Princess Victoria And ‘Boy Jones’

When 18-year-old Princess Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, she found herself on the receiving end of some decidedly creepy attention.
Lonely men wrote offering to marry her.
Creepiest of all, though, was Edward Jones, a teenage street urchin who made a habit of breaking into Buckingham Palace and wandering around for days at a time in the hope of meeting the Queen.
‘Supposing he had come into the bedroom, how frightened I should have been’, wrote Victoria in her journal after Jones had been discovered lurking in her dressing room after stealing some of her underwear.
What makes the Jones case so fascinating is the way the Establishment responded to the threat posed by one persistent street urchin.
For a start, there was embarrassment at the way Jones had exposed lax Royal security.
Ageing flunkies dozed half-sozzled through the night while the nearest police station was over a mile away.
When he claimed at his trial to have been living in the Palace for more than a year, having slid down a chimney, no one was quite sure whether to believe him.
Amid such confusion, there was no option but for the magistrate to acquit Jones of breaking in with the intention of theft – it was, he said, just a daring folly.
Despite being decidedly ugly, Jones became a folk hero.
If the ‘Boy Jones’, as he became known, had left it at that, then his might have been a jolly tale.
The problem was the young man was clearly in the grip of a compulsion, because he kept on returning to the palace to perch on the throne or rifle through Victoria’s letters.
Alarmed by his persistence, the authorities first kidnapped the lad and handed him over to the Navy for a long spell at sea.
When that didn’t work, he was charged with theft and sent to Australia.
But Jones turned up again in England years later like a bad penny.
By this time, though, both the ‘Boy’ and the object of his obsession were middle-aged, and Victoria was no longer anyone’s idea of a romantic princess.
There were no more attempts to break in.