Dreadful as is the spectacle of punishments, so repugnant to the feelings of humanity; let us, however, take a view of the fatal spot, where the minister, far from listening to the impulse of compassion, but too frequently injurious to the interests of both king and state, delivered up to the hand of the executioner the noble and ignoble, whose blood was suffered to flow indiscriminately in the same channel.
The duke d’Aveiro, on approaching the scaffold, shewed every symptom of the most abject fear, and by his cowardice lost that interest in the hearts of the spectators, which a contrary conduct, even in the greatest criminals, never fails to inspire; whilst the old marchioness of Tavora was all herself, never losing sight of the character by which she had constantly been distinguished, and preserving to the last moment of her existence an heroic firmness, and an unalterable presence of mind.
The sentence which condemned her to death having been read to her, she ordered her breakfast as usual, and seated herself at her toilette, where she dressed herself in her accustomed manner. Her confessor having hinted that her moments ought to be otherwise employed, she calmly answered, that there was time enough for every thing. She afterwards breakfasted with her female attendants, and conversed without the smallest emotion. On arriving at the foot of the scaffold, she refused all assistance, and addressing herself in a loud voice to those who had offered it, I am very well able to mount it by myself; for I have not been put to the torture like the others. She accordingly went up with a firm step, but on reaching the platform of the scaffold, her constancy was put to the most cruel proof; for meeting her husband, the marquis de Tavora, he reproached her in the bitterest terms for having caused the destruction of her family. Looking towards him with a serene countenance, she only replied, Well, then! bear your misfortunes as I do, and do not reproach me with them. The executioner coming towards her, she bound her eyes herself, begged him to dispatch his business quickly, spoke a very few words to her confessor, and with her handkerchief gave the fatal signal.
The second son of a woman, whose greatness of mind makes her criminality the more severely to be regretted, displayed a degree of courage equal to that of his mother: he was only nineteen years of age, but his youth did not exempt him from the torture. The severest torments, however, lost their effect; not a groan, not an avowal of any kind escaped him; till at last the executioner hoping that filial affection might draw from him a confession, which the most excruciating tortures could not extort, brought his father to him, who exhorted him in the most pathetic terms not thus uselessly to prolong his sufferings, since not only he himself, but all the accomplices had made an ample confession. Scarcely could the marquis finish his discourse, before he was interrupted by his son, who briefly answered, Father, it was you who gave me life, and you are at liberty to deprive me of it.
The sword of justice hung some time longer suspended over the three Jesuits, Malagrida, Alexander, and Matos, who had been taken up as instigators and principal chiefs of the conspiracy.[44] Their execution was daily expected; but unfortunately the common modes of justice had not been allowed to take their course, and to the astonishment of all the world, it was not till some years after their imprisonment, that Gabriel Malagrida was alone condemned by an extraordinary court of justice, to be burned alive, (the 21st September, 1761) and then not as a conspirator and regicide, but as a heretic and impostor.[45]
Carvalho, now made count d’Oeyras, had not, however, waited the execution of Malagrida, to banish the Jesuits from Portugal.[46] That a religious order, which causes disturbances in the state, and enters into conspiracies, deserves banishment, and even capital punishment, no one will pretend to deny; but, on the other hand, may it not be alledged that the religious order which had rendered the most essential services to the state, and indeed to Christian countries in general, by instructing youth, and civilizing colonies, might better have been reformed, than entirely destroyed.
A conspiracy, which had been preceded by a revolution in America, attended by circumstances capable of overturning the mother country, and which was followed by the expulsion of the Jesuits, ended at last in a state of tranquillity, which it had cost too many sacrifices to obtain, not to employ every possible means to ensure its duration: but notwithstanding all the endeavours of the king and his minister, the Spaniards and French were determined to disturb it.
A Spanish army, composed of forty thousand men, entered Portugal in 1762; their progress, however, through that country was but very short; and by the assistance of the English, and the count de la Lippe, to whom the former had given the command of the Portugueze troops,[47] an honourable peace was signed on the 10th of February in the following year: after which their quiet was only disturbed by some hostilities in America, which terminated very much in the same manner as the former ones, without the powers of Europe being engaged in the quarrel. The count d’Oeyras, afterwards created marquis de Pombal, never lost sight, even in the midst of all his difficulties, of his original plan of reforms and ameliorations. The greatest obstacles he had to encounter proceeded from Brazil, and the town of Oporto, from the inhabitants of which he had but little reason to expect opposition, since the measure to which they so strongly objected was shortly followed by an increase of their wine trade, which became twice as considerable as before.
Portugal being much more fruitful in vines than in corn, the king published an edict in 1765, commanding all the vines in the environs of the Tagus, Mondego and Vecha, to be rooted up, and the land sown with wheat.
The vineyards in the neighbourhood of Lisbon, Oeyras, and some other places, were, however, suffered to remain. By a former edict, of the month of October, 1761, twenty-two thousand writers or clerks employed in the different tribunals were reduced to only thirty-two persons. The minister, by a salutary law, which took place on the 25th of May, 1773, for ever abolished the odious distinction formerly existing in Portugal, between the old and new christians. The latter, composed of converted Jews and Moors, were always suspected of insincerity, and regarded in the kingdom as marked with infamy, and for ever separated from the other Christians, and incapable of acting in any capacity, either ecclesiastical or civil. The progress of learning also was a principal object in the marquis de Pombal’s system of improvement: he reformed the university of Coimbra; he converted on the 19th of May, 1766, the college occupied by the novices of the order of Jesus, and which was esteemed one of the finest buildings in Lisbon, into a school for the nobility: he likewise established other schools for children of all descriptions; and published a plan of public education, which, if properly followed, could not fail of restoring science and good morals throughout the whole of Portugal. He left no means untried to wrest from the hands of the English the different branches of commerce, of which they were become exclusive possessors. He set just bounds to the despotic authority of the holy office, which, by an edict of the 20th of May, 1769, became merely a royal tribunal, invested with no other power than what was transmitted to it by the sovereign, thus depriving it of all its odious privileges and pretensions; such as the form of its proceedings, and the absurd idea of uniting the authority of the pope and bishops to that of the king; whilst at the same time, it acknowledged no supreme chief but the pope alone. He patronised the arts, and caused a statue of Joseph the Ist to be erected to him. It was on the very day of its exhibition to the public eye, the day he justly esteemed the happiest of his life, that he discovered it had been marked for his destruction. The last melancholy satisfaction, in attending his master’s dying moments, together with the sixty millions of cruzadoes found in the royal treasury after his decease, formed a sufficient proof of the uprightness of his administration.