Gomes Freire de Andrade: the Vienna-born general Lisbon hanged in 1817

On Saturday 18 October 1817, Lieutenant General Gomes Freire de Andrade shaved and put on his full uniform. He was 60, and for almost five months he had been held alone in the Fort of São Julião da Barra, the fortress at the mouth of the Tagus at Oeiras. He was not allowed to wear the uniform for long.1 source1 source

The sentence required him to die in the white robe of the condemned. He fainted and was revived. Once the sentence had been read he steadied himself, and then he waited, barefoot, for several hours. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Haddok, one of the British officers at the fort, was later investigated, to no effect, for greeting the prisoner when he fetched him from his cell and for lending him a pair of shoes so that he would not wait barefoot.1 source1 source

Five companies of the 19th Infantry Regiment from Cascais formed the cordon around the gallows, and they were ordered to face away from it. When the general tried to speak to the soldiers, the priests attending him shouted so that his words could not be heard. Two days earlier he had asked to be shot, as befitted his rank. The request was refused, and he was hanged.2 sources2 sources

His body was burned with tar sent from the Royal Arsenal on the personal order of Miguel Pereira Forjaz, the regency's secretary for war, and the ashes were thrown into the sea. That same day, in Lisbon, eleven men convicted with him were hanged at Campo de Santana.3 sources3 sources

His father, Ambrósio Freire de Andrade e Castro, was a cavalry officer whom Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the future Marquis of Pombal, sent to Vienna as minister plenipotentiary, Portugal's envoy, to fill the post Carvalho himself had left in 1749. Ambrósio presented his credentials to the Emperor Francis I in May 1752. In July 1754 he married Maria Anna Elisabeth, Countess of Schaffgotsch, a Bohemian noblewoman then 15 years old.2 sources2 sources

Their son was baptised Gomes Pereira Freire de Andrade e Castro in St Stephen's Cathedral on 27 January 1757. His father wrote at once to Carvalho e Melo with the news, offering the boy as “one more servant”, and asked the minister to take him under his protection.1 source1 source

No Viennese school records him, so he was probably taught at home. By 13 he was riding at the Spanish Riding School and helping his father translate documents and draft dispatches. Ambrósio died on 14 November 1770, leaving debts, and the widow wrote to Pombal for help. In 1771 the crown granted the family the income of a commandery, the estate of Mendo Marques.1 source1 source

At 18 he told the Portuguese embassy that he wanted to serve in the Portuguese army. In 1780 Queen Maria I made him a knight of the Order of Christ, and Joseph II, the emperor, told the ambassador that the young man was well brought up and of good reputation. He left Vienna on 5 December 1780 and reached Portugal, a country he had never seen, in February 1781. In Vienna he had also joined a Masonic lodge, Zur gekrönten Hoffnung.2 sources2 sources

He enlisted as a cadet in the Peniche infantry regiment in 1782 and was commissioned an ensign the same year, at 25. In 1784 he volunteered for the Portuguese squadron sent to join Spain's bombardment of Algiers, the corsair base, and commanded one of the gunboats that attacked the harbour in repeated sorties. By 1788 he was a major.2 sources2 sources

That year he went to Russia as a volunteer and joined Prince Grigory Potemkin's army besieging Ochakov, the Ottoman fortress at the mouth of the Dnieper. He fought with the light infantry in the assault of 17 December 1788 (6 December by the Russian calendar), which took the fortress in about two hours. Catherine the Great gave him the Order of St George. In July 1790 he commanded a floating battery against the Swedes at Svensksund, a Russian defeat, and survived when it sank under him.2 sources2 sources

He served with the Prussians against revolutionary France before coming home in 1793 to command the Lisbon garrison regiment, known after him as “Freire's regiment”. Portugal had joined Spain against France, and in September 1793 a 6,000-strong Portuguese division left for the Roussillon campaign in the eastern Pyrenees. Gomes Freire followed at the head of his regiment; by one account he was back from Prussia too late to sail with the fleet and went overland.3 sources3 sources

At Céret, on 26 November 1793, he led about 200 men forward to hold the position when the Spanish lines gave way. He quarrelled with his superiors, among them Forjaz, then an aide to the division's commander, and was sent home in 1794.3 sources3 sources

Promoted marechal de campo, roughly a major general, in 1795, he drew up a plan for the defence of Lisbon in 1799 and was the quartermaster of the northern army in the brief War of the Oranges against Spain in 1801. In 1806 he published a 400-page essay on reorganising the army, arguing that soldiers should serve for a fixed term near their homes so they could go back to their fields. He was made a lieutenant general in 1807.2 sources2 sources

When General Junot's French army entered Lisbon on 30 November 1807, the royal family and court had sailed for Brazil the day before, leaving a regency behind. Gomes Freire was commanding the defence of the south bank of the Tagus and Setúbal. The Marquis of Fronteira, dictating his memoirs in 1861, said Gomes Freire had told him he watched the fleet sail from Cascais without knowing where it was going. Eunice Relvas notes that other evidence places him at Setúbal at the time.2 sources2 sources

Junot disbanded most of the Portuguese army and in 1808 sent its best units to France as the Portuguese Legion, about 8,000 men under the Marquis of Alorna, with Gomes Freire as second-in-command. Napoleon wanted them out of the country, where they might have risen against the occupation. Some 1,300 deserted on the march through a Spain in revolt. Gomes Freire later said he had stalled, hoping for a British landing that never came. He obtained a month's leave and set out only on 10 April 1808, when his division had already reached Salamanca.4 sources4 sources

The Legion fought at Wagram in 1809 and in 1812 marched into Russia, where its regiments fought at Smolensk and Borodino and were all but destroyed in the retreat. Gomes Freire mostly held garrison posts behind the front. He refused to join Masséna's invasion of Portugal in 1810 and asked, without success, to return to Russian service.2 sources2 sources

In 1812 he followed the Grande Armée as governor of the district of Drisna and fell ill at Smolensk during the retreat. In 1813 he commanded the garrison of Jena and in June became governor of Dresden, where he saw Napoleon's victory of 27 August and the siege that followed. He was taken prisoner when Dresden fell in late 1813 and held in Hungary until Napoleon's defeat. He reached Paris on 5 June 1814.3 sources3 sources

He sailed from London and landed in Lisbon on 25 May 1815. Anyone who had served Napoleon was suspect, and he spent some days locked in the Tower of Belém before a court found no crime and freed him. He was paid a lieutenant general's salary but never given a command. On 4 April 1817 he declined an invitation to meet Beresford, pointing out that a year earlier he had asked for the regency to tell the marshal officially that the king counted him a lieutenant general of the army.3 sources3 sources

Gomes Freire settled in the Rua do Salitre, near the Rato fountain, with Matilde de Faria e Melo, his companion. Old comrades came to the house, among them officers left unpaid; one militia colonel, Manuel Monteiro de Carvalho, had not been paid for thirty months. At the end of 1815 the Grande Oriente Lusitano, the main body of Portuguese Freemasonry, chose Gomes Freire as its Grand Master. He took office early in 1816, on 1 March by one account, and held the post until his death.3 sources3 sources

The conspirators called themselves the Supreme Regenerating Council of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. Most were junior officers or former officers, and their plan was simple. Troops would gather in Lisbon one night and seize Beresford. The next day, as the soldiers made their demands, Gomes Freire would step in, take control and set up a provisional government to summon the Cortes, the old parliament, which would choose a constitutional king.2 sources2 sources

Three men who had got inside the society went to Beresford instead: two officers, José de Andrade Corvo and Pedro Pinto de Morais Sarmento, and a lawyer, João de Sá Pereira Ferreira Soares. From mid-April 1817 he had them report on the plotters. On the night of 22 May he took advice from three senior officials at his house, and the next day he handed the papers to the regency. One study dates the handover a few days earlier, to 18 May.3 sources3 sources

On the afternoon of 25 May, at a friend's palace, Gomes Freire said he expected to be arrested that night. The arrest party came at two in the morning of 26 May 1817; some studies put the arrests on the night of 24 to 25 May. They found him in undress uniform, with a travel bag, his wallet and two loaded pistols on the table. About thirty men were seized in a few hours, while artillery stood ready on the Lisbon quays.3 sources3 sources

He alone was taken to São Julião da Barra and kept there without contact with the other prisoners. For his first six days nobody paid for his food, and the fort's British governor, Archibald Campbell, fed him at his own cost. He was refused a razor for weeks.1 source1 source

The case was heard by the Juízo da Inconfidência, the special court for crimes against the crown. Judges questioned Gomes Freire in his cell with only a clerk present, and he was never confronted with the informers or the co-defendants who accused him. No compromising paper was found on him. The prosecution rested almost entirely on what the informers said.1 source1 source

On 24 June he handed Campbell a written protest for the king and for the Duke of Sussex, a son of George III who had encouraged his book on the army. Beresford passed it to the regency instead, and it never reached Rio. Once Gomes Freire knew what had become of his papers, he told Campbell he would be “hanged like a dog near the Tower”, as the fort was also called.1 source1 source

In a letter of 16 October, two days before he died, he wrote that the marshal had only lately told him the protest had gone to the governors, not to Brazil.1 source1 source

Whether he led the plot is still argued. José Manuel Lopes Cordeiro reads the plan as one that would bring in Gomes Freire only after the coup, and notes that the conspirators were condemned without conclusive proof. Manuel Pinto dos Santos names an officer, José Ribeiro Pinto, as its main organiser. Colonel António José Pereira da Costa concludes that Gomes Freire knew of the plot and did not denounce it, but took no part.3 sources3 sources

Beresford's share of the blame is disputed too. He uncovered the plot and organised the arrests. Cordeiro writes that he followed the trial closely; Pereira da Costa sees him keeping his distance and acting only through official channels. Attacked when the liberals reviewed the trial in 1821–22, Beresford gave his copies of the papers to Joaquim Ferreira de Freitas, a former priest living in London, for a memoir in his defence published in 1822. Simão José da Luz Soriano, using Beresford's letters to the police, rejected that defence in the 1880s.3 sources3 sources

Pereira da Costa points instead to Portuguese enemies, above all Forjaz, who had loathed Gomes Freire since the Roussillon campaign and who once rebuked Beresford for writing about the prisoner's treatment.1 source1 source

The sentence ordered death by the garrotte on a gallows built at São Julião, and his head cut off and burned with his body. In the event he was hanged. Eight of the condemned were given this death with infamy. Gomes Freire was kept apart from the others to the end, perhaps because the authorities feared a rescue.1 source1 source

In Lisbon the eleven were hanged at Campo de Santana, and the bodies of several were burned on pyres whose glow could be seen across the capital. The sentence was printed only after the executions; the Gazeta de Lisboa announced on 20 October that it would be out soon.3 sources3 sources

On 30 March 1818 João VI banned all secret societies on pain of death, and the Grande Oriente Lusitano suspended its lodges. Lisbon stayed quiet. When an emissary of the Sinédrio, a secret society founded in Porto in January 1818, sounded out the capital in 1819, he found people still cowed by “the terrible example of Campo de Santana”, in the words of the historian José de Arriaga (1886).1 source1 source

The revolution came from Porto, on 24 August 1820. Within three years the trial's meaning had flipped, and the new liberal regime honoured the condemned as founders of its cause. In 1821 João Domingos Bomtempo rededicated his Requiem to the “martyrs of the fatherland” and conducted its first performance at a memorial mass in the church of São Domingos. The liberal regime reviewed the trial and the sentence was annulled. Survivors who had been transported or had fled came home under the amnesty of 1821, except Baron von Eben, who died in Colombia.3 sources3 sources

Civil war and the reign of Dom Miguel silenced the memory for a time. In 1853 General Cabreira, governor of São Julião, raised a monument on the esplanade where Gomes Freire died. In 1879 Lisbon renamed Campo de Santana the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, the Field of the Martyrs of the Fatherland, and named the Rua Gomes Freire beside it.1 source1 source

The First Republic made 18 October 1917, the centenary, a national holiday by a decree of 6 September. That day a procession went from Oeiras station to the monument at São Julião, where the war minister, Norton de Matos, spoke.2 sources2 sources

On 28 October Lisbon unveiled a plaque on the house in the Rua do Salitre where he had been arrested, and a second procession marched to the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, where another plaque honoured the eleven. In the Revista Militar, Eduardo Noronha called the execution one of the most abject judicial crimes in the history of political killings.3 sources3 sources

Under the Estado Novo dictatorship, Luís de Sttau Monteiro's play Felizmente Há Luar! (1961) turned Gomes Freire into a symbol of resistance. He never appears on stage. The title, “Luckily there's moonlight”, comes from a phrase attributed to Forjaz in 1817. The play was first staged in Paris in 1969, and in Portugal only in 1975. It is now read in secondary schools.2 sources2 sources