Killing Queen Victoria

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 18:00:00 +0000

The young man — the boy — stood under the elms. It was around noontime on the hot, sunny Sunday of 3 July 1842, and he had positioned himself behind and apart from the crowd of high-spirited Londoners who had assembled on either side of the Mall, two or three deep, to view the Queen’s cortège make its usual Sunday trip from Buckingham Palace to St. James’s and the Chapel Royal. He must have looked like a fool in his dark, oversized coat, but he had to keep it on for two reasons: he was homeless, carrying all his possessions on his back, and he needed it to conceal the small flintlock pistol at his breast. He was sweating, he was dirty, he smelled. He hardly saw himself as a human being. John William Bean Junior was seventeen and tired to death of his life.

The world found him repulsive. His vertebrae, devastated by disease — perhaps extrapulmonary tuberculosis — curved in an S and slumped into a conspicuous hump over his right shoulder. His head hung at little more than four feet off the ground — if that. His arms were atrophied sticks, his hands those of a young child. When he walked, his twisted body lurched in the direction of his hump. His eyes sunk into his head. His expression was permanently careworn and weary. As a final indignity, God or happenstance had marred his face with a scar or a blotch about his nose.

Salon.com > Queen Victoria

Killing Queen Victoria