Draga was nine years older than the king, unpopular with Belgrade society, well known for her allegedly numerous sexual liaisons, and widely believed to be infertile.

So intense was the opposition to Mašin among the political classes that the king found it impossible for a time to recruit suitable candidates for senior posts.

Opposition to the union seemed to subside somewhat for a time upon the publication of congratulations of Nicholas II of Russia to the king on his engagement and of his agreement to act as the principal witness at the wedding.

This reconciled the political parties, but did not placate the army which, already dissatisfied with the king's marriage, became still more so at the rumours that one of the two unpopular brothers of Queen Draga, Lieutenant Nikodije, was to be proclaimed heir presumptive to the throne.

In March 1903, the king suspended the constitution for half an hour, time enough to publish decrees dismissing and replacing the old senators and Councillors of state.

[11] Attempting to appease the opposition, King Alexander granted an amnesty to the persecuted Radicals, and in 1901 issued a moderately liberal constitution.

[12] Apparently to prevent Queen Draga's brother being named heir presumptive, but in reality, to replace Alexander Obrenović with Prince Peter Karađorđević, a conspiracy was organized by a group of army officers headed by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević, also known as "Apis", and Novak Perišić, a young Serbian Orthodox militant who was in the pay of the Russian Empire,[13] as well as the leader of the Black Hand secret society which would assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

(There is another possibility, used in a Serbian TV history series The End of the Obrenović Dynasty in which the royal couple was in a secret safe room hidden behind the mirror in a common bedroom.

They were shot and their bodies mutilated and disembowelled, after which, according to eyewitness accounts, they were thrown from a second-floor window of the palace onto piles of garden manure.