The couple met in Birmingham's Hope and Anchor tavern, which was owned by Hannah's parents; George was a goldsmith and chaser and earned an average of £20 a week.

[4] According to Jenny Sinclair, Edward's biographer, George's behaviour was erratic when he was younger and he was an "impulsive and a heavy drinker" by the time he was twenty.

[18] About a week after he moved in, he hit his mother for no apparent reason and threatened her with a pistol; she returned to Birmingham shortly afterwards, leaving Oxford in Lambeth with his sister Susannah and her husband William Phelps.

[20][21] He drew up a document of eleven rules, signed by the fictitious A. W. Smith; the first of these was "That every member shall be provided with a brace of pistols, a sword, a rifle and a dagger; the two latter to be kept at the committee room".

[23][g] On 10 June 1840—the eleventh anniversary of George Oxford's death—Oxford walked to Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace, and waited for two hours; the royal couple were known to take an evening drive most days and groups of onlookers were common at that time.

At around 6:00 pm Queen Victoria—four months pregnant with her first child, Victoria, the Princess Royal—and Prince Albert left the palace in their drosky, an open-topped horse-drawn carriage, accompanied by the postillions (the drivers mounted on horses) and two outriders.

[24][25] The carriage passed a group of spectators by the gates to the palace and travelled along Constitution Hill; as it came within a couple of metres of Oxford, he drew out his first pistol and fired.

[37] Subsequent newspaper speculation suggested the organisation may be connected to the Chartists—the working-class movement pressing for self-determination and democratic reforms—the Germans or a faction of the Orange Order within the Tories.

[38] The reference to Germany was concerning to some in Britain, as if Victoria had been assassinated, she would have been succeeded on the British throne by Ernest Augustus, king of the German state of Hanover.

Murphy considers him "without question the most wicked, the most feared, and the most reviled of George III's sons", and observes that the reference to Augustus would have been "chilling to any British reader".

These included the pathologist Thomas Hodgkin; John Conolly, the head of Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell; and the surgeon James Fernandez Clarke, who accompanied as the Oxfords' family doctor.

[47] Campbell opened the prosecution by recounting the history of events and details of Oxford's purchase of the pistols and his practising in shooting galleries; he also referred to Young England and read out the rules and regulations and some of the correspondence, but made no comment on them.

[52][53] According to the criminologist Richard Moran, it was strange that Campbell spent nearly an hour reading through the Young England information, but made no comment as to its significance.

[52] Based on the transcript of the trial, Moran considers "it is difficult to ascertain if Campbell meant to ridicule Oxford by the introduction of this material, or if he had some other, undisclosed purpose.

[62] Based on his interview, Conolly surmised that Oxford showed: ... an occasional appearance of acuteness, but a total inability to reason—a singular insensibility as regards the affections – an apparent incapacity to comprehend moral obligations, to distinguish right from wrong – an absolute insensibility to the heinousness of his offence, and to the peril of his situation—a total indifference to the issue of the trial; acquittal will give him no particular pleasure, and he seems unable to comprehend the alternative of his condemnation and execution; his offence, like that of other imbeciles who set fire to buildings, et cetera, without motive, except a vague pleasure in mischief—appears unable to conceive anything of future responsibility.

[66] They concluded "We find the prisoner, Edward Oxford, guilty of discharging the contents of two pistols, but whether or not they were loaded with ball has not been satisfactorily proved to us, he being of unsound state of mind at the time.

"[67] The judge, unhappy with the non-standard nature of the decision, bade them retire again to reconsider; they returned an hour later to say Oxford was "guilty, being at the time insane".

[68][69] Oxford, aged 18, was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure,[70] a verdict based on the Criminal Lunatics Act 1800 that allowed the state to incarcerate him for as long as it wished.

[81][82] A visitor to the asylum in 1842 reported that Oxford spent his time drawing—his works "were uncommonly well executed, and evinced a natural talent for the art"—and reading.

[83] He taught himself to read French, but bemoaned the lack of opportunity to practise his pronunciation; when asked about his mental state, he acknowledged that he was there because others had thought him insane, but said he "was really very far from being mad".

[69] The case notes on him in February 1854—probably by Bethlem's superintendent, William Charles Hood—described how Oxford "from the statements of the attendants and those associated with him he appears to have conducted himself with great propriety at all times".

[87] Oxford's case notes stated that "With regard to his crime he now laments the act which probably originated in a feeling of excessive vanity and a desire to become notorious if he could not be celebrated".

[84] A journalist from The Times visited Broadmoor in January 1865, and described Oxford as "a fat, elderly man" leading a group of inmates who were decorating the premises.

[97][n] Oxford was escorted to Plymouth in late November and boarded the SV Suffolk; the ship set sail on 3 December 1867 and arrived in Melbourne on 7 February 1868.

[128] Following so soon after the acquittal of Oxford, Victoria was unhappy with the result and wrote to Peel in March 1843:[129] The law may be perfect, but how is it that whenever a case for its application arises, it proves to be of no avail?

Follett, —and they allow and advise the Jury to pronounce the verdict of Not Guilty on account of Insanity,—whilst everybody is morally convinced that both malefactors were perfectly conscious and aware of what they did!

[132] These included the direction "to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under ... a defect of reason".

[135] Ponsonby wrote to William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, passing on the Queen's thoughts: Her Majesty thinks it worth consideration whether the law should not be amended.

[137] In the mid 1840s the writer George W. M. Reynolds published the series The Mysteries of London, which includes Henry Holford, a pot-boy; this character was a combination of Oxford and the boy Jones—a teenager who broke into Buckingham Palace several times between 1838 and 1841.

[146] In 2010 the author Mark Hodder wrote The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, a steampunk novel whose plot centres on one of Oxford's descendants—also called Edward Oxford—who travels back in time to assassinate Victoria, only to be thwarted by fictitious renderings of the explorer and writer Richard Francis Burton and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.