On this date in 1852, a 63-year-old Jesuit priest was garroted outside Madrid’s Toledo Gate for attempting to assassinate Queen Isabella II.
Only five days before, Martin Merino y Gomez (Spanish Wikipedia link) had slipped into the palace wearing his clerical robes, and planted a dagger in the Queen’s side. (Non-fatally; her corset partly shielded the blow.)
Despite some speculation that he might have been connected to some more elaborate plot, investigation found him to be a lone nut, “crazed with Liberal doctrines, disordered vanity, and bilious disease.”
Neither a clear motive nor a real link to any other actor was ever established. Merino died as a lone nut, and then his parricidal remains were burned to ashes and scattered to the winds.
On this day..
- 1935: David Maskill Blake, wedding's eve murderer
- 1391: Agnese Visconti and Antonio da Scandiano, adulterous lovers?
- 1885: August Reinsdorf and Emil Kuchler, Kaiser Wilhelm I bombers
- 1940: Peter Barnes and James McCormack, the last IRA men hanged
- 1896: Benjamin Ratcliff, school shooter
- 1545: Cornelis Appelman and Willem Zeylmaker, Batenburgers
- 1931: The Longhua Martyrs and the Five Martyrs of the League of Left-Wing Writers
- 1902: Privates Edmond Dubose and Lewis Russell, deserters to the Philippine Resistance
- 1579: Thomas Sherwood, Catholic martyr
- 1714: Various rebel slaves in the Cape Colony
- 1920: The White Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak
- 1868: Susan, a 13-year-old