Regent for Life: Difference between revisions
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* Cardinal Richelieu has elements of this in ''[[The Three Musketeers (1993 film)|The Three Musketeers 1993]]''. (Not so in [[The Three Musketeers (novel)|the book]], where he is an [[Evil Chancellor]] but Louis XIII is already grown up.)
* ''[[Batman Begins]]'' has a minor example, as the CEO takes over Wayne Enterprises soon after Bruce loses his parents. Near the end of the film, Bruce simply decides to [[Awesome Yet Practical|discreetly buy stock until he was the majority shareholder.]]
* ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia|Prince Caspian]]''
* The [[Richie Rich]] movie features this when Richie's parents go missing (presumed dead). Cadbury is named the benevolent regent of the Rich estate...until the scheming van Dough frames Cadbury for their murder and takes the regent role by force.
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* Miraz in ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia|Prince Caspian]]'' started out as "Lord Protector" or some other title and slowly took on the title of king by disposing of anyone at Court opposed to him. He raised the true heir, his brother's son Caspian, as his own heir... until he had a son of his own, prompting Caspian to flee the proceeding murder plot.
* Queen Clothilde in [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s reworking of ''[[Swan Lake]]'' (''[[The Black Swan]]'') intends to 'dispose of' her son Siegfried after he marries and conceives an heir.
* The Stewards of Gondor in ''[[Lord of the Rings]]'' were a family of hereditary regents. Good ones, though. Unfortunately, the only one we actually ''meet'' in the books and films alike is Denethor, mentally unhinged by the loss of his favourite son, the hordes of Mordor at his doorstep, and finally by {{spoiler|the [[Evil Overlord]] himself through the seeing-stone which Denethor foolishly thought he could control}}. In the movies, possibly due to [[Flanderization]], he and Boromir both make it very clear that "[[Narm|Gondor has no king. Gondor
** And in the book, Denethor would have a solid precedent for refusing to give Aragorn the throne: Aragorn's ancestor Arvedui tried to claim the throne of Gondor, and they turned him down.
* Cersei Lannister in ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' becomes regent for her adolescent son, and is heading this way. ([[Smug Snake]] that she is, ambition is [[Mama Bear|not her only motivation.]])
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* ''[[The Mistmantle Chronicles]]'' had King Silverbirch of an island neighboring Mistmantle become regent until his daughter Larch could take the throne. Eventually he went crazy over a mad lust for silver and tried to have her killed, so Larch is in hiding, waiting for her chance to take the throne back.
* Prince Thanel tries to set this up in ''[[Heralds of Valdemar|Exile's Valor]]'' when he discovers that marrying the Queen isn't enough to make him King. It doesn't work.
* Dion Morgan, Regent of Nuin "for Our Very Present Emergency" in [[Edgar Pangborn]]'s [[DAVY]]. It is noted by one of the narrators that the "emergency" started as the accession of an insane hereditary President, but came to mean something like "period lasting from the year Your Excellency got away with it until Your Excellency can decently be kicked out"
* In [[Marion Zimmer Bradley]]'s STORMQUEEN, when Allart becomes king at the end, he appoints the passed over ''emmasca'' heir Felix Hastur as his chief counselor, as Felix is likely to live two or three normal generations, and "perhaps between us we can make something like a king." It seems likely that this grew into the pattern depicted in the novels of post-Recontact Darkover, where we find an Elhalyn king left to "keep the throne warm with his royal backside, which is the most useful part of him", while the current Hastur of Hastur customarily wields all the power.
* A slightly different version is found in Tappan Wright's [[ISLANDIA]], where the King of Islandia is technically regent for Alwin XVII, who was never seen again after a battle centuries before, but who has never been declared dead. Islandia's version of constitutional monarchy came about by this historical accident.
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** It become something of of a precedent in Japan. When the samurai rebelled against the court and reduced the entire court, emperor as well as the Fujiwara regent, into their figurehead, the shogunal Kamakura government itself was taken over by regents just 7 years after Minamoto Yoritomo had taken the title of shogun. The next 134 years, all shoguns were themselves figureheads, as was the whole imperial court still including the regent for the Emperor...
** Let's not forget that the Fujiwara also controlled the Emperor because he was himself mostly Fujiwara: the Fujiwara had defeated the Soga clan for the right to marry the Emperor, and after a few generations, the Fujiwara had completely hijacked the Imperial genome (except for the Y chromosome).
** It was widely believed that [[Toyotomi Hideyoshi]] planned that, should be conquered ''China'', he's going to transplant the entire Japanese political system to
** ''Kampaku'', one of the three titles used for Regents for Life in Japan, is in fact a historical [[Memetic Mutation]] of
* And after [[World War One]], Miklos Horthy declared himself regent of the Hungarian kingdom. Although the old Habsburg family is still around, the country never got a king again.
** In fact, Karl I (the last Austro-Hungarian emperor) had never officially abdicated and travelled twice to Hungary to try to reclaim the throne, only for Horthy's forces to stop him.
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** Lu Zhi, wife of Liu Bang of Han, is another Chinese example. She presided as the power behind the throne for three emperors up until her death.
** Tang Dynasty Empress Wu Zetian was probably a semi-example. She ruled as regent for two of her sons, and seized power at the age of 66 to become the only woman to rule as Huangdi in her own right.
** Huo Guang of Western Han is a rare benign example, being the most powerful person in China between 87 B.C. to 68 B.C. He served as regent for three emperors, deposed the second of the three, and the third was [[Genre Savvy]] enough to ask others to present matters to Huo ''before''
** There're actually too many examples in the Chinese history to quote
* Catherine de Medici of France acted as Regent while her two underage sons were King and heavily interfered in the reign of her third son, Henry III. It is doubtful they would have retained power without her. She is widely detested for her supposed role in the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, where thousands of French Protestants were killed. Modern historians suspect that Catherine didn't actually have anything to do the massacre, but given her track record it's not surprising that she was blamed.
* Queen Victoria believed that she had only by the grace of God avoided a
** Not quite; the hypothetical regent would have been Victoria's mother, not Conroy himself (among other things, there is no way an Irish commoner would have been accepted as regent, a role never given out to people who weren't members of the Royal Family). Conroy would have been the power-behind-the-regent in such an arrangement, and believed that he would enjoy considerable influence with Victoria even after she took the throne, but it turned out she wasn't as fond of him as he thought. And even if she had signed the document, it wouldn't have mattered. Parliament would never have consented to such an arrangement
* Birger Jarl of Sweden (1210-1266), first [[The Man Behind the Man]] of his brother-in-law King Eric "the Lisp and Lame" and managed to get his underaged son Valdemar to be declared King after his death and made himself his regent. Then he beat down a rebellion from several nobles who concidered that cheating.
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