Get ready for the most British story you'll ever read.

Queen Victoria was famous "not amused" (although this seems to be an actually apocryphal tale) but she was quite the literary critic too.

In 1882, Roderick Maclean decided he was so happy with his new poem, that he would share it with the Queen. She didn't like it and sent him a reply, that he thought was rather curt. Taking this to heart, Robert went a stage further than most on receiving some bad feedback, he set out to assassinate Queen Victoria.

At Windsor, on March 2nd, Roderick drew a pistol and attempted to shoot Queen Victoria. What happened next is contested. One article claims his gun was a toy, others heard the shot. One version has Chief Superintendent Hayes, of the Borough Police thwarting Roderick, another has (and this is the wonderful bit) had Eaton school boys grappling with Roderick using their umbrella.

Either way, Roderick, of course, failed to kill the monarch. He was caught and tried. He was then found "not guilty, but insane" and had indeed been diagnosed as insane a few years earlier. Interestingly Queen Victoria was not happy about that and asked for a change in English law so that those implicated in similar cases would be  "guilty, but insane"; this led to an actual change of the law and the Trial of Lunatics Act 1883.