Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy Page A

He was turned down flat; Oxford, at this stage, would have to represent himself.
    Susannah’s letter to her mother in Birmingham would arrive later that day, but the police were faster; Sergeant Otway had taken the seven o’clock train from Euston Station to Birmingham, one of the first intercity train routes in Britain. He found Hannah among her relatives. Hannah received the news badly, responding with a hysterical fit, by one account, and fainting, by another. She would take the afternoon train to London and be there by the evening.
    Inspectors Pearce and Hughes bundled Oxford past his sister and uncle, out the back of the station, where the three jogged through the Horse Guards’ parade ground and into the back entrance to the Home Office, at Whitehall. Oxford ran, without handcuffs, and in a jocular mood. He was clearly enormously excited at the prospect of his examination by all the leading Whig politicians: Melbourne,Russell, Palmerston, and the rest would be giving him their focused attention: he had wanted to make a noise—and the examination proved to him that he had done exactly that. If he had known of his uncle Marklew’s attempts to find him counsel, he would certainly have disapproved. He had, at that moment, no desire to let anyone speak for him, and no desire to be found innocent. If his pistols had indeed been empty, he preferred everyone not to know that, seeing him instead as a dangerous conspirator with high if mysterious political connections. He was placed to wait in a room adjoining the room where depositions were to be taken, and a reporter, seeing him there, noted his self-centered pleasure: “he paced up and down the room with perfect self-possession, and an air of consequence and satisfaction, as if he felt pleased to find himself an object of so much interest.”
    At eleven, Oxford was examined first by the Home Secretary and his undersecretaries, Phillipps and Maule; Normanby then decided upon a fuller examination by a larger body, at two o’clock. The ministers discussed the constitution of that larger body. Precedent was unclear as to whether the Privy Council or the Cabinet should examine the evidence. In the end, they decided upon the Cabinet. One of that body, John Cam Hobhouse, recorded his less than impressed opinion of Oxford in his diary. “He was young,” Hobhouse wrote,
    â€¦ and under the middle size, neatly made, with a darkish olive complexion. * He had black eyes andeyebrows, dark chestnut hair. He had not a bad expression, but with a curl on his lips, as if suppressing a smile or sneer. He was dressed as became his condition, which, we were told, was that of a barman at a pothouse. There was nothing displeasing in his look or manner, until he spoke, when his pert audacity and his insolent carelessness gave him the air of a ruffian.
    Maule orchestrated the examination to convince those assembled that Oxford was the shooter, and his pistols were loaded. Establishing the first point was simple: several witnesses stated that, without any doubt, they had seen Oxford shoot; three of these testified as to Oxford’s incriminating statement, upon his capture, that he had done the shooting. Establishing that the pistols had been loaded was more difficult, as no ball had been found despite an intensive search. One witness, however, claimed that the ball “passed directly before my face,” with a whizzing sound, and another that he had seen a mark left by one of the balls on the wall.
    Oxford was given the opportunity to question each of the witnesses, and his questions—punctuated by his uncanny bursts of laughter—did little to further his case, and nothing in particular to challenge the flimsy evidence that his pistols had been loaded. Rather, he quibbled about details: some witnesses claimed that he had shot his two pistols with his two hands, some that he shot both using one hand; one witness claimed that he was between five and