Maria I, Portugal's first queen to reign in her own right, born 1734

On 17 December 1734, a week before Christmas, a daughter was born in Lisbon to Prince José, heir to King João V, and his wife, Mariana Vitória, an infanta of Spain. She was the couple's first child. On 9 January 1735 she was christened Maria Francisca Isabel Josefa Antónia Gertrudes Rita Joana.2 sources2 sources

Popular biographies give her birthplace as the Ribeira Palace, the royal residence on the Tagus waterfront where the Praça do Comércio now stands; the scholarly accounts used here say only Lisbon. Nothing of the palace survives. It collapsed in the earthquake of 1 November 1755, together with its library and the new opera house next door.3 sources3 sources

Nobody in 1734 could be sure the little princess would rule. Her grandfather made her Princess of Beira only until her father had a son. He never did: three more daughters followed, and no woman had yet worn the Portuguese crown in her own right. Forty-two years later she was acclaimed in the square where the palace had stood.4 sources4 sources

Maria's father became King José I in 1750 and gave wide powers to his minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later Marquis of Pombal, who made enemies of the old nobility and expelled the Jesuits in 1759. After an attack on the king on the night of 3 September 1758, a court condemned members of the Távora, Aveiro and Atouguia families, and on 13 January 1759 they were executed on a scaffold at Belém.2 sources2 sources

Her marriage was a political question for years. Spain put forward a younger brother of Charles III, a son of George II of Britain was briefly mentioned, and France told its envoys to watch closely. Her mother favoured Pedro, José's younger brother, and so did the princess. Pombal and the king were wary of him, because nobles who resented the minister looked to Pedro as a figurehead.1 source1 source

In the spring of 1760 the Spanish ambassador asked formally for her hand for the infante Luis. Turning Spain down without offence meant announcing the match with her uncle, and the wedding took place on 6 June 1760. By then, as the historian Caetano Beirão put it, with the nobility crushed by executions and arrests and the Jesuits expelled, Pombal had nothing left to fear from the match.2 sources2 sources

Their first son, José, was born on 20 August 1761, and two more children, João and Mariana Vitória, reached adulthood. As the boy grew, Pombal is said to have planned for Maria to renounce her rights in favour of her son, who was being educated by men the minister chose. The plan rests on later accounts and diplomatic letters, but she was kept off the Council of State, where an heir would normally sit.5 sources5 sources

José I died at the Ajuda palace on 24 February 1777. In a political testament he asked his heir to free the prisoners of state, whom he pardoned without admitting they were innocent. Maria acted at once. From the forts of Pedrouços, the Junqueira, São Julião da Barra, the Barreiro and Setúbal, and from convents where noblewomen had been shut away, the prisoners walked out.1 source1 source

Counts differ. The historian Patrícia Alves, following Caetano Beirão's 1934 study of the reign, writes of some hundreds of people; a 2026 newspaper column puts the number freed by the general pardon at nearly 800. Among them were relatives of the Távoras, including the future poet Leonor de Almeida, shut in the convent of Chelas since 1759. On 17 May 1777 a royal decree declared that her father, the 2nd Marquis of Alorna, had been imprisoned unjustly and restored the honours of his house.2 sources2 sources

On 13 May 1777 Maria was acclaimed in the Terreiro do Paço, where the Ribeira Palace had stood, with the great nobles, councillors and secretaries of state around her and crowds filling the square. Her husband was acclaimed with her as King Pedro III. The official orator, the judge José Ricalde Pereira de Castro, spent much of his speech explaining why a woman could lawfully inherit the throne, citing the Cortes of Lamego, the supposed founding laws of the monarchy.2 sources2 sources

Pombal was already gone from court. Titles and posts went at the acclamation almost entirely to his known enemies, and two noblemen close to Pedro took senior offices. In October 1779 the queen had judges question the old marquis. A decree of August 1781 declared him guilty and deserving of exemplary punishment, then spared him because of his illness and great age, ordering only that he keep twenty leagues from court.2 sources2 sources

The new reign became known as the Viradeira, the turnabout, and liberal historians of the nineteenth century cast Maria as a pious reactionary undoing Pombal's Enlightenment. Recent work is more cautious. Maria kept men from the old government, such as Aires de Sá e Melo at foreign affairs and Martinho de Melo e Castro at the navy and colonies, and the reign founded scientific and teaching bodies of its own. Bello Vázquez reads the old picture as a mix of liberal ideology and a habit of describing a female ruler through piety and hysteria.2 sources2 sources

The freed prisoners wanted more than freedom. The Marquis of Alorna, son-in-law of the executed Marquis of Távora, pressed for a full review of the 1759 trial and gathered new testimony. By an alvará, a royal charter, of 9 October 1780 the queen appointed a board of judges to examine the original case file and nothing else.1 source1 source

Their sentence was published on 23 May 1781. The judges found it implausible that so many leading nobles had joined a plot to remove the king, given the absence of hard evidence. They revoked the 1759 sentence for the Marquis and Marchioness of Távora, their sons Luís Bernardo and José Maria, and their son-in-law the Count of Atouguia.1 source1 source

The victory was mostly symbolic. Nothing in the sentence returned the confiscated estates, and the Crown's prosecutor lodged objections. Maria neither upheld nor rejected them. In December 1783 she named another board to study them, and the case was still open in 1790. The Duke of Aveiro, the other great house destroyed in 1759, was not cleared.1 source1 source

The review was awkward for the queen, since the 1759 sentence had been passed in her father's reign. Peters and Willis date an isolated episode of delirium to 1781, and the historian who prefaced Luísa Paiva Boléo's biography of the queen links one of her early crises to the pressure on her to sign the Távora document. Peters and Willis note that she was later tormented by fear for her father's soul because of the executions.2 sources2 sources

On 24 October 1760, four months after her wedding, in the Carmelite nuns' convent at Carnide, outside Lisbon, Maria made a promise before an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She would found a church and convent for Discalced Carmelite nuns if God gave the kingdom an heir. José's birth the next year settled the debt, and once she was queen she paid it.2 sources2 sources

On 24 October 1779, the vow's nineteenth anniversary, Pedro III laid the first stone of the Basílica da Estrela with his own hands. The church was consecrated on 15 November 1789, though masons were still at work in the 1790s. Mary del Priore describes the convent's prioress gaining a growing hold over the queen as Maria weakened.2 sources2 sources

Two months after the stone was laid, on 24 December 1779, the queen approved the Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. Its moving spirits were the 2nd Duke of Lafões, João Carlos de Bragança, and the Abbé José Correia da Serra, a priest who had grown up in Italy. Lafões was among the known enemies of Pombal rewarded at the acclamation. The academy met for the first time on 16 January 1780, and Maria lent it rooms and her protection.2 sources2 sources

Abroad, Maria made peace with Spain, ruled by her uncle Charles III, after fighting over the borders of southern Brazil: on 10 October 1777 she ratified the Treaty of San Ildefonso at her palace of Queluz. In Mary del Priore's account the early reign also saw the old laws compiled, private factories encouraged and a trade surplus that left the treasury some years of relief.2 sources2 sources

Pedro III died on 25 May 1786. The marriage had been a close one, and Maria lost the man some historians now see as her main political ally. On 11 April 1787 the noblewoman Teresa de Mello Breyner wrote from Lisbon that the queen seemed to want to resume all the outward signs of sovereignty she had given up out of deference to her husband.3 sources3 sources

Then smallpox came. Her eldest son and heir, José, died of it on 11 September 1788. On 2 November it killed her daughter Mariana Vitória, and soon afterwards her husband, the Spanish infante Gabriel, and their infant son. Maria had opposed inoculation against smallpox on religious grounds, and she blamed herself.4 sources4 sources

On 29 November 1788 she lost her confessor, Inácio de São Caetano, an ally against those at court who wanted the widowed queen off the throne. Mary del Priore counts six deaths of people closest to her in a few years, and adds the news from France, where revolution broke out in 1789 and her Bourbon cousins were later beheaded.2 sources2 sources

On 1 February 1792 the queen suffered a mental collapse. Pressed by the ministers, her surviving son João, now heir and Prince of Brazil, agreed on 10 February to carry out the royal functions on her behalf and in her name. He was not yet 25.3 sources3 sources

The court sent to England for Francis Willis, the doctor credited with bringing George III back from his madness of 1788 and 1789. He arrived in March 1792 and prescribed moral management, an early form of psychological treatment, and proper food instead of drugs. The first reports were hopeful. Unlike in England, though, he only advised; he did not control the patient.1 source1 source

He tried to take the queen away from the pressures of court, including on a sea voyage, but her courtiers and officials insisted on going too. In the end he declared her incurable, advised that physicians from the University of Coimbra should go on caring for her, and left for England in August. Peters and Willis put his gain from the trip at some £16,000.1 source1 source

For seven years João governed without the title. Only on 15 July 1799, when the queen's condition was judged irreversible, did he formally become Prince Regent. By the time she died he had run the country for almost a quarter of a century.2 sources2 sources

When Napoleon's army under Junot marched on Lisbon in November 1807, the royal family sailed for Brazil, a story told in full elsewhere. Maria went aboard the ship of the line Príncipe Real with João and his sons on 27 November. The fleet reached Salvador on 22 January 1808; the queen came ashore on the 24th, a day after the rest of the family. On 7 March 1808 they entered the harbour of Rio de Janeiro.1 source1 source

In Rio she lived out of sight. On 16 December 1815 Brazil was raised to a kingdom, joined with Portugal and the Algarves in a United Kingdom. She died on 20 March 1816 at the Carmelite convent where she had been living, aged 81. João became king.3 sources3 sources

Her body was laid out with aromatic herbs and carried in procession to the convent of Nossa Senhora da Ajuda in Rio, where she was buried on 23 March 1816. In Lisbon the news came so late that the funeral rites for her soul were held only on 4 October.1 source1 source

When João VI sailed home in April 1821, her coffin went too. The royal family came ashore in Lisbon on 4 July, the day after the fleet entered the Tagus. The coffin moved from convent to convent until 18 March 1822, when it was carried by torchlight to the basilica she had built, and she was buried there.4 sources4 sources

Maria I was the first woman to reign over Portugal in her own right, and the arguments heard in 1777 about the Cortes of Lamego and Catarina of Braganza were made to justify her. The academy she approved still meets in Lisbon, and the library created in her name in 1796 became the National Library.3 sources3 sources

Her reputation is still argued over. The republican poet Guerra Junqueiro helped fix the image of the mad queen, and Mary del Priore says she had believed it herself until she began reading. Bello Vázquez, following Beirão, points out that almost no private writings of the queen survive, so most of what is said about her mind comes from others.2 sources2 sources