Regicide

This would be consistent with Pinker's (2011)[2] view that modern state capacity leads to a reduction in violence, both interpersonal and in terms of military conflict.

[3] Before the Tudor period, English kings had been murdered while imprisoned (for example Edward II and Edward V) or killed in battle by their subjects (for example Richard III); Scottish kings had also died in battle against rebels (such as James III) or been assassinated (Duncan II, James I); but none of these deaths is usually referred to as regicide.

It became obvious to the leaders of the Parliamentarians that they could not negotiate a settlement with him and they could not trust him to refrain from raising an army against them; they reluctantly came to the conclusion that he would have to be put to death.

Two days later, the Council of Officers of the New Model Army voted that the King be moved from the Isle of Wight, where he was prisoner, to Windsor "in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice".

From a Royalist and post-restoration perspective, this Bill was not lawful, as the House of Lords refused to pass it and it predictably failed to receive the Royal Assent.

[10] He forgave those who had passed sentence on him and gave instructions to his enemies that they should learn to "know their duty to God, the King – that is, my successors – and the people".

[11] He then gave a brief speech outlining his unchanged views of the relationship between the monarchy and the monarch's subjects, ending with the words "I am the martyr of the people".

Parliament, with the assent of the new king, Charles II, enacted the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, giving a general pardon to those who had committed crimes during the civil war and interregnum, but the regicides were among those excluded from it.

Concern amongst the royal ministers over the negative impact on popular sentiment of these public tortures and executions led to jail sentences being substituted for the remaining regicides.

The bodies of the regicides Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton, which had been buried in Westminster Abbey, were disinterred and hanged, drawn and quartered in posthumous executions.

Some people throughout in the 1760–1850 period in England and Great Britain who have been suspected, arrested, and perhaps punished for trying to lethally harm the reigning monarch, which has sometimes been understood to be attempted "regicide", do not appear to have had the intention of actually killing the king or queen.

[14] According to Poole (2000), the actions and utterances of English figures such as Nicholson, Firth, Sutherland, Hadfield, Collins, Oxford, Francis and Bean, all of whom tried to get the monarch's attention for some matter, "point more often to physical remonstance after experiences of extreme frustration with an ineffectual petitioning process.

[16] At trial, Alibaud held the king responsible for the economic ruin of his family, compared himself to Marcus Junius Brutus (most well known amongst the assassins of Julius Caesar), and stated: "Regicide is the right of all men who are debarred from any justice but that which they take into their own hands.

After Conservative political factions in Mexico finally convinced Agustin I to return, and unaware of the consequences of a law aimed solely at him, he was taken prisoner by a general he had himself pardoned as emperor.

Later, after the downfall of the Second Mexican Empire, which saw the reign of Maximilian I of Mexico—a member of the House of Habsburg, which had previously ruled Mexico as New Spain from the 16th to 18th century— the Republican forces of Benito Juarez, with aid from the U.S. and sabotage by Colonel Miguel López, captured and executed him on 19 June 1867.

On 14 July 1958, at least four members of the ruling Hashemite family (including the King and the Crown Prince) of the Kingdom of Iraq were killed by revolutionaries of the Nationalist Officers' Organization under the command of Abdul Salam Arif.

According to Adomnan of Iona's Life of St Columba, Áed Dub mac Suibni received God's punishment for this crime by being impaled by a treacherous spear many years later and then falling from his ship into a lake and drowning.

This approach was spoofed by Gilbert and Sullivan, when The Mikado sang, "My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime".