How did Tiradentes die?

Caught in an attic

The road to the gallows began three years earlier. In March 1789, when the plot to make Minas Gerais a republic was betrayed to the governor, Tiradentes was in Rio de Janeiro, sounding out support. He realized he was being followed and hid in the attic of an acquaintance’s house on the Rua dos Latoeiros. On May 10, 1789, soldiers found him there with a loaded blunderbuss in his hands.

He was held in the island fortress of Ilha das Cobras, in Rio’s bay, and questioned there. He spent his final days in a jail in the center of the city; the Palácio Tiradentes, opened in 1926, stands on its site.

Three days in April

The end came fast once the judges were ready. On April 18, 1792, the royal court signed its sentence: eleven men to hang. It was read to them the next day. On April 20 the judges produced a letter from Queen Maria I, signed back in 1790, that turned death into exile for every condemned man but one. Why the exception was Tiradentes is explained in Why was Tiradentes the only conspirator executed? By the evening of April 20, he was the only prisoner still facing the rope.

The morning of April 21

The account comes from Friar Raimundo de Penaforte, who stayed beside him to the end. On the morning of Saturday, April 21, the hangman came in to dress him in the alva, the white robe of the condemned. Tiradentes took off his shirt and put the robe on himself. According to the friar, he kissed the hangman’s hands and feet. Then he climbed more than twenty steps to the scaffold, keeping his eyes on the crucifix.

Around eleven o’clock he was hanged, and his body was afterward quartered, as the sentence required, and displayed along the road to Minas Gerais, with his head on a post in Vila Rica. He was 45.

A sentence meant to erase a name

The punishment did not stop with his body. The house where he had lived was torn down and its ground salted. His children and grandchildren were declared infamous. Of the ten men spared by the queen and exiled to Africa, several died there. Then came silence: under the Brazilian Empire, ruled by Maria I’s descendants, the ensign was not someone to celebrate.

How the story turned

The sentence wanted him remembered as a warning. A century later he was remembered as a martyr. In 1890 the new Republic made April 21 a national day, and painters gave the hanged man a white robe, a crucifix and a face borrowed from Christ. The robe, at least, was real.

In 1965 a law naming him the civic patron of the nation went back to the sentence itself and contradicted it: the conviction of 1792, it declares, is no stain on his memory. The man the Crown meant to erase gave his nickname to a town in Minas, a palace in Rio and a public holiday.