Princess Amélie of Orléans was the Queen Consort of King Carlos I of Portugal. Born Marie Amélie Louise Hélène d’Orléans on September 28, 1865, in Twickenham England, where her family had been living in exile since Napoleon III had assumed the French throne in 1848. She was the eldest of the eight children of Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, and Princess Marie Isabelle of Orléans.

Amélie and the future King Carlos of Portugal (September 28, 1863 – 2/1/1908) met in Chantilly, France.  Both were guests at a hunting party and noticed that they had the same birthday. They were engaged February 7, 1886 and on May 22, 1886 at the Church of St. Dominic, Lisbon. They had three children but their daughter the Infanta Maria died at birth.

Carlos succeeded to the throne of Portugal upon the death of his father on 19 of October 1899.  In 1900-1901  King Carlos distinguished himself as a patron of science and literature, and was himself an artist.  In March 1894 he took a very active part in the celebration of the birth of Prince Henry the Navigator, and decorated the Portuguese poet, Joao de Deus,.   He took interest in deep-sea soundings and marine exploration, and published an account of some of his own investigations, the results themselves being shown at an oceanographic exhibition opened by him on the 12th of April 1897.

But in  May 1907 Dom Carlos suspended the Portuguese constitution  and appointed Senhor Franco as dictator with a view to carrying out necessary reforms. This caused widespread discontent.

                                                 Dom Carlos Assassination

On February 1, 1908, upon their return to Lisbon from a stay at the Palace of Vila Viçosa, the Royal family was the target of an assassination. Both King Carlos and the Prince Royal, Luís Filipe, were killed, and the Duke of Beja, Manuel, the second son, was injured. Queen Amélie was unharmed and is credited with likely having saved the life of her younger son by waving her bouquet of flowers in the air to obstruct their aim. Afterwards she was put under close guard with her son and mother-in-law, at the Palace of Necessidades. She then withdrew to the Pena National Palace where she remained under the Royal Family was ousted.

Duke of Beja was crowned King Manuel II. (The pictures above are of Dom Carlos on the left and his son, Dom Manuel II on the right).  However, the political climate was unstable and the monarchy was deposed in October 1910. The Royal family went into exile back in Twickenham where her son was married to Augusta Victoria of Hohenzollern, her second marriage, (1890-1966) in 1912.  The Dowager Queen then moved to France and settled at the Château de Bellevue in Le Chesnay, close to the Palace of Versailles; this became her permanent home for the rest of her life.

Dom Manuel II remained in London devoting his life to book collecting and publishing a series devoted to “Early Portuguese Books.” He died at age 42 on July 2, 1932. This left Amélie alone as her mother in law had previously reposed and Dom Manuel  II had no children with his queen.

At the onset of World War II, the Portuguese government invited her to return and live in the country, but she declined, preferring to remain in France where she received diplomatic immunity. She did, make a pilgrimage after WWII to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima, the 12th century Moorish princess that converted to Christianity when she beheld an apparition of the Holy Mother.

                                                                   Rectifying the Queen

Marc Jones has 7:05 AM for Queen Amelie but we rectified it to 11:05 AM or 4 hours later. For those using the Jones 1000, we are giving both charts.  The green is Jones’s time.  The red and green the colours of the Portuguese flag is the rectified one.

In our rectified version, the Queen has a Cosmic Cross, and Grand Earth Trine in her chart, the latter showing her practicality under stress.  She has little water in her chart, so she probably kept her emotions under wraps and keeping an imperturbable exterior or “grace under pressure.”  She  knew how to play the part of the queen well and with few conjunctions in her chart, she relied on her training and intuition to manage life’s vicissitudes.

The Queen’s temperament type falls in a locomotive pattern, that fits her self-assuredness but she has the bottom quarter of the locomotive empty putting her into the “lost” group, making her have to rely on herself when she preferred to rely on others, so she was not completely at home with the role thrust upon her.  Her ascendant at 29 Scorpio, and her Mercury in Virgo suggests she had a good retentive memory but also hint that great sorrow is in the offing even though its ruler Pluto is opposite it in the fifth house of children and rather wide of orb. 

Scorpio’s co-ruler Mars is in the tenth house, showing her rise to great heights but opposite Neptune in the fourth, tells of a sudden and swift fall.  Uranus in the seventh highlights the death of her son and husband because of the change in politics and that opposite her Moon shows the great anguish it cost her throughout the remainder of her life.

Queen Amélie died in Le Chesnay, France  on October 25, 1951. Her remains were returned to Portugal, where she was buried in the Royal Pantheon of the House of Braganza, at the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon next to her daughter and slain son and husband.