The whole population of Lisbon continued throughout the winter in tents or huts in the fields. The distress was extreme in every part of Portugal, and called forth, as has been already stated, the pity of all neighbouring nations. In Spain, Ferdinand deeply sympathised in his queen’s sorrow for her countrymen, and repealed the existing prohibitions of exporting some of the necessaries of life, and the heavy duties imposed upon the export of others, as related to Portugal. In England, though the claim might be less, more was done. George II applied to parliament for the means of relieving a people so severely afflicted; and the sum of £100,000 [$500,000] was immediately granted for that purpose. The ministers expended it in corn and other articles of provisions or indispensable necessaries, which were shipped off without a moment’s delay to the desolated city. The Portuguese felt gratitude both for the benefits conferred and for the kindly fellow-feeling that had prompted the act; and the old ties of friendship between England and Portugal seem to have regained much of their previously decaying strength.b
The measures which Pombal adopted on account of and after the earthquake, although in themselves prudent and humane, were enforced in a severe and arbitrary manner. He caused the public granaries to be thrown open, because hundreds of persons who had not been buried under the ruins, or killed by the falling buildings, were wandering about like ghosts and dying from hunger. He adopted measures for the immediate import of grain from all quarters, abolished the duties on corn, and strictly forbade the export of provisions of any description. The water-conduits which had been destroyed were also immediately restored and carefully maintained.[176] The indescribable misery which resulted from this calamity gave occasion to murders and plunder in such a country as Portugal. Pombal applied remedies for this evil also, but by the use of most horrible means. Thieves and robbers, regardless of the most imminent dangers, and urged by their covetousness, ventured into streets which were masses of ruins, and carried away property from churches, palaces, and private houses before the very eyes of the inhabitants, who were trembling for their lives. To put an end to this fearful system of plunder, the minister ordered guards to be placed at all the outlets from the city and in every street, and summary justice to be executed upon everyone who either refused or was unable to give a satisfactory account of what he was carrying. Hundreds of gallows were erected around the circuit of the city which was filled with the dead and the dying, and with persons robbed of all their property and means even of present existence; and on these gallows 350 people were hanged within three days.
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.
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
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.
Some weeks elapsed ere the perpetrators of this outrage were detected, during which time Aveiro and Tavora were assiduous in their visits to the royal invalid. But in the end Pombal obtained a clew to the plot. A great number of persons were seized and imprisoned; and in January, 1759, as it is alleged, after a very arbitrary and unsatisfactory trial, the duke, the marquis, his two sons, and several other persons were broken on the wheel; the old marchioness, in consideration of her sex, was beheaded, and the young marchioness was shut up for life in a convent. Many persons were banished, and others imprisoned for life.
One of the conspirators is said, whilst under the torture, to have accused three Jesuits as the instigators of the conspiracy, but to have retracted this accusation upon the scaffold. Of these three Jesuits, one was tried for heresy, not treason, convicted, and executed; the other two were not even brought to trial; but Pombal took the opportunity to charge the crime upon the whole order, as the fruit of its principles and doctrines—an imputation to which their earlier conduct rendered the order but too obnoxious. He issued orders for the confiscation of their property, and the seizure of their persons, throughout Portugal and the colonies, as advisers and instigators of regicide, and for the investigation of their doctrines. In the month of September of this same year they were finally proscribed and banished.
The missionary fathers were torn from the reductions, and with all Jesuits who could be found in Brazil, old and young, even the patients in their infirmaries, were stowed on board ship, without any of the conveniences, or scarcely any of the necessaries of life, like the unfortunate negroes in slave vessels, and transported to Europe. Upon reaching the mouth of the Tagus, some were landed and thrown into the Lisbon prisons, where they languished during the remainder of José’s reign; others were sent forward to Italy, where they were landed upon the papal territories, and left to find their way to the houses of their order. It is said, however, that an allowance was made from Lisbon for their support, and that Pombal often complained of the extraordinary longevity of his Jesuit pensioners.[178]
Pombal, who really appears to have been partly actuated by disgust at the slavery, however easy, in which the fathers had held their converts, and to have desired to place the Indians upon a level with their Portuguese masters, now endeavoured at once to effect this equalisation.[179] The scheme, if not extravagant, was at least premature.
In Portugal likewise, Pombal, though he succeeded better, attempted too much; and by his injudicious endeavours to secure to the Portuguese the profit made by foreign, and especially English merchants, he merely harassed and injured the trade of the country, without at all advancing the end at which he aimed. That end was in fact unattainable. To deprive the enterprising capitalist of his profits is very possible, but not so to transfer them to the indigent, ignorant, or unenterprising. Pombal moreover involved Portugal in a quarrel with Rome, by his endeavour to subject the clergy to a lay tribunal, a sort of board of conscience, when accused of high treason, or other state crimes. Prior to this rupture, a papal dispensation had been obtained for one of those incestuous connections so frequent in the peninsula, and more especially in Portugal. José had no son; and to insure the undisputed succession of his eldest daughter, Donna Maria, it was deemed expedient to marry her to her uncle, his younger brother, Dom Pedro. The dispensation was obtained, and the marriage celebrated in 1760.
The two Bourbon monarchs, Louis XV of France, and Charles III of Spain, being involved in the Family Compact War, now required the king of Portugal to join them against England, Charles kindly offering Spanish troops with which to garrison the Portuguese fortresses against British aggression. Unprepared as he was for war, he therefore boldly refused to desert his old ally; the Bourbon ambassadors quitted Lisbon (a step nearly tantamount to a declaration of war), and a Spanish army immediately invaded Portugal.
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
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.
Should it be asked how it was possible that the cowardly, superstitious, and weak king could approve of such a revolutionary method of proceeding, this will be best explained by calling to mind that, from the time of the disputes with the Jesuits, he lived in a continual state of fear, not only of the order, but of his nobility and of his brother Dom Pedro. He had therefore completely thrown himself into the arms of his minister, who surrounded the king and himself with guards, relying upon whose protection the weak king rejoiced that by the instrumentality of his minister he was able to exercise a dominion uncontrolled by the people or the nobles, such as was enjoyed by Louis XIV or Frederick of Prussia.
Pombal’s measures with respect to trade, commerce, industry, and agriculture were neither the best nor free from selfish views; but they roused up the Portuguese and awakened them from the slumber and idleness of their monkish life, although this rousing was frequently not performed with a very gentle hand. We shall therefore attribute no higher importance to the school of commerce established by Pombal, to the solemn and public examinations which were held in his presence, and to the public attention which he thereby roused, than that he opposed a school of practical life to the prevailing monkish institutions, and a secular celebration which bore upon education and life to ecclesiastical processions. He also contributed very largely to the improvement of agriculture in the province of Alemtejo, although we should feel by no means disposed to undertake the defence of all those measures which he adopted with this view; the same may be said of the great canal of Oeyras and of the fair established in the same place. He provided for the security of the city repeatedly destroyed by earthquakes; he provided an abundant supply of water by means of magnificent conduits, and erected numerous noble public edifices. But the means, however useful, were not the less tyrannical and cruel. The unfortunate inhabitants whose dwellings had escaped the terrific power of the earthquake were obliged to pull down their houses and build them up again at their own cost, according to a prescribed plan and on a given scale, if, either in their external appearance or by their situation, they interfered with Pombal’s magnificent plan of broad streets and beautiful houses. Travellers were struck with admiration at his immense architectural structures, the arsenal, the exchange which was connected with it, and the market-house, and it was said there was nothing in Europe of their kind to be compared with these buildings; but, in fact, the only real glory in the matter was that Pombal’s buildings were all erected in the taste and style of the new age, whereas those of João V retained all the characteristics of the Middle Ages; for the exchange and the market-house were wholly destitute of merchants and wares, and there was no suitable army or fleet to correspond to the arsenal.
Pombal was at that time the object of the most deadly hatred as a tyrant in the nation which he was desirous of reforming; this alone was sufficient to render everything hateful which originated with him amongst a people whose condition he was indeed unable immediately to improve, but whom he annoyed, provoked, and tormented by means of his state police and his numerous and detested decrees. He durst not, in consequence, venture out of his house without a guard, and was obliged to have recourse to the most hateful means of maintaining the respect due to his station and rank. Wraxall,i who, as regards hearsays, mixes together truth and falsehood, stories, footmen’s reports, and lies of all kinds, but who is deserving of credit when he speaks as an eye-witness, informs us that, as late as the year 1772, he found all the prisons full of unfortunate individuals, some of whom had been buried in these living graves for fifteen years.
The advantages therefore which Portugal gained through Pombal’s administration, and which were loudly celebrated through the whole of Europe, rested upon a very unstable foundation. The most remarkable of these advantages were: security from assassination, which Lisbon had never enjoyed before the time of Pombal’s rule; the rebuilding and adornment of the capital; cleanliness of the streets; a free trade in books; an academy which deserved well of the friends of the sciences; a disciplined army, etc. All these momentous changes and creations, however, wholly depended for their continuance upon the absolute power of the minister, and that again upon the life of the king. As long as José lived, Pombal maintained his influence, and pursued the same energetic course both towards priests and soldiers. He put limits to the number of brotherhoods and ecclesiastical orders, and availed himself of the aid of his sister, who was herself a nun, to carry his reforming principles even into the nunneries. Military affairs he conducted in the same manner, for he never hesitated to cashier whole regiments if they transgressed his army regulations respecting discipline, or suffered themselves to be guilty of acts of injury or violence towards their officers, who were gathered from all nations and countries.
The king, who was nearly eighty years old, no sooner became seriously ill than Pombal foresaw his fate, for the queen was appointed regent and he was kept far removed from the sick-bed of the monarch. He therefore, shortly before José’s death, which took place in February, 1777, preferred a request to the regent to be relieved from his official duties, and appealed, as a reason for his request, to his advanced age and his bodily infirmities. In this remarkable document he gives a brief but comprehensive statement of the whole of the arrangements and condition of all the departments of the government at that time. No person who reads this paper can fail to be pleased with the ability which it displays and to admire its author, who had raised the financial condition of the country to a degree of prosperity which it had not reached for centuries; he appended a paper to his petition for leave to retire from public life, in which a correct account is not only given of the diamonds in the royal cabinet, but in which it is stated that a sum of 76,000,000 cruzados in hard cash [about £6,400,000 or $32,000,000] was deposited in the royal treasury.
The king however died before the regent had returned her answer; he was succeeded by his daughter, Donna Maria I, to whom Pombal preferred his request anew on the 1st of March, 1777, which was granted to him by a decree of the date of the 4th of the same month, drawn up in a kindly spirit. The regent, at the end of February, had already released from imprisonment several of the clergy and persons of distinction who had been incarcerated as being implicated in the conspiracy against the king’s life, under the appearance of having taken this step by her husband’s command: in the beginning of March everything was changed. The new and unholy marriage which was celebrated in the royal family, for which the pope had granted a dispensation, may be regarded as a preliminary announcement of the return to the old order of things: this marriage, now solemnised, had been commanded by the king immediately before his death. It appeared as if it were not enough that the reigning queen should be married to her own paternal uncle, but the son of this marriage must be further allied with his mother’s sister, Donna Maria Benedicta.
The whole history of this incestuous family furnishes proofs enough that, although the pope might sanction and bless such marriages for money, they had the stamp of retribution upon them. This was soon evident in the case of the new queen Donna Maria. Immediately after her father’s death she assumed the reins of government, which she shared with her husband Dom Pedro; soon afterwards, however, she exhibited traces of insanity, and at a later period became completely mad. As her unsoundness of mind was closely connected with her excessive superstition, she did not wait for Pombal’s removal from the presidency of the council, which took place a few weeks afterwards, but immediately proceeded to take steps for the restoration of all those religious abuses which had previously existed in the kingdom. She restored to the papal nuncio and the saints of the Jesuits all the honours and distinctions which they had previously enjoyed among the people. The nuncio immediately played again the character of a spiritual monarch; and the pope received half a million of florins as an indemnification for the expense to which he had been put by the support of the Jesuits who were landed at Cività Vecchia. The estates of the ridiculous patriarchate were given back; the holidays, confraternities, and tribunals of the Middle Ages restored, and those saints of the Romish church who had been the enemies of all temporal sovereigns were again reinstated in the honours of the church and the calendar. This was the case with Gregory VII, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Francis Borgia, whose names had been erased from the calendar by the orders of Pombal. All this took place long before Pombal received permission to retire from his official duties.
Hundreds were liberated from their subterranean dungeons, among whom were bishops, grandees of the kingdom, and members of families of the first distinction, and especially the sixty Jesuits who had been restored to freedom upon the command of the queen; all these combined and allowed the weak-minded lady no rest or peace till she let loose her jurists upon the reformer, with the forms and formulas of their Byzantine criminal law, of which its codes furnish abundance, for the torment of all those who are unfortunate enough to live in countries in which Byzantine justice is honoured. Some idea of the number and power of the minister’s enemies at court may be deduced from the fact that he had hunted forth whole crowds of that court mob which, under all sorts of titles and pretences, had wasted or spent on themselves and their pleasures the revenues of the kingdom, or sacrificed them to his own creatures; and that again he had not only met the expenditure, but accumulated a large reserve-fund in the treasury of a kingdom whose exchequer had always been previously empty. In the royal treasury he kept always on hand 40,000,000 cruzados, and in the tithe exchequer 30,000,000, which was a thing long unheard of in the history of Portuguese finances.
Pombal shared the fate of all those who have ever attempted to carry through a revolution or even a reform by means of violence and severity; the cruelty, criminality, and violence of their measures rouse every human feeling against them to such an extent that neither sense nor gratitude remains for the various beneficial changes which they have effected. The numbers of prisoners who were released from their dreadful captivity and dungeons at the king’s death furnish but too strong proofs of the strict applicability of this principle to Pombal, and of the severities which he exercised under pretence at least of serving the interests of humanity, and promoting the cause of knowledge and improvement. In the very first days of the new government 500 human beings came forth from their cells as from their graves, who had never been brought before any legal tribunal, and their number was afterwards increased to 800. When it was determined to prosecute the marquis, it was alleged by his enemies that during his administration 9,640 men had been banished or incarcerated, of whom 3,970 had been completely innocent, and of the rest only 800 then remained alive. For four years (from 1777-1781) Pombal was prosecuted before the courts by individuals who brought actions against him for false imprisonment and damages, and a prosecution was not commenced against him, on account of his administration of the state, till he had been first baited and hunted down by the lawyers.
At length a severe final judgment was pronounced against the marquis, now in his eighty-second year. In August, 1781, the queen overruled the decision of the courts, and limited the punishment to a public disapproval of the manner in which he had discharged the duties of his office, and banishment from the court.
Almost every improvement or change which had been effected by Pombal had disappeared before his death, which took place in 1782. Priests and monks of all colours, Jesuits, now called ex-Jesuits, want of police, filth, insecurity for life and property, and a total relaxation of military discipline again appeared; but the whole effects of his exertions and labours could not be rooted out. Murphyl who visited Portugal in 1789, found many changes in the old Portuguese life, and every change which he mentions is referred to Pombal. He further boasts that Portugal was indebted to this celebrated minister for an institution of which England was long destitute; in England hundreds of unfortunate debtors were continually to be found languishing in the public prisons at the suit of some heartless and intolerant creditor. In 1744 Pombal issued an ordinance, which since that time has continued to be the law in Portugal, by which, on the one hand, debtors were freed from personal arrest or imprisonment at the suit of their creditors,[181] and the means were given to the latter by which obtaining possession of the property of their debtors was rendered as easy as it had previously been difficult.h
The strict friendship subsisting between Spain and Portugal had been most beneficial to the former during the war with England (1779-1783). Not only had the Portuguese harbours afforded neither shelter nor assistance, as of old, to the hostile British fleets, but the Portuguese flag had been the means of transporting the wealth of America to Spain; and it is said that when the English ministry had projected an expedition against Peru, whilst distracted by Tupac Amaru’s revolt, its execution was prevented by a remonstrance from the court of Lisbon, representing that, in case of an invasion of the Spanish dominions, Portugal was bound by treaty to take part in the war. Charles, duly sensible of these advantages, sought to strengthen the ties of relationship and friendship by those of wedlock; and in 1785 his fourth son, Don Gabriel, married the infanta Marianna Victoria of Portugal, and Dom João, the queen of Portugal’s second son, the eldest Spanish infanta, Carlota Joaquina.
This last union was the more agreeable to Charles, inasmuch as Dom João had a very fair chance of eventually succeeding to the crown, the incestuous union of his eldest brother with his aunt having proved barren. But it was not the youngest of this ill-assorted pair that was destined to be the survivor. Three years after Dom João’s marriage, the prince of Brazil himself, whom the bigoted prejudices of the queen had not suffered to be inoculated, died of the smallpox, and Charles’ son-in-law became prince of Brazil in his stead. Queen Maria had, in 1786, lost her uncle-husband, Pedro III, but he had interfered little with her government, and his death had therefore no effect upon public affairs.
The queen appears to have been really anxious to promote the prosperity of her kingdom. When the Peace of Versailles had relieved her from the embarrassments consequent upon her intimate connection with two hostile belligerents, she endeavoured to strengthen the old friendship with England by concluding a commercial treaty, at the same time that she maintained her new relations of friendship and commerce with the Bourbon courts.b
The queen now began to show signs of an insanity which took a religious form and in which she suffered all the agonies of her vivid belief that she was doomed to eternal fire. Her confessors endeavoured to comfort her by milder applications of their doctrines, but from 1788 the government was more and more taken out of her incapable hands by Dom João, who was not, however, fully constituted regent until 1799.
Meanwhile the ferment of the French Revolution had stirred all Europe, and Portugal indirectly. We have already described the embroilment of Spain. Portugal endeavoured to keep a strict neutrality, but her treaties with Spain and England enabled them to enforce their demand for aid.[182] She added nine sail of the line to the British fleet, and five thousand infantry under General Skelater to the Spanish armies. These troops shared the easy successes of the first rush across the Pyrenees and the bitter disasters of the following repulse. Spain now, in 1795, signed a treaty of alliance with France, and Portugal applied for terms, but was rejected as “a mere province of England”; the ambassador at Paris was ordered out of the country, and on showing some delay was thrown into prison, where he remained for months.
Portugal was now driven to open alliance with England, against whom Spain declared war in 1796. At the same time Dom João learned that Napoleon and the Spanish prime minister Godoy had agreed to conquer and divide Portugal as a spoil of war. The English voted £200,000 [$1,000,000] to Portugal and sent six thousand men under Major-General Sir Charles Stuart. These with a native army of some forty thousand men placed under the prince of Waldeck frightened off Spanish invasion, whereupon Stuart and the English troops withdrew. Little had happened thus far except the loss of some commerce to French privateers. In 1799 Dom João formally assumed the regency and tried vainly to secure the favour of Napoleon, who would listen to nothing less than the payment of a heavy tribute, breach of the alliance with England, the closing of Portuguese ports to English ships, the surrender of a portion of Portuguese territory to Spain. As alternative to these hard terms made under the name of Spain, war was offered. Dom João accepted the latter alternative, and proclaimed war on Spain, February 10th, 1801.
As related in the Spanish history, Portugal was invaded by the Spanish at once, and with such ease that, by June 6th, João was glad to accept the Peace of Badajoz at the cost of ceding Olivenza to Spain. Napoleon, however, required more, and sent troops which extorted a tribute of £1,000,000 [$5,000,000] and the cession of Portuguese Guiana to France. Napoleon’s representative at Lisbon was General Lannes (or Lasnes) who at first provoked great hatred by his insolent bearing, but later procured a large influence over João and secured the dismissal of the ministers of English sympathies. In 1804 he was succeeded by General Junot who accepted a treaty of neutrality which gave Portugal quiet for some years, while Napoleon went on from great to greater.
The English tried to break the Portuguese peace with France, but could succeed in nothing more than keeping her ports open in spite of Napoleon’s continental system against English trade. By 1807, however, Napoleon was master enough of the East to turn again to Portugal and by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (October 29th, 1807), resumed his project of dividing it among Godoy, the king of Etruria, and himself. The terrified João offered every sacrifice for peace, going so far as to order from his realm every British subject and to close his ports to England, though this meant commercial ruin to Portugal. But Napoleon, pretending that the submission was too late, sent forward his troops under General Junot.a
The Treaty of Fontainebleau contained all the decisions respecting the campaign against Portugal, and the partition of that kingdom. The Spaniards were to reinforce the army of the Gironde with twelve thousand men; at the same time to invade the north of Portugal with forty thousand men; and to give orders for another army to enter Algarve under Solano. In terms of the treaty, Lisbon and the whole centre of the country were to fall to the share of France, a part of the northern division was to be given as compensation to the queen of Etruria, and a sovereign territory to be formed in the south for Godoy. The part not allotted by the treaty to any of the three parties just mentioned was to be the subject of future negotiations, when possession of the whole was obtained.
Notwithstanding the imminent danger, the prince-regent had neither taken measures for defence, made preparations for setting sail to Brazil, nor even for the removal of the rich stores in the arsenals and magazines of the capital. The prince and his whole court would have been taken by surprise in Lisbon by the French rapidly advancing on the capital through Beira, had not a swift sailing ship brought a copy of the Moniteur to Lisbon, in which Napoleon, who supposed that his army was long since in that city, too hastily expressed his triumph by the declaration: “The house of Braganza has ceased to reign.”
The army of the Gironde was under the command of Marshal Junot, who gained his ensign’s commission by an act of great presence of mind displayed under the eyes of Napoleon at the siege of Toulon, although he was in reality possessed of very small military capacity. He had been in Lisbon as ambassador, and still held that title, never having been formally recalled; the troops under his command, however, contained but very few men who could be thoroughly relied upon, for this army of the Gironde had been very hastily drawn together. The prime of the French army was at that time still in Germany (September, 1807) and in Prussia, and the first army, as well as that by which it was succeeded, consisted of a mixture of soldiers and officers, who, on the landing of the English and the outbreak of the Spanish rising, proved wholly unequal to maintaining the glory gained by the grand army; this was not at first perceived. Junot wished to collect and organise his army, seeing it was composed of very different elements, when he suddenly received orders to march direct upon Lisbon in order to surprise the prince-regent in his security. We may form some idea of the rapidity with which he prosecuted his march, from the fact that he had taken twenty-five days to march from Bayonne to Salamanca, where he arrived on the 12th of November; while, on the other hand, he reached Alcantara as early as the 17th, and was in Abrantes on the 23rd, about eighty miles from Lisbon.
The difficulty of the march, the pathless and rough character of the districts through which he led the army were indescribable; but no measures whatever were adopted by the Portuguese for resistance or even to increase the difficulty of the journey. A great portion of the army fell a sacrifice to the difficulties of the march, or to want, in neighbourhoods where no idea could be entertained of any kind of sustenance or cover. Many had fallen into pits, others perished in the attempt to cross running streams; but the immense loss in men was taken into no account whatever. As a reward for the rapidity of his march, Junot received the title of the duke of Abrantes, although he reached Lisbon with only a small part of his army [about two thousand men] at the end of November, and a long time elapsed before all the stragglers joined their respective corps.
The prince-regent was at length induced, by the number of the Moniteur which was sent to him, to throw himself into the arms of the English, whose ships were lying in the Tagus, and, under their protection, to save himself by setting sail for Brazil. He took his departure from the Tagus on the 29th, under English convoy, with eight ships of the line, three frigates, three brigs, and a considerable number of transports, in order to remove the seat of his government to Brazil.[183] The well-stored arsenal, from whose treasures the whole French army was afterwards clothed and provided, fell without diminution into the hands of the French, in consequence of his precipitate departure. Junot’s advanced guard even reached Belem in time enough to capture some ships of war which had been detained by contrary winds, and were still within reach of the guns of the fort.
The second army, which was assembled at Bayonne to reinforce Junot’s corps, was still stronger than the first; but the whole of Europe deeply condemned Napoleon’s want of honour, and was angry with the French sophists and cringing flatterers who ventured to defend and to praise the emperor’s policy in the use of this army. At the very moment in which he concluded a treaty with Spain against Portugal, and was using one part of the Spanish army under Bernadotte in Denmark, and was alluring the second to Portugal, he caused a body of troops to be assembled at Bayonne, but not to march against Portugal, as he had announced. It soon became obvious that Napoleon planned to take possession of Spain in the midst of peace.
The Spaniards who had assisted Junot in the conquest of Portugal having withdrawn into their own country, the French general had scattered his troops from Algarve and Oporto, and had done everything which could render the sojourn of the French in their country intolerable to the Portuguese. Napoleon immediately laid a contribution of 100,000,000 francs on Portugal; the people were obliged, besides, to pay 600,000 francs to Junot, which the emperor had assigned to him as governor-general; and Junot raised 5,000,000 more on his own account. Napoleon not only drew away the national troops from Portugal and took them into his own army, but appeared desirous of playing the same constitution-comedy with the Portuguese in Bayonne as he had played with the Spaniards. He sent for a number of the notables as deputies, but retained them in hostages; and they were afterwards placed in a very dangerous position, when, given up by him, they became suspected by their own countrymen. The only favour which he granted them was to remit forty of the hundred millions of contribution which he had at first imposed. In small matters, every officer in Portugal played the despot and oppressor.h