Shooting Victoria (88 page)

386:   “Not at all,” she replied: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 2:198.

386:   “We looked,” Victoria wrote, “but could find nothing”: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 2:198.

387:   “… it is entirely owing to good Brown's great presence of mind and quickness that he was seized”: Victoria and Victoria,
Darling Child
33.

387:    … the two strolled arm in arm, out of the front gates of the Palace, through the crowd, and to Marlborough House:
Bristol Mercury
2 March 1872, 8.

387:    … the Queen, he claimed, “was not in the slightest degree flurried or alarmed”: “Outrage on the Queen” (Commons).

387:    … “the Queen showed the greatest courage and composure”: “Outrage on the Queen” (Lords).

388:   Every newspaper account of the attempt dutifully noted Victoria's unflinching coolness and bravery: For example, the
Pall Mall Gazette
(1 March 1872, 8) calls Victoria “perhaps the calmest person in the thrilling group, who drew herself up at sight of the pistol, and with the greatest presence of mind leaned back within the frame of the carriage.”

388:   “I wish to God I had succeeded; then they could have done with me as they pleased”:
Daily News
2 March 1872, 5.

388:   At a crowded meeting of working men in the Surrey Chapel Mission Hall, in Southwark, a resolution was moved to express indignation about the attempt and affection for the Queen's person:
Times
1 March 1872, 9.

389:   … George Odger, working-class leader and heretofore outspoken republican, declared himself sure “that every man in that room … would denounce in the most indignant manner such a dastardly proceeding”:
Times
1 March 1872, 9.

389:   A Division's police surgeon and another medical man examined O'Connor in his cell:
Lancet
13 April 1872, 515.

389:   Gladstone visited Victoria in the Palace that morning—”dreadfully shocked at what [had] happened”: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 2:199.

389:   … throngs largely composed of the dregs of the nearby slums of St. Giles and Seven Dials besieged the court and packed the tiny courtroom:
Pall Mall Gazette
1 March 1872, 8.

389:   When he was brought to the bar, hisses ran through the back benches:
Daily News
2 March 1872, 5.

389:   “… that death which is due to him as a Christian, a Republican—(laughter)”:
Daily News
2 March 1872, 5.

390:   The blood rushed to O'Connor's face, and, according to a reporter, “out of the eye there blazed the light of fanaticism”:
Daily News
2 March 1872, 5.

390:   … John Brown, with his broad Scottish accent and the “grim jocularity” with which he recounted the easy capture and drubbing of the boy, provided the most entertainment:
Times
2 March 1872,10.

390:   Victoria, as protective of him as ever, was loath to let him come at all, and only agreed if he went under the close watch of an equerry and of his tutor: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 2:199.

390:   A number of MPs and Peers had assembled in the Palace forecourt that O'Connor had penetrated the day before:
Times
2 March 1872, 9.

391:   “Strange to say my head and health have not suffered from this dreadful fright”: Victoria and Victoria,
Darling Child
33.

391:   … the newspapers presented him as an imbecile, a “crack-brained youth”:
Times
4 March 1872, 8; 2 March 1872, 9.

391:   The Dublin
Irishman …
argued that “nothing could be more repugnant, nothing more odious, nothing more loathsome to the spirit of
the Irish people than a cowardly assault on a defenceless lady”: qtd. in
Times
4 March 1872, 8.

392:   … a letter-writer to the Dublin
Freeman's Journal
pointed out quite accurately that O'Connor's ancestors were Conners, not O'Connors:
Freeman's Journal
5 March 1872, 3.

392:   … the best punishment for this over-imaginative halfwit was the one prescribed under Peel's Act: the “ridiculous and slightly degrading” punishment of a flogging:
Spectator
, qtd. in
Pall Mall
Gazette
2 March 1872, 1.

392:   “… folly seems to have been so mixed with depravity in this attempt that Mr. Gladstone is inclined to hope this young man may perhaps not have been wholly master of his senses”: Guedalla 1:338–39.

392:   … he had looked forward to a trial as a state prisoner, but “shrunk from a degrading punishment”: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 2:201.

392:   She was sure he would have murdered her if his ignorance had not prevented him: Victoria and Victoria,
Darling Child
33.

392:   … the Queen pointedly sent Gladstone an article from the
Lancet
which she thought proved his sanity: Guedalla 1:340.

393:   Hamilton “was also an Irishman but
Fenianism
did
not exist
then”: Guedalla 1:339.

393:   “He meant to
frighten
&
this may
be tried again & again & end badly some day”: Guedalla 1:339.

393:   … transportation had come to an end five years before: Hughes 180.

393:   … she insisted that O'Connor be forced to leave England after serving his sentence: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 2:199.

393:   She was angry at the police, who she thought were neither vigilant or numerous enough to protect her: Victoria and Victoria,
Darling
Child
33–34.

394:   The “Boy O'Connor,” as the press dubbed him, was reportedly an exemplary prisoner at Newgate:
Times
8 April 1872, 13.

394:   … no solicitor attended to him during his first days in prison:
Daily
News
12 April 1872, 6;
Birmingham Daily Post
11 March 1872, 8.

394:   … a man instantly recognizable by his enormous size of 26 stone (or 364 pounds), drove his own brougham up to the door of Newgate:
Times 7
March 1872, 12.

395:   … Lady Tichborne was free to indulge her fantasy of reuniting with her son and began to search for him: Gilbert 33–34.

395:   … as rumors surfaced that survivors of the
Bella
might have been picked up and deposited in Melbourne: Woodruff 32.

395:   An attorney acquaintance of Castro who had seen the advertisement and was certain that the butcher was the baronet, persuaded him to reveal himself: Woodruff 40.

395:   … the Claimant's French was limited to “oui, madame” in an atrocious accent: Woodruff 80; Atlay 214.

395:    That mystery was perhaps solved by the Claimant himself in a confession he wrote in 1895 and quickly repudiated: Orton 31.

396:   Whicher soon uncovered enough evidence to convince him that the Claimant was not Roger Tichborne at all, but Arthur Orton: Sum-merscale 264–65.

396:   Coleridge was a passionate orator who used his skills both to catch out the Claimant in cross-examination, and to deliver a month-long opening speech that demolished the Claimant's case: Gilbert 153–54, 180.

397:   The Claimant proved like O'Connor to be a model prisoner, “cheerful and far from reserved”:
Times
8 March 1872, 12.

397:   He largely kept apart from the rest of the prisoners, electing as a Roman Catholic to avoid the Anglican services on Sundays:
Times
11 March 1872, 12.

397:   … exercising in solitude in the yard:
Times 9
March 1872, 11.

397:   … he spent the rest of his life in poverty and humiliation, forlornly promoting his claims in music halls, circuses, and pubs: McWilliam.

398:   … when he died in 1898, he was buried with that name inscribed upon his coffin: McWilliam.

398:    “
What
in fact can be more important… than the faithfulness & discretion &
independent
unselfishess of those personal servants …?”: Guedalla 1:305.

398:   On 5 March, she presented Brown with a £25 annuity and the medal …:
Daily News
6 March 1872, 4.

399:   Arthur “could
not
do, for his very position, what Brown
did
, who was deservedly rewarded for his presence of mind, and devotion”: McClintock 148. The Queen wrote these words to Arthur's governor, Howard Elphinstone, hoping that he would contact the Prince of Wales and set him straight about the propriety of Brown's and Arthur's rewards.

399:   … “Arthur was
very
amiable”: McClintock 148.

399:   The public, eager to witness his comeuppance, filled the galleries:
Punch
30 March 1872,130.

400:   … he was, he admitted, “unutterably dull”: Nicholls 55.

400:   … he “went smashingly into the Chelsea baronet as if he had been Chelsea china”:
Punch
30 March 1872, 130.

400:   “A perfect storm,” as Gladstone put it, ensued: Guedalla 1:342.

401:   Dilke's attack on the Queen “was about as contemptible as that by the lad who presented the flintless and empty pistol the other day”:
Punch
30 March 1872, 130.

401:   It took some time for him to cease to be a social pariah: Roy Jenkins, “Dilke”; Nicholls 59.

401:   … the Queen insisted that he not be given any office that would place him close to her, and that he publicly renounce his “earlier crude opinions”: Nicholls 111–12.

Chapter 21: Out of the Country

402:   According to one of the doctors who examined him in Newgate, Arthur O'Connor's great object was “truth at all times”:
Times
12 April 1872,11.

402:   To Catherine, Arthur was still to her a “good lad” and the “best of boys”:
Times
12 April 1872, 11.

402:   … he had to endure what he had brought upon himself:
Daily News
12 April 1872, 6.

402:   Arthur, he believed, had changed greatly since the day in late 1866 when a cab in Chancery Lane had knocked him down, split his head open, and sent him to the hospital:
Times
12 April 1872, 11.

402:   He had never been the same since—had become increasingly irritable and frequently burst out in fits of irrational passion:
Lancet
27 April 1872.

403:   Back in 1853, two years before his son Arthur was born, he became deeply involved in the care of his uncle Feargus: For Feargus O'Connor's insanity, and Thomas Harrington Tuke's and George Roger O'Connor's involvement, see Geary 127–36. In the accounts of 1853, Feargus's son is invariably referred to as Roger, but the accounts of 1872 make clear that
George
Roger is the nephew connected with Tuke and with his uncle Feargus's last days. In the
Lancet
27 April 1872, Tuke identifies George O'Connor as the nephew with which he was acquainted.

403:   “… general paralysis of the insane”—soon (but not yet) understood to result from syphilis: Geary 132.

403:   The commission, examining him, found him frantic and incoherent:
Times
13 April 1853, 8.

403:    Feargus O'Connor lived on for another two years in pitiful physical decline, suffering severe epileptic seizures and losing control of his bodily functions: Geary 135.

403:   A week after his son's imprisonment, he met Tuke in his consulting room:
Lancet
27 April 1872, 571.

404:   … all of which indicated to Tuke “a fanciful and hypochondriacal state of mind”:
Lancet
27 April 1872, 571.

404:   He recommended to George that other doctors examine his son. Four others did; three concurred with Tuke:
Lancet
27 April 1872, 572.

404:    Besides, he suggested, in the event of the boy's recovery, both his previous good character, and the Queen's well-known propensity to clemency, would surely both work to free the boy: Tuke 673.

404:   On Tuesday the 9th of April, the grand jury at the Central Criminal Court briefly heard the testimony of two witnesses—Prince Leopold and John Brown—and quickly returned a true bill against O'Connor, for a misdemeanor under Peel's Act:
Daily News
10 April 1872, 6;
Times
10 April 1872, 11.

405:    … he “saw the effects of what he had done”:
Times
12 April 1872, 11. The
Daily News
12 April 1872, 6 reports him as saying that he “saw the
evil
of what he had done.”

405:   Those in the courtroom were visibly startled by the boy's plea:
Times
12 April 1872, 11.

405:   George O'Connor … did not learn about the plea until the next day:
Daily News
12 April 1872, 6.

405:   The courtroom was crowded, particularly with bewigged barristers expecting the setting of new legal precedents: Transcripts of O'Connor's trial appear in the
Daily News
12 April 1872, 5–6, and the
Times
12 April 1872, 11.

406:   … “he bowed neither to judge nor jury,” noted a reporter, “but posed himself as if sitting for his photograph”:
Daily News
12 April 1872, 5.

406:   … Baron Cleasby, a judge known to be a niggler on points of law, and never quite comfortable in a criminal courtroom: Boase, “Cleasby.”

406:   But Cleasby would have none of it, interrupting Hume-Williams after the second sentence of his opening speech:
Daily News
12 April 1872, 5.

407:   “I had always told him to tell the truth, and I believe he has done so”:
Daily News
12 April 1872, 6.

407:   “Is it your desire that your son should be imprisoned for life in a lunatic asylum?”:
Daily News
12 April 1872, 6.