Edward Oxford

Edward Oxford
1840 watercolour of Oxford's assassination attempt. Oxford stands in front of the Green Park railings, pointing a pistol at Victoria and the Prince Consort, while a policeman runs towards him. One of the Queen's attendants is on horseback at left.
Born	(1822-04-18)18 April 1822 Birmingham, Warwickshire, England
Died	23 April 1900(1900-04-23) (aged 78) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Known for	Attempting to assassinate Queen Victoria
Criminal charge	Treason

Edward Oxford (19 April 1822 – 23 April 1900) was the first of eight people who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria.

Edward was born in Birmingham in 1822, the third of Hannah Marklew and George Oxford's seven children. His father, a gold chaser, died when he was seven. His mother was able to find work and support the family, which meant Edward was able to attend school both in Birmingham and the Lambeth area of London, where the family moved when he was about 10. When Oxford left school, he first took bar work with his aunt in Hounslow, then in other public houses as a pot boy, or waiter. At the time of the attack he was barely eighteen years old, unemployed and living with his mother and sister in lodgings in Camberwell, having recently quit his job at the Hog-in-the-Pound in Oxford Street. Since his mother had returned to Birmingham on a regular trip to see family over a month before, Oxford was, in effect, living alone at the time of the event.

On 4 May 1840, he bought a pair of pistols for £2, as well as a gunpowder flask, and began practising in various shooting galleries in Leicester Square, the Strand and the West End. A week before the attack, he went into a Lambeth shop owned by a former schoolmate named Gray and bought fifty copper percussion caps, and enquired where he could buy some bullets and three-pennies' worth of gunpowder. Gray sold him the powder, and told him where he could find the ammunition. On the evening of 9 June he showed several witnesses what appeared to be a loaded pistol; when he was asked what he planned to do with it, he refused to say, other than stating that he had been firing at a target.

At about 4.00pm on 10 June 1840, Oxford took up a position on a footpath at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. The Queen, who was four months pregnant with her first child, was accustomed to riding out in a phaeton, or low, open horse-drawn carriage, with her husband, Prince Albert in the late afternoon or early evening, with no other escort than two outriders. When the royal couple appeared some two hours later and drew level with him, he fired both pistols in succession, missing both times. He was immediately seized by onlookers and disarmed. Oxford made no attempt to hide his actions, openly declaring: "It was I, it was me that did it."