On the first of February 1908, an open carriage carrying the royal family of Portugal rolled through the Terreiro do Paço on the Lisbon riverfront. There was no significant security detail. Two Republican agitators, Alfredo Luís da Costa and Manuel Buíça, stepped forward and opened fire with rifles. King Carlos I was killed instantly.
His elder son, Luís Filipe, was mortally wounded and died about twenty minutes later. The younger son, Manuel, was hit in the arm but survived. The only person in the carriage unharmed was Queen Amélie, who had tried to shield Manuel and even struck one of the gunmen with her bouquet when he climbed onto the side of the carriage. The assassins were killed on the spot once the small royal bodyguard reacted, but the damage was done.
Portugal’s queen consort was gone, and her eighteen-year-old son became King Manuel II. Amélie had not been born to the Portuguese throne. She was a foreigner, the daughter of Prince Philippe of Orléans, Count of Paris, and a descendant of King Louis Philippe I, the Orleanist king overthrown in the revolutions of 1848. Because of that upheaval, she was born in exile in Twickenham, London, on the 28th of September 1865.
The family only returned to France in 1870 after the fall of Napoleon III and the creation of the Third Republic. Amélie grew into an intelligent young woman, reading widely in French history, archaeology, poetry, and fiction, and learning Latin and some German. She also became a skilled drawer and painter. In the mid-1880s, as she entered adulthood, a marriage was arranged with Carlos, Crown Prince of Portugal.
The wedding took place in Lisbon on the 22nd of May 1886, when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-three. On her wedding day she wore an elaborate gown of rose-colored velvet lined with silver embroidery, a gift from the city of Paris. She would wear it only twice more, once when meeting Pope Leo XIII in 1892 and again when celebrating the twelfth birthday of her eldest son in 1899. It remains part of the Portuguese Crown Jewels today.
The marriage produced children quickly. Luís Filipe was born in March 1887, just ten months after the wedding. A daughter, Infanta Maria Anna, was born prematurely in December 1887 and died at birth. A third child, another son named Manuel, was born in November 1889.
That same year, King Luís died at just fifty years of age, and Carlos ascended the throne shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday. Amélie became queen consort at twenty-four. By then she had begun to adapt to her new homeland. She had arrived unable to speak the language, but by 1889 her Portuguese was good enough to converse freely with her subjects.
Still, she found court life oppressive, with its formality and endless ceremonies. There were deeper troubles as well. Portugal had once been a formidable imperial power, but by the late nineteenth century it had become one of Europe’s poorest countries. The loss of Brazil and other overseas territories was barely compensated by new colonies in Angola and Mozambique.
In 1890, the British issued an ultimatum effectively commanding Portugal to stop acquiring land in Africa, ending the so-called Pink Map strategy of carving a continuous corridor across Southern Africa. At home, the economy failed to industrialize, remaining dependent on agriculture, shipbuilding, and fishing. The people stayed poor, and the country declared bankruptcy twice during Carlos’s reign. Amélie also faced marital unhappiness.
Carlos was a serial philanderer with multiple affairs during the 1890s and 1900s. She found solace in charitable work, studying medicine for two years at the Escola Politécnica in Lisbon. She claimed this was to treat Carlos’s health problems from obesity, but in reality her attention focused on establishing hospitals and treatment centers for tuberculosis patients, including a sanatorium for children and a clinic offering palliative care to the dying. By the mid-1900s, unrest in Portugal had grown into outright political tension.
Republicans and socialists protested against the government and the monarchy, and terrorist organizations such as the Carbonária stirred up hatred of the crown. The media became increasingly vocal in criticizing Carlos. Given these tensions, the lack of protection for the royal family on that February day in 1908 was fatal. Manuel’s accession brought no stability.
Barely more than a teenager, he lacked credibility and maturity at a time when the country needed a firm hand. The anti-monarchist journalist João Chagas warned him, “Your Highness arrived too young into a very old world. ” Advised by his mother, Manuel tried anyway, nominating a consensus government that included monarchists and Republicans and calling legislative elections in April 1908. None of it proved sufficient.
The economic crisis and political instability continued. The end of the monarchy came in the autumn of 1910. On the 3rd of October, a rebellion broke out in several locations and spread quickly the next day. The Portuguese military proved reluctant to suppress it, with the civil police and fiscal guard staying in their barracks.
On the evening of the 4th of October, Manuel and his mother were advised to leave Lisbon before the royal palace was stormed. The following morning at nine o’clock, a Portuguese Republic was declared from the balcony of Lisbon City Hall. By then, the king and his mother and their followers had boarded the royal yacht Amélia, named after the former queen. They initially planned to make for Porto, but when they learned that Portugal’s second city had also joined the revolt, they set sail for British-held Gibraltar and from there into exile in Britain.
A provisional government was formed under the Republican Teófilo Braga, and in 1911 a new constitution created the First Portuguese Republic. Amélie and Manuel took up residence in Twickenham, where Amélie had been born in exile as part of the French royal family. She was likely one of very few people who ended up living in the same place in London forty years apart as a result of royal exile from two separate countries. In the first years of their exile, conspiracies were launched to restore Manuel to the throne in 1911, 1912, and 1919.
From exile, he and his mother supported Portugal’s entry into the First World War and asked monarchists at home to refrain from overthrowing the government during its duration. After one further brief restoration attempt in 1919, they accepted the reality of exile. The 1920s were lived quietly, and Manuel died suddenly of suffocation from tracheal edema in the summer of 1932, at the age of forty-two. Amélie spent much of her later years in France, her ancestral homeland.
During the Second World War she was invited to return to Portugal, but aside from a brief visit in 1945 when the war ended, she lived out her remaining years in France. She died there on the 25th of October 1951, at eighty-six years of age. She had been a queen consort for only eighteen years, and a widow in exile for more than four decades.
The monarchy she joined ended with the gunfire on that Lisbon square in 1908, and the republic that followed never gave her back her crown.