Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria (Hardcover)

Queen Victoria was the most shot-at of all British monarchs (she rather welcomed this, as the public horror at the various attempts proved, to her, how much she was loved by the public). This book mentions them only in passing, and concentrates entirely on a Fenian plot (most public outrages of the time were the result of the Irish question) to blow up Westminster Abbey while she was there celebrating her silver jubilee. It is an extremely interesting and very complex story, with a fascinating main character in the American 'General' Frank Millen, an apparently respectable journalist and ex-missionary who was never properly brought to book. But there are innumerable ramifications involving British and Irish MPs, the smuggling of explosives, forgery, burglary and murder, American support for Irish nationalists, actions for libel against The Times - all against the background of the Irish famine, the controversy connecting Charles Stuart Parnell with alleged criminal activities and Lord Randolph Churchill's support of Ulster. It is a complex tapestry, and the author treats it almost filmically, with the scene moving swiftly from place to place: the British consulate in New York to HM Legation in Stockholm to the House of Commons to Room 56 of the Home Office.... Campbell has consulted documents only very recently released (in fact, he seems to have had to prise them almost physically from the Records Office) and although the reader must concentrate hard to follow the story, identify the many character and appreciate their motives, he tells an exciting and surprising story with pace and skill. (Kirkus UK)

A true-life Day of the Jackal, set a century earlier and involving as many tangled subplots. Queen Victoria, writes British journalist Campbell (The Maharaja's Box, 2002), was no stranger to assassination attempts. "As a function perhaps of the length of her reign (1837-1901) rather than of her attraction for deranged assailants," he writes, "Queen Victoria was the most shot-at sovereign in British history." Seven attacks were made by pistol. Had the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish independence movement largely organized and staffed by Irish American soldiers after the Civil War, had its way, bombs would have felled the monarch; the Brotherhood and like-minded terrorist cells claimed credit for many explosive attacks on agents of the Crown, including spectacular assaults on Scotland Yard and Victoria Station. The plan to do Vicky in went awry for many reasons, but it was nursed along by the oddest of cabals, numbering agents from the British government who encouraged, funded, and otherwise aided the would-be assassins in an effort to discredit the rising movement for an independent Irish republic. Involving Foreign Office spymasters, dashing adventurers such as the shadowy Francis Millen (late of the Mexican navy, and titular head of what Fleet Street tabloids called "the Jubilee dynamite gang"), the eminent but star-crossed Irish politician Charles Parnell, dozens of minor characters, and even a brief sighting of Jack the Ripper, Campbell's tale meanders from one improbable scenario to another, neatly illustrating the strange-bedfellows theory of politics and the absolute corruptibility of professional powermongers. By the end, readers will be scratching their heads at the incompetence, egotism, and brutality of just about everyone who figured in the assassination attempt of 1887-but also wondering why it didn't succeed. Messy, complex, and thoroughly intriguing: Campbell spins it with gusto. (Kirkus Reviews)

' Campbell's research is prodigious and largely original '