Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/19/shooting-victoria-thomas-murphy-review

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Between 1840 and 1882, there were eight attempts on the life of Queen Victoria. Apart from the maniacal Hyde Park dandy Robert Pate, who struck the queen on the head with his cane, none came close to succeeding: one would-be assassin dropped his pistol, another got no further than waving his firearm threateningly in the direction of the royal carriage and yet another was beaten to the ground by two passing Etonians wielding umbrellas. Although the charge for threatening the life of the monarch was high treason, for which the punishment was to be hung, drawn and quartered, all the lost and melancholy rag-bag crew of men at the centre of Paul Thomas Murphy's gripping book were sentenced either to the lunatic asylum or to transportation with hard labour.

Unravelling a rich skein of themes – justice, monarchy, prison, policing, public fears and private lunacy among them – Murphy shows how the survival of Victoria was also the survival of the British monarchy. As the queen observed: "It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved." Inheriting in 1837 a throne whose recent incumbents had been for the most part foreign, degenerate and unpopular, the courage of Victoria (and Prince Albert) in the face of these assassination attempts earned admiration at a time of political and social unrest. The queen refused to cower from the crowd and consolidated her popularity by insisting on walking freely among her subjects.

All the eight men here showed degrees of mania but Murphy uses them to examine larger public fears. The press looked for conspiracy theories: the right feared a politicised working-class, as represented by the Chartists, and the left the threat from Hanover – Victoria's reactionary uncle King Ernest was thought to be plotting domination.

The largest subject in the book, however, is madness and its definitions. The most obviously deranged of the eight was Roderick McLean who was provoked into a murderous frenzy by any encounter with the colour blue, but it is the first of the assassins, Edward Oxford, whose case exemplifies the parameters of sanity if you live in a world marked by inescapable poverty and hopelessness. It was a fantasy of notoriety that made Oxford buy a pair of duelling pistols and take a pot shot at Victoria in 1840. When his lodgings were raided, police discovered a stash of letters addressed to "Captain Oxford", apparently the leader of a group called Young England. For a while rumours flew that the initials E.R. reportedly engraved on Oxford's pistols stood for Ernestus Rex though it soon transpired that Young England was the creation of a lonely fantasist. Oxford, delighted by the publicity, pleaded insanity: the court heard about his cackling laughter, long silences and torrents of weeping. The plea was upheld and he was incarcerated in Bedlam – a sentence considered too lenient by many (reports of Oxford's comfortable life and daily pint of wine inspired the second shooter John Francis who hoped that he too might be committed to the madhouse). Oxford's period in the asylum was astonishingly productive: by the time of his release, 25 years later, he was fluent in French, German and Italian, wrote poetry, painted and had learned to be an expert wood-grainer and marbler. Oxford emigrated to Australia where he became vice-president of the Melbourne Self-Improvement Society.

<em>Shooting Victoria</em> is a teeming, discursive pleasure. Murphy's book is a feat of historical sympathy, shining light on the larger picture of the 19th century and its indestructible queen.

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