Published in the New Law Journal 3 December 2010, p 1688
To date the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated is the unfortunate Sir Spencer Perceval (1762-1812), and his place as a regular answer in pub quizzes across the land is thereby assured. No doubt there have been many other attempts, and indeed the total number of failed attempts can never be known.
One alleged attempt forms the background to one of the most famous cases in English legal history, that of Daniel M’Naghten, whose case has framed the legal test for insanity for over a century and a half. Every lawyer will have heard of the case and most will associate it with the legal test for insanity (see Jeremy Dein QC and Jo Sidhu, “Legal Insanity” in Cases that Changed Our Lives, LexisNexis 2010).
Not so many, however, would know that the factual background to the case involves a rather intriguing conspiracy theory.
For most of his life, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, M’Naghten lived largely anonymously as a wood-turner, although he had a few other interests as well. Among other things, he tried his hand at acting for three years, taught himself French, attended a debating society, travelled to France and attended anatomy classes at Glasgow University – all of which amount to fairly advanced pastimes for a Victorian artisan, one would have thought ... But inevitably much of the detail of his life is rather sketchy.
What we do know is that somewhere amongst those seemingly random activities he formed the view that the Tories had it in for him. He reported this concern to the police, and alleged that he was being tracked by “Tory spies”.
No one believed a word of it or otherwise paid him much attention at the time, but in January 1843 he took a step towards legal immortality when he shot and killed a civil servant, Edward Drummond. He made his one and only public statement on the affair in the Magistrates’ court the following day, in which he lumped the blame on the Tories for having “entirely destroyed my peace of mind” (a complaint which, fortunately, does not usually suffice to apportion blame for murder).
An improbably large sum of money for the day (£750) was found on him, and this was used to fund a formidable legal defence team, assembled with great speed. At trial the issue was the definition of legal insanity, and the ensuing holding still represents the single most important statement of that definition in English law.
M’Naghten’s name is accordingly still cited in the law reports more than a century and a half later. Yet it has left unresolved the question of the true purpose of his shooting Drummond that day. Why did he have such a large amount of money on him? Where did he get it from, given the generally modestly-lucrative nature of his legitimate occupation?
Most assume that M’Naghten had not intended to kill Drummond at all, but rather the Prime Minister of the day, Sir Robert Peel, and that the money was paid to him to carry out the hit. Perhaps, therefore, the conspiracy runs, M’Naghten wasn’t mad at all, but made up the vague ramblings about delusions in the hope of escaping the gallows (if so it wasn’t much mitigation, as he spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum).
As conspiracy theories go it seems plausible enough, at least on the basis that Drummond was hardly an obvious target for a political assassination. He had been a civil servant most of his life, and at the time was personal secretary to Peel. It was while en route from Peel’s house to Downing Street that he was shot by M’Naghten, so it is easy enough to believe M’Naghten thought he was killing Peel himself. After all, this was not the age of television and Peel’s appearance would therefore have been far less well known than that of any modern holder of the office.
Such is the conclusion of no less an authority than the Dictionary of National Biography. Even if one believes M’Naghten aimed at the wrong man, however, we are still left with some difficult and intriguing questions. First, who paid him the money? Someone or some people very wealthy, one assumes.
Secondly, what persuaded such wealthy benefactors to assume that M’Naghten was a suitable assassin? Did he have a proven record in the field that has been lost with time? If not, and indeed if he truly was insane, then he wasn’t much of a choice.
Thirdly, was the £750 paid in full and final settlement of M’Naghten’s services to be rendered? If so, then the backer(s) had to have been pretty confident that he was going to do as he agreed rather than scarper – and indeed that he would succeed in doing it.
Well, who knows. It is hardly the only famous Victorian murder mystery to remain unsolved, and indeed insoluble.
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