Dom Miguel de Braganza
All Portugal submitted; only on the island of Terceira, one of the Azores, the governor Cabrera had upheld the rights of Dom Pedro and his daughter. Repeated attempts of the usurper to subdue the island were frustrated. The leaders of the constitutional party collected there, and there in March, 1830, Dom Pedro established a regency composed of the marquis of Palmella, the lawyer Guerreiro, and General Villaflor, who took possession of the whole group of islands in the name of the lawful government of Portugal.
By injuries to English and French subjects the barbarous reign of violence which prevailed under Dom Miguel soon added the enmity of those two powers to its native opponents. They exacted compensation and the humiliation of the usurper encouraged the party opposed to him which now found further and more energetic support. For in April, 1831, a revolt in Brazil had obliged the emperor Dom Pedro to resign his throne in favour of his son, Dom Pedro II, who was still a minor. In Europe a task lay ready to his hand: that of assisting his daughter Maria da Gloria to her throne, and at the same time freeing Portugal from her tyrant.
Countenanced by England and France, the duke of Braganza, as Dom Pedro now called himself, obtained a small land-force and a fleet, and with these he appeared at Terceira in March, 1832. With seventy-five hundred men he sailed thence to Portugal, landed in the neighbourhood of Oporto, and on the 8th of July obtained possession of this rich commercial city. But he did not succeed in rousing the country to enthusiasm in his cause. In the summer of 1833 his means were exhausted and only a bold decision availed to give a new turn to the undertaking, which, just in itself, had degenerated into a mere aimless adventure. By a loan raised in the city of Oporto he settled the demands of an English free-lance, named Sartorius, who was in his service, and replaced him by Captain Charles Napier. With the latter there embarked a corps of three thousand men under the duke of Terceira, General Villaflor, to try their fortune in the southern province of Algarve. The result exceeded all expectation; the province went over to the cause of Dom Pedro and the queen, and as the ships were on their way back to Oporto, Napier attacked Dom Miguel’s fleet off Cape St. Vincent and won a complete victory. Five ships of war with 280 cannon fell into his hands, and those on board, thirty-two hundred soldiers and sailors, entered Dom Pedro’s service. The news encouraged the duke of Terceira to venture a march on Lisbon, and this bold action also succeeded. Queen Maria da Gloria was proclaimed in the city, and four days later Dom Pedro also entered the town and took over the regency in his daughter’s name.
[1832-1834 A.D.]
But the new government was by no means securely established. The regent understood little of Portuguese matters and, as always in these southern revolutions, the victorious party were strangers to the moderation required to restore tranquillity to the country. Dom Miguel had preserved the greater part of his army and its ranks were swelled by the peasants who were completely subjected to him and the priests, and by a numerous and continually multiplying rabble. This army maintained itself in the neighbourhood of Coimbra and on the upper Tagus; frequently it even penetrated to Lisbon and thus the two representatives of priest-ridden absolutism, Dom Miguel and Don Carlos, stood opposed to the two minor queens, whom chance had made the representatives of the principle of liberalism.
It was in Portugal that matters first came to an issue. To England, Portugal was the most important country as Spain was to France, and for both powers a real neutrality was an impossibility. A complete victory for Dom Miguel, signified to England—apart from the indignation which must be excited by that monster’s system of rule—the complete loss of her influence in Portugal, and at the same time the destruction of the constitutional principle which naturally had the sympathies of the English nation and the Whigs who were then in power, and which was identified with the government of those classes of society whom a commercial people like the English must necessarily consider. And England had already long since broken through her neutrality.
In regard to the government of France, the position was similar: Louis Philippe was the natural ally of Queen Isabella, whose claims to the throne rested, like his own, on a violation of the principle of legitimacy. But the victory of the Portuguese pretender would of necessity lead to that of the Spanish claimant whose cause had equal chances in its favour, and moreover there could not be a better opportunity of opposing a liberal solidarity on the part of the western powers to the legitimatist solidarity of the eastern, and thus confirm the stability of the new throne of France. This community of interests brought about the conclusion of a quadruple alliance between Portugal and Spain, England and France (12th of April, 1834), by which the regents of Portugal and Spain agreed to expel the two pretenders, and for this object a Spanish corps was to co-operate with the Portuguese troops; the undertaking was to be supported by England with her warships and by France, if necessary, with troops.
[1834-1835 A.D.]
The result was soon apparent. On the 12th of May Dom Miguel’s army was defeated by the united Spanish and Portuguese army at Asseiceira and on the 26th the two allies, Dom Miguel and Don Carlos, surrounded by a superior force, capitulated at Evora in the province of Alemtejo. The former took a money payment, which he might squander anywhere but in Spain and Portugal, promised to respect his niece’s rights and retired from the scenes, taking ship for Genoa. Don Carlos went to England.