Part 22

Great as was the triumph of the revolt in Brazil, it at first filled the heart of the King of Portugal with alarm, for it deprived him of an ally in Europe on whose valuable assistance he had firmly relied. Everywhere he looked in vain for help. Sweden could do nothing; England was torn by civil war; and in France his ally, Cardinal Richelieu, had been succeeded as supreme minister by Cardinal Mazarin. John IV. instinctively felt that he could not depend upon Mazarin, who would certainly throw him over, if a peace should be made between France and Spain, and in his despair he made an offer to resign his throne to a French prince, who should bring ample assistance from France. The nature of this offer is best told in a letter from Mazarin to the Duke of Longueville, dated October 4, 1647. “The King of Portugal,” wrote the Cardinal, “after having maturely considered the state of affairs, is disposed to resign his crown and retire to the Azores, and to offer his kingdom to any one whom the Queen of France shall select, believing himself strong enough to have such a person recognized as king and obeyed by all the people of Portugal. He only desires that the person selected should be a prince who may expect powerful help from France, and that he shall have the means to make such an alliance with his eldest son, as may eventually secure the succession of the kingdom to the latter. He proposes M. the Duke of Orleans and Mademoiselle, or M. the Prince, or you and your daughter.”[29] This strange offer of abdication came to nothing, and it may well be doubted if John IV. would have had the power to introduce a foreign prince in this way; and if he had succeeded, Mazarin would have abandoned Portugal with equal certainty even if a French prince had been on its throne. Though this scheme failed, John IV. still hankered after help from France; he offered his daughter, Donna Catherine de Braganza with a large dowry both to the Duke of Beaufort and to the young Louis XIV., and he also promised large sums of money to the avaricious cardinal for his own use. Years passed on, occupied with these various schemes and entreaties for assistance, and it was not until John IV. threatened to make peace at any price with Philip IV. that Mazarin’s trusted agent, the Chevalier de Jant, signed an offensive and defensive alliance with Portugal on September 7, 1655.[30]

This behaviour of France did not seriously concern Portugal so long as the war between France and Spain continued to occupy the chief strength of the Spanish armies; but on all sides, John IV. saw that he was regarded abroad as a temporary monarch, ruling only until Spain had an opportunity to crush him. From England he could get no help; Cromwell showed his contempt for him and for the received principles of international law, by ordering the trial and execution of Dom Pantaleone de Sá, a lad of nineteen, and the brother of the Portuguese ambassador Rodrigo de Sá, for murder and riot in London;[31] and his refusal to surrender Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice in 1650 to Admiral Blake, caused that gallant admiral to capture his ships and pillage his colonies. On the other hand, the people of Portugal stood staunchly by their legitimate monarch. Brazil recognized his authority and sent him what help she could; the Indian and Chinese possessions contributed what they could in money, and his great admiral Dom Salvador Correa de Sá e Benevides defeated several Spanish fleets, and conquered Angola and the former Portuguese possessions on the African coast.

In the midst of these perplexities, expecting daily to hear of the conclusion of a peace between France and Spain, which should leave the latter power free to crush him, King John IV., the first king of the House of Braganza, died on November 6, 1656. His eldest son Dom Theodosio, whom he had created Prince of Brazil, had predeceased him in 1653, and his heir was a boy of thirteen, weakly both in body and in intellect. John IV. was not a great man; he is no more to be compared with John “the Great” than the victory of Montijo is to that of Aljubarrota; but his name and accession mark a great event. Hesitating and undecided by nature, all his strength came from his queen; but for her, he would never have been king of Portugal. But the revolution which placed this mediocre man upon the throne is both interesting and important; it shows how impossible it is for a nation which has once been great to acquiesce in the loss of its independence. The heroic age of Portugal was indeed past, but the victory of Montijo and the insurrection in Brazil show that the people had recovered from the inertness and sloth which had permitted Philip II. to establish the power of Spain over them. The struggle with Spain was not concluded; the hardest part of the contest was to come, yet the people, if not their chosen monarch, never dreamed of failure. New and national institutions arose under the direction of João Pinto Ribeiro to take the place of the effete institutions of the Sixty Years’ Captivity; councils of war and the colonies were organized at Lisbon; ships were built and armies raised; new tribunals such as the “Junta do Commercio” were erected. Nor were men of letters backward in encouraging the revival of independence; Francisco de Sá de Menezes the poet, Antonio Vieira the preacher, and Jacinto Freire de Andrade, the biographer of Dom João de Castro, all showed the spirit of patriotism, and it is not unworthy of notice that the first Portuguese newspaper, the _Gazeta de Lisboa_ was established in 1641. The whole course of the Revolution of 1640 shows that the people of Portugal in the seventeenth century were not unworthy of their ancestors, and that they had learnt much, because they had suffered much, during the “Sixty Years’ Captivity.”

XV.

THE ENGLISH ALLIANCE.

The death of John IV., and the accession of the boy Affonso VI., proved to be anything but a disaster to the House of Braganza. The queen became sole regent, and this energetic and able woman, who had always been the courageous supporter of her weak husband, determined to prosecute the war against Spain with redoubled vigour. She, too, hankered after a close alliance with France, and distrusted the promises of Mazarin; but she felt that it was no good to wait for allies until Spain was at liberty to attack her, and now ordered the Portuguese army to take the field. Hitherto, since the battle of Montijo, the war had languished, and had been confined to skirmishes on the frontier, but the queen-regent determined to renounce this policy and to invade Spain. Her enterprize was not crowned with success, and the siege of Badajoz which she attempted resulted in failure and defeat. It was obvious that the Portuguese army, though full of gallant and loyal soldiers, was quite undisciplined and unfit for any serious operation of war. This being the case, the queen got her ambassador at Paris, the Count of Soure, to engage Frederick, Count Schomberg, the most famous military adventurer of his time, to enter her service, and to bring with him eighty officers and four hundred non-commissioned officers, to organize and discipline the Portuguese army. Schomberg, whose strange fate it was to serve under nearly every leading monarch in Europe, and to die an English duke at the battle of the Boyne, gladly accepted the queen’s offer. Like the Count of Lippe-Buckeburg and Marshal Beresford in later days, he found that the Portuguese made excellent soldiers, brave and amenable to discipline, and the result of his labours appeared in the great victory won by Dom Antonio Luis de Menezes, Count of Cantanhede, over the Spaniards under Don Luiz de Haro, at Elvas, on January 14, 1659.

This victory, though it revived the courage of the Portuguese, who had been much depressed by their repulse at Badajoz, in one way injured the cause of Portugal, for it so incensed Don Luiz de Haro that, during the famous conferences on the Island of Pheasants with Mazarin, which led to the signature of the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, he would not listen to any intercession on behalf of the Portuguese, and insisted on the insertion of a secret article in the treaty, that France would promise to abandon them entirely. Neither Mazarin nor Louis XIV. intended to observe this secret article and to give up the advantage of having such a useful ally in the peninsula to use against Spain, and they accordingly looked about for some means to evade it. Mazarin again sent the trusty Chevalier de Jant to explain to the queen-regent that the seeming desertion of Portugal was rather nominal than real, and that the little kingdom would not be left to bear the whole brunt of the war with Spain. The means was found in 1660 by proposing that Charles II., the newly restored King of England, should marry the Donna Catherine de Braganza. This notion was acceptable to all parties. Mazarin and Louis XIV. would thus assist Portugal without breaking their promise to Spain; Charles II. would get some ready money, and would repay the debt of gratitude he owed for the shelter afforded to Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice. The Earl of Clarendon saw the advantage of the alliance in establishing the influence of England in the peninsula and in India; and the queen-regent was promised the help of a powerful army of English veterans, trained in the Great Civil War, whom Clarendon was anxious to get out of the country, and also the aid of England in making peace with the Dutch. Thus all parties were satisfied, except the King of Spain, who protested vehemently, and his Catholic Majesty offered to give a dowry to any Protestant princess whom Charles II. might select, if only he would give up this Portuguese alliance. These protests were in vain. The strong wills of Louis XIV., Lord Clarendon, and the queen-regent of Portugal were all set upon the marriage, and Francisco de Mello, Count da Ponte, was sent to London, and Sir Richard Fanshaw, the translator of the “Lusiads,” was sent to Lisbon to arrange the preliminaries. These were soon settled, and on May 18, 1661, the marriage was announced to the English Parliament. Catherine de Braganza was to bring as her dowry the town of Tangier in Morocco, the island of Bombay, and the town of Galle in Ceylon, as well as £800,000 in money; while on his side Charles II. promised to force the Dutch to make peace with Portugal, and in consideration of a further sum of £30,000 a year to send an army of not less than three thousand veterans to aid in the war with Spain. These liberal terms were approved in Parliament in spite of the religion of the Portuguese princess; and in April, 1662, the Earl of Sandwich arrived in the Tagus with twenty English ships to take the bride to England. The marriage took place on May 31, 1662, and it was thus, upon the suggestion of the King of France, that the first step was made towards the revival of the old alliance between England and Portugal, which had existed under the kings of the House of Aviz, an alliance which was, in the indignant language of later French writers, to make Portugal a province of England.

Before the English soldiers arrived and the final struggle with Spain commenced, a Court revolution took place in Lisbon. The king, Affonso VI., was now nearly nineteen, and he had grown up a debauched and vicious youth. A stroke of paralysis had disordered his intellect, and his mother, absorbed in the cares of government, had left him too much to servants. He was entirely under the influence of his valet, a young man named Conti, and his chief delight was to range the streets of Lisbon at the head of a troop of mulattoes and negro slaves, and to play pranks of which the English “Mohocks” of the eighteenth century would have been ashamed. The queen-regent, in disgust, banished Conti to Brazil, and two accomplished courtiers, Sebastião Cesar de Menezes, Count of Atouguia, and Luis de Sousa e Vasconcellos, Count of Castel Melhor, persuaded the angry young king to declare himself of age on June 21, 1662, and to take the government into his own hands. The queen retired into a convent, and all power fell into the hands of the two conspirators.

Fortunately for Portugal the two counts were energetic and able statesmen, and they pursued in every point the policy of the queen. Castel Melhor formed the English veterans, who had arrived under the command of Murrough O’Brien, first Earl of Inchiquin, some French and German volunteers and mercenaries, and the newly organized Portuguese levies, into a powerful army, of which Schomberg was the real, though not the ostensible, commander-in-chief. With this army a series of victories were won, which caused Affonso VI. to be surnamed Affonso “the Victorious,” though his own successes, such as they were, were confined to the streets of Lisbon. On June 8, 1663, the Count of Villa Flor, with Schomberg by his side, utterly defeated Don John of Austria, an illegitimate son of Philip IV., at Ameixial, and afterwards retook Evora; on July 7, 1664, Pedro Jacques de Magalhães defeated the Duke of Ossuna at Ciudad Rodrigo; on June 17, 1665, the Marquis of Marialva and Schomberg destroyed a Spanish army under the Marquis of Carracena, at the battle of Montes Claros; and Christovão de Brito Pereira followed up this victory with another at Villa Viçosa.

These repeated successes utterly broke the power of Spain in the peninsula, and peace was only a matter of time, when Castel Melhor decided to increase both his own power and that of Portugal by marrying the king, who was a mere tool in his hands, to a French princess. Such an alliance was highly approved by Louis XIV., who believed it would bring Portugal under his influence, and the bride selected was Marie Françoise Louise Elisabeth, Mademoiselle d’Aumâle, daughter of Charles Amadeus, Duke of Nemours, and Elisabeth de Vendôme, and grand-daughter of Henry IV. of France. She was brought to Portugal by her relative, the Cardinal d’Estrées, and the marriage was celebrated at Lisbon with the greatest pomp in 1666. But instead of increasing his power, the great minister, Castel Melhor, found that this union brought about his ruin. The handsome and accomplished young queen could not but loathe her worthless and degraded husband, and she speedily fell in love with his younger brother, Dom Pedro, the Duke of Beja. Her passion was returned, and after fourteen months of an unhappy married life, the queen suddenly left the palace for a convent, and applied for a divorce on the ground of non-consummation to the chapter of the cathedral church of Lisbon. Her action was followed by a Court revolution, and Dom Pedro shut King Affonso up in a portion of the palace, and assumed the regency on November 23, 1667. Every one rejoiced at the overthrow of the vicious king. The measures of Dom Pedro were universally approved by the people of Lisbon, and on January 1, 1668, he was recognized as regent by the Cortes. The great minister, Castel Melhor, was not prosecuted, and was allowed to retire to Paris, and the young prince, who was not yet twenty, took the government of Portugal into his own hands.

The regent immediately hurried on the negotiations for a peace with Spain, which had been commenced under the directions of Castel Melhor, by the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Richard Southwell, the English ambassadors at Madrid and Lisbon, and on February 13, 1668, the long war, which had lasted for twenty-seven years--ever since the small band of conspirators in Lisbon had proclaimed King John IV.--was formally concluded. By the Treaty of Lisbon, Spain solemnly recognized the independence of Portugal, and gave its sovereign the title of “Your Majesty,” which had never been acknowledged even to Emmanuel and John III., and in return Portugal ceded Ceuta, in Morocco, to the King of Spain. This diplomatic success was followed on March 24th by the grant of a divorce to the queen, who, on April 2nd, with the dispensation and blessing of the Pope, married the regent Dom Pedro. The wretched Affonso was sent to the Azores, and a new era of peace and prosperity commenced for Portugal. The regent was fully convinced of the necessity of peace and economy, in order to restore the prosperity of the kingdom after its long struggle with Spain. He reduced the army, and dismissed all the foreign soldiers, and he set to work to make improvements in every department of administration. The treasury was empty, and the country was miserably poor. Agriculture had been neglected during the long war; the Dutch and English had seized upon the Asiatic trade; the Indian possessions were worth little or nothing; and the only source of revenue, except taxation, was the wealth of Brazil. Yet Dom Pedro had the wisdom and self-restraint not to increase the taxes, or press too heavily upon the sugar and tobacco planters of his great dominion in South America, and he preferred to reduce the expenses of his household to the lowest possible amount. In all his endeavours he was assisted by his wife, and it was no wonder that the Portuguese people loved and reverenced their prudent rulers.

The only event of importance during the regency was the plot of Dom Pedro Francisco de Mendonça and Dom Antonio de Cavida to restore Affonso VI. to the throne, in 1674. It was fortunately discovered in time; the ringleaders were executed, and Affonso VI. was removed from the Azores, where he had been trying to make a party, and established at Cintra, where he died in 1683. The regent then ascended the throne as Pedro II. and added the title of “king” to the power he had enjoyed for fifteen years; but in the same year he lost his wife, for whose sake he had overthrown his brother. His reign was marked by the same characteristics as his regency; and his strict economy and maintenance of peace gave an opportunity for the exhausted country to recover. He was an excellent administrator, not only from inclination, but from a desire to be independent of the Cortes, which he summoned as seldom as possible, and never after the arrival of the first consignment of gold from Brazil. In his foreign policy he made a point of remaining on good terms with both France and England, and he refused to interfere in the internal affairs of Spain. His friendship with England was kept up through his sister, Catherine, who, by his instructions, kept herself aloof from ministerial quarrels, and remained quietly in her adopted country after her husband’s death, all through the stormy reign of James II. and the Revolution of 1688, and who did not return to Portugal until 1692. With France he was more wary, for he feared the ambition of Louis XIV., and was apprehensive of the danger to Portugal which the accession of a Bourbon prince to the throne of Spain might cause.

The vacancy, which would be caused by the death of Charles II. of Spain, and the general scramble which seemed likely to take place for his dominions, were of more importance to King Pedro II. of Portugal, than to William III. of England, or Louis XIV. of France. He felt that he was utterly unable to cope with any of the great powers, and he commenced saving money for the general war which was certain soon to break out. In 1687, at the request of his minister and most intimate friend, the Duke of Cadaval, he consented to marry again, in order to have an heir to the throne. He selected for his second wife Maria Sophia of Neuburg, daughter of the Elector Palatine, greatly to the chagrin of Louis XIV., who hoped he would have chosen a French princess; and by her he had four sons. When the death of Charles II. became an event daily to be expected, he proclaimed his intention of remaining neutral, and refused, in consonance with the traditions of the House of Aviz, to be himself a candidate for the Spanish throne. Nevertheless, he increased his navy, placed his army on a war footing and repaired his fortresses, and in 1699, he had the pleasure of receiving the first important consignment of gold from Brazil, amounting to a ton and a half, which proved to him that he had a new source of revenue more productive than any taxes he could impose at home.

At last, on November 1, 1700, Charles II. of Spain died, and Louis XIV. in accepting the throne for his grandson, made his famous declaration, “There are now no longer any Pyrenees.” King Pedro carried his complaisance so far as to acknowledge Philip V., as king of Spain, and he even sheltered a French fleet under the Count de Chastenau in the Tagus, against the assaults of the English admiral, Sir George Rooke. But he soon saw that, as he feared, it was impossible for him to remain neutral, and the insolence of Cardinal Porto Carrero, who spoke of him to King Philip as “the rebel duke of Braganza,” and the information that there was a secret treaty, which promised French help for the subjugation of Portugal, made Pedro II. decide to enter into a yet closer alliance with England. This was exactly what the great Whig ministry wanted, and, in 1703, the Right Honourable John Methuen was sent to Lisbon with full powers to negotiate a political and commercial treaty with Portugal.

On December 27, 1703, the famous Methuen treaty was signed, by which Portuguese wines might be imported into England at a lower duty than those from France and Germany, in return for a similar concession to English manufactured goods. The immediate result of this treaty was that King Pedro acknowledged the Archduke Charles, the English candidate, as King of Spain, and that he gave the English a base of operations in the peninsula. The ulterior result was that Englishmen in the eighteenth century drank port wine instead of claret and hock, while the Portuguese imported everything they wanted beyond the bare necessaries of life from England. This was an advantage to both nations, for Portugal is eminently an agricultural country with neither the teeming population nor the materials necessary for manufactures, while England obtained a friendly province from which to import the wine and produce of a southern soil, and a market for the sale of the products of her manufactories. The close connection thus formed went deeper than mere commerce; it established a friendly relationship between the two peoples, which was of infinite advantage to the smaller nation. At Lisbon a regular English “factory” was established, and at Oporto a large colony of English wine merchants and shippers carried on business operations, which doubled the prosperity of the beautiful city on the Douro. The steady influx of English capital increased the wealth of Portugal, and the vineyards of the Entre-Minho-e-Douro became proverbial for their prosperous and industrious peasantry; while, on the other hand, the importation of English goods gave means of comfort and luxury to the Portuguese people which distinguished them in the eyes of all travellers of the last century from the Spaniards and Italians. To this day the beautiful porcelain from the famous English works at Worcester and Derby, Chelsea and Bow, is to be found in Portuguese cottages; and the English people have not lost their taste for port and St. Michael’s oranges.