1840
Percussion pistol of the ‘commonest kind possible’ made in Birmingham
THE 18-YEAR-OLD EDWARD Oxford was the first of seven assailants to attack Queen Victoria. On 10 June 1840, from a range of 10yds or so, he fired with two pistols – one of which is pictured – at the pregnant queen whilst she was riding in a horse-drawn carriage with Prince Albert along Constitution Hill. Oxford was immediately overpowered by a member of the public, Joshua Lowe. At the same time Lowe’s nephew, Albert Lowe, seized the pistols. PC Charles Brown then took Oxford into custody. No bullets were found at the scene and there were some doubts as to whether the pistols had been loaded. Oxford was tried for high treason, but there was a good deal of evidence about mental health issues suffered by his family. He was acquitted on the grounds of insanity and sent to Bethlem hospital. In 1864 the patients there were transferred to Broadmoor, and three years later Oxford was offered release if he agreed to leave the country. He was last heard of on his way to Australia.
This was not the first time that the security surrounding Queen Victoria had been breached. In December 1838, 14-year-old Edward Jones, disguised as a chimney sweep, was caught in Buckingham Palace’s Marble Hall, but ran from the building. He was caught by the police in St James’s Street with items of the queen’s underwear stuffed down his trousers. He became known as the ‘Boy Jones’ in newspapers, and is an early example of an intruder making his way into the grounds of a royal palace. He climbed over the wall from Constitution Hill and entered Buckingham Palace on 30 November 1840, and repeated his exploit the following night, on 1 December, when he was found hiding under a sofa in the queen’s dressing room, ten days after she had given birth to her first child, Princess Victoria. Jones was sentenced to three months’ detention, but was found again by police officers in a royal apartment on 15 March 1841, just under a fortnight after his release from prison. The Boy Jones was the inspiration for the film The Mudlark starring Alec Guinness who played Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in a story of a waif who entered Windsor Castle to meet Queen Victoria.
Another example from 1838 involved a man who wanted to meet Queen Victoria and who managed to get into Buckingham Palace and wait for her outside her bedroom – but he fell into a drunken sleep in an adjoining room.
On 30 May 1842, John Francis fired a pistol at Queen Victoria when she was riding in a carriage returning to Buckingham Palace, at about 6 p.m., after her daily drive. Francis was immediately arrested by PC William Trounce from A Division and had in fact been seen the previous day threatening the queen at the same spot, but no further action had been taken, apart from excusing ladies-in-waiting from accompanying the queen. Security arrangements were very different in those days! Francis was convicted of high treason, but his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Prince Albert considered that the way in which Edward Oxford had been acquitted had, perhaps, encouraged a further attempt against the queen. This second attempt on the queen’s life was one of the issues that influenced the formation of the Detective Branch.
On Sunday, 3 July 1842, soon after John Francis’ death sentence had been commuted, Queen Victoria was riding in a procession of three carriages along The Mall from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace when 17-year-old John Bean held out a pistol at arm’s length, pointed it at the queen’s carriage and pulled the trigger. The pistol was old and did not fire. Bean had been holding it in his hand for some minutes beforehand with no attempt to conceal it. Charles Dassett, a member of the public, seized Bean and handed him into the custody of police officers, but they expressed their doubts about whether Bean could be charged with any offence as the gun had not fired, and the incident was not generally treated seriously by onlookers. The gun was loaded with a relatively small amount of powder, and Bean was charged with a misdemeanour rather than treason. The court heard evidence of his good character and then awarded a sentence of eighteen months. Prince Albert encouraged Parliament to pass a law against aiming a firearm at the sovereign, striking her, throwing anything at her or producing any weapon with intent to alarm her.
After a seven-year period without further incident, 23-year-old William Hamilton swore at the queen and discharged a gun, loaded only with powder, on 19 May 1849 in Green Park. He pleaded guilty under the new law and was transported for a period of seven years.
The most serious incident affecting Queen Victoria occurred on 27 June 1850, when she was starting her return journey from Cambridge House, Piccadilly, to Buckingham Palace. Robert Pate, a former lieutenant in the 10th Hussars, who had become mentally unstable, stepped out from the crowd of 200 or so people, and struck the queen with a cane, causing a bruise and bleeding to her forehead despite her bonnet taking most of the force of the blow. The senior footman, Robert Fenwick, grabbed Pate by the collar, and Sergeant James Silver then arrested Pate, who needed protection from the angry crowd. At Vine Street police station, Pate, who lived in Duke Street, St James’s, was charged with assault. He was found guilty and transported for seven years.
On 29 February 1872, Arthur O’Connor, a 17-year-old Irishman, climbed over Buckingham Palace’s wall and rushed at Queen Victoria’s carriage with an empty pistol in one hand and a petition to free Irish prisoners in the other. O’Connor was the great nephew of Irish MP Fergus O’Connor. Queen Victoria’s servant, John Brown, knocked the assailant to the ground before the queen could see the pistol, and was rewarded with a gold medal for his bravery. O’Connor was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, but the queen remitted another part of his sentence that involved twelve strokes of the birch, and he was later sent to Australia. The museum has a note from the then Prince of Wales asking to see the gun involved.
The last assailant to attack Queen Victoria actually fired a bullet at her, at Windsor railway station on 2 March 1882, as she was seated in her horse-drawn carriage on her way to Windsor Castle. Roderick MacLean was apparently aggrieved that a poem he had sent to Buckingham Palace was not being fully appreciated. The firing of the bullet was from a range of about 30yds, and missed its target. A number of Eton schoolboys tackled MacLean, who was then taken into custody by Chief Superintendent Hayes of the Windsor Borough police. MacLean was tried for treason, his Belgian pistol being more effective than the firearms used by some of his predecessors, but the death sentence was avoided because he was found ‘not guilty, but insane’.
On 5 April 1900, 15-year-old Jean-Baptiste Sipido attacked the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) at Brussels whilst the royal party was on its way to Denmark. The young man leapt on to the footboard of the train carriage and fired four shots into the royal compartment – each of them missing its target – before Sipido was seized, shouting of his intention to kill the prince because of the casualties of the Boer War. Sipido was acquitted by the Belgian court, apparently because of his young age, and later became a director of the General Society of Belgian Socialist Cooperatives.
On 16 July 1936, as King Edward VIII was riding on horseback in a ceremonial procession down Constitution Hill after presenting new colours to the Brigade of Guards in Hyde Park, George MacMahon lowered a newspaper that concealed a gun and aimed at the king. A Mrs Lawrence, standing next to MacMahon in the crowd, grabbed his arm and Special Constable Anthony Dick then knocked the gun from his hand and arrested him. MacMahon, whose real name was Jerome Bannigan, was a publicity-seeking fantasist and claimed at one stage that he had not intended to harm the king, but that he had been paid £150 by a foreign power for the assassination, had been in contact with MI5 immediately before the incident, and had deliberately bungled the attempt. His revolver was brand new and had probably never been fired. It was later proved to be inaccurate for distances over 10yds; the king was about twice that distance away from him. MacMahon’s story was rejected by the court and he was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour; King Edward had abdicated before his sentence was completed.
On 5 June 1939, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, was leaving her residence in Belgrave Square and was about to get into her car when a man named Vincent Lawlor fired a gun at her. The firearm, retained in the Crime Museum, had a barrel that had been shortened to the point where it had become a very inaccurate weapon and he missed his target. Lawlor was arrested and appeared in court, where he was bound over to keep the peace for one month on condition that he returned to his native Australia.
In 1974, a ransom note found in the possession of Ian Ball indicated his motive for intercepting and attacking the royal Rolls-Royce carrying Princess Anne back to Buckingham Palace after an official function. Ball’s intention was to kidnap the princess and ask for a ransom of £3 million. Bizarrely, his note indicated that he had wanted the queen herself, accompanied by two solicitors to vouch for her identity, to personally bring the money to a jumbo jet at Heathrow Airport, to travel to Switzerland with him and then to write him a free pardon both for his crime of kidnapping and for a parking ticket he had incurred. Ball overtook the royal car, forced it to stop, jumped out of his Ford Escort and attacked the vehicle – intending to kidnap the princess – and managed to open the door, something that was then possible from the outside but is not now. During the ensuing violent scuffle, protection officer James Beaton, whose own firearm jammed, shielded Princess Anne and was shot three times. The chauffeur, PC Michael Hills, and a member of the public who came to assist, were also shot and wounded. Princess Anne and her husband were taken on to the safety of Buckingham Palace in a police car.
Ball himself was chased, overpowered and arrested by PC Peter Edmonds as he fled from the scene. Ian Ball pleaded guilty to attempted murder and attempted kidnap, and was ordered to be detained under the Mental Health Act 1959 for a period ‘without limit of time’ on the grounds of criminal insanity.
The incident caused a major review of royalty protection methods and tactics, including driver training. The queen made a number of gallantry awards, including the George Cross to Inspector Beaton.
A starting pistol was used by an unemployed youth, Marcus Simon Sarjeant (b. 1964), on Saturday, 13 June 1981, as he stood in the crowd watching the procession for the Queen’s Birthday Parade, the annual high point of London’s ceremonial occasions. As Queen Elizabeth II passed from The Mall into Horseguards Road, mounted side-saddle on her police horse, Burmese, Sarjeant suddenly produced a gun and fired six shots in rapid succession towards her. The queen rapidly reassured the frightened horse and continued her ceremonial duties, without apparently turning a hair, whilst Sarjeant was overpowered by a special constable and a guardsman. A starting pistol actually fires blank ammunition to begin a race, but the true nature of the gun was only apparent afterwards.
The incident was investigated by Ian Blair, who later became the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Sarjeant had a framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth, on the back of which he had written various threats against her, and he indicated that he had intended at one stage to kill her, but had not been able to find a more effective weapon. He was charged under the 1842 Treason Act and was sent to prison for five years.
Just over a year later, there was an even more serious incident when, on 7 July 1982, Michael Fagan managed to scale the railings at a vulnerable corner of Buckingham Palace, at about 6.40 a.m., then climb into the queen’s private apartments and reach her bedroom, where he was able to spend almost ten minutes talking to her. The queen, a non-smoker, raised the alarm by telephoning for cigarettes, and Fagan was detained by a footman until a police officer arrived. Fagan apparently had no intention of injuring the queen and had legally committed no offence (apart from civil trespass), but was prosecuted for stealing a bottle of wine, a matter on which he was later acquitted. The obvious and embarrassing security lapses included part of the perimeter wall that could easily be climbed, a window left open, the night duty police officer in the queen’s corridor not having been properly relieved and a failure to implement effective security in a manner that was also compatible with the privacy, comfort and unobtrusiveness required in the queen’s own home. Fagan was committed under Section 60 of the Mental Health Act 1959.
Aaron Barschak was an interloper at a fancy dress party held at Windsor Castle to celebrate Prince William’s 21st birthday on 21 June 2003. The self-styled ‘comedy terrorist’ infiltrated the guests and interrupted a speech by Prince William in which he thanked the queen and his father, the Prince of Wales, for organising the party. Barschak was rapidly arrested and taken away as he claimed to be the terrorist Osama bin Laden, but the implications of his ability to pose as a party guest was a concern and a scandal (notwithstanding the fancy dress costumes of many of the guests). Aaron Barschak was apparently trying to gain publicity for his unsuccessful career as a comedian, but escaped prosecution because of the lack of a specific law against trespassing on royal premises.
The 32-year-old Jason Hatch was the centre of a stunt, on 13 September 2004, when he climbed on to an exterior ledge of the facade of Buckingham Palace as part of a protest about the rights of fathers to gain access to their children in disputed child custody cases. Other protesters had created a diversion, and Hatch’s colleague was detained by armed police and prevented from following him on to the ledge. In a climate of high security over terrorism, the armed officers considered, but did not use, their guns against him.