Vaughan Wilkins gives Queen Victoria's wicked uncles both barrels and Private Eye has more on Hakluyt

The spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye.

That was me blogging the other day. And today I bought the new Eye and found that it has featured again:

One of Keir Starmer's first appointments as prime minister in July 2024 was that of Varun Chandra, head of the Hakluyt intelligence consultancy, as investment and trade adviser (while he retained a stake in the firm, as revealed in Eye 1629).

and:

As Mandelson's appointment worked its way through the clearance procedure, with everything hanging on the Foreign Office permanent secretary, who should arrive in this role? One Sir Oliver Robbins, fresh from a stint at... Hakluyt. He duly took the view that what he described last week as a "borderline case" could be confirmed, no questions asked.

and

After Mandelson's sacking last September, Chandra was, remarkably, on the shortlist of three to take on the ambassadorship. Starmer was then reportedly persuaded that recent events perhaps indicated that a professional diplomate might make on a better choice ... In January Chandra was nevertheless given the consolation prize of becoming the PM's "special envoy" to the US on trade and investment to go with his existing role.

After that, the news that I think Vaughan Wilkins' granddaughter, who has published under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan, has also written as Rose Wilkins may fall a little flat.

But let's get on to what this post was going to be about: a splendid reply by Vaughan Wilkins to a critic of his first novel, And So – Victoria, that was published in The Queen (23 September 1937).

l have read with amusement the letter in your issue of September 2nd, in which a simple-minded American correspondent upbraids me for saying unpleasant things in my novel And So – Victoria about the very unpleasant sons of George III. He – or she – chides me too for imagining conversations between historical personages. 

"Boston" obviously has merely a superficial knowledge of the family of George III, or he would not leap to the defence of a creature like the Duke of Cumberland. It is true that on that sinister person’s tomb the customary laudatory inscription is incised – but when he became King of Hanover, the first thing he did was to abolish the constitution. 

The Duke of York was a nasty, muddleheaded old man, whose mistress sold commissions in the army he nominally commanded. The Duke of Clarence was another muddle-head who unquestionably lived on the verge of mental derangement. The Duke of Kent was a pompous egoist and sadist. Let "Boston" read about the mock execution His Royal Highness staged in Canada; or in the Crevy Papers about his curious reactions to marriage. 

"Boston" thinks (does he or she really mean it !) that George III was a nice kind fellow because he made an allowance to the last of the exiled Stuart Princes "out of his own private income". George IV could –  and did – spend £300 on a single coat: he threw away hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds in building himself palaces that were both hideous and unnecessary. He raced; he gambled; he kept harems; he drank – not out of his income, but out of contributions which time and again had to be levied for him by the State, He intrigued against his father; he abominated his mother; he persecuted his wife; he tormented (and hated) his daughter; he betrayed his friends; he could not keep his word; he did not pay his bills. This is not a novelist’s imagination: it is a matter of record. 

Of course, I don’t know "for a fact the conversations that took place in the homes of George III sons”. But if "Boston" will not allow me to imagine them then I and every other historical novelist will have to shut up shop. The giants of the past, Dumas, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, must all incur "Boston's" displeasure. Anyhow, it is very odd to find a champion of the Hanoverian from the city of "The Tea-party"!

I suppose that when set against the depredations of the Hanoverians even Peter Mandelson begins to seem palatable.

Down a recherché rabbit hole: More on Vaughan Wilkins's family

One of this blog's more obscure heroes is Vaughan Wilkins, a now-obscure historical novelist who had quite a following from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through him, we discovered the spooky "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt that occasionally features in Private Eye. That's because Wilkins's son Christopher was one of its founders.

Another of Vaughan Wilkins's sons is the artist William Wilkins. His daughter Laura has published fiction under the names Laura Powell and Laura Vaughan [and maybe under a third name too]. Powell and Vaughan are the middle names of her father and grandfather (who was christened William Vaughan Wilkins) respectively.

Vaughan Wilkins's only children's book, the interestingly of-its-period After Bath, was published in 1945. It is dedicated: "For Four Children with all my love: William, Christopher, Christine; and Richard."

So it looks as though he had at least one more child to investigate (that semicolon is intriguing), at least until the injunctions come in.

Vaughan Wilkins: The writer in wartime

I've found the transcript of a radio interview this blog's hero Vaughan Wilkins gave to the BBC's North American Service in 1943. 

It formed part of a programme in a series called Bridgebuilders. This edition looked at the book trade in wartime and, as well as the novelist Wilkins, a bookseller and a publisher appeared.

A transcript of the programme was printed in the 5 August 1943 issue of The Bookseller. Wilkins was interviewed by Nicholas Stuart.

Stuart: Before you can sell your book or publish it, it's got to be written. So to give us the low-down on that side of the question, here is Vaughan Wilkins, author, among other publications of the best-selling novel And so Victoria. Now, Mr. Wilkins, just you tell us all about writing books in war-time. 

Vaughan Wilkins: Writing is a difficult business at the best of times. Don’t you believe it if anyone says otherwise. When I was a newspaper editor, I thought it was easy. Now I know better. And it is far harder in war-time Britain. 

Stuart: Well, I guess that’s quite understandable.

Wilkins: There are two reasons. One physical, and the other psychological. 

Stuart: Perhaps you’d care to expand that statement, Mr. Wilkins. 

Wilkins: Like the publisher and the bookseller, the author suffers from labour shortage - his own labour. In peace-time, if that happens, it is usually his own fault - his own laziness. But to-day he is not the master of his own labour. He can’t do or not do, what he chooses, or does not choose. If an author is of military age and fit he may be called up. Even if he isn’t, there are still lots of duties which he owes to his country, civil and home defence duties of all sorts. Difficult to write books, you know, when you’re soldiering or sailoring, or even Home Guarding. Take my own case. My publishers in London and in New York - that means you, Lathom - will tell you that I have been behind time - horribly behind time - on those books I contracted to write for them. 

Stuart: What are your particular difficulties? 

Wilkins: When war broke out, I was struggling to write a book with six children under twelve years old evacuated from London billeted in my house. They were fine brave children, as good as gold. But to have one’s paternal responsibilities suddenly increased by half a dozen, doesn’t speed up book production. 

Stuart: No, I'll bet it doesn’t. 

Wilkins: Well, then, I was also billeting officer for my parish. Which meant that I was at the beck and call of some 70 or 80 evacuees and their hosts. A cross between a quartermaster-sergeant and a fairy godmother. Another hold-up there! Then the invasion threat came, and with it the formation of the Home Guard as it is now called. Well, we dug trenches. We made rifle pits. We flung together against the invader barricades of farm carts and barbed wire. We learned to throw bombs. We keep watch. Doing that doesn’t help getting a book written. In the mere matter of time for writing. 

Stuart: That must be so indeed. But you mentioned psychological reasons, Mr. Wilkins ? 

Wilkins: Many people read books just to escape for a little from the present. There can be no reason why they shouldn’t. But all they’ve got to do is to open the book and read it. It’s a very different matter for the author: He’s got to sit down and write that book of escape in cold blood. He’s got to withdraw himself from the present, in which Britain's fate, and the fate of humanity, are in the balance. And when it comes to war books. The tremendousness of the issue, the tragedy and the glory and the speed of the drama are so vast that the imagination is overwhelmed. Here in Britain one sees made manifest the actuality of our new brotherhood: the truth that Britain and America are, in the words of the Atlantic Charter, "met together". I have come to London to find the streets thronged with Americans - our Allies, more than that, our brothers. No, one doesn't have to search for inspiration now, the problem is dealing with it.

Stuart: And that bridgebuilders was the voice of the author. You may like to know that Vaughan Wilkins' new book, Being Met Together, is appearing in your country very soon.

It was when a friend and I noticed that every secondhand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of Fanfare for a Witch, and I mean that literally, that I started collecting him, almost as a joke.

But I do remember enjoying his first book, And So - Victoria, when it was serialised for Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 in 1976.

The latest on the Labour Party and Hakluyt

Liberal England takes an interest in the "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt, and its deepening relationship with Labour, for the recherché reason that it was co-founded by a son of the long-forgotten historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins.

Peter Geoghegan keeps us up to date with the latest news of Hakluyt and Labour in the London Review of Books:

Labour is said to have turned last September to another ‘strategic advisory’ firm, Hakluyt, to facilitate meetings with business leaders. Hakluyt began in a field in which the UK truly excels: private spying. 

Named after the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt, the company was founded in 1995 by a group of former MI6 agents, but in recent years has sought to distance itself from the world of spooks. Spying on Greenpeace activists on behalf of oil companies is supposedly a thing of the past. 

The company’s website looks more like that of a private bank than a corporate espionage outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board. 

‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for decades told me. ‘It’s incredibly well connected. That’s how it can charge so much. Hakluyt wouldn’t get out of bed for less than a hundred grand.’ 

Its contact book is set to become even more valuable now Starmer has appointed its managing partner, Varun Chandra, a former investment banker who helped set up Tony Blair Associates, as his special adviser on business and investment (Chandra duly resigned from Hakluyt). He might well be joined in government by Olly Robbins, the former Brexit chief negotiator and a Hakluyt partner. Another Hakluyt executive is Tony Benn’s granddaughter Emily Benn.

The Honourable Emily Benn is the daughter of Stephen Benn, who became the third Viscount Stansgate upon the death of his father Tony Benn.

Spook-friendly intelligence firm courts Labour - and what it's got to do with this blog's hero Vaughan Wilkins

The current Private Eye brings news that the "spook-friendly" intelligence firm Hakluyt is helping build bridges between business and the Labour Party.

In the last year or two it has hired Emily Benn from the party dynasty, former Labour minister Shriti Vadera and former Labour candidate Andrew Hilland. The last two were both close to Gordon Brown when he was at Number 10.

Not only that, says the Eye. Hakluyt also invited Darren Jones to its "secretive" conference last year and helped to fund Peter Kyle's recent trip to California to meet tech bosses.

The Eye reminds us that Hakluyt was set up by former MI6 officers to sell intelligence skills to the private sector.

One reason the firm is of interest to this blog is that one of those former officers was Christopher Wilkins. He is the son of the historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins, who has his own label here.

Christopher Wilkins may have been named after the hero of his father's first novel, And So - Victoria. Which gives me an excuse to end with a reminder of how the authorities thought it was thought far too scandalous to be filmed when it was published in 1937.

After Bath by Vaughan Wilkins: Shades of Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Burgess

Back in the Eighties there was a big house in the village of Marston Trussell, some three miles from here, that used to open as a second-hand bookshop on Sunday afternoons.

I walked there once and came away with two books. One was a paperback copy of  de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which I was never to read but kept on my shelves, as you do, in the hope of absorbing its contents by osmosis. And the second was After Bath, the only children's book by Vaughan Wilkins.

Wilkins usually wrote historical novels and was obviously popular between the 1930s and 1950s. At one time every second-hand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of his Fanfare for a Witch, so I started seeing if I could find his other books.

I don't know what children made of After Bath when it was published in 1945, but the interesting thing about it to me today is how much it of its period.

The villains after the gremlins, who are armed with bombs and machine guns and given to torturing people. They are like a cross between Nazi stormtroopers and Chicago gangsters, which immediately put me in mind of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

As drawn by Audrey Pilkington in the book, the gremlins have bowler hats and long noses, which look forward to Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

The plot of After Bath is a quest by four siblings to restore magic to a city. After several clashes with the gremlins, they find all they need do is apply to the Magic Control Board, where a benevolent bureaucrat gives them their wish once they have filled in the right forms.

Wilkins doesn't strike one as a Labour supporter - in 1943 he published a pamphlet called Looking Back to See Straight for the Individualist Bookshop in Fleet Street - but you couldn't get a more Clement Attlee hero than that.

Who found Richard III and did the Princes in the Tower survive?

Philippa Langley was the catalyst of the dig that found Richard III in Leicester. In particular, she played an invaluable role in getting the city council enthused by the project. Without her intervention, it would not have agreed to the excavation of Britain's most famous car park.

But she is not "the historian who found Richard III," as you so often see her described. The old boy was found by archaeologists from the University of Leicester.

For a fair account of the dig, I recommend a History Extra podcast with the archaeologist and author Mike Pitts. It was recorded just as the film The King in the Car Park was released, and as Pitts foresaw, that film has led to trouble. 

He later gave his own views on the fairness of the way the film paints the university. As you will see from the post I wrote at the time, they were pretty forthright.

******

The idea that the Princes in the Tower survived, at least for a time, is an enticing one. Similar stories were told about the children of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and about Louis XVII, the young son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Many supported the claim of Anna Anderson that she was Anastasia, the Tsar's youngest daughter, while Peter Bessell, the Liberal MP of the 1960s, supported a man who claimed to be the Tsarevich Alexei.

This blog's hero Vaughan Wilkins wrote a novel. A King Reluctant, which imagined Louis XVII had been rescued and sent to Britain. This was filmed as Dangerous Exile, and as it was a British film of the 1950s, the boy was played by Richard O'Sullivan.

In recent years DNA fingerprinting - another breakthrough by the University of Leicester - has shown the the conventional wisdom was correct. Nicholas II's children all died with him at Yekaterinburg. Louis XVII died at the age of 10 while a prisoner at the Paris Temple.

I didn't find last weekend's documentary Philippa Langley and Robert Riner convincing, but the evidence that Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower is not overwhelming. The boys just faded from view and the circumstantial case against Richard is strong.

Some commentators in the press, annoyed by Langley (as it easy to be), have leant too strongly on the discovery of two children's skeletons in the Tower of London in 1674 and their burial in an urn at Westminster Abbey. 

My impression is that there is much scepticism among historians about the identification of these bones as the remains of the Princes in the Tower. And the fact that the Royal Family and the Westminster Abbey authorities have resisted calls for the opening of the urn in recent years suggests there is a worry that tests would reveal that it does not contain royal remains. What would they do with the bones then?

For a better presentation of the case for the survival of the Princes in the Tower, listen to Matthew Lewis on the latest History Rage podcast.

Martin Stephens looks back on his acting career

My recent information dump* on the deeply obscure historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins included the fact that the celebrated child actor Martin Stephens had appeared in a BBC radio adaptation of Wilkins' first novel And So - Victoria broadcast in 1962.

Stephens had already given stunning film performances in both Village of the Damned and The Innocents. Though these films are more celebrated today than they were at the time, his presence in And So - Victoria suggests that the adaptation was a big deal.

BBC Genome suggests he appeared in only one other radio play, while And So - Victoria consisted of five hour-long episodes. Stephens, as the young Christopher Harnish, would have been central to the first three.

Like a lot of child actors who emerge happily from the experience, Stephen gave up acting at an early age. In the video above he talks about his childhood and what he has done since.

* This was meant to be the ultimate niche post, but has proved strangely popular.

Recent discoveries about Vaughan Wilkins

When I gave talks on blogging I suggested that one use of a blog is as a writer's notebook. You can upload as much of your research as you choose and link it all together.

If you are lucky, your readers will help out - for an example see the comments on a post about my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold.

So here are my latest discoveries about the now obscure historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins. If this post is not for you, try my latest Joy of Six or listen to Scott Walker as a 15-year-old.

First I have found a sketch of Vaughan Wilkins in his days as chief sub-editor on the Daily Express by Collie Knox. And pretty fearsome he founds - this is the more attractive part:

Second, I have found on Twitter that Vaughan Wilkins was the great grandson of William Wilkins, the architect of the National Gallery.

Third, the Wilkins family contained clergymen, including Vaughan Wilkins' own father, as well as a famous architect. William Wilkins' younger brother George Wilkins was a canon at Southwell Minster.

So it's interestting that I have recently noticed that his first book, And So - Victoria, contains at least three references to Southwell Minster.

The most substantial of them, from chapter 12, runs:

It was on the road back from their Northern tour that they next heard of her. They had come slowly from Carlisle into Nottinghamshire, where Setoun had an old small house of red brick in the minster town of Southwell. The shadow of a grey tower fell across the high-walled lawn, and the rooms were full of the clangour of bells at noon and eventide - so full that they seemed to hum with the deep music long afterwards, as conch-shells echo with the sea.

Fourth, though my discovery of Vaughan Wilkins stems from And So - Victoria being a Book at Bedtime in the autumn of 1976, I have found that it was dramatised by the BBC back in 1962.

The hero as a boy was played by Martin Stephens, now famous from The Innocents and Village of the Damned.

The spooky background of Boris Johnson's new chief of staff

The Guardian reports today:

Boris Johnson has appointed Dan Rosenfield, a relatively little-known former Treasury official and banker, to become his chief of staff, a key part of a reorganisation process following the departure of Dominic Cummings.

Rosenfield currently works for Hakluyt, an upmarket corporate advisory firm that has a number of former intelligence members among its staff.

I came across Hakluyt some years ago on sites like WikiSpooks, which tells us:

Hakluyt fills a niche in the spook sector by specializing in upmarket business, with which it has been very successful. In its brochure, Hakluyt promises to find information for its clients which they "will not receive by the usual government, media and commercial routes". The company tries to distinguish itself from other business intelligence consultants, spinmasters and clipping services. 

"We do not take anything off the shelf, nothing off the Net—we assume that any company worth its salt has done all of that," Hakluyt's Michael Maclay explained at a 1999 conference in the Netherlands. "We go with the judgement of people who know the countries, the élites, the industries, the local media, the local environmentalists, all the factors that will feed into big decisions being made."

WikiSpooks also says Hakkuyt was set up in 1995 by three "UK spooks" and by 2001 claimed a quarter of FTSE 100 companies as its clients.

That year it ran into controversy when the Sunday Times claimed that it had underhand tactics to gain information about Greenpeace and those dangerous radicals at Body Shop.

The most colour about Hakluyt I have found is in an article on the website of the wealth management firm Spears. It begins:

When Christopher James launched his business intelligence firm in 1994 - before anyone knew what business intelligence was - he named it after an international man of mystery.

Richard Hakluyt was an Elizabethan priest, diplomat, spy and travel writer who, while posted to Paris as secretary to the English ambassador, had kept Walsingham informed about French and Spanish activities there. 

That’s not a career so different from James’s own, which has taken in the SAS, MI6 and the FCO, the core of Britain’s secretive global influence.

It also tells us that "a friend from the Welsh Guards, Christopher Wilkins, chipped in with some money to rent an office" when the company began trading.

Why was I interested in Hakluyt?

I disappeared down this particular rabbit hole because Christopher Wilkins is the son of the once popular and now forgotten historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins, whom I have blogged about from time to time.

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," as William Blake put it.

When I thought of writing this post I found I had quite forgotten how I knew Christopher Wilkins was Vaughan Wilkins' son. But I managed to prove it all over again via the University of Sheffield's catalogue of its holdings of the papers of an obscure Labour peer and a website about Suffolk artists.

Maybe someone in the intelligence field should offer me a job?

Oscar Wilde, Vaughan Wilkins and Dangerous Exile

I have mentioned the historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins, whose career flourished for 20 years or more from the mid 1930s, a few times here.

One post was about his first novel, And So - Victoria, which the censors of the day thought far too disrespectful of the royal family to be filmed. And I also went to a Nottinghamshire village to photograph his grave.

A film was later made of one of his books: Dangerous Exile was an adaptation of the novel A King Reluctant.

You can find Dangerous Exile on YouTube. Richard O'Sullivan, the hardest working British child actor of the 1950s, plays the Dauphin, the young son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, who has been smuggled out of his prison in revolutionary France.

It's not a great film, but I did spot something interesting in the opening titles the other day: Vyvyan Holland is credited as historical adviser.

Vyvyan Holland was one of the sons of Oscar Wilde. He turns out to have several such credits on IMDB, including one for The Trials of Oscar Wilde, in which Peter Finch played his father.

At start of the 19th century Europe was alive with tales that the Dauphin had escaped his captors and with young men who claimed to be him. 

They even reached America - think of 'the dolphin' in Huckleberry Finn.

But recent DNA analysis of what has always been thought to be the boy's heart confirmed that he had died in France in 1795.

What is it with revolutions and killing children?

And So - Victoria and why it was never filmed

Visiting Vaughan Wilkins' grave in Farnsfield I mentioned that his first historical novel And So - Victoria, a success on both sides of the Atlantic when it came out in 1937, was never filmed.

In his memoirs the British film producer and director Victor Saville gave one explanation:

And So Victoria, as the title indicates, was set in the period before Victoria came to the throne. A fascinating yarn about her Uncles Cumberland and Brunswick attempting to prevent her accession - the wicked uncles, always a popular them in British history. 

I put Hugh Walpole to work on the screenplay, but, unhappily, he never got to grips with it. I admired Walpole the novelist - The Cathedral still holds vivid memories for me - but, alas, he was most unsure of himself as a dramatist. He was a delightful man to work with but a hell of a snob. Perhaps that is why the royal story fascinated him. 

I got nowhere rapidly and I was forced to put the project on one side. The war prevented production of this scale of picture, so the rights remain alongside many others in the vast accumulation in MGM's library.

Jeffrey Richards, however, tells a different story. Both MGM and Warner Bros wanted to film the novel, but they fell foul of Colonel Hanna, the Lord Chamberlain, who wrote:

The morals and manners of all classes of society were slack and crude; the language was coarse and very outspoken. Incest was quite an every day occurrence. If the intention is to show up the evil lives that were lived by our Royal Family in those days, then I have no hesitation in saying that I think it would be most undesirable and probably prohibitive.

Quite how Walpole or anyone else would have condensed this weighty novel's plot into a feature film I can't imagine.

But if the BBC could rescue the rights from the vaults of MGM, or wherever they now reside, it would be a natural for the Poldark Sunday evening slot.

Vaughan Wilkins' grave in Farnsfield churchyard

There is nothing quite as forgotten as a forgotten writer. Yet as I once blogged:

The historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins must have had a huge following in the 1950s. At one time every secondhand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of Fanfare for a Witch. 

For that reason, almost as a joke in fact, I started collecting his other books. Now I even have a couple of signed first editions.

I could have added that one of his books was filmed as Dangerous Exile in 1957 and that everyone wanted to film his first one, And So -Victoria, after its huge success on publication in 1937.

But that idea met with resistance from the Royal Family as it dealt with sex and violence among Queen Victoria's wicked uncles as they battled for the succession to the throne of England.

There is not much detail in Vaughan Wilkins' Wikipedia entry, but I recall reading in a reference book years ago is that he was editing a minor Fleet Street newspaper when he was still in his twenties.

One thing that does make Wikipedia is his place of burial: Farnsfield in Nottinghamshire. And finding that there was a bus there from Southwell yesterday, I knew what I had to do.

Farnsfield is a large and prosperous village - large and prosperous enough to support a range of shops - but its church turned out to have been wholly rebuilt by the Victorians.

Knowing more or less when Wilkins died, I looked for graves from around that date and soon found his.

It gave his place of residence (not his place of birth as Wikipedia wrongly has it) as Duxmere, Ross-on-Wye - Dennis Potter was to move there a few years later.

Anyone who has read Wilkins' books knows that he strongly identified with Wales and the Border. One of those first editions I own is inscribed by Wilkins himself:

'From a frequenter of Tenby to another.'

However, two Wilkins held the living at Farnsfield in the 19th century and there are other connections with the family in the church and on a page about its history.

Perhaps the pull of family was too strong or perhaps, being dead, he did not get much say in the matter.

One other point: if you have two first names and a surname that each have seven letters, it does make for a neat inscription.

Later. I must have been very focused on Wilkins when I wrote this: it looks a fine church.

The eight attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria

My great great great uncle refused to shave his beard off for Queen Victoria. Penny Pepper's great great great uncle tried to shoot her.

In an article published by the Guardian on World Mental Health Day, she tells the story of Edward Oxford's crime and of his humane treatment when he was found innocent by reason of insanity.

She concludes:

It’s tragic that there is very little sense of true asylum, of sanctuary, within today’s mental healthcare system.

Remarkably, Oxford's attempt on Victoria's life - he fired two pistols at the royal carriage at Constitution Hill near Buckingham Palace in May 1840 - was the first of eight more or less serious attempts on the old girl's life.

Barrie Charles, who has written a book on the subject, lists them on his website.

The Social Historian lists only seven but adds a press report from the Nottinghamshire Guardian:

Saturday 15 June 1895 ATTACKS ON THE QUEEN. The apprehension of a crazy youth with a loaded revolver on his way to Balmoral on Friday to obtain an interview with the Queen is the first incident of the kind that has occurred on Deeside. There her Majesty has been singularly free from annoyances of any description, and has usually moved about without any guard or protection whatever.

And there was also an incident in Sidmouth when she was a baby. Shooting Victoria has the story:

When in June 1840 Edward Oxford fired his two pistol at Queen Victoria, she suffered the first of her eight assaults. But that was not the first time she found herself at the wrong end of a gun. 

Twenty years before, in January 1820, seven-month-old Princess Victoria had just moved into Westbrook Cottage outside Sidmouth, Devon, with her father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Her father, then deeply in debt, had chosen the place both to flee creditors in London, and to make sure that his precious daughter, in line for the royal succession, remained in England. 

It was there that a boy outside the house, shooting birdshot at sparrows, fired through a window, narrowly missing the infant Victoria, then in the arms of a nurse.

This incident was the starting point of And So - Victoria by Vaughan Wilkins, whose historical novels were popular in the 1950s. There it takes on a far more sinister aspect.

The sea above the Earth

The historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins must have had a huge following in the 1950s. At one time every secondhand bookshop in the country had a copy of the World Books edition of Fanfare for a Witch.

For that reason, almost as a joke in fact, I started collecting his other books. Now I even have a couple of signed first editions.

One of those other books by Wilkins is his anthology of odd historical snippets Endless Prelude. It contains the following from 1212 by Gervase of Tilbury:

In our own time there befell a marvellous but well-known event to prove how the upper sea lieth above us. 

One a certain holy-day after High Mass, the folk were thronging forth from the parish church, on a morning so misty that it made a sort of twilight. On a stone tomb within the churchyard they found an anchor fixed, with its cable stretched tight and hanging down from the air. 

While they were disputing among themselves of this matter, they saw at length the rope move as though men were labouring to weigh anchor. When, therefore, for all this straining at the rope, the anchor yet clung to the tomb, they heard through the foggy air as though it had been the cries of sailors labouring with all their might to raise an anchor from the deep. 

Soon, when they found their labour to be in vain, they sent down one of their fellows, who, as skilfully as any shipman of our own, appeared hanging to the rope and descending with alternate interchange of hands. 

When he had torn the anchor from the tomb, he was, however, caught by the bystanders, in whose arms he gave up the ghost, suffocated by the breath of our gross air, as a shipwrecked mariner is suffocated in the sea. 

His fellows above, after an hour's delay, cut the cable, let the anchor, and sailed away.
In memory of this event the iron bands of the doors of that church were forged from that anchor; which bands are there still for all men to see.

Unfortunately, this account does not say where the church was.

The edition of Gervase's work available on Google Books says that such airships were a common feature in Celtic legend.

Put them down as a Medieval version of the phantom airships that flourished at the opening of the last century.