Tomar, 16 April 1581: Philip II of Spain swears to rule as a Portuguese king

On the afternoon of Sunday 16 April 1581 a high, carpeted stage stood in the Cistern courtyard of the Convent of Christ at Tomar, the head house of the Order of Christ, and the walls around it were hung with rich tapestries. Bishops and the representatives of Portugal's towns were already in their places when the king came out of his lodgings in the same convent. He wore a long robe of brocade and the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece.1 source1 source

Ahead of him walked João, Duke of Bragança, Constable of the kingdom, holding the sword of state upright, and the standard-bearer Jorge de Meneses with the royal banner still furled. Heralds and mace-bearers went in front. Minstrels, shawms, trumpets and kettledrums struck up as he entered, and on the stage he sat down and took a gold sceptre from his chamberlain.1 source1 source

The king was Philip II of Spain. That afternoon he became Filipe I of Portugal. The Bishop of Leiria, António Pinheiro, made a speech setting out his right to the throne, and Damião de Aguiar, one of Lisbon's two representatives, answered for the kingdom. Then Philip knelt before an open missal with a cross laid on it, put his right hand on the book, held the sceptre in his left and repeated the oath that his secretary, Miguel de Moura, read out to him.1 source1 source

The Duke of Bragança swore first, his right hand on the cross and missal, and kissed the king's hand. As he finished, the standard-bearer unfurled the banner. The other nobles followed, then the prelates, the royal councillors, the lords of lands and the castle governors, and then the representatives of the towns, so many that the notaries filled pages with their names. When the king had accepted their oaths, Portugal King of Arms, the senior herald, called out “Hear ye” three times, and the standard-bearer cried “Real, real, real” for King Philip.1 source1 source

Every step followed, in the notaries' words, the custom and ceremonies used by the kings of Portugal. That was the point. Philip had taken Portugal with an army, and at Tomar he had himself raised as the lawful heir of its old kings.3 sources3 sources

The crisis began in Morocco. On 4 August 1578 King Sebastião was killed at the battle of Alcácer Quibir, leaving no children, and much of the Portuguese nobility was taken prisoner. The crown passed to his great-uncle, Cardinal Henrique, an elderly churchman with no heir of his own, who had to settle a succession that could not wait.2 sources2 sources

Several descendants of King Manuel I came forward. The strongest were Philip, whose mother was Manuel's daughter Isabel; Catarina, Duchess of Bragança, daughter of Manuel's son Duarte and Henrique's favourite; and António, Prior of Crato, son of Manuel's son Luís. António was the only claimant descended through the male line, but he was illegitimate, and Henrique declared him so.1 source1 source

Philip worked on the Portuguese for two years. His envoys in Lisbon, among them Cristóvão de Moura, courted the higher nobility and clergy and tried to talk António out of his claim. Francisco Ribeiro da Silva, a historian at the University of Porto, found that even the representatives of Lisbon's guilds took Castilian gold from the ambassador Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce.2 sources2 sources

Philip's ambassadors, led by the Duke of Osuna, also put guarantees on the table: a memorial of 25 chapters on how Portugal would be governed under him, offered first to the Lisbon city council and then at the Cortes that Henrique called to Almeirim in January 1580 to settle the succession. The old king died on 30 or 31 January (sources differ) without naming an heir, and a board of governors took over. Osuna signed the memorial at Almeirim on 20 March, but at the time it came to nothing.4 sources4 sources

On 19 June 1580 António had himself proclaimed king at Santarém. Philip answered with an army under the Duke of Alba, which crossed the border at the end of June and on 25 August routed António's hastily raised force at Alcântara, outside Lisbon. António, wounded, escaped through the north of the country and went abroad. His cause held out in the Azores until 1583, and he died in Paris in 1595.2 sources2 sources

Philip himself entered Portugal at Elvas on 5 December 1580. Lisbon was in no state to receive him. The city had been sacked when António's troops abandoned it and attacked again when Alba's arrived, and plague was spreading through its streets.2 sources2 sources

The plague decided where the Cortes would meet. Philip and the Duke of Alba weighed Évora, Abrantes, Elvas and Tomar, and the king chose Tomar, according to the art historian Milton Pedro Dias Pacheco. Its convent, the head house of the Order of Christ, could lodge a king and his court. Philip stayed there for almost seventy days and began governing from it.2 sources2 sources

Philip left little to chance. He forbade the towns to send supporters of the Prior of Crato as their procuradores. Before the Cortes met he also published a general pardon for those who had been “induced, deceived or compelled” to disturb the peace. It did not extend to the Prior himself, whom Philip pursued without mercy.3 sources3 sources

The ceremony of 16 April was the acclamation, the levantamento, in which the estates raised Philip as their king and he swore to keep their laws. The Cortes proper opened four days later. On the afternoon of Thursday 20 April the king, sceptre in hand, sat under a canopy worked with gold and silver in the chapter house of the Knights of Christ. There were no minstrels this time, the notaries noted, because it was not the custom.1 source1 source

The Bishop of Leiria spoke again. He compared the Cortes to the councils of the Church, hoped the Holy Spirit would assist them and reminded the estates of the king's pardon. Damião de Aguiar thanked Philip in the name of all three estates. Then Lisbon's other representative, Rodrigo de Meneses, climbed the dais and handed the king a paper with some chapters of Cortes, and the session ended.1 source1 source

On Sunday 23 April, St George's day, the three estates met again in the same room to swear allegiance to Philip's heir, his son Diogo. The king accepted the oaths in the prince's name. The commons later asked for Diogo to be brought up in Portugal; Philip replied that the boy's mother had died and he was too young to be parted from his sisters.2 sources2 sources

Each of the three estates asked for Osuna's offer back. In the third of their chapters the commons asked Philip to grant the Duke of Osuna's chapters and to swear to them in the form of the letter King Manuel I had given in 1499, when his son Miguel was heir to Castile and Aragon as well as Portugal. Philip agreed. When the chapters were turned down in 1580, he added, he had minded it more for the harm he foresaw for the kingdom than for himself.2 sources2 sources

The chapters, sometimes called the Statute of Tomar, described a union of crowns, not of kingdoms. Portugal would keep its laws and customs. Cortes dealing with Portugal would meet only in Portugal. Offices, from governor down, would go to Portuguese, unless the king sent a son, brother, uncle or nephew to govern. Church posts and the trade with India and Guinea would stay in Portuguese hands, and gold and silver would be coined with Portugal's arms alone.4 sources4 sources

The estates also presented their own chapters, as at every Cortes. The commons began by asking Philip, a widower, to marry in Portugal, and the estates asked him to abolish the town militias and the royal stud farms. The commons' fourth chapter put the heart of the matter plainly.2 sources2 sources

Philip replied that all this was already contained in the 25 graces. Chapter XXIII carried a sum of money: 300,000 cruzados to ransom the captives still held in Morocco, to stock up grain, and to fight the plague in Lisbon.3 sources3 sources

The promises were put in writing only on 15 November 1582, in two letters patent signed in Lisbon: one carried the 25 chapters, the other the king's answers to each estate. Philip bound his successors as well. Any king who broke them, the letter says, should be “cursed with the curse of Our Lord”.2 sources2 sources

One chapter he would not carry out. The sixth promised that the soldiers garrisoning Portugal's fortresses would be Portuguese. Philip wrote that nothing would please him more, but that for the quiet of his kingdoms he would defer it to “a better and more convenient occasion”. Castilian and German troops stayed, and complaints about soldiers billeted in Portuguese homes appear in the commons' chapters.2 sources2 sources

Philip left Tomar in May and made his state entry into Lisbon on 29 June 1581. He lived in Portugal for about 25 months in all and had the royal palace on the Lisbon riverfront rebuilt. At the end of 1582 news came that Diogo had died, so the Cortes met in the palace on 30 January 1583 to swear in his son Philip, the future Philip III of Spain. In February the king set out for Castile, and he was back in Madrid on 28 March.2 sources2 sources

After that Portugal was governed from a distance. The Council of Portugal, the body of Portuguese councillors promised in chapter XV, sat in Madrid from 1583 and handled appointments, grants, bishoprics and overseas governments. In Lisbon a viceroy of royal blood or a board of governors ruled in the king's name, and Portugal's overseas possessions stayed separate from Castile's.1 source1 source

Philip's government was busy. A law reforming the courts was issued on 27 July 1582, the same day as the rules that moved an appeal court, the Casa do Cível, from Lisbon to Porto as the Relação do Porto. A commission began revising the kingdom's laws in 1582; the new code, the Ordenações Filipinas, was finished in 1595 and published in 1603, after Philip's death.1 source1 source

Some promises bent. In 1592 Philip restored the customs posts on the land border, arguing that free passage helped merchants more than ordinary buyers, and there were riots in Porto and Braga. The same year a new duty of 3 per cent on goods passing through Portuguese ports, the consulado, began paying for a coastal fleet against corsairs. Portugal now shared Spain's enemies: by one contemporary count, the English took 28 India ships between 1580 and 1594.1 source1 source

Historians still weigh the balance differently. Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão accused Philip of failing to keep part of the promises of 1581; A. H. de Oliveira Marques called his administration excellent. Ribeiro da Silva compares the chapters to an unwritten constitution, which Philip did not fully respect and his successors broke much further.1 source1 source

Much depended on how 1580 was told. Fernando Bouza, of the Complutense University of Madrid, shows that Portuguese who wanted their country to stay a kingdom insisted that Philip had inherited it, because only an inheritance protected the privileges of Tomar; a conquered country could be treated as a province. A later book, the Arte de Furtar (The Art of Stealing), puts all three versions in Philip's mouth: “I inherited it, I bought it, I conquered it.”2 sources2 sources

Under Philip's grandson, Philip IV, and his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, Madrid's rule grew more centralising, until on 1 December 1640 a group of nobles in Lisbon ended the union and the Duke of Bragança became King João IV.1 source1 source

Because of the promises of Tomar, the Iberian Union was a union of crowns. For sixty years under Habsburg kings, Portugal kept its own laws, coinage, courts, councils and officials, and its empire was run separately from Spain's.3 sources3 sources

The law code begun under Philip lasted longest. João IV kept the Ordenações Filipinas in force after 1640, and they remained in force in Portugal until the coming of liberalism in the nineteenth century. In Brazil they were finally repealed only in 1917.1 source1 source

The period's reputation has changed too. In the nineteenth century Portuguese writers described the sixty years as a long night of submission. Ribeiro da Silva writes that no one can seriously hold so dark a view today, and that the three Philips should not be judged as if they were one king.1 source1 source