The House of Romanov ruled Russia for just over three hundred years, from the election of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917; sixteen months after that abdication, on the night of 16–17 July 1918, the last tsar, his wife, their five children and four members of their household were shot and bayoneted to death in the cellar of a requisitioned merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg. The dynasty did not so much fall as exhaust itself, and then was extinguished.
Nicholas II had inherited an autocracy that he believed it his sacred duty to preserve undiminished. He ruled an empire of roughly 170 million people across a sixth of the world’s land, and he met its mounting strains — defeat by Japan in 1904–05, the revolution of 1905, and finally the catastrophe of the First World War — with concession offered too late and withdrawn too soon. By 1917 the army was bleeding, the cities were starving, and the dynasty had isolated itself behind the peasant mystic Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over the Empress Alexandra had become a public scandal.
When food riots and a soldiers’ mutiny erupted in the capital, Petrograd, in late February 1917 (Old Style), the monarchy collapsed within days. Nicholas abdicated on 15 March 1917 (New Style) for himself and, on medical advice concerning his haemophiliac son, also for the boy. His brother declined the throne. A 304-year dynasty ended without a battle for it.
What followed was captivity, and then murder. Held under the Provisional Government at Tsarskoye Selo, moved to Tobolsk in Siberia, and finally confined in the Ipatiev House in Bolshevik-held Yekaterinburg, the family was killed as anti-Bolshevik forces closed on the city. The five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the thirteen-year-old Alexei — were murdered with their parents. The killing of the children removed any line of legitimist restoration and turned a deposed family into martyrs whose remains, identity, and fate would be contested for the rest of the century.
Louis XVI ruled France for eighteen years, from his accession in May 1774 to the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792; four months later, on 21 January 1793, the deposed king — stripped of his titles and tried under the commoner’s name “Louis Capet” — was guillotined before a crowd of some twenty thousand in the Place de la Révolution in Paris. He was the first reigning European monarch executed by a revolutionary tribunal of his own subjects, and his death severed any path back to the Bourbon throne.
Louis had inherited not a tyranny but an insolvency. The French crown of the 1770s commanded perhaps twenty-eight million people and the most prestigious court in Europe, yet its finances were chronically broken: a tax system that exempted the nobility and clergy, debt swollen by French support for the American Revolution, and a monarch without the will to force reform through the privileged orders. When his ministers’ attempts to tax the elite failed, Louis was compelled in 1789 to summon the Estates-General, an assembly that had not met since 1614 — and in doing so he opened a door he could not close.
The Estates-General became the National Assembly, the Bastille fell on 14 July 1789, and within two years France had a constitution that reduced the king to a salaried executive. Louis never reconciled himself to it. His attempted flight to Varennes in June 1791, halted and dragged back to Paris, destroyed the fiction that he accepted the Revolution; thereafter he was a suspect monarch presiding over a war he was believed to want France to lose. On 10 August 1792 the Tuileries Palace was stormed, the monarchy suspended, and the king imprisoned.
What followed was a trial whose verdict was effectively settled in advance. The newly elected National Convention, having proclaimed the Republic, found Louis guilty of conspiracy against liberty by an essentially unanimous vote, then condemned him to death by the narrowest of margins — 361 of 721 deputies, the bare majority. The guillotine that killed him had been adopted as a humane and egalitarian instrument; it made the king’s death indistinguishable in method from a commoner’s, which was precisely the point.
Charles I reigned over England, Scotland, and Ireland for almost twenty-four years, from his accession in March 1625 to his execution on 30 January 1649; on that cold morning he was beheaded with a single stroke of the axe on a scaffold erected outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, condemned by a court of his own subjects as a “tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy.” He was the only English king ever tried and executed by his people, and his death briefly abolished the monarchy itself.
Charles fell because he could not reconcile his conception of kingship with the reality of his power. He believed, as a matter of religious conviction, that he ruled by divine right and answered to God alone — that Parliament existed to serve the king, not to share in governing him. For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, he governed without summoning Parliament at all, raising revenue through expedients that many regarded as illegal and enforcing a high-church religious uniformity that alarmed his Puritan and Presbyterian subjects.
The system broke when Charles tried to impose his religious policy on Scotland. The resulting Bishops’ Wars bankrupted him and forced him to recall Parliament in 1640 to pay for them; the Parliament he summoned instead dismantled his prerogative government. By 1642 king and Parliament were at war. Charles lost the First Civil War by 1646, surrendered, and then — fatally — negotiated in bad faith from captivity, secretly allying with the Scots to launch a Second Civil War in 1648 that cost thousands more lives.
That second war was his death warrant. The victorious army, convinced that no settlement with Charles could ever hold, purged Parliament of members who still sought compromise and established a High Court of Justice to try the king for treason. Charles refused throughout to recognize the court’s authority, insisting that no earthly tribunal could judge a sovereign. He was convicted, sentenced, and executed within the space of ten days. The monarchy was abolished and a republic, the Commonwealth, proclaimed in its place.
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was queen of Scotland from the age of six days until her forced abdication at twenty-four; she then spent nineteen years a prisoner in England before her cousin Elizabeth I had her beheaded for treason at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587. She fell twice over — first deposed from the Scottish throne in 1567 by rebellious nobles who held her infant son as a more pliable monarch, and then, in 1587, executed by the English crown that had given her not refuge but captivity. Her death was the first judicial killing of an anointed queen by another anointed sovereign, and it haunted the monarchs of Europe.
Mary’s tragedy was lodged in her birth. Crowned queen of Scots before she could speak, raised in France, and married at fifteen to the French dauphin, she was for two years also queen consort of France. Widowed at eighteen, she returned in 1561 to govern a Scotland that had turned Protestant in her absence, a Catholic queen ruling a Calvinist realm of turbulent, factious nobles. Her own claim — through her grandmother, a sister of Henry VIII — also made her the leading Catholic heir to the English throne, and so a permanent threat in the eyes of Elizabeth I and a permanent magnet for Catholic plots.
It was her marriages, not her religion alone, that destroyed her Scottish rule. Her second husband, Lord Darnley, was complicit in the murder of her secretary David Rizzio before his own murder in 1567 — an explosion at Kirk o’ Field, after which Darnley was found strangled. When Mary then married the Earl of Bothwell, the man widely suspected of killing Darnley, her nobles rose against her, her forces melted away at Carberry Hill, and at Lochleven she was forced on 24 July 1567 to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James VI.
She escaped, lost the Battle of Langside in 1568, and fled across the border into England — a fatal misjudgment. Elizabeth could neither restore a queen accused of murder, release a rival claimant, nor in conscience execute an anointed cousin, and so held her for nineteen years. The deadlock broke when Mary’s letters endorsing the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth were intercepted by Elizabeth’s spymaster. Tried under a special statute, condemned, and finally signed away by a reluctant Elizabeth, Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay. Sixteen years later her son inherited the English throne she had been killed for coveting, uniting the crowns she could not.