390: Victoria, as protective of him as ever, was loath to let him come at all, and only agreed if he went under the close watch of an equerry and of his tutor: Victoria Letters (second series) 2:199.
390: A number of MPs and Peers had assembled in the Palace forecourt that O’Connor had penetrated the day before: Times 2 March 1872, 9.
391: “Strange to say my head and health have not suffered from this dreadful fright”: Victoria and Victoria, Darling Child 33.
391: … the newspapers presented him as an imbecile, a “crack-brained youth”: Times 4 March 1872, 8; 2 March 1872, 9.
391: The Dublin Irishman … argued that “nothing could be more repugnant, nothing more odious, nothing more loathsome to the spirit of the Irish people than a cowardly assault on a defenceless lady”: qtd. in Times 4 March 1872, 8.
392: … a letter-writer to the Dublin Freeman’s Journal pointed out quite accurately that O’Connor’s ancestors were Conners, not O’Connors: Freeman’s Journal 5 March 1872, 3.
392: … the best punishment for this over-imaginative halfwit was the one prescribed under Peel’s Act: the “ridiculous and slightly degrading” punishment of a flogging: Spectator, qtd. in Pall Mall Gazette 2 March 1872, 1.
392: “… folly seems to have been so mixed with depravity in this attempt that Mr. Gladstone is inclined to hope this young man may perhaps not have been wholly master of his senses”: Guedalla 1:338–39.
392: … he had looked forward to a trial as a state prisoner, but “shrunk from a degrading punishment”: Victoria Letters (second series) 2:201.
392: She was sure he would have murdered her if his ignorance had not prevented him: Victoria and Victoria, Darling Child 33.
392: … the Queen pointedly sent Gladstone an article from the Lancet which she thought proved his sanity: Guedalla 1:340.
393: Hamilton “was also an Irishman but Fenianism did not exist then”: Guedalla 1:339.
393: “He meant to frighten & this may be tried again & again & end badly some day”: Guedalla 1:339.
393: … transportation had come to an end five years before: Hughes 180.
393: … she insisted that O’Connor be forced to leave England after serving his sentence: Victoria Letters (second series) 2:199.
393: She was angry at the police, who she thought were neither vigilant or numerous enough to protect her: Victoria and Victoria, Darling Child 33–34.
394: The “Boy O’Connor,” as the press dubbed him, was reportedly an exemplary prisoner at Newgate: Times 8 April 1872, 13.
394: … no solicitor attended to him during his first days in prison: Daily News 12 April 1872, 6; Birmingham Daily Post 11 March 1872, 8.
394: … a man instantly recognizable by his enormous size of 26 stone (or 364 pounds), drove his own brougham up to the door of Newgate: Times 7 March 1872, 12.
395: … Lady Tichborne was free to indulge her fantasy of reuniting with her son and began to search for him: Gilbert 33–34.
395: … as rumors surfaced that survivors of the Bella might have been picked up and deposited in Melbourne: Woodruff 32.
395: An attorney acquaintance of Castro who had seen the advertisement and was certain that the butcher was the baronet, persuaded him to reveal himself: Woodruff 40.
395: … the Claimant’s French was limited to “oui, madame” in an atrocious accent: Woodruff 80; Atlay 214.
395: That mystery was perhaps solved by the Claimant himself in a confession he wrote in 1895 and quickly repudiated: Orton 31.
396: Whicher soon uncovered enough evidence to convince him that the Claimant was not Roger Tichborne at all, but Arthur Orton: Sum-merscale 264–65.
396: 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: Gilbert 153–54, 180.
397: The Claimant proved like O’Connor to be a model prisoner, “cheerful and far from reserved”: Times 8 March 1872, 12.
397: He largely kept apart from the rest of the prisoners, electing as a Roman Catholic to avoid the Anglican services on Sundays: Times 11 March 1872, 12.
397: … exercising in solitude in the yard: Times 9 March 1872, 11.
397: … he spent the rest of his life in poverty and humiliation, forlornly promoting his claims in music halls, circuses, and pubs: McWilliam.
398: … when he died in 1898, he was buried with that name inscribed upon his coffin: McWilliam.
398: “What in fact can be more important… than the faithfulness & discretion & independent unselfishess of those personal servants …?”: Guedalla 1:305.
398: On 5 March, she presented Brown with a £25 annuity and the medal …: Daily News 6 March 1872, 4.
399: Arthur “could not do, for his very position, what Brown did, who was deservedly rewarded for his presence of mind, and devotion”: McClintock 148. The Queen wrote these words to Arthur’s governor, Howard Elphinstone, hoping that he would contact the Prince of Wales and set him straight about the propriety of Brown’s and Arthur’s rewards.
399: … “Arthur was very amiable”: McClintock 148.
399: The public, eager to witness his comeuppance, filled the galleries: Punch 30 March 1872,130.
400: … he was, he admitted, “unutterably dull”: Nicholls 55.
400: … he “went smashingly into the Chelsea baronet as if he had been Chelsea china”: Punch 30 March 1872, 130.
400: “A perfect storm,” as Gladstone put it, ensued: Guedalla 1:342.
401: 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”: Punch 30 March 1872, 130.
401: It took some time for him to cease to be a social pariah: Roy Jenkins, “Dilke”; Nicholls 59.
401: … the Queen insisted that he not be given any office that would place him close to her, and that he publicly renounce his “earlier crude opinions”: Nicholls 111–12.
Chapter 21: Out of the Country
402: According to one of the doctors who examined him in Newgate, Arthur O’Connor’s great object was “truth at all times”: Times 12 April 1872,11.
402: To Catherine, Arthur was still to her a “good lad” and the “best of boys”: Times 12 April 1872, 11.
402: … he had to endure what he had brought upon himself: Daily News 12 April 1872, 6.
402: 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: Times 12 April 1872, 11.
402: He had never been the same since—had become increasingly irritable and frequently burst out in fits of irrational passion: Lancet 27 April 1872.
403: Back in 1853, two years before his son Arthur was born, he became deeply involved in the care of his uncle Feargus: For Feargus O’Connor’s insanity, and Thomas Harrington Tuke’s and George Roger O’Connor’s involvement, see Geary 127–36. In the accounts of 1853, Feargus’s son is invariably referred to as Roger, but the accounts of 1872 make clear that George Roger is the nephew connected with Tuke and with his uncle Feargus’s last days. In the Lancet 27 April 1872, Tuke identifies George O’Connor as the nephew with which he was acquainted.
403: “… general paralysis of the insane”—soon (but not yet) understood to result from syphilis: Geary 132.
403: The commission, examining him, found him frantic and incoherent: Times 13 April 1853, 8.
403: Feargus O’Connor lived on for another two years in pitiful physical decline, suffering severe epileptic seizures and losing control of his bodily functions: Geary 135.
403: A week after his son’s imprisonment, he met Tuke in his consulting room: Lancet 27 April 1872, 571.
404: … all of which indicated to Tuke “a fanciful and hypochondriacal state of mind”: Lancet 27 April 1872, 571.
404: He recommended to George that other doctors examine his son. Four others did; three con
curred with Tuke: Lancet 27 April 1872, 572.
404: 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 673.
404: On Tuesday the 9th 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: Daily News 10 April 1872, 6; Times 10 April 1872, 11.
405: … he “saw the effects of what he had done”: Times 12 April 1872, 11. The Daily News 12 April 1872, 6 reports him as saying that he “saw the evil of what he had done.”
405: Those in the courtroom were visibly startled by the boy’s plea: Times 12 April 1872, 11.
405: George O’Connor … did not learn about the plea until the next day: Daily News 12 April 1872, 6.
405: The courtroom was crowded, particularly with bewigged barristers expecting the setting of new legal precedents: Transcripts of O’Connor’s trial appear in the Daily News 12 April 1872, 5–6, and the Times 12 April 1872, 11.
406: … “he bowed neither to judge nor jury,” noted a reporter, “but posed himself as if sitting for his photograph”: Daily News 12 April 1872, 5.
406: … Baron Cleasby, a judge known to be a niggler on points of law, and never quite comfortable in a criminal courtroom: Boase, “Cleasby.”
406: But Cleasby would have none of it, interrupting Hume-Williams after the second sentence of his opening speech: Daily News 12 April 1872, 5.
407: “I had always told him to tell the truth, and I believe he has done so”: Daily News 12 April 1872, 6.
407: “Is it your desire that your son should be imprisoned for life in a lunatic asylum?”: Daily News 12 April 1872, 6.
408: Coleridge reduced Tuke to silence: Times 12 April 1872, 11.
408: “I was his first subject since he had showered vituperation upon the Tichborne Claimant”: Tuke 672.
408: 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”: Times 12 April 1872, 11.
409: “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”: Guedalla 1:344–45.
410: … “the eye of the police should continue to rest upon O’Connor”: Guedalla 1:346.
411: Gladstone suggested in return that the “animadversions of the press” would more effectively “repress these strange aberrations”: Guedalla 1:348.
411: The day after the boy’s sentencing he wrote the governor of Newgate to suspend the sentence of whipping: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
412: “I was not mad, nor was I perfectly sensible”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
412: “I can never agree to a condition which would condemn me to almost perpetual exile”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
413: … if O’Connor ever returned “it wd be as an altered man”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
413: “This is vexatious”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
413: Tasmania … where the children of George’s uncle Roderic—Feargus’s half-brother—were prosperous landowners: Hughes 394; Read and Glasgow 14.
413: … “he seems to take a higher tone, and to consider himself a person of some importance”: TNA HO 144/3.
414: … “the people being very loyal,” he later wrote, “I might suffer some annoyance were I to be known”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
414: He had a poet’s mind, and that mind “stands alone, and lives in a glorious solitude, apart from the world”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
415: “The man must be mad”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
415: “I had no legal power to detain the youth”: TNA PRO HO 140/3/10963.
416: … “he is of a romantic turn of mind, he has no employment, and spends most of his time at home reading and writing what he calls poetry”: TNA PRO HO 140/3/10963.
416: Gull had experience working with the insane: Hervey.
417: “I was thinking what a wonderful calm reigned in London, and that it was owing to the perfection of government”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
417: “Thought continually revolving upon religion”: TNA PRO HO 144/3/10963.
418: … committed to Hanwell Asylum as an “imbecile”: Tuke 673.
418: “… surprised & annoyed” by O’Connor’s return: RA VIC/ MAIN/L/13/191, May 1875.
418: “He is evidentially quite unfit to be at large”: RA VIC/MAIN/28/10, 22 May 1875.
418: “… but he must surely now deeply deplore his share in a proceeding which consigned a sick and insane boy to degrading punishment”: Tuke 673.
419: “If only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me!”: Victoria and Victoria, Darling Child 47.
Chapter 22: Blue
420: Roderick Maclean was filthy, either unwilling or unable to wash off the dust of the many roads upon which he had tramped: Glasgow Daily Herald 4 March 1882, 5.
420: … his twenty-eight years: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.
421: God read his thoughts: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882, 1 summarizes Maclean’s autobiography on this subject; see also the psychological evidence given at his trial, in Times 20 April 1882, 11.
421: God had given him eternal life: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8.
421: He was certain that his own claim to the British throne was at least as great as George IV’s had been: Times 20 April 1882, 11.
421: The number was four: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882,1.
421: “The Fourth Path, a novel by Roderick Maclean”: Daily News 5 March 1882, 5.
422: The color—his color—was blue: Times 20 April 1882,11; Daily News 20 April 1882, 3.
422: Maclean knew that wearing blue was forbidden to anyone besides himself alone: Times 20 April 1882, 11.
422: Occurrences of four were now more likely ominous than auspicious to him: “He had, he said, a mysterious connection with no. 4, and this numeral in any combination of figures was always disastrous to him”: testimony of Dr. Sheppard at Maclean’s trial, Times 20 April 1882, 11.
422: … they wore blue to cause him “perplexity and agony,” to “injure, annoy, and vex me on every opportunity”: From a letter Maclean sent to his sister Annie, Times 20 April 1882,11.
423: His childhood, he would later recall, was “as happy as any youthful days could be”: Maclean wrote this in his (now lost) autobiography; rpt. Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882, 1.
423: His father Charles Maclean had earned a fortune as master-carver and master-guilder to the gentry and nobility. He had employed—auspiciously—forty people: 1851 England Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2005.
423: … a massive console table and mirror that he manufactured had been given pride of place in the nave of the Crystal Palace: Auerbach 96–7.
423: Roderick Maclean was born three years after the Exhibition: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5, notes “He gave his age as 28, and his birthday occurred during his stay at Southsea”; if this is true, Maclean was born sometime between 9 February and 23 February 1854; the Berkshire Records Office (Broadmoor Hospital) file (BRO D/H14/02/2/1/1095) gives Maclean’s exact birth date as 10 February 1854.
423: … an estate in the suburbs that he remembered as an Eden: Maclean’s lost autobiography, qtd. Sims 69.
423: He was educated to be a gentleman at a school on Harley Street: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882, 1.
423: Roderick’s father was a literary gentleman of sorts, taking up in 1861 the proprietorship of a new humor magazine, Fun: Lauterbach 4.
423: Roderick recalled mingling among George Augustus Sala, Tom Hood (son of the great comic poet), and W. S. Gilbert in his pre-Sullivan days, and others: Lauterbach 5, Sims 69.
423: … he sold it in 1865: Lauterbach 11.
423: … Charles apparently lost
much of his fortune in the spectacular collapse of the banking firm of Overend and Gurney: White 66n.; Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8; a classified advertisement in The Times, 23 January 1868, notes “late Charles Maclean” about what had once been his operation, the Commercial Plate Glass Company.
423: … Roderick suffered his own fall, literally, slipping in the doorway of his Gloucester Road house, smashing his head and gashing his scalp open: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882,1; Times 20 April 1882,11.
424: His head continued to give off the sensation of a “slight shock from a galvanic battery”: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882,1.
424: He developed morbid fears that his siblings, his mother, and especially his father were trying to kill him: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8.
424: He lashed back, threatening to kill his family and at one time vowing to blow up St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8.
424: Twice he booked Roderick passage for America: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8.
424: In 1874, when Roderick was twenty, Charles Maclean took steps to have him committed to an asylum: Daily News 20 April 1882, 3.
424: … the renowned psychologist Henry Maudsley … was happy to comply, and declared Roderick insane: Times 20 April 1882, 11.
424: The other doctor, Alfred Godrich, found Roderick highly excitable but not a lunatic: Daily News 20 April 1882, 3.
424: … Maclean’s father instead exiled Roderick as an apprentice on a farm near Dover: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8. According to the dates given by the attorney Wollaston Knocker, Maclean could have been at this farm earlier, at age eighteen (or about 1872). Newspaper reports of his trial make clear that he left the farm in August 1874.
424: … Maclean offered a young boy sixpence to derail a coming train with a beam of wood: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8.
425: Maclean and the boy were acquitted: Dover, Folkestone, and Deal Guide.
425: … his father claimed that he attempted to derail trains at least twice more: Leeds Mercury 7 March 1882, 8.
425: … his brother Charles tried to place him in the home of a family friend, the artist Samuel Stanesby: Times 20 April 1882, 11.
Shooting Victoria Page 65
