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Regicide is the purposeful killing of a monarch or sovereign of a polity and is often associated with Usurper. A regicide can also be the person responsible for the killing. The word comes from the Latin roots of regis and cida ( cidium), meaning "of monarch" and "killer" respectively. In the United Kingdom tradition, it refers to the judicial execution of a king after a trial, reflecting the historical precedent of the trial and execution of Charles I of England. The concept of regicide has also been explored in media and the arts through pieces like Macbeth (Macbeth's killing of King Duncan).
Scholars have found that regicide is particularly common in political systems with unclear succession rules.
According to a 2025 analysis, regicide was common across Chinese history in the period 1046 BCE to 1911 CE. 35.7% of rulers died unnaturally, with most of the deaths as a result of killings or suicides prompted by the ruler’s relatives and trusted ministers or invading armies. The analysis found that uncertainty about succession was a key factor in regicide, as rulers with unclear succession were more likely to be killed.
There is evidence that regicide and the ability of states to keep or even expand their territories are negatively correlated: Firstly, elite violence hindered the development of territorial state capacity, and the killing of rulers also directly resulted in a more likely loss of territory. And secondly, state capacity, reflected by territorial state capacity, could be hypothesized to have had a restraining effect on interpersonal violence. This would be consistent with Pinker's (2011) view that modern state capacity leads to a reduction in violence, both interpersonal and in terms of military conflict.
At his trial in the High Court of Justice on Saturday 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall, Charles asked "I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful". footnotes 12 and 17. "The record of the Trial also appears in Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, Vol IV, covering 1640–1649 published in London in 1809. p. 995". In view of the historic issues involved, both sides based themselves on surprisingly technical legal grounds. Charles did not dispute that Parliament as a whole did have some judicial powers, but he maintained that the House of Commons on its own could not try anybody, and so he refused to plead. At that time under English law, if a prisoner refused to plead, they would be treated identically to one who had pleaded guilty. This has since changed; a refusal to plead is now interpreted as a not-guilty plea.
Charles was found guilty on Saturday 27 January 1649, and his death warrant was signed by fifty-nine commissioners. To show their agreement with the sentence of death, all of the Commissioners who were present rose to their feet.
On the day of his execution, 30 January 1649, Charles dressed in two shirts so that he would not shiver from the cold, lest it be said that he was shivering from fear. His execution was delayed by several hours so that the House of Commons could pass an emergency bill to make it an offence to proclaim a new King, and to declare the representatives of the people, the House of Commons, as the source of all just power. Charles was then escorted through a window of the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall to an outdoor scaffold where he would be beheaded. 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". § "After the trial" ¶ 4 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". footnotes 12 and 35. "The record of the Trial also appears in Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, Vol IV, covering 1640–1649 published in London in 1809. p. 1132." His head was severed from his body with one blow.
One week later, the Rump, sitting in the House of Commons, passed a bill abolishing the monarchy. Ardent Royalists refused to accept it on the basis that there could never be a vacancy of the Crown. Others refused because, as the bill had not passed the House of Lords and did not have Royal assent, it could not become an Act of Parliament.
The Declaration of Breda 11 years later paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. At the time of the restoration, thirty-one of the fifty-nine Commissioners who had signed the death warrant were living. 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. A number fled. Some, such as Daniel Blagrave, fled to continental Europe, while others like John Dixwell, Edward Whalley, and William Goffe fled to New Haven, Connecticut. Those regicides who could be found and arrested were put on trial. Six were found guilty and suffered the fate of being hanged, drawn and quartered: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, and Gregory Clement. The captain of the guard at the trial, Daniel Axtell, who encouraged his men to the King when he tried to speak in his own defence, an influential preacher, Hugh Peters, and the leading prosecutor at the trial, John Cook, were executed in a similar manner. Colonel Francis Hacker, who signed the order to the executioner of the king and commanded the guard around the scaffold and at the trial, was hanged. 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.page 19 "History Today", February 2014
Some regicides, such as Richard Ingoldsby and Philip Nye, were conditionally pardoned, while a further 19 served life imprisonment. The bodies of the regicides Oliver Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Henry Ireton, which had been buried in Westminster Abbey, were disinterred and hanged, drawn and quartered in posthumous executions. In 1662, three more regicides, John Okey, John Barkstead and Miles Corbet, were also hanged, drawn and quartered. The officers of the court that tried Charles I, those who prosecuted him, and those who signed his death warrant, have been known ever since the restoration as regicides.
The Parliamentary Archives in the Palace of Westminster, London, holds the original death warrant for Charles I.
After the abolishment of the First Mexican Empire, Agustín I was first exiled and on 11 May 1823, the ex-emperor boarded the British ship Rawlins en route to Livorno, Italy (then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany), accompanied by his wife, children, and some servants. 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. He was executed by firing squad on 19 July 1824. The aftermath of his execution was met with indignation by Mexican royalists. The sentiment of those horrified by the execution was compiled by novelist in "El cadalso de Padilla:" "Done is the dark crime, for which we will doubtlessly be called ."
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 Juárez, with aid from the U.S. and sabotage by Colonel Miguel López, captured and executed him on 19 June 1867. Emperor Maximilian's last words were "…May my blood which is about to be spilled end the bloodshed which has been experienced in my new motherland. Long live Mexico! Long live its independence!".
The biblical David refused to harm King Saul, because he was the Lord's anointed, even though Saul was seeking his life; and when Saul eventually was killed in battle and a person reported to David that he helped kill Saul, David put the man to death, even though Saul had been his enemy, because he had raised his hands against the Lord's anointed. Christian concepts of the inviolability of the person of the monarch have great influence from this story. Diarmait mac Cerbaill, King of Tara (mentioned above), was killed by Áed Dub mac Suibni in 565. 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.Adomnan of Iona. Life of St Columba. Penguin books, 1995
Even after the disappearance of the divine right of kings and the appearance of constitutional monarchies, the term continued and continues to be used to describe the murder of a king.
In France, the judicial penalty for regicides (i.e. those who had murdered, or attempted to murder, the king) was especially hard, even in regard to the harsh judicial practices of pre-revolutionary France. As with many criminals, the regicide was so as to make him tell the names of his accomplices. However, the method of execution itself was a form of torture. Here is a description of the death of Robert-François Damiens, who attempted to kill Louis XV:
In Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher Michel Foucault cites this case of Damiens the Regicide as an example of disproportionate punishment in the era preceding the "Age of Reason". The classical school of criminology asserts that the punishment "should fit the crime", and should thus be proportionate and not extreme. 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".
In common with earlier executions for regicides:
In both the François Ravaillac and the Damiens cases, court papers refer to the offenders as a patricide, rather than as regicide, which lets one deduce that, through divine right, the king was also regarded as "Father of the country".
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