The month of January is not a good month for monarchies, throughout that month three kings were beheaded and Henry VIII diedwho had two queens executed. The first to lose his mind was Charles I of England in 1649.. Defeated in the civil wars once morest the parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell, the king was tried and sentenced for being a “tyrant and a traitor” to death by beheading. On January 28, he was led to the scaffold but not before asking to be dressed in two shirts because of the cold of the morning and so that his enemies “wouldn’t see him tremble.” The republic proposed by the English parliamentarians might only be maintained thanks to the heavy hand applied by Oliver Cromwell who assumed the role of Protector of Great Britain.
Carlos’s son restored the monarchy twenty years later. His first measure was to punish the regicides who had condemned his father with such retaliatory zeal that he ordered Cromwell’s exhumation and his posthumous beheading..
Almost 150 years later, it was France’s turn to behead its monarch.. By then the ax had been put aside to cut off the royal heads for the more effective guillotine, an invention attributed to Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin for his enthusiastic praise of this instrument that democratized the death of aristocrats but had actually been invented. by his colleague Dr. Antoine Louise.
Queen Sofia weeps for her brother Constantine II, the last king of Greece
The guillotine was located in the current Plaza de la Concordia, where the now Capetian citizen was taken. The ex-king tried to address the gathering alluding to the greatness of France, but his voice was drowned out by the crowd. His death started the French Republic characterized by the persecution of all those who opposed (or were suspected of opposing) the revolutionary movement.
Twenty years later the monarchy returned to power at the hands of Louis XVI’s brother, Louis XVIII (Louis XVII, the never anointed king of France, is lost in the darkness of history to reappear in different parts of the world, even on the banks of the Río de la Plata).
The third member of the royal family to beheaded was a Spaniard, Alfonso de Borbón, son of Alfonso XIII, Duke of Cádiz. It was not in circumstances as dramatic as that of the aforementioned monarchs, nor for political reasons. It turns out that the duke went skiing in Colorado (USA) and when he went down a ski slope he did not see a braided cable and he cut off his head, dying instantly. At some point the duke had said “had he lived in the 18th century he would already have been guillotined.” He only missed him by 200 years.
Also on January 28, 1547, Henry VIII died. This king died in his bed but was responsible for sending two of his six wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to the scaffold.
Throughout the 20th century, monarchies entered into crisis. The evolution of democracy, party pressures, socialist, communist and anarchist claims (which took more than one monarch) weakened the concept that monarchs were divine representatives. That representativeness was transferred “to the people” and the monarchies were disappearing or reduced to a decorative plane. King Faruq of Egypt experienced this change firsthand and in 1956 he predicted that the monarchies would be reduced to the king of England and the 4 irreplaceable kings: the one with the cup, the one with clubs, the one with gold and the one with swords.
If the disputes in the British monarchy continue, soon only the four kings of the cards will remain.
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