Shooting Victoria (5 page)

Albert returned to England on the 8th of February, after a horrendous sea crossing—and to enthusiastic crowds from Dover to Buckingham Palace. Cheering crowds were always to be a barometer indication of the health of the relationship between monarch and public, and she was well aware of the crowds during and after her wedding, as promising a marriage and a reign that was blessed. “I never saw such crowds of people,” Victoria wrote, as she had seen in the park between Buckingham Palace and the Chapel Royal at St. James. And then the glorious ceremony, less glorious to Victoria because of the red, gold, and white trappings of the ceremony (with which Hayter was faithfully festooning his state painting) than because of the perfect man with whom she was exchanging solemn vows. Victoria was in ecstasy about the match in every respect,
including the physical. Victoria was neither a prude, as traditionalists have it, or an erotic firecracker, as the revisionists do. But she was an extremely affectionate and physical being, and she was a woman extremely attracted to male beauty, truly believing Albert to be the most beautiful man, physically, she had ever seen. Her joyful journal entries after her marriage express repeated awe at Albert's body. The morning after the wedding, she waxed ecstatic about Albert's—throat: “He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen … He had a black velvet jacket on, without any neckcloth on, and looked more beautiful than it is possible for me to say.”

After their marriage, unanswered questions about Albert's role in the monarchy continued to strain their relationship. Socially, he and the Queen were one: riding together in the afternoons, cheered at the theatre or dancing together in the evenings. But for someone raised for duty, eager to take on the responsibilities of government, Albert was thwarted at every turn. He still helped the Queen with the blotting paper when she signed official documents, but that was as close as he got to them. He was not allowed to see the contents of the state boxes. When Victoria saw her ministers, she saw them alone—as she had, on principle, from the first day of her reign. Even the running of the household was closed to him: all of Victoria's personal expenses were handled not by the Prince, but by Lehzen. Indeed, Lehzen's deep personal loyalty to Victoria now acted as a gall to the Prince: something that he saw as standing between the two of them. By May, he was writing complainingly to a friend that he was “the husband, not the master of the house.”

He did find ways to take on a greater role in the monarchy. For one thing, there were the personal appearances as Victoria's representative; this was the reason he was in Woolwich now. He would soon be involved in non-partisan, charitable organizations: he had accepted the presidency of the Anti-Slavery Society; he was slated to give his first public speech in England for that organization on the first of June. And, of course, there was the coming event that
would change the nation and reform his relationship with Victoria: within weeks of the wedding, Victoria knew she was pregnant; now, at three months, her “interesting condition” was becoming more obvious to the world, and certainly to the perceptive artist who sketched her.

At six that evening, Albert returned to her. Before she married, Victoria had regularly exercised on horseback, but soon after her marriage—and perhaps because of her pregnancy—she stopped, preferring to take her airings with her husband, in an open carriage. While in residence in London, the two regularly rode out in the late afternoons; their rides regularly reported in the Court Circular, published in every newspaper. Their rides were regular enough so that crowds outside the Palace gathered to cheer them. This evening was no exception: soon after Albert's return, the two emerged, accompanied by their equerries, for their regular airing up Constitution Hill and in Hyde Park.

*
“Young England” happens to be the same name that young Benjamin Disraeli and his companions would choose for their quasi-feudalistic movement within the Tory party, two years after this. The correspondence is almost certainly a complete coincidence, unless one of the Tory Young Englanders recalled news accounts of Oxford's society when formulating his own.

two

B
RAVOS

H
annah Oxford did not know, and would never know, whether the pistol her son had thrust into her face was loaded or not. But she had seen this sort of violent and irrational behavior many times before—from Edward, and from Edward's father (also named Edward) before him. The elder Edward Oxford's behavior suggested what we would diagnose today as extreme bipolarity: he cycled regularly between episodes of frantic mania, followed by tremendous bouts of depression. More than once, neighbors discovered him riding indoors on horseback, and at another time throwing his entire dinner (“both meat and vegetables”) out the window. When Edward was an infant, he sold every stick of furniture in his house without telling his wife, and decamped to Dublin to spend the money. He repeatedly threatened to harm himself, and at least twice attempted to kill himself with an overdose of laudanum.

His marriage to Hannah was a nightmare. As their son was to do, he threatened her with pistols. He abused her mentally, threw things at her, regularly beat her. The two had met when they were both twenty, in the Birmingham public-house that Hannah's father owned. From the start, the elder Oxford intimidated her. Their six-week courtship—if courtship is the proper term for the torment Hannah experienced—consisted of his beating down her will: he repeatedly and unsuccessfully pressed her to marry him, and “on those occasions,” according to Hannah, “he would pull a razor out of his side pocket, and bare his throat, saying he would cut his throat in my presence if I refused him.” Eventually, he showed her a double-barreled pistol and threatened to blow her and then his brains out if she refused him. She accepted.

Oxford's father was, by profession, a gold-chaser, or engraver—a highly skilled and remunerative craft, one that earned him £20 for a good week—the same amount his son later earned in a year. According to his wife, he was skillful and quick, “the best workman in Birmingham.” He was, however, an outsider. He was reportedly ethnically distinct: the son or grandson of a black father.
*
(Hannah Oxford, however, denied this.) Moreover, the man's inner demons destroyed any hope of worldly success, and any hope of a successful marriage. On the day before their wedding, Hannah confronted him with a letter she had received, detailing his bad character. He responded by pulling a large roll of banknotes from his pocket and setting them afire. Intimidated again, Hannah married him.

Her husband's abuse only increased with time. He tormented his wife when she was pregnant with Edward's older brother: starving her, throwing things at her, making faces at her: “jumping about like a baboon, and imitating their grimaces.” This sort of behavior to a pregnant woman would strike most Victorians as particularly
ominous, as many at the time believed that a woman's extreme emotional shock during pregnancy could physically and mentally imprint itself upon the child. The superstition is perhaps best remembered today in the celebrated case of Joseph Merrick, popularly and cruelly known as the Elephant Man, whose deformities, his mother believed, were a direct result of her stumbling into the path of a parading elephant while she was pregnant.

Oxford's brother was born, in the terminology of the day, an idiot, and died at two. When Hannah was pregnant with Edward, his father repeated his abusive behavior: the grimaces, the threats—and the physical abuse: he knocked Hannah unconscious with a quart pot, and a local surgeon treated her frequently at this time for head injuries. Hannah herself believed her husband's abuse the cause of her son Edward's eccentricity, claiming that his torment “had an effect upon her then situation by means of that species of secret sympathy of which there are many instances, and communicated to the unborn child the insanity with which the father was afflicted.”

Edward was born on 9 April 1822, and, whether because of upbringing, or genetics, or even “secret sympathy,” his behavior eerily reflected his father's. Edward for the first years of his life was a witness to his father's excesses—though, by all accounts, father and son got on very well. After years of abuse, when Edward was five or six, Hannah finally separated from her husband. Oxford Senior died in 1829, on the 10th of June—a date that his son knew about and remembered: a date, perhaps, very much on his mind when he was living at West Place.

From an early age, Edward had fits of unprovoked, maniacal laughter. Hannah later admitted that she attempted to cure him of this by beating him. Edward's fits were extremely disruptive; Hannah supported herself in her widowhood first with a pastry shop, and then with a coffee-and-tea shop, both of which failed—because of young Edward, according to Hannah: “my customers complained of his conduct” of “crying out and bawling aloud,” she
claimed, “and I lost my business.” Edward would have episodes of near-catatonia, and episodes of motiveless, violent rage, in which he would “knock and destroy anything he might have in his hand.” His fits were often directed against strangers, as when he positioned himself in the upper room of his house and rained household goods on the heads of passersby. “He was once taken to the station house for this,” said his mother, “and he did not seem conscious of having done wrong.” Another time, he was brought to the station house for leaping onto the back of the carriage of a woman he did not know, simply to torment her. Edward proved to be too much for his mother to handle, and she left much of his upbringing to others: he lived with his uncle Edward Marklew, Hannah's brother, and with his maternal grandfather for some time; he stayed with a neighbor, George Sandon, for about a year; he boarded at schools in Birmingham and South London. His odd behavior continued at all of these places. Sandon recalled that he constantly beat other children, “very severely.” Sandon also remembered his “habit of throwing things out of the up-stairs upon children below.” And there were his laughing and crying fits. “When I asked him why he did so,” according to Sandon, “he gave me no straightforward answer, but ran out, which I thought was very singular for a boy of eight years of age.” Not surprisingly, as a boy, Oxford had very few friends.

Coming from a family of publicans on his mother's side, Edward was “brought up to the bar,” as he later joked, at the age of fourteen, working for his aunt Clarinda Powell at the King's Head, in Hounslow, southwest of the metropolis. He proved to be a generally capable (though at times scatterbrained) employee. Still, he continued to attract trouble. He was arrested after a scuffle with a neighbor—he struck the man on the head with a chisel, was brought before a magistrate, and found guilty of assault. At the time, his aunt Clarinda defended him. But she certainly had serious doubts about the boy's sanity. He seemed incapable of empathy. When, for example, Oxford overheard a customer at the King's
Head speak to his aunt Clarinda about the vicious assault he had suffered the night before, he could only laugh and “jeer” at the injuries the man had received. As he had done when he assisted his mother, Oxford tended to unnerve customers and cost his aunt business: his aunt remembered one time, when she was ill, leaving Edward to run a busy bar. At ten o'clock, hours before closing time, he methodically shut off every gas jet in the house, plunging the crowded pub into complete darkness. “He could not account why he did so,” she claimed. “I was obligated to come down from a sick bed, at the risk of my life, to soothe him.” The King's Head closed eleven months after Oxford's arrival.

Oxford then—without his aunt's reference, she later made clear—sought employment in London, and worked for the next three years in three public houses, located ever closer to the heart of the metropolis: first, the Shepherd and Flock, on Marylebone High Street, then the Hat and Feathers, in Camberwell, and finally at the Hog in the Pound, at the intersection of Oxford and Bond Streets. He held the position of barman at these pubs, and, not surprisingly for someone who created the rank-obsessive organization of Young England, he was obsessive about his place in the public house hierarchy: as he would later protest, not a lowly potboy, but the man who drew pints, poured spirits, and oversaw the till. As a barman, he earned something around £20 a year, or approximately eight shillings a week. That pay would put him on a level with the poorest of the poor as described by social investigator Henry Mayhew in his revelatory
London Labour and the London Poor
. But of course Oxford had one great advantage over the street-folk described in that work: free room and board. His wages, then, were not terrible—but would never give him the wealth or independence that befitted a Captain of Young England.

Edward Oxford's London employers generally considered him a capable and efficient worker, though they, as well as their employees and customers, could not help but be baffled and disconcerted by his
eccentric behavior. The inexplicable, maniacal laughter continued. He would fall into deep self-absorbed trances, spells of heated internal dialogue, activity visible to onlookers only in the resultant bursts of heightened emotion. A reporter at the
Morning Chronicle
described one such episode, at the Shepherd and Flock: