Alfredo Costa

Alfredo Costa fired the first shots into the Portuguese royal carriage and was cut down beside it. He was a shop clerk and a republican activist in a Lisbon where the monarchy had been governing without parliament for nine months. King Carlos I had appointed Joao Franco as prime minister and then dissolved the Cortes and allowed him to rule by decree, which converted an unpopular government into a dictatorship in the eyes of a republican movement that had been growing for thirty years. A rising planned for late January 1908 was betrayed and its organisers arrested. What followed was not the plan but a remnant of it. On 1 February the royal family crossed the Terreiro do Paco in an open carriage, returning from Vila Vicosa. Costa stepped onto the running board and shot the king in the neck at close range. Manuel Buica, a schoolteacher and marksman with a carbine under his coat, fired from the crowd and hit the king again and then the heir, Luis Filipe, who had stood up and drawn a revolver. Both assassins were killed on the spot, Costa by the guard and an onlooker. The king and his elder son died within minutes. The younger son Manuel was hit in the arm and became king at eighteen, reigning two years before the republican revolution of October 1910 removed the monarchy. The killing did not cause that revolution and did not prevent it. What it did was remove the two people who might have made a constitutional restoration credible, and leave the throne to a boy.

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