Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy

noise—that he had aimed and fired a bullet at her. Oxford was asked whether his guns had been loaded so many times in the hours after his arrest that he eventually refused to answer.
    Immediately after Victoria and Albert drove from the scene of the shooting, all bystanders not mobbing Oxford and hauling him to the station house hastened to scrutinize the wall to the Palace gardens, hoping to find Oxford’s bullets themselves or any marks they left. The Millais family was among them, and, years later, William Millais (John’s brother) claimed that two bullet marks were clearly visible, marks that disappeared over the next few days,as gawkers poked new marks into the walls with their walking-sticks and umbrellas. * No bullets were found, however. Soon after Oxford’s arrest, a large detail of officers was dispatched to the wall with birch brooms and barrows, to sweep up all the dirt beneath the walls and convey it to the station house for careful sifting. They toiled until eleven that night and for much of the next day, finding nothing. The next evening, two boys claimed to have found a ball in a place the police had already carefully scrutinized—but the police soon discovered the ball was too large for Oxford’s pistol; someone, it seems, was attempting to assist the police by planting evidence against Oxford. By Friday, police attention shifted from the wall to the gardens on the other side, on the theory that Oxford had shot high and over the wall. No balls were ever found there, either.
    There was never any question in the minds of Victoria and Albert, however: they had been shot at, at dangerously close range—from six paces away, according to Albert—and it was a miracle that the Queen had not been hit. “It seems the pistols were loaded,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “so our escape is indeed providential.” Albert was too surprised to notice the trajectory of Oxford’s first shot, but claimed that he saw that of the second—with a certainty that transcended the actual evidence: “The ball must have passed just above [the Queen’s] head,” he wrote to his grandmother, “to judge from the place where it was found sticking in an opposite wall.” The royal couple were as certain about the shooter as they were about the lethality of his shots: he was not mad, certainly, but “quiet and composed”—a villain who deserved punishment.
    On Thursday morning, two angry and curious crowds gathered, one outside of the A Division station house on Gardiner Street, and the other, a short distance away, in front of the Home Office, atWhitehall, where Oxford was to be examined. To avoid a confrontation with the crowd, the police decided to hustle Oxford out the back door. As he emerged from his cell between Inspectors Hughes and Pearce, he saw, for the first time since he had left West Place after dinner the day before, his sister Susannah, accompanied by their uncle, Edward Marklew. Susannah had been desperately applying to see him since his arrest, but his family’s requests to see him were denied. Upon seeing her brother, Susannah shrieked “there he is!” and nearly fainted. After learning of the shooting, and after fetching her husband William from the soda factory, Susannah had written her mother in Birmingham with the news and then she sought her Uncle Edward’s assistance. Edward Marklew, as Hannah’s brother, was naturally a publican, landlord of the Ship, in the City. His assistance so far had been tireless and wholly ineffective. He had tried to obtain legal counsel for his nephew, but the solicitor he contacted refused, claiming to be too busy with the prosecution of the two sensational legal cases of the day: Courvoisier’s and Gould’s. Marklew had then applied at the Home Office for Oxford to have some sort of an adviser during the coming examination: if not a solicitor, then he himself asked to attend.