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]