Assassination

Assassination is the act of murdering a prominent or important person, Usually the person is a political leader, like the head of a country or a political party. Assassinations are usually done for political motive or for financial gain.

At Acre during the Ninth Crusade, England’s Prince Edward (later King Edward I) was struck with a poisoned dagger by an “Assassin”, a member of  a Muslim sect that murders leaders to further its political ends. His wife Eleanor of Castile, who was accompanying him devotedly, cared for the king and saved his life. The Arabic word "assassin" was introduced into the English language through this incident.

James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, regent for the infant King James VI of Scotland was assassinated in Linlithgow on January 23, 1570. He was killed by James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, a supporter of his legitimate half-sister, Mary, Queen of Scots. As Moray was passing in a cavalcade in the main street below, Hamilton fatally wounded him with a carbine shot from a window of his uncle Archbishop Hamilton's house. It was the first recorded assassination by a firearm.

Assassination of the Regent Moray. Victorian stained glass window in St. Giles Kirk, Edinburgh.. Photy by Kim Traynor

The first assassination of a head of a state with a handgun took place in 1584 when Prince William the Silent, the German-born leader of the Protestant states of Holland was murdered during their conflict with the Catholic Spain of the Habsburgs. Gerard Balthasar, a French devotee of the Spanish King Phillip II, killed him in his own home with a wheel-lock pistol.

After the assassination of  Prince William the Silent, security was tightened everywhere, and it was generally assumed that the next Spanish target must be Queen Elizabeth. Shooting of any kind was banned within two miles of the Queen’s residence, and it was recommended that at seaports every man entering the country should be searched for incriminating evidence, down to the soles of his shoes.

The earliest known use of the verb "to assassinate" in printed English was in Matthew Sutcliffe in 1600 pamphlet, A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, five years before it was used in Macbeth by William Shakespeare. 

Charlotte Corday assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, a leader in the French Revolution, in his bathtub on July 13, 1793. His death was one of the pretexts for the subsequent Reign of Terror.

The first, and to date only, British Prime Minister to be assassinated was Spencer Perceval. On the evening of May 11, 1812, Perceval entered the lobby of the House of Commons, when a Liverpool merchant with a grievance against the government, John Bellingham, stepped forward, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest.

Bellingham was tried and convicted, and on May 18th was hanged at Newgate Prison. Despite initial fears that the assassination might be linked to a general uprising, Bellingham had in fact acted alone, as a protest against the government's failure to compensate him for his imprisonment in Russia for a trading debt.

A painting depicting the assassination of Perceval. 

In 1835, Andrew Jackson became the first US president to experience an assassination attempt when a deranged house painter named Richard Lawrence fired a pistol at the president from just feet away.  Lawrence’s gun misfired, so he pulled out a second weapon and squeezed the trigger. That pistol also misfired. Jackson then beat up his attacker with a walking cane.

The first sitting member of Congress to be assassinated was Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, who was shot to death by a Ku Klax Klansmann in 1868. Despite identifying his killer by name before his death the assassin was never arrested or charged with a crime.

Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of former U.S. President James A. Garfield, specifically chose to use a revolver with an ivory handle because he wanted it to look good as a museum exhibit after the assassination.

In 1932 a group of Japanese assassins called “The League of Blood” targeted twenty high ranking politicians and businessmen but succeeded only in killing two.

The French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou was shot dead on October 9, 1934 in Marseille when a Bulgarian revolutionary opened fire. It wasn't revealed until 1974 that the revolutionary missed and the Minister was really killed by a police officer aiming for the revolutionary.

A German carpenter named Georg Elser attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in November 1939, only one month into World War II. His bomb, hidden at a speech venue, went off successfully but failed to kill the German Fuhrer, who had finished his speech and left early.

"The Avengers" was also the name of a Jewish team of assassins that used to kill Nazi war criminals after World War II.

Bill Foley's photograph The Last Smile shows Anwar Sadat only moments before his assassination.

Before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it was not a Federal offense to kill the President or Vice President of the United States.

Seven of the eight US Presidents who have died in office either through illness or assassination were elected at precisely 20-year intervals.

President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy (who had just announced a presidential bid) were all assassinated within less than five years of each other.

The spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated is now a cat sanctuary for 250 cats.

A father once hired a bunch of assassins to kill his son's online World of Warcraft character because he was spending too much time on it.