This behaviour of France did not seriously concern Portugal so long as the war between France and Spain continued to occupy the chief strength of the Spanish armies; but on all sides, John IV. saw that he was regarded abroad as a temporary monarch, ruling only until Spain had an opportunity to crush him. From England he could get no help; Cromwell showed his contempt for him and for the received principles of international law, by ordering the trial and execution of Dom Pantaleone de Sá, a lad of nineteen, and the brother of the Portuguese ambassador Rodrigo de Sá, for murder and riot in London;[31] and his refusal to surrender Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice in 1650 to Admiral Blake, caused that gallant admiral to capture his ships and pillage his colonies. On the other hand, the people of Portugal stood staunchly by their legitimate monarch. Brazil recognized his authority and sent him what help she could; the Indian and Chinese possessions contributed what they could in money, and his great admiral Dom Salvador Correa de Sá e Benevides defeated several Spanish fleets, and conquered Angola and the former Portuguese possessions on the African coast.
In the midst of these perplexities, expecting daily to hear of the conclusion of a peace between France and Spain, which should leave the latter power free to crush him, King John IV., the first king of the House of Braganza, died on November 6, 1656. His eldest son Dom Theodosio, whom he had created Prince of Brazil, had predeceased him in 1653, and his heir was a boy of thirteen, weakly both in body and in intellect. John IV. was not a great man; he is no more to be compared with John “the Great” than the victory of Montijo is to that of Aljubarrota; but his name and accession mark a great event. Hesitating and undecided by nature, all his strength came from his queen; but for her, he would never have been king of Portugal. But the revolution which placed this mediocre man upon the throne is both interesting and important; it shows how impossible it is for a nation which has once been great to acquiesce in the loss of its independence. The heroic age of Portugal was indeed past, but the victory of Montijo and the insurrection in Brazil show that the people had recovered from the inertness and sloth which had permitted Philip II. to establish the power of Spain over them. The struggle with Spain was not concluded; the hardest part of the contest was to come, yet the people, if not their chosen monarch, never dreamed of failure. New and national institutions arose under the direction of João Pinto Ribeiro to take the place of the effete institutions of the Sixty Years’ Captivity; councils of war and the colonies were organized at Lisbon; ships were built and armies raised; new tribunals such as the “Junta do Commercio” were erected. Nor were men of letters backward in encouraging the revival of independence; Francisco de Sá de Menezes the poet, Antonio Vieira the preacher, and Jacinto Freire de Andrade, the biographer of Dom João de Castro, all showed the spirit of patriotism, and it is not unworthy of notice that the first Portuguese newspaper, the Gazeta de Lisboa was established in 1641. The whole course of the Revolution of 1640 shows that the people of Portugal in the seventeenth century were not unworthy of their ancestors, and that they had learnt much, because they had suffered much, during the “Sixty Years’ Captivity.”
