Assassination of King Carlos I of Portugal
King Carlos of Portugal and his heir were shot dead in an open carriage in Lisbon on 1 February 1908. The monarchy had been failing publicly for two decades. The British ultimatum of 1890 over African territory was a national humiliation, the state defaulted in 1892, and successive governments alternated between two parties whose only difference was which set of clients they employed. Carlos appointed João Franco as prime minister in 1906 and, when the parliamentary arithmetic became impossible, dissolved parliament in 1907 and let him govern by decree — which united republicans, dissident monarchists and much of the press against the crown itself. A failed republican rising in January 1908 produced arrests and a decree providing for deportation without trial, and the king signed it. The royal family was returning from Vila Viçosa and drove in an open landau through the Terreiro do Paço, the great riverside square. Two men, Alfredo Costa and Manuel Buíça, a schoolteacher and marksman with a carbine under his coat, fired from the crowd. The king was killed almost instantly, the crown prince Luís Filipe fatally wounded, and the younger son Manuel hit in the arm; the queen reportedly struck at one of the assassins with a bouquet. Both attackers were killed on the spot. Manuel II reigned for two years and eight months and was overthrown by the revolution of October 1910. Portugal's first republic then produced forty-five governments in sixteen years. Carlos was also a serious oceanographer who published on deep-sea fauna and equipped his own research vessel, which is not what he is remembered for. It is the only assassination of a reigning Portuguese monarch, and the last of a European monarch before Sarajevo.
- Year: 1908 CE
- Category: Political
