10. AETHELRED II


Aethelred’s tenure as king of England led to the inglorious epithet of Aethelred the Unready. However, a better translation of the moniker would be ‘ill-advised’, as it is generally agreed that the counsel Aethelred received was little and poor.

Although he was too young to have been complicit in the murder of his older brother (Edward the Martyr), who was killed after having been on the throne for only two and a half years, the crime was carried out by those loyal to him in order that the younger sibling would take his place. This meant that there was a lot of mistrust surrounding the young monarch and, as the reputation of the murdered boy grew after his death, it would become increasingly difficult for Aethelred to unite his subjects.

And the necessity for a united British army was urgent with a renewed threat from the north. The Danes had recommenced raids along England’s coast, breaking the treaty they had made with Aethelred’s father, Edgar. After the English suffered a serious defeat at the Battle of Maldon in 991, Aethelred began paying tribute to the Danes in return for peace. However, the Danes were hard to appease and had restarted hostilities by 997.

Finally, in 1002, Aethelred reached breaking point and took drastic action. On 13 November he issued an order that all Danes in England should be executed, calling it “a most just extermination”. It was an indiscriminate attempt at a show of strength that claimed the life of Danish leader Sweyn’s sister, Gunhilde, and Sweyn invaded in retaliation, leading to Aethelred’s downfall.

9. LOUIS I
Louis the Pious was, in many ways, as sensible a leader as his nickname would suggest. His father, Charlemagne, appointed him king of Aquitaine at the tender age of three. He became king of the Franks and emperor of Rome upon his father’s death in 814 and decided that, in order to avoid any diplomatic issues, any of his unmarried sisters would be packed off to nunneries.

When Louis nearly died in an accident in 817, he decided to ensure that, should he suddenly expire, there would be a neat plan of succession to set out who ruled what in the Frankish empire. He confirmed that his nephew Bernard would remain the king of Italy, but the will described his son Lothair’s position as ‘overlord’, implying that Italy would be submissive to him. Needless to say, the wording of this document did not please Bernard and, spurred on by rumours that Lothair was to invade, he set about preparing a rebellion.

However, word quickly reached Louis I of Bernard’s plan and the king immediately took an army to confront his errant nephew. Bernard was shocked by the speed of the king’s reaction and went to try and negotiate, before being forced into surrender. It’s here that Louis’ place in this list of murderous kings is assured…

He sentenced his nephew to death, before deciding that he should be blinded instead – a punishment that was apparently merciful. However, the procedure was not entirely successful. As a result, while Bernard was indeed blinded, he spent two days in unbearable pain before dying anyway. Three civil wars would follow but the legacy of this killing would haunt the deeply religious ruler for the rest of his life.


8. CHARLES II of Spain
The reason for Charles II’s reputation as a bloodthirsty king is very much rooted in his heritage. He was the last of the Habsburg line – a lineage that was so devoted to preserving the purity of its bloodline through inbreeding that it eventually led to a man like Charles. Disfigured, infertile and cursed to spend his life suffering from various illnesses, the king was in a similar amount of mental anguish.

Charles II’s condition was no secret among the European court. He was just three years old when the throne became his and his mother, Mariana, became queen regent, designating much of the work of governing the country to advisors.

His mother remained regent long after Charles could have taken kingship himself, but it was decided that such a move would be unwise. A struggle for power began when Mariana was exiled, and Don Juan José (Charles’s half-brother) took responsibility for the country and the king.

Charles’s illness was grotesquely misunderstood at the time – interpreted as a sign that the king was probably bewitched; he would even undergo an exorcism in the final years of his life.

His worst crime was the 1680 auto-de-fe (display of public penance and executions) in Madrid, during which many heretics were burned. Charles II attended the trial and burnings, though the executions were probably ordered by someone else. A blood-soaked reign, but a misunderstood one.

7. CHARLES II of Navarre
Charles II believed that the kingdom of Navarre was far too small for a man with such a noble lineage as his and spent his life trying to wheedle his way to a more important status. He ordered the assassination of the Constable of France in 1354 and made a deal with the English, forcing the French King John II to make peace.

John grew tired of his treachery and finally arrested him in 1356, only for Charles to be broken out in 1357. When John II agreed to a peace treaty with the English, Charles II freed all the prisoners in Paris. With the city on the verge of revolution, Charles U-turned and took the opportunity to lead the aristocracy at the Battle of Mello and the subsequent massacre of the rebels.

He blindly swore patriotism and honour while consistently reaching out to the opposition in the hope of a better deal. His meddling in the war between Castile and Aragon proved disastrous and he staged being captured to avoid having to participate. Towards the end of his life he tried to convince English king Edward III to invade and overthrow Charles V, as well as being involved in two attempts on Charles’s life. When his scheming with Gascony against Castile went wrong, Navarre was invaded in 1378 and he was forced to agree to an alliance with Castile and France. He burned to death in 1387, allegedly when the sackcloth filled with brandy he was bathing in caught fire.



6. HEROD I


There are many who would claim that King Herod committed his most heinous deed with the Massacre of the Innocents. However, the story of the slaughter of all boys in Bethlehem under the age of two is only found in the Bible; there are no historical records from the time detailing such an atrocity. Herod’s crimes were much more personal.







5. RICHARD I
The man dubbed ‘Lionheart’ spent most of his life fighting. He first took up arms against his father, Henry II, in 1173 and continued to aggressively pursue the throne until Henry’s death in 1189, when some quite reasonably suggested that Richard had driven the king to his grave.

Blood was spilled on the same day that Richard took the crown, when the barring of Jewish figures from the coronation was misinterpreted as an order to instigate violence against all of London’s Jews. Richard ordered the executions of those who took part, but the instances of copycat ‘Christian’ violence would set the tone for a king who was desperate to join the Crusades.

4. EDWARD I
When Edward I came to the throne he had a very clear goal in mind: to take back what he saw as English land which had been stolen.


3. ERIK XIV
While many kings can lay claim to ordering the deaths of hundreds – even thousands – during the course of their reign, not many can say they committed murder with their own hands.

The king of Sweden Erik XIV suffered from mental instability, but not to an extent that made him incapable of ruling. He strengthened Sweden’s position in northern Europe by claiming territory in Estonia, leading to the Seven Years’

2. HENRY VIII
English king Henry VIII’s voracious nature and hot temper have become the stuff of legend. He is renowned for being a man of ferocious appetites – in all aspects of life – and he was prepared to use any means necessary to quell his opposition.


1. LEOPOLD II
Desperate to establish a colony overseas, Belgian king Leopold II turned to Africa and the potential riches of the Congo. To circumvent his own parliament, he created a dummy organisation called the International African Association, which he claimed would act in the interests of philanthropy and scientific research with a view to converting the citizens to Christianity. It was all completely legal and it gave the monarch the freedom to act however he wanted in the land under his control.

Its stated aim could not have been further from the truth. What had attracted Leopold to the Congo, in addition to the notion of creating an empire, was the tremendous supply of rubber in the area. He would spare nothing in order to get what he wanted. Despite having promised that he would protect the people of the Congo from slavers, Leopold promptly and brutally turned the country into a slave state.

The treatment of the workers was savage and uncompromising. Leopold allowed some missionaries into the Congo in order to allay the fears of foreign powers who believed he might be doing exactly what he was doing, and reports began to reach Europe about the maiming and executions of the men and women working on the plantations, as well as of the mass dumping of corpses.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people died during Leopold’s rule of the Congo but the estimated figure is in the millions. The atrocities led to the establishment of the first human rights movement and Leopold was finally compelled to give up the Congo to the Belgian parliament in 1908.

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