Shooting Victoria (15 page)

*
It was a promise that Edward Marklew apparently reneged upon; in January 1841, Jabez Pelham appeared in court as an insolvent debtor, citing, among other debts owed him, £510 due from Hannah Oxford for the defense of her son
(Times
29 Jan. 1841, 7).

*
Oxford, Courvoisier, Gould, and Bailey formed such a notorious quartet at Newgate that a request was made to Sir Peter Laurie, alderman and official of the prison, to take plaster casts of the heads of the four. He refused, arguing that this sort of thing was done only
after
criminals were tried and found guilty
(Morning Chronicle 17
June 1840, 3).

*
Later, when news of Courvoisier's confession came out, Phillips was savaged in the press for defending a man he knew to be guilty, especially by attempting to place blame for the murder on others. He was forced to defend himself from this charge for years after the trial (Costigan 324).

*
Not to be confused with the Undersecretary for the Home Department, Fox Maule.

six

G
UILTY
, H
E
B
EING AT THE
T
IME
I
NSANE

T
he courtroom was packed on the first day of Oxford's trial. The sheriffs, however, had just had good practice with handling the crowds at the Courvoisier trial, and they adopted the same procedure with this one: they gave out a limited number of tickets and restricted access to all avenues leading to the courtroom.

At a quarter to ten, Oxford was called to appear, and every eye in the courtroom turned to the dock. He emerged after a few seconds, at first dejected: but he looked out over a sea of bewigged magistrates and barristers, and at the roomful of notables, and was heartened. His solicitor Jabez Pelham's prediction to him at his arraignment turned out to be true: there were no more Dukes present than there had been then. But the Duke of Brunswick was again a spectator, as were the Earls of Errol, Colchester, and
Uxbridge, as well as a Baron and a Count, and a scattering of Lords and Honorables. The Lady Mayoress of London and a retinue of “elegantly-dressed ladies” occupied a box usually reserved for the county magistracy. Undersecretary Fox Maule, Oxford's seeming friend, and his wife were among the first to arrive. Oxford's expression of dejection changed to a silly-looking smile of bafflement, excitement, and curiosity. He would for most of the trial exhibit a
nonchalance
that, for many, confirmed his lack of reason. Rather than pay attention to the proceedings, he was captivated much more by the herbs strewn before him, “picking, rubbing, and smelling” them for the next two days. These herbs, particularly malodorous rue, had been placed before the dock at every Old Bailey session for ninety years, ever since a prisoner suffering from gaol-fever—the various contagions consequent to the seriously overcrowded prison—had infected and killed a judge, an alderman, and a number of jurymen and witnesses. They had been strewn thereafter not simply to mask the stink of prisoners, but in an attempt to sanitize the noxious miasma that inmates at Newgate were considered to be emitting. Oxford likely had no idea that the herbs stigmatized him. But they did provide him with a welcome distraction.

To defend Oxford, Pelham had engaged John Sydney Taylor and William Bodkin, both highly respectable advocates and philanthropists, both strongly committed to a number of reformist causes. Taylor, who led the defense, was a founding member of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, and fought passionately for that cause in the columns of the
Morning Herald
. At the time of this trial, however, Taylor's poor health seriously undermined his energetic advocacy; he had for some time been battling against a mysterious and malignant disease. At age forty-four he was dying, and would be dead in a year.

In terms of legal reputation, however, Bodkin and Taylor could not hold a candle to their opposition. Leading the prosecution were the attorney general, John Campbell, and the solicitor general, Thomas Wilde. Campbell, who would handle opening arguments,
had a reputation for aggressive advocacy in his writing, his politics, and in the courtroom. His assertiveness and ambition had made him a number of enemies, including, as it happened, the presiding judge in this case, Lord Denman. His superb analytical mind, however, was obvious to all. Thomas Wilde, who would handle the prosecution's closing, had admitted liabilities in his presentation of a case—he had a flat voice and a monotonous delivery—but he made up for these with an astute command of legal niceties and tactics. Both Campbell and Wilde would one day sit on the woolsack as Lords Chancellor. The two had four attorneys assisting them. Foremost among these was Sir Frederick Pollock, the conservative predecessor to Campbell as attorney general, whose presence on the prosecution made clear that Whig government and Tory opposition were united in desiring a guilty verdict.

There were three judges presiding over the case. At their head was Baron Denman, who, as Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, was the second-ranking judge in the country, after the Lord Chancellor. Denman was thought not to have one of the greatest legal minds of his day, but was renowned for his impartiality and courtesy—as the “personification of judicial dignity.” Joining him on the bench were Sir Edward Hall Alderson and Sir John Patteson. The trial was to raise a number of puzzling legal questions, and—as Denman himself was to make clear—was to create a number of important precedents. These three judges would show themselves very much aware of the important issues, if not always clear on how to deal with them.

At ten, the judges entered, and the clerk read the charge of High Treason against Oxford: he “did compass, imagine, and intend to bring and put our said lady the Queen to death.” And to do it, he “maliciously and traitorously did shoot off and discharge a certain pistol … being loaded with gunpowder and a certain bullet … with intent thereby and therewith maliciously and traitorously to shoot, assassinate, kill, and put to death our said lady the Queen.” In order to prove Oxford guilty, then, the prosecution had to convince
a jury that there were bullets in Oxford's pistols, even though no bullets were ever found.

Oxford pleaded not guilty to the charge, in a “distinct and firm tone.” The jury was then sworn in with no challenges on either side.

In his opening, the Attorney General anticipated and countered the defense's two-pronged defense, first that the guns were not loaded; and second, if that didn't work, that Oxford was insane. Oxford's pistols
were
loaded, Campbell insisted, and a great deal of evidence supported that claim. Oxford had, in the days before the shooting, sought to buy bullets. He had used bullets in shooting galleries across London. He had, on the night before the shooting, showed off his loaded pistol. On the day of the shooting, eyewitnesses had heard the whizzing of bullets. And while the prosecution was to bring forward two witnesses who would testify that certain marks on the palace wall were likely caused by bullets, Campbell was less certain about the validity of that evidence: he was sure that the bullets passed over the wall, and were lost there. Moreover, Oxford's words proved that he had fired live ammunition. When, after the shooting, one bystander, William Clayton, accused another bystander, Joshua Lowe, of shooting, Oxford stated “It was I”—admitting, according to Campbell, to the act of firing bullets. In custody, he had asked “Is the Queen hurt?”—an absurd question, if Oxford had done nothing to hurt her. And when at the station house he was asked if his guns were loaded, he had answered that they were.

As to Oxford's supposed insanity, Campbell delved into legal precedence, citing a number of legal views on insanity and citing four previous criminal cases—including Hadfield's—to argue for a very high bar in proving insanity. Legal minds agreed, he claimed, that in order for an insanity defense to succeed, one must establish that the defendant was wholly insane at the time; partial insanity was not enough. Only “total alienation of the mind, or total madness, excuses the guilt of felony or treason.” And legally, total
madness involves a complete inability to distinguish between right and wrong: to acquit a defendant on the grounds of insanity, “it must be shown that at the very time, the particular time, when the offence charged was committed, he was not an accountable being; that he was then labouring under some delusion, that he could not distinguish right from wrong, and that he was unconscious of committing any offence.” In all of the four legal cases Campbell cited, the defendants demonstrated mental aberration; in one of them, there was a clear history of insanity in the family. But in three of the four, the defendants were found guilty because it could not be shown that they were totally deranged and incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong at the time of their criminal act. Only Hadfield was acquitted. But, Campbell claimed, Oxford was no Hadfield. Hadfield suffered a head wound that discernibly affected his sanity. He suffered delusions, and his behavior became increasingly irrational to the point that, soon before his attack on King George, he attempted to murder the son he loved: thus, his insanity was manifest to all at the time of the shooting.

Campbell claimed that Oxford was
not
manifestly deranged—not even partially insane—at the moment of the shooting. Anticipating the defense's many witnesses, Campbell questioned their relevance: while Oxford may have exhibited bizarre behavior throughout his life—while he might be the son and grandson of unbalanced men—that evidence could not establish his total derangement on 10 June. No one ever sought his committal for madness then, or before; rather, he was a capable employee. In support of this line of argument, Campbell pointed out that Oxford was not a “potboy,” as was popularly thought, but a “publican”—rare recognition of his superior stature that must have pleased Oxford. Moreover, his signed statement after his examination before the Cabinet, coolly admitting to the shooting, demonstrated conclusively that Oxford was very much aware of what he had done.

The prosecution's witnesses both placed Oxford at the scene and testified that his pistols were loaded. The defense conceded the first
point, but argued that his guns were not loaded at all. That Oxford often shot live ammunition at targets before the attempt hardly proved the pistols were loaded on the day of the shooting. Oxford's own claims after his arrest that his pistols were loaded, given his manifestly vainglorious attempt to promote himself as an adherent of Young England, were dubious. The testimony by two witnesses that bullets had made marks on the wall of the Palace gardens was undercut by the Attorney General's opinion that Oxford's bullets had carried over that wall. And the two witnesses who swore that they heard the whizzing of a bullet seemed quite confused in their testimony. The defense, in cross-examination, let pass the fact that it would be virtually impossible to hear the whizzing of a ball immediately after a gun's violent explosion. There was hardly any need to bring this up: both witnesses seemed hopelessly confused about the difference between seeing and hearing a shot. Thus Samuel Perks's (or Parkes's) testimony: “the report of the pistol attracted my attention, and I had a distinct whizzing or buzzing before my eyes, between my face and the carriage.” The other witness to the shot, Elizabeth Stockeley, was even more confused about what she saw and what she heard:

… it was the second flash which appeared to come over the Queen's head, and it came close past me; the flash did—it seemed something that whizzed past my ear, as I stood; it seemed like something quick passing my ear, but what I could not say …

Q
. What do you mean by the flash?
A
. The light and the smoke—I cannot explain what it was that whizzed by my ear—it was my right ear.

As for testimony that Oxford was sane at the time of the shooting, the prosecution refrained from presenting a single witness to counter the many witnesses the defense planned to call to demonstrate Oxford's insanity. They had such a witness available
to them: Charles Aston Key, the surgeon who had declined to examine Oxford with the defense's medical witnesses, was present and offering advice to the prosecution. But the prosecution had no intention of having anyone testify to Oxford's sanity. They certainly preferred to prove the boy guilty of High Treason: the formidable prosecutorial team demonstrated that. Executing Oxford would have a highly desirable value in deterring future would-be Oxfords from threatening the Queen. But they surely knew that their evidence that Oxford's pistols were loaded was weak, and thus they could lose the case. Moreover, asking the jury to convict him of a capital crime—one for which the penalty was hanging, drawing, and quartering—was always a risky proposition. The public's perception of Oxford by the time of the trial had shifted: while he was once the desperate and malevolent bravo, he had become a rather pathetic boy who craved attention. The jury might acquit Oxford just to save him from the excessive punishment of an excruciating death.

Oxford's insanity defense offered the government a third option. While each defense strategy—proving unloaded guns, or proving insanity—would result in Oxford's acquittal, the consequence of acquittal for unloaded guns differed dramatically from the consequence of an acquittal for insanity. If Taylor and Bodkin succeeded in proving that Oxford had no balls in his pistols, he would walk from the Old Bailey a free man. If, on the other hand, he was acquitted on the ground of insanity, he would be subject to confinement at the Queen's pleasure—confinement that could last for decades, if not a lifetime, as happened in the case of James Hadfield.

The prosecution recognized that Oxford's defense attorneys could be
too successful
: they could earn Oxford an acquittal and see him in effect confined for life. That fact shaped Oxford's prosecution. Campbell, Wilde, and the other prosecutors promoted, as energetically as they could, the case that the pistols were loaded. But they offered next to nothing to prove that he was sane. Indeed,
they actually helped promote the notion that he might be insane. In his opening, Campbell read Oxford's Young England papers to the jury in full: all the rules and regulations, as well as Oxford's three letters. Moreover, during testimony the prosecution asked Samuel Hughes, the policeman who discovered and broke open Oxford's box of secrets, to read all of the documents in full a second time. Campbell offered no explanation for these documents. He had no intention of suggesting that Young England was real; both prosecution and defense agreed that the organization was a figment of Oxford's imagination. The prosecution, in other words, introduced the very evidence that Oxford's defense would claim to make the strongest case for his insanity.