Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  425: … one of his sisters would mail him, wherever he was, a postal order for a few shillings: Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8.

  425: Once, denied admission to one of these in Somerset, he deliberately smashed a window so that he would spend the night in jail: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  425: Occasionally he was able to gain temporary admission to the local lunatic asylum, as he had once done in Dublin: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5; Bristol Mercury 4 March 1882, 8.

  425: “On your thrown you set and rule us all”: Surrey Advertiser and County Times 11 March 1882, 5.

  426: … Maclean showed her a dagger he carried in his sleeve to “take care of himself”: Surrey Advertiser and County Times 11 March 1882, 5.

  426: … to Boulogne, France; throughout Germany: even perhaps to Jamaica, where according to one report he passed as Roderigues Maclean: Times 6 March 1882, 6; 20 April 1882, 11; Daily News 4 March 1882, 5. A long list of his residences between 1874 and 1882, which Maclean submitted at Broadmoor in an attempt to ascertain which parish should support his stay there, lists Boulogne—but not Germany or Jamaica.

  427: “Dear Annie,—I have no doubt but that you will be somewhat surprised to receive another letter from me”: The first of two letters to Annie introduced at Maclean’s trial: Times 20 April 1882, 11.

  428: … quickly arranged for a local surgeon to examine him, sign a certificate of lunacy, and commit him to the Bath and Somerset Lunatic Asylum: Times 20 April 1882, 11; Bristol Mercury 6 March 1882, 8; British Medical Journal 11 March 1882, 355.

  428: He remained there for fourteen months, happier to be in an asylum than anywhere else—but even there fearing contact with perfidious attendants and visitors: Times 20 April 1882, 11.

  428: … the massive population there, he wrote Annie, made things “a thousand times worse”: Times 20 April 1882, 11. Some reports did, however, place Maclean in London at this time: for example, Manchester Times 18 March 1882, 6.

  428: … Brighton, where he spent a month in the local workhouse: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  428: While there, he wrote a letter to Annie: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882, 1.

  428: … he got a deeply disturbing letter from his brother Hector: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5, which does not name the brother who sent this letter; that it was Hector Maclean is suggested by the entry for Hector Maclean (with three children) in the 1881 census: 1881 England Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2004.

  428: … the workhouse authorities at Brighton threatened to transfer Maclean to Kensington, his home parish workhouse: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  428: There he found a room in the poorer part of town, in the home of Mrs. Sorrell: The Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8, published in Portsmouth, has the clearest and fullest account of Maclean’s stay in Southsea. See also Times 4 March 1882, 10, which like most accounts mistakes Mrs. Sorrell for “Mrs. Hucker.”

  429: … he claimed to be a writer and poet employed by the West Sussex Gazette: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5; Birmingham Daily Post 4 March 1882, 5.

  429: It was not long before his landlady concluded he was a man “with a tile loose”: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  429: By night he entertained Sorrell and Hucker with a little concertina that he had obtained in Brighton, and with a little ventriloquist routine: Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8; Bayes.

  429: He would lecture them on political economy until they could take it no more. He was a great admirer of Prime Minister Gladstone: Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8.

  429: And he was a passionate supporter of the ultra-radical politician Charles Bradlaugh: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  429: … his atheism, his republicanism, and his scandalous advocacy of birth control ensured that a majority of the Commons supported a measure each time to refuse to let him take the oath or his seat: Royle; Tribe 197, 210.

  429: … since no one would give him the oath, he decided to take it himself: Tribe 214–15.

  430: … his older sister Caroline having very recently died: Lloyd’s Weekly 19 March 1882, 8.

  430: Annie wrote to warn him that his family’s support of him would soon diminish: Birmingham Daily Post 4 March 1882, 5; Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8.

  430: … his brother offered no financial support, and instead reminded Roderick of his mental weakness, and recommended he seek restraint: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882,1.

  430: His brothers were wealthy: one had a good business in London, and the other had married into wealth: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  430: He vowed that he would go to London to enforce his rights: Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8.

  430: He also engaged in another topic of conversation while at Mrs. Sorrell’s: Queen Victoria: Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8.

  431: His odd questions confirmed Sorrell’s and Hucker’s opinion that Maclean was “soft”: Hampshire Telegraph 4 March 1882, 8.

  431: Around midday, Maclean walked into a pawnbroker’s on Queen Street, Portsmouth: For details about Maclean’s purchase of a pistol, see Times 20 April 1882,11.

  431: It was a cheap pistol: a six-shooter of Belgian make: Times 20 April 1882, 11; Leeds Mercury 20 April 1882, 7; Birmingham Daily Post 4 March 1882, 5.

  431: … it was formidable-looking enough for witnesses later to mistake it for a Colt revolver: Times 3 March 1882, 5.

  431: … his name was Campbell, he told the shopkeeper, and he needed the pistol because he was about to join the South African Cap Mounted Rifles: Times 20 April 1882, 11.

  431: … by the end of the first one he gave Mrs. Sorrell notice: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  432: Maclean knew himself to be a brilliant actor: Times 20 April 1882,11.

  432: He would leave on Thursday morning, the twenty-third, to go to London and find employment in Harris’s troupe: Times 4 March 1882, 10.

  432: She sent him another postoffice order, and pleaded with him to stay where he was and take on any job he could—even take up a broom and sweep street-crossings: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5; Times 4 March 1882, 10.

  432: Mrs. Sorrell gave him a couple shillings in return for his concertina and a scarf he owned: Glasgow Herald 4 March 1882, 5.

  432: That day, Maclean returned to the pawnbroker’s, paid the remainder on the pistol, and took it away wrapped in an old piece of white linen: Reynolds’s Weekly 23 April 1882, 1.

  432: He returned as well to the gunsmith’s and bought as many pin-fire bullets as he could for a shilling: Times 20 April 1882,11.

  432: Mrs. Sorrell gave him a final gift of a better hat and pair of shoes than his own: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  432: Maclean collapsed outside of Maclachlan’s garden gate in what Maclachlan was certain was an epileptic fit: Times 20 April 1882, 11.

  433: … at 3:00 on that afternoon—Saturday 25 February—he arrived in Windsor: Reynolds’s Weekly, 23 April 1882, 1.

  433: Maclean found accommodation at 84 Victoria Cottages: Daily News, 4 March 1882, 5.

  433: He did by one account have a single eccentricity: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  434: “I should not have done this crime”: Times 4 March 1882,10.

  434: “Did you know this is a first-class waiting room—not the place for you?”: Times 20 April 1882, 11.

  435: … he had been careful to ensure his good fortune by loading only four of them: Daily News 3 March 1882, 5; Times 3 March 1882, 5.

  435: The daughter next in age, Louise, was far too free a spirit for Victoria to consider as a companion: Hibbert, Queen Victoria 394.

  436: … Beatrice had done much of the chaperoning: Times 1 March 1882, 3.

  436: But she wore another color as well, as was also usual on state occasions: Times 2 March 1882, 8.

  437: “What nerve! What muscle! What energy!”: St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria 428.

  438: … “I plight my troth to the kindest of mistresses”: Weintraub, Disraeli 521.

  438: … he f
lattered the Queen ceaselessly and shamelessly, laying it on, as he famously observed, “with a trowel”: St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria 427.

  438: … she preferred to see him as “full of poetry, romance and chivalry”: Matthew and Reynolds.

  439: “You have it, Madam,” he declared to her: Weintraub, Disraeli 544.

  439: More than once he favored and sponsored legislation that she wanted and his Cabinet did not: Most notably the Public Worship and Regulation Act of 1874 and the Royal Titles Act of 1876. Weintraub, Disraeli 529, 550.

  439: Disraeli, according to Victoria, had “right feelings,” and “very large ideas, and very lofty views of the position this country should hold”: Matthew and Reynolds; Weintraub, Disraeli 547.

  439: … Victoria’s concern for his own health was dictated “not so much from love of me as dread of somebody else”: Guedalla 2:7.

  440: … a righteous rage against Turkish atrocities in the Balkans reanimated him, forcing him once again into the political spotlight: Matthew.

  440: … Gladstone made his case against Disraeli not to Parliament, but to the people directly, in rousing orations at mass meetings: Matthew.

  440: … “like an American stumping orator, making most violent speeches”: St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria 442.

  440: Her anger was mixed with more than a hint of jealousy: Hibbert, Queen Victoria 487; St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria 442.

  440: She would rather abdicate, she wrote her private secretary, “rather than send for or have any communication with that half-mad firebrand”: Weintraub, Disraeli 625.

  441: She kept him, as he noted, at “arm’s length”: Guedalla 2:39.

  441: He spoke to her, she said, as if she were a public meeting: St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria 384.

  441: Victoria had feared that the coming Liberal government would be a “calamity for the country and the peace of Europe”: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:73.

  441: Of all her governments, she told Vicky two years later, this one was “the worst I have ever had to do with”: Hibbert, Queen Victoria 369.

  442: The first two attempts … were thwarted when bystanders jostled the would-be assassins’ arms: Burleigh 34; Radzinsky 177,199.

  442: Alexander himself thwarted the third would-be assassin, a man named Alexander Soloviev: Burleigh 45.

  442: … 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: Radzinsky 332–33.

  443: Finally, People’s Will planned an apocalypse from which Alexander would never escape: For accounts of Alexander II’s assassination, see Burleigh 50–51; Radzinsky 411–16.

  443: Sundays in St. Petersburg, Alexander would usually drive a mile from the Winter Palace and back in order to review his troops: Hingley 113.

  443: “A fine one!”: Radzinsky 414.

  443: … with one arm he helped carry Alexander’s body while with the other he held the briefcase containing the explosive: Radzinsky 416.

  444: “Feel quite shaken and stunned by this awful news”: Victoria, Letters (second series) 3:202.

  444: The bombers had obviously chosen the site for its symbolic value: Short, 50; K R M Short offers a fully-detailed study of the Fenian bombing campaigns in his The Dynamite War.

  445: Rossa’s hatred of the British had been born when his fatherless family was evicted during the worst of the Great Famine: Edwards.

  445: The British government might protest, but the U.S. government—hungry for Irish votes—did nothing to stop him: Burleigh 3–4.

  445: 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: Gantt 132.

  445: … Rossa’s bombers targeted London, placing a cruder device—fifteen pounds of blasting powder lit by a fuse—in a niche outside Mansion House: Short 55.

  446: … the discovery by police … of eight more “infernal machines”—slabs of dynamite with clockwork detonators: Short 69.

  446: Guiteau, a failed lawyer, evangelist preacher, newspaper editor, lecturer, writer, and insurance salesman: Clark 1–2, 11, 18–19; Ackerman 134–5.

  447: … Guiteau leapt to the conclusion that his speech alone was responsible for Garfield’s election: Clark 38.

  447: 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: Clark 40.

  447: Soon after Garfield’s inauguration, Guiteau arrived in Washington, D.C. with a single shirt and five dollars: Clark 37.

  447: 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: Clark 37, 41–2; Ackerman 268.

  447: … “Never speak to me again on the Paris consulship as long as you live”: Ackerman 338.

  447: As he lay in bed one night, the disappointed office-seeker had a burst of inspiration: Ackerman 346–47.

  448: Within two weeks, he realized that his inspiration was divinely inspired: Ackerman 346.

  448: 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”: Ellman 165–66 supports his claim that the handles were wood with a photograph; Clark 49, and Ackerman 355, claim that he actually bought the pearl-handled model. Despite its name, the pistol was probably not British, but a cheap American knockoff of the well-known pistol produced by the British firm Webley: Ellman 165–66.

  448: A novice with a gun, Guiteau spent time the next day practicing shooting on the banks of the Potomac: Ackerman 355.

  448: “The President’s tragic death was a sad necessity”: Ackerman 374.

  448: At 8:30 that morning, he took up a position in the ladies’ waiting room of the station: For accounts of Garfield’s assassination, see Clark 56–63; Ackerman 375–380.

  448: … 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: Clark 58, 110.

  448: The fifteen or so doctors who examined him, however, ensured that he would die: Clark 69.

  449: 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: King, ed. 417–18.

  Chapter 23: Worth Being Shot At

  451: From their saloon car behind the Queen’s own, the members of the household—Victoria’s private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby, her two equerries James Carstairs McNeill and Viscount Bridport, her current lady-in-waiting Lady Roxburghe, and her maids of honor—emerged: Illustrated London News 11 March 1882, 228.

  451: Ponsonby offered the Queen his arm: Pall Mall Gazette 3 March 1882, 8.

  452: Their head, Chief Superintendent Hayes, stood at the verge of the yard, ready to signal to his sergeant: Times 4 March 1882, 10.

  452: … he had let down the carriage stairs and was ready to hand her warm wraps for the short journey: Daily News 4 March 1882, 5.

  452: … he was stouter and suffered several chronic illnesses: Cullen 165–8.

  452: … Victoria enjoyed the cheers of the crowd, the shouting of the boys from Eton, she thought, drowning out the rest: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:265.

  453: … about forty feet away from her: Times 20 April 1882, 11.

  453: Victoria heard the sharp report; she thought it had come from a train engine: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:265.

  453: Chief Superintendent Hayes, who was nine feet away from him, was the first to reach him, shouting “scoundrel!” and grabbing him by the neck: Times 4 March 1882, 10; 20 April 1882, 11.

  453: Two of the Eton boys, armed with umbrellas, belabored Maclean over his head and shoulders with zeal but indiscriminate aim, smacking in the process at l
east one of Maclean’s captors: Times 20 April 1882,11.

  453: Victoria … “saw people rushing about and a man being violently hustled”: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:265.

  453: The carriage sped up the hill, the other two carriages following: According to more than one account, Ponsonby and the equerries, about to enter the second carriage, dashed to the spot where Victoria’s carriage had been, and reassured themselves she was uninjured before continuing on to the Castle. How they could possibly ascertain Victoria’s state by examining the place she had vacated, however, is left unexplained: Daily News 3 March 1882, 5; Times 3 March 1882, 5.

  453: The crowd—and particularly the Eton boys—wanted to lynch Maclean on the spot: Aberdeen Journal 3 March 1882, 4.

  454: … “Don’t hurt me; I will go quietly”: Times 4 March 1882, 10.

  454: … he declared “that man fired at your Majesty’s carriage”: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:266.

  454: Victoria immediately ordered McNeill back to the station to see if anyone had been hurt: Times 3 March 1882, 5.

  454: “Was not shaken or frightened,” she wrote: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:266–67.

  454: She hurried to tell her one child in the Castle—Arthur—what had happened: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:267.

  454: She then took tea with Beatrice while her account was telegraphed to the rest of her children and to other relatives: Victoria Letters (second series) 3:267.

  455: … the Eton boys running beside them hooting, and Maclean demonstrating visible anxiety the whole way: Daily News 3 March 1882, 3.

  455: From the group of Eton boys, the two who had pummeled the captured Maclean with their brollies identified themselves: Times 12 March 1936, 10.

  455: Fraser and Hayes examined his gun: two chambers loaded; two recently discharged; two empty: Daily News 3 March 1882, 5.

  455: Superintendent Hayes detained Maclean for shooting the Queen with intent to do her grievous bodily harm: Times 3 March 1882, 5.

  455: “Oh, the Queen”: Times 4 March 1882, 10.

  455: Maclean was forced to wash himself: Reynolds’s Weekly 5 March 1882, 1.