Shooting Victoria (39 page)

Hamilton was charged under Peel's Security and Protection of Her Majesty's Person Act—the first person ever so charged. He was conveyed from Whitehall to Newgate in a cab, guarded by three policemen. And in Newgate he remained quietly. Nothing like the sort of celebrity coverage accorded to Oxford, Francis, and to a lesser extent Bean was accorded to Hamilton. Hamilton almost certainly preferred it that way—his perpetual sullenness, his inability to delight in his capture or swell up with self-importance during his few moments in the spotlight suggest he viewed his short burst of notoriety as a grim necessity, a prelude to the steady sustenance that prison or transportation would supply him. Sustenance at the Queen's pleasure at Bethlem, on the other hand, seems never to have occurred to him; the newspapers tended to note his complete sanity, and he never planned an insanity defense.

His trial was set for the next sessions at the Central Criminal Court in three weeks' time. The newspapers speculated as to his possible punishment, most aware that Peel's Act included the humiliation of whipping as a part of the punishment. Less known about the act, however, was that if Hamilton earned the strictest sentence, he could not be whipped at all: 5th and 6th Victoria, c. 31 mandated a sentence of seven years transportation
or
up to three years' imprisonment with hard labor, with the additional penalty of public or private whippings.
The Illustrated London News
deplored the discrepancy:

It is, perhaps, to be regretted that the framers of the bill did not provide that transportation
and
flogging should be the punishment. We have certainly no desire to revive the barbarous punishments of past ages, but we think that a weekly, semi-weekly, or even daily infliction of the cat-o'-nine-tails for three months at the least, preparatory to transportation, would greatly tend to prevent such lunacy as that of the last offender from breaking out into action.… Insane as such offenders may be,
they have sanity enough to understand the logic of the cat-o'-nine-tails.…

Hamilton's judges would have to decide whether severity or humiliation would best serve prisoner and public.

As Hamilton awaited trial, Victoria and Albert formalized their plans for visiting Ireland, which they both had desired to do as early as summer 1843, when the steam-powered royal yacht
Victoria and Albert
replaced the obsolete
Royal George
. But the Repeal movement was at its height that year. After that, there was famine and revolt. In 1849, however, all troubles had passed or were passing. Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Clarendon was positive that the time was now ripe: “Since Her Majesty came to the throne, there has been no period more politically propitious for her coming here than the present one. Agitation is extinct, Repeal is forgotten—the seditious associations are closed,—the priests are frightened and the people are tranquil. Everything tends to secure for the Queen an enthusiastic reception.…” He might have added that the Irish rebels of 1848 were about to become a memory, as well: William Smith O'Brien and his colleagues had been in Richmond Bridewell, Dublin, for nine months after their sentencing to death for treason, hoping to have their convictions overturned on a writ of error. In the week before Hamilton's attempt, the House of Lords had rejected that writ. At the beginning of June, the government commuted their sentences from death to transportation for life. The Irish state prisoners refused to accept the commutation, preferring imprisonment, full pardon, or even martyrdom to exile. Refusing the Queen's mercy was an unprecedented act, and the government had to rush through an Act of Parliament allowing the government to commute a sentence with or without the prisoner's agreement. On the ninth of July, three weeks before the Queen's visit, Smith O'Brien and his comrades shipped out on the
Swift
for Van Diemen's Land. For the moment, significant organized resistance to British rule had ceased to exist.

The only obstacle the royal couple faced was financial: impoverished Ireland simply could not bear the cost of a state visit. Accordingly, Albert made clear to the Prime Minister that their visit would not be a state visit at all, but “one having more the character of a yachting excursion.” It would, nevertheless, be a trip filled with high ceremony: in Dublin there would be a ball, a levee, a drawing room, and at every stop there would be addresses and processions. The Queen planned to put Conroy's methods to use once again, winning over her Irish subjects simply by placing herself among them.

They planned to leave for Ireland at the beginning of August, immediately after Parliament prorogued, or ended its session. Albert, in the meantime, occupied himself deeply in furthering a project he had been contemplating for some time. On the day of Hamilton's trial, Albert was busy presenting prizes at the well-attended exhibition of manufactures held by the Society of Arts—an organization of which Albert had been president since Victoria's uncle, the Earl of Sussex, the previous president, died in 1843. A member of the Society, Henry Cole, a quintessentially Victorian dynamo of a man, had been promoting a scheme of a national exhibition of arts and manufactures, with prizes: an exhibition similar to national exhibitions held in Belgium and France—similar indeed to an exhibition in Paris from which Cole had just returned. In his remarks on this day, Albert alluded to the Paris exhibition and spoke favorably of a British exhibition that Cole was proposing to take place in 1851. Already, Albert had high ambitions for that exhibition.

Two weeks later, he met privately with Henry Cole to discuss a permanent home for the exhibitions, proposed to take place in 1851 and every five years thereafter. Cole had suggested, a year before, Leicester Square as a site: central, accessible, and, if seedy, affordable. But before they chose a site, they needed to agree on the scope of the coming exhibition. “I asked the Prince,” Cole later wrote, “if he had considered if the Exhibition should be a National or an International Exhibition.”

Albert thought for a moment. “It must embrace foreign productions,” he said, adding emphatically “international, certainly.”

In that case, any building in Leicester Square would not be large enough, and the two agreed on another site: Hyde Park.

With his decision, Albert transformed the Exhibition into something unique and truly great: “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851,” as Albert later devised the title, a celebration of free trade and the material benefits of industrialization: the first world's fair. With the opening of the Great Exhibition, Britain would symbolically take its place as the greatest nation of all, host to the world and the main exhibitor of ten thousand modern marvels, all of them housed in a building that itself was the greatest modern marvel of all. After his meeting with Cole, Albert never looked back: he embraced this project as if it were his life's great work, which is exactly what it turned out to be. In Victoria's eyes, this project would complete her husband's apotheosis.

At ten in the morning of 14 June, William Hamilton, still dressed as a bricklayer in the only clothes he owned—white fustian jacket and trousers—was brought before the bar of the Old Bailey before Chief Justice Wilde and Justices Patteson and Rolfe, to suffer his final moments in the public eye. He was without legal representation. Unlike every other one of Victoria's assailants, William Hamilton had no family to support him, no one to obtain counsel for him. And the fact that he was Irish did not help him at all. His nation had disowned him; no one sought clemency for him. Nor would he have wanted the Queen's mercy, which would only give him the impoverished freedom from which he only wished to escape. He needed no encouragement whatsoever to plead guilty. The government, nevertheless, was taking no chances: Attorney General Jervis was accompanied by four other attorneys, more than ready to establish his guilt under Peel's law.

The clerk read the charges, and Hamilton quietly pled guilty. He was then asked whether he could see any reason whether the court should not pass judgment upon him. He did not reply.

Chief Justice Wilde then passed sentence, first reviewing Hamilton's life—noting with disgust the fact that he was fully supported by two women—and then the circumstances of the crime, noting especially that all evidence pointed to the fact that Hamilton's pistol was unloaded: Hamilton had obviously not intended to kill the Queen. His true crime, nevertheless, was heinous: not simply alarming the Queen, or her subjects. Worse than this, in shooting at the Queen in public, Hamilton threatened to damage the relationship between the Queen and her subjects. “The Queen might be perfectly assured of her personal safety,” Wilde told Hamilton, “from the feelings entertained by her subjects toward her; but it was necessary that her laudable desire to show herself to her people should not be at all interfered with by such acts of insult as that to which you have pleaded guilty, and that the public should also not be deprived of the wholesome and pleasing enjoyment of seeing their Sovereign in public by such proceedings as these.”

He then sentenced Hamilton to seven years' transportation. As if to compensate for the fact that this heavier sentence could not include a public whipping or two, Wilde noted that this sentence involved “a very considerable amount of degradation and suffering.” Hamilton was removed from the bar, to embark upon on what could accurately be termed a penal odyssey. He had avowedly shot at the Queen to experience prison life, and he got his wish in spades. Two years before, Colonial Secretary Henry Gray had completely reconsidered and revised the government's policy on transportation. Australia was no longer to be the dumping-ground for felons as much as it was a final destination for the reformed and rehabilitated—the place where criminals, after long, grueling years of confinement and hard labor in England, were shipped, no longer convicts but “exiles,” given tickets of leave and dispersed as laborers across the countryside and in the outback. The voyage to Australia, then, became to Hamilton more a
reward than a punishment; the punishment he would suffer under the grim discipline and with the backbreaking labour in English prisons, and the hulks of Woolwich. After that—after five years of that—Hamilton was finally shipped aboard the convict ship
Ramillies
to Fremantle, Western Australia, the shores of which he surely greeted as the promised land.

In the afternoon after Hamilton was tried, his landlord, Daniel O'Keefe, appeared before the judges at the Old Bailey, requesting to be heard. William Hamilton, he claimed, had taken his pistol from him; he wanted it back. It had become a precious commodity: he had been offered £40 for it. The courtroom exploded in laughter.
Punch
in its next issue ridiculed this profitable trade in criminal artifacts, “this idolatry of the martyrs of crime and saints of the Newgate Calendar”: “A bit of Courvoisier's drop would probably fetch more than St. Katherine's own wheel, or one of the veritable arrows that shot St. Sebastian.” The court did order O'Keefe's pistol returned to him, and thus O'Keefe had the last laugh; the £40 repaid William Hamilton's debt to him several times over.

On the night of the second of August 1849, the royal yacht
Victoria and Albert
, accompanied by a flotilla of vessels, steamed into Cove Harbor, the first stop on the Queen's tour of Ireland. Victoria, Albert, and their four eldest children had traveled straight from Osborne the day before without stopping, surprising the town's inhabitants, who expected them to arrive the next day. Nonetheless, they set to welcoming the Queen with zeal, setting off fireworks, firing guns in a
feu de joie
, lighting bonfires: the servants of one landowner lost control of their bonfire, and the resulting wildfire consumed fourteen acres and set the harbor alight with a bright orange glow. Victoria was delighted with the effect. The warm glow at Cove was emblematic of her entire visit, which was an unqualified, stunning success. For nine days the Irish fell in love with the Queen—and Victoria returned their feelings in equal measure. As Victoria progressed through the country, the cheering,
shrieking crowds growing ever larger, ever more vociferous, ever more captivated by the little woman with the tall husband and the beautiful children. Victoria's charming of the people of Ireland was the greatest test of her genius as a political performer—and was her greatest
coup
.

She landed in Cove the next day, and at the request of local officials, she ordered it renamed Queenstown, as her Uncle George IV had renamed Dublin's harbor town Kingstown twenty-eight years before.
*
That afternoon, after steaming up the River Lee, the royal family made their first procession, a two-hour ride through Cork. Victoria was delighted with the enthusiasm of her reception: “the crowd is a noisy, excitable, but very good humored one, running and pushing about, and laughing, talking, and shrieking.” She was particularly struck by the beauty of Irish women: “such beautiful dark eyes and hair, such fine teeth, nearly every 3rd woman was pretty, some remarkably so.”

The raucous but good-willed crowds of Cork were only a prelude to the enormous and seemingly ubiquitous crowds of Dublin, attending to every movement of the royal family, masses that formed instantly even on Victoria's and Albert's improvised trips, when, according to the
Illustrated London News
, “balconies were filled as if by magic—groups were formed instantaneously—and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and the loud huzzas that arose ever and anon, testified that at every new point of her progress there was a new burst of feeling.” From the moment the Queen, and then the Prince, and then the royal children showed themselves to the roars of the “thousands and thousands” crowding ships and the shores of Kingstown Harbor, the crowds never abated and the excitement of the public grew to a crescendo. The trip was orchestrated carefully so that the Queen could alternatively show herself to the elite, in a levée, a drawing room, a concert, a visit
to the Duke of Leinster—and to the masses, in processions, in a review of the troops attended by a hundred thousand people, in her public comings and goings.