“It was me, I did it,” said 18-year-old Edward Oxford, a little confused but firm, as he lay in the middle of the road, with random passers-by sitting on him. Instead of him shaking with fear of the future, they were shivering with horror: they had just seen him shoot at the open carriage of a pregnant Queen Victoria and her husband Albert. Had he hit her? Is she alive? They did not know. The horses spooked and galloped instinctively down the street with the royal carriage in tow. Edward only found out that he had missed when he was in custody awaiting trial for treason. Will he die now?
His mother hoped that the jury would be merciful. Edward was the third of her seven children and she was very attached to him. He may have left his job as a publican at the beginning of May 1840 for no reason, but he was a good boy.
He lived with her, but she didn’t know him. She did not know where he spent his days, much less what was going through his mind, such as the thought of how easy it would be to kill Queen Victoria. He had once noticed that she was riding around in an open carriage with only two attendants, so killing her really shouldn’t be such a problem.
The more he thought about it, the more his imagination became intertwined with reality. He was already having trouble distinguishing between the two worlds. When his room was later searched, a list of the intricate rules of a military group called Young England was found. The rules stipulated, among other things, that members of the group had to be armed with a pistol, a sabre, a rifle and a dagger. Edward also had in his possession letters exchanged between officers and members of the group.
But when the police tried to find them, they found that they were living only in Edward’s imagination, but they were alive enough for Edward to do everything they did. Learning to shoot, for example. After days spent at the shooting range, he was so good that he had little doubt that he would succeed in hitting the four-months-pregnant Queen, who celebrated her 21st birthday on 24 May 1840.
He began to observe her closely to learn about her habits. The week before 10 June, which he chose as the day of the big test, he bought 50 bullet caps from a former classmate’s shop and asked where he could get bullets and gunpowder. They had the latter there, but he had to go to the dugout to get ammunition.
On 10 June 1840, at around 4 pm, it was ready. He stood at a chosen spot on Constitution Hill Road and waited. Minutes passed and the Queen was not there. Then he heard the tramp of horses. As usual with the royal couple, there were no security guards.
The carriage drove past his hiding place and he stepped out of the shadows. He fired twice, once with one gun and once with the other. Passers-by panicked, but did not run away. He was quickly disarmed and subdued and detained by the police, although no one really knew who he was shooting at.
It later turned out that the Queen had taken her away unharmed, and no bullets were found. Now Edward Oxford insisted that the guns contained only gunpowder and could not possibly have injured her.
The police spent almost a month investigating before the trial of the country’s most notorious criminal at the time began. On 9 July, the courtroom was packed.
Oxford sat there as if he had no interest in the whole thing. When the prosecution witnesses spoke against him, he did not respond. He remained calm even when it was the defence’s turn. Members of his family and friends testified that he had always appeared to them to be a bit of a weakling and that his father and grandfather, both alcoholics, had also shown signs of mental illness.
Although Oxford’s father died when Edward was seven, he was forced to live in an environment full of domestic violence until then, as his mother testified. Edward was always a bit odd, she said, crying for no reason and prone to outbursts of hysterical laughter.
As the Queen survived and the defence had prepared well, the jury the next day found Oxford not guilty and the judge gave him the usual punishment in such cases – he will be imprisoned until Her Majesty’s will is otherwise. Or else, he sentenced him to life in a mental hospital, because there was no indication that the Queen would be willing to forgive him. She was furious that he had not been beheaded.
Edward Oxford – A small-minded polyglot
A few weeks later, the 18-year-old moved into his new home, Bethlem Psychiatric Clinic. No one was involved with him. Fourteen years later, someone wrote in his file: “There is not a single annotation on this case and no notes on the state of mind he was in when he was admitted, but from the reports of the hospital staff and those close to him, it can be concluded that he behaved remarkably well at all times.”
He was indeed a model patient. Although he had only finished primary school, he had now started his studies. He had learnt French, German and Italian so well that he spoke them fluently, and had also mastered Spanish, Greek and Latin. He painted a lot and played the violin. He beat all the patients at chess.
It turns out that the small-minded young man is in fact an extremely bright and artistically talented man. “He now regrets his action, which was probably due to his excessive self-conceit and his desire to become at least famous, if not to be famous,” his doctors in Bethlem wrote.
Despite this, his requests for release were regularly refused. Bethlem Hospital was his home for 24 years when, in April 1864, the men’s ward at Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital opened and Edward, aged 42, was transferred there.
On admission, doctors wrote that he appeared to be mentally well, but physically he had digestive problems and swelling in his legs, and that he had been suffering from ureteritis since his arrival. He thought he had picked it up in Bethlehem when he drank some strange things. But he soon recovered and was able to live effectively in his new institution: he worked as a woodcarver and painter.
It was more than obvious that he had not been a danger to anyone for a long time, but it was also clear that he was unlucky because the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, who could have pardoned him, was in politics even when he shot the Queen. His successor, Gathorne Hardy, was not burdened by the past, but in 1867 he decided that Oxford was free to live, but not in England. He must go to one of her overseas colonies and never return.
Towards the end of October 1867, 45-year-old Edward Oxford was free again for the first time in 27 years. He chose Australia as his new home. He spent a month in England under the supervision of a Broadmoor butler before boarding the HMS Suffolk on 27 November 1867 and leaving his homeland for good.
He was now free, but had spent the last 27 years behind the high fences of psychiatric institutions. There, in Melbourne, where he knew no one who could come to his aid, he seemed doomed to fail, but once again he proved himself to be a capable man. He made the most of his second chance.
He married a widow with two children and started a family. He became a church elder in Melbourne, wrote newspaper articles drawing attention to the intolerable living conditions in the slums, and in 1888 published his book Lights and Shadows of Life in Melbourne.
He signed as John Freeman. Freeman translates as free. He symbolically chose the name Free John for his new name, and being free also meant that he never spoke about his past.
Even before his death, his wife did not know that she was married to the most notorious British criminal of his time, although he was far from the only assassin of Queen Victoria. After him, several other people tried to kill her. Most of them were declared unfit, but none of them got a second chance, as did Edward Oxford, who died in 1900 as John Freeman, after having spent 33 fruitful years of a free life in Australia.
Incompetent but effective
Queen Victoria died not long after him, having survived all the assassinations against her, but not so lucky was the 69-year-old Spanish Prime Minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, a trusted adviser to the dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.
As Blanco was seen as Franco’s successor and was expected to continue his policies, members of the Basque separatist organisation ETA decided to remove him. The assassination was one of the most spectacular in history, although the assassins were more lucky than clever.
In 1972, they first decided to kidnap Blanco. They watched him and realised that he went to Mass regularly, but when they began to consider what to do, they concluded that it was actually easier to kill him than to kidnap him.
Then they watched him for months. The Prime Minister’s car stopped at the same place at the same time every morning. This is where he would die, they decided, and began to forge a plan so complex that it was almost doomed from the start.
Late in November 1973, the young foursome in charge of preparations knocked on the door of the owner of the building next to where the Prime Minister stopped every morning. We were sculptors and we would rent a basement flat, they explained. The landlord gave them a close look and rented them an apartment.
It wasn’t very clever of him to remember them well, but the foursome were light years away from trained terrorists. The young adventurous idealists who had been stealing and breaking into military outposts, taking weapons and ammunition, knew nothing about what they were doing now.
But that didn’t stop them from digging a tunnel to the place where Blanc’s car usually stopped on the way to the church. On 7 December 1973, in one of the rooms of the rented flat, they broke through a wall and began to tunnel through the sticky earth under the road, without a single one of them dreaming of tunnelling. Everything they should have known before, they learned from their own mistakes.
For a start, it was only in practice that they realised that the flails they had brought from the Basque Country were decidedly oversized. One of them suffered from claustrophobia, but only realised this in the tunnel. They had not checked where the sewer ran, but they had broken through it. The small room they were digging out of smelled like a septic tank.
The dug-up soil was put in rubbish bags, but they could not take it away. The room was soon full. Here and there the tunnel collapsed a little. Finally, they went to a bookshop and found a manual for tunnel construction, but the instructions were obviously not suitable for such small tunnels because they did not work in practice.
But they persisted. They obviously realised that they were not the real masters, because they had a gun on them all the time. They were not worried about being found out, but about being ambushed. They would rather commit suicide than suffocate. But that would have been easy to do anyway. When they were digging a seven-metre space for explosives, they inadvertently made sure that their lungs were full of poisonous gases.
Their skin was green and oily. They were smoking. The room stank. But they lasted eight days and finished the tunnel. Then, on 15 December, they met with their comrades from ETA, who provided explosives. Eighty kilograms of it were loaded into the boot of a car in the Basque Country and brought to Madrid.
They now had to carry 50 kilograms of high-explosive Goma-2, stolen from the State armoury, and 30 kilograms of low explosives into the basement apartment. In the trunk they also had 200 metres of detonator fuse cord.
The explosives were planted in a designated area in the tunnel, just below where the Prime Minister’s car stopped on the road. A fuse was attached and dragged into the apartment. There, it was combined with an electric cable and the two were pulled up Claudio Coello Street.
They have decided to connect the power cable to the power source in the suitcase right now. When it is announced that the Carrera Blanca is standing over an explosive, whoever is holding the case will simply switch on the electricity and trigger the explosion.
Theoretically it should have worked, the only problem was that the quartet was not only barefoot when building the tunnels, but also when handling explosives, and so knew nothing about electricity.
Where is the Prime Minister?
But this was not the reason for postponing the action until 20 December. With the new US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in town, Madrid was overrun by police. The foursome passed the time by watching The Day of the Jackal, a film in which a professional assassin, the Jackal, plots to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle.
The big day has finally arrived. Will the crazy plan work? On 20 December at 9am, Carrero Blanco left his house and went to Mass. A few minutes later, he was in the Jesuit church and an ETA member was not far away, suitcase in hand.
But at 9.25 a boy suddenly appeared. Did he have any matches, he asked the man with the suitcase. He panicked and so did his colleagues, who were standing around like electricians doing a routine check of the wiring. They found those unlucky matches and got rid of the guy.
A minute or two later, the story repeated itself, but with a new guy who wanted fire. The tension escalated and so did the confusion. They were expecting Blanc’s car at around 9.30 and the time was getting dangerously close, with some children hanging around. They shook off this other boy and waited.
At 9.30, Carrero Blanco left the church and got into the car with the bodyguard and the driver. The driver headed down a one-way street and then slowed down right in front of an ETE car, which for who knows why its members had decided that it should be parked parallel to some random car.
Suddenly, there was an explosion. The ETA member with the suitcase suddenly disappeared, and so did Blanc’s car. Other ETE members started shouting that there had been a gas explosion. There was complete panic.
The first police report from the field to headquarters was that a gas had exploded. Had the Prime Minister’s car been damaged, the presumed people wondered. No, nothing had happened to it, they reported from the field. “There are five or six cars damaged. Two more seriously. The injured appear to have been taken to Montesa hospital …” they continued.
The headquarters asked again if anything had happened to the Prime Minister. His car was nearby, so they needed to make sure he was OK. The field police were told once again to check on his car, and once again they repeated that he was fine. He was nowhere to be seen, only the escort car was damaged.
One traffic policeman reported that he had driven past before the explosion, but the headquarters sent a Terrain to the Prime Minister’s home to check whether his car was at the door.
But … We have just heard that one of the cars ended up on the roof of the church, the SUVs reported. A firefighter is coming down from it right now. There were three passengers in the car. “It seems that the car that went up, that was sent to the roof by the explosion … was the car of the Prime Minister! I can’t confirm that yet. He appears to be dead,” the police official’s report states.
“The car on the roof is the Prime Minister’s car! It seems to be dead,” they finally confirmed. Four amateur ETE terrorists had set off an explosion so powerful that it sent the car five floors into the air. It flew over the top of the church, slightly damaging its edge, and landed on the other side of the building on the roof of the second floor of the annexe.
There was, of course, no doubt that Carrero Blanco, his bodyguard and driver were dead at the scene. In the middle of the Claudio Colleo road, there was a huge hole, which immediately filled up with water from the burst pipes. The car accompanying Blanco was destroyed and the trio inside injured. A taxi was also destroyed and around 20 cars were damaged.
The four ETA members went about their business in an amateurish way, but they knew they wanted to kill Blanco and did not want innocent victims. They were young, idealistic, committed, resigned to the danger, cunning and righteous, but utterly incompetent.
They have put themselves in constant danger, quite unnecessarily. They were constantly worried that they would lose their guns, even though they did not need them. They chose to kill Prime Minister Blanc in an extremely complicated explosion, even though they could have achieved the same result with, say, a car bomb, without having to dig a tunnel or expose themselves.
All four assassins escaped. Franco formally blamed six ETA members for the murder and took revenge on the others. Some believe that this assassination led Spain down a more democratic path, because Carrero Blanco was irreplaceable, others that it would have taken that path in any case.
The ETI has already disagreed on whether or not to carry out the assassination. In the end, an internal split emerged, creating two groups, ETA (m) or ETA (military), which, as a small clandestine organisation, wanted to achieve its goals only through armed rebellion, and ETA (p-m) or ETA (politico-military), which fought for Basque independence through social policy and armed rebellion.
Attack with a tricycle
Ten years earlier, in 1963, in Greece, a crazy plan to assassinate was not undertaken by an anti-state organisation, but by a parastatal with close links to the government. Its target was 51-year-old MEP Grigoris Lambrakis, who had worked as a doctor before entering Parliament in 1961.
The Greeks knew it well. In his day, he was a member of the national long jump team, but now he was a pacifist who constantly stressed the importance of peace. He was a leftist in Parliament, and in those days in Greece it was not wise to be a leftist.
On 21 April 1963, for example, Lambrakis and a crowd of people set off on a 42-kilometre march from Athens to the Marathon. The police dispersed the crowd and many marchers were beaten or imprisoned, including the later composer Mikis Theodorakis. Lambrakis, because of his parliamentary immunity, was unable to do anything, but he walked the route to the finish line alone, holding an open banner that read: HELLAS or GREECE.
A photo of him soon became iconic among left-wing politicians, and he became the idol of left-wing activists who had been persecuted since the Second World War. But he also became an increasingly sharp thorn in the side of the right-wing, who did everything they didn’t like under the guise of fighting communism.
But Lambrakis went on and on and on, protesting against nuclear armaments and calling for peace. The right had had enough of him. He had to be silenced, and if there was no other way, then by force. The police and the army had no objections, but they had to take care of their image.
Lambrakis was a prominent and popular member of society, so they were not allowed to touch him themselves, but they could find someone to do it on their behalf. They hired two thugs from the far right to deal with Lambrakis discreetly and with style.
Except that they have never heard of the words discreet and style. They grabbed a stick and got into a tricycle, or tricycle, which only from a distance resembled a car. They went to the place where Lambrakis gave his anti-war speech in Thessaloniki on 22 May 1963. While he was standing in front of the crowd, the Greek Anti-War Committee learned that the duo were on their way and under police protection, but did nothing.
There were a lot of people and even more police, but the duo that drove there were supposed to be blinded by the police, and they made it to their target without any problems. The two thugs were about to hit Lambrakis on the head and run away, but because they were not very bright, they forgot that they would have to slow down the car to hit him.
They both moved towards him at pedestrian speed and eventually actually managed to hit him with a bat. Discreetly, in full view of everyone at the rally. And they were not few. Lambrakis fell unconscious on the ground and they tried to escape.
Now they realise that it won’t go as planned. True, the police did not bother them, but his supporters were not part of the state establishment. They chased after the tricycle and it could not accelerate fast enough to escape. People dragged them to the ground and did what the police should have done – they held them back.
Lambrakis died of brain injuries five days later, and the police and army’s plan to sweep the case under the carpet collapsed when the case fell into the hands of young Christos Sartzekias. He was ordered to prove how Lambrakis’ death was an accident, and he decided to find the truth.
The killers, Emannouel Emannouilides and Spyro Gotzamanis, who had to be arrested by the police, are now before a judge. Although Christos Sartzekias knew that death might await him too if he poked his head in the hornet’s nest, he exposed the involvement of the police top brass and exposed a secret right-wing organisation that was doing the dirty work for the police, such as contract killings.
The resulting unrest has forced the Prime Minister to resign and put several key police officers behind bars. But in the end, as expected, nothing happened. In December 1966, a jury unanimously acquitted most of the accused and convicted only three, and even these to low sentences.
But people have not forgotten. Half a million people turned out for Lambrakis’ funeral. They shouted pro-state slogans and slammed the right-wing para-state organisations that they blamed for his death. The slogan “Lambrakis lives!” continued to resonate long after he was dead. A few hours after his death, the composer Mikis Theodorakis founded a youth movement with his name and the letter Z, which stands for Live.
Comedians by force of circumstances
Apart from Hitler and his close associates, there were not many people who mourned the death of Reinhard Heydrich, the man with a heart of steel, as the architect of the Holocaust was called. In 1942, British intelligence contacted the Czech resistance in order to stop him, and what followed was a grotesquerie that was unparalleled.
Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčik were young and brave soldiers, but it is still not clear why they were chosen to break Heydrich’s lifeline.
It was 27 May 1942 and Josef Gabčik was sweating profusely under his coat. He didn’t need it to protect him from the cold, he wore it to hide his Sten machine gun underneath. His comrade Jan Kubiš stood on the other side of the road, equally nervous. He was carrying two bombs in his bag.
Not far from them, Josef Valcik was watching out for Reinhard Heydrich’s car. The trio knew that the driver would have to slow down on the bend or he would not be able to catch up, and this would be the chance to kill him. The time was 10.29 when Kubiš and Gabčik saw the sign that Valcik had sent them with a mirror – Heydrich was coming.
The driver slowed down as he should have. Heydrich’s Mercedes was now only three metres away from Gabcik. The young man seized the opportunity: he threw off his coat, pointed the machine gun at Heydrich and pulled the trigger. And nothing happened.
The mechanism has locked. Gabčík usually carried vegetables for his rabbits under his coat, but when he was carrying a disassembled machine gun underneath it, it got a little stuck. He had not inspected the machine gun before he assembled it, and when he had, he had not tested it.
“Stop!” shouted the very much alive Heydrich. He grabbed his gun, pointed it at Gabcik and pulled the trigger. And again nothing happened. Heydrich had no problems with the vegetables, but he did have problems with the bullets – the gun was empty.
His driver could have pressed the accelerator and froze her, but then at least someone would have done something sensible, and since this was not the moment to make wise decisions, the driver pressed the brake.
Gabčik was hurriedly clearing vegetables for the rabbits with his machine gun, when Kubiš entered the scene. Nobody saw him, but he easily threw a bomb at the car. But that day was not his day either. The bomb exploded by the right rear wheel and Heydrich was still alive, even though he had been hit in the back by a piece of metal from the car casing.
Apparently completely out of his mind, Heydrich now turned his empty gun on Kubiš. Gabčik, meanwhile, gave up on his “vegetable” machine gun, threw it away and started running. But Heydrich was not yet finished with his wise decisions. He sent a chauffeur after him. He was faster than Gabchik and caught him, but Gabchik shot him in the leg. With what? With the gun he was carrying. Why didn’t he shoot Heydrich with it? Because he was Gabčík.
Meanwhile, Kubiš swung himself onto his bike and raced down the hill, his face streaming blood. He was standing too close to the explosion, but the flying metal fragments also injured him.
Valcik, who had told the duo that Heydrich was coming, disappeared, and the comedy-like drama continued for the infamous SS man. He collapsed on the ground, bleeding from a hole in his back. A passing woman recognised him. “Heydrich! Jesus Mary!” she screamed in horror.
The hospital was less than a kilometre away, but he had no driver to take him there. The ambulance never came. Passers-by stopped their cars. The first one who drove past, a baker, refused to take the wounded man with him when he saw the SS uniform. He made the excuse that he didn’t have time.
The other did not have that option because a Czech policeman forced him to cooperate, but he took his revenge. With a bleeding Heydrich in the passenger seat, he took a wrong turn and returned to the starting point. The sitting Nazi then said he would rather lie down, but he stopped the van and slowly made room for Heydrich in the back. He had to lie on his stomach because of his injury. The driver pulled out and drove the Nazi to a nearby hospital only half an hour after he was injured.
Heydrich died a week later due to the complications that followed, and it remains a mystery to this day why the intelligence officers chose such mediocre soldiers as Kubiš and Gabčik to kill such an infamous SS man.
During the training in England, Kubiš scored only five points out of ten, while Gabčik managed to score six. When their ability to handle explosives was assessed, Gabčik was described as “slow to practice and slow to react”. His knowledge of the effect of vegetables on the action of machine guns was not tested, but despite the comical complications, the action ended successfully.
