The Story of the Nations: Portugal

by H. Morse Stephens

Carvalho’s energy at this time established his reputation with the king, and he felt able to commence his campaigns against the nobility and the Jesuits. In order that he might have his time free for matters of such importance he was made Prime Minister in 1756, with power over all departments of administration, and his friend, Luis da Cunha, was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in his place. Of his long series of administrative reforms, and his efforts to improve the condition of the country, which were spread over his government of twenty-seven years, it will be better to speak as a whole; but a special description must here be given of his campaign against the Jesuits, which brought about the suppression of that famous order. It is not necessary to speculate on the various motives, which induced Carvalho to attack the Jesuits, but the principal cause lay in the fact that they were wealthy and powerful, and therefore a dangerous force in an absolutist monarchy. It must be remembered that the Jesuits of the eighteenth century formed a very different class of men to their predecessors. They were no longer intrepid missionary pioneers, but a corporation of wealthy traders, who made use of their spiritual position to further the cause of their commerce. They had done a great work in America by opening up the interior of Brazil and converting the natives, and their administration of Paraguay, one of the most interesting achievements in the whole history of Christianity, was without doubt a blessing to the people. But by the middle of the eighteenth century they had gone too far. It was one thing to convert the natives of Brazil, and another to absorb much of the wealth of that country, in doing which they prejudiced not only the Crown, but the Portuguese people, whom they kept from settling in the territory under their rule. Whether it was a sufficient reason for Carvalho to attack the order because it was wealthy and powerful, and had departed from its primitive simplicity, is a question for every one to decide for themselves, but that this was the reason, and that the various excuses alleged by the admirers of the great minister are without foundation, is an undoubted fact. On September 19, 1757, the first important blow was struck, when the king’s Jesuit confessor was dismissed, and all Jesuits were forbidden to come to Court. Carvalho, in the name of the King of Portugal, also formally denounced the order at Rome, and Benedict XIV., the then Pope, appointed the Cardinal de Saldanha, a friend of the minister, Visitor and Reformer of the Society of Jesus. The cardinal did not take long in making up his mind, and May 15, 1758, he forbade the Jesuits to engage in trade.

An attempt upon the king’s life, which shortly followed this measure, gave the minister the opportunity he wanted for urging the suppression of the famous society. The history of the Tavora plot, which culminated in this attempt is one of the most mysterious affairs in the whole history of Portugal, and from the many contradictory accounts which have been published, it is almost impossible to arrive at the exact truth. But it is certain that the Jesuits and the nobles had no reason to love the king and his minister, and it is hardly to be wondered at that their opposition resulted in violent measures. The great nobles had been systematically deprived of all political power since the accession of King Joseph, for Carvalho, like Richelieu, distrusted them, and preferred to employ men of his own rank in life or of bourgeois descent in public business in preference to noblemen and their relations. The three leaders of the plot were the Duke of Aveiro, a descendant of John II., and one of the greatest noblemen in Portugal, the Marquis of Tavora, who had filled with credit the post of Governor-general of India, and the Count of Atouguia, a descendant of the gallant Dom Luis de Athaide, the defender of Goa; but the heart and soul of the conspiracy was the Marchioness of Tavora, a beautiful and ambitious woman, who was bitterly offended because her husband had not been made a duke. The confessor of this lady was a Jesuit named Gabriel Malagrida, who is by some authors treated as a half-insane fanatic, and by others as a dangerous intriguer, incensed by the attacks of Carvalho upon his order. Whether Malagrida was innocent or guilty, whether he was mad or sane, whether the Tavoras were incited by religious or political motives, or merely by a desire for private revenge, whether all these noblemen, and especially the Duke of Aveiro, were not merely accused in order to allow Carvalho to strike a blow at the nobility, whether, finally, all those who were punished were victims of the minister or really guilty, are questions which cannot be determined here. The evidence on all sides is most contradictory, and all that is certain is that the king was fired at and wounded on the night of September 3, 1758; and that in the following January, the three noblemen who have been mentioned, the Marchioness of Tavora, Malagrida with seven other Jesuits, and many other individuals of all ranks of life, were arrested as implicated in the attempt to murder. The laymen had but a short trial, and, together with the marchioness, were publicly executed ten days after their arrest.

King Joseph certainly believed that the real culprits had been seized, and in his gratitude he created Carvalho, Count of Oeyras, and encouraged him to pursue his campaign against the Jesuits. On January 19, 1759, the estates belonging to the society were sequestrated; and on September 3rd, all its members were expelled from Portugal, and directions were sent to the viceroys of India and Brazil to expel them likewise. The news of this bold stroke was received with admiration everywhere, except at Rome, and it became noised abroad that a great minister was ruling in Portugal. The elder Pitt, who was anxious that Portugal should join in the Seven Years’ War, publicly acknowledged the ability of the Count of Oeyras, and at his demand apologized for the infraction of the law of nations, which had been committed by the English Admiral Boscawen’s attack upon the French squadron under La Clue, in the Portuguese harbour of Lagos.

The Count of Oeyras had no desire to take part in the general war raging in Europe, and refused to accede to Pitt’s wishes, until the King of Spain, according to the arrangement of the “Pacte de Famille,” attacked Portugal, as being a declared enemy of the Franco-Spanish alliance owing to the Methuen treaty with England. The Spaniards under the Marquis of Sarria invaded the northern provinces of Portugal in 1762, and captured in rapid succession the towns of Miranda, Braganza, and Almeida. Then the Count of Oeyras appealed to the English statesman, and not in vain. English soldiers and munitions of war were at once despatched to Lisbon, and, at the special request of the minister, a general in English pay, the Count of Lippe-Buckeburg, with some English officers and sergeants, were sent to reorganize the Portuguese army as Schomberg had done in the century before. The Count of Lippe, assisted by the energy of the Portuguese minister, quickly formed the Portuguese troops into a disciplined army, and on the arrival of Brigadier-General John Burgoyne, a gallant cavalry officer, who had distinguished himself at Belle-isle, but who is better known in English history from his surrender at Saratoga, to take command of the English troops, the allied army advanced. They were uniformly successful; the Spaniards lost all their former advantages; they were defeated at Valencia de Alcantara, where the English took three standards and a Spanish general; and on October 5th Burgoyne stormed the entrenched camp of Villa Velha, and ended the campaign. The Spaniards were now quite ready to give in, and on February 10, 1763, peace was signed between Portugal and Spain. The Count of Oeyras had learnt a lesson from the contrast between the two campaigns, and when Burgoyne and his English soldiers returned to England, the Count of Lippe-Buckeburg was requested to remain, and he not only reorganized the Portuguese army, but put all the Portuguese fortresses on the Spanish frontier, and especially Elvas, in thorough repair, according to the received ideas of fortification.

On the conclusion of this short war, the Count of Oeyras once more turned his attention to the Jesuits, and in 1764 the Jesuit priest Malagrida was burnt alive, not as a traitor, but as a heretic and impostor, on account of some crazy tractates he had written. The man was regarded as a martyr, and all communication between Portugal and the Holy See was broken off for two years, while the Portuguese minister exerted all his influence with the Courts of France and Spain to procure the entire suppression of the society, which he hated. The king supported him consistently, and after another attempt upon his life in 1769, which the minister as usual attributed to the Jesuits, King Joseph created his faithful servant Marquis of Pombal, by which title he is best known to fame. The prime ministers of France and Spain cordially acquiesced in the hatred of the Jesuits, for both the Duc de Choiseul and the Count d’Aranda had something of Pombal’s spirit in them, and imitated his policy; in both countries the society, which on its foundation had done so much for Catholicism and Christianity, was proscribed, and the worthy members treated with as much rigour as the unworthy; and finally in 1773 Pope Clement XIV. solemnly abolished the Society of Jesus. King Joseph did not long survive this triumph of his minister, for he died on February 24, 1777, and the Marquis of Pombal, then an old man of seventy-seven, was at once dismissed from office.

To analyse the internal reforms and general measures of improvement introduced into Portugal by Pombal is almost impossible in a single paragraph, so far-reaching were his endeavours, so unlimited his energy. He has often been compared with Richelieu, chiefly, it seems, because of his rigorous suppression of the Tavora plot; but the men whom he really resembled were the benevolent despots and their ministers who abounded in Europe before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He firmly believed that the greatest happiness of a people depended upon the maintenance of an absolutist monarchy, which could do more good than representative institutions, and his struggle with the Jesuits was mainly due to the fact that they were so wealthy and independent, especially in Brazil, as to hamper the power of the Crown. The class of statesmen and politicians to which he belonged included such monarchs as Frederick the Great of Prussia, the Emperor Joseph II., Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Charles III. of Spain, and such great reforming ministers as Aranda in Spain and Tannucci in Naples; and like them he believed that real good could only be done by an absolute monarch, who had the interests of his people at heart. The greatest evidence Pombal gave of this royal concern for the people was in the famous decree of May 25, 1773, by which slavery was abolished in Portugal, or rather by which grandsons of slaves, and all children of slaves born after that date, were declared free, and which at the same time abolished all distinctions between “old” and “new” Christians, by which latter term the descendants of the converted Jews and Mohammedans were still called, and made all Portuguese subjects alike eligible for civil, military, and ecclesiastical offices. In Brazil, however, he made no attempt to put down slavery, believing, like all his contemporaries, that negroes were made on purpose to be slaves; but even there he repeated and enforced the edicts against making slaves of the natives of the country. In matters of internal administration he advocated and maintained efficiency and economy, and at one blow in 1761 he swept away more than three-quarters of the petty offices which hampered the administration of justice. The law courts were made accessible, and lawsuits cheap; and in 1769 he robbed the Inquisition of its power by making it an open and public court, subject to the rules which regulated other courts. In matters of police he showed the same vigour, and by stern repression prevented the machinery of the law from being used to further private revenge. He recognized the importance of education, and reorganized the University of Coimbra in 1772 by abolishing the teaching of the dark ages which still continued there and introducing the modern element; and though he expelled the great teaching order of the Church, he maintained the educational establishments of the Jesuits, and turned their college at Lisbon into a school for the training of the young nobility. Of the reforms in the army, which he carried out with the help of the Count of Lippe-Buckeburg mention has already been made, and he was equally energetic with regard to the navy, over which department he placed the most energetic of his subordinates, Martinho de Mello e Castro. Nor was the great minister careless of more material affairs; he showed a taste for architecture and building; under his superintendence the part of Lisbon which had been ruined by the earthquake rose from its ashes in redoubled beauty, adorned with fine streets, squares, and buildings, generally designed by the famous Portuguese architect Joaquim Machado de Castro. He did not neglect to encourage agriculture and viniculture, which must ever be the source of livelihood of the greater number of the Portuguese people, and he introduced the silkworm into the northern provinces, and made special regulations for the management and encouragement of the bold fishermen of the Beira and the Algarves. In his attempt to introduce manufactures the Marquis of Pombal was not so successful; the Portuguese are not a manufacturing people, and the system of protection which he enforced only roused the opposition of English merchants, who protested against it as a breach of the Methuen treaty, and made manufactured articles dearer than they had been during the first half of the century. Yet some of the native industries which he established or protected were not unworthy of his care, and the glass-works of Leiria, the lace of Vianna, and the potteries of Aveiro enjoyed a great and deserved reputation. In commercial matters he showed the result of the lessons he had learnt during his official residence in London, for he founded the Royal Bank of Portugal in 1751, and established the Oporto Wine Company, against which infraction of their monopoly the English wine merchants loudly inveighed. He encouraged trade with Brazil by granting concessions to the gold seekers and planters of that great colony; and the importation of gold, sugar, and tobacco brought back to Lisbon some of the prosperity of the sixteenth century. In Asia he was clear-sighted enough to perceive that any attempt to contend for a share of the Indian or the spice trade was bound to be of no avail; but he was the first of Portuguese statesmen to perceive the value of the little settlement of Macao in the Canton river. Most of the Chinese trade, which had been yearly growing in value, was in the hands of the factory of the English East India Company at Canton, but the jealousy of the Chinese Government was such that the Company had no assured position there. But Macao was a free port; most of the factors and writers of the East India Company resided there, and Pombal, seeing that the tea trade passed through Portuguese territory, greatly encouraged it, and took care that it should pay due toll to the Portuguese authorities and contribute to the wealth of the Portuguese Crown. Nor was the great minister insensible to literature and the fine arts. He founded the “Arcadia de Lisboa” in 1757, for the propagation of the teachings of the school of the French encyclopædists; and it was under his influence and protection that Diogo Barbosa Machado compiled his “Bibliotheca Lusitana” and Damião Antonio de Lemos wrote his “Historia de Portugal,” a work which stands midway between the naïve annals of Bernardo de Brito and Antonio Brandão, and the modern scientific histories of Alexandra Herculano and Rebello da Silva. Of music he was particularly fond; he persuaded the king to build the opera house at Lisbon, and to invite the famous singer Caffarelli, the confidant of the King of Spain, to sing there, and to him was dedicated the best Portuguese opera, the “Alessandre nell’ Indie” of David Peres.

Such were some of the reforms, schemes, improvements, and tastes of the great minister; they made him the friend of his sovereign and the adored of the people; but, on the other hand, his persecution of the Jesuits and his rigorous treatment of the leading noblemen, whom he had often imprisoned without trial, made him many personal enemies, and when his patron died he knew that his own fall was at hand. King Joseph had died without male issue, and was succeeded on the throne by his eldest daughter, Donna Maria Francisca, who had married in 1760 her own uncle Dom Pedro, a younger brother of King Joseph. By this arrangement it was hoped that all disputes as to the accession would be avoided; the husband and wife were crowned together, and coins were struck in the joint names of Maria I. and Pedro III. Both the king and the queen were feeble and weak-minded, and the reins of government fell into the hands of the widow of King Joseph, Donna Marianna Victoria, a fanatical Catholic who had always resented the influence of Pombal and opposed his policy. By her advice the great minister was at once dismissed from office and ordered to send in his accounts, while his enemies were released from prison. Their names will show how powerful was the enmity he had to expect, for among them were Dom Miguel de Annunciacão, Bishop of Coimbra; Dom João Amberto de Noronha, Count of San Lourenço; Dom João de Almeida Portugal, Marquis of Alorna, a former Viceroy of India, and brother of the Marquis of Tavora; Dom Martinho de Mascarenhas, son of the executed Duke of Aveiro; Dom José, illegitimate brother of the late king and Grand Inquisitor of Portugal; Antonio de Andrade Freire, the Chancellor; Dom Frederico de Sousa Holstein; and Dom João de Braganza, Duke of Lafoẽs. These men at once surrounded the new sovereigns and gave utterance to complaints against Pombal; the proceedings in the case of the Tavora plot were reversed, and the prosecution of the late minister pressed on with bitter hostility. Yet his enemies hardly dared to condemn such a benefactor to his country to any severe penalty, and after being driven about from pillar to post for four years, the old man, now more than eighty years of age, was condemned to be banished twenty leagues from Court. Had his relentless persecutor, the widow of King Joseph, been alive, his punishment would doubtless have been more severe, and, as it was, the queen dared not pass such a light sentence until after her mother’s death. The old minister did not long survive his disgrace, and died at Pombal on May 8, 1782, at the age of eighty-three. To the credit of Pedro and Maria let it be admitted at once that in consideration of his father’s long and eminent services the young Marquis of Pombal was fully confirmed in all the honours and estates which had been conferred upon the minister by King Joseph.

It need hardly be said that the fall of Pombal left many aspirants to his high place. The three Secretaries of State, Martinho de Mello e Castro, Thomas Xavier de Lima Brito, Viscount of Villa Nova de Cerveira, afterwards Marquis of Ponte de Lima, and Ayres de Sá e Mello; the Intendant of the Treasury, Pedro José de Noronha, Marquis of Angeja; and the Intendant of Police, Diogo Ignacio de Pina Manique, had all been trained in official work by Pombal, and were all eager to succeed their master in power. None of them, however, were successful, for the great nobles who had been recalled to Court were determined to have no such supreme ruler again over them, while they were too jealous of each other and too inexperienced in affairs to take office themselves. Matters went on therefore at the commencement of the new reign much as they had done under the management of Pombal; his spirit remained amongst the ministers, and in such measures as the commercial treaty with Russia, the lighting of Lisbon by oil lamps, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the impulse he had given to all reforms is clearly to be seen. The “Arcadia de Lisboa” was indeed allowed to disappear, but in its place the Duke of Lafoẽs established the “Academia Real das Sciencias” in 1779, which did even better work for literature by its publication of the works of the early Portuguese chroniclers. In carrying out these measures the king and queen had little share; Pedro III. was a silly and vicious man, and Maria Francisca was a woman of weak intellect, completely subservient to her confessor, Ignacio de San Caetano who found her greatest happiness in raising vast sums of money and sending them to the Latin convent at Jerusalem. The only important event in which they took a part was their conference with the Court of Spain at Badajoz in 1785, when an arrangement was come to about the disputed frontier in South America; and when Dom John, the second son of Pedro and Maria, was betrothed to Donna Carlotta Joaquina, grand-daughter of Charles III. of Spain. In the following year Pedro III. died, and his death, followed as it speedily was by those of her confessor and of her elder son, Dom José, who had married his aunt, Donna Maria Benedictina, completely upset the small amount of intellect possessed by Maria Francisca. It was observed in 1788 that she was quite unfit to transact any business; and in 1792, when the progress of the French Revolution was setting all Europe in a blaze, Dom John found it necessary to take the management of affairs into his hands, though he was not declared regent until 1799.