One of the last of the Swedish kings of the line of Vasa, Gustavus III., was assassinated in 1792, being shot by Count Anckarstroem, at a masked ball, March 16th. This murder was the result of an aristocratical conspiracy, the King having done much to lessen the power of the nobility. He was engaged at the time he was shot in getting up a crusade against revolutionary France, of which he purposed being the head. He survived his wound thirteen days.
An attempt to assassinate Joseph I., King of Portugal, was made in 1758, when the celebrated Marquis of Pombal was the real ruler of that country. Many executions took place, including several of the highest nobles. The Jesuits, who were then very unpopular, and against whom most European governments were directing their power, were charged with this crime, and some of them were put to death, and the rest banished from Portugal.
In the year 1831, Count Capo d'Istria, then President of Greece, was assassinated at Nauplia, by the brothers Mauromichalis. He was supposed to be a mere tool of Russia, in whose service much of his life had passed. He was by birth a Greek of the Ionian Islands; and after they had become a portion of Napoleon I.'s empire, he took office in Russia, rising very high. Employed to look after Russia's interests in Greece, he was ultimately chosen President of the latter country in 1827. Popular at first, he soon became odious, and was nothing but a Russian agent. His death probably cut short plans which, had they succeeded, would have had much effect on the course of European events. In the old land, where it was considered a sacred duty to kill tyrants, he was suddenly slain as he was entering a church. His death caused little regret, though the deed of the Mauromichalis was warmly condemned; many persons being ready to profit from crimes the perpetration of which they are swift to condemn, and as ready to execute the perpetrators.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] The word assassin, according to that eminent Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, is derived from hashish, being the liquid preparation on which the Old Man of the Mountain used to intoxicate his operators, and which appears to have been an uncommonly powerful tipple. The men whom he thus drugged, or hocused, when they were to commit murder, "were called, in Arabic, Hashishin in the plural, and Hashishi in the singular." The Crusaders brought the word from the East. The ancients had not the word, but they had the thing, as the English suffer from ennui, but have no name for it. A temperance lecturer might turn this connection between blind drunkenness and reckless murder to some good purpose.
[C] Mr. De Quincey's immortal Connoisseur, who delivered the Williams Lecture on Murder, speaking of the supposed assassination of Gustavus Adolphus, at the Battle of Lutzen, says,—"The King of Sweden's assassination, by-the-by, is doubted by many writers,—Harte amongst others; but they are wrong. He was murdered; and I consider his murder unique in its excellence; for he was murdered at noonday, and on the field of battle,—a feature of original conception, which occurs in no other work of art that I remember." His memory was bad. He must have heard the story that Desaix was murdered on the field of Marengo, after coming up to save Bonaparte from destruction; and he must also have heard the story that Dundee was murdered at Killiecrankie. Mr. Hawthorne mentions that he saw, in an old volume of Colonial newspapers, "a report that General Wolfe was slain, not by the enemy, but by a shot from his own soldiers." All these reports are just as well founded as that which represents Gustavus Adolphus as having been assassinated. Harte's doubts are, as the reader can see by referring to his work, well sustained, and leave the impression that the King was killed in fair fight. We have heard a very ingenious argument in support of the proposition that Stonewall Jackson was assassinated by some of his own men,—and there is some mystery about the cause or occasion of his death.