been much depressed by their repulse at Badajoz, in one way injured the
cause of Portugal, for it so incensed Don Luiz de Haro that, during the
famous conferences on the Island of Pheasants with Mazarin, which led to
the signature of the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, he would not listen
to any intercession on behalf of the Portuguese, and insisted on the
insertion of a secret article in the treaty, that France would promise
to abandon them entirely. Neither Mazarin nor Louis XIV. intended to
observe this secret article and to give up the advantage of having such
a useful ally in the peninsula to use against Spain, and they
accordingly looked about for some means to evade it. Mazarin again
sent the trusty Chevalier de Jant to explain to the queen-regent that
the seeming desertion of Portugal was rather nominal than real, and that
the little kingdom would not be left to bear the whole brunt of the war
with Spain. The means was found in 1660 by proposing that Charles II.,
the newly restored King of England, should marry the Donna Catherine de
Braganza. This notion was acceptable to all parties. Mazarin and Louis
XIV. would thus assist Portugal without breaking their promise to Spain;
Charles II. would get some ready money, and would repay the debt of
gratitude he owed for the shelter afforded to Prince Rupert and Prince
Maurice. The Earl of Clarendon saw the advantage of the alliance in
establishing the influence of England in the peninsula and in India; and
the queen-regent was promised the help of a powerful army of English
veterans, trained in the Great Civil War, whom Clarendon was anxious to
get out of the country, and also the aid of England in making peace with
the Dutch. Thus all parties were satisfied, except the King of Spain,
who protested vehemently, and his Catholic Majesty offered to give a
dowry to any Protestant princess whom Charles II. might select, if only
he would give up this Portuguese alliance. These protests were in vain.
The strong wills of Louis XIV., Lord Clarendon, and the queen-regent of
Portugal were all set upon the marriage, and Francisco de Mello, Count
da Ponte, was sent to London, and Sir Richard Fanshaw, the translator of
the “Lusiads,” was sent to Lisbon to arrange the preliminaries. These
were soon settled, and on May 18, 1661, the marriage was announced to
the English Parliament. Catherine de Braganza was to bring as her dowry
the town of Tangier in Morocco, the island of Bombay, and the town of
Galle in Ceylon, as well as £800,000 in money; while on his side Charles
II. promised to force the Dutch to make peace with Portugal, and in
consideration of a further sum of £30,000 a year to send an army of not
less than three thousand veterans to aid in the war with Spain. These
liberal terms were approved in Parliament in spite of the religion of
the Portuguese princess; and in April, 1662, the Earl of Sandwich
arrived in the Tagus with twenty English ships to take the bride to
England. The marriage took place on May 31, 1662, and it was thus, upon
the suggestion of the King of France, that the first step was made
towards the revival of the old alliance between England and Portugal,
which had existed under the kings of the House of Aviz, an alliance
which was, in the indignant language of later French writers, to make
Portugal a province of England.
Before the English soldiers arrived and the final struggle with Spain
commenced, a Court revolution took place in Lisbon. The king, Affonso
VI., was now nearly nineteen, and he had grown up a debauched and
vicious youth. A stroke of paralysis had disordered his intellect, and
his mother, absorbed in the cares of government, had left him too much
to servants. He was entirely under the influence of his valet, a young
man named Conti, and his chief delight was to range the streets of
Lisbon at the head of a troop of mulattoes and negro slaves, and to
play pranks of which the English “Mohocks” of the eighteenth century
would have been ashamed. The queen-regent, in disgust, banished Conti to
Brazil, and two accomplished courtiers, Sebastião Cesar de Menezes,
Count of Atouguia, and Luis de Sousa e Vasconcellos, Count of Castel
Melhor, persuaded the angry young king to declare himself of age on June
21, 1662, and to take the government into his own hands. The queen
retired into a convent, and all power fell into the hands of the two
conspirators.
Fortunately for Portugal the two counts were energetic and able
statesmen, and they pursued in every point the policy of the queen.
Castel Melhor formed the English veterans, who had arrived under the
command of Murrough O’Brien, first Earl of Inchiquin, some French and
German volunteers and mercenaries, and the newly organized Portuguese
levies, into a powerful army, of which Schomberg was the real, though
not the ostensible, commander-in-chief. With this army a series of
victories were won, which caused Affonso VI. to be surnamed Affonso “the
Victorious,” though his own successes, such as they were, were confined
to the streets of Lisbon. On June 8, 1663, the Count of Villa Flor, with
Schomberg by his side, utterly defeated Don John of Austria, an
illegitimate son of Philip IV., at Ameixial, and afterwards retook
Evora; on July 7, 1664, Pedro Jacques de Magalhães defeated the Duke of
Ossuna at Ciudad Rodrigo; on June 17, 1665, the Marquis of Marialva and
Schomberg destroyed a Spanish army under the Marquis of Carracena, at
the battle of Montes Claros; and Christovão de Brito Pereira followed
up this victory with another at Villa Viçosa.
These repeated successes utterly broke the power of Spain in the
peninsula, and peace was only a matter of time, when Castel Melhor
decided to increase both his own power and that of Portugal by marrying
the king, who was a mere tool in his hands, to a French princess. Such
an alliance was highly approved by Louis XIV., who believed it would
bring Portugal under his influence, and the bride selected was Marie
Françoise Louise Elisabeth, Mademoiselle d’Aumâle, daughter of Charles
Amadeus, Duke of Nemours, and Elisabeth de Vendôme, and grand-daughter
of Henry IV. of France. She was brought to Portugal by her relative, the
Cardinal d’Estrées, and the marriage was celebrated at Lisbon with the
greatest pomp in 1666. But instead of increasing his power, the great
minister, Castel Melhor, found that this union brought about his ruin.
The handsome and accomplished young queen could not but loathe her
worthless and degraded husband, and she speedily fell in love with his
younger brother, Dom Pedro, the Duke of Beja. Her passion was returned,
and after fourteen months of an unhappy married life, the queen suddenly
left the palace for a convent, and applied for a divorce on the ground
of non-consummation to the chapter of the cathedral church of Lisbon.
Her action was followed by a Court revolution, and Dom Pedro shut King
Affonso up in a portion of the palace, and assumed the regency on
November 23, 1667. Every one rejoiced at the overthrow of the vicious
king. The measures of Dom Pedro were universally approved by the people
of Lisbon, and on January 1, 1668, he was recognized as regent by the
Cortes. The great minister, Castel Melhor, was not prosecuted, and was
allowed to retire to Paris, and the young prince, who was not yet
twenty, took the government of Portugal into his own hands.
The regent immediately hurried on the negotiations for a peace with
Spain, which had been commenced under the directions of Castel Melhor,
by the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Richard Southwell, the English
ambassadors at Madrid and Lisbon, and on February 13, 1668, the long
war, which had lasted for twenty-seven years--ever since the small band
of conspirators in Lisbon had proclaimed King John IV.--was formally
concluded. By the Treaty of Lisbon, Spain solemnly recognized the
independence of Portugal, and gave its sovereign the title of “Your
Majesty,” which had never been acknowledged even to Emmanuel and John
III., and in return Portugal ceded Ceuta, in Morocco, to the King of
Spain. This diplomatic success was followed on March 24th by the grant
of a divorce to the queen, who, on April 2nd, with the dispensation and
blessing of the Pope, married the regent Dom Pedro. The wretched Affonso
was sent to the Azores, and a new era of peace and prosperity commenced
for Portugal. The regent was fully convinced of the necessity of peace
and economy, in order to restore the prosperity of the kingdom after its
long struggle with Spain. He reduced the army, and dismissed all the
foreign soldiers, and he set to work to make improvements in every
department of administration. The treasury was empty, and the country
was miserably poor. Agriculture had been neglected during the long war;
the Dutch and English had seized upon the Asiatic trade; the Indian
possessions were worth little or nothing; and the only source of
revenue, except taxation, was the wealth of Brazil. Yet Dom Pedro had
the wisdom and self-restraint not to increase the taxes, or press too
heavily upon the sugar and tobacco planters of his great dominion in
South America, and he preferred to reduce the expenses of his household
to the lowest possible amount. In all his endeavours he was assisted by
his wife, and it was no wonder that the Portuguese people loved and
reverenced their prudent rulers.
The only event of importance during the regency was the plot of Dom
Pedro Francisco de Mendonça and Dom Antonio de Cavida to restore Affonso
VI. to the throne, in 1674. It was fortunately discovered in time; the
ringleaders were executed, and Affonso VI. was removed from the Azores,
where he had been trying to make a party, and established at Cintra,
where he died in 1683. The regent then ascended the throne as Pedro II.
and added the title of “king” to the power he had enjoyed for fifteen
years; but in the same year he lost his wife, for whose sake he had
overthrown his brother. His reign was marked by the same characteristics
as his regency; and his strict economy and maintenance of peace gave an
opportunity for the exhausted country to recover. He was an excellent
administrator, not only from inclination, but from a desire to be
independent of the Cortes, which he summoned as seldom as possible,
and never after the arrival of the first consignment of gold from
Brazil. In his foreign policy he made a point of remaining on good terms
with both France and England, and he refused to interfere in the
internal affairs of Spain. His friendship with England was kept up
through his sister, Catherine, who, by his instructions, kept herself
aloof from ministerial quarrels, and remained quietly in her adopted
country after her husband’s death, all through the stormy reign of James
II. and the Revolution of 1688, and who did not return to Portugal until
1692. With France he was more wary, for he feared the ambition of Louis
XIV., and was apprehensive of the danger to Portugal which the accession
of a Bourbon prince to the throne of Spain might cause.
[Illustration: PEDRO II.
(_From a Print in the British Museum._)]
The vacancy, which would be caused by the death of Charles II. of Spain,
and the general scramble which seemed likely to take place for his
dominions, were of more importance to King Pedro II. of Portugal, than
to William III. of England, or Louis XIV. of France. He felt that he was
utterly unable to cope with any of the great powers, and he commenced
saving money for the general war which was certain soon to break out. In
1687, at the request of his minister and most intimate friend, the Duke
of Cadaval, he consented to marry again, in order to have an heir to the
throne. He selected for his second wife Maria Sophia of Neuburg,
daughter of the Elector Palatine, greatly to the chagrin of Louis XIV.,
who hoped he would have chosen a French princess; and by her he had four
sons. When the death of Charles II. became an event daily to be
expected, he proclaimed his intention of remaining neutral, and refused,
in consonance with the traditions of the House of Aviz, to be himself a
candidate for the Spanish throne. Nevertheless, he increased his navy,
placed his army on a war footing and repaired his fortresses, and in
1699, he had the pleasure of receiving the first important consignment
of gold from Brazil, amounting to a ton and a half, which proved to him
that he had a new source of revenue more productive than any taxes he
could impose at home.
At last, on November 1, 1700, Charles II. of Spain died, and Louis XIV.
in accepting the throne for his grandson, made his famous declaration,
“There are now no longer any Pyrenees.” King Pedro carried his
complaisance so far as to acknowledge Philip V., as king of Spain, and
he even sheltered a French fleet under the Count de Chastenau in the
Tagus, against the assaults of the English admiral, Sir George Rooke.
But he soon saw that, as he feared, it was impossible for him to remain
neutral, and the insolence of Cardinal Porto Carrero, who spoke of him
to King Philip as “the rebel duke of Braganza,” and the information that
there was a secret treaty, which promised French help for the
subjugation of Portugal, made Pedro II. decide to enter into a yet
closer alliance with England. This was exactly what the great Whig
ministry wanted, and, in 1703, the Right Honourable John Methuen was
sent to Lisbon with full powers to negotiate a political and commercial
treaty with Portugal.
On December 27, 1703, the famous Methuen treaty was signed, by which
Portuguese wines might be imported into England at a lower duty than
those from France and Germany, in return for a similar concession to
English manufactured goods. The immediate result of this treaty was that
King Pedro acknowledged the Archduke Charles, the English candidate, as
King of Spain, and that he gave the English a base of operations in the
peninsula. The ulterior result was that Englishmen in the eighteenth
century drank port wine instead of claret and hock, while the Portuguese
imported everything they wanted beyond the bare necessaries of life from
England. This was an advantage to both nations, for Portugal is
eminently an agricultural country with neither the teeming population
nor the materials necessary for manufactures, while England obtained a
friendly province from which to import the wine and produce of a
southern soil, and a market for the sale of the products of her
manufactories. The close connection thus formed went deeper than mere
commerce; it established a friendly relationship between the two
peoples, which was of infinite advantage to the smaller nation. At
Lisbon a regular English “factory” was established, and at Oporto a
large colony of English wine merchants and shippers carried on business
operations, which doubled the prosperity of the beautiful city on the
Douro. The steady influx of English capital increased the wealth of
Portugal, and the vineyards of the Entre-Minho-e-Douro became proverbial
for their prosperous and industrious peasantry; while, on the other
hand, the importation of English goods gave means of comfort and
luxury to the Portuguese people which distinguished them in the eyes
of all travellers of the last century from the Spaniards and Italians.
To this day the beautiful porcelain from the famous English works at
Worcester and Derby, Chelsea and Bow, is to be found in Portuguese
cottages; and the English people have not lost their taste for port and
St. Michael’s oranges.
[Illustration: OPORTO. PRESENT STATE.
(_After a Photograph._)]
From a political point of view, the Methuen treaty assured the very
existence of Portugal; in all times of danger it could now count upon
the support of the great power whose interest it was to have an ally
from whose country it could act against Spain. On March 7, 1704, the
Archduke Charles arrived at Lisbon with a powerful English fleet under
Sir George Rooke, conveying ten thousand English troops under the
command of Henri de Ruvigny, Lord Galway. On April 30, Philip V.
declared war against Portugal, and the English advanced with a
subsidiary Portuguese army under the Count das Galveras and Diniz de
Mello e Castro. The campaign was successful; the allies took Salvaterra
and Valença, and Sir George Rooke surprised the important fortress of
Gibraltar. In the following year but little was done on the Portuguese
frontier, because the Archduke Charles had sailed round to Barcelona,
and King Pedro, who felt himself to be dying, gave up all active
interest in affairs, and made over the regency to his sister Catherine,
Queen-dowager of England. Had he been conscious he might have heard of
the great successes and reverses of the campaign of 1706. Lord Galway
and Dom João de Sousa, Marquis das Minas, advanced into Spain, and after
taking Alcantara, Coria, Truxillo, Placencia, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Avila
in rapid succession, occupied Madrid on July 2, 1706. But they did not
remain there long; the Spaniards rose in arms for Philip V., and in
August, 1706, the allied army fell back as quickly as it had advanced.
Dom Pedro, however, remained unconscious of these stirring events; he
gradually sank, and died at Alcantara on December 9, 1706, leaving a
reputation of having been one of the best of the kings of Portugal. The
great interest of his reign is to be found in the gradual formation of
the English alliance, which is the clue to the Portuguese history of the
next century. It was commenced by the marriage of Catherine de Braganza
to Charles II., strengthened by the action of Lord Sandwich and Sir
Richard Southwell in making peace with Spain, and finally cemented by
the Methuen treaty, and it is curious to note that the first link in
this chain was forged by Louis XIV. and Mazarin in recommending the
marriage of Charles II.
It is important to observe the position of Portugal in Asia and South
America during the half-century which succeeded the “Sixty Years’
Captivity,” and to see how the despised discovery of Pedro Alvares
Cabral was to more than take the place of the vaunted Asiatic connection
commenced by the voyage of Vasco da Gama. The heavy blows struck by the
Dutch and English against the Portuguese monopoly of the Eastern trade
before the successful revolution in 1640, have already been noticed, and
the ruin of the Portuguese in Asia was consummated by the Dutch during
the long naval war which succeeded the attack upon their settlements in
Brazil. The China trade had not attained very important dimensions, so
the Dutch left the Portuguese undisturbed at Macao, but they destroyed
their settlements in the island of Formosa, and the English absorbed
what trade there was by their factory at Canton. It was the spice trade
and the command of the Spice Islands, which the Dutch chiefly coveted,
and of which they obtained a monopoly, which they practically retain to
this day. After the foundation of Batavia, all the efforts of the Dutch
were directed against Malacca, which, though in a decayed state, was yet
mistress of no inconsiderable trade; twice they stirred up the Achinese
to attempt the conquest of Alboquerque’s famous settlement, but the
Portuguese beat off the natives, and it was not until 1640 that the
Dutch destroyed the rival of Batavia. The Portuguese made no further
effort to share the spice trade, and after the massacre of the English
at Amboyna in 1624, the more dangerous rivalry of the merchants of that
nation was also withdrawn. In India, the Dutch made a point of securing
the pepper trade only, and left the English to absorb that of the
products of Northern India, of the muslins of Dacca and the brocades of
Ahmadabad and Surat. The Portuguese repulsed the Dutch from Goa in 1639,
but these determined traders were not to be beaten; in 1662, in spite of
the peace which had been concluded by the intervention of England, they
took Cochin, the principal Portuguese station in Southern India, and by
1664 were masters of all the chief pepper ports on the Malabar coast.
They were equally successful in Ceylon, where they captured Jafnapatam,
the last important Portuguese port, in 1658; and in 1669, they expelled
the Portuguese from the Coromandel coast likewise, and took S. Thomé and
Macassar. In Northern India the English were the most formidable rivals
of the Portuguese. After the capture of Hūglī by the orders of
Shah Jehān, the Portuguese dropped all communication with Bengal, and
the trade of that important province fell into the hands of the English.
On the other side of India, the English were equally successful. Their
victory off Surat had broken the prestige of Portugal, and the trade
with Gujarāt, Kathiawār, and Sind was chiefly in their possession.
So weak indeed had the Portuguese become, that Diu, the city
immortalized by the brave deeds of Antonio de Silveira and João de
Castro, was plundered by a band of Arabs in 1670; and Goa itself,
“Golden Goa,” was only saved from the Marāthas of Sambajì, the son of
Sivajì, by the timely aid of a Mogul army. On the other hand, the
Portuguese Jesuits won a reputation almost as great as that of the
Portuguese heroes; though the Inquisition still continued its horrid
work at Goa, there were nobler missionaries than the inquisitors, and
the name of João de Brito, who preached with unexampled success until
his cruel martyrdom in Madura in 1693, deserves to be ranked with that
of St. Francis Xavier himself. In Africa, the chief Portuguese ports
were re-conquered by Salvador Correa de Sá e Benevides in 1648, but they
were only of little value, since they had been maintained chiefly as
stations on the road to India, and not for purposes of African trade.
The Dutch made their resting-place at the Cape of Good Hope, which is
the reason why Mozambique was left to the Portuguese; and they also
took possession of the rich island which had been first sighted by
Lourenço de Almeida, to which they gave the name of Mauritius, after
Prince Maurice of Nassau. On the western coast the Portuguese retained
Angola, the Cape Verde Islands, and their other possessions; but they
lost St. Helena to the Dutch, who held it until it was captured by the
English captain, Anthony Munden, in 1673, when it was made into a
station of the English East India Company. With their possessions in
Morocco, the Portuguese parted with the more willingness, since they
were only a source of expense; and the cession of Ceuta to the Spaniards
and of Tangier to the English was generally approved. Of Bombay the
other territorial cession made to England on the marriage of Catherine
de Braganza, little need be said, for though destined to become the
capital of western India, it proved at first of so little value, that in
1668 Charles II. granted it to the East India Company for ten pounds a
year.
[Illustration: SPECIMENS OF PORTUGUESE SILVER AND COPPER COINS.
SILVER COINS.
(1) A vintêm, 20 reis = about a penny.
(2) Half a tostaõ, 50 reis = nearly threepence.
(3) Three vintens = about threepence halfpenny.
(4) Tostaō, 100 reis = rather more than sixpence.
(5) Six vintens = about sevenpence.
(6) Twelve vintens, 240 reis = about one shilling and twopence.
(7) Crusado novo, 24 vintens = about two shillings and fourpence.
COPPER COINS.
(1) One-and-a-half-reis piece (Peter II., 1700) = less than half a farthing.
(2) Three-reis piece (Maria and Peter III., 1797) = less than a farthing.
(3) Five-reis piece (Maria Regina, 1799) = about a farthing.
(4) Ten-reis piece (Maria I., 1799) = a little more than a halfpenny.
]