It’s 2 March, which can only mean one thing. YES, THAT’S RIGHT! It’s the anniversary of the day Queen Victoria survived the last of eight attempts to assassinate her, prompting William McGonagall to write another of his spectacularly terrible poems.
She’d just got off the Royal Train at Windsor and got into a carriage when Roderick Maclean shot at her, missed, and “was seized by Chief Superintendent Hayes, of the Borough Police”, according to the Birmingham Daily Gazette.
Or, it was a toy pistol, and an Eton schoolboy called Gordon Wilson jogged Maclean’s arm with an umbrella, if you were reading the Lichfield Mercury.
But who cares about that? The most important thing was that William Topaz McGonagall was moved to express himself via the medium of poesy, and did so as magnificently as you would expect.
If you want to read the other ten(!) verses, you can! This one’s pretty special, for example:
And these two are a highlight for me:
Maclean was tried for high treason, found “not guilty, but insane”, and sent to Broadmoor, where (the Eton schoolboy not surviving WWI) he proceeded to outlive everyone else involved in the whole sorry business.
