“An offence new in its kind”: responses to assassination attempts on British royalty, 1800–1900

Attempted assassinations have only rarely been given sustained and systematic attention by historians. This article focuses on a series of attempts to assassinate members of the British royal family across the nineteenth century. In exploring the responses of political elites and wider publics to these attacks, the author argues for the development of a robust and enduring script with which to navigate physical attacks on the sovereign and his or her family. Overall, this script tended to support the monarchy by articulating visions of the proper relationship between crown and people and contrasting these with political regimes in Europe and elsewhere. It also, however, served to highlight some of the key tensions within a modernizing institution between accessibility and publicity on the one hand and security on the other.