Five Literal Kings for a Day
Ideally, becoming a king is pretty much a lifetime appointment. Best-case scenario, you’re handing it off with your last breath. If your rule is cut short by anything but death or illness, it probably means you’re stuck in some sort of torture device or getting worked by an angry mob. Even so, at least you can take solace in the fact that, for a while there, you were top dog. Unless, of course, you’re one of the unlucky few to have spent less than a day in charge.
Here are five people who were king for literally less than one day…
Min Shaw Saw
Min Shaw Saw was the son of King Sithu I of Burma. As royalty works, that made him the heir apparent to the throne. Unfortunately for him, there was an exceedingly bad seed in the family, his younger brother, Narathu. When his father was assassinated by his brother, Min Shaw Saw was called back to Burma to take the throne. I gotta tell you, if you’re called back to your kingdom to be made king right after your father was assassinated, the first thing you should do is lock your bedroom door.
Min Shaw Saw was killed by Narathu the same night he became Burma's king, in a development that it feels like someone should have predicted.
Vira Bahu I
When you replace your father as ruler, that’s a lot of pressure. Everyone in the kingdom is going to be wondering if you’ll ever live up to his legend. Or, if your father was a real jerk, whether you’ll break the pattern. I’m sure Vira Bahu I felt these same worries when he succeeded his father Nissanka Malla as the king of what is now Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, he didn’t even get a couple hours of sunlight to try to prove himself. He got one single night of sleep as king before Tavuru Senevirat, the leader of the army, killed him the next morning for being unworthy of his father's throne.
I mean, give the guy at least one full workday, dude.
Soththisena
Apparently, being king in Sri Lanka isn’t nearly as cushy a job as you’d imagine, thanks to the mortality rate. It seems the citizens of Anuradhapura, now Sri Lanka, harbored an extreme dislike of nepotism, which, fair. They expressed this multiple times via assassination, which is a little less reasonable. A man named Soththisena found out that the first day as king is the most dangerous one in the year 434 AD.
He did at least get to be king for a few waking hours, succeeding his father Mahanama, but he was killed that evening in a conspiracy led by his half-sister, who promptly placed her husband Chaththagahaka Janthu on the throne, which casts some aspersions to the overall motive.
Louis XIX of France
Louis XIX of France is the only entry on this list who came out of his stint as king with his life intact, probably because he was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. He was named king by his father, Charles X, who was, to put it mildly, incredibly unpopular. He’d just lost a vote of no confidence in Parliament, so nobody was particularly interested in who he thought should be the next king.
This was made immediately and forcefully clear to Louis XIX upon his ascension, and he wisely chose to abdicate, only 20 minutes after becoming king. He passed the hereditary hot potato to his nephew Henry V, who himself would only be king for a week.
Luis II of Portugal
Luis II of Portugal can match Louis XIX in the brevity of his reign, but it was far less pleasant. He was, as you might guess, assassinated, but in a nasty little twist, he was assassinated at the same time as his father. They were both shot in the Lisbon Regicide, and sustained fatal injuries, but Prince Luis Filipe survived 20 minutes longer than his father, during which he was technically in charge.
Of course, he wasn’t really able to focus on anything but bleeding out at the time.
