Double Timing Wife Part 2

Yet, should anyone have been thinking seriously of the archduke's security on that day in June 1914? The answer is yes, because this was the heyday of assassins. In peaceful Britain, Queen Victoria survived no fewer than seven known attempts on her life. In 1861 Russia's Tsar Aleksandr II was killed in the fifth attempt on his life. The French president had been assassinated in 1894, two prime ministers of Bulgaria in 1895 and 1907, Emperor Franz Joseph's wife Elizabeth in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900 and King George I of Greece only fifteen months before the fateful day in Sarajevo. Even closer to Sarajevo, the king and queen of Serbia had been murdered in their bedroom by a clique of their own officers in 1903. They were shot several times, hacked at by sabres and an axe and the queen's partly dismembered body was tossed over the balcony into the garden below. It was altogether a messy double murder for a gang of professional soldiers.

Double Timing Wife Part 2

The archduke and his wife were in the second car, a 1911 Gräf und Stift double phaeton luxury limousine owned by Lt Colonel Count Franz von Harrach, who was in the front passenger seat. At the wheel was Harrach's best driver, Leopold Lojka. Seated in the jump seat facing the imperial couple was General Oskar Potiorek, military governor of the province.