Finally, other more imperative duties called Count Inouye home, and he was succeeded by Viscount Miura, a man of a different stamp. Then followed the murder of the Queen, with all its unhappy train of consequences. Although the crime was undoubtedly concocted by the Queen’s implacable enemy, the Tai Won Kun, the Japanese Government never sought to evade the share of responsibility imposed upon it. The tragedy was a far severer blow to Japanese interests than to those of Korea, for the Queen alive, and even still bitterly hostile to Japan, could never have worked the harm that the manner of her taking-off had caused. And, indeed, while apology for this murder from the moral point of view cannot be justified, in spite of the cruel character of the victim and of the fact that there was then visited upon her only the same treatment which she had herself given to scores and hundreds of others, when considered from the diplomatic point of view the act was even more foolish and reprehensible. The following account from Hershey[21] gives in brief, but with sufficient detail for our purposes, the events of this period:— The impolitic attempts at hasty and radical reform in Korea, which followed the outbreak of the Chino-Japanese war, were resisted by the Court party at Seoul, headed by the Queen and the Min family to which she belonged. Early in October, 1895, the Queen planned a _coup d’état_ with a view to disbanding the soldiers who had been trained by Japanese officers, and of replacing the pro-Japanese partisans of reform in the Korean Cabinet by her friends. The result was a counter-plot (in which the King’s father, the veteran conspirator Tai Won Kun, was a prime mover) to seize the King and Queen with the aim of obtaining complete control of the Korean Government in interest of the pro-Japanese and reform party. In carrying out this plot (in which the Japanese Minister Miura seems to have been an accomplice) the Queen was murdered by Japanese and Korean ruffians. “This disgusting crime,” Hershey goes on to say, “although it assured the power of the reform Cabinet for the time being, reacted upon its perpetrators, and was followed, four months later, by another equally revolting, by means of which Russia gained control of the Government of Korea. In January, 1896, there took place a slight uprising in Northern Korea, at the instigation, it was said, of pro-Russian leaders. When the major portion of the army had been sent out of the capital to suppress the rebellion, 127 Russian marines with a cannon suddenly landed at Chemulpo on February 10, and immediately entered Seoul. The next day the King, accompanied by the Crown Prince and some court ladies, fled in disguise to the Russian Legation, where he remained until February 20, 1897.”