by Will Durant
The great event in the art history of Pombal’s regime was the statue raised to Joseph I, which still stands in Lisbon’s Black Horse Square. Designed by Joaquim Machado de Castro, cast in bronze by Bartolommeo da Costa, it represented the King riding a steed victoriously over serpents symbolizing the evil forces overcome during his reign. Pombal made the inauguration of the monument (June 6, 1775) a celebration of his triumphant ministry. Troops of soldiery lined the square; the diplomatic corps, the judiciary, the Senate, and other dignitaries were assembled in full costume; then came the court, then the King and the Queen; finally Pombal came forward and unveiled the figures and the massive pedestal, on which a medallion pictured the minister wearing the Cross of Christ. Everyone but the King understood that the real subject of the celebration was Pombal.
A few days after the unveiling he sent to Joseph I a rosy-colored description of the progress made by Portugal since 1750: the spread of education and literacy, the growth of manufactures and trade, the development of literature and art, the general rise in the standard of living. Truth must make many deductions from his account: industry and trade were growing, but very slowly, and were in financial difficulties; the arts were stagnant, and half of Lisbon still lay (1774) in the ruins caused by the earthquake of 1755. The natural piety of the people was restoring ecclesiastical power. Pombal’s lordly manners and dictatorial methods were making new enemies every day. He had enriched himself and his relatives; he had built for himself an extravagantly costly palace. There was hardly a noble family in the kingdom that did not have a beloved member wasting away in jail. Everywhere in Portugal there were secret hopes and prayers for Pombal’s fall.
IV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE PAST
The King was sixty years old in 1775. Illnesses and mistresses had aged him beyond his years, and he spent hours in meditation on sin and death. He wondered had he been right in following the policies of his minister. Had he been just to the Jesuits? Those nobles and priests in prison—he would gladly have pardoned them, now that he sought pardon for himself, but how could he mention such an idea to the unrelenting Pombal, and what could he do without Pombal? On November 12, 1776, he suffered an apoplectic stroke, and the court almost visibly rejoiced in expectation of a new reign and a new ministry. The heir to the throne was his daughter Maria Francisca, who had married his brother Pedro. She was a good woman, a good wife and mother, a kind and charitable soul, but she was also a fervent Catholic, who had so resented Pombal’s anticlericalism that she had left the court to live quietly with Pedro at Queluz, a few miles from the capital. The foreign diplomats notified their governments to expect an early reversal of Portuguese policies.
On November 18 the King received the sacraments; on November 29 Maria became regent. One of her first acts was to end the bishop of Coimbra’s long imprisonment; the seventy-four-year-old prelate was restored to his see amid almost universal rejoicing. Pombal saw his authority waning, and noted with somber premonitions that courtiers lately subservient to him now looked upon him as politically moribund. In a final act of despotism he took a wild revenge upon the village of Trefaria, whose fisherfolk had opposed the forcible impressment of their sons into the army; he ordered a platoon of soldiers to burn the village down; they did it by flinging lighted torches through the windows of the wooden cottages in the dark of night (January 23, 1777).
On February 24 Joseph I died; the regent became Queen Maria I (r. 1777-1816), and her husband became King Pedro III (r. 1777-86). Pedro was a man of weak mind; Maria absorbed herself in piety and charity. Religion, which was half the life of the Portuguese people, rapidly recovered its power. The Inquisition resumed its activity in censorship and the suppression of heresy. Queen Maria sent forty thousand pounds to the papacy to partially reimburse it for expenses incurred in caring for the banished Jesuits. On the day after Joseph’s burial Queen Maria ordered the release of eight hundred prisoners, most of them incarcerated by Pombal for political opposition. Many of them had been in the dungeons for twenty years; when they emerged their eyes could not bear the sun; nearly all were in rags; many looked twice their age. Hundreds of prisoners had died in jail. Of the 124 Jesuits who had been imprisoned eighteen years before, only forty-five still lived.33 Five nobles condemned for alleged complicity in the plot to kill Joseph refused to leave prison until their innocence had been officially declared.
The sight of the released victims of Pombal’s hostility, and the news of the burning of Trefaria, brought his unpopularity to the point where he no longer ventured to show himself in public. On March 1 he sent to Queen Maria a letter resigning all his offices and asking permission to retire to his estate in the town of Pombal. The nobles who surrounded the Queen demanded his imprisonment and punishment; but when she discovered that all the measures which they resented had been signed by the late King, she decided that she could not punish Pombal without laying a public stain upon her father’s memory. She accepted the minister’s resignation, and allowed him to retire to Pombal, but she ordered him to remain there. On March 5 he left Lisbon in a hired chaise, hoping to escape notice; some people recognized him and stoned his carriage, but he escaped. At the town of Oeiras his wife joined him. He was seventy-seven years old.
Now that he was only a private citizen he was assailed from every side by suits for debts he had neglected to pay, for injuries he had inflicted, for properties he had taken without adequate compensation. Bailiffs besieged his doors at Pombal with a succession of writs. “There is not a hornet or a gnat in Portugal,” he wrote, “that does not fly to this remote spot and buzz in my ears.”34 The Queen helped him by granting continuance for life of the salary he had received as minister, and added to it a modest pension. Nevertheless countless enemies urged the Queen to summon him to trial on charges of malfeasance and treason. She compromised by allowing judges to visit him and subject him to examination on the charges. They questioned him for hours at a time through three and a half months, until the old dictator, exhausted, begged for mercy. The Queen delayed action on the report of the examination, hoping that Pombal’s death might relieve her embarrassment; meanwhile she sought to appease his foes by ordering retrial of those who had been convicted of complicity in the attempt upon her father. The new court confirmed the guilt of the Duke of Aveiro and three of his servants, but exonerated all the rest of the accused. The Tavoras were declared innocent, and all their honors and property were remitted to their survivors (April 3, 1781). On August 16 the Queen issued a decree condemning Pombal as an “infamous criminal,” but adding that since he had begged for pardon he was to be left at peace in his exile and in the possession of his property.
Pombal was entering upon his final illness. His body was almost covered with pus-oozing sores, apparently from leprosy.35 Pain kept him from sleeping more than two hours in a day; dysentery weakened him; and his doctors, as if to add to his torments, persuaded him to drink a broth made from the flesh of snakes. He prayed for death, received the sacraments, and ended his sufferings on May 8, 1782. Forty-five years later a party of Jesuits, passing through the town, stopped at his grave and recited a requiem, in triumph and pity, for the repose of his soul.
CHAPTER XI
Spain and the Enlightenment
1700-88
I. MILIEU
AT his death in 1700 Charles II, last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, bequeathed Spain and all its global empire to the age-long enemy of the Hapsburgs—Bourbon France. The grandson of Louis XIV, as Philip V of Spain, fought bravely during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) to maintain that empire unimpaired; nearly all Europe rose in arms to prevent so dangerous an aggrandizement of Bourbon power; in the end Spain had to yield Gibraltar and Minorca to England, Sicily to Savoy, and Naples, Sardinia, and “Belgium” to Austria.
Moreover, the loss of sea power left Spain only a precarious hold on the colonies that nourished her commerce and her wealth. Wheat in Spanish America gave from five to twenty times the yield per acre that came from the soil of Spain. From t
hose sunny lands came mercury, copper, zinc, arsenic, dyes, meat, hides, rubber, cochineal, sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, tea, quinine and a dozen other medicaments. In 1788 Spain exported to her American colonies goods valued at 158,000,000 reales; she imported from them goods valued at 804,000,000 reales; this “unfavorable balance of trade” was wiped out by a stream of American silver and gold. The Philippines sent cargoes of pepper, cotton, indigo, and sugar cane. At the end of the eighteenth century Alexander von Humboldt estimated the population of the Philippines at 1,900,000, of Spanish America at 16,902,000; Spain herself, in 1797, had 10,541,000.1 It is one credit to Bourbon rule that this last figure almost doubled the population of 5,700,000 in 1700.
Geography favored Spain only for maritime commerce. In the north the land was fertile, fed with rains and the melting snows of the Pyrenees; irrigation canals (mostly bequeathed to their conquerors by the Moors) had reclaimed Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia from aridity; the rest of Spain was discouragingly mountainous or dry. The gifts of nature were not developed by economic enterprise; the most venturesome Spaniards went to the colonies; Spain preferred to buy industrial products from abroad with her colonial gold and the yield of her own mines of silver, copper, iron, or lead; her industries, still in the guild or domestic stage, lagged far behind those of the industrious North; and many of her rich mines were operated by foreign management for the profit of German or English investors. The production of wool was monopolized by the Mesta, an association of flock owners privileged by the government, entrenched in tradition, and dominated by a small minority of nobles and monasteries. Competition was stifled, improvements lagged. A meager proletariat festered in the towns, serving as domestics to the great or as journeymen in the guilds. Some Negro or Moorish slaves adorned affluent homes. A small middle class lived in dependence upon the government, the nobility, or the Church.
Of the agricultural land 51.5 per cent was owned in vast tracts by noble families, 16.5 per cent by the Church, 32 per cent by communes (towns) or peasants. The growth of peasant proprietorship was retarded by an old law of entail, which required that an estate should be bequeathed intact to the eldest son, and that no part of it should be mortgaged or sold. Through most of the century, except in the Basque provinces, three quarters of the soil was tilled by tenants paying tribute in rent, fees, service, or kind to aristocratic or ecclesiastical landlords whom they rarely saw. As rents were raised according to the productivity of the farm, the tenants had no incentive to inventiveness or industry.2 The owners defended the practice by alleging that the progressive depreciation of the currency forced them to raise rents to keep pace with rising prices and costs. Meanwhile a sales tax on such necessaries as meat, wine, olive oil, candles, and soap fell heavily upon the poor (who spent most of their income on necessaries), more lightly upon the rich. The result of these procedures, of hereditary privilege, and of the natural inequality of human ability, was a concentration of wealth at the top, and at the bottom a somber poverty that continued from generation to generation, alleviated and abetted by supernatural consolations.
The nobility was jealously divided into grades of dignity. At the top (in 1787) were 119 grandees—grandes de España. We may guess at their wealth from the probably exaggerated report of the contemporary British traveler Joseph Townsend that “three great lords—the dukes of Osuna, Alba, and Medinaceli—cover [own] almost the whole province of Andalusia.”3 Medinaceli received one million reales yearly from his fisheries alone; Osuna had an annual income of 8,400,000 reales; the Count of Aranda had nearly 1,600,000 reales a year.4 Below the grandees were 535 titulos— men who had been given hereditary titles by the king on condition of remitting half their income to the Crown. Below these were the caballeros— chevaliers or knights named by the king to lucrative membership in one of the four military orders of Spain: Santiago, Alcántara, Calatrava, and Montesa. The lowliest of the nobles were the 400,000 hidalgos, who owned modest tracts of land, were exempt from military service and from imprisonment for debt, and had the right to display a coat of arms and be addressed as Don . Some of them were poor, some joined the beggars in the streets. Most of the nobles lived in the cities, and named the municipal officials.
As the divine guardian of the status quo the Spanish Church claimed a comfortable share of the gross national product. A Spanish authority reckoned its annual income, after taxes, at 1,101,753,000 reales, and that of the state at 1,371,000,000.5 A third of its revenues came from land; large sums from tithes and first fruits; petty cash from christenings, marriages, funerals, Masses for the dead, and monastic costumes sold to pious people who thought that if they died in such robes they might slip unquestioned into Paradise. Monastic mendicants brought in an additional 53,000,000 reales. The average priest, of course, was poor, partly because of his number; Spain had 91,258 men in orders, of whom 16,481 were priests and 2,943 were Jesuits.6In 1797 sixty thousand monks and thirty thousand nuns lived in three thousand monasteries or convents. The Archbishop of Seville and his staff of 235 aides enjoyed an annual revenue of six million reales; the Archbishop of Toledo, with six hundred aides, received nine million. Here, as in Italy and Austria, ecclesiastical wealth aroused no protest from the people; the cathedral was their creation, and they loved to see it gorgeously adorned.
Their piety set a standard for Christendom. Nowhere else in the eighteenth century was the Catholic theology so thoroughly believed, or the Catholic ritual so fervently observed. Religious practices rivaled the pursuit of bread, and probably exceeded the pursuit of sex, as part of the substance of life. The people, including the prostitutes, crossed themselves a dozen times a day. The worship of the Virgin far surpassed the adoration of Christ; images of her were everywhere; women lovingly sewed robes for her statues, and crowned her head with fresh flowers; in Spain above all rose the popular demand that her “immaculate conception”—her freedom from the stain of original sin—be made a part of the defined and required faith. The men almost equaled the women in piety. Many men, as well as women, heard Mass daily. In some religious processions (until it was forbidden in 1777) men of the lower classes flogged themselves with knotted cords ending in balls of wax containing broken glass; they professed to be doing this to prove their devotion to God or Mary or a woman; some thought such bloodletting was good for the health7 and kept Eros down.
Religious processions were frequent, dramatic, and colorful; one humorist complained that he could not take a step in Madrid without coming upon such a solemnity; and not to kneel when it passed was to risk arrest or injury. When the people of Saragossa rose in revolt in 1766, sacking and looting, and a religious procession appeared with a bishop holding the Sacrament before him, the rioters bared their heads and knelt in the streets; when the retinue had filed by they resumed the sack of the town.8 In the great Corpus Christi procession all the departments of the government took part, sometimes led by the king. Throughout Holy Week the cities of Spain were draped in black, theaters and cafés were closed, churches were crowded, and supplementary altars were set up in public squares to accommodate the overflow of piety. In Spain Christ was king, Mary was queen, and the sense of divine presence was, in every waking hour, part of the essence of life.
Two religious orders especially prospered in Spain. The Jesuits, through their learning and address, dominated education and became confessors to royalty. The Dominicans controlled the Inquisition, and though this institution had long since passed its heyday it was still strong enough to terrify the people and challenge the state. When some remnants of Judaism appeared under Bourbon laxity the Inquisition snuffed them out with autos-da-fé. In seven years (1720-27) the Inquisitors condemned 868 persons, of whom 820 were accused of secret Judaism; seventy-five were burned, others were sent to the galleys, or merely scourged.9 In 1722 Philip V testified his adoption of Spanish ways by presiding over a sumptuous auto-da-fé in which nine heretics were burned in celebration of the coming of a French princess to Madrid.10 His successor, Ferdinand VI, showed a milder spi
rit; during his reign (1746-59) “only” ten persons—all “relapsed” Jews—were burned alive.11
The Inquisition exercised a strangling censorship over all publication. A Dominican monk reckoned that there was less printing in Spain in the eighteenth century than in the sixteenth.12 Most books were religious, and the people liked them so. The lower classes were illiterate, and felt no need for reading or writing. Schools were in the hands of the clergy, but thousands of parishes had no schools at all. The once great Spanish universities had fallen far behind those of Italy, France, England, or Germany in everything but orthodox theology. Medical schools were poor, ill-staffed, ill-equipped; therapy relied upon bloodletting, purging, relics, and prayer; Spanish physicians were a peril to human life. Science was medieval, history was legend, superstition flourished, portents and miracles abounded. The belief in witchcraft survived to the end of the century, and appeared among the horrors that Goya drew.