There’s such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would.
– William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5. Claudius to Gertrude, saying that God provides protection for a king like a fence, and traitors can only peer through it but cannot harm the King. Claudius’ hypocrisy in voicing the ideology of the divinity of kings when he himself has slaughtered God’s annointed, his brother King Hamlet, marks him out as a particularly evil Machiavellian Shakespearean monarch.