The Monarchy of the North: Porto's 25-day kingdom of 1919

At about one o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday 19 January 1919, the army commanders in Porto declared the monarchy restored. Manuel II, who had lived in exile in England since 1910, was again King of Portugal, at least in the north.2 sources2 sources

Their leader, Captain Henrique de Paiva Couceiro, tall, thin and fair, put on an old dress uniform and rode into the city on horseback to take over the military headquarters. Nobody in Porto resisted. Over the next hours other northern towns declared for the king.2 sources2 sources

A Junta Governativa do Reino, the Governing Junta of the Kingdom, took power with Couceiro at its head. Its own official gazette printed the proclamation that explained the rising.3 sources3 sources

For the next 25 days Portugal had two governments: a republic in Lisbon and a kingdom in Porto. Republicans called it the Monarchy of the Trauliteiros, after the club-wielding militias that hunted their opponents. The name that stuck came later, from the title of a two-volume history by the monarchist journalist Rocha Martins in 1922: the Monarchy of the North.2 sources2 sources

Portugal had been a republic since the revolution of 5 October 1910, which sent the young Manuel II into exile. The new regime was dominated by Afonso Costa's Democratic Party, which persecuted the Church, its own republican rivals and the monarchists alike. Many royalists emigrated; some prepared to fight.2 sources2 sources

Paiva Couceiro was the most stubborn of them. Born in 1861, he had made his name in the wars of conquest in Mozambique in the 1890s and had been governor-general of Angola from 1907 to 1909. In October 1910 he was the only commander who actually fought the republican revolution in Lisbon. The Republic tried to win him over; he refused and went into exile in Galicia, where other royalists were gathering.2 sources2 sources

From there he led two armed incursions. At dawn on 5 October 1911 a column of about 950 exiles, only 250 of them armed, crossed the border and occupied Vinhais, near Bragança; republican troops retook it the next day. On 8 July 1912 a second attempt fell on Chaves and was beaten off after several hours. Each time Couceiro expected the countryside to rise, and each time it did not.2 sources2 sources

His chance came with the next crisis. In December 1917 Major Sidónio Pais overthrew the Democrats and opened his “New Republic” to conservatives, Catholics and monarchists; his assassination at Rossio station on 14 December 1918, told in a separate article, left that coalition without a leader.2 sources2 sources

On 10 January 1919 republican officers rose in Lisbon and at Santarém, claiming that a restoration was being prepared. The Santarém rebels surrendered in mid-January to a column of Sidónio's loyalists led by Teófilo Duarte. Each camp now feared the other would strike first. In Porto the plotting was barely hidden: the editor of Pátria, Porto's leading royalist daily, told the Spanish press during the rising that it had been hatched in his newsroom with the backing of the military juntas. The plotters' watchword was “now or never”.4 sources4 sources

The king's representative in Portugal, Aires de Ornelas, preferred to work with a conservative republic and let a restoration come by consent. On 14 January he scribbled “go on, words of the king” on a memorandum about the “possibility” of a monarchist military movement. He later said he was only commenting on a possibility; the plotters in Porto read it as royal consent. Couceiro told the Integralist writer António Sardinha the day before the rising that he had to act before the government replaced the monarchist officers of the Lisbon garrison.2 sources2 sources

Couceiro presided over the Junta and styled himself regent. Its members included the Viscount of Banho, the Count of Azevedo, Captain Sollari Allegro at the interior ministry and, as foreign minister, Luís de Magalhães. José Relvas, soon to lead the government in Lisbon, read the list and remarked that the staff “is not numerous”.4 sources4 sources

The Junta legislated busily through its official gazette, the Diário da Junta Governativa do Reino de Portugal. It named civil governors for Porto, Aveiro, Braga, Bragança, Coimbra, Vila Real, Viana do Castelo and Viseu, the territory it claimed, and even for Portalegre in the south.2 sources2 sources

Public buildings across most of the Minho, Trás-os-Montes and part of the Beiras raised the blue and white flag of the old monarchy: in Viana do Castelo, Braga, Guimarães, Lamego, Viseu and Bragança. Many priests and their parishioners, angry at a decade of anticlerical laws, joined in. But the movement never spread south of Aveiro and Viseu, and its forces were halted near Aveiro, between Porto and Coimbra.2 sources2 sources

The kingdom needed friends abroad. Luís de Magalhães travelled to Madrid in early February, hoping Spain would recognise the Junta as a belligerent, and royalists marched through Porto with lanterns to cheer the Spanish, British, French and Brazilian consulates. Madrid ordered its border governors to intern émigrés who might help the rising, and no recognition came.2 sources2 sources

In Lisbon the news from Porto broke the uneasy truce. Aires de Ornelas assured the government he had known nothing and that the king had told monarchists to back the authorities. But Prime Minister João Tamagnini Barbosa turned for help to the republican parties, and Lisbon filled with armed civilian volunteers of the old republican militias. On 22 January volunteers gathered at the Campo Pequeno bullring to receive rifles and training.3 sources3 sources

Frightened monarchists took refuge in the cavalry barracks at Belém. On the night of 22 to 23 January, Ornelas and Colonel Álvaro de Mendonça, Sidónio's former war minister, led about 800 soldiers, most of them cavalry, some 200 civilians and 28 guns up to Monsanto, the wooded heights west of the city. Rui Ramos describes the move as defensive: Ornelas told those who mentioned Couceiro that “we can have nothing in common with those people”. Once on the hill, he could not stop his men raising the blue and white flag.1 source1 source

Government forces under Lieutenant-Colonel Ernesto Vieira da Rocha surrounded the hill, reinforced by troops from the south, sailors and the armed volunteers, among them a battalion of Lisbon students. After two days of artillery duels they stormed the slopes on 24 January. A group of civilians under the former captain Júlio da Costa Pinto held out until about five in the afternoon.4 sources4 sources

Ornelas, Costa Pinto, João de Azevedo Coutinho and the cavalry commanders were taken prisoner. Rui Ramos gives 39 dead; Pedro Marçal Vaz Pereira, who gives the same toll, adds 330 wounded. The illustrated weekly Ilustração Portugueza wrote that Lisbon had spent two days in “the most mortifying disquiet”.3 sources3 sources

The defeat sealed the fate of the north, because without the capital a restoration was close to impossible. It also changed the government. Tamagnini Barbosa resigned on 26 January, and the next day José Relvas, finance minister in the provisional government of 1910, formed a cabinet of “republican concentration”. It took in every party from the Democrats to the socialists, Sidonists included, and brought the Republic back to the constitution of 1911.4 sources4 sources

Irregular gangs of club-men had appeared in Porto in October 1918, still under Sidónio, to beat up and intimidate the old republican politicians. Under the Junta they became volunteers attached to its interior ministry, in units with names such as Segurança Pública. Republicans called them a cudgel squad; Luís de Magalhães compared them to the somatén, the Catalan civic militia.2 sources2 sources

Republicans in the north were arrested, and the regional press reported many fleeing violence. In Porto, prisoners were held and beaten at the Eden-Teatro, a theatre turned into a detention centre. Protests by some officers over the treatment of prisoners forced out the police commissioner, José Baldaques.3 sources3 sources

Violence ran both ways. Rui Ramos judges that republican brutality in Lisbon was probably worse. On 7 February 1919 the monarchist Jorge Camacho, brought to the capital under arrest, was lynched by a crowd in the Terreiro do Paço, the great square on the river.1 source1 source

Some observers predicted a civil war of four years. It lasted weeks. Couceiro had few troops and struggled to supply them. The Republic held Lisbon, most of the country and the sea: two cruisers, three destroyers, three gunboats and four minesweepers cut off supplies to the north and harried its coast.2 sources2 sources

The navy's seaplanes flew for the Republic too; the Ilustração Portugueza photographed one moored at São Jacinto, near Aveiro. In Spain, Couceiro's agents were still trying in February to buy arms in quantity, even aeroplanes. Monarchists complained that republican warships shelling Viana do Castelo had killed a nine-year-old boy.2 sources2 sources

The fighting was mostly skirmishing, as the republican commander himself admitted. At Águeda, south-east of Aveiro, on 27 January seven hours of shooting left two dead and a few wounded. That setback and the news from Monsanto demoralised the royalists. Republican columns pushed north, and on 11 February they entered Estarreja, north of Aveiro on the road to Porto.2 sources2 sources

The end came from inside Porto. On 13 February Couceiro was away from the city with most of its troops. Captain João Sarmento Pimentel, ill with flu, took the chance: at the head of the Guarda Real, which became the Republican Guard again that day, he quietly restored the republic. Ramos writes that Sidonists and monarchists combined to end what had become an embarrassment to everyone.2 sources2 sources

Couceiro's forces fell apart. Leading royalists fled across the border; the interior minister, Sollari Allegro, had already reached Galicia. The last royalist fighters left Trás-os-Montes for Galicia on 19 February, and operations ended on the 20th. Couceiro was in exile in Spain once more.4 sources4 sources

Leaders of the rising who had not escaped were arrested and brought before the courts, and many monarchists went into exile. In September 1919, 1,196 people were in prison accused of taking part in the revolt, 593 of them soldiers; many more faced suspicion, inquiries and purges. Suspected monarchists were removed from public office, and at the University of Coimbra four law professors were suspended, among them António de Oliveira Salazar, the future dictator. A law of 9 April 1921 finally amnestied them all.4 sources4 sources

Manuel II did not come. Spanish newspapers placed him in Madrid, Pontevedra or at the border, but he stayed in England, and he twice tried without success to get in touch with Couceiro's circle. According to Relvas's memoirs, days before the end the king sent a telegram, passed on by the foreign minister Egas Moniz, asking the government to send his own orders to the royalist forces, without Couceiro's knowledge, to stop fighting, in return for an amnesty for his followers. He later called Couceiro's rising a “nefarious crime” committed against his instructions.3 sources3 sources

The defeat deepened the splits among monarchists. The Integralists of Integralismo Lusitano, who wanted an authoritarian, anti-parliamentary monarchy, broke with Manuel II in October 1919, declaring themselves monarchists “because we are nationalists and not out of loyalty to the person of the king”. In Lisbon, the restoration scare had brought the Democrats back to power, which was what Manuel had feared.3 sources3 sources

Couceiro stayed a rebel. In 1937 he wrote to Salazar, by then dictator, complaining of a regime in which “the police and the censor's pencil keep watch”, and was arrested and deported to Spain. He died in 1944. By 1939 both he and Sarmento Pimentel, the man who had restored the republic in Porto, were living in exile.2 sources2 sources

The Monarchy of the North was the last serious attempt to bring back the Portuguese crown by force. After those weeks no monarchist movement launched another rising on that scale, and Portugal has been a republic ever since, under the First Republic, the Estado Novo dictatorship and the democracy that followed it.4 sources4 sources

Rui Ramos reads it as a sign that crown or republic was ceasing to define the main political divide. Liberal conservatives in both camps, he argues, had more in common with each other than with the republicans and monarchists who now wanted a dictatorship. He also notes that fights between republican parties usually killed more people than this one: the real contest was moving inside the republican camp.1 source1 source