Oxford, Edward

Edward was born in Birmingham in 1822 and was the third son of Hannah Markle and George Oxford, who had seven children before him. His father, a seeker of gold , died when Edward was seven. Mother was able to work and feed her family, so Edward attended school in Birmingham and in Lambeth, a district of London , where the family moved when the boy was about 10. When he graduated from high school, he first took up work at his aunt's bar in Hounslow, and then in other public institutions, an errand boy, or a waiter ^[1] . At the time of the assassination attempt on Queen Victoria, he was barely eighteen, he was unemployed and lived with his mother and sister in an apartment in Camberwell . Since his mother went to Birmingham for some time, Oxford lived alone at the time of his assassination ^[1] .

On May 4, 1840, he bought a pair of pistols for £ 2, as well as a powder bottle, and began practicing at various shooting ranges in Leicester Square, Strand , and in the West End . A week before the attack, he went to the Lambeth store, owned by Edward's former classmate, Gray, and bought fifty copper capsules , also asking where he could buy some ammunition and three-pence gunpowder ^[2] . Gray sold him gunpowder and told him where to find ammunition. On the evening of June 9, several witnesses saw Oxford with a loaded pistol; when asked why he needed him, he did not want to say, confining himself to reporting that he was shooting at targets ^[3] .

At about 4 pm on June 10, 1840, Oxford took up a position on the path leading to Constitution Hill , near Buckingham Palace . The queen, who was her first child in the fourth month of pregnancy, was used to riding in a chaise, or a low, open carriage with her husband, Prince Albert at the end of the day or in the early evening, without security escort ^[3] . This was used by Edward Oxford. When the royal couple appeared nearby two hours later and approached him at a minimum distance, he shot twice in a row, but missed both times. The young man was immediately captured and disarmed by onlookers. Edward made no attempt to deny his actions, openly declaring: "It was me, this was me, did it" ^[4] .

Oxford was immediately arrested and charged with high treason for attempting to assassinate the monarch. After the arrest, his apartment was searched and a locked box containing a sword and scabbard, two bags for pistols, gunpowder, a mold for casting bullets, five round lead bullets, part of the capsules purchased from Gray ^[2] , as well as complex rules and works of the imaginary were found military society called "Young England" (not to be confused with the later conservative political group, which had the same name), complete with a list of officers he invented, and imaginary correspondence with them ^[3] . Members of the society, according to the rules, should have been armed with two pistols, a sword, a rifle and a dagger ^[5] .

The Old Bailey trial was adjourned until July 9, in order to more thoroughly investigate both of his shots and their possible motives. Despite Oxford's earlier confessions, no bullets were found at the crime scene and Crown could not prove that there were guns or shots. Oxford later claimed that the weapon contained only gunpowder ^[6] .

The young man was not paid attention during most of the proceedings. Prosecutors provided a lot of eyewitness accounts, while the defense consisted only of family members and friends testifying that Oxford always seemed insane, and that both his grandfather and father were alcoholics, which explained the signs of a mental illness. This court had to be reckoned with, since in Victorian England it was believed that alcohol and hereditary influence were the reasons proving the insanity of a person. Oxford's mother testified to the court that her late husband was a cruel and frightening man, and that her son was not only prone to bouts of hysterical laughter, but that he could make strange noises and was obsessed with firearms as a child . Various prominent pathologists and doctors have testified that due to “brain disease” or some other factors such as the shape of the head, Oxford was either mentally abnormal or simply unable to control himself ^[7] .

The next day, the jury acquitted Oxford, stating that he was " not guilty because of insanity ." Like all such prisoners, he was sentenced "to be detained until Her Majesty’s opinion is known." In essence, it was an indefinite period. Oxford was sent to Bedlam State Crimean Crazy House , where he remained as a patient for the next twenty-four years. All this time he was engaged in drawing, reading, and learned to play the violin; Bedlam’s employees reported that he can play checkers and chess better than any other patient ^[8] , he also learned French, German and Italian, acquired some fluency in Spanish, Greek and Latin to a degree of fluency, and also worked as an artist decorator within the hospital. When he was transferred to Broadmoor in 1864 ^[9] , notes made upon his arrival described him as “apparently a normal person, sane.” He still claimed that the pistols with which he shot the Queen were loaded with nothing but gunpowder, and that his attack was caused not by a desire to injure Her Majesty, but solely to become famous ^[10] .

Oxford was still organized and well-behaved in Broadmoor, working as a woodcarver and painter. Although it was clear to everyone that Oxford was sane and no longer a threat to society, George Gray, the Home Secretary ignored the request to order the release of the detainee. Only three years later, the new Minister of the Interior proposed to be released from Oxford’s imprisonment, provided that he would go to one of the foreign colonies of the Empire, and if he returned to the UK, he would be imprisoned for life ^[11] .

Oxford lived the rest of his life in Melbourne , Australia . He landed in Melbourne under a new name - John Freeman. In an effort to transform his life and become a respectable citizen, Freeman became a house painter and joined the West Melbourne Society for Mutual Improvement. In 1881, he married a widow with two children, became a church leader in St. James’s Cathedral, began to write newspaper articles about urban slums, markets, and racecourses, under the pseudonym Argus , which became the basis for his book, published in 1888. , “Light and Shadows of Melbourne Life.” He died in 1900.

His patient record at Broadmoor includes a letter sent in 1883 by George Haydon, Bedlam’s steward to Dr. David Nicholson. It includes an article from The Age , a Melbourne newspaper that reports that on May 4, 1880, “John” Oxford, identified as the man who shot the Queen many years ago and who was therefore a patient in a psychiatric hospital before he was deported to Australia, was recently convicted of stealing a shirt and spent a week in prison. After his release, the head of the prison turned to the police with a request to look after Oxford "due to the eccentric behavior of the old man." Police subsequently arrested Oxford for vagrancy, and he was reportedly sent for an additional medical examination. There were no further updates to the record ^[12] . However, Hydon was not sure that this man was Edward Oxford.

The connection between Oxford and “John Freeman” was carried out in 1987 in Smith's article “Light and Shadows in the Life of John Freeman” ^[13] . Freeman wrote several letters to Haidon dating from 1888, ending with Haidon's death in 1889. Freeman's wife and stepsons seem to have been completely ignorant of the past life events of their father and husband. In addition, the photograph of John Freeman taken for the Centennial Exhibition in Melbourne in 1888 ^[14] corresponds to the portrait of Freeman made for the Bedlam archive ^[15] . Freeman's letters to Haidon were handed over to the National Library in the 1950s by his family. Stevens notes that the former manager didn’t add anything to Broadmoor’s report on Oxford, his progress outside the troubling newspaper report, and never confirmed that Oxford was the author of Freeman’s book. This is probably because Haydon quit Bedlam at the time he began to receive letters.

Despite the historical precedent of insanity, Queen Victoria opposed public opinion and remained morally convinced that Oxford and other criminals who attempted to assassinate Her afterwards understood and realized their actions. She was furious when Daniel Maknoten , who tried to kill Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and instead killed his personal secretary, was acquitted in 1843. When Roderick Macklin attempted to shoot her on the Windsor platform forty years later and was sent to Broadmoor, she demanded that Prime Minister Gladstone change the law in relation to “guilty but insane,” unshakably believing that if Oxford would be hanged immediately after the assassination attempt, his death would act as a deterrence for the other assassins who attempted Her.

A literary reference to Oxford appears in Charles Dickens ' novel “The Shop of Antiquities,” which Dickens wrote during the month before and after the assassination attempt. Although he was interested in this incident, Oxford did not appear in the text, but in one of the accompanying illustrations created by Hablot K. Brown , commonly known as “Phiz” ^[16] .

In the illustration for chapter 28, Mrs. Jarley, owner of the wax museum, teaches the heroine, Little Nell, the duties of a guide. Although the novel takes place about fifteen years before 1840, Brown was undoubtedly inspired by Madame Tussauds in London, where the figure of Edward Oxford was the highlight of the program. His caricature of a failed killer with wide eyes, a silly grin, a flintlock pistol in his right hand and a beer in his left, with a piece of paper that says “Young England” falling out of his pocket, was easily recognizable by all contemporaries. On the line of the shot, Queen Victoria is sitting calmly and serenely, dressed in coronation robes of 1838 with a power and a scepter in her hands. Although the pistol is pointed in her direction, the Phiz reassuringly depicts the Queen literally much higher than the attacker, calmly and majestically moving her away from the dangerous madman.

Oxford is the protagonist of the novel by Mark Hodder "The Strange Case of Jack Poprygun," written in 2010.

In 2009, an inaccurate version of the assassination was portrayed in the movie Young Victoria . While Oxford (played by Joseph Altin) shoots, Prince Albert ( Rupert Friend ) sits in front of Victoria ( Emily Blunt ), and a second bullet wounds him. The scene in which the police searched Oxford's apartment and found a newspaper with illustrations of the royal couple was not included in the theatrical release.

The scene of the assassination attempt on the queen is also contained in the eighth episode of the first season of the series Victoria . The role of Oxford was played by Harry MacIntyre. According to the plot, Oxford acts on the instructions of Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, who will ascend the British throne if Victoria and her unborn child die. However, in the end, the investigation leads to the fact that Oxford is recognized as insane, and the letters from Hanover - as a fake, made by himself.

• Charles, Barrie. Kill the Queen! The Eight Assassination Attempts on Queen Victoria. - Amberley Publishing, 2012 .-- ISBN 978-1-4456-0457-2 .
• Murphy, Paul. Shooting Victoria. - Pegasus Books, 2012 .-- ISBN 1605983543 , ISBN 978-1605983547 .
• Stevens, Mark. Broadmoor Revealed: Some patient stories. - Berkshire Record Office, 2009.
• Diamond, Michael, Victorian sensation , Anthem Press, 2003. ISBN 1-84331-150-X .
• Sinclair, Jenny, A Walking Shadow: The Remarkable Double Life of Edward Oxford , Arcade Publications, 2012, ISBN 0987239090 .

• Edward Oxford Biography
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