REPEATED ATTACKS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4872, 18 July 1936, Page 5

REPEATED ATTACKS

ON ENGLAND'S RULERS. QUEEN VICTORIA'S ADVENTURES AUSTRALIAN AFFAIR. England's sovereigns have shared the common peril of royalty in the past and only the untroubled reign of King George V has contrived to efface memories of the repeated attacks made on our Sovereigns. Queen Victoria was frequently assailed. The first attempt on her life was made while she was yet a young bride, in fact almost amid the general festivities which surrounded that event. The marriage ceremony had taken place on February 10, 1840; on June 10 a witless potboy, Edward Oxford, fired two shots at the Queen from a pistol as she was driving through the Green Park from Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park Corner. She was unhurt, and to all appearances unmoved. The next two attacks followed in rapid succession two years later. On a Sunday, May 29, 1842, Prince Albert noticed that a man had pointed a pistol at the Queen as she drove past him in her carriage through the Green Park. She and the Prince resolved to pass the same spot again the next day in order to trap the attacker, if, as they expected, he made a second appearance. The device succeeded. The man appeared, fired 1 without result, and was captured. He proved to be a destitute carpenter named John Francis, and was tried and condemned to death, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life.

The. very day that the mitigation of the punishment of Francis was made known another attack was delivered. This time it took place as the Queen

was passing from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Royal on July 3. The King of the Belgians was in the carriage, and as it passed down the Mall a hunchbacked lad named John William Bean raised a pistol but did not succeed in discharging it before he was seized. It was a half-hearted attack and on examination the weapon was found to be loaded with powder, some scraps of paper firmly rammed down, and fragments of clay pipe. The boy received eighteen months' imprisonment. Seven years later, on May 19, 1849, as she was returning from a drive near Constitution Hill, a blank charge was fired at her by an Irishman named William Hamilton, of Adare, while on May 27 in the next year Robert Pate, a retired officer, struck her on the head with a cane as she was leaving Cambridge House in Piccadilly, where the Duke of Cambridge was lying ill. This last attack was the more brutal as she was just recovering after her confinement, her third son, Arthur, having been born on May 1. Both these assailants were sentenced to seven years' transportation under the Act for Securing the Queen's Safety, which had been passed in 1841.

Again in 1872 a youth of seventeen, Arthur O'Connor, fired a pistol at the Queen outside Buckingham Palace. He was seized by the faithful John Brown and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and twenty strokes of the birch rod. The pistol proved not to have carried any missile.

In 1882 she was shot at by Roderick Maclean, a lunatic, who fired a pistol at her at Windsor Railway Station as she was returning from London. King Edward VII, when he was Prince of Wales, was also the target of a would-be assassin. His dropping of old links with France at the turn of the century was partly responsible. The Dreyfus case, the Fashoda incident, the attitude of the French over the Boer War forced him to take notice of public feeling and instead of attending the Paris Exhibition or going to the Riviera he decided to visit Denmark.- His saloon car was drawn up at the platform of the Gare du Nord in Brussels when a youth named Sipido fired four shots at almost point-blank range. The attacker managed to escape to France, and there was intense British indignation when Sipido was acquitted in a Belgian Court. One of the most outspoken comments on the incident came from the ex-Kaiser, who wrote in indignation .to the Prince of Wales: "Either their laws are ridiculous or the jury are a set of damned b scoundrels." One of the attacks on a member of the British Royal Family was made in Australia. It occurred in Sydney when the Duke of Edinburgh was visiting a public picnic at Clonfert in aid of the Sailors' Home. The attack upon him was made during his second visit to Sydney, an Irishman named O'Farrell shooting him in the back with a revolver. Fortunately the wound was not serious and within a month the Duke was able to resume command of his ship and return to England, reaching the Spithead after an absence of seventeen months. Punishment for Treason.

"To compass or imagine" the death of the King is a treasonable offence, and in the past the punishment for a convicted man was terrible in the extreme. It consisted of being drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution and there being hanged by the neck, but not till dead, and, while yet alive, being disembowelled, the body then being divided into four quarters and the head ,and quarters placed at the disposal of the Crown. Until 1790 a woman was burnt for treason. In that year hanging was substituted for burning for female traitors, and in 1814 the part of the sentence relating to hanging and disembowelling was altered to hanging until death. Drawing, beheading, and quartering after hanging was abolished in 1870, so was forfeiture of a man's estates except where he was outlawed. An Act of 1814 also enables the Crown, by sign manual, to substitute beheading for hanging. In 1878 and 1879 the existing legislation on the subject was collected and incorporated in draft criminal code. Thi code drew a distinction between treason and treasonable crimes, the former being taken from the Treason Act of 1351 which included reference to "compassing or imagining the death of the King, the Queen, or their eldest son and heir."