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.