this Penelopean disorganization of his army,-that back-bone of a demoralized state, affords the only satisfactory clue to the labyrinth of revolutions under which Portugal has since groaned. Affairs could not long go on thus. The neighbouring despotisms were fast falling. Lord Beresford saw the danger when too late. He sailed for Rio, to obtain that reform which had been too long delayed; it was now approaching as an armed man.' The train was laid, a spark ignited it. On the 23d August, 1820, a colonel and a few officers raised the constitutional cry at Oporto, which was instantly seconded by the whole city, and a junta forthwith appointed. The Regency at Lisbon made some faint show of resistance; and, aware of the unpopularity which Lord Beresford had brought upon himself and the English officers, removed them from the service. But this was of no avail; the dispositions of the army were as much changed as its discipline; and on the 18th September, within three short weeks of the first breaking out of the insurrection at Oporto, a subaltern marched his detachment into the principal square of Lisbon, and quietly proclaimed the constitution. The cry was taken up with enthusiasm. The new form of government was carried by acclamation; and in a few hours the Regency had ceased to exist. No real resistance was attempted, nor was there a life lost. The Cortes assembled, and, having promulgated an impracticable constitution, pursued a course of folly and misgovernment that quickly alienated all parties. The revolution meanwhile crossed the Atlantic. The overthrow of his authority in Europe, conveyed no instruction to the ears of John VI. The Count Palmella in vain exhorted him to meet the coming demands for reform with concession and temper. The wretched old man resolved to be firm; and accordingly a second revolution swept him across the seas from Rio, a dependent upon the uninstructed insolence of the Cortes. On his arrival at Lisbon, he affected or felt a new found zeal for liberality, and gave way to all the absurd excesses of the Cortes, who treated him with a want of respect as impolitic as it was ungenerous. The insults offered to their King roused the indignation of the proverbially loyal Portuguese. Their Queen had scornfully rejected the constitution of the Cortes, who, after heaping obloquy on her fame, had voted her mad, and confined her accordingly. This was one of the many indignities which the poor old King bore probably with the greatest patience; for his virago Queen, a worthy sister of Ferdinand the Beloved, fomented discord and misery in his family, and had just accused him to this brother of that madness, under the imputation of which she now suffered. Affairs trailed on thus till 1823, when the overthrow of the constitutional party in Spain by the French, afforded an example which was soon followed by the Portuguese under Dom Miguel and the Queen. The Cortes fell as they rose, without a struggle. Two parties contributed to their overthrow-the King's and the Queen's-the royalists and the ultra-royalists; the one headed by the Count Palmella, the noted Pamplona, Count of Subserra, and the unfortunate Marquis of Loulé; the other was directed by the Queen, her son Dom Miguel, (of whom we shall now not lose sight,) and by the Marquisses of Chaves and Abrantes. These last formed the Apostolic or Spanish faction, while the other received some support from England. The Pamplona party gained the ascendency; some order was established, and the light of liberty was not lost sight of; for two distinct decrees in favour of a representative government were deliberately issued by the king, some time after his triumph over the Cortes. The power of the ministry became each day more strong; and had not some unknown influence prevented Lord Beresford from joining them, although earnestly solicited to do so, both by the old King and by the British Ambassador, it is probable much future misery might even yet have been avoided. Pamplona acquired the magic power of a strong mind over the weak intellect of the King, while his connexion with the powerful family of the Marquis of Loulé, gave him weight in the country. The Queen and her ultra-tory party were alarmed; and therefore, with a ruthless ambition, resolved on a desperate attempt to carry the ascendency. Her son Dom Miguel, to say the least of him, was worthy of his mother. The King, attended by his court, and the Marquis of Loulé as chamberlain, went to hunt at Salva-terra. Dom Miguel, his friend the Marquis of Abrantes, and their two assistants, Leonardo Cordeiro, and Jose Verissimo,* accompanied them. On the second morning after their arrival, the Marquis of Loulé was found lying dead on a heap of rubbish, in the full courtdress in which he had attended at the King's supper on the preceding night. Dom Miguel and his friends asserted that he had fallen from a window, and so killed himself; but, on examination, it was discovered that some sharp instrument had been intro Both now two most active and insolent agents of police at Lisbon, who were publicly dismissed in May last, at the demand of this country, for their outrage on British subjects. duced into his mouth, by which he had been covertly stabbed to the brain. Secret examinations were taken, and nothing positive then transpired; but on the publication of the general amnesty which followed the exile of Dom Miguel, his associates Verissimo, Cordeiro, and the Marquis of Abrantes, were specially excepted from pardon. The plot, however, failed for the time; for the King returned to Lisbon in dismay, and his affectionate subjects rallied round him; but the army, which had never recovered from the disaffection produced by Lord Beresford's disciplinarian experiments, now supported Dom Miguel, who, after some preliminary intrigues, openly put himself at its head, and declared death to those thunderbolts of Masonic impiety, who 'would burst forth and consume the House of Braganza, and 'reduce to ashes the most beautiful country in the world.'* In accordance with these humane and grandiloquent sentiments, he decreed the absolute power of the King, whose sublime virtues' his proclamation declared to exceed the imagination;' but whom he nevertheless placed under restraint, while his mutinous soldiery took possession of the palace. Orders also were issued by this dutiful son for the arrest of all the attendants, ministers, and domestics, of his beloved father, together with that of no less than 18,000 other persons. Fortunately, the foreign ambassadors followed the advice of Sir Edward Thornton, and steadily opposed this rebellious assumption of power; but the army adhered not the less firmly to Dom Miguel, while the Queen, aided by the intrigues of Spain, openly supported him. The timid old King, afraid to recur to strong measures of defence, fled for refuge to the British flag; and, having escaped from his palace to the Windsor Castle, then anchored in the Tagus, he succeeded in entrapping his rebellious son on board also. Dom Miguel, on being ushered into the royal presence, found the King surrounded by many of his officers, and all the foreign ministers. The suffering father addressed his unnatural son in words of strong and touching reproach;-he alluded to the pardon which had already been granted to him for the affair of the Marquis of Loulé; and concluded his address by commanding him to remain on board the Windsor Castle until further orders. Those further orders pronounced his banishment, and he was forthwith sent to Vienna; while the Queen was at the same time publicly removed from court. The King and his ministers resumed their wonted functions, and all those persons * Letter of Dom Miguel to his father. who had been arrested by the command of Dom Miguel were released. There was now a hope for the tranquillity of Portugal; but the British Ambassador, by whose able assistance that country had been enabled to weather these rough and dangerous storms, was superseded, when he might have been most useful in supporting the well disposed, and setting the seal of exclusion on the irreclaimable ultra party of the Queen and her hopeful son. Sir Edward Thornton was succeeded by a minister well known in Europe as the attendant genius at the extinction of liberty in Naples and Spain; one, in short, well acquainted with the mysteries of the Holy Alliance. The ministry of Pamplona and Palmella soon fell before the wand of this deeply initiated British ambassador. At a subsequent period, during the same ambassador's residence, a like fate attended the liberal ministers Barrados and Lacerda. Not another word was heard in favour of the representative charter, whose defeat became the openly avowed object of the ministers of the Holy Alliance assembled at Lisbon, while its support, we presume, was the object of the British minister. But we regret to say, that his secret efforts were as remarkably unsuccessful here, as they had been both at Naples and Madrid. The discomfited ultras took courage, and, as birds of ill omen, once more hovered along the Spanish frontier. In the midst of these difficulties, the old King died. A more unhappy course through life than that of this royal personage can scarcely be pointed out. The weak son of a mad mother, the despised husband of a wicked wife, the hapless father of a rebellious son, the powerless tenant of an absolute sceptre, a fugitive from his long-descended dominions in Europe, and an outcast from his adopted throne in America, he lived a life of bodily suffering, mental imbecility, and domestic misery; and died, leaving his friends, his family, and his country, the prey of civil strife and foreign interference. The death of John brought new elements of strife into the complicated tissue of Portuguese politics. Sir Charles Stuart had ably completed the separation of the two rival courts of Rio and Lisbon. The Brazils had been erected into an empire under the rule of Dom Pedro, to whom was also preserved the succession to the kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves, &c. Meanwhile the old King was soothed with the titular dignity of Emperor of Brazil. Within a few months after this vain assumption, death removed all crowns and cares from his brow. His eldest son, the Emperor Dom Pedro, by every right of birth, treaty, and reason, succeeded to the dominions of his father. He did so succeed, and was so recognised by his subjects of both and all his realms, by all the members of his family, and by the courts of Europe and America. Thus far is undoubted. But the separation between the two states of Portugal and Brazil was of that force, that they could not continue under the same head. Dom Pedro had to make his choice in due time between Europe and America. He gave the preference to the new land that had adopted him; and, with a straight-forward and loyal consistency, proceeded to abdicate his European dominions, the old Braganza inheritance, to his eldest daughter, Dona Maria, the heiress and representative of that royal house, next in succession to her brother Dom Sebastian, for whom was reserved the American empire of his father. This abdication was coupled with two conditions, meant to heal the yet open wounds of Portugal, viz. the adoption of a constitutional charter, and the marriage of the young Queen with his penitent brother Dom Miguel. What feelings of affection or policy dictated this last proviso, it is vain to enquire. We only know that this act of brotherly kindness, or compromising policy, has been the chief cause of the miseries under which Portugal has groaned for these last six years. Still, a brother may be pardoned for not believing in an utter depravity, the extent and depth of which seems to have deceived even the experienced Chancellor of Aus tria. The accession of Dom Pedro was greeted in Portugal more warmly than his constitutional charter, which, however, met with the joyful acceptance of a vast majority of the enlightened portion of the nation. Its wise and temperate provisions certainly disappointed the wild reveries of the fanatics of freedom; while its liberal principles offended the absolute dogmas of the Queen's party. The hostility of these two extremes is its praise. It was sworn to by all the authorities, and by none more fully than by the present ruler of the kingdom, who was then a free agent at Vienna. But now appeared the fruits of that error of our ambassador, (to call it by its gentlest name,) which aided the re-establishment of the Queen's party after their outrageous conduct in 1824. They possessed much local influence in the country, and received unremitting support from Spain and the Holy Alliance, many of whose representatives at Lisbon had refused to be present at the ceremony of swearing to the constitutional charter of Dom Pedro. This faction resorted to every possible intrigue to defeat its establishment; they declared that it was the same as that of the Cortes; and to substantiate their calumny, they did not hesitate to falsify many of its clauses,thus paying an indirect compliment to its merits. This forgery |