make a revolution without the army. Well, the Portuguese Army is
faithful to its King, and I shall always have it at my side.... I have
no shadow of doubt of its fidelity." Poor Charles the First!

At the end of January, 1908, a revolutionary plot was discovered, and
was put down with severity. After signing some decrees to that end, at
one of his palaces beyond the Tagus, the King, with his whole family,
returned to Lisbon and the party drove in open carriages from the wharf
toward the Necessidades Palace. In the crowd at the corner of the great
riverside square, the Praça do Comercio, stood two men named Buiça and
Costa, with carbines concealed under their cloaks. They shot dead the
King and the Crown Prince, and slightly wounded Dom Manuel. Both the
assassins were killed on the spot.

It is said that there was no plot, and that these men acted entirely on
their own initiative and responsibility. At any rate, none of the
Republican leaders was in any way implicated in the affair. But on All
Saints' day of 1910, Buiça's grave shared to the full in the rain of
wreaths poured upon the tombs of the martyrs of the new Republic; and
relics of the regicides hold an honored place in the historical museum
which commemorates the revolution.

Franco vanished into space, and Dom Manuel, aged nineteen, ascended the
throne. Had he possessed strong intelligence and character, or had he
fallen into the hands of really able advisers, it is possible that the
revulsion of feeling following on so grim a tragedy might have
indefinitely prolonged the life of the Monarchy. But his mother was a
Bourbon, and what more need be said? The opinion in Lisbon, at any
rate, was that "under Dom Carlos the Jesuits entered the palace by the
back door, under Dom Manuel by the front door." The Republican