Shots in the Terreiro do Paço: the Lisbon regicide of 1 February 1908

The carriage left the river station slowly. Infante Manuel, the king's younger son, had gone down to the quay to meet his parents and his brother, and now he sat with them in an open landau while his mother told him how their train had come off the rails on the way from the Alentejo. It was a little after five on the afternoon of Saturday 1 February 1908.2 sources2 sources

They were crossing the Terreiro do Paço, also called the Praça do Comércio, the great arcaded square on the river that English residents called Black Horse Square. There was no crowd at the far corner, where the road turns into the Rua do Arsenal.2 sources2 sources

Within a minute or two his father and his brother were dead. The man with the beard was Manuel Buíça, a primary school teacher. A second gunman, Alfredo Costa, ran out from under the arcades and fired a pistol into the carriage at point-blank range. Police killed both gunmen within minutes, and an innocent passer-by.3 sources3 sources

Portugal was a constitutional monarchy, and Carlos I had reigned since October 1889. In January 1890 he gave way to a British ultimatum over Africa, and in 1891 the state went partly bankrupt. The census of 1900 had counted 5.4 million people in Portugal, and that of 1911 would count almost 6 million. Most of them were poor, and many in Lisbon saw their stout, cigar-smoking king as a symbol of waste.4 sources4 sources

In May 1906 Carlos broke the rotation and made João Franco prime minister, although Franco had no majority of his own. When the Progressistas withdrew their support in the spring of 1907, the king dissolved parliament without calling elections, and Franco ruled by decree. Contemporaries called it a dictatorship. In an interview with the Paris daily Le Temps in November 1907, the king backed Franco and mocked the old parties.2 sources2 sources

On 28 January 1908 republicans, the Carbonária and a breakaway monarchist faction tried to overthrow Franco and failed, a story told in our article on the Elevador da Biblioteca coup. Franco answered with a decree, signed by the king at Vila Viçosa and published on 31 January, that let the government send people judged a danger to the state into exile or to the colonies.3 sources3 sources

The royal family had spent almost all of January at Vila Viçosa, where Carlos liked to hunt. According to Jorge Couto, then director of the National Library, the king came back to show that he did not fear the republicans, and asked for an open landau instead of his usual motor cars.1 source1 source

Manuel Buíça came from the north. He was a primary school teacher, a former cavalry sergeant and a widower with two young children. The writer Aquilino Ribeiro, then a young republican conspirator who knew him, remembered a sociable, hot-tempered man with a black beard, a regular at the Café Gelo in the Rossio, whose back room was a meeting place for revolutionaries.2 sources2 sources

Alfredo Luís da Costa came from the south. He had been a shop worker and a commercial traveller, presided over the Lisbon association of commerce employees and spent his savings on a small publishing house that printed pamphlets against the regime. In 1906 he said that crushing the oppressor in a justified impulse of revolt was a duty for everyone.1 source1 source

Both belonged to a Masonic lodge and to the Carbonária, and both had contacts among the republican leaders. On the night of 28 January they led a group of about twenty armed men who came under fire from the Municipal Guard while waiting for the signal to rise.3 sources3 sources

On the morning of 1 February, by Aquilino's account, Costa came to the attic where the writer was hiding from the police. A member of the republicans' military committee had told him the troops would not move while Franco was at large, so he had a group of five ready to wait for the dictator: himself, Buíça, a young wine-warehouse worker called Domingos Ribeiro and two customs guards Franco had dismissed. Buíça already had his carbine. If they missed Franco in the street, Costa said, they would find him at the Terreiro do Paço that afternoon, meeting the royal family.1 source1 source

The king, the queen and the crown prince left Vila Viçosa by train for Barreiro, the railhead on the south bank of the Tagus. Barata describes a tense, silent journey; the king, who usually played and joked with his suite on the way, hardly said a word. Near Casa Branca the train ran off the rails, which delayed it badly.1 source1 source

At the river station in Lisbon, the royal family was expected off the Barreiro steamer at a quarter past four. Guilherme Pinto Basto, a friend of the king who had left his office to meet them, found that because of the derailment the boat would be about 35 minutes late. He chatted with Infante Manuel and the king's brother, Infante Afonso, while they waited.1 source1 source

Aquilino has the five conspirators in the square by then, after waiting in vain for Franco in the Rua Alexandre Herculano: Costa near the landing stage, Buíça by a lamp post on the north side, the others strolling under the western arcades. Franco, Aquilino says, slipped in unseen through the gate of the Navy Arsenal.1 source1 source

The steamer came alongside at about five. Queen Amélia stepped ashore first, and a godchild gave her a bouquet of flowers. The family walked slowly through the station, stopping to talk, then all four climbed into an open landau drawn by two pairs of horses, the front pair ridden by a postilion. The driver kept to a walk so that the carriage of attendants could catch up, but it had not yet reached the square.1 source1 source

So the royal carriage crossed the square alone. Pinto Basto, walking about forty paces behind it, could see nobody between him and the landau but the king's adjutant, Francisco Figueira, and two small boys running after it. There were policemen about, but they let people go where they liked.1 source1 source

Aquilino's reconstruction, from what a conspirator told him, gives the last exchange. Seeing the royal carriages pass without Franco, Costa overtook the slow landau, reached Buíça and asked whether they should finish off the whole lot. Buíça stepped away from the lamp post: “Vamos a eles!”, let's go for them.1 source1 source

Pinto Basto heard the first shot at about 5.25, just as the front horses began to turn into the Rua do Arsenal by the telegraph office. Buíça had stepped off the pavement behind and to the left of the carriage and was firing his carbine, a repeating rifle that could fire seven or eight shots in quick succession. Costa ran at the landau from behind, jumped onto the step and fired his pistol at the king's back.3 sources3 sources

Queen Amélia stood up in the carriage and struck at the arm of the man firing from behind with the only thing in her hands, the bouquet. Luís Filipe, who sat facing his father, drew a Belgian automatic pistol and stood to fire back. His attendant had loaded it with six cartridges that morning at Vila Viçosa, and two were left when it was found in the carriage, so he probably fired four shots before he was hit in the chest and in the left cheek. Pinto Basto believed it was the prince who brought Costa down.2 sources2 sources

The coachman and the postilion whipped the horses into the Rua do Arsenal. Manuel, by his own account, was hit in the upper right arm after the turn, a blow that felt like a whipcrack. He looked down at his brother, slumped to one side with blood pouring from a huge wound in his face, and pressed a handkerchief to it. The handkerchief, he wrote, was soaked at once.1 source1 source

Behind them the square was in chaos. Pinto Basto counted thirty or forty shots and saw at least one more man firing at the carriage from further off. Francisco Figueira went at Buíça with his sword and took a bullet in the leg. One policeman covered Pinto Basto with a revolver until he raised his arms and shouted that he was the king's friend.2 sources2 sources

Both gunmen were killed by the police within minutes, and so was João Sabino da Costa, a goldsmith's journeyman who had nothing to do with the plot. Aquilino says the police fired blindly, killing a passer-by he describes as a 17-year-old shop boy and wounding several others. Policemen fired into Costa as they dragged him to their station.3 sources3 sources

Nobody knew where to take the carriage. Manuel recalled talk of the hospital at Estrela; Pinto Basto, running behind, saw the coachman look back as he passed the gate of the Navy Arsenal and shouted to him to turn in, because there was an ambulance room inside. Pinto Basto and four others lifted out the crown prince first, because someone thought he was still alive, then the king.2 sources2 sources

A Dr Moreira certified both deaths. Dr Bossa, who Manuel thought was the first doctor to arrive, told him days later that when he first struck a match the pupils still contracted, and when he tried again there was no sign of life left. Bossa then dressed Manuel's arm. Queen Maria Pia, the king's mother, came to the Arsenal but did not go into the room where her son lay.2 sources2 sources

Charles Page Bryan, the American minister, reached the Arsenal soon after and saw the two bodies. The two queens and Manuel were hurried away under heavy guard. That evening the dead, dressed again and covered with the national flag, were driven to the Necessidades palace with their chamberlains seated beside them.2 sources2 sources

There was no formal autopsy: the Minister of Justice decided it was not needed, since the gunmen were dead and there would be no trial. Before the embalming began on 2 February, the royal physicians examined the king. Two bullets had entered his back. One broke his spine at the base of the neck and came out under his chin; the other lodged in his right lung.1 source1 source

Manuel, aged 18, was proclaimed king at three o'clock the next afternoon. That day he sent for Franco and asked him not to stand in the way of a new government. Franco resigned and three days later left for Spain, Italy and France. Part of the political class blamed him for his intransigence and for failing to protect the royal family.2 sources2 sources

On 4 February Rear-Admiral Ferreira do Amaral formed a cabinet of the two old parties and independents, known as the government of acalmação, or appeasement. It restored press freedom, released the republican leaders, amnestied the sailors of the naval revolts of 1906 and annulled Franco's decrees, the deportation decree among them.3 sources3 sources

Foreign newspapers ran the story on their front pages, but in Lisbon the killings caused more astonishment than grief. The funeral was held on 8 February, and father and son were laid in the royal pantheon of the Braganzas at the monastery of São Vicente de Fora. The daily papers reported 20,000 to 40,000 people coming there to see the bodies. Twenty-five years later they were moved into a marble tomb in the church.4 sources4 sources

Couto notes that photographs of the funeral show official pomp but no great crowds. The British minister, Sir Francis Villiers, reported the absolute indifference of the people, mingled in some cases with satisfaction.2 sources2 sources

The gunmen drew more visitors. Many people went to the morgue to see their bodies, their graves were covered in flowers, and their portraits were sold in the streets and shown in the shop windows of the Baixa. The republican press raised a subscription for Buíça's orphaned children. A pilgrimage to the regicides' graves at the Alto de São João cemetery, organised by the Associação do Registo Civil, drew about 80,000 people according to sources of the time, and the monarchist and republican papers argued over it.2 sources2 sources

The republican poet Guerra Junqueiro wrote to the Porto paper A Voz Pública to deny reports that he had condemned the attack. He called the king a monster and the killers heroes.1 source1 source

A judicial case was opened, but the gunmen were dead, so there was no trial to prepare for, and the contents of the case file later vanished. The historian Reto Monico points out that the new governments showed little interest in the truth: the word of the day was acalmação, and a thorough investigation might have implicated politicians now in power.3 sources3 sources

The Swiss daily Basler Nachrichten wrote on 9 February that the official inquiry had revealed nothing, perhaps because the ruling parties feared being compromised. Bryan, the American minister, wrote on 3 February that the killers seemed to have acted as their own agents, moved by anger at the deportation decree, and not as the tools of any organisation.2 sources2 sources

Other evidence points to more people. Pinto Basto saw a third man firing, and Monico notes talk of at least four men in the square. Aquilino names five conspirators. The British minister later described José Maria de Alpoim, leader of the breakaway monarchist faction, as implicated by his own admission in the conspiracy that preceded the killings. Couto writes that once the king's return was announced, some republican leaders and the Carbonária quickly planned an attack, and that the Viscount of Ribeira Brava undertook to buy the rifles.5 sources5 sources

Historians still split two ways, Monico writes: some see the regicide as the isolated act of Buíça and Costa, others as a conspiracy of the Republican Party and the monarchist opposition. Rui Ramos argues the killers hit exactly whom they meant to, because a new Franco could always be found, but not a new king.2 sources2 sources

The killings did not set off the revolution some conspirators had hoped for; on 3 February the American minister cabled that perfect calm prevailed. But, as Jorge Couto puts it, they ended Franco's dictatorship and the king's personal role in politics in a crime. The government of appeasement freed the republican leaders and let them honour the killers in public, while the monarchist parties went back to their quarrels.4 sources4 sources

Portugal had three governments in 1908 alone, and the monarchy lasted only 32 more months, through six governments. The republicans, weak in the countryside, took Lisbon: its seats in the April election and every seat on its council in November. On 5 October 1910 the Republic was proclaimed from the balcony of Lisbon's town hall, and Manuel II went into exile.4 sources4 sources

In the years that followed, the republicans honoured Buíça and Costa as great patriots. Political murder did not end with the monarchy: in December 1918 a gunman shot President Sidónio Pais dead at Lisbon's Rossio station.2 sources2 sources