Perhaps as a result of the length of her reign (1837 – 1901) rather than of her attraction for deranged assailants, Queen Victoria was the most shot-at sovereign in British history.

There were seven attacks made openly on her person, the first in 1840, the last in 1882. All took place while she was driving, accompanied, in a carriage. All were made at comparatively close range by males using single-shot pistols (except for the fifth attempt in 1850, when the Queen was struck momentarily unconscious by an ex-officer of the 10th Hussars wielding a brass-handled cane). None of the assailants was a marksman; none was found to be part of a wider conspiracy. Two of the Queen’s attackers were judged insane, three were transported to Australia. Two, whose pistols were afterwards found to be empty, received comparatively short sentences. Two were Irish.

Queen Victoria was brave: she continued to ride out in public after the first wave of attacks and noted in her journal that she “did not wish to have the kind of security that nervous monarchs throughout Europe insisted upon”. Her mournful seclusion after her beloved husband’s death in 1861 removed the Queen from the public gaze and, for the time being, from the reach of firearm-brandishing lunatics. During the Irish revolutionary excitements of six years later, she dismissed her ministers’ fears that she would be kidnapped by Fenians from Balmoral or Osborne House on the Isle of Wight as “too foolish”.

By the fifth decade of her reign, however, the Queen could never feel safe from sudden cataclysmic death – inflicted not by a lone crackpot with a pistol, but by an armed international conspiracy confected by Irish-exile revolutionaries and their sympathisers in America. The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in New York in 1859 by the Gaelic scholar John O’Mahony, ostensibly as the American wing of the Irish Revolutionary (later Republican) Brotherhood, which had been secretly formed in Dublin by the veteran revolutionary James Stephens a year earlier with the aim of winning Irish independence by armed force. Their weapon of choice was dynamite, the recently developed high-explosive – easy to carry, conceal and prime – used by Russian nihilists to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg in 1881.

Ever since then the so-called “dynamite press” in America had made wildly inflammatory threats. In April 1881, Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s private secretary, wrote to Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary: “It is stated in The Observer today that there is a newspaper in New York which advocates the assassination of the Queen. Her Majesty asks if this is true.” It was.

Although many threats on her life were made, both openly and secretly, there were no politically motivated assassination attempts on the Queen and her family in the period from 1881. Then, on 1st June 1887, with the great service of thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey to mark Victoria’s Golden Jubilee three weeks away, The Times published information from New York of a threatened series of bomb attacks. Scotland Yard had meanwhile received information that a bombing team was about to cross the Atlantic, with the Queen as their target. The newspapers called it the “Jubilee Plot”.

In 1886, Maharajah Dalip Singh abandoned his wife and large family and turned up in Paris with his teenage lover, publicly proclaiming his hatred of his former English mentors. He pronounced himself “England’s proud implacable foe”, threatening to offer his services to Russia. He found a willing English-speaking type-setter in Paris who printed up pompous proclamations to “his people”, who were yearning, so he believed, for his return. Singh sent the inflammatory manifestos to London as evidence of his unbending purpose. The printer’s name was Patrick Casey.

Patrick Casey moved to Paris in 1870 and was later joined by his older brother Joseph. In Paris, the Casey brothers worked as newspaper compositors, though they could often be found in Jim Reynold’s Irish-American bar proclaiming dynamite vengeance against the crown to whatever journalist happened to be buying the drinks.

On hearing the news of Dalip Singh’s move to Paris, the Queen was heartbroken. Singh had been a special favourite since being brought to London almost forty years before, when his kingdom was annexed after two Anglo-Sikh wars. He had been granted an enormous Indian Office pension – and a government mortgaged Suffolk shooting estate. Now, he sent the Queen abusive letters. He was set to fly into the welcoming arms of the Tsar, he told her. A huge scandal was threatening.

On 21st March 1887, Singh departed Paris for Russia with his mistress, servant and several spaniels. He bore with him the passport of Patrick Casey. Casey had also obtained the necessary Russian visas. At the border crossing the Maharajah, dressed in his oriental finery, insisted he was Monsieur Casey. The frontier gendarmerie were baffled. They thought he was a circus magician and his young female companion a fortune-teller. After a frantic round of telegrams, Singh and his entourage were spirited over the border. They first arrived at the Imperial capital, St Petersburg, but were quickly moved on to Moscow. The identity switch seemed pantomimic, but for a month thereafter the exotic Singh clung to his bizarre alter ego. News of Katkov’s strange guests began to leak. Why, it began to be asked in diplomatic circles, should the editor of the Moscow Gazette have wished to smuggle the notorious dynamiter Patrick Casey into Russia?

On 16th April 1887, Dalip Singh at last met Mikhail Katkov in Moscow. On 10th May, Katkov personally presented the Tsar with a long memorandum from the Maharajah promising to “wrench India out of the hands of England”. His Imperial Majesty scribbled approving comments in the margin. On the morning of 29th May, Katkov cabled Singh in Moscow: “Your Highness, your business is in a good way.” However, it soon became public knowledge that it was Katkov who had smuggled “Patrick Casey” into Russia. They said that Casey was an assassin who intended the death of Queen Victoria. Rumours of a grave threat to the Queen were already in the papers on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Times had reported on 4th May:

Extreme nationalists in this country are preparing for another series of dynamite outrages in England, and many signs point to the Queen’s Jubilee as the time fixed upon for the beginning of the reign of terror.

On 30th May, only a day after his first meeting with the Tsar, Katkov was summoned to the Imperial summer palace at Gatachina outside St Petersburg. Before Tsar Alexander III, the editor begged forgiveness on his knees. Patrick Casey was later named by a Scotland Yard source as one of the prime plotters against the Queen on Jubilee eve: “Information had been received in London which leaves no doubt that dynamiters have arranged to commit an outrage in Jubilee week… the movements of Patrick Casey and his associates in Paris have been closely followed by special detectives”. The Morning Advertiser had a scoop two days later – an interview with the notorious firebrand himself:

May we touch upon the question of dynamite, Mr Casey… is there anything coming off?

In all probability there will be something coming off, and very soon.

The newspaper was sceptical:

We venture to think that the lieges may enjoy their Jubilee without fear of mines and explosions of bomb-shells, infernal machines, or any other ‘devilish enginery’ of the Dynamite Brotherhood.

The Home Secretary thought the opposite. There was a flurry in Whitehall at the discovery that Irish labourers had been contracted the year before to overhaul the Palace of Westminster’s plumbing. Gothic-revival water closets were intimately inspected. Nothing was found and, indeed, there was no bombing attempt on the Queen during her Jubilee celebrations.