Most of us today think of Queen Victoria as an elderly, corpulent matron, dignified but forbidding-looking. But in 1838, she was young and not unattractive; just crowned Queen of her country, and still virginal and unmarried. Throughout Britain, there was widespread sympathy for, and curiosity about, the young Queen. Her coronation was viewed by huge and enthusiastic crowds, who were looking forward to her spring-like reign.

In 1838, there was no such thing as royal security. Queen Victoria’s court at Buckingham Palace was run on well-nigh mediæval procedures by a number of inert functionaries, and no person was directly responsible for her secur­ity. Three groups of equally ineffective royal guardians operated independently of each other: the elderly and feeble royal porters, the pages (who valued their night’s sleep), and the military sentries, who didn’t take their work very seriously. 

This slack regime was to be exposed by a determined young stalker – the extraordinary ‘Boy Jones’, who developed an obsession with the young Queen. Time after time, he sneaked into Buckingham Palace to spy on her, sit on the throne, and rummage in her private apartments. “Supposing he had come into the Bedroom, how frightened I should have been!” the fearful Victoria wrote in her journal after the Boy Jones had been discovered lurking underneath a sofa in the room next to the one where she slept. 

Edward ‘The Boy’ Jones was born in 1824, the son of a drunken old tailor whose entire family lodged in a single room and slept on miserable rags. Due to his work-shy and irresponsible nature, and his habit of never washing, the prospects of Edward gaining steady employment looked bleak indeed. The Boy Jones was not insane, but his habits were very odd: he seldom spoke to anyone and spent all evening building cardboard houses and reading from a pile of scrap paper he had purchased for a penny.

In December 1838, the Boy Jones was caught inside Buckingham Palace, where he had rummaged round in the empty bedrooms, including Queen Victoria’s private apartments. Since he had stolen a quantity of underwear, and some other palace mementoes, “the Sweep in the Palace”, as he was called for being so very dirty, was tried at the Westminster Sessions. Thanks to a clever barrister and a good-natured judge, his palace intrus­ion was treated as a joke, and he was acquitted.

In December 1840, the Boy Jones was back in the Palace. This time, he was caught lurking underneath a sofa in Queen Victoria’s dressing room. He had been there for several hours, witnessing the Queen’s private tête-à-tête with Prince Albert. It would have been perfectly possible for him to burst into the young Queen’s bedroom, pull off her bedclothes and shout: “View halloo!” There was widespread outrage that such a filthy ragamuffin should be able to enter Buckingham Palace at will, and the incompetent royal guardians were rightly lambasted by the press. But ‘simple trespass’, even into a royal palace, was not a criminal offence. Due to the delicate question as to what the Boy had seen in Queen Victoria’s dressing room, he was tried in camera by the Privy Council, and sentenced to three months in prison as a rogue and a vagabond. 

After he had been released from prison in March 1841, it did not take long for the Boy Jones to find his way back into Buckingham Palace for a third time; he was arrested in the Picture Gallery, eating some cold meat and potatoes he had stolen in the royal kitchen. Once more, he was brought before the Privy Council, and sentenced to three more months in jail. There was much speculation as to how an uneducated teenage boy could enter Buckingham Palace whenever the fancy took him: did he climb down the chimneys, or did he have an accomplice in the palace kitchen? The Boy himself, probably truthfully, claimed that each time he had felt an urge to visit the Queen he had got in through an unsecured lower ground floor window. There was also speculation as to how many times he had been inside Buckingham Palace but escaped undet­ected. His father said that Edward had often been away for days on end; when asked what he had been doing, he had refused to explain his absence.

Lord Melbourne’s government wanted to get rid of the Boy Jones at any cost, being understandably fearful that he might injure or even assassinate the Queen. They took the extreme step of having him shanghaied – kidnapped and placed on board a ship bound for Brazil. When the Boy returned, like a bad penny, he was again clandestinely kidnapped by government agents and forced to serve as a sailor in the Royal Navy, without charge or trial, in breach of habeas corpus. The Boy Jones twice tried to escape and was twice recapt­ured, ending up serving as little more than a galley slave for six years. Charles Dickens and other humanitarians objected to this illegal and cruel treatment, but Queen Victoria and her government did not relent. The real reason for his eventual release, in 1848, was that they feared the adverse newspaper publicity if he should die of disease while still a prisoner. 

Sadly, the Boy Jones’s lengthy cruise had not changed his ways. In 1849, he was convicted for burgling the house of a solicitor and transported to Fremantle, Western Australia, where he was released on a ticket-of-leave and employed as a seller of pies. But hard work was not to his liking, and he found some way to return to England, where he was again arrested for theft in 1857, being sentenced to six months in prison. In September 1868, a newspaper could report that Mr Jones, who had just been made Minister of Public Works in Victoria, was in fact the brother of the notorious Boy. Both had started life at the very bottom of society, and the advancement of Mr Jones was heralded as “a singular illustration of the changes that take place in new and thriving colonies”. The Boy Jones was also in Australia, and few years earlier he had been leading an industrious life and living with his brother in Melbourne.

When the journalist Sir Henry Lucy wrote a magazine article asking what had become of the Boy Jones, a resident of Perth, Western Australia, wrote back to him with some extraordinary information, namely that the Boy Jones had emigrated to Perth, where he “rose to the high estate of town crier”. Unfortunately, the Boy Jones’s fame had preceded him: “When he went forth, bell in hand, to perform his important functions, the naughty boys of Perth were accustomed to gather round him and make pointed inquiries as to the approaches to Buckingham Palace and the health of the Queen. The man Jones, angered beyond self-restraint, occasionally made dashes at the enemy, committing assaults which made his appearance in the police court familiar.”

On Boxing Day 1893, an old man known locally as Thomas Jones had decided to go into Bairnsdale, East Gippsland, to get something to drink. He was lodging with a fireman named George John Hadfield, who gave the old man a Christmas present of 10 shillings. Thomas Jones trudged into Bairnsdale, bought some spirits, and lay down on the edge of the Mitchell River bridge, swigging from his bottle. Later the same afternoon, the semi-stupefied Jones rolled over the edge of the parapet and fell 12ft (3.7m), striking his head hard against a large stone and expiring shortly after. A few days later, the Bairnsdale Advertiser had a startling story to tell: the drunken old ‘Thomas Jones’ had once been the famous Boy Jones, of Buckingham Palace notoriety. Once upon a time, Jones had been apprenticed to the sweep who had the contract for sweeping the palace chimneys. On the occasion of the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the mischievous lad had decided to pay them a visit. He climbed down the chimney of the Queen’s bedroom and hid underneath the bed. But before the arrival of the newlyweds, he was discovered and ignominiously dragged forth. Although when sober, Jones had been quite sensitive to any allusion to this sensational episode of his youth, several old acquaintances of his vouched for the story being nothing but the truth.

Several authors have made more or less well-informed deductions about what was wrong with the Boy Jones. Did he suffer from schizophrenia? His own father, his employer Mr Griffiths, and many of the journalists who interviewed him during the days of his fame, all found him very odd. What was he writing, when he sat before the fire poring over his sheets of scrap paper, changing and correcting the text again and again – love letters to the Queen, chapters in his forthcoming book on Buckingham Palace, or just nonsense? Nobody will ever know, since the extra­ordinary Boy always ended his hour-long writing sessions by throwing everything he had written into the fire. Like the majority of schizophrenics, the Boy Jones was a loner; he had no friends, no confidante even among his own siblings. A gloomy, solitary figure, brooding and secretive, he showed no respect or affection even for his long-suffering parents. 

But to qualify as a schizophrenic, the individual has to suffer from some kind of delusions and/or hallucinations. There is no evidence that the Boy Jones ever suffered from either. His father, and most of the journalists who met him, considered him fully sane, although profoundly odd in his intellect and manners. Two experienced doctors who examined the Boy in December 1840 did not declare him insane, although they must have been under considerable pressure from the Government to do so. Had they given way to this pressure, the Boy Jones would have put into Bedlam for a very considerable period of time.

There is a condition known as a schizoid personality, where the individual is strikingly withdrawn and solitary, emotionally cold, and lacking interest in social relationships. Such individuals do not fulfil the criteria for schizophrenia and may well have a normal intelligence. Many of them have odd ideas and compulsions, are proud and reserved, and appear to be indolent, absent-minded and engrossed in fantasy. As mentioned above, the Boy Jones had a thorough aversion to menial work. Mr Griff­iths said he was of a “proud and ambitious turn of mind, never thinking anything good enough”. Although it is, of course, speculat­ive to attach a psychiatric diagnosis to an individual who has been dead for more than 100 years, and whose character is preserved only in the words of others, this description fits the gloomy, solitary Boy Jones rather well.

Individuals with a schizoid personality disorder may have secret voyeuristic interests, or even develop erotomania, also known as de Clérambault’s syndrome. The shy, introverted patient, who is often an unattractive loner, develops a fixation on some person of the opposite sex, often someone of a much higher position in society. The patient develops a delusion that this stranger returns his feelings, and begins pestering him or her with unwanted letters and presents, or becomes a stalker, following the loved one from a distance, even breaking into his or her house.

A contemporary of the Boy Jones, the French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Esquirol, described the curious case of an unattached 36-year-old man of melancholy disposition and unprepossessing appearance, who fell desperately in love with a beautiful actress. He tried to communicate with her, approached her repeatedly, and loitered outside the theatre and outside her house. Although she made it clear she wanted nothing to do with him, and her husband once beat him up badly enough to put him in hospital, he continued to stalk her. When the forthright Esquirol asked him how he could possibly believe she had any interest in an ugly, penniless nobody such as himself, the deluded Frenchman replied: “All that is true, but love does not reason, and I have seen enough to leave me in no doubt that I am loved.” 

In 1920, psychiatrist Gaetan de Clérambault described another case of eroto­mania. A 53-year-old French milliner developed the idée fixe that George V was in love with her. All London knew of their affair and wanted it to succeed, she believed. She spent large sums of money travelling to England, where she prowled around the royal palaces, although the corpulent, middle-aged Frenchwoman could not repeat the heroics of the Boy Jones in order to meet her beloved monarch in the flesh. 

Stalking is a serious problem in present-day society. A large number of stalkers are intimacy-seekers, who develop an obsess­ion with some person and a desire to get to know him or her better. Some of them choose humble victims: the secre­tary falls for her office manager, the repressed spinster working for the local charity becomes obsessed with the vicar, or the unemployed young loner becomes infatuated with his social worker. Other intimacy-seekers have higher ambitions: they become celebrity-stalkers. There is a strong association between this group and the erotomaniacs. There are many modern cases of patients with erotomania stalking celebrities. Brad Pitt, Madonna, Jodie Foster, David Letterman and former President Bill Clinton all had their own stalkers. 

There are several obvious similarities between these cases of intimacy-seeking, erotomanic stalkers and the Boy Jones – but there are also differences. Firstly, the Boy seems to have been obsessed both by the glories of Buckingham Palace in general and by the Queen herself in particular. Although he sneaked into her private apartments at least twice, once stole her underwear, and another time spied on her from underneath a sofa in her dressing-room, there is no evidence he tried to follow her around, or to break into Windsor Castle as well. Secondly, although stalking behaviour has been observed in adolescents, it is usually on a local or domestic level. There are very few, if any, examples of young teenagers becoming celebrity stalkers and breaking into their victim’s houses. The medico-legal and psychiatric literature is unable to come up with anything even resembling a 14-year-old Boy stalking a 19-year-old Queen. The conclusion must be that in spite of the advances in crimino­logy and psychiatry, the Boy Jones remains unique and unclassifiable. 

The cases of the Boy Jones, Richard Dunn and other Victorian stalkers (see panel) clearly demonstrate that stalking is not a modern phenomenon, rather a new categorisation of a form of aberrant human behaviour that has been around for centuries. There are clear parallels between the Boy Jones, the Frenchwoman who was in love with George V, and that other, more recent palace intruder, Michael Fagan. The demented Richard Dunn, who stalked Angela Burdett-Coutts for 15 years before turning his attentions to Princess Mary of Cambridge, was a 19th-century kindred spirit to the sinister Margaret Mary Ray, who stalked David Letterman and the astronaut Story Musgrove. 

This is an edited extract from Jan Bondeson’s book Queen Victoria’s Stalker (Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2010). £16.99.