Shooting Victoria (91 page)

454:   “Was not shaken or frightened,” she wrote: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 3:266–67.

454:   She hurried to tell her one child in the Castle—Arthur—what had happened: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 3:267.

454:   She then took tea with Beatrice while her account was telegraphed to the rest of her children and to other relatives: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 3:267.

455:   … the Eton boys running beside them hooting, and Maclean demonstrating visible anxiety the whole way:
Daily News
3 March 1882, 3.

455:   From the group of Eton boys, the two who had pummeled the captured Maclean with their brollies identified themselves:
Times 12
March 1936, 10.

455:   Fraser and Hayes examined his gun: two chambers loaded; two recently discharged; two empty:
Daily News
3 March 1882, 5.

455:   Superintendent Hayes detained Maclean for shooting the Queen with intent to do her grievous bodily harm:
Times
3 March 1882, 5.

455:   “Oh, the Queen”:
Times
4 March 1882, 10.

455:   Maclean was forced to wash himself:
Reynolds's Weekly
5 March 1882, 1.

455:   A local surgeon, William Brown Holderness, was brought in to examine him:
Daily News
3 March 1882, 5. Other early accounts claim that Victoria's doctor, James Reid, also examined Maclean and pronounced him sane, but later denials suggest this to be unlikely.

456:   Several diplomats who wished to offer up personal congratulations at the Palace were directed to call at Marlborough House:
Belfast
News-Letter
3 March 1882, 5.

456:   Others made their way by train to Windsor Castle on the next day:
Pall Mall Gazette
3 March 1882, 8.

456:   The House of Commons churned for a time that evening with a growing consternation:
Times
3 March 1882, 5.

456:   “I hope the matter will not receive the same sort of judicial handling which a similar one as I recollect received from Mr. Justice Cleasby”: Guedalla 2:179.

456:   … many had collected outside newspaper offices throughout Britain to hear the results of Bradlaugh's bid for re-election in Northampton:
Bristol Mercury
3 March 1882, 8.

457:   I have before me as I write a copy of an evening paper published in San Francisco on March 2nd:
Leeds Mercury
25 March 1882, 5.

457:   … jamming the special telegraph wire to the Castle:
Pall Mall
Gazette
3 March 1882, 8;
Graphic
11 March 1882, 227.

457:   She received messages:
Times
3 March 1882, 5;
Pall Mall Gazette
3 March 1882, 8;
Daily News
6 March 1882, 6;
Times
6 March 1882, 6.

458:   … Victoria was particularly affected by President Chester Arthur's message to her:
Aberdeen Journal
6 March 1882, 3.

458:   And postbags bulging with congratulations soon joined telegrams:
Aberdeen Journal
8 March 1882, 5. One newspaper reports that five hundred telegrams poured in by 6 March, another two thousand telegrams by the seventeenth.
Bristol Mercury
6 March 1882, 8;
Newcastle Courant
17 March 1882, 8; White 41.

458:   “Telegrams, as well as letters,” she wrote in her journal on 3 March, “pouring in”: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 3:267.

458:   … “the boys cheered as we passed … and everyone seemed so pleased”: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 3:267.

458:   … “anything like the enthusiasm, loyalty, sympathy and affection shown me is not to be described”: Victoria and Victoria,
Beloved
Mama 116.

458:   … the bullet had been found by Inspector Noble of the Great Western Railway:
Times
4 March 1882, 10.

458:   That truck had moved on to Reading, but Inspector Noble found it there that afternoon:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

458:   … the apparent answer to which was that the bullet passed between the rear of the carriage and the rumble seat—between Victoria and John Brown:
Illustrated London News
11 March 1882, 230.

459:   … “for it proves,” she wrote, “that the object was not intimidation, but far worse”: Victoria
Letters
(second series) 3:267.

459:   I am not guilty of the charge of shooting with the intention of causing actual bodily harm:
Times
4 March 1882, 10.

460:   He was thus a confident man when at 1:30 that afternoon, handcuffed to a plain-clothed officer, he was rushed in an open fly from the station house to Windsor Town Hall:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

461:   “I saw the prisoner with a revolver in his hand. The line of fire was straight from my eye to one of the panels of Her Majesty's carriage”:
Times
4 March 1882, 10.

461:   “Have you fired a pistol in your life?”:
Daily News 4
March 1882, 6.

461:   “That is a point in my favor”:
Glasgow Herald
4 March 1882, 5.

462:   “We have nothing to do with that”:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 6.

462:   … some of the crowd rushed at the carriage:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5;
Times
4 March 1882, 5.

462:   Superintendent Hayes, attempting to avoid confrontation by avoiding Windsor train station altogether, removed Maclean from the station in a closed fly through Eton and to the railway station at Slough:
Times
6 March 1882, 6.

462:   … anything less, she thought, would have a “
painful effect”
: Guedalla 2:181.

463:   … “the dominant feeling in my mind has been that the whole of these deplorable attempts on the life of the Queen have proceeded from men of weak and morbid minds”: Guedalla 2:180.

463:   … Gladstone reversed himself, and the Cabinet, meeting on Saturday, agreed to follow the precedents of 1840 and 1842: Guedalla 2:180.

463:   Victoria was satisfied with Parliament, and told Gladstone so: Guedalla 2:181.

464:   The address was then read “extremely well”: Victoria and Victoria, Beloved Mama 116.

464:   Victoria, “visibly affected,” replied briefly to the address:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

464:   She shook the hands of her young saviors:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8. By some accounts Victoria promised the boys a commission in the army. With or without this incentive, one of the boys, Gordon Chesney Wilson, grew up to become a true son of the Empire: he served as aide-de-camp to Baden-Powell at the siege of Mafeking, married the daughter of the Seventh Duke of Marlborough and thus became an uncle to Winston Churchill, died in battle in Ypres in the first months of the First World War, and was buried in a Flanders field (Clutterbuck and Dooner 448–49).

464:   Elisabeth, a devoted huntress, had been riding to the hounds in Cheshire for the past month, and had come … to offer Victoria her congratulations and her farewells:
Times
4 February 1882, 9; 7 March 1882, 10.

464:   Luigi Lucheni[,] was an Italian anarchist who when caught admitted that he was out to kill the first royal he could lay his hands upon: Sinclair 174.

465:   … he plunged into her body a short file sharpened to stiletto fine-ness, breaking her rib and piercing her lung, pericardium, and heart: Sinclair 177.

465:   … that news was widely reported the next day, along with Maclean's stays in a Dublin asylum as well as Weston-super-Mare infirmary:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5;
Birmingham Daily Post
4 March 1882, 5;
Leeds Mercury
4 March 1882, 3.

465:   … Wollaston Knocker[,] recognized Maclean from the first reports of the shooting and quickly telegraphed the Mayor of Windsor:
Daily News
4 March 1882, 5.

465:   A few days later, Knocker's more detailed account of Maclean's earlier, bizarre behavior appeared in newspapers across the country:
Leeds Mercury 7
March 1882, 8.

466:   The Home Secretary, William Vernon Harcourt, did consider the possibility that Maclean was a part of a larger political conspiracy: TNA PRO HO 144/95/A14281.

466:   Most… called for the assassination of another “crowned ragamuffin” every month:
Times
26 May 1881, 11.

466:   … “the present attempt on the life of Her Majesty the Queen was the work of a lunatic”: TNA PRO HO 144/95/A14281.

466:   The horror one felt at learning the Queen had again been attacked, Gladstone proclaimed, was mitigated by one “remarkable consideration”: “Attempt on the Life of Her Majesty.”

468:    “Your Majesty's Law Officers are sensible how important it is that there should be in this case a power of imprisonment without any limit of time”: RA VIC/MAIN/L/14/116.

468:   … “if there should be any fear of his not being convicted for intent to murder … the plea of insanity will be brought forward”: RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1882,10 March 1882.

469:   Maclean might have “a horrid, cruel face”: RA VIC/ MAIN/L/14/115.

469:   He might be the “utterly worthless” offshoot of “respectable relations”: Victoria and Victoria,
Beloved Mama
116.

469:   … she wrote Gladstone “she is glad to hear of this proposed arrangement for the trial of Maclean w
^h
seems very satisfactory”: Guedalla 2:181–82.

469:   “The Mayor (to the prisoner) Have you any question to put to the witness?”:
Daily News
11 March 1882, 3.

470:   Stephenson had little to say about Maclean's state of mind besides noting that, as far as he could tell, there was nothing the matter with the man:
Times
11 March 1882, 10.

Chapter 24: Special Verdict

472:   … he argued in it both that he had no intention of whatsoever of shooting the Queen, and that he had long been, and still was, insane:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 1.

472:   … if his overblown prose and his later repeated but unsuccessful attempts to get the manuscript published are any indication: he apparently sought to gain with it the literary fame he knew he so greatly deserved:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 1; Sims 67–70; White 56. Maclean's memoirs have disappeared, but fragments from and summaries of them appear in
Reynolds's Weekly
following his trial, and in writer George R. Sims's own memoirs,
My Life: Sixty Years' Recollections of Bohemian London
.

472:   … “to express from her heart how very deeply touched she is by the outburst of enthusiastic loyalty, affection, and devotion which the painful event of the 2d. inst. has called forth from all
classes and from all parts of her vast Empire”:
Times
14 March 1882, 10.

472:   … “the bright sunshine and the sea, mountains, vegetation and lightness of the air and the brightness and gaiety of everything”: Victoria and Victoria,
Beloved Mama 117
.

472:   Rumors that three Fenian terrorists were on their way from Paris to assassinate Victoria had reached the ears of the police who accompanied her: Nelson 35; Lamont-Brown 132.

472:   John Brown did not, and drove everyone to distraction by his frantic attempts to discover the assassins: Cullen 190.

472:   Victoria attributed his hypervigilance not to any actual threat, but to “his increasing
hatred
of being ‘abroad'”: Nelson 35.

472:   Victoria and Beatrice returned to Windsor amidst the same heightened security, four days before Maclean's trial:
Daily News
15 April 1882, 5.

473:   London's
cause célèbre
of 1882: the Jumbo craze: For the Jumbo craze, see Chambers 116–164.

473:   … last August, Jumbo had destroyed the zoo's elephant house: Chambers 109–110.

473:   When led out the next day to walk the eight miles to Millwall Docks, Jumbo similarly refused: Chambers 125.

474:   In mid-March, Jumbo fever peaked, as on one day 24,007 people packed the zoo: Chambers 146.

474:   … Jumbo fever subsided quickly, the British sheepishly realizing that they could go on without Jumbo: Chambers 196.

474:   When on 19 April two constables conveyed Maclean up from the subterranean passage and into the dock of the small courtroom at Reading, he appeared dirtier and shabbier than ever: Williams 115;
Illustrated London News
22 April 1882.

474:   … a number of fashionably dressed ladies stared back at him, some through opera glasses:
Pall Mall Gazette
19 April 1882, 8.

474:   … “Few who looked upon him … had any doubt that insanity had marked him for its own”: Williams 115.

474:   … they had otherwise provided for him well, paying for his meals at Reading Gaol:
Times
13 April 1882, 9.

475:   … one reporter comparing the spectators to a Nonconformist congregation:
Pall Mall Gazette
19 April 1882, 8.

475:   The Queen had that morning done the same, sending a primrose wreath to be placed on his grave at Hughenden:
Daily News
20 April 1882, 5.

475:   “We cannot help regretting,” proclaimed
The Times
, “that the accused has been treated so much
au sérieux”: Times
19 April 1882,11.

475:   “like employing a five ton Nasmyth hammer to crack a walnut-shell”:
Reynolds's Weekly
23 April 1882, 4.

476:   Guiteau had managed to turn the trial into a circus: Clark 125–39.

476:   “As to Maclean there is no doubt of his insanity”: Journal of Lewis Harcourt, rpt. White 52.

477:   Much therefore had happened in the hour before Maclean stepped into the dock:
Times
20 April 1882,11;
Pall Mall Gazette
19 April 1882, 8.