by Will Durant
Pombal struck back by persuading Joseph that the Society of Jesus was secretly encouraging further revolt in Paraguay, and was conspiring not only against the ministry but against the King as well. On September 19, 1757, a decree banished from the court the Jesuit confessors of the royal family. Pombal instructed his cousin, Francisco de Almada e Mendonça, Portuguese envoy to the Vatican, to leave no ducat unturned in promoting and financing the anti-Jesuit party in Rome. In October Almada presented to Benedict XIV a list of charges against the Jesuits: that they had “sacrificed all Christian, religious, natural, and political obligations in a blind wish … to make themselves masters of the government”; and that the Society was actuated by “an insatiable desire to acquire and accumulate foreign riches, and even to usurp the dominion of sovereigns.”14 On April 1, 1758, the Pope ordered Cardinal de Saldanha, patriarch of Lisbon, to investigate these charges. On May 15 Saldanha published a decree declaring that the Portuguese Jesuits carried on commerce “contrary to all laws divine and human,” and he bade them desist. On June 7, probably at Pombal’s urging, he ordered them to abstain from hearing confessions or preaching. In July the superior of the Lisbon Jesuits was banished sixty leagues from the court. Meanwhile (May 3, 1758) Benedict XIV died; his successor, Clement XIII, appointed another commission of inquiry; and this body reported that the Jesuits were innocent of the charges brought against them by Pombal.15
There was some doubt whether Joseph I would support his minister in attacking the Jesuits; but a dramatic turn of events drove the King completely to Pombal’s side. On the night of September 3, 1758, Joseph was returning to his palace near Belém from a secret rendezvous, probably with the young Marchioness of Tavora.16 Shortly before midnight three masked men emerged from the arch of an aqueduct and fired into the coach, without effect. The coachman put his horse to the gallop, but a moment later two shots came from another ambush; one shot wounded the coachman, the other wounded the King in his right shoulder and arm. According to a later court of inquiry a third ambush, by members of the Tavora family, awaited the coach farther on the highway to Belém. But Joseph ordered the coachman to leave the main road and drive to the house of the royal surgeon, who dressed the wounds. The resultant events, which made a noise throughout Europe, might have been very different if the third ambush had succeeded in the attempted assassination.
Pombal acted with subtle deliberation. Rumors of the attack were officially denied; the King’s temporary confinement was ascribed to a fall. For three months the secret agents of the minister gathered evidence. A man was found who testified that Antônio Ferreira had borrowed a musket from him on August 3 and had returned it on September 8. Another man was reported as saying that Ferreira had borrowed a pistol from him on September 3 and had returned it a few days later. Ferreira, said both these witnesses, was in the service of the Duke of Aveiro. Salvador Durão, a servant in Belém, testified that on the night of the attack, while he was keeping an assignation outside the Aveiro home, he had overheard some members of the Aveiro family returning from a nocturnal enterprise.
Pombal prepared his case with caution and audacity. He set aside the procedure required by law, which would have tried the suspected nobles by a court of their peers; such a court would never condemn them. Instead, as the first public revelation of the crime, the King issued on December 9 two decrees: one nominated Dr. Pedro Gonçalves Pereira as judge to preside over a Special Tribunal of High Treason; the other ordered him to discover, arrest, and execute those responsible for the attempt to kill the King. Gonçalves Pereira was empowered to disregard all customary forms of legal process, and the tribunal was told to execute its decrees on the day of their announcement. To these decrees Pombal added a manifesto, posted throughout the city, relating the events of September 3, and offering rewards to any person who would give evidence leading to the arrest of the assassins.17
On December 13 government officers arrested the Duke of Aveiro, his sixteen-year-old son the Marquis of Gouveia, his servitor Antônio Ferreira, the old and the younger Marquis of Tavora, the old Marchioness of Tavora, all servants of these two families, and five other nobles. All Jesuit colleges were on that day surrounded by soldiers; Malagrida and twelve other leading Jesuits were jailed. To accelerate matters, a royal decree of December 20 permitted (against Portuguese custom) the use of torture to elicit confessions. Under torture or threat of it fifty prisoners were examined. Several confessions implicated the Duke of Aveiro; he himself, under torture, admitted his guilt; Antônio Ferreira acknowledged that he had fired at the coach, but swore that he had not known that the prospective victim was the King. Under torture several servants of the Tavoras compromised that entire family; the younger Marquis confessed complicity; the older Marquis, tortured to the point of death, denied his guilt. Pombal himself assisted at the examination of witnesses and prisoners. He had had the mails examined; he claimed to have found in them twenty-four letters by the Duke of Aveiro, by several Tavoras, by Malagrida and other Jesuits, notifying their friends or relatives in Brazil of the abortive attempt, and promising renewed efforts to overturn the government. On January 4, 1759, the King nominated Dr. Eusebio Tavares de Sequeira to defend the accused. Sequeira argued that the confessions, elicited under torture, were worthless as evidence, and that all the accused nobles could prove alibis for the night of the crime. The defense was judged unconvincing; the intercepted letters were held to be genuine and to corroborate the confessions; and on January 12 the court declared all indicted persons guilty.
Nine of them were executed on January 13 in the public square of Belém. The first to die was the old Marchioness of Tavora. On the scaffold the executioner bent to tie her feet; she repelled him, saying, “Do not touch me except to kill me!”18 After being compelled to see the instruments—wheel, hammer, and faggots—by which her husband and her sons were to die, she was beheaded. Her two sons were broken on the wheel and strangled; their corpses lay on the scaffold when the Duke of Aveiro and the old Marquis of Tavora mounted it. They suffered the same shattering blows, and the Duke was allowed to linger in agony until the last of the executions—the burning alive of Antônio Ferreira—was complete. All the corpses were burned, and the ashes were thrown into the Tagus. Portugal still debates whether the nobles, though admittedly hostile to Pombal, had meant to kill the King.
Were the Jesuits involved in the attempt? There was no doubt that Malagrida, in his passionate fulminations, had predicted the fall of Pombal and the early death of the King;19 and no doubt that he and other Jesuits had held conferences with the minister’s titled foes. He had implied his awareness of a plot by writing to a lady of the court a letter begging her to put Joseph on his guard against an imminent danger. Asked, in jail, how he had learned of such a peril, he replied, In the confessional.20 Aside from this (according to an anti-Jesuit historian) “there is no positive evidence to connect the Jesuits with the outrage.”21 Pombal accused them, by their preaching and teaching, of having excited their allies to the point of murder. He persuaded the King that the situation offered the monarchy an opportunity to strengthen itself as against the Church. On January 19 Joseph issued edicts attaching all Jesuit property in the kingdom, and confining all Jesuits to their houses or colleges pending settlement, by the Pope, of the charges against them. Meanwhile Pombal used the government press to print—and his agents to distribute widely, at home and abroad—pamphlets stating the case against the nobles and the Jesuits; this was apparently the first time that a government had made use of the printing press to explain its actions to other nations. These publications may have had some influence in leading to the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and Spain.
In the summer of 1759 Pombal sought from Clement XIII permission to submit the arrested Jesuits to trial before the Tribunal of High Treason; moreover, he proposed that henceforth all ecclesiastics accused of crimes against the state should be tried in secular, not ecclesiastical, courts. A personal letter from Joseph to the Pope announced the King’s r
esolve to expel the Jesuits from Portugal, and expressed the hope that the Pope would approve the measure as warranted by their actions and as necessary for the protection of the monarchy. Clement was shocked by these messages, but he feared that if he directly opposed them Pombal would induce the King to sever all relations between the Portuguese Church and the papacy. He recalled the action of Henry VIII in England, and knew that France too was developing hostility against the Society of Jesus. On August 11 he sent his permission to try the Jesuits before the secular tribunal, but explicitly confined his consent to the present case. To the King he made a personal appeal for mercy to the accused priests; he reminded Joseph of the past achievements of the order, and trusted that all Portuguese Jesuits would not be punished for the mistakes of a few.
The papal appeal failed. On September 3, 1759—the anniversary of the attempted assassination—the King issued an edict giving a long list of alleged offenses by the Jesuits, and decreeing that
these religious, being corrupt and deplorably fallen away from their holy institute [rule], and rendered manifestly incapable, by such abominable and inveterate vices, of returning to its observance, must be properly and effectually banished, … proscribed, and expelled from all his Majesty’s dominions, as notorious rebels, traitors, adversaries, and aggressors of his royal person and realm; … and it is ordered, under the irremissible pain of death, that no person, of whatever state or condition, is to admit them into any of his possessions, or hold any communication with them by word or writing.22
Those Jesuits who had not yet made their solemn profession, and who should petition to be released from their preliminary vows, were exempted from the decree. All Jesuit property was confiscated by the state; the exiles were forbidden to take anything with them but their personal clothing.23 From all sections of Portugal they were led in coaches or on foot to ships that took them to Italy. Similar deportations were carried out from Brazil and other Portuguese possessions. The first shipload of expatriates reached Civitavecchia on October 24, and even Pombal’s representative there was moved to pity by their condition. Some were weak with age, some were near starvation, some had died on the way. Lorenzo Ricci, general of the Society, arranged for the reception of the survivors into Jesuit houses in Italy, and the Dominican friars shared in extending hospitality. On June 17, 1760, the Portuguese government suspended diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
The victory of Pombal seemed complete, but he knew that it was unpopular with the nation. Feeling insecure, he expanded his power to full dictatorship, and began a reign of absolutism and terror that continued till 1777. His spies reported to him every detected expression of opposition to his policies or his methods; soon the jails of Lisbon were crowded with political prisoners. Many nobles and priests were arrested on charges of new plots against the King, or of implication in the old plot. The Junqueira fort, midway between Lisbon and Belém, became the special jail of aristocrats, many of whom were kept there till their death. Other prisons held—some for nineteen years—Jesuits brought from the colonies and charged with resisting the government.
Malagrida languished in prison for thirty-two months before being brought to trial. The old man solaced his confinement by writing The Heroic Life of St. Anne, the Mother of Mary, Dictated to the Reverend Father Malagrida by St. Anne Herself. Pombal had the manuscript seized, and found in it several absurdities that could be labeled heresies; St. Anne, said Malagrida, had been conceived, like Mary, without the stain of original sin, and she had spoken and wept in her mother’s womb.24 Having made his own brother, Paul de Carvalho, head of the Inquisition in Portugal, Pombal had Malagrida summoned before its tribunal, and drew up with his own hand an indictment charging the Jesuit with cupidity, hypocrisy, imposture, and sacrilege, and with having menaced the King with repeated predictions of death. Made half insane by his sufferings, Malagrida, now seventy-two years old, told the Inquisitors that he had spoken with St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Theresa.25 One judge, moved to pity, wished to stop the trial; Pombal had him removed. On January 12, 1761, the Holy Office pronounced Malagrida guilty of heresy, blasphemy, and impiety, and of having deceived the people by pretended divine revelations. He was allowed to live eight months more. On September 20 he was led to a scaffold in the Praça Rossio, was strangled, and was burned at the stake. Louis XV, hearing of the execution, remarked, “It is as if I burned the old lunatic in the Petites [Maisons] asylum, who says that he is God the Father.”26 Voltaire, recording the event, pronounced it “folly and absurdity joined to the most horrible wickedness.”27
The French philosophes, who in 1758 had looked upon Pombal as an “enlightened despot,” were not pleased with his development. They welcomed the overthrow of the Jesuits, but they deprecated the arbitrary methods of the dictator, the violent tone of his pamphlets, and the barbarity of his punishments. They were shocked by the treatment of the Jesuits during their deportation, by the wholesale execution of ancient families, and by the inhumane treatment of Malagrida. We have, however, no record of their protesting the eight-year imprisonment of the bishop of Coimbra for condemning Pombal’s Censorship Board, which had allowed the circulation of such radical works as Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary and Rousseau’s Social Contract.
Pombal himself preached no heresies, and went to Mass regularly. He-aimed not at the destruction of the Church but at its subjection to the King; and when, in 1770, Clement XIV agreed to let the government nominate to bishoprics, he made his peace with the Vatican. Joseph I, as he neared death, rejoiced in the thought that, after all, he might die with full benefit of clergy. The Pope sent a cardinal’s hat to Pombal’s brother Paul, and to Pombal himself a ring bearing the papal portrait, and a miniature framed in diamonds, and the entire cadavers of four saints.
III. POMBAL THE REFORMER
Meanwhile the dictator had left his mark upon the economy, administration, and cultural life of Portugal. With the help of English and German officers he reorganized the army, which turned back a Spanish invasion in the Seven Years’ War. Like Richelieu in seventeenth-century France, he reduced the disruptive power of the aristocracy, and centralized the government in a monarchy that could give the nation political unity, educational development, and some protection from ecclesiastical domination. After the execution of the Tavoras the nobles ceased to plot against the king; after the expulsion of the Jesuits the clergy submitted to the state. During the alienation from the Vatican Pombal appointed the bishops, and his bishops ordained priests without reference to Rome. A royal decree curtailed the acquisition of land by the Church, and restrained Portuguese subjects from burdening their estates with bequests for Masses.28 Many convents were closed, and the rest were forbidden to receive novices under twenty-five years of age. The Inquisition was brought under government control: its tribunal was made a public court, subject to the same rules as the courts of the state; it was shorn of censorship powers; its distinction between Old Christians and New Christians (Christianized Jews or Moors, and their descendants) was abolished, for Pombal took it for granted that most Spaniards and Portuguese had now some Semitic strain in their blood.29 A decree of May 25, 1773, made all Portuguese subjects eligible to civil, military, and ecclesiastical office.30 There was no burning of persons by the Portuguese Inquisition after that of Malagrida in 1761.31
In that year Pombal abolished three quarters of the petty offices that had hampered the administration of justice; the law courts were made more accessible, litigation was made less expensive. In 1761 he reorganized the Treasury, required it to balance its books every week, ordered yearly audits of municipal revenues and expenditures, and made some progress in the most difficult reforms of all—the reduction of personnel and extravagance at the royal court. The eighty cooks that had fed John V and his entourage were weeded out; Joseph I had to content himself with twenty. An edict of May 25, 1773, in effect abolished slavery in Portugal, but allowed it to continue in the colonies.
The reformer’s hand moved everywhere. He ga
ve governmental support to agriculture and fisheries, and introduced the silkworm into the northern provinces. He established potteries, glassworks, cotton mills, woolen factories, and paper plants, to end the dependence of Portugal upon the importation of such products from abroad. He abolished internal tolls in the movement of goods, and established free trade between Portugal and her American colonies. He founded a College of Commerce to train men for business management. He organized and subsidized companies to take over Portuguese trade from foreign merchants and carriers; here he—or the Portuguese—failed, for in 1780 the commerce of Portugal was still mostly in foreign, chiefly in British, hands.
The expulsion of the Jesuits necessitated a thorough reconstruction of education. New elementary and secondary schools, to the number of 837, were scattered over the land. The Jesuit college at Lisbon was transformed into a College of Nobles under secular administration. The curriculum at Coimbra was enlarged with additional courses in science. Pombal persuaded the King to build an opera house and to invite Italian singers to lead the casts. In 1757 he founded the Arcadia de Lisboa for the stimulation of literature.
For an exciting half century (1755-1805) Portuguese literature enjoyed a relative freedom of ideas and forms. Liberating itself from Italian models, it acknowledged the spell of France, and felt some zephyrs of the Enlightenment. Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva won national fame by a satire, O Hissope (1772), describing in eight cantos the quarrel of a bishop with his dean. João Anastasio da Cunha translated Pope and Voltaire, for which he was condemned by the Inquisition (1778) soon after Pombal’s fall. Francisco Manoel do Nascimento, son of a longshoreman, took passionately to books, and became the center of a group that rebelled against the Arcadian Academy as a drag on the development of national poetry. In 1778 (again taking advantage of Pombal’s fall) the Inquisition ordered his arrest as being addicted “to modern philosophers who follow natural reason.” He escaped to France, where he spent nearly all his remaining forty-one years; there he wrote most of his poems, ardent for freedom and democracy, including an ode “To the Liberty and Independence of the United States.” His followers ranked him as second only to Camões in Portuguese poetry.—The most elegant and melodious verse of the age was in a volume of love poems, A Marilia, bequeathed by Tomaz Antônio Gonzaga, who suffered imprisonment (1785-88) for political conspiracy, and died in exile.—José Agostinho de Macedo, an Augustinian friar unfrocked because of his dissipated life, boldly took for the subject of his epic, O Oriente, the same subject as Camões—the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India; he judged his poem superior to the Lusiads and the Iliad, but we are assured that it is a dreary performance. More interesting was a satire in six cantos, Os Burros, in which Macedo pilloried by name men and women of all ranks, living or dead.—His favorite enemy was Manuel Maria Barbosa de Bocage, who was imprisoned by the Inquisition (1797) on a charge of spreading Voltairean ideas in his verse and plays. The execution of Marie Antoinette turned him back to conservatism in religion and politics; he recaptured his youthful piety, and saw in the mosquito a proof of the existence of God.32
