Murune

King Murune of Lancre (ruled 709-745) met a terrible fate "Involving a red hot poker, ten pounds of live eels, a three mile stretch of frozen river, a butt of wine, a couple of tulip bulbs, a number of poisoned eardrops, an oyster and a large man with a mallet. King Murune didn't make friends easily".

Annotation

This may well be a Roundworld parody of Rasputin, of whose assassination it has been written: "He was poisoned while dining with a political enemy, and supposedly he was given enough poison to kill three men his size. When he did not die, one assassin sneaked up behind him and shot him in the head, and while checking Grigori's pulse the mystic grabbed him by the neck and strangled him. He proceeded to run away, while the other assassins chased. They caught up to him after he was finally felled by three shots during the chase. The pursuers bludgeoned him, then threw him into a frozen river. When his body washed ashore, an autopsy showed the cause of death to be drowning". Somebody else without many friends...

Some of the specific murder weapons may also be references to Roundworld figures. King Edward II was supposedly killed with a red hot poker; Henry VIII died of a "surfeit of lamphreys"; the Duke of Clarence was drowned in a butt of Malmsey according to Shakespeare's Richard III; and, also in Shakespeare, Hamlet's father was killed with poisoned eardrops. Tulip bulbs contain toxic substances which can be refined into a potentially fatal substance absorbed through the gut. A low-intensity dose can cause agonising stomach and gut pain and convulsions which mimic an eplileptic fit. Tulip bulbs have actually been mistaken for onions and shallots, with the sort of consequences you might expect.