Shooting Victoria (61 page)

That the explosion was a Fenian attack and the manifestation of Irish rage was obvious, but who exactly was culpable was less so. In actuality, the immense majority of Fenians, both in Ireland and the United States, had nothing to do with the attack, nor did any of the Irish Nationalists in Parliament or their leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Both the motivation and the money for the attack came from one man: Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. Rossa's hatred of the British had been born when his fatherless family was evicted during the worst of the Great Famine and had been hardened by years of rough treatment in British prisons, to which he was sentenced under a treason-felony charge. Exiled to New York, he openly established a “skirmishing fund” for terrorist attacks upon Britain. The British government might protest, but the U.S. government—hungry for Irish votes—did nothing to stop him. Rossa's politics—his refusal in particular to work with Parnell and the parliamentary nationalists—proved too militant for the largest body of the Fenians in the United States, the Clan-na-Gael, and in 1880 Rossa broke with them, formed his own organization, and founded the extremist newspaper
United Irishman
, which redoubled his calls for a terrorist fund. Though the Clan-na-Gael would also eventually enter the dynamite war against the British, the attacks so far had all been by Rossa's agents.

Two months later, Rossa's bombers targeted London, placing a cruder device—fifteen pounds of blasting powder lit by a fuse—in a niche outside Mansion House, the Lord Mayor's residence. An alert constable discovered the package, snuffed out the fuse, and carried the bomb to Bow Street Station. Mansion House was quiet that night: a planned grand dinner had been called off because Alexander II had been assassinated three days before. (It was this would-be outrage, as well as Alexander's death, that heightened Victoria's concerns about the safety of Buckingham Palace.) In May 1881 the skirmishers hit Liverpool—a badly constructed pipe bomb
well-placed at Liverpool's main police station exploded but did little damage. A month later, two bombers were captured lighting the fuse of a far more dangerous dynamite bomb outside Liverpool Town Hall. And the discovery by police, three weeks after this, of eight more “infernal machines”—slabs of dynamite with clockwork detonators, shipped from New York in barrels marked “cement”—made it clear that Irish terror had only just begun.

Since last summer, the bombers had been quiescent. But Ireland itself seethed with unrest. Gladstone's government had passed its own Coercion Act, meeting Irish agitation with repression. And under it, in October, three Irish nationalist leaders—Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, and James J. O'Kelly, had been arrested for their agitation for the Land League; they remained imprisoned in Dublin's Kilmainham prison. It was more than likely that Irish frustration would again re-erupt in a dynamite campaign. So far, the royal family had been clearly placed off limits as a target. But Alexander's death had shown the world the dramatic effect of a dynamite bomb upon a world leader, and Victoria now took greater precautions when traveling than ever before. (On her train journey this day, as on all her train journeys nowadays, a pilot train to guard against derailment of the royal train had been sent ahead of her.) How long would Irish terrorists refrain making a target of her—the living monument to British power, British Empire, and British domination of Ireland?

The second victim of assassination in 1881 could hardly have been further removed from Alexander, in terms both of distance and of ideology. Autocrats, it became clear, weren't the only targets for assassination. On 2 July 1881, President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a man who thought that by killing the President he was saving the Union. Guiteau, a failed lawyer, evangelist preacher, newspaper editor, lecturer, writer, and insurance salesman—but a moderately successful con artist—decided in 1880 that he would make his fortune in politics, supporting Garfield in that year's presidential election. He made himself a fixture at
New York Republican Party headquarters, relentlessly buttonholing party leaders and offering to give a speech he had written, and actually giving a part of it once. When Garfield won by a razor-thin popular majority, his winning in New York state proving pivotal in his electoral college victory, Guiteau leapt to the conclusion that his speech alone was responsible for Garfield's election, and that he deserved great reward. He preferred to become Minister to Austria; he would be happy with the consul-generalship in Paris; at the very least, he would accept a consulship in Liverpool. Soon after Garfield's inauguration, Guiteau arrived in Washington, D.C. with a single shirt and $5. Flitting from one upscale boarding house to another as the rent became due, Guiteau joined the many other job-seekers in the capital, haunting the White House and the State Department and barraging Garfield and his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, with righteous demands for his appointment. He managed once to thrust a copy of his speech into Garfield's hands and once to speak to him; another time he slipped into a White House reception and had a conversation with Mrs. Garfield. When he was finally denied access to the White House altogether, and when Secretary Blaine at the State Department shouted at him “Never speak to me again on the Paris consulship as long as you live,” Guiteau understood that his due reward would be denied him. As absurd as his expectations and sense of self were, Guiteau had spent enough time in Republican politics to form an accurate assessment of the state of that party after the election. He realized that the Republicans were split deeply into two factions—the Stalwarts, who supported ex-president Ulysses S. Grant, and the Half-breeds, who did not, and who had been largely responsible for Garfield's election. Those factions, Guiteau knew as he pursued his own appointment, were locked in their own battles over a number of political appointments. As he lay in bed one night, the disappointed office-seeker had a burst of inspiration: if he killed Garfield, all would be well: vice-president Chester Arthur—a true Stalwart—would become president and all party factionalism would come to an end. He would be a hero.

Guiteau's certainty over this course grew quickly. Within two weeks, he realized that his inspiration was divinely inspired. God was speaking to him personally, telling him to kill the president. Suddenly, the entire erratic course of his life made sense: he had been born to perform this patriotic act.

And so Guiteau abruptly shifted from job-seeker to stalker. He borrowed $15 from a distant relative and made his way to a gun shop in downtown Washington, where he found a choice of weapons. He favored a $10 pearl-handled revolver, thinking that it would look best on display in a museum after the shooting. But in the end he opted for economy, choosing a $9 wood-handled, .44-caliber five-shot snub-nosed revolver with a powerful kick, stamped “British Bulldog.” A novice with a gun, Guiteau spent time the next day practicing shooting on the banks of the Potomac. He followed the president (who eschewed all security), considered shooting him at church and then outside the White House, and finally decided to shoot him in the Washington terminal of the Baltimore and Potomac Railway. On the morning of 2 July 1881, he wrote one of several letters justifying his conduct. This one was addressed to the White House and began:

The President's tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican Party and save the Republic. Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little where one goes. A human life is of small value. During the war thousands of brave boys went down without a tear. I presume the President is a Christian, and that he will be happier in Paradise than here.

“I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts,” he wrote. At 8:30 that morning, he took up a position in the ladies' waiting room of the station, through which he knew Garfield would have to pass to get to the platform and his private Pullman coach. Just before 9:30, Garfield entered with Secretary of State Blaine. When they were
a few steps from the doorway to the main waiting room, Guiteau shot twice, the first bullet grazing Garfield's arm and the second plunging into his back, above his waist and four inches from his spine, shattering a rib and passing through a vertebra, and finally lodging below his pancreas. The wound was serious, but not fatal. The fifteen or so doctors who examined him, however, ensured that he would die, searching in vain for the bullet over the next few days by plunging their unwashed fingers into the wound. Garfield lingered in agony until the nineteenth of September before his body, then a 130-pound mass of putrefaction, succumbed. Victoria, who had sent at least six messages expressing her concern during Garfield's long decline and death, immediately ordered her Court to go into mourning for a week—an unprecedented token of respect for an American president.

Guiteau's trial was a sensation in Washington, and it was widely reported in Britain. He mounted an insanity defense: God had directed him, he claimed; the shooting was a divinely inspired uncontrollable impulse. Insanity in Washington, as in Britain, was defined by the MacNaughtan Rules, and Guiteau's defense (in which he acted as co-counsel) roughly followed Hadfield's, Oxford's, and MacNaughtan's, with a number of lay witnesses to his bizarre behavior and a number of doctors to testify to his insanity. The trial was notable for Guiteau's relentless outbursts against the judge and all the attorneys, including his own. He was found guilty, and awaited execution on 30 June, two days before the first anniversary of his shooting.

Guiteau was obviously insane. His extreme grandiosity, his inability to maintain any grip on reality, and his Maclean-like personal connection with God all made that abundantly clear. But Guiteau's act was undoubtedly political as well. He spent months scheming to elect Garfield. He sought recompense, as thousands of others had done, for his political labors. And he genuinely believed that his shooting Garfield would have positive political consequences, healing a party rift and putting into office a more
capable man. Guiteau showed that there can be no clear line drawn between the political and the lunatic assassin.

Nevertheless, after this cold day in March, many Britons would try again to draw that line.

The royal train, having flashed through the station at Slough and turned sharply left to rattle through the playing fields of Eton, slowed to cross Brunel's bowstring bridge over the River Thames and slid to a halt at Windsor Station. It was exactly 5:25. Roderick Maclean heard the train come; he watched the door of the royal waiting room, waiting for Victoria to emerge.

*
Sweet spirit of nitre—ethyl nitrite suspended in alcohol—was a common medicine at the time as a diuretic, antispasmodic, and soothing agent; it would indeed thus likely have been beneficial to Maclean.

*
Actually, there had been a response, after Maclean left—not from the Queen, who almost certainly did not see the poem, but from the wife of her keeper of the privy purse, who returned the poem with a curt note: “Lady Biddulph is obliged to return to Mr. Maclean his verses. The Queen never accepts manuscript poetry”
(Surrey Advertiser and County Times
11 March 1882, 5; Times 6 March 1882, 6).

*
Because Maclean was a pauper, only one doctor's signature (and the cooperation of a magistrate) was needed to commit him (Archibold 183).

*
Victoria was wrong; Beatrice would marry Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885. The Queen at first resisted the marriage, and only agreed on the condition that the couple always live with her, and that Beatrice would continue in her role as her companion (Purdue, “Beatrice”).

*
13 March 1881 by the Western calendar.

*
The Clerkenwell bombing in 1867 had certainly spread terror across Britain. But the bombers' intention was to free Richard O'Sullivan Burke, a Fenian prisoner. The would-be liberators had overfilled their barrel with gunpowder, and the destruction, the maiming and killing, were unintended consequences. The Salford bombers, on the other hand, fully wished to destroy and to wreak havoc.

twenty–three

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rom their saloon car behind the Queen's own, the members of the household—Victoria's private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby, her two equerries James Carstairs McNeill and Viscount Bridport, her current lady-in-waiting Lady Roxburghe, and her maids of honor—emerged to take up their positions in a miniature royal procession behind the Queen and Beatrice. Ponsonby offered the Queen his arm. The stationmaster had put out a red carpet, roped off from the public on either side, leading from the door of the train to the Queen's waiting room. Just outside there, three royal carriages awaited. After a respectable few minutes' wait, the royal party emerged onto the platform and made their way through the cheering crowd. As the royal party entered the waiting room, the crowd hastened toward the exits in order to reassemble in the station yard and cheer the Queen out of the station. To give them time, the Queen waited another
respectable minute before emerging from the street side of the waiting room.