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It was his second attempt on the life of the monarch. The day before he had pointed his pistol at the Queen's carriage as she and Albert had made the short trip from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace. He had hesitated and fled but three people, including Albert, had seen him. The police were now on the alert and so were Victoria and Albert: they boldly decided to ride this day in an attempt to flush him out.



Their plan worked but not without a hitch. Half an hour before their return, PC William Trounce had spotted Francis but as the Queen's carriage rushed down the hill, Trounce was torn between his desire to show due respect to his monarch and his duty to protect her.



He opted for loyalty, turned to face the carriage and salute and was deafened as Francis fired at the Queen at close range.

He thrust his pistol into her face but faithful servant John Brown knocked it to the ground

Such was the lax state of royal security during Victoria's reign. A detail of the Metropolitan Police followed her wherever she went and her Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries added to that detail as a response to any threat but it was she who decided when and how she would travel.



The day Francis shot at her, the decision to ride was hers, as was the decision to ride the next day among a crowd of thousands clamouring to congratulate her. Between the first attempt on her life in 1840 and the last in 1882, Victoria refused to let her assailants cow her and opted to find her greatest security among her people.

HULTON ROYALS COLLECTION Threats to the safety of our monarchy are sadly nothing new

Though her decisions might seem to us dangerous, foolhardy even, and run counter to every tenet of royal security today they ultimately served Victoria well, as she converted seven near-tragedies into triumphs. In the wake of each attempt on her life the public rose up to demonstrate its loyalty and affection.



Edward Oxford, pictured above, was the first: an unemployed barman who dreamt of a career as an Admiral in the Royal Navy. In June 1840, frustrated that the world did not recognise his greatness he confronted Victoria and Albert on Constitution Hill armed with two flashy duelling pistols.



Victoria was four months pregnant with their first child. Had either of Oxford's shots killed the Queen the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line would have been erased but he missed and she rode on.

Queen Victoria in pictures Thu, October 13, 2016 Queen Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria) was Queen of the United Kingdom and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Play slideshow 1 of 14

John William Bean, an 18-year-old hunchbacked dwarf, was the third to attempt to kill the Queen, a little over a month after John Francis made his attempts. Depressed, he decided to end it all or at least change his miserable existence dramatically, by pointing a pistol at the Queen while she and Albert rode to church.



His attempt was the feeblest of all: the gun refused to fire. He was seized by a boy next to him but escaped, only to be caught later that evening when the police rounded up every hunchback and dwarf in the metropolis. Robert Peel, Victoria's Prime Minister, was mortified. When he rushed to the palace and saw the Queen he reputedly burst into tears.



PEEL and the public realised after this third attempt that the mania for taking potshots at the monarch was precipitated not by animosity against Victoria or by any revolutionary political desire but by the "diseased craving for notoriety," as the papers had it, that was held by a few antisocial boys who coveted the attention and glory that came with the charge of High Treason. Peel passed an act that held their crime to be a high misdemeanour, punishable not by death but by imprisonment and whipping. The act may have worked too as the assaults stopped for a while. So Victoria likely never put to use the parasol lined with chain-mail designed for her. That curious fashion accessory now lies deep in the archives of the Museum of London.



William Hamilton, an unemployed bricklayer from Ireland, was the next to fire at the Queen. Again it was on Constitution Hill, on the day of the official celebration of her birthday in 1849. Although he was the fourth to stand just outside Buckingham Palace with a gun his act was as much of a surprise to the Queen's protectors as his predecessors' were. Hamilton also was tired of his life and saw imprisonment a likely improvement.

He got his wish, pleading guilty under Peel's act and suffered seven years' penal servitude and at the prison colony at Gibraltar before disappearing into obscurity in Western Australia. A year later, Victoria's fifth assailant, Robert Pate struck. He was the only one of the seven to harm the Queen. Well-known in London for his manic perambulations about Hyde Park, he interrupted one of these when he came upon the Queen's carriage inside the gates of her uncle's mansion on Piccadilly.



'He thrust pistol her face He pushed himself to the front of the crowd, knowing that when the Queen's carriage emerged he would find himself inches from her, and slashed his cane down upon the royal forehead, blackening Victoria's eye and leaving a welt. faithful John knocked the Victoria had intended to go to the opera that night. When her ladies-inwaiting begged her to stay home, she replied "Certainly not: if I do not go, it will be thought I am seriously hurt and people will be distressed and alarmed."



"But you are hurt, ma'am," her lady replied. "Then everyone shall see how little I mind it," the Queen said. Pate was sentenced to seven years' transportation.

HULTON ROYALS COLLECTION Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1854

Victoria's sixth assailant, Arthur O'Connor, was the grand-nephew of the Chartist politician Fergus O'Connor and he had an overwhelming desire to surpass his great-uncle in fame in one stroke.



In February 1872 he wrote up an edict for the Queen to sign: an order freeing the many Irish political prisoners then in British penitentiaries. His plan was to interrupt the scheduled Thanksgiving at St Paul's cathedral and, with edict in one hand and a rusty flintlock in the other, force the Queen to sign. He knew he would then die but wrote into the edict the command that he be treated as a brave political foe, shot by a firing squad rather than hanged like a common criminal.



He failed to get into the cathedral as police spotted him acting suspiciously there the night before and threw him out. Two days later he clambered over the fence at Buckingham Palace and came upon the Queen at the end of one of her carriage rides.



He thrust his pistol into Victoria's face but was quickly knocked to the ground by her faithful servant John Brown. Brown got a medal for his act, O'Connor only got imprisonment and the threat of a whipping, a threat that was later negotiated into exile in Australia.

HULTON ROYALS COLLECTION Queen Victoria at the christening of her great-grandson, the future King Edward VIII