In 1843 the Royal pair went to visit the French King at Eu, Victoria’s first visit to the Continent. Everything was done to please the visitors, but Lady Bloomfield gives an amusing account of the details. She says that there were curious contradictions in the stateliness of the arrangements made by the King for their comfort. The carriages sent to fetch the Royal party from the shore were char-a-bancs, and though the first was drawn by twelve caparisoned horses they were large and clumsy animals. There was but one driver in front, and three footmen in State livery behind, with many outriders in all kinds of liveries on all sorts of horses, some of them wretched beasts. The chief amusement each day was to go for a picnic, driving for several hours to a wood or a ruin over unmade roads with deep ruts and huge stones, the folk in the char-a-bancs being bumped and shaken to pieces. One night the Corps de l’Opera came from Paris to play before the visitors, and brought with them two pieces for selection, one ridiculing the English, and the other too improper to be acted before the Queen.
It was on the 29th of May in 1842 that a second mad attempt was made on Her Majesty’s life, and it needed but one instance of this sort to prove how courageous were both the Queen and her husband. She was returning from church on the Sunday, and the ladies in the second carriage noticed that the Royal carriage stopped in Birdcage Walk. On reaching the Palace they also noticed that the Prince looked very annoyed and went away with the equerries; the Queen, who was quite calm and collected, going as usual up the grand staircase to her apartments, talking to her ladies, discussing the sermon and dismissing them as was her custom. The next day Matilda Paget and Georgiana Liddell remained all the afternoon expecting a summons to drive with the Queen, but none came, and at about six o’clock Her Majesty departed with Prince Albert in an open carriage. Georgiana went for a walk in the Palace gardens, grumbling that she had been kept in for nothing, but when she got back she was horrified to learn that the Queen had been shot at by a lad named Francis. In the evening Victoria broke off a conversation with Sir Robert Peel to say:
“I dare say, Georgy, you were surprised at not driving with me this afternoon, but as we returned from church yesterday a man presented a pistol at the carriage window, which flashed in the pan; we were so taken by surprise that he had time to escape, so I knew what was hanging over me, and was determined to expose no life but my own.” She added that when the young man had fired again that afternoon the report had been less loud than it was when Oxford fired at her, and that she should not have noticed it had she not been expecting it the whole time she was driving.
This youth of twenty was transported, but six weeks later a hunchback named Bean was seen to present a pistol at Her Majesty, and was taken into custody, but there was a difficulty in that the police would not at first believe in the charge, and let the man go. Thus, when convinced that the matter was serious, they collected all the hunchbacks they could find until they had about sixty at the police station. Admiral Knox says of this in one of his letters:
“Did you see in the papers the account of the attempt on the life of the Queen? You know it was by a hunchback boy, and I heard that when the police set out in pursuit of him, all the hunchbacks in the neighbourhood were arrested. There were no less than fifty or sixty assembled at the station house, and they were all quarrelling and fighting, each saying to the other, ‘Now confess that you did it, and let us off.’ I think it must have been a most absurd scene.”
Bean, however, was recognised, and as his attempt had been only of a half-hearted sort, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. These foolish actions were really induced by a desire for notoriety, and they bring to mind the boy Jones who on several occasions was found secreted in the palace, his inquisitiveness leading to definite results and much needed reform.
This boy, when about fifteen, first appeared in December of 1838, in the dress of a sweep, being found in the marble hall of Buckingham Palace at five o’clock in the morning. He made a dart for the door, but was captured in the Palace gardens. He had either come down a chimney or tried to get up one, for marks of soot were found in many bedrooms. A sword and some linen had been taken from one room, in another he had well larded himself with bear’s-grease, in another he had broken a valuable picture of Queen Victoria and abstracted two letters. He told various tales, saying that he had lived in the Palace for months and had been behind a chair when Cabinet meetings had been held, also that he came from Hertfordshire. However, he was proved to be the son of a tailor named Jones, who lived in York Street, Westminster, and it was also proved that he had always stated a determination to see the inside of the Palace. When he was tried the matter was regarded as an escapade, and he went free.
This youth had been entirely forgotten when, eleven days after the birth of the Princess Royal in 1841, a young man was discovered lying under the sofa in the Queen’s dressing-room, which adjoined the chamber in which she lay. He was short, dirty, repulsive-looking, and about seventeen. It was Jones again, who said he had entered the Palace twice by scaling the wall and getting in at a window, and had been there from Tuesday night to one o’clock on Thursday morning, secreting himself under different beds. He said he had sat on the throne and heard the baby cry. His punishment was three months in the House of Correction. Of him Samuel Rogers said he must be a descendant of In-i-go Jones, and The Satirist and other papers treated him to a few remarks, among them being:—
“Now he in chains and in the prison garb is
Mourning the crime that couples Jones with darbies.”