Redundant royals have been disposed of in various grisly and ingenious ways over the centuries. Beheading was fashionable at one time, as Mary, Queen of Scots, discovered in 1587. Revolution, assassination and death in battle were other popular methods.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mary Queen of Scots. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, poisoned herself with an asp, according to popular belief. Julius Caesar was stabbed in the back by colleagues. In 1485, Richard III became the last English king to die in combat. His naked and battered body was carried off Bosworth Field on a horse – possibly the same horse he had lost earlier in the battle.

In more recent times, voluntary abdications by monarchs, merry and morose, have gained in popularity. Other sad sovereigns, such as Britain’s George III, became mentally ill and were shut away. John II Casimir, the king of Poland from 1648-68, made such a right royal mess of things that he grew depressed and became a monk.

Others just got tired of reigning. In 305, the Roman emperor Diocletian abdicated due to ill health. In 1848, King Louis-Philippe of France was driven out by public hostility. In 2013, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands declared she was done ruling and threw in her crown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Netherlands’ newly crowned King Willem-Alexander with his mother Beatrix after her abdication. Photograph: Patrick Storzer/AFP/Getty Images

In this respect, Emperor Akihito, who abdicated as Japan’s emperor on Tuesday, pleading age and infirmity, is part of a regal trend. Like Beatrix, he will be succeeded on the throne by his son. Britain’s heir apparent, Prince Charles, may welcome the precedent. His mother, the holder of the Guinness world record for reigning, may not.

Abdication certainly has its problems. In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI broke with tradition and quit the Vatican without dying first. He left his successor, Francis, to deal with a host of embarrassing scandals. Benedict still styles himself as “His Holiness” and goes about dressed in papal white – raising awkward questions about pop-up popes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pope Francis (L) greets Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

Similar difficulties arose in 1936 after Britain’s popular Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, his American lover, and eventually took off for the Bahamas. Doubts arose over who was truly sovereign – Edward’s newly invested younger brother, King George VI, or the “king over the water”.

Some doubted the British monarchy could survive the scandal. Others hoped it wouldn’t. But it did.

Many historical abdications, forced or otherwise, were harbingers of tumultuous, even disastrous, upheavals. When the “king of kings”, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, unwillingly became the last shah of Iran and fled in 1979, the country was taken over by turbanned clerics with their own ideas about divine rights.

A similar thing happened in Afghanistan in 1973. The last king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was known as a moderniser and his reign was said to be relatively peaceful. But after he was sneakily dethroned while taking a cure in Italy, Afghanistan plunged into decades of violence, jihadism and foreign invasions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mohammed Zahir Shah at his home in Italy in 2001. Photograph: Ansa/Reuters

Even more momentously perhaps, Nicholas II, the tsar of all the Russias, was forced to abdicate after the February 1917 revolution – and executed by the Bolsheviks the following year. To be fair to Lenin and the rest, Nicholas was responsible for much violent repression, including antisemitic pogroms. Yet Stalin and other Soviet leaders continued in much the same vein.

Peter II, the last king of Yugoslavia, suffered a less drastic fate in 1945 at the hands of the prime minister, Josip Broz Tito. Not only did Peter have to abdicate, the monarchy was abolished from under his feet. The new republic of Yugoslavia did not last long. It formally ceased to exist in 2003.

Some countries have never had monarchies, but their leaders still behave like kings of all they survey. Israel is one example. The US, which rebelled against its lawful sovereign in colonial times, is another. In Britain, the late Margaret Thatcher habitually used the royal plural. For such leaders, abdication, when it comes, is enforced by popular vote.

• This article was amended on 7 May 2019. Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate after Russia’s February 1917 revolution, rather than by the Bolsheviks.