The wave of democratic revolt which had swept over Europe during the
first decade of the twentieth century was continued in 1910 by the
revolution in Portugal. This, as the result of long secret planning,
burst forth suddenly before dawn on the morning of October 4th. Before
nightfall the revolution was accomplished and the young king, Manuel,
was a fugitive from his country.
The change had been long foreseen. The selfishness and blindness of the
Portuguese monarchs and their supporters had been such as to make
rebellion inevitable, and its ultimate success certain. Mr. William
Archer, the noted English journalist, who was sent post-haste to watch
the progress of the revolution, could not reach the scene before the
brief tumult was at an end; but he here gives a picture of the joyous
celebration of freedom that followed, and then traces with power and
historic accuracy the causes and conduct of the dramatic scene which
has added Portugal to the ever-growing list of Republics.
When the poet Wordsworth and his friend Jones landed at Calais in 1790
they found
"France standing on the top of golden years
And human nature seeming born again."
Not once, but fifty times, in Portugal these lines came back to my
mind. The parallel, it may be said, is an ominous one, in view of
subsequent manifestations of the reborn French human nature. But there
is a world of difference between Portugal and France, between the House
of Braganza and the House of Bourbon.
It was nearly one in the morning when my train from Badajoz drew into
the Rocio station at Lisbon; yet I had no sooner passed the barrier
than I heard a band in the great hall of the station strike up an
unfamiliar but not unpleasing air, the rhythm of which plainly
announced it to be a national anthem--a conjecture confirmed by a wild
burst of cheering at the close. The reason of this midnight
demonstration I never ascertained; but, indeed, no one in Lisbon asks
for a reason for striking up "A Portugueza," the new patriotic song.
Before twenty-four hours had passed I was perfectly familiar with its
rather plaintive than martial strains, suited, no doubt, to the
sentimental character of the people. An American friend, who arrived a
day or two after me, made acquaintance with "A Portugueza" even more
immediately than I did. Soon after passing the frontier he fell into
conversation with a Portuguese fellow traveler, who, in the course of
ten minutes or so, asked him whether he would like to hear the new
national anthem, and then and there sang it to him, amid great applause
from the other occupants of the compartment. In the cafés and theaters
of Lisbon "A Portugueza" may break out at any moment, without any
apparent provocation, and you must, of course, stand up and uncover;
but there is in some quarters a movement of protest against these
observances as savoring of monarchical flunkyism. When I left Lisbon at
half-past seven A.M. there was no demonstration such as had greeted my
arrival; but at the first halting-place a man stepped out from a little
crowd on the platform and shouted "Viva Machado dos Santos! Viva a
Republica Portugueza!"--and I found that the compartment adjoining my
own was illumined by the presence of the bright particular star of the
revolt. At the next station--Torres Vedras of historic fame--the
platform was crowded and scores of red and green flags were waving. As
the train steamed in, two bands struck up "A Portugueza," and as one
had about two minutes' start of the other, the effect was more
patriotic than harmonious. The hero had no sooner alighted than he was
lifted shoulder-high by the crowd, and carried in triumph from the
station, amid the blaring of the bands and the crackling of innumerable
little detonators, which here enter freely into the ritual of
rejoicing. Next morning I read in the papers a full account of the
"Apoteose" of Machado dos Santos, which seems to have kept Torres
Vedras busy and happy all day long.
One can not but smile at such simple-minded ebullitions of feeling; yet
I would by no means be understood to laugh at them. On the contrary,
they are so manifestly spontaneous and sincere as to be really
touching. Whatever may be the future of the Portuguese Republic, it has
given the nation some weeks of unalloyed happiness. And amid all the
shouting and waving of flags, all the manifold "homages" to this hero
and to that, there was not the slightest trace of rowdyism or of
"mafficking." I could not think without some humiliation of the
contrast between a Lisbon and a London crowd. It really seemed as
though happiness had ennobled the man in the street. I am assured that
on the day of the public funeral of Dr. Bombarda and Admiral dos Reis,
though the crowd was enormous and the police had retired into private
life, there was not the smallest approach to disorder. The
police--formerly the sworn enemies of the populace--had been reinstated
at the time of my visit, without their swords and pistols; but they
seemed to have little to do. That Lisbon had become a strictly virtuous
city it would be too much to affirm, but I believe that crime actually
diminished after the revolution. It seemed as though the nation had
awakened from a nightmare to a sunrise of health and hope.
And the nightmare took the form of a poor bewildered boy, guilty only
of having been thrust, without a spark of genius, into a situation
which only genius could have saved. In that surface aspect of the case
there is an almost ludicrous disproportion between cause and effect.
But it is not what the young King was that matters--it is what he stood
for. Let us look a little below the surface--even, if we can, into the
soul of the people.
Portugal is a small nation with a great history; and the pride of a
small nation which has anything to be proud of is apt to amount to a
passion. It is all the more sensitive because it can not swell and
harden into arrogance. It is all the more alert because the great
nations, in their arrogance, are apt to ignore it.
What are the main sources of Portugal's pride? They are two: her
national independence and her achievements in discovery and
colonization.
A small country, with no very clear natural frontier, she has
maintained her independence under the very shadow of a far larger and
at one time an enormously preponderant Power. Portugal was Portugal
long before Spain was Spain. It had its Alfred the Great in Alfonso
Henriques (born 1111--a memorable date in two senses), who drove back
the Moors as Alfred drove back the Danes. He founded a dynasty of able
and energetic kings, which, however, degenerated, as dynasties will,
until a vain weakling, Ferdinand the Handsome, did his best to wreck
the fortunes of the country. On his death in 1383, Portugal was within
an ace of falling into the clutches of Castile, but the Cortes
conferred the kingship on a bastard of the royal house, John, Master of
the Knights of Aviz; and he, aided by five hundred English archers,
inflicted a crushing defeat on the Spaniards at Aljubarrota, the
Portuguese Bannockburn. John of Aviz, known as the Great, married
Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt; and from this union
sprang a line of princes and kings under whom Portugal became one of
the leading nations of Europe. Prince Henry the Navigator, son of John
the Great, devoted his life to the furthering of maritime adventure and
discovery. Like England's First Lords of the Admiralty, he was a
navigator who did not navigate; but it was unquestionably owing to the
impulse he gave to Portuguese enterprise that Vasco da Gama discovered
the sea route to India and Pedro Alvarez Cabral secured for his country
the giant colony of Brazil. Angola, Mozambique, Diu, Goa, Macao--these
names mean as much for Portugal as Havana, Cartagena, Mexico, and Lima,
for Spain. The sixteenth century was the "heroic" age of Portuguese
history, and the "heroes"--notably the Viceroys of Portuguese
India--were, in fact, a race of fine soldiers and administrators. No
nation, moreover, possesses more conspicuous and splendid memorials of
its golden age. It was literally "golden," for Emmanuel the Fortunate,
who reaped the harvest sown by Henry the Navigator, was the wealthiest
monarch in Europe, and gave his name to the "Emmanueline" style of
architecture, a florid Gothic which achieves miracles of ostentation
and sometimes of beauty. As the glorious pile of Batalha commemorates
the victory of Aljubarrota, so the splendid church and monastery of
Belem mark the spot where Vasco da Gama spent the night before he
sailed on his epoch-making voyage. But it was not gold that raised the
noblest memorial to Portugal's greatness: it was the genius of Luis de
Camoens. If Spenser, instead of losing himself in mazes of allegoric
romance, had sung of Crécy and Agincourt, of Drake, Frobisher, and
Raleigh, he might have given us a national epic in the same sense in
which the term applies to _The Lusiads_. With such a history, so
written in stone and song, what wonder if pride of race is one of the
mainsprings of Portuguese character!
But the House of Aviz, like the legitimate line of Affonso Henriques,
dwindled into debility. It flickered out in Dom Sebastian, who dragged
his country into a mad invasion of Morocco and vanished from human ken
on the disastrous battlefield of Alcazar-Khebir. Then, for sixty years,
not by conquest, but by intrigue, Portugal passed under the sway of
Spain, and lost to the enemies of Spain--that is to say, to England and
Holland--a large part of her colonial empire. At last, in 1640, a
well-planned and daring revolution expelled the Spanish intruders, and
placed on the throne John, Duke of Braganza. As the house of Aviz was
an illegitimate branch of the stock of Affonso Henriques, so the
Braganzas were an illegitimate branch of the House of Aviz, with none
of the Plantagenet blood in them. Only one prince of the line, Pedro
II., can be said to have attained anything like greatness. Another,
Joseph, had the sense to give a free hand to an able, if despotic,
minister, the Marquis of Pombal. But, on the whole, the history of the
Braganza rule was one of steady decadence, until the second half of the
nineteenth century found the country one of the most backward in
Europe.
Nor was there any comfort to be found in the economic aspect of the
case. A country of glorious fertility and ideal climatic conditions,
inhabited by an industrious peasantry, Portugal was nevertheless so
poor that much of its remaining strength was year by year being drained
away by emigration. The public debt was almost as heavy per head of
population as that of England. Taxation was crushing. The barest
necessaries of life were subject to heavy imposts. Protection
protected, not industries, but monopolies and vested interests.
In short, the material condition of the country was as distressing as
its spiritual state to any one with the smallest sense of enlightened
patriotism.
King Charles I.--name of evil omen!--ascended the throne in 1889. His
situation was not wholly unlike that of the English Charles I.,
inasmuch as--though he had not the insight to perceive it--his lot was
cast in times when Portugal was outgrowing the traditions and methods
of his family. Representative government, as it had shaped itself since
1852, was a fraud and a farce. To every municipality a Government
administrator was attached (at an annual cost to the country of
something like £70,000), whose business it was to "work" the elections
in concert with the local _caciques_ or bosses. Thus, except in the
great towns, the Government candidate was always returned. The efficacy
of the system may be judged from the fact that in a country which was
at heart Republican, as events have amply shown, the Republican party
never had more than fourteen representatives in a chamber of about 150.
For the rest, the Monarchical parties, "Regeneradores" and
"Progresistas," arranged between them a fair partition of the loaves
and fishes. This "rotative" system, as it is called, is in effect that
which prevails, or has prevailed, in Spain; but it was perfected in
Portugal by a device which enabled Ministers, in stepping out of office
under the crown, to step into well-paid posts in financial
institutions, more or less associated with the State. Anything like
real progress was manifestly impossible under so rotten a system; and
with this system the Monarchy was identified.
Then came the scandal of the _adeantamentos_, or illegal advances made
to the King, beyond the sums voted in the civil list. It is only fair
to remember that the king of a poor country is nowadays in a very
uncomfortable position, more especially if the poor country has once
been immensely rich. The expenses of royalty, like those of all other
professions, have enormously increased of late years; and a petty king
who is to rub shoulders with emperors is very much in the position of a
man with £2,000 a year in a club of millionaires. He has always the
resource, no doubt, of declining the society of emperors, and even
fixing his domestic budget more in accord with present exigencies than
with the sumptuous traditions, the palaces and pleasure-houses, of his
millionaire predecessors. It is said of Pedro II. that "he had the
wisdom and self-restraint not to increase the taxes, preferring to
reduce the expenses of his household to the lowest possible amount."
But Dom Carlos was not a man of this kidney. Easy-going and
self-indulgent, he had no notion of appearing _in forma pauperis_ among
the royalties of Europe, or sacrificing his pleasures to the needs of
his country. Even his father, Dom Luis, and his uncle, Dom Pedro, had
not lived within their income; and expenses had gone up since their
times. The king's income, under the civil list, was a "conto of reis" a
day, or something over £80,000 a year. Additional allowances to other
members of the royal family amounted to about half as much again; and
there was, I believe, an allowance for the upkeep of palaces. One would
suppose that a reasonably frugal royal family, with no house-rent to
pay, could subsist in tolerable comfort on some £2,250 a week; but as a
matter of fact, Dom Carlos made large additional drafts on the
treasury, which servile ministries honored without protest. He had
expensive fantasies, which he was not in the habit of stinting. The
total of his "anticipations" I do not know, but it is estimated in
millions of pounds.
These eccentricities, combined with other abuses of finance and
administration, rendered even the _cacique_-chosen Cortes unruly, and
our Charles I. looked about for a Strafford who should apply a
"thorough" remedy to what he called the parliamentary _gâchis_. He
found his man in João Franco. This somewhat enigmatic personage can not
as yet be estimated with any impartiality. No one accuses him of
personal corruption or of sordidly interested motives. His great
private wealth enabled him the other day to find bail, at a moment's
notice, to the amount of £40,000. On the other hand, his enemies
diagnose him after the manner of Lombroso, and find him to be a
degenerate and an epileptic, ungovernably irritable, vain, mendacious,
arrogant, sometimes quite irresponsible for his actions. A really
strong man he can scarcely be; scarcely a man of true political
insight, else he would not have tried to play the despot with no
plausible ideal to allege in defense of his usurpation. Be that as it
may, he agreed with the King that it was impossible to carry on the
work of government with a fractious Cortes in session, and that the
only way to keep things going was to try the experiment of a
dictatorship. Dom Carlos, in his genial fashion, overcame by help of an
anecdote any doubt his minister may have felt. "When the affairs of
Frederick the Great were at a low ebb," said the King, "he one day, on
the eve of a decisive battle, caught a grenadier in the act of making
off from the camp. 'What are you about?' asked Frederick. 'Your
Majesty, I am deserting,' stammered the soldier. 'Wait till to-morrow,'
replied Frederick calmly, 'and if the battle goes against us, we will
desert together.'" Thus lightly was the adventure plotted; and, in
fact, the minister did not desert until the King lay dead upon the
field of battle.
Franco dissolved the Cortes, and on May 10, 1907, published a decree
declaring the "administration to be a dictatorship." The Press was
strictly gagged, and all the traditional weapons of despotism were
polished up. In June, the dictator went to Oporto to defend his policy
at a public banquet, and on his return a popular tumult took place in
the Rocio, the central square of Lisbon, which was repressed with
serious bloodshed. This was made the excuse for still more galling
restrictions on personal and intellectual liberty, until it was hard to
distinguish between "administrative dictatorship" and autocracy. As
regards the _adeantamentos_, Franco's declared policy was to make a
clean slate of the past, and, for the future, to augment the civil
list. In the autumn of that year, a very able Spanish journalist and
deputy, Señor Luis Morote, visited most of the leading men in Portugal,
and found among the Republicans an absolute and serene confidence that
the Monarchy was in its last ditch and that a Republic was inevitable.
Seldom have political prophecies been more completely fulfilled than
those which Morote then recorded in the _Heraldo_ of Madrid. Said
Bernardino Machado:
"The Republic is the fatherland organized for its prosperity.... I
believe in the moral forces of Portugal, which are carrying us directly
toward the new order of things.... We shall triumph because the right
is on our side, and the moral idealism; peacefully if we can, and I
think it pretty sure that we can, since no public force can stop a
nation on the march."
Said Guerra Junqueiro, the leading poet of the day: "Within two years
there will be no Braganzas or there will be no Portugal....The
revolution, when it comes, will be a question of hours, and it will be
almost bloodless."
I could cite many other deliverances to the same effect, but one must
suffice. Theophilo Braga, the "grand old man" of Portugal, said: "To
stimulate the faith, conscience, will, and revolutionary energies of
the country, I have imposed on myself a plan of work, and a mandate not
to die until I see it accomplished."
The Paris _Temps_ of November 14, 1907, published an interview with Dom
Carlos which embittered feeling and alienated many of his supporters.
"Everything is quiet in Lisbon," declared the King, echoing another
historic phase: "Only the politicasters are agitating themselves.... It
was necessary that the _gâchis_--there is no other word for it--should
one day come to an end.... I required an undaunted will which should be
equal to the task of carrying my ideas to a happy conclusion.... I am
entirely satisfied with M. Franco. _Ça marche_. And it will continue;
it must continue for the good of the country.... In no country can you
make a revolution without the army. Well, the Portuguese Army is
faithful to its King, and I shall always have it at my side.... I have
no shadow of doubt of its fidelity." Poor Charles the First!
At the end of January, 1908, a revolutionary plot was discovered, and
was put down with severity. After signing some decrees to that end, at
one of his palaces beyond the Tagus, the King, with his whole family,
returned to Lisbon and the party drove in open carriages from the wharf
toward the Necessidades Palace. In the crowd at the corner of the great
riverside square, the Praça do Comercio, stood two men named Buiça and
Costa, with carbines concealed under their cloaks. They shot dead the
King and the Crown Prince, and slightly wounded Dom Manuel. Both the
assassins were killed on the spot.
It is said that there was no plot, and that these men acted entirely on
their own initiative and responsibility. At any rate, none of the
Republican leaders was in any way implicated in the affair. But on All
Saints' day of 1910, Buiça's grave shared to the full in the rain of
wreaths poured upon the tombs of the martyrs of the new Republic; and
relics of the regicides hold an honored place in the historical museum
which commemorates the revolution.
Franco vanished into space, and Dom Manuel, aged nineteen, ascended the
throne. Had he possessed strong intelligence and character, or had he
fallen into the hands of really able advisers, it is possible that the
revulsion of feeling following on so grim a tragedy might have
indefinitely prolonged the life of the Monarchy. But his mother was a
Bourbon, and what more need be said? The opinion in Lisbon, at any
rate, was that "under Dom Carlos the Jesuits entered the palace by the
back door, under Dom Manuel by the front door." The Republican
agitation in public, the revolutionary organization in secret, soon
recommenced with renewed vigor; and the discovery of new scandals in
connection with the tobacco monopoly and a financial institution, known
as the "Credito Predial," added fuel to the fire of indignation. The
Government, or rather a succession of Governments, were perfectly aware
that the foundations of the Monarchy were undermined; but they seemed
to be paralyzed by a sort of fatalistic despair. They persecuted,
indeed, just enough to make themselves doubly odious; but they always
laid hands on people who, if not quite innocent, were subordinate and
uninfluential. Not one of the real leaders of the revolution was
arrested.
The thoroughness with which the Republican party was organized says
much for the practical ability of its leaders. The moving spirits in
the central committee were Vice-Admiral Candido dos Reis, Affonso Costa
(now Minister of Justice), Joao Chagas, and Dr. Miguel Bombarda. Simoes
Raposo spoke in the name of the Freemasons; the Carbonaria Portugueza,
a powerful secret society, was represented by Machado dos Santos, an
officer in the navy. There was a separate finance committee, and funds
were ample. The arms bought were mostly Browning pistols, which were
smuggled over the Spanish frontier by Republican railway conductors.
Bombs also were prepared in large numbers, not for purposes of
assassination, but for use in open warfare, especially against cavalry.
Meanwhile an untiring secret propaganda was going on in the army, in
the navy, and among the peasantry. Almost every seaman in the navy, and
in many regiments almost all the non-commissioned officers and men,
were revolutionaries; while commissioned officers by the score were won
over. It is marvelous that so wide-spread a propaganda was only vaguely
known to the Government, and did not beget a crowd of informers. One
man, it is true, who showed a disposition to use his secret knowledge
for purposes of blackmail, was found dead in the streets of Cascaes. On
the whole, not only secrecy but discipline was marvelously maintained.
At last the propitious moment arrived. Three ships of war--the _Dom
Carlos_, the _Adamastor_, and the _San Raphael_--were in the Tagus to
do honor to the President-elect of Brazil, who was visiting King
Manuel; but the Government knew that their presence was dangerous, and
would certainly order them off again as soon as possible. The blow must
be struck before that occurred. At a meeting of the committee on
October 2, 1910, it was agreed that the signal should be given in the
early morning of October 4th. All the parts were cast, all the duties
were assigned: who should call this and that barrack to arms, who
should cut this and that railway line, who should take possession of
the central telegraph-office, and so forth. The whole scheme was laid
down in detail in a precious paper, in the keeping of Simôes Raposo.
"You had better give it to me," said Dr. Bombarda, "for I am less
likely than you to be arrested. Even if they should think of searching
at Rilhafolles [the asylum of which he was director], I can easily hide
it in one of the books of my library." His suggestion was accepted, the
paper on which their lives and that of the Republic depended was handed
to him, and the meeting broke up.
On the morning of Monday, October 3d, all was as quiet in Lisbon as
King Carlos himself could have desired. At about eleven o'clock Dr.
Bombarda sat in his office at the asylum, when a former patient, a
young lieutenant who had suffered from the persecution mania, was
announced to see him. Bombarda rose and asked him how he was. Without a
word the visitor produced a Browning pistol and fired point blank at
the physician, putting three bullets in his body. Bombarda had strength
enough to seize his assailant by the wrists and hand him over to the
attendants who rushed in. He then walked down-stairs unaided before he
realized how serious were his wounds. It soon appeared, however, that
he had not many hours to live; and when this became clear to him, he
took a paper from his pocketbook and insisted that it should be burned
before his eyes. What the paper was I need not say. At about six in the
evening he died.
Bombarda was a passionate anticlerical, and his murderer was a
fanatical Catholic. The citizens, with whom he was very popular, jumped
at the conclusion that the priests had inspired the deed. As soon as
his death was announced in the transparency outside the office of _O
Seculo_, there were demonstrations of anger among the crowd and some
conflicts with the police.
Meanwhile the Revolutionary Committee, to the number of fifty or
thereabouts, were sitting in the Rua da Esperança, discussing the
question, "To be or not to be." The military members counseled delay,
for the Government had ordered all officers to be at their quarters in
the various barracks which are scattered over the city. The intention
had been to choose a time when most of the officers were off duty and
the men could mutiny at their ease; but this plan had for the moment
been frustrated. The military view might have carried the day, but for
the determination shown by Candido dos Reis, who pointed out that it
would be madness to give the Government time to order the ships out of
the Tagus. Finally, he turned to the military group, saying, "If you
will not go out, I will go out alone with the sailors. I shall have the
honor of getting myself shot by my comrades of the army." His
insistence carried all before it, and it was decided that the signal
should be given, as previously arranged, at one o'clock in the morning.
That evening, at the Palace of Belem, some two miles down the Tagus
from the Necessidades Palace, Marshal Hermes da Fonseca,
President-elect of Brazil, was entertaining King Manuel at a State
dinner. There was an electrical sense of disquiet in the air. Several
official guests were absent, and every few minutes there came
telephone-calls for this or that minister or general, some of whom
reappeared, while some did not. At last the tension got so much on the
nerves of the young King that he scribbled on his menu-card a request
that the banquet might be shortened; and, in fact, one or two courses
were omitted. Then followed the dreary ritual of toasts; and at last,
at half-past eleven, Dom Manuel parted from his host and set off in his
automobile, escorted by a troop of cavalry. Two bands played the royal
anthem. Had he known, poor youth, that he was never to hear it again,
there might have been a crumb of consolation in the thought.
It would be impossible without a map to make clear the various phases
of the Battle of Lisbon. Nor would there be any great interest in so
doing. There was no particular strategy in the revolutionary plans, and
what strategy there was fell to pieces at an early point. It is not
clear that the signal was ever formally given, but about the appointed
hour mutinies broke out in several barracks. In some cases the Royalist
officers were put under arrest, in one case a colonel and two other
officers were shot. A mixed company of soldiers and civilians, with ten
or twelve guns, marched, as had been arranged, upon the Necessidades
Palace, to demand the abdication of the King; but they were met on the
heights behind the palace by a body of the "guardia municipal," and,
after a sharp skirmish, were forced to retire, leaving three of their
guns disabled behind them. They retreated to the general rallying-point
of the Republican forces, the Rotunda, at the upper end of the
mile-long Avenida da Liberdade. This avenue stands to the Rocio very
much in the relation of Charing Cross Road to Trafalgar Square: there
is a curve at their junction which prevents you from seeing--or
shooting--from the one into the other. On reaching the Rotunda, the
insurgents learned that the Rocio had been occupied by Royalist troops,
from the Citadel of St. George and another barrack, with one or two
machine guns, but no cannon.
There, then, the two forces lay, with a short mile of sloping ground
between them, awaiting the dawn. Under cover of darkness, a body of
mounted gendarmes attempted to charge the insurgent position, but they
were repulsed by bombs.
Meanwhile, what had become of the naval cooperation, on which so much
reliance had been placed? It had failed, through the tragic weakness of
one man. Candido dos Reis is one of the canonized saints of the
Republic; but I think it shows a good deal of generosity in the
Portuguese character that the Devil's Advocate has not made himself
heard in the case. Dos Reis had undertaken the command of the naval
side of the revolt; but oddly enough, he seems to have arranged no
method of conveyance to his post of duty. He found at the wharf a small
steamer, the captain of which agreed to take him off to the ships; but
there was some delay in getting up steam. During this pause, some one
as yet unidentified, but evidently a friend of Dos Reis, rushed down to
the wharf and shouted to him that the revolt was crushed and all was
lost. Dos Reis, who had assumed his naval uniform on board the steamer,
took it off again, and, in civilian attire, went ashore. He proceeded
to his sister's house, where he spent an hour; then he sallied forth
again, and was found next morning in a distant quarter of the city with
a bullet through his brain.
There is no doubt that he committed suicide. The theory of foul play is
quite abandoned. As it was he who had vetoed the proposed postponement
of the rising, one can understand that the sense of responsibility lay
heavy upon him; but that, without inquiry into the alleged disaster,
without the smallest attempt to retrieve it, he should have left his
comrades in the lurch and taken the easiest way of escape, is surely a
proof of almost criminal instability. The Republic lost in him an
ardent patriot, but scarcely a great leader.
The dawn of Tuesday, October 4th, showed the fortunes of the revolt at
rather a low ebb. The land forces were dismayed by the inaction of the
ships; the sailors imagined, from the non-appearance of their leader,
that some disaster must have occurred on land. It was in these hours of
despondency that the true heroes of the revolution showed their mettle.
In the bivouac at the Rotunda, as the morning wore on, the Republican
officers declared that the game was up, and that there was nothing for
it but to disperse and await the consequences. They themselves actually
made off; and it was then that Machado dos Santos came to the front,
taking command of the insurgent force and reviving their drooping
spirits. The position was not really a strong one. For one thing, it is
commanded by the heights of the Misericordia; and there was, in fact,
some long-range firing between the insurgents and the Guardia Municipal
stationed on that eminence. Again, the gentle slope of the Avenida, a
hundred yards wide, is clothed by no fewer than ten rows of low trees,
acacias, and the like, five rows on each side of the comparatively
narrow roadway, which is blocked at the lower end by a massive monument
to the liberators of 1640. Thus the insurgents could not see their
adversaries even when they ventured out of their sheltered position in
the Rocio; and the artillery fire from the Rotunda did much more damage
to the hotels that flanked the narrow neck of the Avenida than to the
Royalist forces. On the other hand, it would have been comparatively
easy for the Royalists, with a little resolution, to have crept up the
Avenida under cover of the trees, and driven the insurgents from their
position. Fortunately for the revolt, there was a total lack of
leadership on the Royalist side, excusable only on the ground that the
officers could not rely on their men.
While things were at a deadlock on the Avenida, critical events were
happening on the Tagus. On all three ships, the officers knew that the
men were only awaiting a signal to mutiny; but the signal did not come.
At this juncture, and while it seemed that the Republican cause was
lost, a piece of heroic bluff on the part of a single officer saved the
situation. Lieutenant Tito de Moraes put off in a small boat from the
naval barracks at Alcantara, rowed to the _San Raphael_, boarded it,
and calmly took possession of it in the name of the Republic! He gave
the officers a written guaranty that they had yielded to superior
force, and then sent them off under arrest to the naval barracks. He
now asked for orders from the Revolutionary Committee; and early in the
afternoon the _San Raphael_ weighed anchor and moved down the river in
the direction of the Necessidades Palace. In doing so she had to pass
the most powerful ship of the squadron, the _Dom Carlos_: would she get
past in safety? Yes; the _Dom Carlos_ made no sign. The officers were
almost all Royalists, but they knew they could do nothing with the
crew. As a matter of fact when the crew ultimately mutinied, the
captain and a lieutenant were severely wounded; but I can find no
evidence for the picturesque legend of a group of officers making a
last heroic stand on the quarter-deck, and ruthlessly mowed down by the
insurgents' fire. It is certain, at any rate, that no lives were lost.
In the Palace, on its bluff above the river, King Manuel was
practically alone. No minister, no general, was at his side. It is
said, on what seems to be good authority, that when he saw the _San
Raphael_ moving down-stream under the Republican colors, he telephoned
to the Prime Minister, Teixeira de Sousa, to ask whether there was not
a British destroyer in the river that could be got to sink the mutinous
vessel. Even if this scheme had been otherwise feasible, it would have
demanded an effort of which the minister was no longer capable. At
about two in the afternoon the _San Raphael_, cruising slowly up and
down, opened fire upon the Palace, and her second shot brought down the
royal standard from its roof. What could the poor boy do? To sit still
and be blown to pieces would have been heroic, but useless. Had he had
the stuff of a soldier in him, he might have made his way to the Rocio
and tried to put some energy into the officers, some spirit into the
troops. But he had no one to encourage and support him. Such counselors
as he had were all for flight. He stepped into his motor-car, set off
for Cintra and Mafra, and is henceforth out of the saga.
The flight of Dom Manuel meant the collapse of his cause. It is true
that the Royalists were reenforced by certain detachments of troops who
came in from the country, and, beaten off by the insurgents at the
Rotunda, made their way to the Rocio by a circuitous route. The Guardia
Municipal, too, were stanch, and showed fight at several points. It was
the total lack of spirited leadership that left the insurgents masters
of the field. Having done its work at the Necessidades, the _San
Raphael_ moved up stream again, and began dropping shells over the
intervening parallelogram of the "Low City" into the crowded Rocio.
They caused little loss of life, for they were skilfully timed to
explode in air; the object being, not to massacre, but to dismay. There
is nothing so trying to soldiers as to remain inactive under fire; and
as there had never been much fight in the garrison of the Rocio, the
little that was left speedily evaporated. At eleven in the morning of
Wednesday, October 5th, the Republic was proclaimed from the balcony of
the Town Hall, and before night fell all was once more quiet in Lisbon.
The first accounts of the fighting which appeared in the European Press
were, as was only natural, greatly exaggerated. A careful enumeration
places the number of the killed at sixty-one and of the wounded at 417.
Some of the latter, indeed, died of their wounds, but the whole
death-roll certainly did not exceed a hundred.
The Portuguese Monarchy was dead; and the causes of death, as disclosed
by the autopsy, were moral bankruptcy and intellectual inanition. It
could not point to a single service that it rendered to the country in
return for the burdens it imposed. Some of its defenders professed to
see in it a safeguard for the colonies, which would somehow fly off
into space in the event of a revolution. As yet there are no signs of
this prophecy coming true; but the prophets may cling, if they please,
to the hope of its fulfilment. For the rest, it was perfectly clear
that the monarchy had done nothing for the material or spiritual
advancement of the country, which remained as poverty-stricken and as
illiterate as it well could be. Dom Carlos had not even the common
prudence to affect, if he did not feel, a sympathy with the nation's
pride in its "heroes." The Monarchy could boast neither of good deeds
nor of good intentions. Its cynicism was not tempered by intelligence.
It drifted toward the abyss without making any reasonable effort to
save itself; for the dictatorship was scarcely an effort of reason.
"The dictatorship," said Bernardino Machado, the present Foreign
Minister, "left us only one liberty--that of hatred." And again, "The
monarchy had not even a party--it had only a _clientèle_." That one
word explains the disappearance of Royalism.
For it has simply disappeared. Even the Royalist Press is almost
extinct. Some papers have ceased to appear, some have become
Republican, the few who stick to their colors do so rather from
clerical than from specifically Royalist conviction. All the leading
papers of the country had long been Republican; and excellent papers
they are. Both in appearance and in matter, _O Mundo_ and _A Lucta_
("The Struggle") would do credit to the journalism of any country. In
size, in excellence of production, and in the well-considered weight of
their articles, they contrast strangely with the flimsy, ill-printed
sheets that content the Spanish public.
The Provisional Government has been sneered at as a clique of
"intellectuals"; but it is scarcely a reproach to the Republic that it
should command the adhesion of the whole intelligence of the country.
Nor is there any sign of lack of practical sense in the admirable
organization which not only insured the success of the revolution (in
spite of certain cross accidents) but secured its absolutely peaceful
acceptance throughout the country. There are no doubt visionary and
fantastic spirits in the Republican ranks, and ridiculous proposals
have already been mooted. For instance, it has been gravely suggested
that all streets bearing the names of saints--and there are hundreds
of them--should be renamed in commemoration of Republican heroes,
dates, exploits, etc. But the common sense of the people and Press is
already on the alert, and such whimsies are being laughed out of court.
Of the Provisional Government I saw only the President and the Foreign
Secretary. The President, an illustrious scholar, historian, and poet,
is a delightful old man of the simplest, most unassuming manners, and
eagerly communicative on the subjects which have been the study of his
life. When I asked him to explain to me the difference of national
character which made the Portuguese attitude toward the Church so
different from the Spanish, he took me right back to the Ligurians--far
out of my ethnological depth--and gave me a most interesting sketch of
the development of the two nations. But when we came to topics of more
immediate importance, he showed, if I may venture to say so, a clear
practical sense, quite remote from visionary idealism. The Foreign
Minister, Dr. Machado, is of more immediately impressive personality.
Younger than the President by at least ten years, yet little short, I
should guess, of sixty, he is extremely neat and dapper in person,
while his very handsome face has a birdlike keenness and alertness of
expression betokening not only great intelligence but high-strung
vitality. He is a copious, eloquent, and witty talker, and his
remarkable charm of manner accounts, in part at any rate, for his
immense popularity. Assuredly no monarchy could have more distinguished
representatives than this Republic.
The desire of the Republic to "play fair" was manifested in another
little trait that interested me a good deal. In the window of every
book-shop in Spain a translation from the Portuguese, entitled _Los
Escandalos de la Corte de Portugal_, is prominently displayed. It is a
ferocious lampoon upon the royal family and upon Franco; but in Lisbon
I looked for it in vain. On inquiry I learned that it had been
prohibited under the Monarchy, as it could not fail to be; but, had
there been any demand for it, no doubt it might have been reprinted
since the revolution. There was apparently no demand. The people to
whom I spoke of it evidently regarded it as "hitting below the belt."
"We do not fight with such weapons," said a leading journalist. In no
one, in fact, did I discover the slightest desire or willingness to
retail personal gossip with respect to the hated Braganzas.