Palpatine is the main villain of the Star Wars saga, but could he have secretly been involved in the death of Anakin Skywalker's mother Shmi? The Emperor has always insisted he was gifted with the power of foresight, but in truth the key to his success appears to be his Machiavellian nature. Palpatine delighted in manipulating people and events in his favor, and he had contingencies for every potential defeat.
Curiously, when he was writing the script of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas toyed with the idea of having the Sith be responsible for the death of Anakin's mother Shmi Skywalker. In one early scene, Anakin confronts Count Dooku, and is goaded into killing his prisoner by a watching Palpatine. It was presented as a key moment in Anakin's fall to the dark side, with the future Emperor encouraging the Jedi into murdering a defeated foe. In one early draft, Palpatine pushed Anakin to do the deed by revealing Dooku had paid the Tusken Raiders to kidnap and kill Shmi. Lucas decided it was a little too on-the-nose, and he ditched the dialogue. But this does raise an intriguing question; did Palpatine merely take advantage of the tragedy, or did he in fact engineer it?
Certainly there is something distinctly odd about the death of Shmi Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. According to Cliegg Lars, a hunting party came out of nowhere and kidnapped her, taking her prisoner. But the Lars Homestead is quite far from the normal Tusken hunting grounds, meaning this group had strayed from their usual territory. Furthermore, it seems remarkably coincidental that Anakin Skywalker arrived just in time to hold his mother in his arms as she died.
It's unlikely Palpatine actually engineered Shmi's death, if only because there's no way he could have directly influenced the Tuskens. It is possible, however, that the rise of the dark side led to increased aggression across the galaxy, triggering fresh outbreaks of violence on Tatooine. According to the junior novelization of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, the Tusken Raiders took Shmi deliberately in order to goad the colonists into pursuing them, so they could launch a series of deadly traps. It was only when they had accomplished that fearful goal that they began torturing Shmi. The junior novelization suggests every one of Anakin's dreams coincided with Shmi undergoing a fresh bout of torture, which is quite a chilling detail.
While Palpatine probably wasn't directly responsible for Shmi's death, those Force dreams may well be his influence. Darth Sidious is an opportunist; the Clone Army was created by Sifo-Dyas as a weapon against the Sith, but became key to his plans. In the same way, Sidious could well have been keeping an eye on Shmi as a potential tool to be used against Anakin, and he would therefore have become aware of her capture. It's not hard to imagine Palpatine then interfering, ensuring Anakin saw enough of what was going on to be disturbed, but not enough to realize the urgency of his mother's need until it was too late. That would certainly be in keeping with his casting similar dreams into Anakin's mind years later, in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith.