Shooting Victoria (59 page)

Bradlaugh was despised and hated by the millions. He was sneered at regularly by the press. He was forced into a relentless battle to prove his legitimacy, and was continually beaten down by the highest political body in the land. Not surprisingly, Roderick Maclean saw him as a kindred spirit.

In his long talks with Sorrell and Hucker, Roderick Maclean spoke as well, at length, about his deteriorating relationship with his family. While at Southsea he received several letters from them. First, he heard from his sister Annie—his only living sister now, his older sister Caroline having very recently died. Annie wrote to warn him that his family's support of him would soon diminish, if not disappear altogether. She was facing her own poverty—was indeed about to take a position as a governess—and her brothers balked at the idea of continuing to support him without her. A letter from one of his brothers didn't help matters: in it his brother offered no financial support, and instead reminded Roderick of his mental weakness, and recommended he seek restraint. Maclean was enraged at the way his family treated him, he told his landlady and fellow lodger. His brothers were wealthy: one had a good business in London, and the other had married into wealth. Over the years, he felt, he had established his right to be supported by his family: they should be giving him more now, not less. He vowed that he would go to London to enforce his rights.

He also engaged in one other topic of conversation while at Mrs. Sorrell's: Queen Victoria. Did she ever come to Portsmouth? he asked them. She did, of course, passing through every time she
came to or went from Osborne on the Isle of Wight. Was Victoria nice? If he happened to be sketching when she passed him and he raised his hat to her, would she stop and talk to him? His odd questions confirmed Sorrell's and Hucker's opinion that Maclean was “soft.”

One day he returned to Mrs. Sorrell's, angry because he had been to Gosport, where at midday he had requested to inspect the dockyard, and had been turned away. More than likely, this day was Thursday 16 February, and there was the best of reasons for his exclusion from the dockyard: at about 11:30 that morning, Victoria and her daughter Beatrice disembarked in Gosport from the yacht
Alberta
, to board a train bound for Victoria Station and from there to ride to Buckingham Palace. If Maclean had wanted to see the Queen on that day, he was thwarted. In any case, he was unprepared for any meeting. And so on that day, he began to prepare. Around midday Maclean walked into a pawnbroker's on Queen Street, Portsmouth. He had seen a revolver for sale in the window and asked the assistant, John Fuller, the price: five shillings and twopence. He had already shopped for a pistol at a gunsmith's near Mrs. Sorrell's, but he could never afford the eleven shillings they asked. Indeed, he hadn't 5s. 2d., but he might be able to get it. He asked if Fuller would lower the price; he would not. But he would agree to hold the pistol for 2s. until Maclean raised the rest. It was a cheap pistol: a six-shooter of Belgian make, with a pinfiring mechanism which fired bullets by striking a tiny peg at the heel of each bullet. It was an inaccurate and clumsy weapon, but it was formidable-looking enough for witnesses later to mistake it for a Colt revolver. Maclean invented a reason for buying the gun: 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. Fuller accordingly wrote out a receipt for Maclean in the name of Campbell.

Maclean had originally intended to remain in Southsea for three weeks, but by the end of the first one he gave Mrs. Sorrell
notice. He told her that while he was out he had seen someone he didn't like: his enemies were closing in on him again, and Portsmouth suddenly seemed too big for him. More than this, he had to resolve his money problems. He had come up with another idea for dealing with these: one of his brothers had married the sister of Augustus Harris, the lessee of the Drury Lane Theatre. Maclean knew himself to be a brilliant actor. He would leave on Thursday morning, the twenty-third, to go to London and find employment in Harris's troupe.

On the day before he left, he received another letter from his sister Annie. She was responding to a letter he had written her from Brighton—a letter that convinced her that her brother had again reached a breaking point. 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. Mrs. Sorrell and Mr. Hucker agreed with Annie and advised Maclean to stay. But he was adamant: he would go to London. To provide him with some pocket money for his journey, Mrs. Sorrell gave him a couple of shillings in return for his concertina and a scarf he owned. That day, Maclean returned to the pawnbroker's, paid what he owed for the pistol, and took it away wrapped in an old piece of white linen. He returned as well to the gunsmith's and bought as many pin-fire bullets as he could for a shilling—eighteen or nineteen in all. The proprietor, who later claimed “it occurred to me that a beefsteak would do him more good than cartridges,” asked him what he wanted them for: he was going abroad, he replied.

At seven the next morning, he set out. Mrs. Sorrell gave him a final gift of a better hat and pair of shoes than his own. He told them he would walk from Petersfield to Guildford, and from there to London. At first he faithfully kept to that course. The next morning, five miles north of Petersfield in Newton Valence, he was spotted by a clergyman, Archibald Maclachlan, who saw a shabbily dressed man clutching a battered carpetbag staggering up the road, apparently in great pain. Maclean collapsed outside of
Maclachlan's garden gate in what Maclachlan was certain was an epileptic fit. Maclachlan ran to assist him: he was pale, half-starved, unconscious. With Maclachlan's help Maclean came to, wild-eyed. The clergyman offered to let him stay, but Maclean refused: he had to go on. So Maclachlan fed him some bread and butter, and when Maclean tottered off down the road, Maclachlan sent one of his servants to accompany him part of the way. Maclean made it to Guildford that night. The next morning, Maclean changed course. He did not head to London and dramatic fame, as he had assured Sorrell and Hucker. Instead he struck out due north, and at 3:00 on that afternoon—Saturday 25 February—he arrived in Windsor. The Queen was in residence.

Maclean found accommodation at 84 Victoria Cottages—again, in the poorer part of town. He told his landlord, a man named Knight, that he had just been hired as a grocer's assistant in the neighboring town of Eton and would begin work Monday. He also told him that he received a weekly allowance by mail—and that this should arrive on Wednesday. When Mrs. Knight asked him for a week's rent in advance, Maclean balked, since he did not have enough; could he pay a shilling now and the rest later? Mrs. Knight agreed. He proved to be a quiet lodger, leaving the house after breakfast and returning at teatime. He did by one account have a single eccentricity: he refused to remove his overcoat indoors, even when it was very warm, and he had a constant habit of smoothing down its front. With hindsight, the Knights thought that this might have something to do with his pistol, which they never saw.

On Tuesday, the last day of February, Maclean went to the central railway station, to join the crowds who came to see Queen Victoria off on the royal train for a short visit to London, where she was to hold a drawing room. Maclean was too late and missed her, though he did tell Mr. Knight that he saw “Jock Brown” there. The next day, Wednesday, Maclean asked his landlord if he could remain at home during the day. He had a toothache, he claimed. Also he was waiting for his allowance to arrive in the mail. It never came.

That day of wait was the first of March. The next day—the gloomy wet day of 2 March 1882—Roderick Maclean had made sure that he arrived at Windsor Station long before the Queen did—a good forty-five minutes before, at least. No one took much notice of him as he slipped into the station, came slouching around the platform, and sneaked into the first-class waiting room. He sat at a writing desk, fished out of his pockets a stub of a pencil, tore a scrap of paper out of his little notebook, and wrote his note.

I should not have done this crime had you, as you should have done, paid the 10s. per week instead of offering me the insulting small sum of 6s. per week, and expecting me to live on it. So you perceive the great good a little money would have done, had you not treated me as a fool, and set me more than ever against those bloated aristocrats, led by that old lady Mrs. Vic., who is an accursed robber in all senses.

—Roderick Maclean March 2, 1882,

Waiting-room, Great Western Railway.

Back went the pencil and the note into his pocket. Inside the waiting room it was quiet, but Maclean could hear growing commotion outside; the 4:50 train was loading and about to leave the station. The stationmaster, John George Smythe, was on the platform to signal an all-clear to the engineer. Smythe glanced into the first-class waiting room, and the sight of the seedy black-bewhiskered tramp arrested his steps. He burst in and accosted Maclean: “Did you know this is a first-class waiting room—not the place for you? What are you doing here?”

“I am waiting for a train.”

“What train?”

“The next train from London; what time does it arrive?”

“5 5 [5:05]: you had better go into the other room and not here.” Roderick Maclean sheepishly complied, walking past Smythe, out the door and back onto the cold platform. He made his way through the bustle and out of the station, skirting on his way the sumptuous little waiting room reserved exclusively for Victoria's use. It was now 4:50
P.M.
At 5:25, the Queen's train was scheduled to steam into the station; Victoria would disembark and pass through her little waiting room to the front of the station, where a closed carriage awaited to take her the short drive to the Castle. On the road outside, Maclean turned left and walked to a set of palings marking the station's verge. He stopped there, within a few feet of the road across which Victoria's carriage would pass as it moved out of the station.

He would wait there. In his pocket, readily accessible, was his pistol. While he carried enough cartridges to fill all the pistol's chambers, he had been careful to ensure his good fortune by loading only four of them. One bullet, somewhere, somehow, he had already discharged. That left him with three live rounds for the Queen.

As Maclean waited in the cold, that old lady—that accursed robber Mrs. Vic—sat in the saloon car of her royal train as it gained speed out of Paddington Station, clattered through the northwest suburbs of London and shot into the countryside. By the Queen's side—
always
by her side, these days—sat her youngest daughter Beatrice. Since Albert's death twenty-one years before, one of her daughters had always served as her companion. First had been Alice, but Alice had married Prince Louis of Hesse and moved away to Darmstadt. (She had since died, the first of Victoria's children to predecease her, of diphtheria in 1878, on 14 December, the terrible anniversary of Albert's death.) Then, Helena became her companion until she too married, in 1866. The daughter next in age, Louise, was far too free a spirit for Victoria to consider as a companion, so the position fell to Beatrice: shy, capable, loyal
Beatrice. Beatrice, Victoria expected, would never marry as long as she had her mother to care for.
*

Both Victoria and her daughter were tired, and they surely looked forward to their return to Windsor, as well as their upcoming retreat to the French Riviera. London had been, as usual, exhausting, as Victoria again had crammed their schedule in order to be in and out of the metropolis in little more than two days. There had been the upcoming royal wedding to plan for, between her youngest son Leopold and Princess Helen of Waldeck. Princess Helen was in town with her father, and they had to be entertained and introduced to London society; Beatrice had done much of the chaperoning. There had been for the Queen visits to the Duchess of Cambridge and the widowed ex-Empress of France, Eugènie, as well as the obligatory but to Victoria mildly nerve-racking rides in an open carriage through the Parks. And yesterday there had been a Queen's drawing room, where the Queen, with her daughters Helena and Beatrice, as well as her daughters-in-law Alexandra and Maria (Prince Alfred's wife), welcomed the usual enormous queue of young ladies into high society. Victoria dressed for the occasion, as usual, in a black dress trimmed with white. But she wore another color as well, as was also usual on state occasions: the deep blue sash of the Order of the Garter. And she also wore the gem-encrusted star of that Order, with its sapphire-blue garter and its diamond-studded rays—four major ones, and four minor ones. Roderick Maclean, in following the Queen's movements, surely knew that Victoria was tormenting him as everyone else did, appropriating his color and his number.

For two days straight, then, Victoria had performed the role she had learned by 1882 to play to perfection. Her popularity and prestige had never been higher, and would not diminish for
the rest of her life. Her annual schedule had changed little over the past decade; she still spent most of the year apart from her people, secluded at Balmoral, Osborne, and Windsor. She still avoided London as much as she possibly could. But the grumbling about her absences, which grew in the 1860s and reached a peak in 1871, no longer existed. London had the grandeur and glitter of a court without her, centered on the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House. Much had changed in the way the public viewed her: then she was a Queen, subject to public standards of behavior for monarchs. Now she was an institution: an Empress and a ruler unlike and surpassing any previous one. The old rules and expectations no longer applied. Before, the Queen's popularity stemmed from her
doing;
now, it stemmed from her simply
being
.

Victoria was sixty-two, now—old, or at least growing old. She was however more vital and healthy at sixty-two than she had been at fifty-two or even forty-two, during that dark decade after Albert's death when she continually wished her own death and continually pleaded broken health to avoid appearing in public. In the years after the thanksgiving she had regained a zest for life, and had taken up her duties with renewed energy: “What nerve! What muscle! What energy!” her Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had said of her in 1880. But while she might have a greater vigor, she had become venerable in the public eye. She had ruled now for forty-five years, and was therefore the only monarch that most of her subjects could remember having. Through time, fertility, and royal precedence, she had become the grandmother of Europe. When Oxford had shot at her four decades before, she was pregnant with her first child; now she was a great-grandmother. Her own children had married into the royal houses of Russia, Denmark, and Germany, and her many grandchildren were now beginning to marry, carrying her and Albert's bloodline across the continent. Foreign policy, to Victoria, was a family matter; wars were family squabbles. And her own seniority over European royalty reflected and signified her nation's precedence as a world superpower.