by Tom Anderson
The assassination of Azcuénaga in February 1802 has been debated ever since its occurrence, hardly less hotly now than then. Many people believe that Azcuénaga was assassinated on Castelli’s orders in order to force a new presidential election. On the other hand, the official explanation is not implausible, either – that Azcuénaga was shot by a Spanish loyalist from Lima. It could either have been a random attack or a deliberate attempt by the loyalist movements to put the expansionists in power – they, too, wanted war and the chance for the UPSA to collapse that Azcuénaga had warned of.
If this was the case, it worked. The Meridian population was outraged by the audacity of the attack, and a new crackdown was launched in Peru. After a month of official mourning, a new presidential election was called. Castelli stood against Juan Andrés, a reactionary deputy who was also a Jesuit.[257] Andrés received more votes than the political situation a few months ago might have suggested, both due to some public sympathy with Azcuénaga’s views after his assassination and due to the remaining general respect for the Jesuits among the people of the UPSA, especially the lower classes. However, Castelli nonetheless won the contest by a significant margin, and was sworn in by the Archbishop of Córdoba[258] on 16th April 1802. He immediately began placing his own men into positions of power – Pichegru was made Marshal-General of the Fuerzas Armadas – and preparing the country for a war of liberation.
Meanwhile, in New Granada, Ambrosio O’Higgins had been made Viceroy in 1797 after the retirement of Caballero, and had received the title Marquis of Caracas from the Spanish Crown. He died in 1801, but his son Bernardo[259] was a colonel in the army and commanded some of the respect of his father. The younger O’Higgins was as certain as his father that it was only a matter of time before there was open war between the United Provinces and the Spanish Empire. All that was needed was a trigger to ignite the tension.
A trigger that would come, though neither side would realise it for a while, in 1804…
Chapter 46: The Unsinkable Lusitania
“With the example of the Portuguese phoenix before us, it is small wonder that the gentlemen in question hold such theories; but we should be careful not to confuse human activity with natural processes, as the two run on decidedly different physical laws.”
– Frederick Paley, in a lecture attacking Catastrophism at the Royal Society (1825)
*
From: “A History of Portugal” by Giuseppe Scappaticci, Royal Palermo Press (1942, English translation 1951)—
In many ways, the Great Earthquake of 1755 was the central event in Portuguese history. The earthquake came at a decisive moment, disastrously so in many ways. Among speculative romantics [alternate historians] hailing from that country, musing on the possibility of the earthquake never happening is by far the most common scenario for tales, no matter what our determinist geologists might say about the unlikelihood of such a notion. But this is forgiveable. The earthquake was one of the greatest in European history, reaching far beyond Portugal – where it did by far the most damage – to be felt as far away as Finland, to topple buildings in western Ireland. To a Europe that was catching its breath in the dark valley between the War of the Austrian Succession and the War of the Diplomatic Revolution, this natural disaster was unexpected and catastrophic.[260] Many pondered the possibility of it being a punishment from God for human activities, an idea that appeared (in a less coherent fashion) among Enlightenment thinkers’ circles as readily as it did those of priests and peasants.
Regardless of the cause, the earthquake devastated Portugal. King Joseph I and the royal family were fortunate enough to have been taking mass outside Lisbon when the earthquake struck, but witnessed the devastation that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed countless artworks, libraries and examples of fine architecture. The quake did not spare Portugal’s other cities, though Lisbon was perhaps the hardest hit. Portuguese history itself was going up in smoke before the King’s eyes, and his own royal Ribeira Palace joined the list of buildings destroyed. It was a chaotic scene that could have destroyed a nation, particularly considering Spain was becoming more hostile over the unsatisfactory outcome to the Guaraní War in South America. This would eventually lead to the First Platinean War just a few years later, illustrating how desperate Portugal’s situation could have been.
Fortuitously, Joseph I’s Prime Minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo[261] rose to the challenge of dealing with the earthquake: while many panicked or despaired, not least the royal family, he simply spoke his famous quote: “What to do now? Bury the dead and feed the living.” He organised rescue efforts and the construction of tent cities to house refugees, while also sending survey teams around the country to learn what the signs immediately preceding the earthquake had been. Troops from the Portuguese Army were called in to feed the people and keep the peace, publicly hanging looters so the rest got the message quickly. It was essential that such an event never be allowed to happen again: earthquakes might not be preventable as such, but their damage could be limited. Carvalho took a personal hand in the reconstruction of Lisbon, laying out buildings structured to better resist seismic shock, and wider streets than in the old city, the mottos. “One day they will seem small,” he said, presciently given the coming age of Cugnot steam wagons.
Carvalho had long opposed the entrenched powers of the Portuguese nobility, considering them reactionary, out-of-touch and ineffective. His masterful handling of the earthquake boosted his own popularity with the Portuguese people, as well as that of the King, and he used the opportunity to secure his hold on power. In 1758 a plot by the powerful Távora and Aveiro families against the King – possibly concocted by Carvalho himself, though scholars are divided – gave him the excuse to execute most of their members and annex their lands to the Crown. As well as eliminating his enemies, the Portuguese treasury needed every peso it could get. Carvalho’s rebuilding plans were grand and well-reasoned, but expensive.
The Prime Minister effectively ran the country, successfully leading the damaged country through the First Platinean War, until Joseph I’s death in 1769.[262] At this point, the crown passed to his eldest daughter, now Maria I, as queen regnant and co-monarch with her uncle and husband Peter III. One of Maria’s first acts was to remove Carvalho from his post and banish him from the country to Brazil, having singularly opposed his policies throughout his premiership.[263] Of course, Carvalho soon crossed into what was then the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru[264] and eventually joined political forces with his old sparring partner and fellow exile, the former Prime Minister of Spain the Marquis of Ensenada.
Although the two influential political thinkers died before the Second Platinean War, their writings and their making Buenos Aires a hotbed of radical thinking doubtless helped inspire the Platinean Revolution and the creation of the United Provinces of South America. That could be considered revenge on Ensenada’s part over Spain, but for Carvalho it was a last laugh – for no matter how power-seeking he was, he remained a Portuguese patriot who wanted the best for his country. Under Maria and Peter, Portugal’s economy had slumped due to their appointments of incompetent favourites as ministers, and the recovery from the earthquake damage had stalled. But the creation of the UPSA, and Portugal’s role as an undeclared ally during the war, meant that free trade was now opened up between the Portuguese colonies and the UPSA, just as it was between the UPSA and Britain. The Spanish-imposed trade monopoly in the Americas was crumbling rapidly. Brazil was now able to trade openly with the government in Córdoba, and the colony’s economy boomed. In addition, many Portuguese dispossessed by the earthquake damage (many were still living in temporary accommodations fifteen years later) took the opportunity to emigrate to Brazil, seeking their fortunes as news of new opportunities filtered across the Atlantic. Not all of those stories were true, and not all emigrants found restitution – but enough did to encourage yet more.
Portugal was rocked by the news of Peter III’s death in 1786 in a hu
nting “accident”, in which he was shot down in front of the Queen. Accusations of foul play were never proven, although a plot backed by the spiritual successors of Carvalho in the Portuguese court was suspected. In any case, the King’s death before her eyes sent the Queen into a manic depression from which she never recovered.[265] After a few months of deadlocked crisis in the Portuguese court, the Queen was declared unfit to rule and her son, Peter, Prince of Brazil[266] acceeded to the throne at the age of 25 as King Peter IV. The former Queen retired to a convent until her death in 1795.
In the first few months of Peter’s reign, a sour saying began circulating in reactionary circles: “Are we certain that he is his father’s son, and not Carvalho’s?” Peter was a dynamic ruler who brought an air of hands-on determination to the Portuguese monarchy that it had not had for many years. He kept on the (by now aged) Prime Minister Martinho de Melo e Castro, one of his mother’s more reasonable choices for the job. Melo died two years later, but Peter’s freer hand gave him time to implement some of his more ambitious policies, which had been shot down by Queen Maria’s more reactionary court. Melo had grand ideas for Brazil as the jewel of the Portuguese Empire, using the new influx of colonists to develop and further colonise the land, building trade links with the new UPSA and blocking the Spanish out of most of South America. Peter granted him a green light for these policies if Melo would give him his support – by now quite strong in the court – for radical domestic upheavals.
After Melo’s death in 1788, Peter appointed his like-minded son Jaime as Viceroy of Brazil, continuing the development of the colony’s relations with the UPSA.[267] He worked with the Captain-General of the frontier province of Rio Grande do Sul, Jorge de Sepúlveda, who had been exiled from Joseph I’s court for fighting a duel with the British ambassador years before. Sepúlveda knew the situation on the ground better than Melo the younger and was able to help turn the Viceroy’s dreams into reality; in return, Melo backed Sepúlveda’s policy of firmly enforcing the vaguely defined Brazilian/Meridian border and driving out any Indians who straddled the border – as well as increasing direct control over the border regions, this meant that trade between the UPSA and Brazil was more tightly controlled, and customs and taxation raised more funds for the treasury.
Peter then appointed the Duke of Cadaval, Nuno Caetano Álvares Pereira de Melo, as Prime Minister of Portugal. Although a reasonably capable politician and astute at manipulating the court, in terms of ideas and policies Cadaval was a nonentity – which was exactly what Peter wanted. Murmured accusations of Bourbon-style absolutism came from the more reactionary elements of the court (those that had survived Carvalho’s purges) as Peter centralised power and laid forth his policies. Melo and his son could have Brazil: it was the rest of the Portuguese colonial empire Peter was interested in.
Plenty of colonial enthusiasts in Portugal had torn their hair out after the earthquake and the damage it had cost, complaining that Portugal would spend the next hundred years trying to repair the damage, and missing countless opportunities for colonisation and trade to the east and south. The country had already suffered from one hiatus in its colonial programme, during the neglect of the personal union with Spain in the seventeenth century. A second could kill the empire, which was already struggling (along with its traditional rival, the Dutch) to keep up with the emerging powers of Britain and France. In particular, the Portuguese East India Company’s trading operations in India were being threatened by the constantly changing situation there, not least because of the actions of the increasingly bullish British and French East India Companies. Both now seemed more interested in gaining a monopoly through force than in trade itself.
But Peter argued that those pessimists had it the wrong way around. The damage to Lisbon and the other cities was indeed something that could take generations to rebuild and millions to finance. The response to that should not be to neglect the empire and focus on that rebuilding, but to the turn the empire into more of a cash generator and let the reconstruction handle itself. Furthermore, more developed colonies – as with Brazil – would let dispossessed people emigrate as colonists, relieving the housing pressures at home. Many people were sceptical of the young, vigorous king’s forceful dream, and a plot led by the Duchess of Lafões to have Peter assassinated, and return the mad Maria to the throne, was uncovered in 1789. Once more the taunt about Peter being Carvalho’s spiritual son went around, as the conspirators were mostly executed and had their lands seized by the crown. Power continued to centralise, but Peter took a leaf out of Christian VII of Denmark’s book and revived the Portuguese Cortes as a way of playing off the commoners against the nobles and the Church. This move is probably what saved his kingdom from much revolutionary sentiment in the late 1790s, an impressive achievement considering the fact that many people still lacked proper housing and recovery from the earthquake was still slow.
Peter appointed new viceroys and governors to the Portuguese colonies in Africa and India. Perhaps the most prominent of these was João Parreiras da Silva, called ‘the Portugee Pitt’ by English admirers, who was appointed governor of Goa and Viceroy of Portuguese India. Elsewhere too Peter’s investment in the navy, the East India Company, and in colonial development yielded results. The Portuguese were fortunate in that they made considerable financial gains off the back of other nations’ expansion – the British stabilising Guinea and the Dutch in the Cape meant that the Portuguese possessions at Bissau, Angola and Mozambique had new trade opportunities opened up to them. But Parreiras did not sit idle and wait for wealth to come to him – he went out and sought it.
The Portuguese in India had made much capital (political and literal) off their good relations with the Maratha Empire for the last century or so. Goanese soldiers and especially artillery were loaned to Indian princes in their own battles, and the Portuguese East India Company continued to dominate the trade of western India, their only serious rival the Dutch in Calicut. However, matters were changing. The decisive defeat of the Marathas by the Afghan Durranis at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 shattered the Maratha Empire into a looser Confederacy plagued with infighting. Furthermore, British and French incursions into the interior of India – culminating in the joint intervention into Mysore in 1801 – threatened to shake the Portuguese near-monopoly on trade in the region. Both Britain and France had large numbers of both European and sepoy troops on the ground, and the Portuguese could not back up their negotiating position without the same. Peter increased recruitment for the Army and introduced the policy of bringing Brazilian-recruited troops out of the country and deploying them into other theatres – probably inspired by the British use of American troops abroad in the War of the British Succession and thereafter.
Parreiras received the army he needed to enforce his will, and by 1794 the Portuguese were on firmer ground in India. The Marathas were disintegrating, Berar having become a British protectorate while the House of Scindia fought a bitter war for leadership over the remnants with the House of Holkar.[268] At this point Parreiras pulled off a diplomatic coup. The Peshwas, theoretically the leaders of the Empire, had been reduced to ruling the land of Konkan from their capital at Poona, not far from British (and once-Portuguese) Bombay. Furthermore, their power had been further reduced by a series of coups and assassinations from Ragunathrao, brother of the Peshwa killed at Panipat and perpetual regent (and attempted assassin) towards his ruling nephews.
By the 1790s, the young Madhavarao Narayan, son of one of those nephews, was Peshwa, but all his matters of state were handled by his able chief minister, Nana Fadnavis. Respected by the leaders of the European trading companies, Fadnavis was the sole reason for the survival of the Peshwa’s domain in the face of pressure from all sides. His assassination in 1795 – coincidentally on the same day as Louis XV’s execution in Paris, and probably committed by former Ragunathrao supporters – triggered open warfare. Madhavarao struggled to hold on to his throne as a pretender, while Raosaheb (claiming to be th
e son of Ragunathrao) arose in the east. With backing from the Nizam of Haidarabad, he marched on Poona. Madhavarao’s control over his army started to disintegrate without the authority of Fadnavis, and he abandoned the city, fleeding to Raigad near British Bombay. It was obviously his hope to appeal for help from the British, but the British Governor-General of Bombay was not the most capable of men and could not have helped him even if he was. In recent years, as military intervention became more important, Bombay had decidedly slipped down the ranks of importance among British Indian cities, for all the effort that had been put into acquriring it from the Portuguese in the first place a hundred and fifty years earlier. The Governor-General of Calcutta was already de facto ruler of all British India, a fact that would be formalised a few years later, and John Pitt was too busy with the events leading up to the War of the Ferengi Alliance to intervene in this dispute on the other side of the country.
However, Parreiras offered his services instead. The Portuguese continued to be viewed with more suspicion than the British and French in India thanks to their efforts with the Inquisition in earlier years, but the desperate Madhavarao was willing to take anything he could get. Knowing perfectly well what he was letting himself in for, he accepted.
The pretender Raosaheb, having sacked Poona, retreated from the city in the face of the Portuguese and Goanese army. A cautious and realistic general, he decided that the best way to defeat such a force was to starve it out. To that end, he ordered his own army to retreat to the fortress city of Gawhilghoor to the east, while maintaining a scorched-earth policy to try and deny the Portuguese provender. However, in the process he lost a large part of his own army, mercenaries who deserted once the chance of plunder was lost in the face of a siege.
