Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [10]
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By the time that Queen Victoria finally relinquished her grip on the British throne, Broadmoor had become a recognised part of the medical, judicial and social landscape. It was a bigger place than it had been in 1863, though the wide range of needs for which it catered remained roughly the same.
What remained of the Victorian Asylum in 1901 still remains today. This is not just the bricks and mortar, but the records from that time, and it is these records that have been used to draw together the stories that follow. This short collection does not pretend to be a complete history of the hospital during the Victorian period, and rather is meant to encourage other researchers to focus on particular aspects of that time. One of the incredible features of the archive is that there is something for everyone. The stories are true, the people are real, and the history is there to be discovered. So enjoy your brief tour round Victorian Broadmoor.
Edward Oxford:
Shooting at Royalty
Edward Oxford was a young man who became famous, or more properly infamous, in Victorian Britain. It was a state that he said he had aimed for, and to that end took aim at Her Majesty Queen Victoria in a probably not very serious assassination attempt. His actions led both to his notoriety and to over twenty-five years detention at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
He was born in Birmingham on 19th April 1822, the third of seven children to Edward and Hannah Oxford. His childhood was spent in both Birmingham and Lambeth. Although his father died when Oxford was seven, his mother was always able to work, and he was sent to school in both places. Oxford and his mother remained close, despite their occasional parting due to her working habits.
After Oxford completed his schooling he took bar work, first from his aunt in Hounslow and then later at other public houses. By the age of eighteen he had grown up to be a pale youth, with brown eyes and auburn hair, around five foot six inches tall. At the start of 1840, he was working as a pot boy (barman) in The Hog in the Pound along Oxford Street in London, and living with his mother and sister in lodgings in Camberwell. He quit this job at the start of May 1840 without having further work to go to.
A week after he quit his job, his mother returned to Birmingham on a regular trip to see family, and Oxford was largely left to his own devices. Some five weeks later, on the late spring evening of 10th June 1840, he took up a position on a footpath at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. It was 6pm. He waited for the young Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to be driven out from the Palace in an open carriage, and when they drew level with him, he fired two shots in succession from separate pistols at the Queen. She was four months pregnant at the time with her first child, Victoria, the Princess Royal.
Immediately, various members of the public seized Oxford and disarmed him. Oxford was quite open about what he had done, exclaiming ‘It was I, it was me that did it.’ What was not clear was exactly what he had done: he had certainly fired two pistols at their Majesties, but whether those pistols could have harmed anyone was never resolved. No bullets were ever found, and the Crown was unable to prove that the pistols were armed when Oxford discharged them. Once sentenced, Oxford always maintained that the pistols contained only gunpowder.
Oxford was arrested and charged with treason. After his arrest, his lodgings were searched and a box found, which amongst other fragments of his life contained the intricate rules he had constructed of a fictitious military society called Young England, complete with imaginary officers and correspondence. Members were to be armed with a brace of pistols, a sword, a rifle and a dagger.
Inevitably, his trial attracted much