During a peace of forty-eight years the Portuguese army had been neglected. The troops did not amount to twenty thousand men, and this small number were ill-armed, and worse disciplined. It is not surprising that Braganza, Miranda, Torre de Moncorvo, and Almeida fell in rapid succession before the invaders, whilst the greatest alarm spread throughout the country.
But the genius of Pombal rose with the emergency. From England he obtained supplies of arms, troops, and especially of officers; and he appointed the count of Schaumburg-Lippe, a German general of considerable reputation,[180] to the chief command of the Portuguese army. Schaumburg-Lippe showed real talent by adapting his measures to the nature of the forces that were to execute them. By his direction the armed peasants defended the mountain passes; and the English brigadier-general Burgoyne successfully performed several surprises and small expeditions, which, if in themselves of little moment, served to revive the spirits of the Portuguese army, and being combined with the annoyance given by the peasantry, checked the progress of the Spaniards. Accordingly, at the approach of winter, the invaders retired within their own frontiers, evacuating all their conquests. This campaign constituted nearly the whole of the Spanish share of the Seven Years’ War in Europe; the rest was confined to contributing a few auxiliary troops to the French armies. In America, Spain was more successful against Portugal, the governor of Buenos Ayres again making himself master of Colonia del Sacramento, with booty of £4,000,000 [$20,000,000], besides numbers of richly laden English merchant vessels.
On the 10th of February, 1763, a treaty of peace was signed at Paris between France, Spain, and England, including the restoration of Colonia del Sacramento to Portugal.
Upon the restoration of peace, José and Pombal resumed their patriotic labours for improving the internal condition of Portugal. With the assistance of Schaumburg-Lippe they remodelled, increased, and disciplined the army. They similarly reformed the state of the navy. They established a more efficient police, and abolished the Indices Expurgatorios, or prohibitory lists of books of the Inquisition, which banished from Portugal many good and really philosophical works. They did not indeed give liberty to the press, but established a board of censure, combining royal with prelatical and inquisitorial judges, by which all publications were to be examined. The verdicts of this board, if still somewhat illiberal, were far less so than the bigoted decisions of the uncontrolled Inquisition. Nay, it is even said to have admitted some free-thinking works, and condemned many books written in support of the more extravagant pretensions of the papal see. To this board, moreover, all schools were subjected. Pombal introduced great ameliorations into the constitution and forms of the University of Coimbra, where, till then, degrees in law, medicine, and divinity had been granted, without any real examination of the proficiency of the candidates.
Pombal likewise somewhat limited the right of entailing property, carried throughout the peninsula to a ruinous extent, diminished the excessive number of monasteries, imposed restrictions upon the admission of novices, and endeavoured to abolish the odious distinctions between the “old” and “new” Christians, by repealing the tax laid especially upon the latter. On the other hand, Pombal sought to encourage agriculture by ordering all vineyards to be destroyed that were planted upon good arable land; he cramped commerce by injudicious attempts to encourage domestic manufactures, by establishing exclusive commercial companies, by passing sumptuary laws, and by various embarrassing regulations.[b]
Schlosser’s Estimate of Pombal
[1750-1777 A.D.]
One of the very first acts of his administration was to abolish the yearly exhibition of burning men for heresy (auto-da-fé); limits were set to the power of the Inquisition in general, and the infliction of all punishments, or cases involving punishments, were referred to the decisions of the secular tribunals. The conventual and religious houses were strictly forbidden to bring, or cause to be brought, young women of good fortune from the Brazils and to receive them into their convents, with a view of enriching their several orders. Restrictions were soon placed upon the nobility also, as had been previously done upon the clergy. Pombal behaved towards the high nobles precisely as Charles XI of Sweden had done towards the same class in his kingdom, with this exception—that the latter rested the defence of his conduct upon the declaration of the estates of the realm. In the Portuguese possessions on the coasts of Asia, Africa, and America, whole districts, lordships, and large estates which at first belonged to the crown had come into the hands of private families, as was also the case in Sweden in the seventeenth century; all these alienations were reclaimed, and all the estates which had come either by gift or occupancy into the hands of private individuals were resumed by the crown, and the families who were thus arbitrarily and violently deprived of their properties received very inadequate compensation.
By this resumption of crown lands which had been long in the possession of the nobility, the members of this body lost much of their influence and power, and the measures must be allowed to have been executed with great rigour. Imprisonment and death were arbitrarily inflicted upon all those who showed themselves discontented with the scientific and philosophic system of government of the prime minister. The first years of Pombal’s administration may be very fitly compared to the times of terror during the French Revolution; for the whole of the dreadful and subterraneous prisons, and all the towers and castles were filled with prisoners of state.