Roderick Edward Maclean was a Scotsman who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria on 2 March 1882, at Windsor, England, with a pistol. This was the last of eight attempts by separate people to kill or assault Victoria over a period of four decades. Maclean's motive was purportedly a curt reply to some poetry that he had mailed to the Queen.The attempted murder followed the arrival of the Royal train, conveying the Queen, Princess Beatrice and the Court from Windsor. Queen Victoria had just walked across the platform of Windsor station to a carriage in waiting when Maclean, who was standing at the entrance of the station yard among a number of spectators, deliberately fired a revolver at her. The shot missed, and Maclean was seized by Chief Superintendent Hayes, of the Borough Police, and the weapon wrenched from his grasp by someone in the crowd. – Birmingham Daily Gazette, 1921

Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson was a British Army officer and husband of the war correspondent Lady Sarah Wilson. As an Eton College student he assisted in thwarting Roderick Maclean's assassination attempt on Queen Victoria in 1882, before joining the Royal Horse Guards in 1887. Wilson was promoted quickly, and as a captain was appointed aide-de-camp to Robert Baden-Powell at the start of the Second Boer War, in which role he served through the Siege of Mafeking. He was created a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 1901.