Has an heir ever made the country believe the current ruler died in order to take over the throne?

Question

Before the invention of the semaphore and the telegraph, a message couldn't travel faster than the speed of a horse (or maybe a messenger pigeon or something along those lines - still pretty slow).

Has there ever been a situation in history where a ruler of a country left for war/attended foreign business far from their country, and an heir made the citizens believe the ruler was dead in order to take over the throne? Maybe he paid a messenger to pretend to carry the message of death?

These would be instances of taking over the country by using misinformation, not assassination.

Answer 1

Yes. King John of England attempted to take the throne from Richard I while he was on crusade. Richard's delayed return was due to the fact that he had been taken prisoner by Leopold V, Duke of Austria, and then handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. John, in the meantime, took advantage of his brother's imprisonment, gathering supporters around him and scheming with Philip II of France. He also

began to assert that his brother was dead or otherwise permanently lost.

Although Richard had named his nephew, Arthur Duke of Brittany, as his heir before leaving for the crusade, Arthur was only a child and John managed to gather around him leading nobles who recognised him as heir. In order to placate John and get his help in raising the ransom money,

Archbishop Walter urged Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and the regency council to adopt a conciliatory policy towards John....Eleanor and the magnates took Hubert's advice and negotiated a truce with John. He agreed to surrender his castles to his mother and if they were unable to get Richard back, he would become king.

Richard, of course, did eventually return upon payment of a huge ransom. John promptly fled to France but was later forgiven by Richard. In 1196, Richard again named Arthur as his heir but he changed his mind on his deathbed in 1199 and named John instead, probably because he felt Arthur was too young to be king and to command the support needed to hold onto the Angevin empire. Arthur subsequently 'disappeared' (1203), with John being the prime suspect in his nephew's murder.

Answer 2

Although he was not an heir to the French throne, general Claude François de Malet attempted a coup in France, in 1812. After escaping from captivity, he informed the National Guard that Napoleon had died in Russia. He succedeed to release two generals, arrested a few others and tried to seize the power in Paris. The same day, he presented letters to Colonel Pierre Doucet that stated Napoleon had died on 7 October. However Doucet had knowledge of letters written by Napoleon after that date and went suspicious.

Shortly after, Malet was arrested and then executed.

Article from wikipedia : Malet coup of 1812

Answer 3

I'm not sure if this counts or not, since it wasn't a monarchy, the successor actually thought the ruler was dead initially (as a result of the detonation of the bomb that he had planted,) and it also wasn't in the Middle Ages, but Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg comes to mind.

In what was probably the closest an assassination plot came to succeeding against Hitler, Stauffenberg planted a bomb in a meeting he attended with Hitler in 1944 and then left the meeting due to receiving a planned telephone call. The device did detonate, at which point Stauffenberg assumed Hitler was dead and activated a plan known as Operation Valkyrie, which allowed Stauffenberg and his accomplices to briefly take over control of most of the German government.

Unfortunately, the conference took place in an above-ground conference room instead of the normal underground bunker due to the weather, so the pressure from the blast was not contained within the room and, thus, was not as deadly. Hitler was injured, but survived. Since the plot was already underway when he found out that Hitler had survived, Stauffenberg pressed for it to continue and attempted to deceive others into believing that Hitler was, in fact, dead.

However, since Hitler was not actually dead, the plot began to fall apart within a few hours as news slowly spread of Hitler's survival. Ultimately, the plot failed and Stauffenberg was executed about 12 hours after the detonation of the bomb. But, for a few hours, he and his accomplices did control much of Nazi Germany due to making people think Hitler was dead.

This coup attempt was the plot of the 2008 movie Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise.

Answer 4

Another example was the (Byzantine) Roman Emperor John Komnenos. This was done according to some sources (Runciman, I think, but Wikipedia does not seem to agree) with the explicit consent of his dying predecessor and father Alexios Komnenos. Afraid that Alexios's daughter and son-in-law would try to stage a coup when Alexios died, John took his father's signet while his father was still dying but before he was dead, and rode to the palace where the people acclaimed him emperor. (His father did not in fact die until the next day.)

This is probably a little cheap in that he was already co-emperor, but while that was certainly more than a mere technicality, it was not really going to be a guarantee of succession (and his brother-in-law did attempt a coup a few months later).