Regicide: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Regicide is a the deliberate killing of a king by one of his subjects. It has particular resonance within the concept of the Divine Right of Kings, whereby monarchs were presumed by decision of God to have a divinely anointed authority to rule. As such, an attack on a king by one of his own subjects was taken to amount a direct challenge to (i) the monarch, (ii) his Divine Right to Rule, and (iii) God's will. 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 by one of his subjects or citizens. The word is applied to the killer as well as the act: in English history it is applied also to those who signed the death warrant for Charles I of England.

Seven famous historical regicides were the executions or deliberate assassinations of

1. Henry IV of France in 1610 assassinated by Ravaillac;
2. Charles I of England in 1649 after sentence of death by parliament;
3. Gustav III of Sweden in 1792 assassinated by Jacob Anckarström;
4. Louis XVI of France in 1793, after sentence of death by parliament;
5. Umberto I of Italy in 1900 by an assassin;
6. Charles of Portugal in 1908, by Alfredo Costa and Manuel Buiça, both connected to the Carbonária (the portuguese section of the Carbonari) and the Freemasonry;
7. ex-Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in 1918 by some of his former subjects.

More recently, King Birendra of Nepal was killed in the massacre of the Nepalese royal family in 2001 by his own son, the Crown Prince Dipendra.