In mid-October, Monro exerted pressure again, this time upon Michael Harkins: two police descended on his lodgings demanding he give an account of himself, and discovered his loaded Smith & Wesson pistol as well as his newspaper clipping detailing Irish Secretary Balfour’s upcoming public engagement. Harkins, shaken, raced to Cohen’s lodgings, where he found that his comrade had just died. The police found Harkins there and arrested him. They soon released him for lack of evidence, but Monro established an around-the-clock watch by six officers who moved into his lodgings. Harkins could do nothing but try to run, writing to Philadelphia begging for someone to buy him a passage home.
Harkins’s immobilization left at large only Thomas Callan (with his dynamite) and the mysterious fifth plotter. Callan was surprised when, in the days after Harkins’s arrest, Harkins did not show up for prearranged meetings. On 26 October, however, all became painfully clear to him when he read in the newspapers accounts of the inquest of Joseph Cohen. Monro appeared personally at the inquest and used the occasion to expose the dynamite plot to the public, revealing all he knew about Millen, Moroney, Cohen, and Harkins to reporters and thus to the world.
Callan panicked. He was holding most of the hard evidence of the plot: he had to dispose of the “tea,” as he called it. The detonators he threw into a local pond. But the dynamite was too heavy for that. And so he dragged the slabs to the back garden and into his lodging house’s water closet. He flushed away as much as he could, until the pipe was blocked. He dragged the rest to a nearby dustbin, and for some reason threw some of it over the wall, into a neighbor’s back garden. (A week later, a boy living there, looking for something with which to line the floor of his pigeon-coop, put some of it in the oven to dry it out: the resulting explosion blew the oven door apart.) Since Moroney had entrusted Callan with none of the funds, Callan was broke, and trapped: he hunkered down in his lodgings, feigning or feeling illness, refusing to leave his bed. He too wrote home, begging for passage back to Massachusetts. And then he waited.
Three weeks later, in mid-November, Callan thought he had found his path to freedom. On the evening of the seventeenth, a stranger came to his lodgings demanding to see him; he was shown up and left ten minutes later. It was almost certainly the mysterious and anonymous fifth conspirator, who handed to Callan four Bank of England £5 notes—some of the money that Moroney had cashed six months before. The man then left the house and vanished from the observation of the police and from history—though for some time he remained in Monro’s mind as a potentially dangerous loose end of the Jubilee Plot.
The next day, Callan received even better news: a letter had arrived from Lowell with a draft for more money—and a prepaid passage to Boston on the Cunard Line. Callan emerged from hiding to cash the £5 notes, to buy a new pair of boots, to disguise himself by shaving off his whiskers. Cashing the £5 notes doomed him: his banker noted their numbers and stalled Callan as he summoned an officer of the City Police. That officer shadowed Callan long enough to conclude that he was about to flee, and then arrested him. Monro ordered Harkins arrested as well. Both were at Scotland Yard by evening.
In the end, only Callan and Harkins went to trial; they alone paid the price for the bungling and double-dealing of their commanders. From the back garden of Callan’s lodgings, the police were able to collect over twenty-five pounds of sodden dynamite, which police chemists were able to determine to be of American make. Traces of the stuff were found in both their portmanteaus. At trial in February 1888, Harkins and Callan were both found guilty under the Explosive Substances Act of 1883 and sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude each. Never ceasing to maintain his innocence, Harkins was released from prison in 1892, seriously debilitated by tuberculosis, and died the next year in Philadelphia. Callan—according to a chief constable who interviewed him, “the most harmless of all the dynamiters with whom I have been brought into contact”—at first maintained his innocence as well but later confessed, revealing to police among other things his close encounter with the royal residence at Windsor, if not with the royal person. Monro recommended that Callan be given early release, and after he had served five years of his sentence Callan was quickly put aboard ship and returned via New York to Lowell, whose citizens had never stopped believing that “Poor Tommy Callan” had been railroaded by the perfidious British. They greeted him as a hero. Callan did not have long to enjoy his minor celebrity; a year later, he was thrown from a cart, smashed his leg, and died.
The botched plot to disrupt the queen’s Golden Jubilee turned out to be the final skirmish in the Irish-American dynamite war. But the threat to the Queen did not disappear. As the danger of Fenian terror bombing receded, that of pan-European anarchism grew. Following Lucheni’s assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, in 1900, Gaetano Bresci killed King Umberto of Italy with four bullets from a .32 revolver. His assassination inspired Leon Czolgosz to kill American President William McKinley a year later.
The anarchist threat hit home on 4 April 1900, when Victoria’s son Bertie was for the only time of his life the target of an assassin’s bullet. The Boer War was at that time raging, and across Europe British popularity was at a nadir, so low that Bertie and Princess Alexandra chose to forgo their usual trip to Biarritz for a safer place: Alix’s native Denmark. They travelled through Belgium, and at the Gare du Nord on the afternoon of the fourth, just as their train was leaving the station, a boy jumped upon the carriage footboard, thrust a pistol through the window, and from six feet away fired two shots at the Prince. He missed. Bertie later enjoyed joking in letters to his friends about the “pauvre fou,” and about his relief that anarchists could not shoot straight. Victoria was in Ireland on that day, commencing her final and triumphal carriage rides among the “wildly enthusiastic” crowds of Dublin; Beatrice told her of the attempt. “Was greatly shocked and upset,” she wrote in her journal.*
The assailant’s name was Jean-Baptiste Sipido. He was only fifteen years old—younger than any of Victoria’s assailants. But he was more truly politically inspired than any of them; he was already a fanatical member of an anarchist club. The Prince of Wales asked Belgian authorities not to treat Sipido too severely, but nevertheless he and the British public were surprised and angered two months later when Sipido was, because of his age, found not mentally responsible for his act. He was set free and immediately fled to France. (He was later extradited to Belgium, where he was confined in a penitentiary until he reached the age of twenty-one.)
At the time of this shooting, Bertie was less than a year away from taking the throne himself—not as Albert I, of course, but as Edward VII. His mother, in the last year of her reign, was already suffering the accumulation of ailments and the slow decline of her faculties that would lead to her death at the very commencement of the twentieth century. Her body was giving out; she routinely travelled in a wheelchair, and her eyesight was fading. Her popularity, however, remained undiminished; indeed, if it were possible, it grew with her every appearance. Those appearances continued until nearly the end. As always, these periodic showings of herself were not motivated by any joy she took in them. She did take joy in them, but always after suffering fretting, nervous anticipation: the actual pleasure she felt among her people was perpetually a rediscovery to her, as was the fact that she had become an icon—London’s greatest attraction. In 1890, for instance, Victoria was surprised that the public would mass simply to get a moment’s view of her when she traveled to London for the interment of one of her beloved ladies, the Marchioness of Ely, at Kensal Green Cemetery. Noting the masses at the cemetery gates, Victoria wrote in her journal “there were crowds out, we could not understand why, and thought something must be going [on], but it turned out it was only to see me.” She might have been baffled at the time, but achieving the personal popularity illustrated on that day had of course been Victoria’s life’s work, and by the end of her reign the very legitimacy of the institution depended absolutely upon that popular desire “only
to see me.”
And it was during the last two decades of Victoria’s reign that British royal ceremonial reached its zenith, with the two great showpieces of the prestige of Victoria’s monarchy, the Golden Jubilee of 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. The first was a celebration of Victoria’s primacy among monarchs as the royalty of Europe gathered to pay homage to her. The second, under the direction of the Queen’s imperialist Minister for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, celebrated the greatness of the British Empire, a greatness embodied by the small but stout woman who had just surpassed her grandfather George III in having the longest reign of any English monarch. Both occasions entirely depended for their success simply upon Victoria going out among her people in processions. Indeed, the Diamond Jubilee consisted only of a procession, as the Queen, in 1897 no longer able to walk into St. Paul’s for the Thanksgiving Service, refused to be carried inside, and instead viewed from her carriage a short Te Deum on the cathedral steps before continuing back to Buckingham Palace.
Before both Jubilees, Victoria underwent the same emotional turbulence she had before the 1872 thanksgiving procession: with an apprehension growing to trepidation at the prospect of plunging into the enormous crowds drew near. And then she experienced them with an ecstatic joy and a great sense of oneness with her people. “A never-to-be-forgotten day,” she wrote on Diamond Jubilee Day, 22 June 1897. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets.… The crowds were quite undescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching. The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.”
She was right: no one in London had ever met with such an ovation. Certainly no monarch before her had experienced anything like the sheer popular jubilation of 1851, or 1872, 1887, 1897—and in 1900, the last year of her life, when in March Victoria went forth in her carriage to celebrate the relief of the South African city of Ladysmith. “Everywhere,” Victoria wrote, “the same enormous crowds and incessant demonstrations of enthusiasm; if possible, even beyond that of the two Jubilees.” That night, she stood before a window in Buckingham Palace with a light placed behind her, so the crowds could see and cheer her. Lord Rosebery, her Prime Minister five years before, was deeply impressed by her actions, writing to her:
I saw your Majesty three times in the streets and in the Park; and my overpowering feeling was “What a glorious privilege to be able to make millions so happy!” No one who saw London then will ever forget it, or will cease to pray for the prolongation of your Majesty’s life, and of your Majesty’s priceless and unceasing exertions for your Empire.
Victoria lived for eight months after that. In those months, her eldest son was shot at, and her second son, Alfred, died. In December she was able to make the trip by train and royal yacht one more time to Osborne; there, she lived through one more Christmas, made miserable by the death of one of her favorite ladies, Jane Churchill; there she saw in the new century, dictating to a granddaughter one of her last journal entries: “Another year begun, and I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly.” And there she weakened and took to her deathbed, flickering in and out of consciousness, and probably never realizing on 19 January that she had become the oldest as well as the longest-reigning monarch of Britain.* Her family gathered around her, in a tableau similar to Albert’s death nearly forty years before. On the evening of 22 January it was clear that the end was coming. Her children each stood before her, identifying themselves and giving their good-byes. She died in the arms of her grandson Kaiser Wil-helm, “a look of radiance on her face.” Her oldest son, now King Edward, closed her eyes, and broke down.
She made one more procession—more subdued than any, but also more fully attended: the journey of her body, across the Solent and to London, past a million of her subjects in the metropolis, all of them, for once, eerily silent, to Paddington Station and Windsor and the funeral at St. George’s Chapel—and then to Frogmore, and to silence by the side of her husband.
To Victoria’s successors, and to the British people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the popular bond between monarch and public, and the primacy of that popular bond to the legitimacy of the monarchy, seems natural and timeless, a part of the very definition of monarchy, codified and sanctified by royal ceremonies that themselves seem timeless. But these ceremonies are not at all timeless. The royal weddings, the Jubilees, the walkabouts and openings, the triumphal appearances upon the royal balcony, are Victorian creations. And the concept that underlies them, the yoking of royal legitimacy and popular will, is a Victorian concept as well—or, to put it more clearly, is Queen Victoria’s concept—a redefinition of monarchy that became her life’s work. Though Victoria throughout her life feared public appearances, she steeled herself to make them. Though as she grew older she grew more anxious about the hubbub of London and the shot of the next assailant, she continued to ride out, in open carriages, to accept and to return the goodwill of the people. She was helped in redefining the monarchy by John Conroy, who while hateful to her in every other way, did teach her the valuable lesson: the fundamental importance of popular acclaim. She was helped greatly by her beloved Albert, a foreigner who nevertheless understood instinctively and intellectually the importance of his wife’s bond with the people, and devoted his life to promoting it, subsuming himself in her elevation. She was helped by her prime ministers—by Peel and Russell and Disraeli and Salisbury and Gladstone—especially by Gladstone—all of whom did their part to answer “the royalty question” in a way beneficial to the institution. And she was greatly helped—more greatly than they would ever know, and than she would ever admit—by her seven assailants, who in deciding to take a pop at the Queen had no intention whatsoever to strengthen the British monarchy, but who nevertheless gave Victoria seven golden opportunities to do exactly that.
All seven of Victoria’s assailants, once they had satisfied their “diseased craving” for notoriety and had their few days in the public spotlight, quickly faded from public attention. Of the seven, only one—Arthur O’Connor—made any sort of attempt to return to it. O’Connor’s arrest at Buckingham Palace in 1874, after two years’ dissatisfaction in Sydney and obscurity in London, went unnoticed by most, and was less an attempt to regain notoriety and more a successful cry for medical help. With this qualified exception, Victoria’s seven assailants shunned public attention; they scattered across England and Australia, or more accurately, were scattered by her Majesty’s government, which used every means it could to distance them from their queen. All seven lived on for many years after their attempts. Several lived lives of quiet contentment, suggesting that the harsh psychiatric and penal regimens they endured had a therapeutic and rehabilitative effect. Others, however, suffered until the ends of their lives, in confinement, and in quiet—or not so quiet—desperation.
Edward Oxford, though deemed insane by the court, was considered sane by the doctors at Bethlem from the moment he entered the place, and every medical professional with whom he came in contact over the next twenty-seven years concurred. “Reported sane since his reception,” his Bethlem case notes state, that opinion restated emphatically with the same entry repeated through the years: “no change.” Contrary to the public perception that Oxford had beat the system and procured himself a life of ease and contentment, Oxford found Bethlem excruciating. He deserved a horse-whipping for his actions, he told a reporter in 1850, not indefinite imprisonment. Nevertheless, no one ever put sane confinement in an insane asylum to better use. Bethlem became his university, and in an obsessive course of study he became fluent in French, German, and Italian. He learned some Spanish, Latin, and Greek as well. He drew; he wrote poetry, his one surviving poem consoling Victoria on the death of the Prince Consort. He outshone his fellow patients in everything he undertook: at knitting gloves, at chess and draughts—and as a painter. He developed in particular great skill in graining, or in simulating wood
-grain and marble-lines with paint. When, in 1864, Broadmoor Hospital replaced Bethlem as the national repository for the criminally insane, Oxford was one of the very last to make the trip there. He was from the start “the most orderly, most useful, and most trusted of all the inmates” there; his painting skills were in constant demand and allowed him in time to accumulate £50 or £60. Soon after he arrived at Broadmoor, his doctors attempted to correct the anomaly of a sane man in a lunatic asylum, pleading with the government that he be released. In 1864 the government refused to listen, but in 1867 Home Secretary Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy reviewed Oxford’s record and made him a deal: Oxford could go free if he moved to one of her Majesty’s colonies and agreed never to return to England. Oxford agreed, knowing exactly where he wanted to go—Melburne, Victoria, Australia. His decision was motivated not because the place yoked together the names of the queen he had shot at and her prime minister at the time, but because the place had over the years become familiar to him. Twenty-four years earlier, George Henry Haydon had come to Bethlem as steward, and Oxford quickly discovered in him a friend. Haydon was Oxford’s own age, and as a young man had explored and then published an account of that part of southeast Australia then known as Australia Felix, happy Australia, and later known as the area about Melbourne, Victoria. He often lectured to the patients and spoke to Oxford about the place; Australia Felix became symbolic to Oxford as a place of free men.
In November 1867, then, Oxford, adopting the simple and telling alias of John Freeman,* left Broadmoor in the company of an attendant, took a train to Plymouth, and alone boarded the Suffolk, which the next March landed at Melbourne. “Whatever has occurred in the past,” he wrote to Haydon in leaving England, “in the future no man shall say I am unworthy of the name of an Englishman.”
Shooting Victoria Page 52
