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Assassination of Lord Mountbatten. Map showing Mullaghmore Peninsula (red) within County Sligo, where Mountbatten was killed. Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a relative of the British royal family, was assassinated on 27 August 1979 by Thomas McMahon, an Irish republican and a volunteer for the Provisional Irish Republican ...
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born Prince Louis of Battenberg; [n 1] 25 June 1900 – 27 August 1979), commonly known as Lord Mountbatten, was a British statesman, naval officer, colonial administrator and close relative of the British royal family. He was born in the United Kingdom to the ...
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The murder of the British royal and World War II hero signaled a dark period ahead for relations between England and Northern Ireland.
The gruesome 1979 IRA assassination of a beloved British royal—which took place the same day as a deadly coordinated attack on British troops—led to outrage, heartbreak and a heightening of “The Troubles,” the decades-long Northern Ireland conflict.
Part of the wreckage of Lord Mountbatten's boat the Shadow V after it had been bombed by the IRA in August 1979.
August 27, 1979, a Bank holiday, had dawned sunny, following days of rain. “Dickie” Mountbatten and some of his family who had been staying at their holiday home, Classibawn Castle near the Village of Cliffoney, County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, decided to take an outing on their boat to take in the good weather.
Fifteen minutes after setting sail, a planted bomb was activated by two members of the Provisional IRA, a paramilitary group of Irish nationalists who waged a terror campaign to drive British forces from Northern Ireland to create a united, independent nation. Known as "the Troubles," the conflict raged for 25 years before IRA and loyalist ceasefires were initiated. By 1998, the year the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement settled the conflict, more than 3,600 people had died.
“The boat was there one minute and the next minute it was like a lot of matchsticks floating on the water,” a witness told the New York Times.
The party of seven aboard the Shadow included Mountbatten, his daughter Patricia, her husband, Lord John Brabourne, their 14-year-old twins, Timothy and Nicholas, and Lord Brabourne’s mother, the dowager Lady Doreen Brabourne. Paul Maxwell, 15, a friend of the family who worked on the boat, was also on board. Mountbatten, Nicholas Brabourne and Maxwell were killed immediately. Lady Brabourne died the next day and the others survived serious injuries.
“Fifty pounds of gelignite exploded, sending showers of timber, metal, cushions, lifejackets and shoes into the air,” Andrew Lownie, author of The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, wrote for the BBC. “Then, there was a deadly silence.”
Lord Louis Mountbatten reviews cadets at the Metropolitan Police College in London, April 2, 1969.
Mountbatten was both a sentimental and symbolic target. “He was one of the most respected members of the royal family and was serving as mentor to [then] Prince Charles,” says Jeffrey Lewis, lecturer in the International Studies Program at Ohio State University.
Mountbatten was also an easy target. The bomb had been placed in his unguarded boat the night before his murder. He had been vacationing in the Irish town of Mullaghmore throughout the 1970s and had refused security detail, despite repeated threats from the Provisional IRA to assassinate him. Mountbatten had declared, “Who the hell would want to kill an old man anyway?”
Brendan O’Leary, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of A Treatise on Northern Ireland, notes that while Mountbatten could not have predicted the IRA would plant and trigger a bomb on his boat, he had been lax about his own security.
“He had been supreme allied commander in southeast Asia, and was said to have been the youngest admiral in the history of the Navy,” he says. “He was also known as the last viceroy of India, who had overseen its partition. He was therefore a very prominent public figure, but a retired man of 79, who played no role in the British security forces in Northern Ireland, and who regularly holidayed in Ireland, could not be described as a legitimate war target.”
Timothy White, a political science professor at Xavier University who teaches courses on Irish culture and politics, adds that by assassinating one of the most beloved members of the royal family, the IRA hoped to convince the British to leave Northern Ireland and allow Northern Ireland to join the Irish republic.
The coffin of Lord Mountbatten at the Westminster Abbey State funeral as members of the Royal Family, (left-right) Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Prince Charles, look on.
The August 27 attacks led to widespread fear and outrage in the region, according to Lewis.
“The indiscriminate nature of the attack led many to condemn the IRA as savage and cowardly,” he says. “At the same time, the sophistication of the bomb—it was detonated by radio remote control—coupled with the Warrenpoint ambush suggested that the IRA was becoming more dangerous and capable. This combination—savagery coupled with tactical competence—was very unsettling.”
Among the English, the reaction in Parliament, newspapers and newscasts, was outrage. O’Leary, who grew up in Northern Ireland and Sudan, points out that Mountbatten had been a war hero and important mentor to King Charles III. His killing and that of his grandchild and his daughter’s mother-in-law ”were regarded as especially outrageous.” In Ireland, he adds, there was outrage that a guest had been killed, as well as children and a woman who had no public or security force connections.
“Ulster Unionists called for increased security, and called the Republic of Ireland a safe haven for terrorists—in fact, the Irish police were able to identify and convict the organizer of the bombing of Mountbatten’s boat with forensic evidence,” O’Leary says. He adds that among those who were sympathetic to the IRA’s causes, more supported the attack of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment, which had been behind the massacre of civilians on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, than the murder of an elderly, retired grandfather and his family.
Margaret Thatcher, elected prime minister just before the assassination, saw the IRA as a criminal, rather than political, organization. She responded by withdrawing political rights associated with prisoner of war status for IRA prisoners. The IRA responded in turn with a hunger strike. The leader of the hunger strike, Irish nationalist Bobby Sands, was then elected to British Parliament but would die in prison from his hunger strike on May 5, 1981. Ultimately, White says, the murder of Mountbatten and his family signaled a raw, dark period ahead for England and Northern Ireland.
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- Lesley Kennedy
- 3 min
Aug 27, 2021 · The real history behind. The assassination of Prince Charles’s great-uncle and confidant, Lord Mountbatten, at the hands of the IRA in 1979, rocked the royal family. Andrew Lownie explains how the events unfolded and considers why Mountbatten – affectionately named ‘Dickie’ – was murdered, and whether the IRA was really behind the ...
- Elinor Evans
Dec 10, 2020 · The Duke of Cambridge named his son, Louis, after Lord Mountbatten. When he was 22, Mountbatten married Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley, an heiress and socialite with whom he had two daughters ...
- Sabrina Barr
Jul 21, 2010 · On August 27, 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten is killed when Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists detonate a 50‑pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V. Mountbatten, a war hero, elder ...
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British raj. Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten (born June 25, 1900, Frogmore House, Windsor, Eng.—died Aug. 27, 1979, Donegal Bay, off Mullaghmore, County Sligo, Ire.) was a British statesman, naval leader, and the last viceroy of India. He had an international royal-family background; his career involved extensive naval commands, the ...
