Shooting Victoria (50 page)

Bertie's morals were not the only ones in question as the 1860s progressed. The very lack of knowledge of Victoria's private life encouraged rumor to fill the vacuum, and her, to say the least, unusual relationship with her handsome Highland servant, John Brown, provided perfect grounds for salacious speculation. Brown had served the royal family since 1848, and Albert himself had appointed him Victoria's “particular ghillie.” He had ever since been a devoted retainer to the Queen, filling, as she said, “the offices of groom, footman, page and
maid
, I might almost say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls.” His forward, abrasive,
and often well-oiled ways antagonized servants, ministers, and the royal family alike, but he was indispensable to the Queen. Their relationship was not a sexual one. But it is equally true that Brown filled in part the void that Albert's death left in Victoria's life; he, too, became her protector and in return treated her with an assertive familiarity she would not allow anyone else. Dr. Jenner understood the Queen's dependency upon the man, and essentially prescribed in 1864 that, for the Queen's health, Brown be brought from Balmoral to Osborne. In 1865, Victoria appointed him “Queen's Highland Servant,” taking orders from no one but her and attending to her both indoors and out. The relationship between the deeply dependent monarch and her deeply indulged favorite became material for cartoons and insinuations in the press. A portrait by Landseer of the Queen on a horse held by the ghillie shown at the 1866 Royal Exhibition became an object of viewers' titters and outright laughter. Victoria was everywhere jokingly referred to as “Mrs. Brown.”

The royalty problem was real, and never more intense than it was in 1871, as complaints about Parliamentary grants to the royal children reached a crescendo, and as outrage grew about the absent monarch. William Gladstone, whose staunch support of the monarchy never wavered during his long political journey from right to left, showed himself more willing to promote and strengthen the monarchy than any other prime minister had. Ironically, however, he was finding that to save the monarchy, he would have to battle the monarch herself.

Gladstone had been Victoria's Prime Minister since 1868, and their relationship had been almost entirely cordial. Gladstone, after all, had been the great Peel's lieutenant; he and Albert had been friendly, and when Albert died, Victoria apparently considered Gladstone the most sympathetic of all her ministers. Though their political sensibilities, as they grew older, shifted in completely opposite directions—Victoria's girlhood Whiggism shifting to Albertian neutrality and then to a distinctly conservative outlook,
while Gladstone's Toryism had by 1871 given way to liberalism approaching radicalism, until the middle of 1871 this hardly seemed an impediment to the smooth working of the government. In August, that all changed, and a chill that would never thaw crept into their dealings with each other.

It had been a long and difficult session of Parliament for Gladstone; in the face of growing opposition he had had to defend, first, Princess Louise's dowry of £30,000, and then Prince Arthur's annuity of £15,000. The Parliamentary session drew on, and it became clear that it would not end until late August. The Queen, who had to meet with her Privy Council the day before the end—to approve of the speech proroguing Parliament—had already made plans to leave for Balmoral the week before. Gladstone asked her to stay until the end of the session, certain that this would do much to lessen public criticism of her. Victoria, feeling ill from the heat at Osborne and impatient to be north, resisted. No one, she complained to the Lord Chancellor, understood that there were limits to her powers, and the government's demands upon her were likely to kill her:

What killed her beloved Husband? Overwork & worry—what killed Lord Clarendon? The same. What has broken down Mr. Bright & Mr. Childers & made them retire, but the same; & the Queen, a woman, no longer young is supposed to be proof against all & to be driven & abused till her nerves & health will give way with this worry & agitation and interference in her private life.

She hinted that unless her ministers stopped pressuring her, she would abdicate, self-pityingly imagining that “perhaps then those discontented people may regret that they broke her down when she still might have been of use.”

In the end, she left for Balmoral before Parliament prorogued. Then it was Gladstone who lashed out, livid at Victoria's refusal to
act in her own interests. “Upon the whole,” he wrote to the Queen's secretary, Ponsonby,

I think it has been the most sickening piece of experience which I have had during near forty years of public life.

Worse
things may easily be imagined: but smaller and meaner cause for the decay of Thrones cannot be conceived. It is like the worm which bores the bark of a noble oak tree and so breaks the channel of its life.

At Balmoral, the Queen's annoyance at her Prime Minister only grew as it became clear that the illness of which she complained at Osborne—and which he, only too used to the Queen's excuses of bad health, ignored—grew at Balmoral into her worst illness since she had become Queen, a dire combination of prostration, rheumatism, and a nasty abscess on her arm, which the eminent surgeon Joseph Lister was called north to lance. Gladstone's communications with her softened, but the damage had been done. After a week's stay in Balmoral in October, Gladstone wrote to his Foreign Secretary that the Queen's “repellent power which she so well knows how to use has been put in action towards me on this occasion for the first time since the formation of the Government. I have felt myself on a new and different footing with her.”

Nonetheless, he was determined to rehabilitate the monarchy. If the Queen was invisible, she would have to
become
visible, in spite of herself. And if the Prince of Wales was not respected, he would have to gain respect by taking on a more important role in royal affairs. Gladstone had been long contemplating just such a role, spinning out a grand plan: the Prince of Wales would replace the Lord-Lieutenant in Ireland, residing and ruling there each winter; summers he would reside in London, taking over many of his mother's duties. Victoria resisted the
plan, but Gladstone clung to it tenaciously. In his mind, it was a plan with a double advantage: not only would it go far in resolving the royalty question, but it would, he hoped, do much to accomplish the mission he set for himself when he became Prime Minister—to pacify Ireland. For Ireland, after years of quiescence, had again become inflamed, and had spread terror to England—terror that personally threatened the Queen and her family.

The seething rage that many Irish had nurtured toward Britain during the dark days of the famine had not disappeared; it spread worldwide and smoldered, with the Irish Diaspora. The United States had taken in most of these immigrants, and in the growing American cities, in particular, that hatred and anger festered. In New York in 1857, the society that would soon be known as the Fenians came into being, a group committed from the start to the militant overthrow of British rule and the establishment of an Irish Republic. The next year, the American Fenian leaders exported their society to Dublin, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood—the IRB—was born. In the early 1860s the Fenians grew both in numbers and in military expertise, the American Civil War providing on both sides training for the planned insurrection in Ireland. With the end of the war, expectations soared that an Anglo-Irish war would soon commence: there were thousands of Fenians in Ireland who needed only money, weaponry, and military leadership from the United States in order to rise up. Delay, infiltration by British authorities, betrayal, mass arrests, and lack of military coordination ensured that when the rising did come, in early 1867, it quickly fizzled out. Even so, Irish republican violence in 1867 crossed the Irish Sea in an unprecedented wave of terror.

In February, as a prelude to the general uprising in Ireland, hundreds of Fenians under the command of John McCafferty, an ex-Confederate raider, descended upon Chester, intending to raid the castle, appropriate the weapons in its armory, and
ship them to Ireland.
*
When it became clear that their plans had been betrayed and the Castle was on the alert, the hundreds of young Irish men melted away as quickly as they had come. With the hope of a full-scale military uprising crushed, the Fenians resorted to guerilla operations to free their captured leaders. In September in Manchester, a gang of Fenians waylaid a prison van carrying Captain Thomas Kelly, leader of the IRB, and his aide. The gang quickly routed the police guard and freed Kelly, killing in the process a police sergeant with a bullet in the eye. Kelly and his aide escaped, but several Fenians were arrested for the murder. Of these, five were found guilty, and the three who were hanged immediately joined the pantheon of Irish nationalist heroes as the “Manchester Martyrs.” In December, the Fenians struck again, this time in London; they attempted to free another captured leader, Ricard Burke, from Clerkenwell Prison. On Friday the thirteenth, a London Fenian by the name of Jeremiah O'Sullivan wheeled up a barrelful of gunpowder to the wall of the prison, lit a fuse, and ran off. Half a minute later came the deafening explosion, rendering the prison wall a gaping void and obliterating the tenement façades on the other side of the street. Six people lay dead in the ruins; six later died. A hundred and twenty were injured. The plotters only intended to blow a hole in the wall large enough to free Burke, but had completely overestimated the amount of powder needed to do that. The carnage, then, was an accident: the conspirators had no intention of spreading such a shockwave of terror across the nation. But that is exactly what the Clerkenwell bombers did, all Britons concluding after that moment that the Fenians would destroy innocent British lives to achieve their ends. With the
mistake of the Clerkenwell outrage, a frightening new form of political terror was born.
*

Not surprisingly, rumors flew in 1867 that the Fenians planned to attack Victoria herself. A month after the shooting in Manchester, word from that city arrived in Balmoral that a plot was afoot to waylay the Queen on one of her afternoon drives. The Government dispatched soldiers to the Palace and ordered plain-clothed police to keep a close eye upon passengers boarding trains in Perth and Aberdeen. “Too foolish,” the Queen thought about the whole affair. Back at Windsor, she refused to allow anyone but John Brown to protect her on her carriage-rides, and so two guards armed with revolvers were set to shadow her at a discreet distance. And at Osborne in December came the greatest alarm of all: Lord Monck, the governor-general of Canada, sent a telegram that two ships had left New York carrying eighty Fenians “sworn to assassinate the Queen.” General Grey, Victoria's private secretary, panicked, begging her “on his knees,” as he put it, to flee the vulnerable Isle of Wight for the safer Windsor Castle. “Crimes such as these contemplated,” he argued, “cannot easily be perpetrated in crowded thoroughfares, or where there is a large population; and the most unsafe places for your Majesty at this moment, are those where the population is most thin and scattered.” Her Prime Minister, Lord Derby, concurred, pleading with her to flee Osborne for London or Windsor. Victoria refused to leave, thinking a show of fear “injudicious as well as unnecessary.” More than this, Windsor she did not consider “
at all safe
,” and as for London—filled, she knew, with an immense population of Irish emigrants—“to London
nothing
will make her go,
till
the present state of affairs is
altered.
” And so at Osborne extra police were posted; a pass system put into effect; some warships patrolled offshore while others were sent to intercept the Fenian ships. The Queen was again annoyed by the fuss, considering herself “little better than a State Prisoner.” It was all, of course, a false alarm, and the Queen castigated Monck “for ever having credited such an
absurd
and
mad
story.”

It was not as if Victoria was blind to the danger the Fenians posed. In the wake of the Clerkenwell outrage, she exhorted her government (unsuccessfully) to suspend
Habeas Corpus
, and when only one of the Clerkenwell bombers was found guilty at trial she wrote her Home Secretary that “one begins to wish that these Fenians should be lynch-lawed and on the spot.” She was, however, slow to understand that her position made her a tempting symbolic target to many who might have nothing against her personally. Four months after the Clerkenwell outrage, the lesson was brutally brought home to her. On 25 April, she learned that six weeks before and half-way around the world her son Alfred had been wounded by a would-be assassin. Alfred, a captain in the Royal Navy traveling around the world on the HMS
Galatea
, had put into Sydney. On 12 March 1868 he was presenting a check at a charity picnic when a man suddenly walked up behind him and at two yards' distance leveled a revolver and shot the prince in the back. The bullet ricocheted off of the rear clip of Alfred's suspenders through his ninth rib, missing his spine by an inch. The shooter, Henry James O'Farrell, cried out “I'm a Fenian. God save Ireland” as he was wrestled to the ground and beaten savagely. O'Farrell's attempt led to a witch hunt to root out the Fenians of New South Wales, but none were found; O'Farrell, with a history of mental problems and an obsession with avenging the Manchester Martyrs, had acted alone. He was found guilty of attempted murder and quickly hanged. Alfred's tour was curtailed while he recovered, attended to by two nurses trained by Florence Nightingale, and he returned home that summer. Victoria was baffled by the attack:
“poor dear Affie is so entirely unconnected with anything political or Irish,” she wrote in her journal.

Irish disturbances in England abated after 1867, but the prisons of England and Ireland were clogged with Fenians, and a vocal and broad-based movement for their amnesty was in full force at the end of 1871. Gladstone had made amnesty a cornerstone of his Irish pacification policy, and many had been freed—in the face of the stiff opposition of the Queen. Still, many of them—those involved with the Manchester killing, for example—remained in prison, and the government had no intention of freeing them.