Regicide accepted list of what constitutes a regicide. The following is a list of other cases of monarchs in history that have been deliberately killed in some fashion according to recorded history: Note that some of the aforementioned monarchs, such as Nicholas II and Haile Selassie, have already ceased to be rulers at the time of their deaths. Regicide 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
Regicide killed in battle by their subjects (for example Richard III), but none of these deaths are usually referred to as regicide. The word regicide seems to have come into popular use among foreign Catholics when Pope Sixtus V renewed the papal bull of excommunication against the "crowned regicide" Queen Elizabeth I, for—among other things—executing Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. Elizabeth had originally been excommunicated by Pope Pius V, in "Regnans in Excelsis", for converting England to Protestantism after the reign of Mary I of England. The defeat of the Spanish Armada and the "Protestant Wind" convinced most English people