Shooting Victoria (6 page)

When not engaged in his business and while sitting down in front of the bar he has been observed by Mr. Minton and the barmaid, a respectable young woman named Evans, to be for a few minutes absorbed in deep thought, and, then, without any apparent cause he would burst into tears, and conceal his face with his hands, when on being spoken to and asked what had affected him, he would stare at the inquirer, and, suddenly starting up, give way to a fit of laughter, and proceed with his employment as usual.

Mary Ann Forman, a barwoman at the Shepherd and Flock, recalled his “strange ways”: “laughing and crying when he made a mistake, and then he hardly knew what he was about.” John Tedman, an Inspector with the Metropolitan Police and a regular at the Shepherd and Flock, often came upon the boy crying, laughing hysterically for no reason, or sullenly silent, and noted as well his propensity for violence. He concluded quite simply that Oxford was an idiot and persuaded Mr. Minton, landlord of the Shepherd and Flock, to turn him away. Oxford moved on from the Shepherd and Flock to another pub, the Hat and Feathers, taking one great prize with him: to his fortune, Mrs. Minton had died while he was there, and in accordance with the custom of the day, Mr. Minton purchased full mourning dress for all of his employees; Oxford thus had a suit of clothing that suggested a respectability above his station.

Trouble seemed to follow him; he tended to work for a few months at each place, impressing upon customers and co-workers
alike his oddities. His employment at the Hat and Feathers lasted six months. From there, Oxford moved to the Hog in the Pound on Oxford Street. Mr. Robinson, the landlord there, had to let him go after a single quarter. “I gave him warning because he was always laughing,” Robinson claimed. “When I reprimanded him for it he still kept laughing. This often took place, and I suffered inconvenience from his conduct. Some of my customers were offended with it.” Robinson must have been particularly mortified when his wife's falling down a flight of stairs provided Oxford with another occasion for an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

When Robinson sacked him, on April 30th, 1840, he provided him with a quarter's wages—the £5 with which he bought his pistols, four days later.

Oxford now had £3, no job, and time: five weeks, to think, to read, and consciously to transform himself into a marksman and a gentleman of affairs: someone with mysterious connections with illustrious figures, caught up in a complicated political conspiracy. He aimed to make Young England credible to the nation. He settled into a routine at West Place. Oxford's mother Hannah had stayed with Oxford for only a week after he had threatened her, at which point she decamped for Birmingham and an extended stay with her relatives there. Whether she had planned on this trip before Oxford's arrival, or whether his own behavior motivated her to leave is not known—but certainly, he could not have been easy to live with: he is known to have threatened her with a pistol again, and struck her in the face, during their few days together. With Hannah gone, Oxford's sister Susannah Phelps became the primary witness to his behavior and the primary object of his torment; as he had done with his mother, he often thrust his pistols into her face, once waking her in this way. Despite this, she later claimed that his regular and virtuous routine demonstrated his innocence of conspiracy: he spent his days at home, took his meals with his remaining family, abstained from drinking, and though he did
leave the house regularly—setting out in the late afternoon—he was always home by ten or eleven at the latest: regular hours, she thought, that would not be conducive to membership of Young England, which she was sure must be a society whose meetings were conducted in hidden places in the depths of the night.

Despite later public opinion which held Oxford to be an idiot, he was actually an avid reader and spent much of his time this month intent upon his books, flying into a rage if his sister interrupted him. His favorite novels were sea tales, tales that would certainly feed his ambition to become Admiral Sir Edward Oxford: he read James Fenimore Cooper's
The Pilot
, and the far less-known and much more lurid
Black Pirate
, a book that suggests Oxford's love of pedestrian sentiment and high melodrama: of the stuff in other words that popular publishers of penny dreadfuls would be churning out
en masse
within the next few years to the general disapproval of polite society.

Two other books that Oxford read were recently published, highly popular, and highly controversial: Charles Dickens's
Oliver Twist
and William Harrison Ainsworth's
Jack Sheppard
. Both novels after their initial success attracted criticism amounting to opprobrium from a number of critics, who lumped them together as “Newgate novels,” and held that by glorifying criminals, they would lead impressionable young readers into lives of vice: Dickens, by rendering the criminal entertaining, and Ainsworth, even worse, by rendering it heroic. Oxford was exactly the sort of impressionable youth critics thought these books would corrupt.

Oxford clearly found true inspiration in the other book he read while at West Place.
The Bravo of Venice
, a German novella written nearly fifty years before, anticipates Newgate novels in its obsession with criminals. The protagonist begins as a nobody and rises to become one of the “two greatest men in Venice”—the other being the Doge. He rises by becoming King of Assassins—though at the end of the story we learn he has actually killed no one.
The Bravo of Venice
, in other words, valorizes the fake assassin. At the
heart of the novel is a scene eerily similar to the one that Edward Oxford would publicly enact in a few weeks, when the Bravo presents a gun loaded with powder, but without bullets, to the face of his ruler. The novel features a secret society of assassins which has its secret meeting place, its own weaponry, its disguises, and its regalia, similar to that which Oxford delineates in his rules for Young England.

Oxford spent his time at home writing, as well. Indulging, perhaps, a quickly developing millennial obsession, he copied, according to his sister, passages from the Bible. And at some point three letters addressed to Edward Oxford became a part of his secret collection of documents, regalia, and weapons. The letters are dated and signed, each one appearing to have been sent to Oxford at his three previous places of employment during the past year. None of the letters appears to have been sent, however: none is postmarked. And each of the letters, though signed by “A. W. Smith,” the fictitious secretary to the fictitious Young England, is almost certainly written in Oxford's own hand. He could have written them at any time over the past year—could even have written them on or around the dates written on each one. It is, on the other hand, quite possible that he composed them, as he composed his rules and regulations for Young England during his five weeks of leisure, as a part of his endeavor to recreate himself and to present himself to the world, when the time came, as a man with a history of covert political involvement, with a
bona fide
political motive for assassination.

The first letter is dated from a year before, May 16th, 1839, addressed to Oxford at Mr. Minton's Shepherd and Flock public house in Marylebone. It depicts Oxford as a new but promising member of the organization, beginning to learn the ropes:

Young England—Sir,—Our commander-in-chief was very glad to find that you answered his questions in such a straight-forward manner. You will be wanted to attend on the 21st of this month, as we expect one of the country
agents to town on business of importance. Be sure and attend. A. W. Smith, Secretary. P.S.—You must not take any notice of the boy, nor ask him any questions.

The detail about the boy is a nice poetic touch, stressing the cloak-and-dagger nature of Young England, and suggesting an intersection between Oxford's mundane, cover existence as a barman, and his secret existence as a Captain (or soon-to-be Captain) in Young England.

The second letter, addressed to Oxford at Mr. Parr's Hat and Feathers, and dated 14 November, suggests Oxford, through his great talents, is rising to stardom in his secret society. It also demonstrates Oxford's literary side, as he—with a novelist's touch—invents a melodramatic scene in an attempt to root his imaginary organization in the real world:

Young England—Sir, I am very glad to hear that you improve so much in your speeches. Your speech the last time you were here was beautiful. There was another one introduced last night, by Lieutenant Mars, a fine, tall, gentlemanly-looking fellow, and it is said that he is a military officer; but his name has not yet transpired. Soon after he was introduced, we were alarmed by a violent knocking at the door. In an instant our faces were covered, we cocked our pistols, and with drawn swords stood waiting to receive the enemy. While one stood over the fire with the papers, another stood with lighted torch to fire the house. We then sent the old woman to open the door, and it proved to be some little boys who knocked at the door and ran away. You must attend on Wednesday next. A. W. Smith, Secretary.

Oxford's third letter connected his virtual secret society with actual political currents of 1840, and with actual political fears. This
is the letter that Oxford surely expected would strike terror into millions of hearts once it became public. Dated a month before (3 April 1840) and addressed to Mr. Robinson's Hog in the Pound, it makes clear that things are quickly building to a climax among the conspirators, to the point that Oxford would have to risk his position as barman to play the role of conspirator:

Young England—Sir,—You are requested to attend to night, as there is an extraordinary meeting to be holden, in consequence of having received some communications of an important nature from Hanover. You must attend; and if your master will not give you leave, you must come in defiance of him. A. W. Smith, Secretary.

It is the reference to Hanover that would have been chilling to any British reader in the spring of 1840. Hanover suggested Queen Victoria's Uncle Ernest, without question the most wicked, the most feared, and the most reviled of George III's sons. He was, in the minds of many, a murderer, thought to have slit the throat in 1810 of his servant. (In reality the servant attacked Cumberland before killing himself.) In politics, he was an ultra-Tory reactionary, the enemy, in a progressive age, to every progressive cause, and a particularly virulent enemy to the Reform Bill of 1832. In religion he was an extremist as well: the Grand Master of the ultra-protestant Orange Lodges, the fiercely anti-Catholic Protestant fraternal organizations. He had a following—of the distinctly conspiratorial kind—and in the minds of many he had ambition and an agenda that could not be contained by the lesser throne of Hanover. And now only the young Queen and her unborn child stood between him and the throne. Upon the death of William IV in 1837, many feared that Ernest and his Orange supporters would rise up and declare for him rather than his niece. That did not happen.
But what didn't happen in 1837 could happen in 1840, with an assassin's bullet.

While Oxford spent much of his time over these few weeks in quiet seclusion, his explosive side frequently needed an outlet as well. Thus his aggression toward his mother and sister. Besides this, Susannah was a frequent witness to his habit of firing his pistols—loaded with powder, but most likely without ball—into the garden from out of the back windows of his lodgings. His family later claimed that he never fired out his own windows in the front of the house, into the Square—but Oxford himself later claimed that he fired to scare old women on the street. (Apparently, his landlady, Mrs. Packman, being extremely hard of hearing, was not disturbed by the shooting.) The explosive crack of his pistols certainly startled the inhabitants of number 6, and many others in the environs of West Square, and quite likely carried beyond the square, beyond the home for Indigent Children, past the grounds of Bethlem Hospital, and into the various airing yards of the asylum's inmates. It is an intriguing possibility, then, that the echoes of Oxford's shots might have further disturbed the thoughts of one of Bethlem's oldest and longest-detained residents, and might have reminded that man of two shots that he had fired from his own pistols, forty years before.

James Hadfield was, as a young man, a soldier in King George III's army, who in 1793 had fought in the war against France that erupted after the execution of Louis XVI. At the battle of Lincelles
*
that year while serving in the bodyguard of the George III's second son, the Duke of York, Hadfield suffered severe saber-wounds to the head. The damage was apparently psychological as well as physical, and Hadfield was soon discharged from the army because of insanity. He moved to London, became a maker of silver spoons,
and brooded about the special role he felt destined to play in what he knew was an imminent cosmic struggle. His apocalyptic beliefs intensified when he by chance fell in with a messianic shoemaker and religious ranter, Bannister Truelock, who convinced Hadfield that the assassination of George III would bring about the end of kings and the end of time. Hadfield by this time considered himself a latter-day messiah who must sacrifice himself to save mankind. He bought a brace of pistols in May 1800 and wandered through London, wondering whether to kill himself to hasten the apocalypse, but held back, fearing eternal damnation. He then hit upon a plan that would bring about the end of kings and bring about the self-sacrifice he needed: he would shoot George III in a public place, and would then happily be torn apart by the crowd. On 15 May, then, Hadfield bought a second-row seat for a performance of Colley Cibber's
She Would and She Would Not
, a performance at Drury Lane Theatre which he knew the Royal Family would be attending. When the King entered and came to the front of the box to acknowledge the cheering of the audience, Hadfield stood upon his seat, leveled one of his pistols at the King, and fired. The pistol's two slugs missed the King's head by inches, lodging in a pillar near the ceiling of the box. George reacted with notable calm, displaying, according to the
Times
, “that serenity and firmness of character which belong to a virtuous mind”; he put his family at ease, and they stayed to watch the entire performance. Hadfield, meanwhile, was seized and taken to a music room adjoining the stage, where he was questioned by the police, by the proprietor of the theatre (and the great dramatist) Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and—in an emotional reunion, on Hadfield's part—by his former commanding officer, the Duke of York. He claimed that he had missed the King on purpose, wanting only to be torn apart himself, and darkly hinted at the coming chaos: “it was not over yet—there was a great deal more and worse to be done.”