The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-06-17 00:00:00

THE

LAST HOURS OF ABDUL AZIZ.

The Times publishes the following letter (taken from the
Temps), dated Constantinople, June 5, which says :
" The day before yesterday the ex-Sultan went down
to the quay, with which three gates of the palace com-
municate. He walked about and was very excited.
Since his deposition he had frequent attacks of frenzy,
followed; by great prostration. The sentry who was in
the small garden in which the house is situated seeing
his agitation, thought it right to apprise the
gendalMtrie officer, who came up and respectfully
begged the ex-Sultan to re- enter. Abdul Aziz, as his only
reply, drew a revolver from his pocket and aimed it at
the officer. Fortunately 2 there was no discharge. The
officer, without at all losing his composure, bent down
and begged his old master again to return. Abdul Aziz
then returned to his apartments. The Colonel specially
charged with his custody was immediately informed
and repeired to the Dolma Bagtche Palace to report
what had happened. Sultan Murad was painfully
affected. He ordered the Colonel to go at once to his
uncle and ask him in his name about his health, and
tell him everything he could desire should be at his
disposal; but that in his own interest and for a time
he would do well to give up his arms. The Colonel
was also ordered to have all the gates of the ex Sultan's
residence closed, and was enjoined to have a gate
made with as little noise as possible in the wall sepa-
rating the house from the Court of the Guards. The
Sultan's habitation was thus converted into aeerison. The
Colonel immediately went to fulfil his painful and
delicate mission. He found the ex-Sultan very calm.
As lie was elaborately explaining the orders he had
received, Very well, raid Abdul Aziz, I under-
stand. You want my arms,' and taking a revolver
from his coat pocket he presented it to the
Colonel. The latter excused himself, saying he would
never presume to take an article from the Caliph's
hand. Abdul Aziz smiled and laid the revolver on a
sideboard. As the Colonel was leaving with it, the
Sultan called him back to tell him he was only imper-
fectly performing his mission. They do not want me
to kill myself, and that sabre (pointing to a splendid
yataghan suspended on the wall), why leave me that?'
The Colonel did not wait for a second invitation, took
the sabre, and withdrew. lathe night the Sultan was
very excited. Yesterday morning he fell into a rage
on seeing the foreign guard-shipe in the Thsphorue ,
decked with flags. They were celebrating Whitsun•
tide. It is suppoeed he took this for a proof of
recognition of his successor by the Foreign Govern-
ments. At any rate, he frightened those around him
by his outburst of anger. Then he got calm again,
and about nine o'clock asked for a looking-glass
and scissors, wanting, he said, to trim his beard
according to custom. His mother, who had sinister
presentiments, had very small scissors given
him, convinced that with them be could not take
his life. She soon afterwards went to him. He
was holding the glass in his left hand and with his
right he was cutting his beard. He asked her to heat
the bath. She told him she would order it. No,' he
insisted, look yourself to the thing being done, and
well done.' She had no sooner left him than he locked
the door of the saloon in which he was. The slaves
not seeing him come out, and not hearing him call them
by clapping his hands, as he was accustomed to do
every instant, became alarmed an' informed his wives.
One of them threw herself against the door and en-
treated him to open it. No reply. Terrified, she had
it broken open, and the Sultan was found stretched on
the sofa, covered with blood and dying. His mother
seized him by the arms, endeavouring to close with her
hands the wounds he had inflicted on his arms. A
terrible scene followed then in the house in which was
expiring miserably that man who the day before
was the absolute master of a great Empire.
The women's shrieks being heard on the other side of
the Bosphorus, the sailors of the ironclads moored just
opposite the house ran as fast as they could to give
help. The Minister of War, Hussein Avni Pasha, who
lives close by was soon en the spot. Several medical
men from the villaze offered their services to the un-
fortunate Abdul kziz. It was in vain. He soon
breathed his last without uttering a word. Near him,
covered with blood, were the scissors he had used to
destroy himself. His Mother, when he was declared to
be dead, not wishing to survive him, rushed to the
window, and it was with the greatest difficulty that
she was prevented from accomplishing her aim. -She is
still being watched:
"Still the Ministers sent messengers in all direc-
tions to fetch all the medical men they could find to
corroborate the death. This was a judicious measure,
as the public could not help saying and believing that
the ex-Sultan bad been assassinated. The customs of
the country induce such a belief. Sultans in the past
have never survived the'r fall, and they expected
even that Abdul Aziz would soon disappear. This
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esaexpectation was unjust. It is averred that the Sultan
Murad would never have consented to sign the Arret
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certificate of death is signed by 19 medical men, several
o
them are the names of
M. Merrion, who represents here worthily the science
and scrupulous honour of our great French medical body.
His name is enough to give supreme authority to this
document. His veracity is further attested by Mg.
Dickson and Sotto, the former the physician to the
English, the latter to the Austrian embassy, as well as
by other doctors too well known among us to admit of
a suspicion respecting their verdict. That Abdul Aziz
tmoaarskseadsstinhaatte it would
ithh have been
wounds
killed himself is an incontestable fact. Be it also re-
mndasterhilasllyboidmy bears.
Saveral assassins would lave been necessary. Abdul
Az'z was strong. He would have defended himself, and
he was in his harem with hismother among his wives, his
chil,lren, his slaves, most of whom would have covered
him with their bodies, and all of whom would have
screamed, called for help, and g iven evidence now agsinst
the murderers. It must be further noted that the Mies-
sul mans, if they have often killed their Sultans, have
always revolted from shedding their blood; they have
got rid of them by strangulation. This is, or rather
let us hope it was, the rule. It is iniquitous to charge
the new Sultan or his Ministers with a crime which
they have nut committed, and it s a duty in so grave
a case to prove their innocence with all possible care,
or, in the contrary case, to establish their guilt.
"The body was taken to the neighbouring Corps de
Garde. It is a Turkish custom to carry dead bodies at
w
once out of the houses in which they have expired. It
ould require a master in the art of writing to paint
that lugubrious scene—the body of a Sultan stretched
on a coarse mattress, and covered by a cotton shroud
in a smoky guard-house, to rep:oduce the terrible
aspect of this bloody chamber, of the desolate young
women and children of this family plunged into
despair and mourning."

The Special CoTrcspondent of The Times also gives the
followlug account of the suicide of Abdul A ziz

. . . "Already throughout Thursday and Friday he
had, it is said, given proofs of mental alienation, and
on Friday, at the time of the new Sultan's progress to
Stamboul, he had addressed some of the crew of an
ironclad anchored close to the Palace, asking them why
they did not fire On the sacrilegious usurper He was
seen walking restlessly up and down his apartment,
took little or no food for two days, and seemed plungtd
into such depths of s wage melancholy, that—as on
Saturday he aimed his revolver stone of the sentries at;
his door—the people of his household deemed it ex-
pedient to remove all wcapans beyond his reach. Early
on Sunday raorsing he parted with his women at the
harem and shut hia s'elf up all alone in his apart-
ment, locking and bolting the two doors which separate
the harem from the selamlick, the women fr nn the
men's apartment. All was silence till about 10 a m.,
when the women, who could see their lord from their
windows at his toilet, saw him fail on a sofa; and rais-
ing an alarm, slle.2eeded, with the aid of the persons
summoned by their cries, in breaking open the doors,
when the Sultan was found lying half across the sofa,
with his feet on the fiber, in a great pool of bl)od, and
with the traces of recent death. He had, it seems,
secreted a small but sharp-pointed pair of embroidery
scissors with which he was wont to trim his beard, or
which he had borrowed fromthe Wide, his mother, fir
that avowed purpose; lie had with it very dili-
gently cut off his bear I close to the skin, leaving
only the thick moustache on the upper lip, probably to
disarm any suepicien of those who were watching the
operation from the harem windows, or possibly to
express by that outward sign the sense of his degrada
tion and deposition, and had then deliberately gone to
work, endeavouring to cut the veins of both his arms
at the elbow, jobbing the scissors with great deter-
mination at both arms, till he succeeded in severing the