Luis Filipe of Portugal

Luis Filipe was king of Portugal for about twenty minutes, which is the shortest reign in European history if it is counted at all. He was the elder son of Carlos I and Amelie of Orleans, Duke of Braganza and heir to a throne that was visibly failing: the monarchy had defaulted on its debt in 1892, lost enormous prestige in the British ultimatum of 1890 over African territory, and by 1907 was governing through the dictatorship of Joao Franco, who had dissolved parliament and ruled by decree with the king's consent. Republican and Carbonaria conspirators regarded that as the end of legality. On 1 February 1908 the royal family returned to Lisbon from Vila Vicosa and crossed the Terreiro do Paco in an open carriage. Two gunmen, Alfredo Costa and Manuel Buica, a teacher and a shop clerk, fired into it. Carlos was killed almost at once. Luis Filipe, who by some accounts stood and drew a revolver, was hit and died within minutes; whether he outlived his father, and therefore reigned, has been argued by Portuguese jurists ever since. His younger brother Manuel was wounded in the arm and became Manuel II. The assassins were shot dead on the spot, along with a bystander. The monarchy did not recover: Manuel reigned for two and a half years before the revolution of October 1910 sent him into exile in England, and Portugal has been a republic since. Luis Filipe was twenty. He had been made Duke of Braganza at birth and had toured Portuguese Africa in 1907, which was intended to prepare him for the throne. Portuguese law counts him as king in some official lists and not in others. The regicide is the only successful assassination of a reigning monarch in Portuguese history, and it removed two generations of the dynasty in a single minute.

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