This fondness for Doric is probably due to the influence of Terzi, who seems to have preferred it to all the other orders, though he always gave his pilasters a beautiful and intricate capital. In any case from about 1580 onwards scarcely any other order on a large scale is used either inside or outside, and by 1640 it had grown to the ugly size used in Santa Clara and in nearly all later buildings, the only real exception being perhaps in the work of the German who designed Mafra and rebuilt the Capella Mor at Evora. Such pilasters are found forming piers in the church built about 1600 to be the cathedral of Leiria, in the west front of the cathedral of Portalegre, where they are piled above each other in three stories, huge and tall below, short and thinner above, and in endless churches all over the country. Later still they degenerated into mere angle strips, as in the cathedral of Angra do Heroismo in the Azores and elsewhere.
Such a building as Santa Engracia is the real ending of Architecture in Portugal, and its unfinished state is typical of the poverty which had overtaken the country during the Spanish usurpation, when robbed of her commerce by Holland and by England, united against her will to a decaying power, she was unable to finish her last great work, while such buildings as she did herself finish—for it must not be forgotten that Mafra was designed by a foreigner—show a meanness of invention and design scarcely to be equalled in any other land, a strange contrast to the exuberance of fancy lavished on the buildings of a happier age.
CHAPTER XIX
THE RESTORATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
When elected at Thomar in 1580, Philip ii. of Spain had sworn to govern Portugal only through Portuguese ministers, a promise which he seems to have kept. He was fully alive to the importance of commanding the mouth of the Tagus and the splendid harbour of Lisbon, and had he fixed his capital there instead of at Madrid it is quite possible that the two countries might have remained united.
For sixty years the people endured the ever-growing oppression and misgovernment. The duque de Lerma, minister to Philip iii., or ii. of Portugal, and still more the Conde duque de Olivares under Philip iv., treated Portugal as if it were a conquered province.
In 1640, the very year in which Santa Engracia was begun, the regent was Margaret of Savoy, whose ministers, with hardly an exception, were Spaniards.
It will be remembered that when Philip ii. was elected in 1580, Dona Catharina, duchess of Braganza and daughter of Dom Manoel's sixth son, Duarte, duke of Guimarães, had been the real heir to the throne of her uncle, the Cardinal King. Her Philip had bought off by a promise of the sovereignty of Brazil, a promise which he never kept, and now in 1640 her grandson Dom João, eighth duke of Braganza and direct descendant of Affonso, a bastard son of Dom João i., had succeeded to all her rights.
He was an unambitious and weak man, fond only of hunting and music, so Olivares had thought it safe to restore to him his ancestral lands; and to bind him still closer to Spain had given him a Spanish wife, Luisa Guzman, daughter of the duke of Medina Sidonia. Matters, however, turned out very differently from what he had expected. A gypsy had once told Dona Luisa that she would be a queen, and a queen she was determined to be. With difficulty she persuaded her husband to become the nominal head of the conspiracy for the expulsion of the Spaniards, and on the 1st of December 1640 the first blow was struck by the capture of the regent and her ministers in the palace at Lisbon. Next day, December 2nd, the duke of Braganza was saluted as King Dom João iv. at Villa Viçosa, his country home beyond Evora.
The moment of the revolution was well chosen, for Spain was at that time struggling with a revolt which had broken out in Cataluña, and so was unable to send any large force to crush Dom João. All the Indian and African colonies at once drove out the Spaniards, and in Brazil the Dutch garrisons which had been established there by Count Maurice of Nassau were soon expelled.