The Breda Declaration eleven 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 signed the death warrant were alive. Parliament, with the consent of the new King Charles II, passed the Compensation and Oblivion Act, which granted a general pardon to those who had committed crimes during the Civil War and the interregnum, but regicides were among those excluded. Some fled. Some, like Daniel Blagrave, fled to continental Europe, while others, like John Dixwell, Edward Whalley and William Goffe, fled to New Haven, Connecticut. The regicides that were found and arrested were brought to justice. Six were convicted and suffered the fate of being hanged, shot and quartered: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot and Gregory Clement. The captain of the guard in the trial, Daniel Axtell, who encouraged his men to barrack the king when he tried to speak in his own defense, an influential preacher, Hugh Peters, and the chief prosecutor of the trial, John Cook, were also executed. Colonel Francis Hacker, who signed the order to the king`s executioner and commanded the guard around the scaffold and at the trial, was hanged.

The concern of royal ministers about the negative impact of these tortures and public executions on public opinion led to the replacement of the remaining regicides with prison sentences. [12] In the cases of François Ravaillac and Damien, court documents label the authors as patricide rather than regicide, suggesting that the king was also considered the “father of the land” by divine law. In Western Christendom, regicide was much more common before 1200/1300. [1] Sverre Bagge has 20 cases of regicide between 1200 and 1800, meaning that 6% of monarchs were killed by their subjects. [1] It counts 94 cases of regicide between 600 and 1200, which means that 21.8% of monarchs were killed by their subjects. [1] He argues that the most likely reason for the regicide`s decline is that clear rules of succession have been established, which makes it difficult to remove rightful heirs to the throne and only ensures that the next heir (and his supporters) has a motive to kill the monarch. [1] In British 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 art through plays such as Macbeth (Macbeth`s assassination of King Duncan) and The Lion King. The word regicide seems to have become popular among continental Catholics when Pope Sixtus V renewed the papal bull of excommunication against Queen Elizabeth I.[4] because, among other things, she had executed Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587, although she had renounced the Scottish crown some 20 years earlier. [5] Elizabeth had been excommunicated by Pope Pius V at Regnans in Excelsis because she had converted England to Protestantism after the reign of Mary I of England. Some regicides, such as Richard Ingoldsby and Philip Nye, were conditionally pardoned, while nineteen others served life sentences.

The bodies of the regicides Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton, who had been buried in Westminster Abbey, were dug up and hanged, pulled and quartered in posthumous executions. In 1662, three other regicides, John Okey, John Barkstead and Miles Corbet, were also hanged, shot and quartered. The court officials who condemned Charles I, those who persecuted him, and those who signed his death warrant have been known as regicides since the Restoration. In France, the judicial punishment of regicides (i.e. those who assassinated the king or attempted to assassinate him) was particularly severe, even given the harsh judicial practice of pre-revolutionary France. Like many criminals, the regicide was tortured to reveal 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: Before the Tudor period, English kings were murdered in captivity (e.g., Edward II and Edward V) or killed in battle by their subjects (e.g., Richard III), but none of these deaths are generally referred to as regicide. Regicide is the deliberate killing of a monarch or ruler of a political regime and is often associated with the usurpation of power. A regicide can also be the person responsible for the murder. The word comes from the Latin roots of regis and cida (cidium), which means “of the monarch” or “murderer.” There is evidence that regicide and the ability of states to maintain or even expand their territories are negatively correlated: first, elite violence has hindered the development of territorial states` capabilities, and the killing of leaders has also led directly to a more likely loss of territory.

Second, it can be assumed that state capacities, reflected in the territorial capacities of the state, have an inhibiting effect on interpersonal violence. This would be consistent with Pinker`s (2011)[2] view that modern state capabilities lead to a reduction in violence, both interpersonal and related to military conflict. [3] On the day of his execution, January 30, 1649, Charles put on two shirts so as not to shiver with cold, lest it be said that he was trembling with fear. His execution was delayed by several hours, allowing the House of Commons to pass an emergency bill that made it a criminal offence to proclaim a new king and declare the representatives of the people, the House of Commons, the source of all just power. Charles was then escorted through a window in the banquet hall of Whitehall Palace to an open-air scaffolding where he was to be beheaded. [9] He forgave those who had condemned him and commanded his enemies to learn to “know their duty to God, the king, that is, my successors, and the people.” [10] He then gave a short speech in which he presented his unchanged views on the relationship between the monarchy and the monarch`s subjects, ending with the words “I am the martyr of the people.” [11] His head was cut off from his body in one fell swoop. In Discipline and Punishment, the French philosopher Michel Foucault cites this case of Damiens the Regicide as an example of disproportionate punishment in the period preceding the “Century of Reason”. The classical school of criminology states that punishment “should correspond to the crime” and should therefore be proportionate rather than extreme.

This approach was parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan when The Mikado sang: “My goal quite sublime, I will achieve it in time for the punishment to match the crime.” [14] Even after the disappearance of the divine right of kings and the emergence of constitutional monarchies, the term continued to be used to describe the assassination of a king. Regicide has particular resonance in the concept of the divine right of kings, according to which monarchs have been given by decision of God a divinely anointed authority to rule. As such, an attack on a king by one of his own subjects was seen as a direct challenge to the monarch to rule according to his divine right and therefore according to God`s will. At his trial at the High Court of Justice at Westminster Hall on Saturday 20 January 1649, Charles asked: “I know by what power I have been appointed hitherto. I would know by what authority, I mean legitimately. [7] Given the historical issues at stake, both sides relied on surprisingly technical legal foundations. Charles did not deny that Parliament as a whole had certain judicial powers, but he argued that the House of Commons alone could not bring anyone to justice and therefore refused to appeal. At that time, a prisoner who refused to plead was treated under English law in the same way as a person who had pleaded guilty. That has now changed; The refusal to plead not guilty is now interpreted as a plea of not guilty. [8] After the First English Civil War, King Charles I was a prisoner of the parliamentarians.