ROYALTY MENACED

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1058, 23 August 1930, Page 26

ROYALTY MENACED

MANY ASSASSINATIONS ATTEMPTED WORK OF ANARCHISTS Many attempts have been made to i assassinate Royal persons in recent years. Some of them have been the work of professed anarchists, of whom a large proportion were victims of the insanity that so often afflicts ! the followers of this political creed. All three successive assailants of Prince Humbert's grandfather and namesake, the King of Italy, were j anarchists; and the last of them succeeded In killing him in the streets of Monza in 1900. Brussels w 7 as the .scene of the attempt made by the'young anarchist | Sipido to shoot King Edward VII. • when he passed through the city in j 1900. The Prince Regent was shot at i

in 1817, and Queen Victoria also was attacked by an insane boy. Another crime occurred in Madrid in 1906, when an anarchist, threw a bomb at the present King Alfonso XIII. as he drove with his bride on his wedding day. Very few countries have escaped these outrages (writes Dermot Morrah, in the London "Daily Mail”), It might perhaps be expected that' the new world would be less liable to them than the old; but three Presidents of the United States have been assassinated. The great President Lincoln, re-elected after the Civil War, was shot in his box at the theatre in 1865 by a partisan of the defeated South; while Garfield in ISBI and McKinley in 1901 also fell victims to the bullets of assassins, who were in the one case a disappointed aspirant to office and in the other a professed anarchist. Perhaps the two most terrible of these murders were attempts to avert threatened coups d’etat by reigning Kings. Jn 1903 King Alexander of Serbia, who had already given offence by marrying a woman whose social antecedents w-ere considered unsuitable, tried to get rid of Ministers he disliked by suspending the Constitution for half an hour. He and his wife Draga were thereupon murdered with frightful savagery by a conspiracy of military officers. In 190 S King Carlos of Portugal was murdered, with his son Louis, Duke of Braganza, while driving in Lisbon, apparently in consequence of his attempt to restore order by investing Senbor Franco with dictatorial powers. Space will not allow more than a bare mention of the killing of Alexander 11. of Russia by Nihilists with bombs in 1881, and of President Carnot of France with a knife by an anarchist in 1894. But perhaps the most momentous assassination since that of Caesar took place at Serajevo, in Bosnia, on June 28, 1914. On that day the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian Throne, was shot with his wife as they drove through the streets. Though the murderer was, j in fact, a Bosnian, the Austrian Government suspected that the crime was the result of a Serbian plot, and the attempt to exact humiliating conditions from Serbia precipitated the European War.