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n Robert Francis Pate’s pate was addled. Just whynRobert Pate was so addle-pated we’ll never know but the poor man had problemsnof his own which made him act in a befuddled manner. His father was a self-madenman who raised his own station in life high enough to be able to afford to buynhis son a commission in the British Army but, when stationed in Ireland,nLieutenant Pate’s favourite horse and dog were both put down during a rabiesnscare and it may be that the trauma of the loss was enough to tip Pate over thenbrink and into helpless madness. He resigned his commission in the 10thnHussars in 1846, and returned to London, where he lived an eccentric, reclusivenexistence at Piccadilly and was frequently seen walking in the park dressed asna dandy – even the Queen had seen this odd flaneur there.
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| Queen Victoria and child |
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nOn May 27thn1850, as Victoria was leaving Cambridge House, after visiting her dying uncle,nthe Duke of Cambridge, Pate approached her carriage and struck her on the headnwith a short cane. Her bonnet absorbed much of the force of the blow but thenbrass ferrule raised a considerable bruise and cut her forehead, leaving anwound that was visible for many years afterwards. Pate was arrested and chargednunder the 1842 Treason Act, found guilty and sentenced to seven years transportationnto Van Diemen’s Land. Claims that Pate was insane were rejected although henseemed to have had no motive and Prince Albert wrote that the man was ‘manifestlynderanged’. Pate’s father pulled strings, hoping that his troubled son mightnbe better treated abroad rather than in an English gaol but things didn’t worknout as planned and Pate spent his first year serving hard labour at thenCascades penal settlement. He was then moved to lighter duties, served hisnsentence and lived in Hobart, where he married a wealthy heiress, until 1865nwhen the pair moved to London, where he lived quietly until his death thirtynyears later.
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| Victoria doubts Albert’s word |
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nThe next attack came in 1872, when Victoria’sncircumstances were vastly different. Albert had died in 1861, the Queen blamednEdward, their eldest son, for his untimely death and entered a period of deep,ndeep mourning from which she never really emerged. She withdrew from publicnlife, became a virtual recluse, known as the ‘Widow of Windsor’, and wore blacknfor the rest of her life. Her partial re-emergence was helped by hernrelationship with her Highland ghillie, John Brown, which raised a few eyebrowsnbut was probably quite innocent and was just a respectful, deep, Platonicnfriendship. Still, on February 28th 1872, Arthur O’Connor, aneighteen-year-old Irishman, climbed over the railings of Buckingham Palace andnapproached the Queen with a pistol in one hand and a self-penned edictndemanding the release of Fenian Irishmen held in English prisons on politicalncharges. It appears that he sought to frighten the Queen into signing the edictnbut when he raised the pistol, John Brown seized him and wrestled him to thenfloor.
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| John Brown to the rescue |
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nThe gun was broken and had no shot in it but nevertheless O’Connor wasnfound guilty of seeking to ‘alarm the Queen’ and sentenced to one year’snimprisonment and twenty strokes of the birch. After a little negotiating, thisnwas changed to a self-imposed exile in Australia, where O’Connor lived undernthe name of George Morton. He returned to London, was sentenced to an insanenasylum, went back to Australia, was committed to another asylum, escaped, wasnre-committed and spent a further forty-four years shuttling around thenmad-houses of Sydney. He also wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, which wasnintercepted before it reached her, offering to take the position of PoetnLaureate if only she would sack Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who currently held thenposition. The cause of his madness was those great Victorian cover-alls – ‘debasednhabits’ and ‘solitary vices’.
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| O’Connor fires at the Queen |
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nThe final attempt on the life of thenQueen also involved a crazed Irishman, one Roderick MacLean, who fired at hernas she walked between a railway train and her carriage at Windsor RailwaynStation on March 2nd 1882. A schoolboy from Eton struck MacLean’snarm with his umbrella before he could aim the pistol, which was, for a change,nactually loaded and in working order, and the shot went wide. MacLean wasnimmediately arrested and charged with High Treason, but it quickly becamenapparent that he was insane. Born into a good family, Roderick MacLean hadndropped out of society and lived as a virtual tramp, depending on handouts fromnhis family and the public. He had a fixation with the colour blue and thennumber four, had sold a scarf and an old concertina and used the proceeds to buyna pistol in Portsmouth, which he loaded with four bullets, and had then walkednfrom Portsmouth to Windsor. He had given one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting anpoem he had written for her Majesty but received what he regarded to be a ‘curt’nreply and so decided that honour demanded that he shoot her.
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| MacLean on Trial |
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nUnderstandably,nthe jury went for a verdict of ‘not guilty, but insane’, andecision that infuriated Queen Victoria who demanded to know how anyone couldnbe not guilty, when she had seen him fire a shot at her, obviously making himnguilty. Constitutional advisors tried to explain to the Queen that, undernEnglish law, no man can be found guilty of a crime unless he be proved to havenhad a criminal intention but Victoria remained unconvinced and pressed Gladstone,nher Prime Minister, for a change in the law, which occurred in 1883, allowingnfor a verdict of ‘guilty, but insane’ a curious anomaly that remained onnthe Statute Books until 1964. It is possible that she believed that if Edward Oxford had been hanged in 1840, this might have deterred all the subsequentnwould-be assassins. Regardless, MacLean spent thirty-nine years incarcerated atnBroadmoor Criminal Insane Asylum, and died there from apoplexy in 1921.
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| Queen Victoria fights back |
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nThisnfinal attempt, which may have been occasioned by a poem, certainly inspirednanother poem by the great William Topaz McGonagall, Attempted Assassinationnof the Queen, a magnificent piece that begins,
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n“God prosper long our noble Queen,nnn
nAnd long may she reign!nnn
nMaclean he tried to shoot her,nnn
nBut it was all in vain.”n
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nAnd goes on to include the following lines,
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n“Maclean must be a madman,nnn
nWhich is obvious to be seen,nnn
nOr else he wouldn’t have tried to shootnnn
nOur most beloved Queen.”n
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nMarvellous!
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