In these days of fear and uncertainty, two diametrically opposed attitudes formed in Portugal. With privileges and property to safeguard, the nobility quickly adhered to the conquerors. The prince regent had barely left for Brazil when a large delegation of elite Portuguese traveled to Bayonne, France, to pay homage to Napoleon. The group included four marquises, a count, a viscount, the head inquisitor, and the bishop of Coimbra. This same delegation published a manifesto in Lisbon, in which they urged the Portuguese to accept the French dominion “under the magnanimous protection of a world hero, the arbiter of kings and people,” such that the Portuguese nation could “one day form part of the great family of which His Majesty (Napoleon) was the beneficent father.”7 Satisfied with this development, Junot attended the opera the first night after the invasion and promised to respect all of the property and rights of the nobility—with the exception of those who had fled to Brazil of course.
But the common Portuguese people had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the French invasion. Without the option to flee as their prince had or the ability to curry meaningful favor, as the remaining elite did, the Portuguese ignored the proclamations of General Junot and the manifesto of the nobility and resisted the invaders. Trouble began on December 13, two weeks after the royal family’s departure. General Junot had ordered the Portuguese flag lowered from São Jorge Castle, where it dominated the view of the city above the neighborhood of Alfama, and the French colors raised in its stead. That same day, Junot ordered six thousand soldiers to parade through Rossio Square to the beat of a military march. This demonstration of force, unexpected and unnecessary, provoked a popular insurrection, promptly suppressed by the general. In the following days, conflicts spread throughout the nation.8 In the bishopric of Coimbra, the terrorized inhabitants fled to the mountains, where French soldiers followed and surrounded them. Some managed to save their hides in exchange for gold, jewels, or cash. The rest were shot dead on the spot. Nearly three thousand people were killed, and more than one thousand homes were burned.9
Between 1807 and 1814, Portugal lost half a million inhabitants. One sixth of the population perished of hunger, battle, or simply fled the country.10 Never in its history had the country lost so much of its population in such a short period. In May 1808, the Portuguese ambassador in London, Domingos de Sousa Coutinho, wrote to Prince João in Rio de Janeiro that the number of Portuguese refugees in England was enormous. “Every walk of life has come, in numbers I don’t even know how to convey,” recounted the diplomat. “The majority of them are almost naked, in need of everything.”11 The Portuguese court was bankrupt, however, so de Sousa Coutinho had to ask the English government for financial assistance to shelter the refugees. In the meantime, the rich bribed Junot in exchange for permission to embark on ships leaving Lisbon.
“Portugal indeed was in a dismal state,” wrote English historian Sir Charles Oman.
Her ports were blocked and her wines could not be sold to her old customers in England, nor her manufactures to her Brazilian colonists. The working classes in Lisbon were thrown out of employment, and starved, or migrated in bands into the interior. Foy and other good witnesses from the French side speak of the capital as “looking like a desert, with no vehicles, and hardly a foot-passenger in the streets, save 20,000 persons reduced to beggary and trying vainly to live on alms.” 12
Thanks to the fierce resistance of the Portuguese and Spanish, Britain finally penetrated the Continental Blockade and initiated a series of victorious campaigns in the Peninsular War that set in motion the definitive fall of the French emperor at Waterloo. But in their conflict, the two great European powers—Britain and France—treated the Portuguese almost as sideline participants. A demonstration of this treatment occurred soon after the first great English victory over the French in Vimeiro, Portugal, on August 21, 1808. It was such a decisive battle that General Junot preferred surrender, leaving Portugal to British control. This agreement, known as the Convention of Cintra, after the city where it was negotiated, stipulated that the French withdraw immediately from the forts and military outputs and hand over all possessions, supplies, munitions, horses, and other means of transport taken from the Portuguese. In exchange, British forces would protect them on their return to France.
The possessions that the French had plundered weren’t returning to their original owners, the victims of the invasion, but rather going to the new occupiers, the English. These goods included $60,000 worth of the Church’s silver, already melted down and ready to be transported; $40,000 confiscated from the Portuguese treasury; and another $25,000 worth of merchandise stolen from public warehouses. The agreement caused a general revolt in Portugal, prompting the British parliament, who deemed it excessively unjust to the Portuguese, to revoke it in part.13
In the absence of the court, Portugal essentially became a British protectorate. Marshal Beresford, charged with commanding and restructuring the battered Portuguese army, took over the governing of the country de facto between 1809 and 1820—and he did so with an iron fist. In 1817, on discovering a military conspiracy that planned to overthrow him, the marshal reacted with alarming cruelty. The leader of the rebellion, General Gomes Freire de Andrade, and another twelve rebels were hanged. Some of them, including Gomes Freire, were then decapitated, burned, and their ashes thrown into the sea.
Even though it was quelled, the rebellion served as a warning signal for those in the coming years. Gomes Freire had an extensive record of conspiracy attempts. In 1805, he participated in the failed coup d’état led by Princess Carlota against her husband. Now a pariah to the Portuguese army, he turned his allegiance to Bonaparte. In 1808, he actively collaborated with the French invaders. After Napoleon’s defeat, he returned to Portugal imbued with liberal ideas. His shifting allegiances foretold not only the end of the English protectorate but also the end of absolute monarchy. Some of the more extreme revolutionaries even proposed the overthrow of the Bragança dynasty and the replacement of João VI with the duke of Cadaval.14
Signs of discontent appeared everywhere. Assessing the failed movement led by General Gomes Freire, Portuguese governors loyal to João VI alerted the king to the rising climate of dissatisfaction in Lisbon and the risk that he ran by staying in Brazil. “Our lord, abiding by our honor and obligation, we should not hide from Your Majesty the discontent of all of your loyal vassals that Your Majesty has stayed so long in the Kingdom of Brazil, after the extraordinary sacrifices they have carried out to ensure the salvation of the Monarchy,” they wrote. “This discontent has now grown in the city, and will continue to increase in all the lands of the Kingdoms.”15
This dissatisfaction resulted less from the humiliations that the country had suffered in the war than from the growing privileges that João VI guaranteed to the English and Brazilians after having transferred the court to Rio de Janeiro. From the perspective of the Portuguese, the situation was unsustainable. They bore the entire burden of the court transfer, while all the benefits went to Brazil and England. The opening of the Brazilian ports in 1808 and the special commercial treaty with the English in 1810 landed hard blows on Portuguese merchants, who nearly went bankrupt. The extraordinary duties imposed by the court to finance the struggle against Napoleon continued even after the end of the war, overburdening merchants and urban workers, especially in Lisbon and Porto.16
Harmed by British competition, Portugal’s trade with Brazil plummeted. The exports to the colony, totalling 94 million cruzados between 1796 and 1807, fell to just 2 million in the following ten years. In the other direction, exports from Brazil to Portugal reduced by half, from 353 million cruzados to 189 million.17 In 1810, 1,214 Portuguese ships entered the port of Rio de Janeiro. Ten years later, in 1820, no more than 212 entered, and of these only 57 came from Lisbon. The rest came from India, Africa, or other South American ports.18 “The widespread hunger, the lack of basic foodstuffs, and the disorganization of wine and olive oil producti
on amounted to paralysis in the ports, initially closed by Junot and afterwards debilitated and at a standstill due to the treaty of 1810,” observed historian Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias.19
We can find an example of Rio's favor by looking at this new system in the redistribution of gunpowder in the Portuguese Empire. Before the arrival of the court in Brazil, the sale of this product fell under the absolute monopoly of the ancient Royal Gunpowder Factory in Portugal. It supplied Lisbon and all of the colonies with no competitors. After 1808, the situation reversed. The new factory installed by João in Rio de Janeiro received the privilege of selling gunpowder to the most attractive and lucrative parts of the market, including Pernambuco, Bahia, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, the ports off the coast of Africa, and the court itself. In the meantime, the old factory received the scraps of the marginal and secondary markets: the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Brazilian provinces of Maranhão, Pará, and Ceará.20
The Portuguese eagerly consumed the hope that when the war ended the treaty would be revoked and the court would return to Lisbon. Neither eventuality happened. The terms of the treaty continued vigorously for much longer, and João VI simply didn’t wish to return yet. Strictly speaking, after 1810 he had no real reason to stay in Brazil. By then, Britain had expelled the last French troops. From then on, the Peninsular War continued in Spain, where it lasted three more years. If he had wanted, the prince regent could have returned to Lisbon without a hitch just two years after he left. But João learned in those two years that, if the Portuguese Empire had a future, its chances of survival lay in Brazil more than in Portugal. He resisted pressure to return for as long as he could. In 1814, even the English government tried to bring him back, sending to Rio de Janeiro a fleet commanded by Admiral John Beresford, brother of the marshal governing Portugal, with the mission of transporting the royal family. The British government feared that if the court didn’t return, the climate of dissatisfaction in Portugal would grow uncontrollable. History soon confirmed their fears.21 The specter of revolution quashed in 1817 resurged in Porto three years later.
On the morning of August 24, 1820, rebel troops gathered in the Santo Ovidio fields of Porto and declared themselves against the English dominion. In the manifesto they distributed, they lamented the penurious situation in which the country found itself and the absence of the king: “As the height of this misfortune, our beloved Sovereign has abandoned living among us. People of Portugal! Since that fateful day, we can count the disgraces as our orphanage continues. We have lost everything!”22 Three weeks later, on September 15, the revolt reached Lisbon, where various popular protests called for the end of absolute monarchy.23 On the 27th, the Provisional Preparatory Board of the Cortes convened in Alcobaça with the task of drafting a new liberal constitution. The Cortes, a council of state, hadn’t met since 1698. Their very convocation, after such a long absence on the Portuguese political scene, indicated how much the king’s power was under threat. The rebels decided to spare the Bragança dynasty, but the return of the king to Portugal became a point of honor.
On October 10, Marshal Beresford, who had traveled to Rio de Janeiro to seek more resources and power from João VI to counter the rebellion, was blocked from disembarking in Lisbon and stripped of his functions. In his place, a new Board of Governors was formed, composed of representatives of the gentry, nobility, clerics, and military men, under the leadership of Sinédrio, a secret organization created in Porto on January 22, 1818, its ideas and expression fundamental to the success of the Liberal Revolution.24
Gathered in February 1821, the Cortes had an extensive docket of work to accomplish: freedom of the press, elaboration of a new civil and criminal code, ending the Inquisition, reducing the number of religious orders, granting amnesty to political prisoners, and installing a bank in Portugal, among other measures. The principal demand, however, was returning the king to Portugal. In Rio, the return of the monarch also became a campaign point of the so-called Portuguese Party, composed of highly privileged military men, public servants, and merchants interested in reestablishing the ancient colonial system.25
We can see the climate of resentment among the Portuguese in relation to Brazil in the pamphlet signed by Manuel Fernandes Tomas, one of the chief revolutionaries of 1820, in which he attacks the Brazilians with outright prejudice. Tomas defines Brazil as “a veritable giant, without arms or legs, speechless in its burning, unhealthy climate . . . reduced to a few hordes of blackies, caught off the coasts of Africa, the only ones able to withstand the scalding rays of this seething land.” The pamphlet, which provoked indignation in Rio de Janeiro, asked of King João whether he should choose to reside “in the land of monkeys, blacks, and snakes, or in a nation of white people, of civilized people, who love their Sovereign.” The pamphlet ended with “Let us turn our eyes away from that savage and uncouth country, towards this land of civilization, to Portugal!”26
Upon hearing the rebels’ demands, which arrived in Rio de Janeiro on October 17, 1820, with the brig Providence, João VI faced an unsolvable dilemma, which questioned the very future of the Portuguese Empire. If he returned to Portugal, he could lose Brazil, which might follow the path of its neighboring Spanish colonies and declare independence. If, on the other hand, he remained in Rio de Janeiro, he could lose Portugal, where revolutionary winds produced by the resentment accumulated over a decade and a half could topple him from supremacy there. From the start, João VI considered sending his heir, Pedro, to Portugal, while he himself stayed in Brazil. It would satisfy the Cortes’s demands and appease the revolutionaries. But Pedro didn’t want to go for two reasons. First, he felt more at home in Brazil, where he had arrived when he was only ten years old, and where all of his friends and advisors lived. Second, Pedro's wife, Princess Leopoldina, was in the last weeks of her pregnancy and could give birth at sea, a highly risky situation in those days. Worse still, some of the ministers wanted Pedro to travel to Portugal alone, leaving his wife behind in Rio de Janeiro, a suggestion that the princess desperately fought for weeks. After many discussions, João VI surprised his ministers with the following utterance: “Well, then, if my son does not wish to go, I shall be the one.”27
It was an unexpectedly courageous move for a king who had always shown himself to be insecure, fearful, and indecisive.
XXVI
The Return
A funereal entourage crossed the streets of Rio de Janeiro in silence. They were transporting the remains of Queen Maria I, who had died in 1816, and those of the infante D. Pedro Carlos—both nephew and son-in-law to the king and victim of tuberculosis in 1812—into the stifling chamber of a frigate anchored at port. On the night of April 24, 1821, João VI accompanied the procession by torchlight, behind two caskets, the first removed from the Convent of Ajuda, the other from the Convent of San Antonio. It was the final act of the Portuguese court in Brazil.
Two days later, the king departed from Rio de Janeiro against his will and without knowing what awaited him in Portugal. He left behind a vastly changed country that had welcomed him with such happiness thirteen years earlier. Its independence was already inevitable. A few hours before the grim ceremony of the night of April 24, João called his elder son and heir to the crown, then twenty-two years old, for a last recommendation: “Pedro, if Brazil separates, better that it happens under you, who will respect me, than under these adventurers.”1
The tense weeks leading up to the departure churned with distress. The echoes of the Porto revolution had arrived in Brazil in mid-October of the preceding year, and it only took a few weeks for them to ignite the spirit of the Brazilians and Portuguese surrounding the court. On the morning of November 26, a crowd gathered at Rocio Square, today Tiradentes Plaza, demanding the presence of the king in the center of Rio de Janeiro and the signing of the liberal constitution. On hearing the news, a few miles away, João, quite startled, ordered all the windows of São Cristovão Palace shut, just as he did on
stormy nights.
“How should I treat the rebels?” he asked the count of Palmela, minister of foreign affairs and war.
“Unfortunately, sir,” the count responded, “there is nothing to deliberate; it is necessary to meet all of their requests.”2
Shortly thereafter arrived Prince Pedro, who spent the wee hours of the morning conversing with the rebels. He fetched the king as the mob had demanded, but João, recalling recent scenes from the French Revolution, took fright. Thousands had surrounded the Palace of Versailles, captured King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and carried them off to Paris, where, after an escape attempt, they were summarily tried and guillotined. Despite the fear that this episode stirred in him, João entered the carriage that awaited him and proceeded to the city center. On the way, however, he noticed that, instead of shouts of protest and offences, the crowd was cheering him. As much as the French mob had hated Louis XVI, so did the Brazilian people love João VI. After half an hour’s journey, he appeared, tremulous, on the balcony of the Royal Palace. He could barely mumble the words dictated to him, which Pedro had to repeat for him aloud, much to the delight of the crowds. João VI, the last absolute monarch of Portugal and Brazil, had agreed to swear to and sign the very constitution that stripped some of his powers.3
1808: The Flight of the Emperor Page 24