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(#9) Elizabeth I of England
- Notable Figure
Queen Elizabeth I of England caught a lot of Catholic-flak for her Protestantism. On several occasions, those wishing to see Catholicism restored to England sought to install Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, to the throne and kill Elizabeth to clear the way. However, Elizabeth's agents of espionage always remained a step ahead of the competition.
In another thwarted attempt, the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, was discovered by Elizabeth's secretary of state, Francis Walsingham. His surveillance led to the discovery of correspondences describing the takeover plan leading all the way back to Mary. Throckmorton was tortured and killed, and Mary was locked up. The Spanish, also motivated to bring Catholicism back to England, were tied to the plot and all ambassadors were banished.
Then conspirators were at it again in 1586 - this time headed by conspirator Anthony Babington, who gave his name to the failed Babington Plot. The uncovering of a second plot against Elizabeth resulted in the execution of Mary, who had previosuly been imprisoned. Elisabeth's top spy, Walsingham, sent in a double agent to carry messages to and from Mary, thus entrapping her and implicating her in the ongoing threats against the queen.
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(#6) Franklin D. Roosevelt
- US President
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, a group of powerful industrialists - armed with the dangerous idea that their coming president was not in fact the answer for their ailing country - began a plot to overthrow the president-elect. The group (allegedly including JP Morgan) stashed away millions of dollars and weapons while ruminating on how a fascist regime should seize control of the US government. They believed that absolute power was the only way to lift the nation out of the Great Depression.
The paranoid clique of power brokers attempted to enlist a popular Marine Corps General, Smedley Butler, to recruit an army loyal enough to him to execute the coup d'état. Instead, Butler reported the indecent proposal to Congress and an investigation ensued. Nobody was prosecuted as a result of the investigation, but several accounts including that of William Dodds, US Ambassador to Germany, indicated that well-heeled industrialists were colluding with Germans to overthrow the US Democracy and install a fascist dictatorship. Of course, FDR was re-elected and the rest is history.
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(#4) Gunpowder Plot
- Military Conflict
Many Britons still celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Day on November 5, the anniversary of the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when King James I and all of Parliament almost suffered the blast of dozens of barrels of gunpowder planted beneath the House of Lords.
A group of Catholics led by Robert Catesby had planned the insurrection for a year with the intent of overthrowing King James I, an anti-Papist. The conspirators rented a cellar at the House of Lords and rolled in over 30 barrels of gunpowder. When Parliament was called to order on November 5, the plan was to blow King James I and the entire government to bits.
One conspirator got cold feet on November 4 and urged the politician Lord Monteagle to steer clear of the House of Lords on November 5. Monteagle reported the mysterious message to police, and on the eve of the plot, a search turned up Guy Fawkes, who had been charged with detonating the rudimentary explosives. Fawkes confessed under torture in the Tower of London and all implicated were killed - some after a trial and some before.
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(#7) Napoleon Bonaparte
- Military Commander
Napoleon Bonaparte didn't begin executing his ambitious takeover of Europe until 1803 - three years after the plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise. At the time of the 1800 plot, Napoleon, as First Consul of France, was on a speedy trajectory toward gaining absolute control of the French government, but his dissenters aimed to stop him in his tracks.
The conspirators plotted to park an explosive-filled barrel, AKA Machine Infernale, that would detonate and spray shrapnel at the motorcade of carriages escorting Napoleon to the opera on Christmas Eve. A plotter who was to signal his collaborator when to light the fuse panicked, so the plan unraveled. The bomb went off too late, killing many including an innocent 14-year-old girl who had been paid to keep an eye on the carriage holding the Machine Infernale - she thought it was a barrel of grain.
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(#1) Adolf Hitler
- Military Commander
Surely, either you or someone you know has said: "If I could go back in time, I'd kill Hitler." However, it turns out he wasn't an easy man to assassinate. There are over 20 documented plots to take down the Fuhrer between 1934 and 1944, but two in particular stand out because he escaped by pure luck.
Most famously, he survived a plot on July 20th known as Operation Valkyrie, in which Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators planted a bomb near a conference room table at Hitler's hideout, the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. It went off, but had been coincidentally repositioned behind a table leg that happened to be sturdy enough to shield Hitler from its full impact. The bomb injured six, four of whom eventually died, and singed Hitler’s pants. The sophisticated conspirators had begun their attempts to kill Hitler in 1943 when Nazi war efforts were deteriorating, and they felt Germany needed to pivot toward a post-Hitler, post-war footing.
The other infamous attempt involved Johann Georg Elser, a German worker and feverish opponent of Nazism, who prepared a bomb in 1939 and carried out intricate, obsessive plans to assassinate Hitler. He hollowed out a hole in a pillar near a podium where Hitler was to give a speech on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch and timed the explosion for what he thought would be a midway point in the oratory. Alas, the blast happened 13 minutes too late, but had Hitler still been delivering the speech, the ceiling would have collapsed on him. Seven died from the explosion.
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(#3) Yalta Conference
- Event
The Nazi war effort had begun to crack by 1943, so desperate times called for desperate measures. Enter Operation Long Jump: an alleged German plan to kill allied leaders Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in Iran.
Russian agents have been credited with thwarting the German assassins before they could execute their brazen plan, and the Russian media loved to trumpet the heroic triumph of successfully saving Stalin and his frenemies. British and American intelligence considered the Russian report to be baloney, maintaining that it never actually happened.
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About This Tool
There have been many failed or successful assassinations in history, which have great significance in different periods of each country. In human history, conflicts and even wars between various political systems or countries have never been interrupted, and assassinations occupy a very extreme and important position. In a flash of lightning, a successful murder would change history.
Assassinations have been used as a conventional method to change the direction of political development and rewrite history. In the history of many countries, many political leaders have suffered murder plots. The random tool lists 10 famous leaders in history who survived threats.
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