How Unsolvable Family Complications Brought Portugal to the Brink of Ruin

José António Saraiva's distinguished literary career reached a powerful conclusion with his account of the Braganza family's self-destructive actions between 1780 and 1830, and the torments they wreaked on the territories under their rule. Saraiva wrote with a mixture of dismay, impartiality, and acute prescience about a dysfunctional family that happened to occupy the pinnacle of power in Portugal. He describes the mismatched and incompatible personalities, and the hatreds, intrigues, and shirking of responsibilities that ensued as Portugal was swept by a whirlwind of destruction that, by the end of history, left the nation shattered.

The author is unafraid to pass judgment on human conduct and its political consequences. He argues that, without the transfer of the royal family to Brazil in 1807, it is difficult to see how that vast territory could not have been divided into small autonomous states, as happened in Spanish America as control of the Old World waned.

It's perhaps surprising that the sinister story of the Portuguese royal family's degeneration, as international conflicts engulfed the country, isn't better known. The book deserves to be translated, even though the author was writing primarily for Portuguese-speaking readers. And it appears at a time when a depleted political order seems to dominate Portugal, leaving a void where perhaps more resolute leadership should exist. But at least the national interest is no longer in the hands of a nest of despots, and those at the top of the hierarchy attempt to maintain power not through outright tyranny, but rather through ambiguous rhetoric and cunning rule-breaking.

The story begins in the period following the 1777 removal of the all-powerful Prime Minister, the Marquis of Pombal. Queen Maria had ascended the throne, but unfortunately for Portugal, she would not witness anything resembling the reestablishment of institutions that the Meiji dynasty would foster in Japan about a century later. The life of idleness at court was disturbed only by petty squabbles, suspicions, and a succession of mourning periods. These, in particular, seem to have affected the melancholic Queen. Saraiva believes she was never the same since hearing the agonizing screams of the noble Távora family as their bones were crushed in the public execution dictated by Pombal. She believed that the soul of her father, King José, had been condemned to eternal damnation for having consented to such a sentence. Until the Queen was officially declared insane in 1792, and her son, the future King João VI, assumed the regency.

Escape from responsibilities

A century after the restoration of independence, the Braganças proved to be a terrible example of the doctrine of royal authority by divine grace. King John was neither psychologically nor intellectually prepared to take on the task. He received no necessary instruction in the art of reigning and failed to ensure that his eight officially recognized descendants received a proper education. Unfortunately, Dona Carlota Joaquina, a Spanish princess of the House of Bourbon who had become queen through an arranged marriage, possessed no virtue to compensate for her indolence. Behind a facade of false decorum, she schemed against her husband, planning to remove him from the regency in 1806. Her malicious and even murderous nature would reveal itself in all its fullness when, years later, successive rebellions transformed the Braganças into a family at war.

More than elected governments, monarchs had the opportunity to act historically. But King John shied away from these responsibilities even as events of tremendous magnitude befell him and Portugal. The crisis erupted in 1807 when Napoleon Bonaparte threatened Portugal with dire consequences if it did not break its alliance with England.

When the French army entered Portugal, its decision to transfer the entire court and much of the state apparatus to Brazil was of enormous significance. But this only came to fruition in extremis , with the regent barely able to disguise his desire to remain in Lisbon. The difficult sea crossing and the risks, known and unknown, of living in the tropics overshadowed the dangers of becoming, like Louis XVI, a victim of the Jacobin terror. Until the last minute, advisors and diplomats negotiated simultaneously with the British and the French. Portugal declared war on Great Britain on October 31st. But two days later, a secret Anglo-Portuguese agreement was signed according to which the British navy would arrange the escape of the Royal Family.

Regent D. João was only 40 years old, but he already behaved like an old man, completely lacking energy and willpower. It was the terror of falling into the hands of a rough and murderous French soldiery that ultimately drove him to flee. When the Court set sail on November 29, 1807, the invading French army found the borders unguarded. There were provisions for five thousand people, on a journey estimated to last 60 days. Much of the state simply abandoned the country. The regent did not think about the future—about how fleeing to Brazil and abandoning Portugal to an undoubtedly cruel fate would later affect his position. After all, his right to rule was based in part on the duty to ensure the well-being of his subjects and not abandon them to a miserable fate.

Saraiva writes that much of the mystique of colonial power was destroyed overnight when the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro glimpsed the wretched state of the Portuguese court upon disembarking in February 1808. A French observer accurately deciphered the attitude toward the obese and clumsy ruler who had suddenly joined them: 'The King is pleasant, but of little majesty.'

A devastated territory

The rudiments of a small state slowly took shape. Care was taken to introduce something that had until then been forbidden in Brazil—a printing press to distribute decrees. Between 1807 and 1814, one-sixth of the Portuguese population followed the court in search of a new life in Brazil. They escaped famine and disorder. Napoleon, having invaded Spain in 1808, quickly discovered that the attitude of the bulk of the population in both Iberian countries did not reflect that of their anti-war rulers. Resistance soon erupted. In less than a year, forty students from Coimbra had mobilized two thousand peasants and attacked the small French garrison in Figueira da Foz, taking their prisoners to the university campus . A British force of three thousand men, commanded by Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, decided to intervene and landed in Figueira da Foz on August 1, 1808. A British protectorate was quickly imposed, with Portugal treated as a vassal state under the command of General (later Field Marshal) William Beresford. The British found a devastated and bloodstained territory. Two days before the British landing, the French had killed three thousand people while suppressing a rebellion in Évora.

British military successes led the French to leave Portugal (under surprisingly generous conditions granted by the new occupiers). But a second invasion occurred in 1809, this time by sea. Porto, with 14,000 defenders, was taken. The death toll was colossal, many of them drowning while trying to cross the Douro in fragile boats, and another 18,000 due to a savage repression. But the French were quickly forced to withdraw, allowing the peasant militias to exact their revenge, with four thousand wounded or weakened French soldiers among their victims.

Saraiva writes with composure about the fate the French had inflicted upon themselves: "The Napoleonic troops behaved like a horde of barbarians. They killed for the sake of killing, they ruined, and they left for the pleasure of it."

Portugal had become a spineless territory without a state. The navy of the homeland of the Discoveries was reduced to a mere 30 ships (many unseaworthy), compared to the 880 of the British navy. Beresford, to whom the regent had granted the power to govern, had restored a shaky order. But in 1820, while visiting King John VI in Brazil, he was deposed in a liberal nationalist revolt, ending the chapter of direct British sovereignty.

A Cornered King

From then on, the growing clamor of military and civilian forces, expressing their demands for representation with liberal rhetoric, accentuated dynastic family divisions. Different royal descendants mirrored the disagreements of their respective progenitors. Being one of the most fragile courts in Europe, it failed to command much respect in Brazil. The King remained weak and indecisive, and neglected his appearance. Carlota's habits and grooming were unconventional, to say the least, earning her a dark reputation for destroying those who got in her way. Her eldest son, Dom Pedro, himself had coarse manners and mistreated slaves and the poor. Dona Leopoldina, the Habsburg princess he had married, writing to her family, described the young, uneducated but ambitious prince as an overbearing man who brooked no opposition.

In 1821, a revolt broke out, which had actually been engineered by Dom Pedro, to force his father to yield to pressure and return to Portugal. This pressure had been felt from many directions since Dom João ascended the throne upon his mother's death. The actions and behavior of a family that was already one of the least convincing examples of royal authority in Europe were now intertwined with the increasingly volatile situation in Portugal.

In the spring of 1821, King John VI was cornered. Manuel Fernandes Thomaz, one of the leaders of the Constituent Courts now meeting in Lisbon, noted that the King would have to choose between "the land of monkeys, blacks, and snakes, or the land of white people, of civilized peoples, and lovers of their sovereign."

The expedition that would return the King to Lisbon was much smaller than the one that had taken him to the Southern Hemisphere. Many of those who had fled in 1807 preferred to remain in Brazil, which seemed to offer far more promising prospects than Portugal. The story of the King's remaining five wretched years of life, facing family conspiracies and a nation divided between absolutist and liberal factions, is well told by Saraiva. The problems began when he agreed to reign with very limited powers. Dona Carlota, on the other hand, defied the liberals and refused to agree, which led to her being stripped of her title and placed under house arrest. She wrote contemptuously to her husband, telling him that her soul would never be enslaved (unlike his).

As regent of Brazil, Dom Pedro challenged the liberals even more vehemently when they attempted to return that territory to colonial vassal status. They were almost as out of touch with the changing reality of the New World as the dynasty they despised had been with the condition of their European kingdom. In the much-mythologized Cry of Ipiranga, on September 7, 1822, Dom Pedro presented himself as Brazil's savior. After promising never to submit to vassalage to Lisbon, he was acclaimed Emperor of Brazil on October 12.

Family at war

It is here that Dom Pedro's brother, Dom Miguel, enters the annals of history, joining his mother in bluntly declaring that absolutism must prevail over liberalism. The rigors of civil war gradually set in in Portugal as the pendulum swung between the rival camps. The malleable King sided with his younger son as the liberals lost ground. A conciliatory letter he sent to Dom Pedro in Brazil received the following response in July 1824: "I, as Emperor, and Your Majesty, as King, are at war."

With King Miguel ascending and about to proclaim his mother queen regnant, the main diplomatic representatives, led by the French ambassador, intervened. Three hundred important figures had been captured in a lightning dawn raid in April 1824, and the powers concerned about the Iberian Peninsula feared that an unstable despotism in Portugal would disturb the peace in Europe. The reactionaries retreated. Meeting with his youngest son in the presence of Marshal Beresford, the King told him: "It is you and your mother who seek to assassinate me."

D. João's wretched existence as a betrayed husband tormented by two warring sons, who also sought to exploit him for their megalomaniacal ambitions, ended on March 10, 1826, when he died at the age of 58, after six days of agonizing stomach pains. In 2000, a Chinese porcelain vase containing his mortal remains was discovered in the monastery of São Vicente de Fora. Tests revealed a concentration of arsenic sufficient to kill two people. The cruel Carlota Joaquina would follow him to the grave in January 1830, a solitary and ruthless shrew known for endlessly repeating a perfidious Castilian saying:

«In stubbornness I am Castilian

in malice I am a gypsy

my goals and my plans

I can't get them out of my head.»

The power struggle now raged between the sons. For a time, it seemed that an understanding might spare Portugal from further bloodshed. Thanks to the mediation of the powers, Miguel seemed willing to accept the Constitutional Charter published in July 1826, which provided for the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, with the King playing a moderating role. Dom Pedro was willing to hand over power to Dom Miguel if he married his then-child daughter, Dona Maria da Glória. The Pope's approval for this blood contract was obtained. But tensions soon returned. Dom Miguel was authoritarian and prone to drastic mood swings (leading the author to suspect he was bipolar). Not even after the regency was transferred to Dom Miguel in 1827—once again thanks to the intercession of the powers—did Portugal find stability.

Fratricidal conflict

King Miguel had returned only twenty days earlier (after several years of exile in Vienna) when he dissolved the Cortes in early 1828. The conditions were ripe for civil war to begin in earnest. Porto, the main seat of liberal sentiment, exploded in revolt. With the rural world clearly supporting the traditional camp, the liberals were isolated. Thousands fled abroad immediately, especially to England. Here, suspicions and rivalries undermined the leaders. It was a warning sign that this doctrine, full of generous sentiments, would in practice have difficulty eradicating political hatreds in Portugal. The year 1828 was terrible for the liberals, only mitigated by an unexpected success against the Miguelists on Terceira Island in the Azores, the archipelago that would soon become a vital center for the resistance.

Most Portuguese people would probably have identified with the values ​​the Miguelists claimed to defend. But drastic international changes rendered this irrelevant. Both France and England surrendered to the liberal winds. D. Miguel's persecution of noble and bourgeois opponents generated outrage, and he soon began to be described as the Portuguese Nero.

But far more sensational was the news that Dom Pedro I of Brazil had turned his back on his New World empire. Many Brazilians were fed up with his arrogance, and he himself had grown tired of governing a new state that needed a patient statesman he was ill-equipped to be. Thus, he abdicated in favor of his five-year-old son in April 1831 and set sail for Europe on a French ship. Knowing his imperious ways, the liberals did not welcome the news with great enthusiasm. However, their internal divisions and conflicting ambitions dissipated in the face of Dom Miguel's excesses.

By 1832, the liberals had already established themselves in Porto, where Dom Pedro joined them. Like it or not, he pledged to save the people, whom he considered "backward, obscurantist, superstitious, and therefore must be rescued by force." Wherever they went, the liberal forces encountered a disgruntled populace. Often, the fiercest resistance came from the clergy rather than from the poorly led Miguelist army. In a letter to his son, the boy emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro railed against the nation's mentality: "These people are fanatized by the priests, and have not, until now, shown any love for freedom."

He also wrote: "It seems impossible that this could happen in the middle of civilized Europe, and in the 19th century." But he was wrong. The tone of the fratricidal conflict, which would last two years, was in keeping with the barbaric way in which power struggles in Europe have often been resolved to this day.

This civil war, fought both on land and at sea, saw mass civilians conscripted against their will; bloody battles gave rise to cruel retaliations that spared no civilians; convents and monasteries were looted and burned; a cholera epidemic proved for a time far more deadly than swords and cannons.

External military intervention was not always a blessing for the liberals, but it tipped the balance in their favor. In May 1834, they received the surrender of their enemies. Unexpectedly, Dom Pedro showed generosity toward the defeated enemy. By this time, he was ravaged by tuberculosis, and perhaps this led him to see things in a less Manichean way. His brother was allowed to go into exile after signing a document promising to remain forever aloof and not interfere in national affairs. This lightened the burden of Dom Maria da Glória's inheritance when she ascended the throne as Queen.

Practically the author's last words were these:

"Five days later, at two-thirty in the afternoon of September 24th, he will close his eyes. He will die in Queluz, in the palace where he was born, and precisely in the same room where he was born—carefully decorated with scenes from the adventures of Don Quixote. No decoration could be more appropriate."

The Braganças' behavior belied the French reactionary Charles Maurras' assertion that the monarchy was "the least bad system, containing the possibility of something good." The Braganças' vices and excesses facilitated their replacement by bourgeois interests, whose manipulation of democracy in a land with little education quickly led some of them to adopt profoundly irresponsible behavior.

Untangling the tangled threads of a family power struggle, waged across two continents over three decades, is no easy task. José António Saraiva accomplished this task with cool impartiality and tireless research, even while battling serious health problems. The skills acquired over more than forty years of newspaper work helped him unravel the darkest and most protracted drama in Portugal's long history.

His book will appeal to a wide range of readers because it combines an accessible style with profound psychological intelligence. It is a worthy and lasting contribution from an illustrious journalist who never lost sight of his mission—for a loyal and attentive readership—to make sense of events in a confusing and capricious world.

Tom Gallagher is a historian and professor emeritus at the University of Bradford. Specializing in Modern European History, he wrote the biography Salazar – The Dictator Who Refuses to Die (Leya). His latest book, Portugal and the West: From British Ultimatum to Utopian Revolt, 1890-1975 , will be published by Leya early next year.