We area mused: queen Victoria survives eighth attempt on her life
It was 5.30 on the evening of March 2, 1882 when the then 62-year-old Queen Victoria arrived by train at Windsor Station, and made her way to her carriage waiting outside.
Among the watching crowd was a 28-yearold Scotsman, Roderick Maclean, who raised a pistol and fired at her.
Fortunately, his shot missed, and he was quickly overpowered by police.
Later, Victoria herself was to describe the attack, saying: “There was the sound of what I thought was an explosion from the engine, but in another moment, I saw people rushing about and a man being violently hustled, rushing down the street.”
It was a shocking attack, but not unprecedented. Maclean was Victoria’s eighth would-be assassin.
The first came in June 1840, when Edward Oxford fired two duelling pistols at Victoria and Prince Albert as they left Buckingham Palace in an open carriage. Oxford was found guilty but insane, and spent 24 years in an asylum before being deported to Australia.
Two years later John Francis attempted to shoot the Queen but his gun failed to go off. After making his escape, he tried again the next day, firing a shot but missing. He was sentenced to be hanged and quartered, with the sentence commuted to banishment for life.
Five weeks later 17-yearold John Bean pulled a gun as the pair’s carriage passed, but it failed to fire.
Nine years after Edward Oxford’s failed attempt,
John Hamilton, standing in almost the same spot, fired at the Queen’s carriage. He was banished to Gibraltar for seven years.
In 1850, Robert Pate, a former British Army officer whose deranged behaviour was well known, smacked Victoria on the head with his cane. Despite immediately announcing: “I am not injured,” she suffered a large bruise and black eye. Pate was sent to a penal colony in Tasmania.
In 1872 17-year-old Arthur O’connor managed to scale the fence at Buckingham Palace and spring across the courtyard, intercepting the Queen’s carriage. O’connor pointed a pistol at Victoria but was thrown to the ground by her personal servant, John Brown. O’connor was exiled to Australia.
Maclean subsequently claimed he had deliberately missed the Queen, and had only fired the shot to draw attention to his impoverished plight.
The Scot had suffered a childhood head injury, which resulted in ferocious headaches.
Following one particularly agitated letter to a sister – in which he threatened murder
– he was pronounced
insane and admitted to the Somerset Lunatic Asylum, but was released within months after apparently being cured.
The British Government ordered an investigation into Maclean’s links to anarchists and republicans.
Both Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, and America’s President James Garfield had been assassinated the previous year.
But no links were found and doctors testified that Maclean was insane and “did not believe he was capable of appreciating the nature or quality of any act which he might commit.”
Tried for high treason, he was found not guilty, but insane, by a jury after five minutes’ deliberation and lived out his remaining days in Broadmoor Asylum.