The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 10

by Unknown

CHAPTER IV. JOÃO IV TO JOÃO VI

[1640-1822 A.D.]

The revolution thus wisely planned, secretly matured, and happily executed, was now complete. Portugal had recovered her independence, and replaced the legitimate descendant and representative of her ancient sovereigns upon the throne. João IV was crowned on the 15th of December, and immediately abolished the heavy taxes imposed by the king of Spain, declaring that, for his own private expenses, he required nothing beyond his patrimonial estates. He summoned the cortes to assemble in January, when the three estates of the kingdom solemnly confirmed his proclamation as king, or acclamation, as the Portuguese term it, probably to express the spontaneous unanimity with which he was chosen. The cortes further acknowledged his eldest son Theodosio as heir-apparent; and voted ample supplies of men and money, to resist the expected Spanish invasion.

[1640-1647 A.D.]

In the islands, in the African settlements, with the single exception of Ceuta, which adhered to Spain, and in what remained of Brazil and India, King João was proclaimed, the moment intelligence of the revolution arrived, the Spaniards scarcely anywhere attempting to resist. In Brazil the viceroy communicated the tidings to Count Maurice of Nassau, the governor of the Dutch conquests, who ordered public rejoicings for the emancipation of Portugal; but Nassau refused either to restore his conquests to their legitimate possessor, or even to desist from further aggression. The Dutch governors and admirals in India proved equally unaccommodating.

In Europe, the new king was readily acknowledged by all the states at war with the house of Austria. He concluded treaties of alliance with France, England, Sweden, and even with Holland, colonial affairs being, in the last instance, reserved for future negotiation and adjustment. The pope refused to receive João’s ambassador; and the Spanish ambassador at Rome, with the aid of a band of assassins, attempted his life. Several persons were slain on both sides, though the intended victim escaped.

It is possible that, had Olivares immediately applied himself with vigour to reduce Portugal, unarmed as she then was, with an empty exchequer and an unorganised government, she might have been again subjugated. Fortunately for her the count-duke looked upon the insurrection with a contempt that averted the danger. He announced the event to Philip, by wishing him joy of the forfeiture of the duke of Braganza’s large estates; and, influenced partly by disdain for the Portuguese, partly by excessive exasperation against the Catalans, he positively rejected all advice to send against Portugal the army preparing for Catalonia. He thus gave Portugal all she needed—time; and a very few months saw her in a condition to maintain and defend the independence she had recovered. Olivares was not, indeed, altogether inactive with regard to Portugal and her king, but his measures were rather those of a petty intriguer than of a great statesman. He prevailed upon the emperor, Ferdinand III, to seize and imprison João’s brother Dom Duarte, who was then serving as a general in the imperial armies. He appears likewise to have instigated the plots and conspiracies by which the new Portuguese government was, for a while, considerably disturbed. The first of these was perhaps the most formidable, being conducted by the primate, the inquisitor-general, and many of the chief nobility, including some connected, by blood or marriage, with João. Not less than six hundred persons, of different ranks, are said to have been concerned in the plot, the object of which was to kill the king and submit Portugal again to Spain. Various stories are told as to how the conspiracy was detected. The following seems the most probable. The archbishop, it is said, endeavoured to seduce the Count of Vimisis to join in the scheme, relying on that nobleman’s supposed anger at his ill treatment by the king, who had deprived him of the government of Alemtejo. The prelate had mistaken his man. The count’s loyalty was superior to his resentment, and the aggrieved nobleman immediately revealed the plot to the king.

The whole project was known to the government, and preparations were quietly made for defeating it; a grand review was ordered, and the principal ringleaders were invited to the palace for the occasion. They went fearlessly, were there made prisoners without difficulty, and the number of troops present prevented any rising in the city. The prisoners were tried and convicted; about ten persons were executed; the primate and inquisitor-general were imprisoned for life; and the remainder were pardoned. The duchess of Mantua was sent back to Spain, under the idea that she had fomented the conspiracy; and the only person for whom Dom Duarte might have been exchanged being thus dismissed, the unhappy prince languished out the remainder of his days in prison. The next plot was entirely hatched at Madrid, where Olivares engaged a Portuguese fugitive to murder João. The man made every arrangement, but his courage failed him at sight of his intended victim, and he fled, without perpetrating his meditated crime. By increased bribes, Olivares induced the villain to renew the attempt, when he was betrayed by an accomplice, seized, and executed. A base fraud, contrived to deprive the king of the ablest of his ministers, Lucena, secretary of state, answered better.

The two countries were now decidedly at war, but their languid and desultory hostilities produced little effect beyond harassing the frontiers. Portugal was weak, and thought only of self-defence; Spain was chiefly intent upon chastising the Catalans.[b]

[1647-1663 A.D.]

The Portuguese were at first successful, and after the defeat which Mathias de Albuquerque inflicted on the baron of Molingen at Montijo on May 26th, 1644, felt at their ease, until it became obvious that Mazarin would desert them without compunction if it suited his purpose. The colonial war with Holland deprived them of the assistance of the Dutch in Europe. Mazarin’s refusal to insist on their independence at the congress at Münster, though he protected their envoys against the Spaniards, made them despondent; and a very curious letter of Mazarin’s (October 4th, 1647), offering the crown of Portugal to the duke of Longueville, exhibits at once the feeble character of João IV [who had timidly offered to abdicate], the despair of the Portuguese, and their dependence on France. Mazarin’s desertion did not at first do great harm, for the war between France and Spain continued, though peace was made with the empire.[c] In the war which, notwithstanding their alliance in Europe, the Portuguese prosecuted against the Dutch in their colonies, they displayed much of their original valour and energy. In Brazil they gradually recovered their lost possessions.[b] But if the arms of João were successful in Brazil and Africa, in India they met with many reverses. In several engagements the Dutch had the advantage; and, in 1655, they succeeded in wholly expelling the Portuguese from the island of Ceylon.

João died in 1656. His eldest son, Prince Theodosio, preceded him to the tomb. Three other children survived him: (1) Catherine, married to Charles II king of England; (2) the infante Alfonso, who, by the death of Theodosio, was heir to the monarchy; (3) the infante Pedro, who, as we shall soon perceive, succeeded Alfonso.

ALFONSO VI (1656-1667 A.D.)

[1656-1667 A.D.]

As the new king was only in his thirteenth year, and had exhibited no proofs of understanding, but a waywardness which would have adorned a savage, the queen-mother was intrusted with the regency.

The administration of this princess—a lady of the house of Guzman, her father being the eighth duke of Medina Sidonia—was distinguished for prudence and spirit. As a Castilian, she was at first obnoxious to the people, who suspected that she must have a leaning towards her own country; but the vigour with which she prepared for war, and the perseverance with which she conducted it, prove that the suspicion was injurious. We cannot advert to the interminable and trifling events which followed, where the combat of a few hundreds is described with as much minuteness as if whole nations had been embattled on each side; where the destruction of a hundred enemies is hailed with as much exultation as if the force of Attila had been annihilated; and the whole campaign was disgraced by the most deplorable imbecility, on the part both of the Portuguese and the Spanish leaders, until the count de Schomberg and Don John of Austria were opposed to each other. After the Peace of the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, when Catalonia was pacified, and the Spanish troops were at liberty to turn their undivided force against Portugal, no doubt was entertained that this country would be subdued. But the queen-regent did not neglect to strengthen the national cause by alliances. Some French, Dutch, and English adventurers, under Schomberg, were obtained; the infanta Catherine, with the fortress of Tangier and a large sum of money, were given to Charles II as the condition of his alliance, and for the aid of some English regiments. Schomberg sustained so much opposition, so much jealousy and ill will from the chiefs associated with him, that he could not prevent Don John from obtaining some rapid successes. Among them was the conquest of Evora. But this advantage was soon neutralised by a signal victory attained over the Castilians; it was still further improved by the recovery of Evora—both monuments of Schomberg’s ability and of English valour. Don John was deprived of the command. This change was fortunate for Portugal; for the new general was so signally defeated at Villaviciosa, that it may be said to have secured the independence of that kingdom. This was the last noted exploit during the reign of Alfonso.

During these hostilities the court of Lisbon exhibited strange scenes. The depraved tastes, the low and profligate habits, the headstrong perversity of the king daily acquired strength, and afforded a melancholy prospect to the nation. He associated with the lowest of the people; he introduced them into his palace; or accompanied them in nocturnal expeditions, undertaken as much for bloodshed as for mere mischief. His band of young companions became the terror of the capital. By his caprices several youths are said to have been tortured to death; and young girls to have suffered a still worse fate: all his diversions partook of his savage and capricious character. So long as he confined them to boxing in the ring, to wrestling, or to breaking the windows by night, the citizens, however scandalised at such conduct, did not much complain; but when their daughters were seduced, or their sons ill used by the royal satellites, even they began to think that a king might do wrong. When common prostitutes were brought to the palace, which was thereby converted into a brothel, their indignation yielded to contempt. The influence of the queen was ineffectual. At length the indignant nobles, at her instigation, forcibly seized two brothers, the vilest and most dangerous of his satellites, and sent them away to Brazil; but other creatures were found to supply their place.

With all his stupidity, the royal brute felt that he was a king; he knew that the time of his majority was long past; he insisted on being invested with the regal authority in all its extent; and, after a struggle between him and his mother, he forced her, in June, 1662, to resign the regency. The removal of so salutary a rein on his excesses could not fail to make things worse. The licentious youths with whom he surrounded himself disgusted by their conduct the oldest servants of the crown, and forced them to retreat from their public offices. His own extravagances increased. His satellites paraded the streets, or scoured the highways, night and day; they not unfrequently returned with plunder, oftener still with their swords stained with blood. We are told that he even charged the people in a public procession; that he instigated the assassination of some obnoxious nobles; that, to show his contempt of a comet which was believed to be the forerunner of some great change, he fired a pistol at it, at the same time reviling it with the lowest terms of scurrility.

It was hoped that, if a wife were procured him, he would, at least, refrain from some excesses; and one was found in Mademoiselle d’Aumale, daughter of the duke of Nemours. But he treated his beautiful queen with open neglect; he disregarded alike her entreaties, her tears, and her remonstrances; nor did the death of his mother make the slightest change in his conduct.

But the strangest part of these transactions remains to be told. That the queen-mother had resigned her authority with reluctance is certain; that she had entertained thoughts of procuring the transfer of the sceptre from Alfonso to Pedro is confirmed by the general tenor of her actions. It is no less true that Pedro aspired to supplant his brother; that he intrigued with the nobles and prelates for that end; and that, by the outward decorum of his conduct, by a scrupulous regard to the decencies of his station, he laboured to make the contrast between himself and the king too marked to be overlooked. Equally certain it is that no one observed this contrast more narrowly than the youthful queen, who soon formed a suspicious connection with the infante. That their plans for the future were soon arranged, is evident enough from the sequel. When Pedro’s plans were matured, when he had interested a considerable party in his behalf, he sought an open rupture—and he had causes enough—with the king. In October, 1667, a furious mob, which had been gained by his emissaries, conducted him to the palace, insisting that justice should be done him on his enemies. On the 21st of November, the queen hastily left the palace, and retired to the convent of St. Francis. Her pretext was the ill-usage she hourly received from Alfonso. The true reason for so extraordinary a step appeared in a letter in which, after adverting to her domestic sorrows, she surprised the public by saying that her marriage was, from its origin, null; that it had never been consummated.

[1667-1668 A.D.]

The perusal of this extraordinary letter filled Alfonso with indignant wonder. He hastened to the convent, and on being refused admission, he ordered the gates to be broken; but his brother, arriving with an escort, persuaded or compelled him to depart. No sooner was he retired, than the infante had a long interview with her. The subject of their conversation appeared from a letter to the chapter of Lisbon, which contained the same charge of impotence against the king. The counsellors of state forced him to sign an act of renunciation. He was then arrested, and sentenced to perpetual confinement, but with permission to enjoy the comforts of life. In conclusion, Pedro was proclaimed regent; and, in that character, was recognised by an assembly of the states. By his creatures, the same states were persuaded to petition the queen, who no longer showed any inclination to leave the kingdom, that she would accept the hand of so deserving a prince. She required no solicitation. Her uncle the cardinal Vendôme, anxious that his family should contain a queen, expedited it without delay. The marriage was celebrated in haste, lest a papal inhibition should arrive, and blast the fruit of so many intrigues. Subsequently, an application was made to the pope, to confirm the dispensation of the cardinal; and Clement, who saw that the mischief was done, admitted the allegation of impotence, and despatched the brief of confirmation.

Thus concluded one of the most extraordinary scenes that has ever been exhibited to the eyes of mankind—extraordinary alike for effrontery and duplicity. However the constitution of Alfonso might have been impaired by debauchery, he was not impotent. No one labouring under such a disability would have been at the trouble either of visiting the public stews or of introducing women of loose morals into the palace. But, without insisting on this presumptive evidence, we are positively informed that Alfonso had one child at least by his favourite mistress. If the debitum conjugale had never been paid, why should a circumstance so important to the kingdom be concealed during sixteen months? Why should it be mentioned, for the first time, when Pedro was ready to usurp the crown? The whole proceeding is explicable enough. The queen felt that she was neglected; she admired the infante, and was gained by him as an accessory to the long meditated plot of dethroning the king. The means adopted by these paramours were even more daring, more indicative of the contempt with which they regarded public opinion, than the end itself.

[1668-1706 A.D.]

Before this iniquitous consummation of ambition and lust, Pedro had the glory of ending the long dispute with Spain. Both nations were exhausted by their past exertions, and both naturally inclined for peace. It was concluded at Lisbon, under the mediation of Charles II, king of England. By it all conquests made by either party were restored, and the subjects of each nation admitted to the privileges enjoyed by the most favoured people. The arms of Portugal were immediately erased from the escutcheon of the Spanish monarchy. This was almost the only transaction of moment in which the regent was engaged, from his marriage to the death of Alfonso. There was, indeed, a conspiracy formed to restore that prince; but it was easily detected and its authors punished. That unfortunate monarch was first removed to the Azores; and then transferred to the palace of Cintra, where, in 1683, he ended his days. The same year was fatal to the queen, who left no other issue than a daughter, the infanta Isabella.

PEDRO II (1683-1706 A.D.); JOÃO V (1706-1750 A.D.)

On the death of Alfonso, the coronation of the new king was celebrated with the usual pomp and circumstance. His reign, like his regency, was passed in profound peace, and consequently furnishes no materials for history, until the celebrated War of the Spanish Succession, following the demise of Charles II, called him into the field. The motives which induced him to take part with the allies against Philip V have been already explained, and the chief events of the war have been related in the history of Spain.[173]

During the reigns of Alfonso and Pedro, the affairs of India continually declined. The Dutch, the most persevering enemies that ever assailed the Portuguese empire in the East, not satisfied with the richest settlements in Malacca and in the India islands, prepared to expel the subjects of his most faithful majesty from the continent. The latter were insulted, sometimes defeated, within sight of Goa. In 1660, they blockaded the bar of Goa, thereby preventing the annual sailing of merchandise for Lisbon. Bombay was delivered to the English. In 1665, Diu was plundered by the Mohammedans, three thousand of the inhabitants being led into hopeless captivity, the rest put to the sword. Finally, Cochin was reduced by the king of Travancore, and the Portuguese empire in India was confined to Goa, Diu, and a few commercial settlements on the coast of Malabar and in the islands. The African and Brazilian possessions continued unimpaired.

By his second queen, a princess of Bavaria, Pedro had several children, most of whom, however, died either in infancy or without issue. He was succeeded, in 1706, by the infante João, born in 1688.[e]

[1706-1750 A.D.]

Dom Pedro’s successor was but eighteen years of age. Lacking in experience and doubtless desirous of equalling his father’s glory, he did not know how to get out of the dangerous political course which Portugal was pursuing and he continued to take part in the war of succession to the sole profit of England and Holland. This persistence was all the more deplorable as the success of the allies in Spain was not long maintained. Scarcely had João V become king when Philip V returned to Madrid in the midst of enthusiastic acclamations and the duke of Berwick achieved over the combined forces of De las Minas and Galway the brilliant victory of Almansa (April 25th, 1707). The Portuguese, against whom the efforts of the Spanish and French were especially directed, lost thirteen regiments and they were unable to hold the positions they had taken. Far from profiting by the hard lesson that fortune had administered to him, João V lost no time in rebinding through marriage the political alliances that his father had adopted; he married Maria Anna of Austria, sister of the emperor Joseph I and of the archduke Charles, Philip V’s rival, and celebrated this brilliant union with the most magnificent fêtes that Portugal had ever seen.

All this did not prevent Philip’s taking each day a more marked advantage. Victor at Badajoz, victor at Villaviciosa, he invaded Portugal in turn; it became evident that whatever else might happen this prince would at least keep the crown of Castile. The victory of the allies at Saragossa completely disappeared amid all these disasters. But what was much more unfortunate still was that Portugal nearly lost Brazil, which was the sole possession that would permit her henceforth to cut some sort of figure in the world. It was the very moment when new explorers had just discovered the opulent mines of Goyaz and the Matto-Grosso that a Spanish-French fleet under the command of the valiant Duguay-Trouin put in an appearance. Powerful with its seven vessels and eight frigates it had no difficulty in forcing the channel to Rio de Janeiro, and after it had landed its forces there was no resistance (September 14th, 1711). Soldiers and inhabitants quickly evacuated the town, taking refuge with their valuables in the neighbouring mountains. Brazil’s fate would doubtless have been settled there and then had it not been for the grave troubles with which France was at that time overwhelmed, and especially for the small number of soldiers assigned to the expedition. Duguay-Trouin had to content himself with sacking Rio de Janeiro and making it pay a ransom of 600,000 cruzados. Instead of a conqueror he was only a devastator, but he went far towards making the Portuguese appreciate all the advantages of the English alliance, and brought back to exhausted France a booty of over twenty-five millions of francs.

The Portuguese, however, were still more convinced by the events which were taking place at the same time in Europe. In taking part in the prolonged quarrels of which Charles II’s succession had been the source, England had but a single aim in view—to inflame the whole of western Europe and take advantage of the conflagration to obtain ascendency over the seas. Just as soon as she had obtained her end by destroying the remains of the French and Spanish navy, by reducing Portugal to the state of a colony, and by making herself sure of the Mediterranean by the rascally occupation of Gibraltar and Minorca, then, having no further interest in continuing the war, she withdrew and was the first to accept Louis XIV’s proposals. But what could the powerless João V do without her? He had to come to terms, or be conquered; and lost in negotiating all the fine hopes that the allies had held before his eyes. The Peace of 1713 with France simply stipulated that the most Christian king renounce all claims upon Brazil, that King Philip V would arrange matters in a manner agreeable to Portugal, and that England would be responsible for the carrying out of the agreed-upon conditions. That of February 6th, 1715, with Philip V gave the territory and colony of Colonia del Sacramento to Portugal in exchange for Albuquerque which had been taken from Castile. And so all the money spent and all the blood spilled, devoted, after all, to establishing England’s supremacy, had brought nothing to Portugal but an impoverished and subdued kingdom, unless we may consider as sufficient consolation João V’s honour of being mentioned first in the text of the treaty.

Scarcely had João emerged from this terrible twelve years’ struggle when the Venetians asked his assistance against the Ottomans. Too devout to reject such a petition, he hastened to send them the count of Rio Grande and a few ships, without any other object than that of sustaining the Christians against the infidels. But in spite of all the great questions over which Europe was still divided, this war was henceforth the only war into which he let himself be dragged. On the contrary he took care to maintain the friendliest relations with Castile, which he should never have ceased to do. He made this union the closer by two marriages—that of his eldest son José, prince of Brazil, with Doña Maria Anna Victoria, daughter of Philip V; and that of the infanta Maria Barbara with the prince of the Asturias (1728). Perhaps we may even reproach João V with having carried his desire to oblige Spain too far by giving up the Philippines and by exchanging the rich colony of Colonia del Sacramento, with all the northern region of La Plata, for a few small colonies in Paraguay, between the Ibicuhy and the Uruguay, which the Jesuits, possessors of all the territory, did not wish to give up (1750). But by this time João V was dying, and the Recollet friar, Gaspard de Incarnação, who ruled in his name, was solely responsible for this foolish concession.

The Colonies Decline

At peace with Europe and patronised by England, did not João V employ at least a portion of the daily increasing wealth which Brazil poured into his hands to maintain the few colonies which still remained to him in the Indies? He did nothing of the kind; and while the Mahrattas drove the Portuguese from Sandomir, Salsette, Thana, Barcain, Senapour, and Karanja, the Dutch, English, and French had every reason to claim the domination of the Orient. In a short time the viceroys of the Indies, no longer daring to inhabit the ancient palace of the Albuquerques and the Castros, lived modestly in the small village of Panjim. What had become of magnificent Goa, and Diu, and Calicut, queen of Malabar? They were already nothing but ruins; a century had sufficed to reduce a powerful empire to a pile of rubbish.

Far from devoting to useful enterprise the riches which fortune showered upon him, João V let the navy, army, and administration constantly decline. He seemed to have no other aim than to emulate the pomp of Louis XIV; but he forgot that Louis reigned over France and that the latter found all the elements of the luxury he displayed in the industry of the kingdom, while Portugal could not obtain them except by exhausting herself to the profit of foreigners. Such was João V’s generosity with his courtiers, his mistresses, his feasts, and his buildings that, with the great nobles following his example, poverty soon arrived, in spite of America. It has been estimated that between 1699 and 1756 there came from Brazil 2,400,000,000 francs, and that Portugal retained but a very small portion. All the rest, that is to say nearly nine-tenths, went to England, either in exchange for merchandise or as the price of transporting the metal, which became hers after all.

It was not sufficient that England should levy such a tribute on Portuguese indolence. Not less zealous for his religious practices than for his pleasures, João V had the idea of establishing a patriarchal legate at Lisbon, and before Rome could agree to this he had to expend enormous sums. He did the same in order that Portugal might possess under this legate a Latin church almost the equal of St. Peter’s, and this contained not less than sixty-six mitred canons at a salary of 5,000 cruzados each. Add to this the construction of the magnificent monastery of Mafra for three hundred monks, with its park twelve miles in length, the gorgeous procession, the collections of pious books to which the public was not allowed access, and what is worse still, the auto-da-fé which the Inquisition made him celebrate with great pomp, and we can realise that he spent on all this appearance of religion at least 500,000,000 francs. It is true that he was recompensed. Grateful Rome granted him the title of “most faithful king” in 1748.

While such follies are discrediting the reign, is it permissible to rehabilitate a prince because he founded a Portuguese academy or an academy of history—because he softened the national manners almost to enervation—because he introduced into his country French customs and Italian music in place of a real civilisation whose establishment the Inquisition would however never have tolerated? But how explain, on the other hand, that far from cursing João V’s memory, the Portuguese have always held it in great veneration? It was because the riches of Brazil struck them all with the same giddiness as they struck him, because his ostentatious piety conformed to the tastes of the nation, because if he fought with his ministers and occupied himself more with theological disputes than with government, he was accessible and kind to all his subjects, and could use those happy words which too often take the place of real merit.

The esteem given João V by Portugal seems to us to be his own condemnation. What is war without greatness, peace without prosperity, devotion without piety? And in these words we may sum up João’s reign. We shall not dwell on the final extinction of the ancient Portuguese liberties whose form had at least survived. João V never convoked the cortes until public tranquillity was threatened with some blow, and yet no one protested. The régime of the Inquisition had produced its usual effect.

The last years of João V were as sad as the others had been brilliant. Stricken with paralysis in 1744, he found a little relief in the baths of Caldas da Raiñha, but this treatment soon ceased to benefit him, and he could do nothing put pass the rest of his existence far from the luxury and fêtes of which he had been so fond. Thenceforth the king of Portugal was the Recollet Gaspard, who, with even less ability in the art of government than his master, had at least the merit of proving himself more economical. For some time João had contracted the costly habit of having masses for all the Portuguese of whose deaths he could learn. Gaspard took care to deceive him as to the deaths which occurred in Lisbon, lest he should send, as they said, all the living to hell in getting the dead out of purgatory.[f]

João died in July, 1750. By his queen, Maria Anna of Austria, João had a numerous issue; but three children only survived him—Maria Barbara, queen of Spain, his successor, José, and the infante Dom Pedro.[e]

THE REIGN OF JOSÉ I

[1750-1751 A.D.]

On September 7th, 1750, the new king was proclaimed with all the usual pomp and circumstance. He found the treasury empty, the army existing in name only; but, as someone has remarked with a certain semblance of accuracy, he found the popular instincts directed towards commerce, and a remarkable readiness to enter on a path of ameliorated industries. But none the less the Methuen Treaty was at that time manifesting all its consequences, and laid a spell of inertia on the most active minds, even on those who, by their continual contact with a commercial and manufacturing nation, were filled with dreams for their country of improvements which only a strong and independent genius could bring about.

At this epoch Brazil had become an inexhaustible resource for the mother-country in all financial embarrassments. December, 1750, witnessed the arrival at Lisbon of the fleet, richly loaded, on which so many hopes were built each succeeding year. From a generous impulse, for which the colonies were most grateful to him, one of the new king’s first acts was aimed at the political betterment of the rich province of Minas from which he drew so much of his wealth; he abolished the poll-tax, which was paid as a right of seigniory, and in 1751 he established at Rio de Janeiro a tribunal of relaçao [i.e., a court of appeal], a real and well-felt advantage for that country, since in former times trials of any importance lasted an eternity, being brought to Lisbon for judgment.

But with the question of important improvements, and the directing of wide measures, the name of one other than the reigning sovereign flows involuntarily from the historian’s pen—that of the great statesman Pombal, who gave his country so mighty an impulse. To José belongs the supreme merit of discerning the merits of this extraordinary man. There is perhaps something of injustice in comparing the king with Louis XIII, as is so frequently done; for he had at all events sufficient firmness of character always to approve the acts of the man he had willingly chosen. On January 19th, 1729, José I had married (during his father’s lifetime) Doña Maria Anna Victoria, daughter of Philip V and Elizabeth Farnese. This lady should have married Louis XV and had never become wholly resigned to the bitterness of her memories. In politics she was not only always opposed to France, but, later, she openly posed as a formidable enemy to the powerful man to whose hands her royal husband had intrusted the destinies of the nation.[g]

The Great Minister Pombal

[1741-1755 A.D.]

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello,[174] who was created count of Oeyras and afterwards marquis of Pombal, whom we shall hereafter call by the last and shortest name, had been introduced to King João V, who was a person of a sickly constitution; he however made himself intolerable to the king by his incessant fertility in plans and projects. In order to remove him from the court, he was first sent on some trifling affairs to London, and secondly upon business of graver importance to Vienna. In these cities he became acquainted with the French philosophy and the new theories of political economy and statecraft, and convinced that the Jesuits, who exercised unlimited dominion in Portugal, and had the whole system of instruction completely in their hands, had kept his countrymen more than a century behind the spirit of the age. The queen of Portugal, who was an Austrian princess, had the management of the government during the very frequent attacks of absence of mind and incapacity under which her husband laboured. Pombal had been employed by her in the execution of affairs of various kinds in Vienna, and he no sooner married her friend the countess Daun, than she resolved to recall him from his embassy and to take him into the ministry in Lisbon.

King João died immediately after the arrival of Pombal in Lisbon, and it was very easy for Pombal to make himself indispensable. The young king was of an indolent character, shrunk from every effort, was licentious and extravagant, but entertained a childish fear of his wife, from whom he carefully concealed his amours. He was as superstitious as the humblest peasant of his superstitious nation, he was as cowardly as Pombal was courageous, and the latter kept him in such a continual state of suspicion and anxiety that the king from fear resigned everything into his hands in order to secure his favour and protection.

Wraxall,[i] who only first became acquainted with Pombal when he was seventy years of age, speaks of his features, his giant build, and his language as characteristic of all that energy which he had exhibited for twenty-seven years in the public administration; it would appear therefore as if nature had from the first designed him for a reformer and dictator. In order to lessen and correct our ideas of the cruelties which he practised in his reforms, we must remember that in Asia, Africa, and southern Europe our cold and tedious morality is completely unknown, and compensated for by warm feelings of religion, which take heaven by violence; and, moreover, no one except a monarchical Danton or Robespierre would have been able to snatch Portugal from its state of powerless subjection to the institutions of the Middle Ages. Pombal appeared to have been raised up to organise a monarchical system of terror, and he alone could have succeeded in bringing Portugal nearer to the other states of Europe and to the spirit of the new age.

The first contest of the minister after he was firmly seated in his position was that with the order of Jesuits. The Jesuits were regarded by him as a dangerous independent aristocracy, and as the guardians of the secrets of the confessional of almost all the princes and nobles of Europe, far beyond the reach of any secular arm. In Portugal, in particular, the order, by the possession and use of great wealth acquired by trade, and of a flourishing colony, threatened the complete oppression of the state, which was entirely in its power. Shortly before Pombal became minister the order of the Jesuits had obtained a temporal dominion in Uruguay in America, secured for themselves all the privileges of government and legislation, and threatened to draw the whole trade of private individuals to themselves by various speculations and large commercial adventures in the Antilles and the European ports. The order was in ill-repute for its casuistry, by virtue of which regicide and bankruptcy might be equally justified, as Arnauld and Pascal had proved in the preceding century. The danger of allowing such an order first to sustain speculators by its credit and then to allow them to fail, had been so clearly proved in Pombal’s time in the superior courts in France, that the parliament at that time zealously pressed for the abolition of the order. The pope himself had issued very severe orders in 1741 against the practices of slave-dealing, usury, and banking, in which the order had engaged. In February, 1741, Benedict XIV published a bull, by which, without naming the Jesuits in particular, all orders whatsoever and all ecclesiastics were strictly forbidden to engage in any description of trade or commerce, to exercise any temporal authority, or to interfere with the sale or purchase of the converts. This bull failed in producing its intended effect, and in December another was issued expressly against the Jesuits. The latter, entitled Immensa pastorum, which is remarkable as being the first manifesto published by the pope against the order of Jesuits, was particularly directed against their conduct in their missions in Asia and Africa, in Brazil and Paraguay.

The bold spirit of usurpation which the Jesuits continued to display, notwithstanding the pope’s first bull, after having caused the Immensa pastorum to be launched against them, urged Pombal also to the adoption of his first strong measures against this dangerous order. In their missions in Paraguay, both in the portions which acknowledged Portugal as their sovereign state as well as those which acknowledged the supremacy of Spain, they had contrived to obtain complete possession of the secular administration, by having secured for themselves the most extraordinary privileges from the kings and queens of these nations, who were entirely subject to their guidance and dominion. No Spaniard or Portuguese was suffered to set foot in their missions without their special permission. The pope in his bull, under threats of the greater excommunication, forbade all and each, and the Jesuits expressly by name, to make slaves of the Indians, to sell, exchange, or make presents of them, to separate them from their wives and children, to despoil them of their property, or to injure or molest them in any other way whatsoever.

Later, Spain ceded the district of Puy in Galicia and the seven missions of the Jesuits in Paraguay, and obtained in return Colonia del Sacramento. This exchange led to disputes with the Jesuits, and finally even gave rise to military expeditions on the part of the Spaniards and Portuguese against the Indians: the Indians themselves were highly dissatisfied with the cession of Paraguay to Portugal. The active resistance of the Indians led the Spaniards and Portuguese to meet force by force, and a formal contest arose, which led to no very conclusive or satisfactory results as long as the matter was wholly left to the three thousand Spaniards and the thousand Portuguese who had been sent to aid and carry into effect the objects of the commissioners; in the year 1753 Pombal adopted different measures. He sent a considerable army into the district, gave the command of it to his brother, Francisco Xavier Mendoza, conferred upon him the office of governor of the province, and intrusted him secretly with full power to destroy and forever put an end to the secular dominion of the Jesuits in this territory. The last part of the commission was kept a profound secret, and Pombal also delayed its execution till the death of the dowager queen of Portugal, who was a blindly devoted adherent to the order. These severe measures against the Jesuits were first carried fully into operation in the year 1755, in which the capital of Portugal was visited and almost destroyed by one of the most dreadful earthquakes which has ever occurred in Europe.[h]

The Earthquake at Lisbon (November 1st, 1755)

[1755 A.D.]

Denis[g] quotes a letter from Pedegache, who was an eye-witness of the horror: “On the 1st of November, 1755, with a quiet atmosphere and a very clear sky, the earth shook, but so slightly that everyone fancied the vibration was due to some rapidly moving vehicle. This first trembling lasted two minutes; after two minutes’ interval there was a repetition of the trembling, but so violent a one that the greater number of the houses began to crack and to fall down: this second trembling continued for upwards of ten minutes. By that time the dust was so great as to obscure the sun. Then came a shock so awful that the houses which were still standing fell with a deafening crash. It seemed as if the earth were returning to chaos. The tears and cries of the living, the sighs and groans of the dying, the shuddering of the earth, the total darkness, all added to the horror of the scene. But at last, after twenty minutes, all became quiet. One thought then filled every mind—flight, and a refuge in the country. But our cup of misery was not yet full. Scarcely had we begun to breathe again when fire broke out in different parts of the town.[175] The wind, which was very boisterous, fanned the flames and left no room for hope.

“Possibly something might have been done to check the fire had not the town been threatened with wide submergence by the sea; at all events the terrified inhabitants easily persuaded themselves that this danger was in store for them, seeing waves breaking furiously over places far removed from the shore. Several people believing that they would find a certain amount of safety on the water ventured on it; but the waves drove the vessels on shore, grinding them one against another, then drawing them seawards with merciless violence as though they would swallow them and the miserable beings clinging to them.

“During all these days our terror has never abated, for the shocks are incessant. On Friday, November 7th, at five o’clock in the morning, there was a shock so violent we imagined our troubles were about to recommence; but happily it was followed by no disastrous consequences. The movement was regular, like that of a rolling vessel. What caused such devastation on the first day was that all the movements were contrary and so exactly opposed to each other that the walls parted with the utmost facility. I have noticed that the strongest shocks are always at daybreak. They say that the sea came up nine feet higher than the highest tide ever remembered in Portugal. On Sunday morning, November 2nd, I saw with the utmost amazement the Tagus, which in some reaches is more than two leagues wide, almost dried up on the city side; the other side was a feeble little stream through which one could see the bed. Almost the whole of Portugal has felt this scourge; the kingdom of Algarve, Santarem, Setubal, Oporto, Mafra, Obidos, Castanheira—indeed all the towns within twenty leagues are destroyed. I write to you from the depths of the country, for there is not a habitable house left. Lisbon has vanished!”

Everyone, from the monarch down to the meanest beggar, had something to deplore. In the town of Lisbon alone thirty thousand persons had perished, and, if one can trust the calculations which were made later, the losses in valuable furniture and in hard cash reached the enormous total of £91,360,000 or $456,800,000. In short, such were the results of this terrible catastrophe that more than twenty years after Dumouriez[k] was still able to say: “Lisbon is an appalling agglomeration of overturned palaces, burned churches, of rubbish such as one sees when a fortification has been blown up. In many places one walks over the sites of houses, in streets contrived on the rubbish thrown up on either side to allow of roadway being made. Here and there one sees reared up isolated houses, and ruins as grotesque, as grimly beautiful, as the remains of Greek and Roman buildings.”[g]

[1756-1757 A.D.]

The whole population of Lisbon continued throughout the winter in tents or huts in the fields. The distress was extreme in every part of Portugal, and called forth, as has been already stated, the pity of all neighbouring nations. In Spain, Ferdinand deeply sympathised in his queen’s sorrow for her countrymen, and repealed the existing prohibitions of exporting some of the necessaries of life, and the heavy duties imposed upon the export of others, as related to Portugal. In England, though the claim might be less, more was done. George II applied to parliament for the means of relieving a people so severely afflicted; and the sum of £100,000 [$500,000] was immediately granted for that purpose. The ministers expended it in corn and other articles of provisions or indispensable necessaries, which were shipped off without a moment’s delay to the desolated city. The Portuguese felt gratitude both for the benefits conferred and for the kindly fellow-feeling that had prompted the act; and the old ties of friendship between England and Portugal seem to have regained much of their previously decaying strength.[b]

Pombal and the Jesuits

The measures which Pombal adopted on account of and after the earthquake, although in themselves prudent and humane, were enforced in a severe and arbitrary manner. He caused the public granaries to be thrown open, because hundreds of persons who had not been buried under the ruins, or killed by the falling buildings, were wandering about like ghosts and dying from hunger. He adopted measures for the immediate import of grain from all quarters, abolished the duties on corn, and strictly forbade the export of provisions of any description. The water-conduits which had been destroyed were also immediately restored and carefully maintained.[176] The indescribable misery which resulted from this calamity gave occasion to murders and plunder in such a country as Portugal. Pombal applied remedies for this evil also, but by the use of most horrible means. Thieves and robbers, regardless of the most imminent dangers, and urged by their covetousness, ventured into streets which were masses of ruins, and carried away property from churches, palaces, and private houses before the very eyes of the inhabitants, who were trembling for their lives. To put an end to this fearful system of plunder, the minister ordered guards to be placed at all the outlets from the city and in every street, and summary justice to be executed upon everyone who either refused or was unable to give a satisfactory account of what he was carrying. Hundreds of gallows were erected around the circuit of the city which was filled with the dead and the dying, and with persons robbed of all their property and means even of present existence; and on these gallows 350 people were hanged within three days.

At the very moment at which Pombal proved himself to be a delivering angel, and was devoting his labours day and night to the public preservation and the restoration of order, the clergy, and especially the Jesuits, endeavoured to expose him to the hatred of the people as an enemy of God. Sermons were preached against him from every pulpit, and a report was industriously put into circulation that the whole of their misfortunes, and even the earthquake itself, was a visitation of the divine wrath on account of Pombal’s conduct towards the clergy. The Jesuits alleged that Pombal had roused the tumult in Oporto to involve them in its consequences.

[1757-1758 A.D.]

At Pombal’s instigation. King José now signed the severe decree by which all Jesuits were banished from the court, which the minister caused to be executed after his own fashion. On the night between the 19th and the 20th of September, 1757, Pombal caused all the Jesuits at the court, then in Belem, at some distance from the capital, to be removed and conducted to Lisbon, and their places at court were immediately occupied by other ecclesiastics. This step against the court confessors was immediately followed by others against the whole order and its constitution.

In order to justify the steps taken against the Jesuits, and to induce all the monarchs in Europe to regard them as decided enemies of the temporal power of princes, Pombal had recourse to a remarkable expedient, which excited great attention throughout the whole of Europe. He published a manifesto against the order, which was eagerly read at all courts, produced a great effect in Austria, and enabled Kaunitz to prevail upon Maria Theresa to adopt many measures to which she never would have consented except for Pombal’s publication.

Both these criminatory reports were sent to the Portuguese minister in Rome (October, 1757), and he was instructed to seek and obtain from Pope Benedict XIV, who was then mortally ill, a complete reform of the order; and as early as February, 1758, a new and urgent note on the same subject was presented to the papal court. The pope yielded to the solicitation and issued a brief in April, by which the patriarch, Cardinal Saldanha, was appointed to examine and reform the abuses of the order in the kingdom of Portugal.[h]

A Plot to Assassinate the King

Whilst the Jesuits and their accusers were battling before the tribunal of the visitor, a plot to murder the king was organised at Lisbon, in 1758, by two of the noblest families in the realm, the motives to which, as is often the case, were enveloped in obscurity; whence it was easy to implicate the Jesuits, whether guilty or not, in the criminal design.

The duke of Aveiro, the chief conspirator, who had been a great favourite of João V, was descended from Dom Jorge, that natural son of João II whom his father had endeavoured to substitute to his cousin Emmanuel as his successor; and a daughter of the duke’s was married to the eldest son of his confederates, the marquis and marchioness of Tavora.[177] It has been surmised that the king, whose gallantries were notorious, was upon too intimate a footing with the young marchioness of Tavora, and that the two families resented such a stain upon their honour; it has been also surmised that the old marchioness, a woman of imperious temper and uncontrollable passions, was exasperated at having been refused a dukedom for her husband; and finally, it was alleged at the time that these two noble families were merely the tools of their Jesuit confessors, who sought by the king’s death to quell the proceedings against their order.

What can be stated with certainty is that a young lady, a distant relative of the Tavora family, who resided with the old marchioness, was found dead, pierced with wounds and wrapped in a sheet, in one of the streets of Lisbon; that no judicial inquiry into the circumstances of her death took place (a mode of connivance not uncommon when suspicion of crime attached to powerful families); that soon afterwards, as the king was returning to the palace at night, from the residence of one of his mistresses [the marchioness of Tavora], several shots were fired at the back of his carriage, one of which wounded him; and that the coachman, instead of going forwards to the palace, instantly turned his horses’ heads, and drove to the house of the king’s surgeon. It is believed that by this step he saved his master’s life, as he thus avoided two or three other parties of assassins who were lying in wait on the road to the palace.

[1758-1759 A.D.]

Some weeks elapsed ere the perpetrators of this outrage were detected, during which time Aveiro and Tavora were assiduous in their visits to the royal invalid. But in the end Pombal obtained a clew to the plot. A great number of persons were seized and imprisoned; and in January, 1759, as it is alleged, after a very arbitrary and unsatisfactory trial, the duke, the marquis, his two sons, and several other persons were broken on the wheel; the old marchioness, in consideration of her sex, was beheaded, and the young marchioness was shut up for life in a convent. Many persons were banished, and others imprisoned for life.

One of the conspirators is said, whilst under the torture, to have accused three Jesuits as the instigators of the conspiracy, but to have retracted this accusation upon the scaffold. Of these three Jesuits, one was tried for heresy, not treason, convicted, and executed; the other two were not even brought to trial; but Pombal took the opportunity to charge the crime upon the whole order, as the fruit of its principles and doctrines—an imputation to which their earlier conduct rendered the order but too obnoxious. He issued orders for the confiscation of their property, and the seizure of their persons, throughout Portugal and the colonies, as advisers and instigators of regicide, and for the investigation of their doctrines. In the month of September of this same year they were finally proscribed and banished.

The Exile of the Jesuits

The missionary fathers were torn from the reductions, and with all Jesuits who could be found in Brazil, old and young, even the patients in their infirmaries, were stowed on board ship, without any of the conveniences, or scarcely any of the necessaries of life, like the unfortunate negroes in slave vessels, and transported to Europe. Upon reaching the mouth of the Tagus, some were landed and thrown into the Lisbon prisons, where they languished during the remainder of José’s reign; others were sent forward to Italy, where they were landed upon the papal territories, and left to find their way to the houses of their order. It is said, however, that an allowance was made from Lisbon for their support, and that Pombal often complained of the extraordinary longevity of his Jesuit pensioners.[178]

Pombal, who really appears to have been partly actuated by disgust at the slavery, however easy, in which the fathers had held their converts, and to have desired to place the Indians upon a level with their Portuguese masters, now endeavoured at once to effect this equalisation.[179] The scheme, if not extravagant, was at least premature.

In Portugal likewise, Pombal, though he succeeded better, attempted too much; and by his injudicious endeavours to secure to the Portuguese the profit made by foreign, and especially English merchants, he merely harassed and injured the trade of the country, without at all advancing the end at which he aimed. That end was in fact unattainable. To deprive the enterprising capitalist of his profits is very possible, but not so to transfer them to the indigent, ignorant, or unenterprising. Pombal moreover involved Portugal in a quarrel with Rome, by his endeavour to subject the clergy to a lay tribunal, a sort of board of conscience, when accused of high treason, or other state crimes. Prior to this rupture, a papal dispensation had been obtained for one of those incestuous connections so frequent in the peninsula, and more especially in Portugal. José had no son; and to insure the undisputed succession of his eldest daughter, Donna Maria, it was deemed expedient to marry her to her uncle, his younger brother, Dom Pedro. The dispensation was obtained, and the marriage celebrated in 1760.

War with Spain

[1759-1763 A.D.]

The two Bourbon monarchs, Louis XV of France, and Charles III of Spain, being involved in the Family Compact War, now required the king of Portugal to join them against England, Charles kindly offering Spanish troops with which to garrison the Portuguese fortresses against British aggression. Unprepared as he was for war, he therefore boldly refused to desert his old ally; the Bourbon ambassadors quitted Lisbon (a step nearly tantamount to a declaration of war), and a Spanish army immediately invaded Portugal.

During a peace of forty-eight years the Portuguese army had been neglected. The troops did not amount to twenty thousand men, and this small number were ill-armed, and worse disciplined. It is not surprising that Braganza, Miranda, Torre de Moncorvo, and Almeida fell in rapid succession before the invaders, whilst the greatest alarm spread throughout the country.

But the genius of Pombal rose with the emergency. From England he obtained supplies of arms, troops, and especially of officers; and he appointed the count of Schaumburg-Lippe, a German general of considerable reputation,[180] to the chief command of the Portuguese army. Schaumburg-Lippe showed real talent by adapting his measures to the nature of the forces that were to execute them. By his direction the armed peasants defended the mountain passes; and the English brigadier-general Burgoyne successfully performed several surprises and small expeditions, which, if in themselves of little moment, served to revive the spirits of the Portuguese army, and being combined with the annoyance given by the peasantry, checked the progress of the Spaniards. Accordingly, at the approach of winter, the invaders retired within their own frontiers, evacuating all their conquests. This campaign constituted nearly the whole of the Spanish share of the Seven Years’ War in Europe; the rest was confined to contributing a few auxiliary troops to the French armies. In America, Spain was more successful against Portugal, the governor of Buenos Ayres again making himself master of Colonia del Sacramento, with booty of £4,000,000 [$20,000,000], besides numbers of richly laden English merchant vessels.

On the 10th of February, 1763, a treaty of peace was signed at Paris between France, Spain, and England, including the restoration of Colonia del Sacramento to Portugal.

Upon the restoration of peace, José and Pombal resumed their patriotic labours for improving the internal condition of Portugal. With the assistance of Schaumburg-Lippe they remodelled, increased, and disciplined the army. They similarly reformed the state of the navy. They established a more efficient police, and abolished the Indices Expurgatorios, or prohibitory lists of books of the Inquisition, which banished from Portugal many good and really philosophical works. They did not indeed give liberty to the press, but established a board of censure, combining royal with prelatical and inquisitorial judges, by which all publications were to be examined. The verdicts of this board, if still somewhat illiberal, were far less so than the bigoted decisions of the uncontrolled Inquisition. Nay, it is even said to have admitted some free-thinking works, and condemned many books written in support of the more extravagant pretensions of the papal see. To this board, moreover, all schools were subjected. Pombal introduced great ameliorations into the constitution and forms of the University of Coimbra, where, till then, degrees in law, medicine, and divinity had been granted, without any real examination of the proficiency of the candidates.

Pombal likewise somewhat limited the right of entailing property, carried throughout the peninsula to a ruinous extent, diminished the excessive number of monasteries, imposed restrictions upon the admission of novices, and endeavoured to abolish the odious distinctions between the “old” and “new” Christians, by repealing the tax laid especially upon the latter. On the other hand, Pombal sought to encourage agriculture by ordering all vineyards to be destroyed that were planted upon good arable land; he cramped commerce by injudicious attempts to encourage domestic manufactures, by establishing exclusive commercial companies, by passing sumptuary laws, and by various embarrassing regulations.[b]

Schlosser’s Estimate of Pombal

[1750-1777 A.D.]

One of the very first acts of his administration was to abolish the yearly exhibition of burning men for heresy (auto-da-fé); limits were set to the power of the Inquisition in general, and the infliction of all punishments, or cases involving punishments, were referred to the decisions of the secular tribunals. The conventual and religious houses were strictly forbidden to bring, or cause to be brought, young women of good fortune from the Brazils and to receive them into their convents, with a view of enriching their several orders. Restrictions were soon placed upon the nobility also, as had been previously done upon the clergy. Pombal behaved towards the high nobles precisely as Charles XI of Sweden had done towards the same class in his kingdom, with this exception—that the latter rested the defence of his conduct upon the declaration of the estates of the realm. In the Portuguese possessions on the coasts of Asia, Africa, and America, whole districts, lordships, and large estates which at first belonged to the crown had come into the hands of private families, as was also the case in Sweden in the seventeenth century; all these alienations were reclaimed, and all the estates which had come either by gift or occupancy into the hands of private individuals were resumed by the crown, and the families who were thus arbitrarily and violently deprived of their properties received very inadequate compensation.

By this resumption of crown lands which had been long in the possession of the nobility, the members of this body lost much of their influence and power, and the measures must be allowed to have been executed with great rigour. Imprisonment and death were arbitrarily inflicted upon all those who showed themselves discontented with the scientific and philosophic system of government of the prime minister. The first years of Pombal’s administration may be very fitly compared to the times of terror during the French Revolution; for the whole of the dreadful and subterraneous prisons, and all the towers and castles were filled with prisoners of state.

Should it be asked how it was possible that the cowardly, superstitious, and weak king could approve of such a revolutionary method of proceeding, this will be best explained by calling to mind that, from the time of the disputes with the Jesuits, he lived in a continual state of fear, not only of the order, but of his nobility and of his brother Dom Pedro. He had therefore completely thrown himself into the arms of his minister, who surrounded the king and himself with guards, relying upon whose protection the weak king rejoiced that by the instrumentality of his minister he was able to exercise a dominion uncontrolled by the people or the nobles, such as was enjoyed by Louis XIV or Frederick of Prussia.

Pombal’s measures with respect to trade, commerce, industry, and agriculture were neither the best nor free from selfish views; but they roused up the Portuguese and awakened them from the slumber and idleness of their monkish life, although this rousing was frequently not performed with a very gentle hand. We shall therefore attribute no higher importance to the school of commerce established by Pombal, to the solemn and public examinations which were held in his presence, and to the public attention which he thereby roused, than that he opposed a school of practical life to the prevailing monkish institutions, and a secular celebration which bore upon education and life to ecclesiastical processions. He also contributed very largely to the improvement of agriculture in the province of Alemtejo, although we should feel by no means disposed to undertake the defence of all those measures which he adopted with this view; the same may be said of the great canal of Oeyras and of the fair established in the same place. He provided for the security of the city repeatedly destroyed by earthquakes; he provided an abundant supply of water by means of magnificent conduits, and erected numerous noble public edifices. But the means, however useful, were not the less tyrannical and cruel. The unfortunate inhabitants whose dwellings had escaped the terrific power of the earthquake were obliged to pull down their houses and build them up again at their own cost, according to a prescribed plan and on a given scale, if, either in their external appearance or by their situation, they interfered with Pombal’s magnificent plan of broad streets and beautiful houses. Travellers were struck with admiration at his immense architectural structures, the arsenal, the exchange which was connected with it, and the market-house, and it was said there was nothing in Europe of their kind to be compared with these buildings; but, in fact, the only real glory in the matter was that Pombal’s buildings were all erected in the taste and style of the new age, whereas those of João V retained all the characteristics of the Middle Ages; for the exchange and the market-house were wholly destitute of merchants and wares, and there was no suitable army or fleet to correspond to the arsenal.

Pombal was at that time the object of the most deadly hatred as a tyrant in the nation which he was desirous of reforming; this alone was sufficient to render everything hateful which originated with him amongst a people whose condition he was indeed unable immediately to improve, but whom he annoyed, provoked, and tormented by means of his state police and his numerous and detested decrees. He durst not, in consequence, venture out of his house without a guard, and was obliged to have recourse to the most hateful means of maintaining the respect due to his station and rank. Wraxall,[i] who, as regards hearsays, mixes together truth and falsehood, stories, footmen’s reports, and lies of all kinds, but who is deserving of credit when he speaks as an eye-witness, informs us that, as late as the year 1772, he found all the prisons full of unfortunate individuals, some of whom had been buried in these living graves for fifteen years.

The advantages therefore which Portugal gained through Pombal’s administration, and which were loudly celebrated through the whole of Europe, rested upon a very unstable foundation. The most remarkable of these advantages were: security from assassination, which Lisbon had never enjoyed before the time of Pombal’s rule; the rebuilding and adornment of the capital; cleanliness of the streets; a free trade in books; an academy which deserved well of the friends of the sciences; a disciplined army, etc. All these momentous changes and creations, however, wholly depended for their continuance upon the absolute power of the minister, and that again upon the life of the king. As long as José lived, Pombal maintained his influence, and pursued the same energetic course both towards priests and soldiers. He put limits to the number of brotherhoods and ecclesiastical orders, and availed himself of the aid of his sister, who was herself a nun, to carry his reforming principles even into the nunneries. Military affairs he conducted in the same manner, for he never hesitated to cashier whole regiments if they transgressed his army regulations respecting discipline, or suffered themselves to be guilty of acts of injury or violence towards their officers, who were gathered from all nations and countries.

The king, who was nearly eighty years old, no sooner became seriously ill than Pombal foresaw his fate, for the queen was appointed regent and he was kept far removed from the sick-bed of the monarch. He therefore, shortly before José’s death, which took place in February, 1777, preferred a request to the regent to be relieved from his official duties, and appealed, as a reason for his request, to his advanced age and his bodily infirmities. In this remarkable document he gives a brief but comprehensive statement of the whole of the arrangements and condition of all the departments of the government at that time. No person who reads this paper can fail to be pleased with the ability which it displays and to admire its author, who had raised the financial condition of the country to a degree of prosperity which it had not reached for centuries; he appended a paper to his petition for leave to retire from public life, in which a correct account is not only given of the diamonds in the royal cabinet, but in which it is stated that a sum of 76,000,000 cruzados in hard cash [about £6,400,000 or $32,000,000] was deposited in the royal treasury.

THE NEW QUEEN AND REACTION

[1777-1785 A.D.]

The king however died before the regent had returned her answer; he was succeeded by his daughter, Donna Maria I, to whom Pombal preferred his request anew on the 1st of March, 1777, which was granted to him by a decree of the date of the 4th of the same month, drawn up in a kindly spirit. The regent, at the end of February, had already released from imprisonment several of the clergy and persons of distinction who had been incarcerated as being implicated in the conspiracy against the king’s life, under the appearance of having taken this step by her husband’s command: in the beginning of March everything was changed. The new and unholy marriage which was celebrated in the royal family, for which the pope had granted a dispensation, may be regarded as a preliminary announcement of the return to the old order of things: this marriage, now solemnised, had been commanded by the king immediately before his death. It appeared as if it were not enough that the reigning queen should be married to her own paternal uncle, but the son of this marriage must be further allied with his mother’s sister, Donna Maria Benedicta.

The whole history of this incestuous family furnishes proofs enough that, although the pope might sanction and bless such marriages for money, they had the stamp of retribution upon them. This was soon evident in the case of the new queen Donna Maria. Immediately after her father’s death she assumed the reins of government, which she shared with her husband Dom Pedro; soon afterwards, however, she exhibited traces of insanity, and at a later period became completely mad. As her unsoundness of mind was closely connected with her excessive superstition, she did not wait for Pombal’s removal from the presidency of the council, which took place a few weeks afterwards, but immediately proceeded to take steps for the restoration of all those religious abuses which had previously existed in the kingdom. She restored to the papal nuncio and the saints of the Jesuits all the honours and distinctions which they had previously enjoyed among the people. The nuncio immediately played again the character of a spiritual monarch; and the pope received half a million of florins as an indemnification for the expense to which he had been put by the support of the Jesuits who were landed at Cività Vecchia. The estates of the ridiculous patriarchate were given back; the holidays, confraternities, and tribunals of the Middle Ages restored, and those saints of the Romish church who had been the enemies of all temporal sovereigns were again reinstated in the honours of the church and the calendar. This was the case with Gregory VII, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Francis Borgia, whose names had been erased from the calendar by the orders of Pombal. All this took place long before Pombal received permission to retire from his official duties.

Hundreds were liberated from their subterranean dungeons, among whom were bishops, grandees of the kingdom, and members of families of the first distinction, and especially the sixty Jesuits who had been restored to freedom upon the command of the queen; all these combined and allowed the weak-minded lady no rest or peace till she let loose her jurists upon the reformer, with the forms and formulas of their Byzantine criminal law, of which its codes furnish abundance, for the torment of all those who are unfortunate enough to live in countries in which Byzantine justice is honoured. Some idea of the number and power of the minister’s enemies at court may be deduced from the fact that he had hunted forth whole crowds of that court mob which, under all sorts of titles and pretences, had wasted or spent on themselves and their pleasures the revenues of the kingdom, or sacrificed them to his own creatures; and that again he had not only met the expenditure, but accumulated a large reserve-fund in the treasury of a kingdom whose exchequer had always been previously empty. In the royal treasury he kept always on hand 40,000,000 cruzados, and in the tithe exchequer 30,000,000, which was a thing long unheard of in the history of Portuguese finances.

Pombal shared the fate of all those who have ever attempted to carry through a revolution or even a reform by means of violence and severity; the cruelty, criminality, and violence of their measures rouse every human feeling against them to such an extent that neither sense nor gratitude remains for the various beneficial changes which they have effected. The numbers of prisoners who were released from their dreadful captivity and dungeons at the king’s death furnish but too strong proofs of the strict applicability of this principle to Pombal, and of the severities which he exercised under pretence at least of serving the interests of humanity, and promoting the cause of knowledge and improvement. In the very first days of the new government 500 human beings came forth from their cells as from their graves, who had never been brought before any legal tribunal, and their number was afterwards increased to 800. When it was determined to prosecute the marquis, it was alleged by his enemies that during his administration 9,640 men had been banished or incarcerated, of whom 3,970 had been completely innocent, and of the rest only 800 then remained alive. For four years (from 1777-1781) Pombal was prosecuted before the courts by individuals who brought actions against him for false imprisonment and damages, and a prosecution was not commenced against him, on account of his administration of the state, till he had been first baited and hunted down by the lawyers.

At length a severe final judgment was pronounced against the marquis, now in his eighty-second year. In August, 1781, the queen overruled the decision of the courts, and limited the punishment to a public disapproval of the manner in which he had discharged the duties of his office, and banishment from the court.

Almost every improvement or change which had been effected by Pombal had disappeared before his death, which took place in 1782. Priests and monks of all colours, Jesuits, now called ex-Jesuits, want of police, filth, insecurity for life and property, and a total relaxation of military discipline again appeared; but the whole effects of his exertions and labours could not be rooted out. Murphy[l] who visited Portugal in 1789, found many changes in the old Portuguese life, and every change which he mentions is referred to Pombal. He further boasts that Portugal was indebted to this celebrated minister for an institution of which England was long destitute; in England hundreds of unfortunate debtors were continually to be found languishing in the public prisons at the suit of some heartless and intolerant creditor. In 1744 Pombal issued an ordinance, which since that time has continued to be the law in Portugal, by which, on the one hand, debtors were freed from personal arrest or imprisonment at the suit of their creditors,[181] and the means were given to the latter by which obtaining possession of the property of their debtors was rendered as easy as it had previously been difficult.[h]

The strict friendship subsisting between Spain and Portugal had been most beneficial to the former during the war with England (1779-1783). Not only had the Portuguese harbours afforded neither shelter nor assistance, as of old, to the hostile British fleets, but the Portuguese flag had been the means of transporting the wealth of America to Spain; and it is said that when the English ministry had projected an expedition against Peru, whilst distracted by Tupac Amaru’s revolt, its execution was prevented by a remonstrance from the court of Lisbon, representing that, in case of an invasion of the Spanish dominions, Portugal was bound by treaty to take part in the war. Charles, duly sensible of these advantages, sought to strengthen the ties of relationship and friendship by those of wedlock; and in 1785 his fourth son, Don Gabriel, married the infanta Marianna Victoria of Portugal, and Dom João, the queen of Portugal’s second son, the eldest Spanish infanta, Carlota Joaquina.

[1785-1799 A.D.]

This last union was the more agreeable to Charles, inasmuch as Dom João had a very fair chance of eventually succeeding to the crown, the incestuous union of his eldest brother with his aunt having proved barren. But it was not the youngest of this ill-assorted pair that was destined to be the survivor. Three years after Dom João’s marriage, the prince of Brazil himself, whom the bigoted prejudices of the queen had not suffered to be inoculated, died of the smallpox, and Charles’ son-in-law became prince of Brazil in his stead. Queen Maria had, in 1786, lost her uncle-husband, Pedro III, but he had interfered little with her government, and his death had therefore no effect upon public affairs.

The queen appears to have been really anxious to promote the prosperity of her kingdom. When the Peace of Versailles had relieved her from the embarrassments consequent upon her intimate connection with two hostile belligerents, she endeavoured to strengthen the old friendship with England by concluding a commercial treaty, at the same time that she maintained her new relations of friendship and commerce with the Bourbon courts.[b]

THE REGENCY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The queen now began to show signs of an insanity which took a religious form and in which she suffered all the agonies of her vivid belief that she was doomed to eternal fire. Her confessors endeavoured to comfort her by milder applications of their doctrines, but from 1788 the government was more and more taken out of her incapable hands by Dom João, who was not, however, fully constituted regent until 1799.

Meanwhile the ferment of the French Revolution had stirred all Europe, and Portugal indirectly. We have already described the embroilment of Spain. Portugal endeavoured to keep a strict neutrality, but her treaties with Spain and England enabled them to enforce their demand for aid.[182] She added nine sail of the line to the British fleet, and five thousand infantry under General Skelater to the Spanish armies. These troops shared the easy successes of the first rush across the Pyrenees and the bitter disasters of the following repulse. Spain now, in 1795, signed a treaty of alliance with France, and Portugal applied for terms, but was rejected as “a mere province of England”; the ambassador at Paris was ordered out of the country, and on showing some delay was thrown into prison, where he remained for months.

[1799-1807 A.D.]

Portugal was now driven to open alliance with England, against whom Spain declared war in 1796. At the same time Dom João learned that Napoleon and the Spanish prime minister Godoy had agreed to conquer and divide Portugal as a spoil of war. The English voted £200,000 [$1,000,000] to Portugal and sent six thousand men under Major-General Sir Charles Stuart. These with a native army of some forty thousand men placed under the prince of Waldeck frightened off Spanish invasion, whereupon Stuart and the English troops withdrew. Little had happened thus far except the loss of some commerce to French privateers. In 1799 Dom João formally assumed the regency and tried vainly to secure the favour of Napoleon, who would listen to nothing less than the payment of a heavy tribute, breach of the alliance with England, the closing of Portuguese ports to English ships, the surrender of a portion of Portuguese territory to Spain. As alternative to these hard terms made under the name of Spain, war was offered. Dom João accepted the latter alternative, and proclaimed war on Spain, February 10th, 1801.

As related in the Spanish history, Portugal was invaded by the Spanish at once, and with such ease that, by June 6th, João was glad to accept the Peace of Badajoz at the cost of ceding Olivenza to Spain. Napoleon, however, required more, and sent troops which extorted a tribute of £1,000,000 [$5,000,000] and the cession of Portuguese Guiana to France. Napoleon’s representative at Lisbon was General Lannes (or Lasnes) who at first provoked great hatred by his insolent bearing, but later procured a large influence over João and secured the dismissal of the ministers of English sympathies. In 1804 he was succeeded by General Junot who accepted a treaty of neutrality which gave Portugal quiet for some years, while Napoleon went on from great to greater.

The English tried to break the Portuguese peace with France, but could succeed in nothing more than keeping her ports open in spite of Napoleon’s continental system against English trade. By 1807, however, Napoleon was master enough of the East to turn again to Portugal and by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (October 29th, 1807), resumed his project of dividing it among Godoy, the king of Etruria, and himself. The terrified João offered every sacrifice for peace, going so far as to order from his realm every British subject and to close his ports to England, though this meant commercial ruin to Portugal. But Napoleon, pretending that the submission was too late, sent forward his troops under General Junot.[a]

THE INVASION OF THE FRENCH (1807 A.D.)

The Treaty of Fontainebleau contained all the decisions respecting the campaign against Portugal, and the partition of that kingdom. The Spaniards were to reinforce the army of the Gironde with twelve thousand men; at the same time to invade the north of Portugal with forty thousand men; and to give orders for another army to enter Algarve under Solano. In terms of the treaty, Lisbon and the whole centre of the country were to fall to the share of France, a part of the northern division was to be given as compensation to the queen of Etruria, and a sovereign territory to be formed in the south for Godoy. The part not allotted by the treaty to any of the three parties just mentioned was to be the subject of future negotiations, when possession of the whole was obtained.

Notwithstanding the imminent danger, the prince-regent had neither taken measures for defence, made preparations for setting sail to Brazil, nor even for the removal of the rich stores in the arsenals and magazines of the capital. The prince and his whole court would have been taken by surprise in Lisbon by the French rapidly advancing on the capital through Beira, had not a swift sailing ship brought a copy of the Moniteur to Lisbon, in which Napoleon, who supposed that his army was long since in that city, too hastily expressed his triumph by the declaration: “The house of Braganza has ceased to reign.”

The army of the Gironde was under the command of Marshal Junot, who gained his ensign’s commission by an act of great presence of mind displayed under the eyes of Napoleon at the siege of Toulon, although he was in reality possessed of very small military capacity. He had been in Lisbon as ambassador, and still held that title, never having been formally recalled; the troops under his command, however, contained but very few men who could be thoroughly relied upon, for this army of the Gironde had been very hastily drawn together. The prime of the French army was at that time still in Germany (September, 1807) and in Prussia, and the first army, as well as that by which it was succeeded, consisted of a mixture of soldiers and officers, who, on the landing of the English and the outbreak of the Spanish rising, proved wholly unequal to maintaining the glory gained by the grand army; this was not at first perceived. Junot wished to collect and organise his army, seeing it was composed of very different elements, when he suddenly received orders to march direct upon Lisbon in order to surprise the prince-regent in his security. We may form some idea of the rapidity with which he prosecuted his march, from the fact that he had taken twenty-five days to march from Bayonne to Salamanca, where he arrived on the 12th of November; while, on the other hand, he reached Alcantara as early as the 17th, and was in Abrantes on the 23rd, about eighty miles from Lisbon.

The difficulty of the march, the pathless and rough character of the districts through which he led the army were indescribable; but no measures whatever were adopted by the Portuguese for resistance or even to increase the difficulty of the journey. A great portion of the army fell a sacrifice to the difficulties of the march, or to want, in neighbourhoods where no idea could be entertained of any kind of sustenance or cover. Many had fallen into pits, others perished in the attempt to cross running streams; but the immense loss in men was taken into no account whatever. As a reward for the rapidity of his march, Junot received the title of the duke of Abrantes, although he reached Lisbon with only a small part of his army [about two thousand men] at the end of November, and a long time elapsed before all the stragglers joined their respective corps.

THE THRONE MOVES TO BRAZIL

[1807-1814 A.D.]

The prince-regent was at length induced, by the number of the Moniteur which was sent to him, to throw himself into the arms of the English, whose ships were lying in the Tagus, and, under their protection, to save himself by setting sail for Brazil. He took his departure from the Tagus on the 29th, under English convoy, with eight ships of the line, three frigates, three brigs, and a considerable number of transports, in order to remove the seat of his government to Brazil.[183] The well-stored arsenal, from whose treasures the whole French army was afterwards clothed and provided, fell without diminution into the hands of the French, in consequence of his precipitate departure. Junot’s advanced guard even reached Belem in time enough to capture some ships of war which had been detained by contrary winds, and were still within reach of the guns of the fort.

The second army, which was assembled at Bayonne to reinforce Junot’s corps, was still stronger than the first; but the whole of Europe deeply condemned Napoleon’s want of honour, and was angry with the French sophists and cringing flatterers who ventured to defend and to praise the emperor’s policy in the use of this army. At the very moment in which he concluded a treaty with Spain against Portugal, and was using one part of the Spanish army under Bernadotte in Denmark, and was alluring the second to Portugal, he caused a body of troops to be assembled at Bayonne, but not to march against Portugal, as he had announced. It soon became obvious that Napoleon planned to take possession of Spain in the midst of peace.

The Spaniards who had assisted Junot in the conquest of Portugal having withdrawn into their own country, the French general had scattered his troops from Algarve and Oporto, and had done everything which could render the sojourn of the French in their country intolerable to the Portuguese. Napoleon immediately laid a contribution of 100,000,000 francs on Portugal; the people were obliged, besides, to pay 600,000 francs to Junot, which the emperor had assigned to him as governor-general; and Junot raised 5,000,000 more on his own account. Napoleon not only drew away the national troops from Portugal and took them into his own army, but appeared desirous of playing the same constitution-comedy with the Portuguese in Bayonne as he had played with the Spaniards. He sent for a number of the notables as deputies, but retained them in hostages; and they were afterwards placed in a very dangerous position, when, given up by him, they became suspected by their own countrymen. The only favour which he granted them was to remit forty of the hundred millions of contribution which he had at first imposed. In small matters, every officer in Portugal played the despot and oppressor.[h]

THE PENINSULAR WAR

[1807-1809 A.D.]

Portugal now became, like Spain, hardly more than the arena where English armies under the duke of Wellington fought a desperate and protracted war with the French under various leaders. The full details of this conflict, known as the Peninsular War, will be found in the history of Spain. For some years it was impossible to distinguish between the military interests of Spain and Portugal, their common safety resting on the destruction of Napoleon and the success of British courage and British plans. In these the Spaniards and Portuguese played small part, according to the British histories, except to harass French communications by their guerillas and harass British security by their intrigues and jealousies.

But there is something to be said for the natives. The French democratic principles had made some progress in Portugal, and the cowardly and stupid king who fled to a colony and left his country for a foreigner to defend was not of much inspiration. In fact patriotism found here little to cling to except the rocks and vines, and those would remain in any case, whoever ruled. Between the world-shaking Napoleon and the weak-minded, England-serving poltroon whom monarchic heredity had with its usual felicity placed on the throne, there was small choice to the Portuguese, and the historian should be sparing of his blame for the impassivity of the nation.

Furthermore the English commander Wellington was notoriously domineering; and the English troops, according to their own historian and their general himself, showed some of the most atrocious examples of drunken insubordination and bestial ferocity in the history of human war. Few of the Portuguese could be blind to the fact that England, in spite of her lofty tone, was really in Portugal for commercial and not for altruistic reasons, and that the war was purely a wrestling-match for commerce and power between two giants, France and England, with little regard for the Lilliputians they might trample in their struggle. It behooves the reader, then, not to follow the bias of either pro- or anti-Napoleonic historians in their common tone of contempt for the alleged pusillanimity of the Spanish and Portuguese.

The fact must be remembered that Spain and Portugal had nothing or next to nothing definite to fight for, as “loyalty” in each country meant little more than a desire to shed blood and money for a monarch of third-rate virtue and first-rate imbecility. It may be said, however, that the verdict of English historians is much more favourable to the Portuguese soldiers than to the Spanish. A brief outline of events will serve here for the history of Portugal, in view of the chapter already given in the history of Spain.

On the flight of the royal family to Brazil, a council of regency was appointed to carry on affairs. The disgust at João was so great that the French general Junot met almost no resistance, but rather welcome as the bringer of freedom and democracy. The council of regency submitted to him at Lisbon. His first acts were to seize the treasury and disband the Portuguese army; on the other hand he forbade the Spanish their expected plunder and he raised the Portuguese Legion of troops who served with fidelity and bravery under Napoleon in other countries down to his defeat at Waterloo.

Having disarmed Portugal by easy measures and false hopes, Junot suddenly announced the end of the dynasty of Braganza, substituted French for Portuguese governors everywhere, and formed a new ministry and a new regency, largely French, with Junot at the head as president, eventually, he hoped, as king of Portugal. Spain had been similarly duped and given a French king, Joseph Bonaparte. Spain responded by rebellion; Portugal, after nine months of submission to Junot, rose and butchered the French in large numbers. Revolutionary juntas took the government and appealed to England for aid, receiving in response both men and money as well as generals, chief among them the Irishman, Sir Arthur Wellesley, later and better known as the duke of Wellington. Portugal was in England’s eyes, according to Canning’s own words, merely the fulcrum for the lever of England to wrench Napoleon from his power.

[1808-1814 A.D.]

After some hindrance, due to division of command, Wellesley was able to march forward; he defeated Laborde at Roliça (or Roriça) August 17th, 1808, and four days later dealt Junot himself such a blow at Vimeiro that he surrendered all his strongholds and his troops on the condition that the English carry the army and its spoils safely back to France on their own ships. This so-called Convention of Cintra, concluded some miles from Cintra, was carried out, but provoked a storm of rage in England.

The French being thus transported, as by Aladdin’s carpet, out of Portugal, Dom João’s regency was re-established and found abundant ground for dispute with the junta of Oporto, and later with the English officers and diplomats. England sent J. C. Villiers as ambassador, and Beresford to organise the native armies. He did his work with skill, and ten thousand Portuguese were taken into English pay. Hardly had Junot’s army been evicted from Portugal when another French army under Soult came over from Spain, which was full of French troops. Soult drove back all resistance and took Oporto, whence Wellington expelled him May 12th, 1809. Wellington then entered Spain and beat “king” Joseph Bonaparte and his marshal Victor at Talavera.

Meanwhile there were endless disputes with the regency, who seemed to divert the moneys England sent until the troops were hampered almost to helplessness, and the English generals were driven frantic. Sir Charles Stuart was finally at England’s insistence added to the regency, and something less inefficient resulted. The people were, however, not altogether convinced of their duty to play “fulcrum” indefinitely to the Archimedean lever of England. They were not cheered by having to dig those famous and enormous lines of defence at Torres Vedras, and they were still less encouraged in being compelled to devastate their own country and retire with the English troops behind breastworks, before the terrible army Napoleon sent under Masséna in 1810.

But while Wellington kept under cover and guarded Lisbon doggedly, Portuguese militia under Antonio de Silveira and various English officers made it increasingly hard for Masséna to subsist his troops. Trant took Coimbra, and in 1811 Masséna was forced to retire or starve. Wellington was now reinforced, and following Masséna cautiously, bested him at Sabugal, April 3rd, 1811. But the year was one of great anxiety to Wellington. England could afford few supplies and the Portuguese regency was more prolific of complaints and quarrels than of provisions. But, though compelled to keep on the defensive, the Iron Duke showed a menace he hardly felt. The war hovered on the borders of Portugal and went generally to French advantage in Spain.

Wellington gradually, and by a patience as great as his skill in emergency, gained the upper hand, and forcing his way into Spain, took Madrid August 12th, 1812. He was later forced out by French adroitness and made a retreat, which, as described in the history of Spain, is infamous in British annals for the outrageous and inexcusable misbehaviour of the troops. Wellington berated his army in violent terms, and though he was not made the more popular thereby, his troops were somewhat sobered. He now received full power from the court in Brazil, and at the same time was made chief of the Spanish armies, with the whole peninsula under his command. He at once assumed the offensive with a vigour that answered the violent criticism his alleged timidity had provoked in England as well as in the peninsula and France. His victories, coinciding with Napoleon’s disastrous Moscow campaign, drove the French out of the peninsula and led him into France, where the Peninsular War was ended with Napoleon’s abdication.

PORTUGAL AN ENGLISH PROVINCE

[1814-1825 A.D.]

The gratitude Portugal was impelled to feel met a shock when the English at the Congress of Vienna refused to insist on the restoration by Spain of Olivenza, of which Portugal had been robbed by Napoleon and the Spanish in 1801. The bitterness was increased by the harshness of the regency, in which Beresford and Stuart still held sway, though the war was over. Beresford had his racial faculty of irritating the Latin peoples by his cold and severe manner and ruthless severities. He was commander-in-chief of the armies. A third of the officers were English, and two-thirds of the country’s revenues were spent on the military. Portugal was in fact if not in theory only an English province. To the amazement of all, João, who had committed the novel feat of carrying his capital from the mother-country to a colony during a war, showed himself still more original when the war was finished; for he declined to bring back his capital. The life at Rio de Janeiro seems to have fascinated him. Portugal drew most of its wealth from the Brazils and he preferred and enjoyed it nearer the source. Worse yet, after taking to Rio some fifteen thousand persons when he fled, he kept persuading the chief nobles and wealthiest merchants to move to Brazil.

In 1816 he became the nominal, as he had long been the actual, king, for his insane mother died at Rio, March 20th of that year, and the regent was crowned in the colony as João VI and meekly acknowledged at home. But still he remained away, resigned Olivenza easily, and called forty-five hundred war-tried Spanish soldiers over to Brazil, where under Le Cor they put down a rebellion, which broke out again in 1825 and succeeded as the republic of Uruguay.

João VI was unpopular with his beckoning people, and his own queen, Donna Carlota Joaquina, was undermining him in favour of Dom Miguel, her younger son, who was not believed to be also his. His admittedly legitimate and elder son, Pedro, was also against him and his absolutist principles. Thus while the queen had in 1805 promised Portugal a constitution, Dom Pedro was a lover of Brazil and a well-wisher to the schemes for its separation from the mother-country.

THE REVOLT AND RECALL OF THE KING

In this unusual tangle of politics the cry of “Portugal for the Portuguese!” began to grow. The only man who could be said to approach popularity was General Gomes Freire de Andrade, who had served under Napoleon throughout the wars, and whose deep hatred of the English had found new fuel, seeing his country and his fellow-soldiers so rigorously governed by the foreigner who had come with promises of freedom. He conspired with others for a rising, but his plans were exposed and he and ten comrades put to death by the regency. The martyrdom, as it seemed, of Freire and his men embittered the country, and it needed only the absence of Beresford (who took ship to Brazil to extract money for the army from the absentee king) to show the way.

August 4th, 1820, the city of Oporto revolted, appointed a provisional junta in the king’s name, and demanded a session of the cortes. Freemasonry principles had been at work, and aided the ripening of the plans. Lisbon similarly rose and chose a junta, which combined with that of Oporto and convoked the cortes. While the cortes was adopting a constitution similar to Spain’s, the English officers were expelled from the country. Beresford, returning, was forbidden to land and compelled to return to England. The new cortes was of democratic persuasion; it clean-swept the remnants of feudalism and put an end to the still-living Inquisition. The “Constitution of 1822” limited the powers of the king to a veto of measures furthered by the annual assembly, promised a free press, universal suffrage, and other decencies of civilisation.

As elsewhere the first sign of emancipation provoked the horror of the Holy Alliance, the ambassadors of Prussia, Austria, and Russia withdrew from the country polluted with such free ideas, and England demanded with a new urgence that João VI return to Lisbon. He came back July 3rd, 1821, but before he was permitted to land promised to accept the constitution, to which he took oath October 1st, 1822, thus outraging the sensibilities of the clergy, who abhorred any trend towards liberty. His queen and Dom Miguel refused to accept the constitution and were ordered out of the country; but the queen, pretending to be ill, was allowed to remain, and busied herself drawing together conspirators known as “Cringers.” In 1823 the French invaded Spain to quell the Spanish revolt against the Nero-like Ferdinand. The absolutists in Portugal chose the moment to rise against the Constitution of 1822, General Silveira being the leader.

THE LOSS OF BRAZIL (1822 A.D.)

[1822-1823 A.D.]

Meanwhile Dom Pedro, left behind in Brazil, had smiled upon those who desired independence of the mother-country which had long been but a blood-sucking vampire. By his complacency Dom Pedro won the privilege of leading the revolt against his own father and becoming the first emperor of Brazil with a liberal constitution back of him. Portugal made only the feeblest effort at resistance and Brazil was thenceforward independent. Its fuller history will be found in the later volume devoted to Spanish America.

The easy surrender of the richest of her colonies exasperated the absolutists still more against the pliant João, and Portugal proceeded to echo the almost incredible Spanish motto, “Hurrah for chains!”; to grow frantic for despotism; to curse those who tried to limit the power of oppression, and to exhibit the spectacle—no less astounding for being so common in history—of a people shedding its blood to destroy its own liberties.[a]

FOOTNOTES

[173] [“On December 27th, 1703, the famous Methuen Treaty was signed, by which Portuguese wines might be imported into England at a lower duty than those from France and Germany, in return for a similar concession to English manufactured goods. The immediate result of this treaty was that King Pedro acknowledged the archduke Charles, the English candidate, as king of Spain, and that he gave the English a base of operations in the peninsula. The ulterior result was that Englishmen in the eighteenth century drank port wine instead of claret and hock, while the Portuguese imported everything they wanted beyond the bare necessaries of life from England. This was an advantage to both nations, for Portugal is eminently an agricultural country with neither the teeming population nor the materials necessary for manufactures, while England obtained a friendly province from which to import the wine and produce of a southern soil, and a market for the sale of the products of her manufactories. The close connection thus formed went deeper than mere commerce; it established a friendly relationship between the two peoples, which was of infinite advantage to the smaller nation.”—Stephens.[d]

We shall see later that the Portuguese felt the treaty less a blessing than an incubus on their power to develop manufactures of their own.]

[174] [Pombal was born in 1699 of a wealthy and well-connected family, entered in the army as a private, but saw no service and retired; he then led a life of roistering notoriety, and had eloped with a niece of the count of Arcos. He was forty years old before he had an official position, and fifty-one before he became minister to the king.]

[175] [This was blamed to incendiaries, though it was inevitable that in such a falling of walls many houses should be set on fire without human aid, though humankind were ready enough to seize the chance for loot. A large part of the people fled to the quays to escape the falling buildings, but there a great tidal wave found them and sweeping the wharves clean drowned men, women, and children in thousands. Voltaire’s Candide includes a notable account of the catastrophe. Estimates of the loss run from fifteen thousand to one hundred thousand lives; thirty thousand being the most generally accepted.]

[176] [When the king in despair asked Pombal what was to be done, he replied, “Bury the dead and feed the living”; he is said to have spent eight days and nights in his carriage hurrying from place to place.]

[177] [Lord Mahon[j] says: “His majesty had debauched, besides the marchioness of Tavora, both the wife and the daughter of the duke of Aveiro.”]

[178] [See also the history of Spain for the account of the expulsion that resulted from Pombal’s initiation.]

[179] [By this celebrated decree of May 25th, 1773, grandsons of slaves in Portugal and all children born after that day were declared free, and all civil restrictions on the “New Christians” or the converted Jews and Moors were forever removed.]

[180] [It is recorded, as a proof of the skill with which the count had trained his artillery men, and of his confidence in them, that he celebrated the king of Prussia’s birthday in 1759, by giving a dinner to his officers, in his tent; the flag at the top of that tent being aimed at during the whole entertainment as a mark for cannon-balls. It is not added with what degree of appetite the officers dined.[j]]

[181] [The credit for fully ending imprisonment for debt is, however, usually given to the later ministers and the queen Maria.]

[182] H. M. Stephens,[d] however, represents Dom João as so zealous for the reduction of the French that he forced his aid upon England and Spain counter to the advice of the English ministry.

[183] [With him went his wife and six children and his insane mother the queen, who violently resisted for some time the efforts to get her aboard.]