THE death of John IV., and the accession of the boy Affonso VI., proved to be anything but a disaster to the House of Braganza. The queen became sole regent, and this energetic and able woman, who had always been the courageous supporter of her weak husband, determined to prosecute the war against Spain with redoubled vigour. She, too, hankered after a close alliance with France, and distrusted the promises of Mazarin; but she felt that it was no good to wait for allies until Spain was at liberty to attack her, and now ordered the Portuguese army to take the field. Hitherto, since the battle of Montijo, the war had languished, and had been confined to skirmishes on the frontier, but the queen-regent determined to renounce this policy and to invade Spain. Her enterprize was not crowned with success, and the siege of Badajoz which she attempted resulted in failure and defeat. It was obvious that the Portuguese army, though full of gallant and loyal soldiers, was quite undisciplined and unfit for any serious operation of war. This being the case, the queen got her ambassador at Paris, the Count of Soure, to engage Frederick, Count Schomberg, the most famous military adventurer of his time, to enter her service, and to bring with him eighty officers and four hundred non-commissioned officers, to organize and discipline the Portuguese army. Schomberg, whose strange fate it was to serve under nearly every leading monarch in Europe, and to die an English duke at the battle of the Boyne, gladly accepted the queen’s offer. Like the Count of Lippe-Buckeburg and Marshal Beresford in later days, he found that the Portuguese made excellent soldiers, brave and amenable to discipline, and the result of his labours appeared in the great victory won by Dom Antonio Luis de Menezes, Count of Cantanhede, over the Spaniards under Don Luiz de Haro, at Elvas, on January 14, 1659.

CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA. (From an Engraving by Faithorne.)
CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA.
(From an Engraving by Faithorne.)

This victory, though it revived the courage of the Portuguese, who had 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.

PEDRO II. (From a Print in the British Museum.)
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.

OPORTO. PRESENT STATE. (After a Photograph.)
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 Hugli by the orders of Shah Jehan, 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 Gujarat, Kathiawar, 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 Marathas 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.

SPECIMENS OF PORTUGUESE SILVER AND COPPER COINS.
SPECIMENS OF PORTUGUESE SILVER AND COPPER COINS.

Very different from this tale of decay is the history of the Portuguese in Brazil during the same period, and the comparison shows clearly of how much greater value is a colony than a dominion conquered and held by the sword. The loyalty of the Portuguese colonists was shown by their expulsion of the Dutch with hardly any assistance from the home government, and the bonds of kinship enabled the Portuguese to maintain their power in South America without the establishment and maintenance of powerful armies. Indeed, one of the most valuable lessons taught by the history of the daughter country, is that the less interference the mother country makes in the affairs of its colony, the better it will be for both countries. The material prosperity of Brazil in the seventeenth century was due to the fact that during that period the colony was essentially agricultural, and that there was therefore time for a large and industrious population to collect, before gold was discovered in large quantities. The production of tobacco and sugar was the staple employment of the inhabitants, and the rapid development of these resources caused the growth of a large fleet, not only to carry these commodities to Europe, but to import the thousands of negro slaves, who worked in the plantations. And it is here well to remark that at this time the Portuguese settlers made no attempt to enslave the native Brazilians, who were protected by the Jesuits and by edicts of the king, but considered it perfectly just and right to make use of negro slaves. This wise behaviour and the conduct of the Jesuits, who laboured assiduously among the natives, placed them on friendly terms with their conquerors, who soon began to intermarry with them. Owing to this friendly relationship the interior of the continent was gradually opened up, and at last gold was discovered in large quantities. It was fortunate for the Portuguese that it had not been discovered before, for otherwise they would certainly have lost their colony during the “Sixty Years’ Captivity,” but at this time they were too strongly planted to be expelled, and had besides the potent protection of the English navy. The first discovery of gold on a large scale took place in 1699, and the arrival of the first cargo at an opportune juncture gave King Pedro the means he required for setting his army on foot. It must be remembered that at this time there were no Californian or Australian gold fields, and that the discovery of gold in Brazil was of more importance than it would be now. King Pedro prepared to work this source of wealth in a prudent manner; he did not attempt to make the gold fields a royal monopoly, which the independent inhabitants of the captainships would not have allowed, but demanded one-fifth of the total registered yearly export. This left enough profit for the gold searchers, and as the yearly revenue of the crown of Portugal from this source was at least £300,000, it may be imagined that the kings of Portugal were well able to maintain a splendid court at Lisbon in spite of the loss of the Asiatic trade. No story is more interesting than this growth of Brazil into the most valuable possession of Portugal; the land, which was at first inhabited by convicts, surpassed in wealth the dominion won by the noblest sons of the country.

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