He was darling, but also lovingly and tolerantly dismissed for his weakness and cowardice. Nobody paid attention to his opinion, and this led him to hide his feelings, seeking victory by postponing solutions, inciting his advisors against each other, ministers thus opposing their colleagues. He achieved the realization of his intentions through tremendous apathy and procrastination. He triumphed by tiring his adversaries.7
According to Lília Schwarcz: “He was lackluster and had no active voice.”8 According to Oliveira Martins: “He had attacks of vertigo and attacks of melancholy because he suffered from hemorrhoids. His ill health yellowed his flaccid visage, from which hung that famous lifeless pout, peculiar to the Bourbons.”9 According to de Oliveira Lima, he was: “Short, fat . . . [with] the small hands and feet of the aristocracy, overly vulgar thighs and legs much too thick for his body, and above all a round face lacking majesty or any distinction, from which loomed the thick and dangling lower lip of the Habsburgs.”10
He ascended to power accidentally after his mother, Queen Maria I, went mad and his older brother, José, heir presumptive, died of smallpox. In 1792, when it was confirmed that his mother was incurably mad, he assumed power provisionally with the support of the State Assembly, composed of nobles, military leaders, and representatives of the Church. In 1799, he became prince regent, which made him a king without a crown. His ascension took place in 1816, a year after his mother died and eight years after arriving in Rio de Janeiro. With his infamously indecisive and fearful personality, he governed Portugal during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of European monarchies.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the turbulence, João suffered periods of deep depression. In the first major bout, recorded in 1805, he distanced himself completely from public life and from participation in the court. People thought that he had gone mad like his mother. “He had no wish to hunt or to ride horses, and turned to a completely sedentary existence,” writes ngelo Pereira. “His neurological condition facilitated a nervous breakdown, at this time poorly understood, which was confused with an attack of alienation. He had vertigo and outbursts of extreme anxiety.” He moved from the Palace of Queluz, where he lived with his family, to the Palace of Mafra, in the company of friars. Thereafter he isolated himself even further, moving to the royal family’s manor in Vila Viçosa, in the region of Alentejo. Thinking her husband demented, Princess Carlota tried to have him removed from power and assume control of the state herself. Alerted by his doctor, Domingos Vandelli, João returned to Lisbon in time to block the coup. From then on, husband and wife lived separately.11
Responsible for his education since childhood, priests surrounded the prince regent in the Palace of Mafra. He adored sacred music and detested physical activity. “He was brought up far away from active, happy, strong and sanguine men, who loved to live life,” writes Pedro Calmon.12 Profoundly religious and influenced by the Church, the prince attended mass every day. General Junot, commander of the French troops who invaded Portugal, described him to Charles de Talleyrand, French minister of foreign relations, as “a weak man, suspicious of everyone and everything, conscientious of his authority but unable to command respect. He is dominated by priests, and can only act under the coercion of fear.”13
The prince’s love life was mediocre at best. He married Carlota Joaquina under dynastic obligation. They had nine children, with whom he lived very briefly under the same roof. His only true love lingers in the history books as an obscure tragedy. At age twenty-five, living in Portugal and already married, Prince João became enamored of Eugênia José de Menezes, one of his wife’s maids of honor.14 Eugênia was granddaughter of Pedro, fourth marquis of Marialva, and daughter of Rodrigo José Antonio de Menezes, first count of Cavaleiros and Princess Carlota’s head steward. Eugênia was born in 1781 when her father was governor of Minas Gerais. In May 1803, still unmarried, she became pregnant. Suspicions understandably fell on the prince regent, who had had amorous encounters with her through the combined machinations of a court priest and Dr. João Francisco de Oliveira, head physician of the army, himself married with children.
After discovering that Eugênia was pregnant, Oliveira quickly decided to sacrifice his own reputation to save the prince regent: He left his wife and children in Lisbon and fled with Eugênia to Spain, abandoning her in Cádiz. The nuns of the Conceição de Puerto de Santa Maria convent took her under their wing and helped her give birth to her daughter. From there, Eugênia moved to two other religious convents, dying in Portalegre on January 21, 1818, after the prince regent had been crowned king in Rio de Janeiro. During this entire period, João paid all of her expenses. Dr. Oliveira, after leaving Eugênia in Spain, fled to America and then to England where, according to Portuguese historian Alberto Pimentel, he reunited at last with the family he had abandoned in Portugal. In 1820, King João granted Dr. Oliveira the distinction of the Order of Christ and named him the head of Portuguese affairs in London.15
It remains João’s only known extramarital affair. In Brazil, he proved himself an even more solitary monarch than he had been in Portugal. His marriage to Carlota Joaquina, already unraveling since 1805, became an explicit separation in Rio de Janeiro. While D. João went to live in the Quinta de Boa Vista, Carlota preferred to live on an estate near Botafogo. They interacted with each other only according to protocol, in public ceremonies, masses, and concerts in the Royal Chapel.
Few historians risk entering into the details of João’s personal life. Two of them, Tobias Monteiro and Patrick Wilcken, point to evidence that, in the absence of his wife, he maintained homosexual relations—more out of convenience than from conviction—with Francisco Rufino de Sousa Lobato, one of the royal valets. Monteiro suggests that Rufino’s duties included regularly masturbating the king. A friar who is identified only as Father Miguel had observed, against his intentions, intimate scenes between the king and his servant on the Santa Cruz ranch at the Summer Palace. After this episode, the friar was transferred to Angola, but before leaving he left written testimony of what he had witnessed.16 It is possible that much of this resulted from palace intrigues, but Rufino received generous sums of money and promotions on various occasions in gratitude for his services. At the end of the Portuguese court’s interlude in Brazil, Rufino had become: viscount of Vila Nova da Rainha, royal councilor, chamberlain, the king’s personal treasurer, secretary of the Casa do Infantado, deputy secretary of the Mesa de Conscienca e Ordens in Brazil, and governor of Fortaleza de Santa Cruz.17
Francisco Rufino was the third of four brothers of the Sousa Lobato family that accompanied João to Brazil in 1808. The others were Matias Antonio, Joaquim José and Bernardo Antonio. All four served as valets and personal assistants to the prince. Two also took part in the State Assembly, the highest advisory body to the king. Their relationship with the prince regent caused much gossip in Rio de Janeiro. Carlota Joaquina attributed to them “the disgraces of Portugal” during her husband’s government, her secretary José Presas recounts. “The Prince always gives himself over to his favorites and courtiers, and he has done no more than aggrandize them, to the detriment of the kingdom and general discontent, as is the case today with the Lobatos,” she said to him.18
Historian Vieira Fazenda recounts that Matias Antonio, given the title of baron and later viscount of Magé, lived in the City Palace, next to the São José Church, in a room contiguous to João’s. He helped the king undress and accompanied him in the reading of the breviary before going to sleep. He stood by the king’s side during nights of thunder and lightning.19 Prussian traveler Theodor von Leithold, arriving in Brazil in 1819, confirmed João’s fear of thunder. “If the King does not feel well, if he nods off or if there comes to pass a storm, which produces a strong reaction in him, he shuts himself in his chambers and receives no one,” he wrote, explaining the cancelation of a ceremony at the Palace of São Cristovão.20
João referred to himself always in the third p
erson: “Your Majesty wants to eat,” “Your Majesty wants to go for a walk,” “Your Majesty wants to sleep.”21 A methodical man, he obsessively and rigorously repeated his daily routines. “D. João VI was a man of habits,” related the painter Manuel Porto Alegre. “If he slept once in a certain place, he would never want to sleep in another, taking things to the point where he would not allow that the bed remained more or less near the wall—it had to be right up against it. Any small change that was attempted would make him suspicious and irksome with whoever made it.”22
This extreme aversion to change included his own apparel. In contrast to the showy kings of France and Spain who preceded him, João dressed badly. He wore the same clothes every day and refused to change them even when he stained or ripped them. “His usual outfit was a broad, greasy jacket made of old corduroy, threadbare at the elbows,” according to Pedro Calmon. In the pocket of this jacket, the king carried grilled and buttered boneless chickens that he devoured between meals.23 “Horrified of new clothes, the King stuffed himself in the same ones from the evening before, which each day withstood less and less the pressure of his startlingly chubby thighs and buttocks,” adds Tobias Monteiro. “The servants noticed the rips, but nobody dared to tell him. They took advantage of his siestas, and sewed his pants while he slept in them.”24
Three men played a fundamental and abiding role in João’s life. During different points in his life, in addition to helping him overcome fear, timidness, insecurity, and depression, they advised him on the decisions that marked his reign. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, count of Linhares, heir and godson of the marquis of Pombal and leader of the “English faction” in the court, acted as the main player responsible for the transfer of the royal family to Brazil. He “picked up where Pombal left off and promoted the Prime Minister’s plan to counter Portugal’s political weakness within Europe by developing the territories of Portuguese America,” affirms historian Kirsten Schultz.25 His death in 1814 left a lacuna in the government that the prince regent never filled.
The second, Antonio de Araújo e Azevedo, count of Barca, succeeded de Sousa Coutinho in the Ministry of War and Foreign Affairs. De Araújo e Azevedo didn’t have the same stature as a statesman as de Sousa Coutinho but was considered one of the most illustrious intellectuals in Brazil. In 1807 he brought in his luggage the English printing presses that initiated the Brazilian press. He was also responsible for important advances in science and culture, including the arrangement of the French Artistic Mission, which arrived in 1816. He died in 1817, one year before João’s coronation.
The last of the three key men was Thomaz Villa Nova Portugal, successor to these first two in the same ministry. During the final phase of his government in Brazil, João, aging and tired, blindly confided in Villa Nova Portugal. “D. João did not even bother to think,” wrote Tobias Monteiro. “However insignificant the decision to be taken was, it fell to Tomas Antonio to resolve it.”26 The correspondence between the two reveals João’s ongoing timidity and insecurity in exercising power. In notes to the minister on January 24, 1821, about an audience that day, the king wrote: “O.C. is coming today, tell me what I should say to him.” João depended on Villa Nova Portugal even for conversations with his own son. “Until this moment, I have not yet spoken with my son, and I want you to tell me if you are of the same opinion; tell me what I should say to him, and if he should have a reply, how I should respond,” the king wrote on January 31, 1821, with respect to the decision about whether to return to Portugal or remain in Brazil. “I have just received my son’s vote, now tell me your judgment,” he prompted on February 4, dealing with the same subject.27
These three men helped save King João VI’s reign and to a large extent his biography, otherwise doomed to failure on the merits of his own personality.28 Thanks to them, João went down in history as a relatively successful sovereign, especially when compared with his peers of the era—dethroned, exiled, imprisoned, and even executed. “The truth is, in spite of the period of unparalleled upheavals during which he ruled, D. João lived and died as king, while the majority of crowned heads in Europe fell before Napoleon,” Jurandir Malerba observes.29 Pedro Calmon defined him as a sovereign who was “troubled and clever, who reigned until his death, in spite of Spain and France, a devilish wife, Napoleon, wars, revolutions, and conspiracies.”30 De Oliveira Lima writes that, although he was no great sovereign capable of military feats or brash administrative coups, João knew how to combine good will, intelligence, and common sense to efficient result. “He was gentle and discerning, ingratiating and prudent, affable and persistent.”31 In the opinion of de Oliveira Lima, thanks to these attributes, “D. João VI, without a doubt, was and is a popular king in Brazil.”32
XIV
Carlota Joaquina
In the books and films that she has inspired, Princess Carlota Joaquina appears as an unfaithful wife and an ugly, unhappy, Machiavellian woman. While suspicions remain, no hard proof exists that she was ever unfaithful. Ugly, unhappy, and Machiavellian, however, she was indeed. No other individual from that time and place etched a portrait in history with such a caricatured and debated image. Quarrelsome, intelligent, and vindictive, she has merited diametrically opposed depictions through the ages. In Carla Camurati’s film Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil, she is a depraved and promiscuous queen. In the official Portuguese history, she appears as a pious and ultraconservative sovereign.1 Her unbridled ambition and thirst for power remains undeniable, however, and led her to participate in numerous conspiracies and coup attempts, some of them against her own husband. All of them failed.
Queen Carlota Joaquina—ugly, Machiavellian, and unhappy but not demonstrably unfaithful.
A rainha D. Carlota Joaquina, engraving by Jean-Baptiste Debret from Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, Paris, 1834–1839, Lucia M. Loeb/Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin
She had powerful black eyes and a wide, capricious mouth, with thin lips over which presided dark, pronounced whiskers. Straight, virile lines shaped her face. Thin, dark-haired, and short, she had skin mottled by scars from smallpox during her childhood.2 The duchess of Abrantes, wife of General Junot, commander of the invading French troops, described her as “small, hobbling on one leg, cross-eyed, a purplish nose, and all too disagreeable given the legends of love affairs that accompanied her.”3 The hobble came after falling from a horse in childhood.4 “The manly, crude features of her face, the nature of her worries, her very impudence, meant that the only feminine part of Carlota Joaquina was the exterior wrapping,” wrote de Oliveira Lima, who also defined her as “one of the major, if not the greatest encumbrances in D. João VI’s life.”5
Daughter of Carlos IV and sister of Fernando VII, both kings of Spain, she was born in 1775 and died in 1830, at fifty-four years old. According to the history books, she participated in at least five conspiracies. In the first, in 1805, she tried to dethrone her husband and assume control of Portugal. The prince regent discovered the coup in time, punished those involved, and separated from her. Later, in the Americas, Carlota attempted to assume the throne of the Spanish colonies in America after Napoleon deposed her brother. Again João blocked her plans, preventing her from traveling to Buenos Aires, where she had planned to be named princess regent in place of her brother. In 1821, now back in Portugal, she refused to sign the Portuguese Liberal Constitution, opposing the demands of the Cortes and the advice of her husband. As a result, she was confined to the Palace of Ramalhão, far from Lisbon and far from power. In 1824, even while in isolation, she conspired to install her favorite son, Miguel, as king of Portugal in what became known as the April Revolt. Leader of a traditionalist party, Miguel, backed by troops, imprisoned his father and attempted to assume the throne. This coup also went awry, and Miguel ended up in exile like his mother. Some still suspect Carlota Joaquina’s hand in her husband’s death. João VI died in 1826 amid bouts of nausea and vomiting. Rumors at the time mentio
ned poisoning ordered by the queen. After João’s death, she once again tried to install Miguel and displace her daughter Isabel Maria, whom João had appointed as regent. Carlota Joaquina failed yet again.6
The queen contrasted sharply with her husband. Pedro Calmon wrote that “no other princess of the century seemed less appropriate as the wife of calm D. João.”7 Few other couples could so differ in their preferences and behavior. João, obese, lethargic, and good-natured, hated riding horses, and a simple walk of a few feet exhausted him. He yawned during feasts and official receptions. But he loved Gregorian chant and ceremonies in the company of priests and monks.8 Carlota Joaquina, on the other hand, lively, hyperactive, and talkative, rode horses better than most men of her era—even with her hobble. Her jaunts on horseback through the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro became famous. She loved feasts and was handy with cannons.9
She demanded—and even threatened—that people pay homage when she passed through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. According to protocol, men had to remove their hats and kneel in front of the royal family as a sign of respect. This requirement caused a series of diplomatic incidents because a large number of foreign visitors refused to enact the ritual. Thomas Sumpter—American envoy to the royal court, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and Carlota’s neighbor near Botafogo—was out riding when the queen’s retinue approached him galloping. The minister greeted them politely but without removing his hat or kneeling. Carlota, dissatisfied, demanded that her guards force him to dismount and fulfill the protocol. The soldiers surrounded Sumpter and threatened a whipping. Irritated, Sumpter drew a pistol in each hand and warned the soldiers that he might kill them if they raised a whip against him. Afterward, he pressed charges against D. João. In another incident, one of Carlota Joaquina’s stablemen whipped Lord Strangford, the British envoy to the court. So many complaints accrued that João finally decided to exempt all foreigners from gestures of deference to the Portuguese royal family.10
1808: The Flight of the Emperor Page 13