Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/574

Rh 552 PORTUGAL [HISTORY. of all was to come. During the time of Massena s cam paign in Portugal the Portuguese showed the valour of a truly heroic nation. When Lord Wellington determined to retire to the lines of Torres Vedras, he commanded all the peasants to desert their fields and leave nothing for the French to subsist upon, and they obeyed him with touching fidelity. The Portuguese troops fully proved their value as soldiers when led and trained by such English generals as Pack and Ashworth, Bradford and John Hamil ton, on every battlefield in the Peninsula and the south of France, and especially at Salamanca and the Nivelle. They well deserved the praise bestowed upon them by Wellington and Beresford, and the enthusiastic reception which they met with when they returned home in 1814. John VI. Shortly after the conclusion of the war, in 1816, the mad queen Maria I. died, and the regent succeeded to the throne as King John VI. The English Government earnestly pressed him to return to Lisbon, where dissensions in the regency and the universal discontent urgently summoned him. But the new king was perpetually hampered by his intriguing and ambitious wife, Carlota Joaquina, who, in order to raise a party in her favour, had as early as 1805 promised a constitution to the Portuguese, and in 1812 had plotted to become independent queen of Brazil. The regency had become intensely unpopular, for Sir Charles Stuart and Marshal Beresford ruled despotically ; and the mass of the people, who had been willing to endure the despotism of the English during the terrible war for existence, as well as the army, which had willingly obeyed the English officers on the field of battle, grew weary of foreign rule in time of peace and raised the cry of Portugal for the Portuguese. Directly after the war, in 1817, the first rising took place in Lisbon in the form of a pronun- ciamento of General Gomes Freire de Andrade, who had commanded the Portuguese contingent in the Russian campaign of 1812 ; but it was instantly and cruelly sup pressed by Beresford and the regency, and the general and eleven others were executed. Yet the radical party was by no means conquered, and when Beresford went to Rio de Janeiro in 1820 advantage was taken of his absence by the people of Oporto, headed by certain officers in the garrison, to raise the cry for reform ; the regency, unable to act without Beresford, gave way before a similar rising at Lisbon ; the English officers were everywhere expelled ; a new regency was proclaimed ; Beresford was not allowed to land when he returned from Brazil ; and a constituent assembly was summoned. The new assembly, consisting largely of men of the most radical opinions, at once abol ished the Inquisition and the relics of feudalism, and pro ceeded to draw up an impracticable constitution, which showed that they had studied the glowing speeches of the men of the French Revolution and had not profited by a knowledge of their mistakes. Prussia, Austria, and Russia withdrew their ambassadors, and England insisted on John s returning to his kingdom. He accordingly left the Brazils to the government of his elder son Pedro, and set out for Portugal, where in 1822, at the earnest request of that son, he solemnly swore to obey the new constitution. He was at once met by the opposition of the queen and his younger son Dom Miguel, who refused to recognize the constitution ; in consequence they were expelled from Lisbon. This event, with the invasion of Spain by the French to put down the rebellion of 1823, encouraged Francisco da Silveira, count of Amarante, to raise a pro- nunciamento in Tras-os-Montes ; but the king at Lisbon declared, amid loud applause, that the constitution of 1822 was abrogated and his own absolutism restored, and he appointed the count of Palmella, the head of the English or constitutional party, to be his minister. But the abso lutist party did not aim at a new form of constitutional government ; they were desirous to reinstate the old abso lutism. The queen and Dom Miguel headed a new plot ; the king s friend, the marquis of Louie, was assassinated ; Palmella was imprisoned and the king himself shut up in his palace. The united action of the foreign ministers who had remained in Lisbon freed the king ; the new in surrection was suppressed ; Palmella was again appointed minister ; and the king, with the two chief conspirators, the queen and Dom Miguel, left Portugal once more for the Brazils. In the following year (1826) John VI. died, leaving by his will his daughter, the infanta Isabel Maria, as regent, to the great disappointment of Dom Miguel, who had returned to Portugal with the expectation of re ceiving it as his inheritance, while his brother Dom Pedro ruled in Brazil. The next twenty-five years are the darkest in the whole history of Portugal and the most complicated to analyse, for the establishment of parliamentary government was no easy task ; it is almost impossible to follow the rapid changes which succeeded each other, and quite impossible to understand the varying motives of the different states men and generals. The keynote to the whole series of the disturbances is to be found in the influence of the army. Beresford s creation was a grand fighting machine ; but armies, and more particularly generals, are almost certain to intrigue in times of peace. On ascending the united thrones Dom Pedro IV. proceeded to draw up a charter Tedn containing the bases of a moderate parliamentary govern- IV - ment and sent it over to Portugal by the English minister, Sir Charles Stuart, and then abdicated the crown of Portugal in favour of his daughter, Donna Maria da Gloria, a child only seven years old, on condition that she married his brother Dom Miguel, who was to recognize the new con stitution. The charter was received with joy by the parlia mentary party, and Palmella became prime minister ; but in 1827 the king foolishly appointed Dom Miguel to be regent in Portugal. This ambitious prince was exceedingly popular with the old nobility, the army, and the poor ; and, having declared himself absolute king, he drove the whole constitutional or chartist party Palmella, Saldanha, Villa Flor, Sampaio, and their adherents into exile. They fled to England, where the young queen then was, but, although they found popular opinion strongly in their favour, they found also that the duke of Wellington and his Tory ministry highly approved of Dom Miguel s behaviour, and that they persisted in confounding the moderate and the radical parties, and in believing that Palmella was a democrat. Meanwhile the reign of Dom Miguel had be come a reign of terror, and a new movement was begun by the conjoined chartist and radical parties, who respectively advocated the charter of 1826 and the constitution of 1822, but who sank their differences to oppose Dom Miguel. The island of Terceira (Azores) had never submitted to this prince, and there in 1829 the marquis of Palmella, the count of Villa Flor, and Jose Antonio Guerreiro declared them selves regents for the young queen ; and on llth August 1830 they defeated in Praia Bay the fleet sent against them by Dom Miguel. This victory was the first ray of hope to the chartist party ; all who could get away from Portugal hastened to the Azores ; and in 1831 Dom Pedro, having resigned the imperial crown of Brazil to his infant son, came to London to join his daughter and prepare for a vigorous struggle against his brother. He met with acquiescence, if not encouragement, from the Liberal Gov ernment of Earl Grey, and managed to raise a large loan ; then he betook himself with all the troops he could raise to the Azores, where he appointed the count of Villa Flor general-in-chief and Captain Sartorius of the English navy commander of the fleet. In July 1832 Dom Pedro arrived at Oporto with 7500 men, being enthusiastically welcomed