Shooting Victoria (65 page)

The fears of all were allayed in the course of this day. For both Crown and defense had come to the courtroom believing the trial's outcome to be a foregone conclusion: an acquittal on the basis of insanity. And for weeks both sides had been working toward the common goal of gathering evidence that would support that conclusion. Both sides, for one thing, had instructed medical experts to interview Maclean and ascertain his state of mind. But while ordinarily the prosecution would instruct medical witnesses in an insanity trial in order to rebut an insanity defense, the government from the start expected their witnesses to
confirm
Maclean's madness. In his diary, Lewis Harcourt, son of the Home Secretary, noted this expectation on the part of his father: “As to Maclean there is no doubt of his insanity and so anxious is the H[ome] S[ecretary] to have it proved that he has given orders for Dr. Sheppard to be instructed by the Solicitor to the Treasury Solicitor to go down to Reading Gaol to examine him.” While there had been in the weeks leading up to the trial some dickering about who would pay for which doctor, and how much evidence each side would disclose to each other, there was no question of the verdict, and both
sides were committed to counteracting the pomp of the trial with celerity, reaching a verdict as efficiently as possible.

Much therefore had happened in the hour before Maclean stepped into the dock: the two judges in their scarlet robes and full-bottomed wigs had taken their seats, the Grand Jury had been empaneled, Chief Justice Coleridge had presented the charge, and the Grand Jury had left and returned with a true bill for treason against Maclean. Maclean was then brought up and the charge read; in a tremulous voice, he denied his guilt. The jury was then sworn without challenge, and the trial proceeded hastily: before lunch, the prosecution had completed and the defense had called its first three witnesses.

In opening for the prosecution, Attorney General Henry James did not wait for the defense to raise the possibility of Maclean's insanity: the man's state of mind, he proclaimed, was a “matter of grave consideration for the jury.” While he noted that it was the job of the defense to prove insanity, he made it clear that the Crown would have no problem whatsoever with that conclusion: indeed, he told the jury, “satisfaction would be felt by every subject of the Queen at the thought that it was not from the ranks of those who were sane that a hand had been raised against our gracious Sovereign.” James and his three colleagues then quickly established the facts of the shooting, by examining most of the witnesses who had testified at Maclean's two examinations. Maclean's attorneys, having no reason to question those facts, remained silent.

In opening Maclean's defense, Montagu Williams set out a strategy that was a variation on the defense in Hadfield's, Oxford's, and McNaughtan's trials: the defense would call both eyewitnesses and medical experts to support overwhelmingly the claim that Maclean was insane. Williams was careful to point out that the evidence would prove Maclean
legally
insane—that is, prove that he was insane according to the McNaughtan Rules. “At the time of committing this act,” Williams stated, “he was an irresponsible agent, not knowing the difference between right and wrong.”
Non-medical evidence to Maclean's eccentricities was to be limited: Maclean's family, who could have provided volumes of evidence concerning their brother's oddities, had, in their desire to detach themselves from their embarrassing relative, successfully requested that they not be called. (Victoria had similarly requested that her household not have to testify.) Therefore, to provide anecdotal evidence of Maclean's insanity, the defense called the Reverend Maclachlan, who had assisted Maclean on his way from Southsea to Windsor (and who now added little to the defense) and a Maclean family friend, Samuel Stanesby, who detailed twenty years of Maclean's eccentric behavior and introduced the paranoid and homicidal letters Maclean had written to his sister Annie—strong evidence of true past insanity to counter any notion that Maclean could be shamming madness in the present.

The defense's most compelling evidence, however, came from the medical experts. Nine doctors appeared in all, six of them brought in by the defense, and the last three originally instructed by the prosecution. While the first doctor simply bore witness to Maclean's debilitating head injury as a child, the other eight testified with impressive unanimity to his madness in the past and in the present, unanimity unmarred since the one doctor who had examined Maclean and declared him sane—Dr. Holderness of Windsor, who had examined him on the evening of the shooting—had been conveniently forgotten about by both sides. Four doctors testified to Maclean's history of insanity, having previously certified his insanity or treated him in an asylum. The other four—including the three doctors brought in by the prosecution, now released by them to testify for the defense—had examined him in jail, and while all testified he was insane, not all presented his illness as within the purview of the McNaughtan Rules. Indeed the defense's own expert, Dr. Henry Manning, superintendent at Laverstock Asylum at Salisbury, turned out to be the worst witness in this respect. For while Manning spelled out in admirable detail Maclean's paranoia, the voices in his head, and his notions about
the color blue and the number four, he insisted, in spite of leading questioning by the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney General, that while Maclean's shooting was “an absolutely irresistible moral impulse, as strong as if it was physical,” he could distinguish between right and wrong, and “decidedly he would know at the time he fired the pistol that he was doing a wrong act.”

Two of the prosecution's three witnesses testified more clearly and effectively to Maclean's legal insanity. (The third, Oliver Maurice, the surgeon at Reading Gaol, simply and briefly declared Maclean's unsoundness.) Edgar Sheppard, professor at King's College and for twenty years superintendent at Colney Hatch Asylum, was certain: Maclean was an imbecile, liable to homicidal or delusional mania, and “the real question of right or wrong does not present itself to a man in such a state.” William Orange, Medical Superintendent at Broadmoor, agreed: “I do not think he was capable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act he committed,” he stated.

In closing, Attorney General Sir Henry James did just about everything in his power to direct the jury to an insanity acquittal. He did not concede the case outright—such a verdict should not be lightly arrived at—but he admitted that “Crown authorities had come to the conclusion that the prisoner's mind was not in a healthy state.” And he reassured the jury that an acquittal on the grounds of insanity would effectively protect the Queen from any future attempt, since Maclean would remain safely in custody at the Queen's pleasure. Summing up, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge repeated James's reassurance that an insanity acquittal would protect the Queen, and added that it would be merciful for Maclean himself. He also rose above the disagreements between judge and medical expert which were a feature of most insanity trials, praising every one of the doctors as “men of undoubted ability and large experience, and wholly without any bias in this case, having no other desire in the world but to arrive at a just and true conclusion.”

The trial went to the jury at 4:40 that afternoon, the only surprise occurring when the jury actually chose to retire rather than give an immediate verdict. They returned after five or ten minutes later with the foregone conclusion: Roderick Maclean was not guilty on the grounds of insanity, and was to be kept in custody at the Queen's pleasure.

Maclean was hustled down the stairs and back to Reading Gaol. A week later, Home Secretary Harcourt ordered a warrant for his transfer; a week after that, Maclean made the short trip from Reading to Crowthorne and entered Broadmoor Asylum. He would never leave. The Queen's pleasure became her son's, and then her grandson's; Maclean died, disturbed until the end, half a lifetime later.

The newspapers the day after the trial displayed unanimous satisfaction with the verdict, which confirmed the public's consensus that Maclean was hopelessly mad, his life “saturated with insanity and its symptoms”; he had been rightly consigned to an asylum rather than the gallows. The
Daily News
concluded that “the jury took the only course compatible with the medical testimony, which did but itself confirm the impression produced by the bare narrative of the facts” and added “such an end to an affair which has excited so much sympathy and so much indignation will be received with general satisfaction.” Satisfying, too, was the brevity and efficiency of the trial, in striking contrast to the painful ordeal Charles Guiteau had inflicted upon the American public. In short, government and prosecution, Maclean's family and his defense, judge and jury were all well pleased with this day's work—and press and public agreed.

Victoria, however, disagreed completely.

“Am greatly surprised & shocked at the verdict on McLean!” she declared, and confided in her journal “it is really too bad.” Her initial astonishment at the verdict quickly grew into an imperious, Queen-of-Hearts rage. She had never considered Maclean insane, and the trial had not changed her mind; he did not deserve an acquittal of any kind. And while his confinement in Broadmoor
would keep Maclean from her, she did not feel in the least protected by the verdict. On the contrary, Maclean's acquittal signaled to all notoriety-seeking halfwits that they too could shoot at the Queen—and get away with it. “It is Oxford's case over again,” she complained to Ponsonby, reminding him that Oxford himself had said that if had been hanged, the attempts that followed his would never have occurred. Now, she thought, it was only a matter of time before new Francises and Beans attacked her. If an assailant such as Maclean “is
not
to be considered
responsible
for his actions,” she wrote angrily, “then indeed
no one
is safe any longer!”

She held her own government most responsible for this threat to her safety. “This always happens when a Liberal Government is in!” she told Ponsonby, with greater passion than accuracy. Her Prime Minister, her Home Secretary, her Attorney General—they all should have protected her by exerting themselves to prove Maclean's guilt, but instead they had colluded to disprove it. When the next day her Home Secretary, William Vernon Harcourt, came to Windsor to introduce a congratulatory address to her, she refused to see him privately, claiming to be “much too excited”; she did, however, make her displeasure known to him through Ponsonby: “She was angry at the result of the Maclean trial as she does not understand the verdict of ‘Not Guilty' and said to Sir Henry Ponsonby ‘I know that Sir William Harcourt and Sir Henry James were determined to make him out mad all along.'” William Gladstone, to whom the Queen fired an incredulous telegram the moment she heard the verdict, was baffled: he was certain that she both knew and approved of the government's strategy. He replied with a ciphered telegram, referring her to the letter he had written her at the beginning of March laying out his reasons for the government's not contesting an insanity plea: “I did not then understand Your Majesty to disapprove,” he told her. But it was clear to him that she disapproved now, with a bitter intensity that called for a quick and delicate response. Gladstone, Harcourt, and Foreign Secretary Granville all wrote to her the day after the shooting to placate her
and once again to justify the government's course. Maclean's lifetime of confinement was more strongly guaranteed with the insanity verdict than it would have been with a guilty verdict, Harcourt argued. Granville noted the relief of finding Maclean to be a madman, and tried to flatter the Queen, praising her “calm and serene courage, when so highly tried.” Gladstone, in his usual maddeningly dispassionate style, both backed away from his government's collusion in bringing about Maclean's insanity verdict and rather weakly attempted to defend the deterrent value of the sentence:

Mr. Gladstone humbly feels with Your Majesty that when an individual, such as Maclean, has probably been sane in respect to the particular act for which he is tried, an acquittal on the ground of insanity is not a satisfactory form under which to attain the end of at least disabling him from further mischief by the total loss of his personal liberty. He hopes indeed that all who understand that this forfeiture is really a forfeiture for life may perceive the gravity of the consequences following the act.

These convoluted concessions to her point of view were not enough for Victoria. Her government had done her a great disservice, and she now wanted action, not words. Gladstone must now do his best to set things right, and just as importantly—more importantly, to a monarch who had, in her eyes, for the past two years been talked down to or ignored, defied, and endangered by her own government—she simply wished for her prime minister to do her bidding, to treat her as the Empress she was—to
serve her
, as Disraeli had done so well during his ministry.

After O'Connor's attempt a decade before, Gladstone had promised Victoria that if the law under which he was tried was defective, his government would change it. And after O'Connor's paltry one-year sentence had been handed down, Victoria had called
upon Gladstone to change that law—Peel's Law—by appending a provision to exile convicted assailants for life. But Gladstone had reneged, blaming weak-willed Judge Cleasby and not the law for the sentence. And when Victoria had insisted that the law was defective, Gladstone had put her off with a vague promise to change the law in the future; and then he had done nothing.
*
And now Maclean had shot at her, and had been acquitted: obviously, any law that did not acknowledge his guilt must be faulty, and must be changed. Within hours of the verdict, she demanded that Gladstone find a way to remove “not guilty on the grounds of insanity” as a verdict from cases such as Maclean's.