Shooting Victoria (30 page)

Dassett looked around to find a policeman to take charge of Bean and his pistol. There were plenty about. Perhaps in official response to Francis's first attempt while the Queen rode to the
chapel, a number of A Division officers were stationed along the route to protect the Queen's
cortège
. Across the Mall and in front of St. James's, Dassett saw two of them. With his brother and uncle and the ever-growing crowd, he crossed over, tugging at a slightly resisting Bean. (“He did not walk so fast as my brother wished,” said Frederick Dassett: “he
is
a cripple.”) Dassett “certainly appeared to me,” one member of the crowd later said, “to be disposed to excite the mob as he walked for a considerable distance laughing with a Pistol in his hand.” And indeed the crowd was amused by it all, thinking that the poor deformed lad had acted in fun—and thinking that the boy Dassett was taking the game too far. It was a hoax, some shouted—the gun wasn't loaded! Others called out to Dassett to give the boy back his pistol, and to let him go. One helpfully suggested that Bean take his pistol back: “put it into your pocket and run away with it.”

At the gate leading to the Chapel Royal, Dassett presented pistol and Bean to P.C. Thomas Hearn, explaining what had happened. Hearn—who had been on the force for only three months—laughed out loud: this did not amount to a charge, he said. He walked away. Behind Hearn was another officer, P.C. William Claxton—who also refused to take Bean in charge. “Pooh, pooh, it's all nonsense,” he laughed, following Hearn and disappearing.

Meanwhile, up Constitution Hill, P.C. James Partridge, an officer with much more experience on the force and particularly with guarding the Queen,
*
spotted the growing crowd outside St. James's Palace with alarm—and immediately ran toward it. Dassett was moving in the opposite direction, looking for yet another officer, with Bean still in his grasp. The crowd numbered at least three hundred people and was growing fast; the word that another attempt had been made was spreading, and “large numbers actually clambered the sharp-pointed railings” of St. James's Park to catch a
glimpse of the perpetrator. Confusion and hostility grew as well: wasn't the boy holding the gun the assailant? Who was the poor hunchback he was holding? John William Bean, sensing opportunity, politely asked Dassett whether he might have his gun back. Dassett ignored him. The crowd roiled as the curious pushed toward the center and as the angry pushed to separate Dassett and Bean. Dassett was forced to let go of Bean—“otherwise my arm would have been broken.” Since he held the gun, the crowd stayed with him. Bean slipped away, past the running P.C. Partridge and into Green Park, heading north—heading homewards.

The mob now had at its gravitational center a confused boy with a gun—
his
gun, obviously. Bean was quickly forgotten and the crowd turned on Dassett as the Queen's assailant. Partridge forced his way to the center of the now-ugly mass, saw the boy with the gun outside the Chapel, and drew the obvious conclusion. Dassett attempted to explain, but Partridge dismissed Dassett's story of the hunchbacked dwarf as “shamming,” relieved him of the pistol (which he wisely slipped into his pocket) and took the boy into custody.

While John William Bean escaped, then, a noisy mass proceeded up the Mall, across the Horse Guards Parade outside Whitehall, and to Gardiner Street station: Partridge (joined by Inspector George Martin, who took custody of the pistol), Charles Dassett, his brother and his uncle, and at least six hundred of the Queen's loyal subjects,
*
heaping angry execrations upon the perplexed sixteen-year-old.

Robert Peel was out of town on this day, at the estate of his Secretary of War, Henry Hardinge. Home Secretary James Graham, who had learned from Commissioner Rowan of the attempt within minutes of Bean's arrival at the station, headed the government examination of the incident. After the experience of the two previous attempts on the Queen, Graham like Peel was convinced
that the elevated process of a Privy Council examination served if anything as an incentive to miscreants like Oxford, Francis, and Bean. But Bean's attempt on the Queen could still be construed as High Treason, and therefore Graham summoned the Privy Council (or at least what there was of it in or near town on this summer Sunday) at 4:30 that afternoon. In the intervening hours, the station house was again besieged by the curious and the concerned. One of the first there was Daniel O'Connell, who, though he led the charge in 1842 to repeal the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain, was second to none in demonstrations of personal loyalty to the Queen. Inside the station, meanwhile, a clearer sense of what had happened on the Mall emerged. A number of witnesses—the Dassetts, their uncle John Janes, and several who had seen Charles Dassett seize Bean, as well as the embarrassed constables Hearn and Claxton—convinced the police that Dassett's tale of a hunchbacked dwarf was not an invention, and that the true perpetrator was at large. By the time that the Council examined witnesses, then, Charles Edward Dassett had become the hero of the day; Graham personally complimented him after his testimony for his meritorious behavior. Hearn and Claxton, on the other hand, were severely reprimanded, and told to consider themselves suspended. (Within a day, they were to be dismissed from the force.)

The inquiry concluded at 8:00, to be resumed upon the capture of the assailant. By this time, the police—suffering yet another public embarrassment, thanks to Hearn and Claxton—were eager to find the culprit quickly. In this, they were assisted greatly by Bean's unusual appearance: a hunchback should be easy to find. A Division quickly broadcast to all the station houses in the metropolis by route paper a description to be read to all officers before they began their shifts, one that more accurately caught Bean's spinal deformity than his limited height:

A Station, Gardener's Lane, Sunday, July 3, Quarter-past 6
P.M.

Description of a boy who presented a pistol at the Queen's carriage in the mall of St. James's park this morning.

He is about 16 or 18 years of age, five feet six inches high, thin made, short neck, and humped back, walks a little on one side, long sickly pale face, light hair, and dressed in a very long surtout coat, of a dark brown or dark colour, which appeared much too large for him, a dark cloth cap, his nose marked with a scar or a black patch, and he has altogether a dirty appearance.

The police will make every exertion to apprehend this boy, and convey him immediately to this station.

William Haining, Inspector.

The description led to one of the most ludicrous episodes in the history of police profiling. Suddenly, it was open season on London's hunchbacks. Constables fanned out across their districts and hauled into their station houses every person who remotely matched the route-paper description, zealously competing with one another for the
coup
of bringing in the Queen's assailant. One of the first to be taken was a cabman in Somers Town, whom somebody someplace remembered had been outspoken in his admiration for John Francis. This young cabman, a hunchback with a splotch on his face, and the oddly near-familiar name of John Oxman,
*
was tricked by an officer of S Division to come to that station house; a reporter there who had never seen the suspect but had heard witness descriptions of him identified the “exceedingly agitated and flushed” boy as the assailant. Oxman was bundled off to A Division early enough so that some newspapers the next day were able to report the certain capture of the assailant. At Smithfield, an inspector was particularly enthusiastic, rounding up two brothers
with severe spinal deformity, and then an entire afflicted family. In another instance, a hunchbacked man was walking down the road dividing E and F Divisions, when he was spotted simultaneously by two officers on either side of the street; both rushed to grab him, each crying that he had seen the man first. They finally negotiated a settlement, together hauling the man to A Division station house, where he was quickly let go. Scores, at least, of hunchbacks spent that Sunday evening in a police cell. The
Illustrated London News
noted that “during the twelve hours for which the majesty of British justice was distanced by that crooked piece of malignity … the number of little deformed men ‘detained,' to use a mild phrase, was astonishing. Before one station-house, a whole regiment of these unfortunate individuals was paraded.”
Punch
caught the absurdity of the moment with a cartoon depicting a parade of stalwart policemen collaring in both hands a scowling set of hunchbacked dwarves, among them a sorry-looking Punch himself.

It was G Division in Clerkenwell, and Thomas Cooper's nemesis Inspector Penny, who took the prize. When Penny read the route paper to officers just beginning evening duty, one of them, P.C. Henry Webb, lingered after muster and reminded Penny that the description in the route paper matched the description a distraught John William Bean Senior had given the police nearly three weeks before of his son. Penny then sent Webb to 14 St. James's buildings, Rosamon Street, to find out whether Bean's parents had heard any news of the runaway. At ten that evening, Webb knocked on the Beans' door; John Bean Junior, to his surprise, opened the door himself. His state of undress, in Victorian terms—no coat, waistcoat, or cap—suggested he had settled back in some time before. Webb asked him where his father and mother were; he did not know, he said—father might be at the public house. Webb duped Bean into putting on coat and cap and following him, either by asking his help in finding his father, or in telling him he had to come to the station house because he had run away. When Webb touched Bean's shoulder, he realized the boy was trembling uncontrollably.
As they left the house, Bean's alarmed mother, Sally, came upon them. Webb allayed her fears by telling her that he was taking her son to the station for a dressing-down by the magistrate for running away from home; a little scare might have a beneficial effect upon the boy's future conduct.

At the station, Bean was questioned by Inspector Penny. Why had he returned home so suspiciously soon after the attempt? He was driven home by hunger, he replied. Penny, convinced that Bean was the assailant, shipped him with Officer Webb in a cab to Gardiner Street. They arrived at midnight. Bean's doppelganger, John Oxman, was still in custody: the resemblance between the two was striking. The Dassetts had to be called in to exonerate Oxman and identify Bean as the one who assaulted the Queen. Charles Dassett and Webb then had the honor of signing the sheet charging Bean with “attempting to shoot at Her Majesty on the Mall in St. James's Park.” With an officer to accompany him, then, Bean was placed for the night in the same cell and same bed in which Oxford and Francis had slept.

He awoke Tuesday morning, 4 July, a few minutes after eight, thinking not of his own sorry plight, but of the sorrier one of the neighbor he had seen two or three times around Clerkenwell. “I suppose Cooper is hanging now,” he said to his jailer. He was right: William Calcraft had pulled the drop on Thomas Cooper minutes before. Cooper's sullen passivity about his fate had vanished two days before the end, and he quaked as he walked to his death. The last days he had spent in relative privacy, largely freed from the sense of being a public spectacle that his predecessor at the noose, Daniel Good, had endured. The overattended and overexcited last sermon for Good had drawn criticism in both houses of Parliament, so the Court of Aldermen, who had charge of Newgate procedures, had decided to bar outsiders from both Cooper's condemned sermon and his procession to the scaffold. Few inside Newgate, then, were able to witness the helplessness Cooper suffered on the morning
of the execution. The poison he had taken on the day of the crime, two months before, had by now paralyzed his hands as well as his feet. Jailers had to dress him; one had to hold a teacup to his lips so that he could drink. His end was quick: he seemed unconscious of the crowd that yelled and groaned at him as he emerged from Newgate, and within a minute he was up the scaffold, hooded and launched, dying, it seems, without pain.

An hour later, while yards away inside Newgate prison John Francis awaited his transportation—and while across town at Gardiner Street John William Bean ate his hearty breakfast—Cooper was cut down, to be buried with Courvoisier and Good inside the prison. At eleven that morning, Bean heard from his cell the patter of one of the many broadsheet sellers hawking the (fictitious) last speech and dying declaration of Thomas Cooper. “So then,” Bean observed, “they
have
hanged Cooper.”

Just before two that afternoon, to avoid the curious crowds outside the Home Office, Bean was run at a trot within a phalanx of A Division officers through side streets and into a side entrance of Whitehall for his Privy Council examination. Attendance at this examination was fuller and more formidable than the day before: Peel had returned, and a number of members of the government, including the Duke of Wellington, had been recalled from Cambridge, where the Duke of Northumberland was being installed as Chancellor. While both Oxford and Francis had displayed arrogant cockiness during their Privy Council examinations, their exhilaration yet untempered by the dispiriting experience of prison life, Bean came before his august examiners already defeated: he collapsed with agitation on entering the room; after that, he could only watch his accusers sullenly and silently as they connected him with the pistol and positively identified him as the Queen's assailant. Within two hours, Bean was remanded to Tothill Fields Bridewell, to be brought back two days later to the Home Office to be charged. Peel had consulted with his Home
Secretary before the examination, and both absolutely refused to grant Bean the elevated charge of High Treason—which both were now certain was a positive incentive to imitators. They needed some time to decide exactly what to do with the boy. Newgate would have to wait.