On the evening of June 10, 1840, a pub worker barely out of his teens stood by the railings of Constitution Hill and pointed a pistol at the Queen of England. Edward Oxford was eighteen. Victoria was in an open carriage beside Prince Albert, about four months into her first pregnancy. He fired once, then again. Nobody was hurt, and to this day nobody can say for certain that either pistol held a bullet.
The Horror
Oxford was born in Birmingham in April 1822, the son of a goldsmith who died when the boy was seven. (One source gives his birthday as April 18 and the main one as April 19, so the day is left out.) He drifted through jobs in London pubs and was dismissed from several, once after attacking a colleague with a knife. In April 1840 he lost his post at the Hog in the Pound. Three days later, according to Wikipedia’s account, he bought two pistols and a powder flask in Blackfriars Road for about £2, and began practising in his back garden and at a shooting gallery in Leicester Square.
He also invented a conspiracy. “Young England” was a revolutionary society with eleven rules and a roll of members whose ranks were marked by bows and cockades. It existed only on paper, and only in Oxford’s head. It later fed newspaper speculation that he was a tool of the Chartists, of foreigners, or of some political faction. There is no sign that anyone but Oxford stood behind him.
The date mattered to him, too. June 10 was the anniversary of his father’s death.
At about six in the evening the royal carriage came up Constitution Hill. Oxford fired as it passed, and the first shot appears to have missed. He fired a second pistol after the carriage had gone by. Victoria wrote in her diary that Albert “directly ordered the postillion to drive on”, and the couple carried on to her mother’s house. The popular version has Albert pushing her head down. The diary line says he told the driver to go on, so the head-pushing is not repeated here as fact.
The crowd took hold of the wrong man first. A bystander named Albert Lowe, who had picked up the pistols, was mistaken for the assassin and beaten. Oxford, who made no attempt to run, then said something to the effect of “I am the man who fired.” The sources give several versions of his words.
Here the story turns strange. Oxford first said the pistols were loaded, then maintained they held only powder. Police searched the area and found no bullet, and no mark in the nearby walls. Wikipedia calls the inability to prove the pistols loaded the prosecution’s greatest weakness. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind calls it “a point of later dispute”. That did not stop the charge being raised to high treason, which still carried hanging, drawing and quartering on paper.
At the Old Bailey from July 9 to 11, 1840, his lawyers argued two lines: the pistols were not loaded, and their client was insane. Three doctors, among them John Conolly, examined him. Conolly concluded Oxford could not reason or grasp his moral obligations. Asked why he had fired, Oxford reportedly said he “might as well shoot at her as anybody else.” The jury first returned an awkward finding, and Lord Denman sent them out again. They came back with “guilty, being at the time insane”, which the court treated as a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Oxford was ordered detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, which meant for as long as the Crown chose.
The Asylum That Taught Him
Bethlem took him on July 18, 1840. In 1840 that meant the criminal wing of the hospital at St George’s Fields in Southwark, the building completed in 1815 on Lambeth Road.
The doctors there did not find a madman. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind says he showed “no sign of mental derangement” from the start. Wikipedia reports that the physicians considered him sane on arrival, and that a case note of 1854 describes him as healthy and sane. Over the following years he taught himself several languages, learned trades, drew, knitted, played the violin and played chess. The historian F. B. Smith, cited by the museum, put it that “Bedlam was his university.” Whether Oxford was ill in 1840 and recovered, or was never very ill, the sources do not settle, and the trial doctors and the asylum doctors disagreed.
In 1864, when the new Broadmoor asylum took over from Bethlem as the main home for criminal lunatics, he was moved there. A visitor in 1865 described him as having “perfectly recovered his sanity”. He appealed for release soon after arriving and was ignored by one Home Secretary. His successor, Gathorne Hardy, offered release in October 1867 on one condition: that Oxford leave the British Isles for good.
The Man Called Freeman
He sailed from Plymouth in December 1867 on the Suffolk and reached Melbourne in February 1868, travelling as “John Freeman”. The steward of Bethlem, George Henry Haydon, helped pay for the passage. In Australia he worked as a house painter and decorator, served as a churchwarden at St James Old Cathedral, and wrote for The Argus under the pen name “Liber”. In 1888 he published Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life. He married Jane Bowen in 1881, and according to Wikipedia he never told her who he had been. He died on April 23, 1900, of apoplexy, and was buried in Melbourne General Cemetery.
One caution on this last chapter. The link between Freeman and Oxford was first made from Haydon’s letters, and a later researcher backed it with a photograph comparison. Wikipedia says some uncertainty remains. It is the accepted story, but it is not beyond argument.
The Legend of the Eight
Popular retellings present this as the first of eight attempts on Victoria’s life, and the count is a common one in popular histories of the reign. Each attempt has not been checked against a source here, so this article does not lean on it. What the sources do support is narrower: Oxford’s case was one of the early tests of how English law handled a defendant whose guilt and sanity were both in doubt. The 1800 Criminal Lunatics Act gave the court somewhere to put him that was neither the scaffold nor the street. Wikipedia places his case just before the M’Naghten rules of 1843, which followed another shooting.
The Modern Relic
You can walk Constitution Hill today, the gentle slope between Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park Corner. Nothing marks the shooting, and the precise spot, “near Buckingham Palace” in the sources, is approximate on the map. Bethlem left Southwark for Monks Orchard in 1930. The central part of its old building on Lambeth Road was retained and became the Imperial War Museum in 1936, so a man who studied languages in a criminal asylum is remembered, in a sense, in a building where visitors now study other people’s wars. The hospital’s history is kept at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, whose website carries a short profile of Oxford. He lies in Melbourne General Cemetery.
