NOT AMUSED: Victoria was distressed by the unwanted attentions of Edward Jones

AFTER her coronation in 1838, Queen Victoria was a frightened woman. She was relentlessly pursued by a weird teenager, Edward “the Boy” Jones, who had an uncanny ability to sneak into Buckingham Palace undetected. * WIN A LUXURY LONG WEEKEND FOR TWO IN CAIRO!!! INCLUDES BA CLUB CLASS FLIGHTS, FIVE STAR ACCOMMODATION AND £1,000 SPENDING MONEY! * He searched her bedroom, stole her underwear and sat on the throne. “If he had come into my bedroom, how frightened I would have been!” the Queen wrote in her journal after the Boy Jones had been hauled from underneath a sofa in her dressing-room. Edward Jones was the son of a drunken tailor whose entire family lodged in a single room, sleeping on miserable rags. Due to his workshy and irresponsible nature the prospects of him gaining steady employment looked bleak.

The Boy Jones was not insane but his habits were odd: he never washed, seldom spoke, and spent all evening reading from a pile of scrap paper he had purchased for a penny. In December 1838, the Boy Jones was caught inside Buckingham Palace where he had rummaged around Queen Victoria’s private apartments. Since he had stolen underwear and some other palace mementoes “the Sweep in the Palace”, as he was called, was tried at the Westminster Sessions. Thanks to a clever barrister and a benign judge, his intrusion was treated as a joke and he was acquitted. In December 1840, he was back in Buckingham Palace. This time, he was caught in the middle of the night lurking underneath a sofa in the Queen’s dressing-room.

He had been there for several hours, witnessing the Queen’s private conversation with Prince Albert. It would have been perfectly possible for him to burst into the young Queen’s bedroom or to sneak into the nursery, steal the recently born Princess Royal and make off with her. There was widespread outrage that such a filthy ragamuffin could enter the Palace at will, and the royal guardians were lambasted for their sloth and incompetence. But “simple trespass”, even into a royal palace, was not a crime. He was tried in camera by the Privy Council and sentenced to three months in jail as a rogue and vagabond. Following his release from prison in March 1841, it did not take long for the Boy Jones to find his way back into Buckingham Palace; he was arrested in the Picture Gallery, eating some cold meat and potatoes he had stolen in the royal kitchen. Once more he was brought before the Privy Council and sentenced to three further months in jail.

There was much speculation about how an uneducated teenager could enter Buckingham Palace at will. The Boy claimed that each time he had got in through an unsecured ground floor window. There was also speculation about how many times he might have entered Buckingham Palace to spy on the Queen and escaped undetected. As a result of his multiple intrusions, the Boy Jones became a celebrity. There were poems, songs and prints about him, and much lewd speculation what he had really seen in the young Queen’s dressing-room. Lord Melbourne’s government wanted rid of the Boy Jones since they were fearful he might injure or even assassinate the Queen, or kidnap the Princess Royal. In the end, they had him kidnapped and shanghaied on board a ship bound for Brazil.

When he returned, like a bad penny, he was again clandestinely kidnapped by government agents and forced to serve in the Royal Navy for six years without charge or trial, in breach of habeas corpus. Care was taken to keep him far away from Britain and to watch him closely whenever the vessel was in port. The reason they finally released him in 1848 was fear of adverse newspaper publicity if he died while still a prisoner. It is sad but true that the Boy Jones’s lengthy incarceration afloat had not changed his ways. In 1849 he was convicted of burglary and transported to Fremantle, Western Australia, where he was employed as a pie seller. But he found some way to return to England where he was again arrested for theft in 1856. In the 1860s one his brothers, who had become a successful civil servant in Australia, invited him to live with him in Melbourne

The drunken old man who had once been the celebrated Boy Jones, Queen Victoria’s stalker, was for some time employed as Town Crier of Perth. He died on Boxing Day 1893 in Bairnsdale, Australia, after falling off the parapet of a bridge while drunk and landing on his head. Although the term “stalker” is a modern one there are several examples of stalking-like behaviour from Victorian times. For example, Irish barrister Richard Dunn, who stalked the wealthy heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts for 15 years, was a contemporary of the Boy Jones, and once shared a prison with him. Queen Victoria’s biographers have viewed the story of the Boy Jones and his multiple intrusions into Buckingham Palace as an amusing tale of a determined young boy who takes on the establishment.