Murder by Numbers by James Moore

Author:James Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

In the early evening of 27 June 1850, Queen Victoria was getting into her carriage when former soldier Robert Pate ran up and tried to bludgeon her over the head with a brass-tipped stick. The deranged Pate was bundled away, but he had drawn blood and caused severe bruising. Only a sturdy bonnet had saved the 31-year-old monarch from greater injury. Undeterred, she went on with a visit to the opera, shooing away staff worried about her wounds, insisting, ‘Everyone shall see how little I mind it.’

Her stoicism echoed that of her predecessor Queen Elizabeth I. In July 1579, while Elizabeth was travelling by royal barge down the Thames, shots rang out. A bullet whizzed past within feet of the queen and badly injured an oarsman. Without losing composure, she handed him a handkerchief to help stop the flow of blood and observed casually, ‘That bullet was meant for me.’

The reigns of the two queens may have been separated by three centuries, but they both showed great bravery in the face of multiple threats of murder. In fact, given the number of very real assassination attempts against the pair, it’s somewhat surprising that both died of natural causes in their beds, notching up a combined total of more than 100 years on the throne.

In 1583 Elizabeth wrote to the French ambassador that there were, ‘two hundred men of all ages who, at the instigation of the Jesuits, conspire to kill me’. Repeated threats against her person meant that in later life Elizabeth even kept a sword by her bedside. And while it emerged that the incident on the barge had in fact been the result of an accident, no one could have blamed Elizabeth for being paranoid. By the time she had written that letter, one serious plan to kill her had already been exposed. In 1570 Pope Pius V had declared Elizabeth a heretic, absolving English Catholics of any allegiance to their queen and, in 1571, a plot centring around Italian banker Roberto Ridolfi aimed at killing Elizabeth and putting the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. It was foiled when damning letters came to light, but it would be followed by two more plots to assassinate Elizabeth and overthrow her government, one in 1583, led by Francis Throckmorton, and another in 1586, led by Anthony Babington. Intelligence uncovered both before they could be enacted, and when Mary’s involvement in the latter became apparent, it led to her execution.

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