The Távora executions at Belém: 13 January 1759

The lock had been jammed. When Pedro Teixeira, the king's personal servant, tried to open the gate of a royal estate in Belém on the night of 3 September 1758, something had been stuffed into the keyhole and the key would not go in. He had it cleared, and the light two-wheeled carriage carrying him and King José I set off at walking pace along a lane between the estate wall and the houses of a government official.1 source1 source

It was about eleven o'clock, the night after the new moon. The carriage turned the corner by the Quinta do Meio, another royal estate also known as the Pátio das Vacas, and the coachman, Custódio da Costa, suddenly urged the mules on. He later said he had seen three horsemen ride out from under an arch and one of them fire at him, but the gun misfired. Some forty or fifty palmos further on, perhaps ten metres, there was a roar of gunfire.1 source1 source

Two loads of heavy shot tore two great holes in the back of the carriage. The king was badly wounded in the right arm, Teixeira was hit, and the coachman was riddled with pellets. According to the royal decree published three months later, three men on horseback had waited by the gate with blunderbusses, and only two of the guns went off.2 sources2 sources

José did not go on to his palace up the hill at Ajuda. Each step towards the palace would take him further from the kingdom's chief surgeon, who lived at Junqueira, so he ordered the carriage turned round and driven to the surgeon's house. There, Teixeira later testified, he received absolution from a priest before letting the surgeon uncover the wounds. A later tradition, recorded by the city's toponymy office, has him taken instead to the house of the Marquis of Angeja at Junqueira.2 sources2 sources

José I came to the throne in 1750 and left the government largely to Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, his Secretary of State for the Kingdom, who would become Count of Oeiras in 1759 and Marquis of Pombal in 1770. Carvalho e Melo's power grew after the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 (told in our article on the earthquake), and much of the old nobility distrusted him as an upstart.5 sources5 sources

The Távoras were among the proudest families at court. Francisco de Assis de Távora, Marquis of Távora by his marriage to the heiress Leonor Tomásia, had been viceroy of India from 1750 to 1755. Unusually for the high nobility, the family ran its own estates, and the historian Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro has calculated that three-quarters of its income came from the remote northern province of Trás-os-Montes.2 sources2 sources

José de Mascarenhas, Duke of Aveiro, was the Marquis's brother-in-law and held the post of Mordomo-mor, the king's chief steward. Under José's father he had presided over the Desembargo do Paço, the highest royal court. He had grievances against the new reign: commanderies that were not renewed, and a refusal to let his heir marry a daughter of the Duke of Cadaval.2 sources2 sources

Then there was the affair. The king was involved with Teresa de Távora, the Marquis's sister, who had married his elder son, Luís Bernardo, her own nephew. She was called the younger Marchioness of Távora to tell her apart from her mother-in-law. The French chargé d'affaires passed on the gossip that the king had been coming from a mistress that night, and Lisbon tradition holds that he had just left her rooms.3 sources3 sources

Queen Mariana Vitória took over as regent and a story circulated that the king had had an accident. By 12 and 13 September, though, the French, Austrian and British envoys had sent home fairly detailed reports of an assassination attempt, and rumours ran around Lisbon. Meanwhile, inquiries went on in secret.3 sources3 sources

The silence broke in mid-December. A decree dated 9 December 1758, signed by Carvalho e Melo and posted up in public on the 13th, announced the attack and promised titles to anyone who exposed the conspirators: commoners would be made noblemen, noblemen raised in rank, and accomplices who talked would be pardoned unless they were ringleaders. Keeping quiet about the crime, it warned, carried the same penalties as the crime itself, even for parents shielding their children.2 sources2 sources

On the morning of 13 December the arrests began. A Jesuit writing six days later listed both Marquises of Távora, the Marquis of Alorna, the Count of Atouguia, Manuel de Távora and José Maria de Távora, with guards posted at the families' houses and at every Jesuit house in the city. A day or two later the Duke of Aveiro was brought in from Azeitão, south of the Tagus, with his son. Around the turn of the year the Counts of Óbidos and Ribeira were also taken, to the Tower of São Julião.1 source1 source

Even the queen claimed she had been kept in the dark. On 17 December she wrote to her mother, Isabel Farnese, the dowager queen of Spain.1 source1 source

The case went to the Junta da Inconfidência, a special tribunal for crimes against the king, under the judge Pedro Gonçalves Cordeiro Pereira. The decree of 9 December swept away the ordinary rules of evidence and procedure. There was to be no time limit and no minimum number of witnesses, and sentences were to be carried out on the day they were given.2 sources2 sources

The three Secretaries of State, Carvalho e Melo among them, were to preside over the interrogations. The prisoners were questioned in rooms of the royal estates at Belém where they were held in secret. The witnesses were few, and hardly any of them were noble.2 sources2 sources

On 20 December a royal decree, answering a petition from the people of Lisbon, allowed the judges to put suspects to torture. The method was the potro, a rack on which the prisoner was tied by the arms and legs while the cords were tightened, in turns called tratos, with a surgeon present to say how much he could bear. Servants of the Duke went on the rack, and so did the Távoras and the Count of Atouguia.2 sources2 sources

Luís Bernardo, the younger Marquis, began to talk three-quarters of the way into his first turn and named his parents and the Duke. His brother José Maria kept denying everything through a turn and a half until the surgeon called a halt. Their father was racked more gently because the surgeon found he had a hernia and asthma, and he too denied. Carvalho e Melo's signature heads the records of the sessions with Luís Bernardo, the Count of Atouguia and the elder Marquis. The count gave names after a turn and a quarter.1 source1 source

The Duke of Aveiro denied everything when first questioned on 24 December. The next day he confessed and blamed four Jesuit priests, and on 28 and 29 December he named the Távoras and the Count of Atouguia. The judges who reviewed the case in 1781 concluded that these last statements had been extracted by torture or the fear of it.2 sources2 sources

On 9 January the court ordered the accused to reply within twenty-four hours through a single lawyer named by the king, Eusébio Tavares de Sequeira. He received the summary of the charges at five in the afternoon of 10 January and handed in his defence at six in the evening of the 11th. The same day the court asked the king for leave to go beyond the penalties fixed by law, and the sentence was drawn up on the 12th.2 sources2 sources

The sentence named three heads of the conspiracy: the Duke, the Marquis and the Marchioness. It said the plotters meant to kill the king and put government in the hands of his brother, Infante Pedro, who would later marry the king's heir, the future Maria I, and that Jesuit priests had guided them. It also banned anyone, on pain of losing all property, from using the surname Távora.3 sources3 sources

The scaffold went up on the large square by the quay at Belém, high enough, the sentence said, for the whole people to see. Ten proclamations were prepared, one for each prisoner, announcing that the King was doing justice on a person who had been Portuguese and had been stripped of that status for conspiracy, high treason and parricide.2 sources2 sources

Leonor de Távora, born in 1700, came first, carried in a black sedan chair with priests beside her. According to a contemporary account quoted by the historian Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, the executioner walked her round the scaffold and showed her, one by one, the instruments with which her husband, sons and son-in-law were to die. Then she was tied to a bench, blindfolded with her own handkerchief, and beheaded.2 sources2 sources

Her sons José Maria and Luís Bernardo, her son-in-law the Count of Atouguia and three servants followed. Each was tied to an X-shaped wooden cross, and the sentence ordered them strangled with a garrotte and the bones of their arms and legs broken with iron mallets. The account says the garrotte cord snapped at the first turn on José Maria, who died from the blows.2 sources2 sources

The Marquis and the Duke came last. The sentence ordered them broken alive, exposed on a wheel and then burned alive with the scaffold. For the Marquis the executioner used an iron mace weighing 18 arráteis, about 8 kilograms, and the account says he died within minutes. The court's secretary certified that the sentence had been carried out on everyone named in it, on the square by the quay at Belém, on 13 January 1759.2 sources2 sources

António Álvares Ferreira, named as one of the two gunmen, was sentenced to be burned alive on a post. All the bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into the Tagus so that, as the sentence put it, nothing should remain of their memory.3 sources3 sources

The families did not end on the scaffold. The Marchioness's daughters, the Duchess of Aveiro and the children were shut in convents and religious houses. The Marquis of Alorna, the executed couple's son-in-law, spent the rest of the reign in the fort of Junqueira, and the Duke's son, the young Marquis of Gouveia, was held there for eighteen years. Teresa, the king's lover, was spared but had to take vows in a convent.3 sources3 sources

The sentence named Malagrida, and Jesuits were soon in custody. On 16 January the queen told her mother that ten priests of the Society of Jesus had been arrested, and thirteen were eventually confined in the fort of Junqueira. Malagrida himself was taken into custody about the time of the sentence; one recent study dates his arrest to 11 January.3 sources3 sources

On 18 January the judges and Carvalho e Melo signed a set of proposals, the Providências, at the Ajuda palace where the court sat. They called for the Jesuits' property to be sequestered and their schools at Coimbra, Évora and elsewhere to be closed and replaced by teachers of reading, writing, arithmetic and Latin paid from the confiscated funds. Rather than expel the Jesuits, the ministers proposed to scatter them around the kingdom and its African outposts.2 sources2 sources

A law of 3 September 1759, the first anniversary of the attack, declared the Jesuits outlaws and expelled them from Portugal and all its territories. Members who had not taken the fourth vow could declare themselves innocent and leave the order. Other Catholic kingdoms followed, and the pope suppressed the order in 1773.2 sources2 sources

Voltaire wrote that a lay court could not put a priest to death for regicide without Rome's consent, which never came. Malagrida was handed instead to the Inquisition, then directed by Carvalho e Melo's brother Paulo, and tried for heresy over visionary writings he produced in prison. His sentence was read at an auto-da-fé in the cloister of the São Domingos convent on 20 September 1761, which ran past midnight. In the early hours of 21 September he was taken to the Rossio, garrotted, and his body burned.7 sources7 sources

That shots were fired and the king was wounded is not in doubt. Who fired them, and on whose orders, has been argued over since 1759. Even the condemned families did not agree. The Marquis of Alorna wrote to his wife from prison, between the lines of his letters in lemon juice, and blamed two people.1 source1 source

Others doubted the king was even the target. Witnesses whom Alorna was allowed to call from 1777 said they had been told the gunmen did not know José was in the carriage and were after Pedro Teixeira. A friar repeated what his uncle, one of the prisoners' jailers, had told him: the coachman had shouted that the king was inside, and the attackers stopped following.1 source1 source

Pedro de Azevedo, the Biblioteca Nacional archivist who published the trial file in 1921, accepted that the Duke was guilty. He found no sign that any Jesuit took part, and he judged that the Marchioness was killed without proof, without being heard and without a real defence. The court, he wrote, decided eleven lives in a few hours.1 source1 source

José Oscar de Almeida Marques points to the three months of secrecy, a trial and executions completed in under three weeks against every established legal practice, and an implausible motive. He writes that Carvalho e Melo himself set the details of the executions, and he does not rule out that the whole affair was staged. Patrícia Alves sees the trial as part of a wider drive to assert royal authority over the Church and the great noble houses.2 sources2 sources

After José I died in 1777, his daughter Maria I dismissed Carvalho e Melo and freed the surviving prisoners (told in our article on Maria I). Alorna pressed for a retrial, and on 23 May 1781 a board of judges revoked the sentence for the Marquis and Marchioness, their two sons and the Count of Atouguia, finding no proof that they took part. The Duke of Aveiro was not cleared.2 sources2 sources

The Crown's prosecutor lodged objections, Maria never ruled on them, and the new sentence said nothing about returning the confiscated estates. A certificate taken from it recorded that it had not been put into effect, and it was printed only in 1808, during the French occupation, without legal force.2 sources2 sources

The sentence ordered the houses of the condemned razed and their ground salted. In Belém the Duke of Aveiro's palace was pulled down, and in 1759 a stone pillar about five metres high, ringed with five carved bands, was set up on the site with an inscription telling passers-by why.2 sources2 sources

The ban did not last. Building resumed on the site in Maria I's reign, and what remains of the Chão Salgado, the salted ground, is a narrow alley off the Rua de Belém.1 source1 source

Up the hill, José gave thanks for his escape. On the spot where he was shot, work began in May 1760 on a church dedicated to Our Lady of Deliverance and Saint Joseph, designed by Giovanni Carlo Bibiena, and its first stone was laid on 3 September 1760. Work stopped more than once for lack of money and resumed in November 1779 under the architect Mateus Vicente. It is known as the Igreja da Memória.1 source1 source

The pillar still stands among the backs of houses in Belém. Its inscription names only the Duke of Aveiro, the one great noble whom the review of 1781 left condemned. In 1923 the remains of the Marquis of Pombal were moved into the Igreja da Memória, the church built to give thanks for the king's escape that night.2 sources2 sources