where he was set on a barge and two days later hoisted aboard ship. Two days after that he sailed for New York. Once the elephant had left, Jumbo fever subsided quickly, the British sheepishly realizing that they could go on without Jumbo, as Americans began to think they couldn’t. By the date of the trial, then, Barnum and his elephant no longer competed for column inches with Roderick Maclean.
When on 19 April two constables conveyed Maclean up from the subterranean passage and into the dock of the small courtroom at Reading, he appeared dirtier and shabbier than ever, wearing his faded green-gray overcoat with its soiled once-velvet collar left open to reveal a ratty shirt and a frayed black tie. His demeanor was equally pathetic, betraying his sense of terror at being surrounded by the enemies who had packed the courtroom. His hands fidgeted ceaselessly; his eyebrows twitched, as his vacant eyes wandered nervously about the courtroom, from judge to jury to counsel, and upwards to the gallery, where on one side a number of fashionably dressed ladies stared back at him, some through opera glasses. “Few who looked upon him,” his attorney later wrote, “had any doubt that insanity had marked him for its own.” Maclean’s brothers could easily have provided him with a respectable suit for the trial: they had otherwise provided for him well, paying for his meals at Reading Gaol and for the services of their solicitor and two barristers, including one of the most capable and renowned—and expensive—criminal attorneys of the day, Montagu Williams. But family, attorneys, and Maclean himself had agreed he would plead insanity. And Maclean’s rags, the regalia of his distraction, served his case best: and so they remained.
From early that morning, there had been a crush at all of the courthouse entrances. Those admitted had apparently been selected for their respectable appearances, one reporter comparing the spectators to a Nonconformist congregation. They were notable, as well, for their overt conservatism. This day, as it happens, was the first anniversary of Benjamin Disraeli’s death,* and many in the courtroom both honored his memory and signified their adherence to his principles by carrying bouquets of primroses, Disraeli’s favorite flower. The Queen had that morning done the same, sending a primrose wreath to be placed on his grave at Hughenden.** Maclean’s agitation could not have been lessened by these symbols of allegiance to another cause—the blue ones in particular.
There had been growing public nervousness about Maclean’s trial. This was the first time one of Victoria’s assailants was being tried for treason since John Francis, forty years before. All of Robert Peel’s reservations then about providing an attention-seeking scoundrel with the elevated trappings of a State Trial—and thus encouraging other addle-brained attention-seekers—poured forth from the press in the days leading up to this trial. “We cannot help regretting,” proclaimed The Times, “that the accused has been treated so much au sérieux, and that, instead of placing Maclean on a sort of pedestal,
he could not have been sent to quarter Sessions to be dealt with in a sharp and summary fashion.” It was all too much: the presence of the Lord Chief Justice, as well as a large team of prosecutors headed by the Attorney-and Solicitor-Generals; the very charge of High Treason with its awful sentence—it was “like employing a five ton Nasmyth hammer to crack a walnutshell,” according to one newspaper. More than this, there were fears that this trial would repeat the excesses of an insanity trial that had finished just two months before, and thus that was fresh in everyone’s minds: Charles Guiteau’s trial for the murder of President Garfield, which had been widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic. During the ten-week trial, Guiteau had acted as his own co-counsel, and with his constant interruptions, his badgering and belittling of attorneys on both sides, his vainglorious week-long pontification from the witness stand, and his dogged insistence upon reading long passages from a book he had written, or rather plagiarized, Guiteau had managed to turn the trial into a circus before his guilt was finally established and he was sentenced to hang.
The fears of all were allayed in the course of this day. For both Crown and defense had come to the courtroom believing the trial’s outcome to be a foregone conclusion: an acquittal on the basis of insanity. And for weeks both sides had been working toward the common goal of gathering evidence that would support that conclusion. Both sides, for one thing, had instructed medical experts to interview Maclean and ascertain his state of mind. But while ordinarily the prosecution would instruct medical witnesses in an insanity trial in order to rebut an insanity defense, the government from the start expected their witnesses to confirm Maclean’s madness. In his diary, Lewis Harcourt, son of the Home Secretary, noted this expectation on the part of his father: “As to Maclean there is no doubt of his insanity and so anxious is the H[ome] S[ecretary] to have it proved that he has given orders for Dr. Sheppard to be instructed by the Solicitor to the Treasury Solicitor to go down to Reading Gaol to examine him.” While there had been in the weeks leading up to the trial some dickering about who would pay for which doctor, and how much evidence each side would disclose to each other, there was no question of the verdict, and both sides were committed to counteracting the pomp of the trial with celerity, reaching a verdict as efficiently as possible.
Much therefore had happened in the hour before Maclean stepped into the dock: the two judges in their scarlet robes and full-bottomed wigs had taken their seats, the Grand Jury had been empaneled, Chief Justice Coleridge had presented the charge, and the Grand Jury had left and returned with a true bill for treason against Maclean. Maclean was then brought up and the charge read; in a tremulous voice, he denied his guilt. The jury was then sworn without challenge, and the trial proceeded hastily: before lunch, the prosecution had completed and the defense had called its first three witnesses.
In opening for the prosecution, Attorney General Henry James did not wait for the defense to raise the possibility of Maclean’s insanity: the man’s state of mind, he proclaimed, was a “matter of grave consideration for the jury.” While he noted that it was the job of the defense to prove insanity, he made it clear that the Crown would have no problem whatsoever with that conclusion: indeed, he told the jury, “satisfaction would be felt by every subject of the Queen at the thought that it was not from the ranks of those who were sane that a hand had been raised against our gracious Sovereign.” James and his three colleagues then quickly established the facts of the shooting, by examining most of the witnesses who had testified at Maclean’s two examinations. Maclean’s attorneys, having no reason to question those facts, remained silent.
In opening Maclean’s defense, Montagu Williams set out a strategy that was a variation on the defense in Hadfield’s, Oxford’s, and McNaughtan’s trials: the defense would call both eyewitnesses and medical experts to support overwhelmingly the claim that Maclean was insane. Williams was careful to point out that the evidence would prove Maclean legally insane—that is, prove that he was insane according to the McNaughtan Rules. “At the time of committing this act,” Williams stated, “he was an irresponsible agent, not knowing the difference between right and wrong.” Non-medical evidence to Maclean’s eccentricities was to be limited: Maclean’s family, who could have provided volumes of evidence concerning their brother’s oddities, had, in their desire to detach themselves from their embarrassing relative, successfully requested that they not be called. (Victoria had similarly requested that her household not have to testify.) Therefore, to provide anecdotal evidence of Maclean’s insanity, the defense called the Reverend Maclachlan, who had assisted Maclean on his way from Southsea to Windsor (and who now added little to the defense) and a Maclean family friend, Samuel Stanesby, who detailed twenty years of Maclean’s eccentric behavior and introduced the paranoid and homicidal letters Maclean had written to his sister Annie—strong evidence of true past insanity to counter any notion that Maclean could be shamming madness in the present.
The defense’s most compelling evidence, however, came from the medical experts. Nine doctors appeared in all, six of them brought in by the defense, and the last three originally instructed by the prosecution. While the first doctor simply bore witness to Maclean’s debilitating head injury as a child, the other eight testified with impressive unanimity to his madness in the past and in the present, unanimity unmarred since the one doctor who had examined Maclean and declared him sane—Dr. Holderness of Windsor, who had examined him on the evening of the shooting—had been conveniently forgotten about by both sides. Four doctors testified to Maclean’s history of insanity, having previously certified his insanity or treated him in an asylum. The other four—including the three doctors brought in by the prosecution, now released by them to testify for the defense—had examined him in jail, and while all testified he was insane, not all presented his illness as within the purview of the McNaughtan Rules. Indeed the defense’s own expert, Dr. Henry Manning, superintendent at Laverstock Asylum at Salisbury, turned out to be the worst witness in this respect. For while Manning spelled out in admirable detail Maclean’s paranoia, the voices in his head, and his notions about the color blue and the number four, he insisted, in spite of leading questioning by the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney General, that while Maclean’s shooting was “an absolutely irresistible moral impulse, as strong as if it was physical,” he could distinguish between right and wrong, and “decidedly he would know at the time he fired the pistol that he was doing a wrong act.”
Two of the prosecution’s three witnesses testified more clearly and effectively to Maclean’s legal insanity. (The third, Oliver Maurice, the surgeon at Reading Gaol, simply and briefly declared Maclean’s unsoundness.) Edgar Sheppard, professor at King’s College and for twenty years superintendent at Colney Hatch Asylum, was certain: Maclean was an imbecile, liable to homicidal or delusional mania, and “the real question of right or wrong does not present itself to a man in such a state.” William Orange, Medical Superintendent at Broadmoor, agreed: “I do not think he was capable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act he committed,” he stated.
In closing, Attorney General Sir Henry James did just about everything in his power to direct the jury to an insanity acquittal. He did not concede the case outright—such a verdict should not be lightly arrived at—but he admitted that “Crown authorities had come to the conclusion that the prisoner’s mind was not in a healthy state.” And he reassured the jury that an acquittal on the grounds of insanity would effectively protect the Queen from any future attempt, since Maclean would remain safely in custody at the Queen’s pleasure. Summing up, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge repeated James’s reassurance that an insanity acquittal would protect the Queen, and added that it would be merciful for Maclean himself. He also rose above the disagreements between judge and medical expert which were a feature of most insanity trials, praising every one of the doctors as “men of undoubted ability and large experience, and wholly without any bias in this case, having no other desire in t
he world but to arrive at a just and true conclusion.”
The trial went to the jury at 4:40 that afternoon, the only surprise occurring when the jury actually chose to retire rather than give an immediate verdict. They returned after five or ten minutes later with the foregone conclusion: Roderick Maclean was not guilty on the grounds of insanity, and was to be kept in custody at the Queen’s pleasure.
Maclean was hustled down the stairs and back to Reading Gaol. A week later, Home Secretary Harcourt ordered a warrant for his transfer; a week after that, Maclean made the short trip from Reading to Crowthorne and entered Broadmoor Asylum. He would never leave. The Queen’s pleasure became her son’s, and then her grandson’s; Maclean died, disturbed until the end, half a lifetime later.
The newspapers the day after the trial displayed unanimous satisfaction with the verdict, which confirmed the public’s consensus that Maclean was hopelessly mad, his life “saturated with insanity and its symptoms”; he had been rightly consigned to an asylum rather than the gallows. The Daily News concluded that “the jury took the only course compatible with the medical testimony, which did but itself confirm the impression produced by the bare narrative of the facts” and added “such an end to an affair which has excited so much sympathy and so much indignation will be received with general satisfaction.” Satisfying, too, was the brevity and efficiency of the trial, in striking contrast to the painful ordeal Charles Guiteau had inflicted upon the American public. In short, government and prosecution, Maclean’s family and his defense, judge and jury were all well pleased with this day’s work—and press and public agreed.
Shooting Victoria Page 49
