Assassin

He shot at Queen Victoria from ten feet away and changed the law of the land by missing. Windsor railway station, March 1882. The Queen had just left the train and was in her carriage when a man stepped out of the crowd with a revolver and fired. He missed. Two Eton schoolboys standing nearby beat him down with their umbrellas before the police reached him. It was the eighth and final attempt on her life across forty-two years, and it produced the outcome she found most satisfying: she said afterwards that it was worth being shot at to see how much she was loved. She was seated in a carriage. The whole thing took seconds.

The trial is the part that mattered. The jury found him not guilty on the grounds of insanity, and Victoria was furious — not because he went free, which he did not, but because of the wording. She wanted it on record that he had done it. Parliament changed the verdict formula to "guilty but insane," a phrase that survived in English law for the next eighty years, purely because a queen objected to the grammar of an acquittal. He was sent to Broadmoor, the asylum for the criminally insane, and stayed there until he died in 1921. He fired one shot and rewrote a statute.

He was already broken before he got there. He had suffered a serious head injury as a young man and was never the same afterwards; his family had him in and out of asylums, and by his twenties he was drifting, unemployed, writing poetry, and living on a small allowance that had been cut. He had written to the Queen. He believed he was owed a response and was being deliberately ignored, and what tipped him was ordinary and pathetic: money running out, letters unanswered, and the conviction that a personal wrong had been done to him by the most powerful person in the world. He bought the revolver. Nobody who knew him was surprised.

Thirty-nine years in Broadmoor followed, unremarkable and undocumented. He is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as a footnote to a legal reform he never understood he had caused.

Forget the missed shot and the umbrellas and the statute. Remember only this: he walked into a crowded railway station with a loaded revolver and nobody looked at him twice, because there was nothing about him worth looking at.