Questioned, condemned, spared: the Marquis of Pombal's last years, 1777–1782

On the night of 11 May 1782 a coach drawn by three pairs of animals carried a coffin through the small town of Pombal, on the road between Lisbon and Coimbra. It stopped at the church of the friars' convent of Santo António. At the door stood the Bishop of Coimbra, Francisco de Lemos, one of the very few friends the dead man had left.2 sources2 sources

The dead man was Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal. For 27 years he had governed Portugal in the name of King José I. Now he had died in exile in a damp old house, after five years of lawsuits, interrogations and a royal decree that called him a criminal. He was 82.3 sources3 sources

Doctors had opened the body before it was embalmed and found the heart hugely enlarged. People came from the villages around for the funeral, the grandest the district had seen. The Benedictine preacher, Joaquim de Santa Clara, praised the man the court had condemned.2 sources2 sources

Carvalho e Melo was born in Lisbon on 13 May 1699 and baptised in the Mercês chapel, which his family held. A minor noble who had been a diplomat in London and Vienna, he became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and War when José I came to the throne in 1750, and Secretary of State for the Kingdom, the senior post, in 1756. He was made Count of Oeiras in 1759 and Marquis of Pombal by a decree of 17 September 1770, and history knows him by the second title.6 sources6 sources

His ministry is remembered for a handful of things, each the subject of its own story. He ran the response to the earthquake of 1 November 1755 and the rebuilding of Lisbon's Baixa. After shots were fired at the king in 1758 he oversaw the trial that sent members of the Távora and Aveiro families to the scaffold at Belém in January 1759, and that year the Jesuits were expelled. He reformed the treasury, the university and trade.3 sources3 sources

He also filled the prisons. Nobles, priests, magistrates and former colleagues were locked in forts on the Tagus, many without trial, on a simple royal order. His last act of power, on 23 January 1777, was to have the fishing village of Trafaria, across the river from Lisbon, set on fire to flush out men hiding there from military service.2 sources2 sources

Pombal's power rested on one man. On 12 November 1776 José I suffered a stroke from which he never recovered, and on 29 November his wife, Queen Mariana Vitória, became regent. The doors of the king's room were closed to the minister for the first time. After 1 February 1777 no government decision was published in his name.1 source1 source

He asked to resign on 7 February. José died on 24 February, and his daughter became Queen Maria I. In a short final will the king asked her to pay his debts and to pardon the prisoners of state, and the prisons opened at once. A count at the time put the political prisoners at more than 800; the historian Patrícia Alves writes of some hundreds.2 sources2 sources

On 1 March Pombal renewed his request and said he wished to leave Lisbon. The decree of 4 March 1777 accepted his resignation, let him keep his secretary of state's salary and gave him the income of a commandery of a military order. It did not thank him for his services; the only reason it gave was the late king's regard for him. A separate note warned him that the queen reserved the right to act if there was cause, “principally over misappropriations from the royal treasury”.3 sources3 sources

He left the next day for his house at Oeiras, his escort barely holding off crowds that shouted at him and threw stones. From there he wrote to his son, the Count of Oeiras.2 sources2 sources

His wife joined him on 9 March and they set off north in the rain. To avoid the towns along the Tagus, where he feared a hostile reception, they went by Bucelas, Sobral and Alenquer. Near Ota, at night, the marchioness and a daughter had to walk through the mud by torchlight while the broken carriage dragged the old man on. They reached Pombal on 15 March.1 source1 source

In Lisbon the new reign became known as the Viradeira, the turnabout. In April 1777 the bronze medallion with Pombal's portrait was taken off the pedestal of José I's equestrian statue in the Terreiro do Paço and replaced with the city's arms. So many satirical verses against him circulated that, Azevedo wrote, they would fill volumes.3 sources3 sources

Money was the first charge. Rumour said he had hidden millions in Dutch banks, while his defenders claimed he had left 78 million cruzados in coin in the treasury, besides many millions in diamonds. The examination of the public accounts found about 1,740 contos of réis, little more than 4 million cruzados, plus some 5 to 6 million cruzados' worth of uncut diamonds.1 source1 source

In Pombal the creditors came. Men who had never dared ask for their money now sued for it, and others claimed back land he had bought cheaply or taken while in power. By 1779 he was defending sixteen lawsuits. A decree of 20 March 1779, requested by the board of the Águas Livres aqueduct, ordered his property seized; he was accused of diverting water from two public fountains to his own houses in Lisbon.1 source1 source

The suit that ruined him was brought by Galhardo Mendanha. Mendanha had bought property from Pombal, felt cheated and stopped paying; Pombal had him jailed in a string of prisons ending in a fort on Terceira, in the Azores, his daughters shut in a convent and the running of his estate taken from him. Freed after the king's death, Mendanha sued for the sale to be annulled and turned his claim into an indictment of Pombal's whole government.2 sources2 sources

Pombal welcomed the chance. His reply reviewed his administration from 1750 onwards and attacked his enemies, living and dead, and he had seven copies made. They passed from hand to hand in Lisbon. The Desembargo do Paço, the high court, ordered those passages struck from the case and every copy destroyed, and the lawyers were jailed. A royal decree of 3 September 1779 condemned what it called an apology for his administration under the pretext of a civil suit.3 sources3 sources

At three in the afternoon of 9 October 1779 two horsemen dismounted at his door in Pombal. They were magistrates sent by the queen to question him: José Luís da França as judge and Bruno Monteiro as clerk. Told that he was asleep and ill, they insisted on seeing him at once and read the decree at his bedside, with the marchioness present. Then two servants helped him to the room where they waited, and the first session lasted two and a half hours.2 sources2 sources

He was very sick. Boils and sores covered his body, a constant itch kept him awake, and two servants sat by his bed at all hours scratching them. His doctors called it sarna castelhana, Castilian scabies, and treated it with viper broth; his biographer J. Lúcio de Azevedo believed it was leprosy. He told his son not to come: his wife and two daughters were nursing him, and the son should come for them when he died.1 source1 source

His defence was that he had only ever obeyed. Until 1759, he told his questioners, José I had decided everything himself, while the minister dealt with trade and shipping; the arrests and executions were the king's orders or the regular sentences of courts. Azevedo, who read the record, rejected much of this and thought it a miserable defence for a man who had run the country.1 source1 source

The charges that stuck were narrow. By Azevedo's summary he was accused of calling himself first minister when he had not been one; of claiming that the character of minister stayed with him after he resigned; of saying that secretaries of state could not be made to account for what they did in the king's name; of revealing state secrets; and of keeping drafts of the defence a decree had ordered suppressed. All came out of the Mendanha case. The abuses of 27 years of government were barely touched.1 source1 source

The last session, on 15 January 1780, is told two ways. Azevedo says the judge read him statements by former agents, among them the future police chief Pina Manique, who swore they had acted on his direct orders, and that the old man broke down in sobs, begged the queen for mercy and accepted the charges. Pombal's admiring biographer the Conde da Carnota called the claim that he asked for pardon false. Malhoa's painting of 1891 imagines the scene.2 sources2 sources

Then nothing happened for a year and a half. The court's attention had moved to the Távora case: on 23 May 1781 a board of judges cleared the memory of most of the nobles executed at Belém in 1759, a sentence passed while Pombal was in power. In Pombal he waited, arguing his lawsuits with his lawyer and growing weaker.2 sources2 sources

The verdict came as a royal decree dated 16 August 1781. Two of the judges whose advice it followed, José Ricalde Pereira de Castro and the crown attorney Azeredo Coutinho, had once been Pombal's trusted men on the commission that reformed the University of Coimbra.2 sources2 sources

The decree first declared that the judges had found him “a criminal worthy of exemplary punishment”. It left the Crown and anyone he had wronged free to pursue his estates for restitution and damages, during his life or after his death. His son wrote with relief that the decree had closed the door on any further proceedings.3 sources3 sources

His body had been failing for years. As early as May 1780 he wrote that he could hardly stand, and a carbuncle on his left shoulder let him lie on one side only; servants lifted him onto a sofa when his bed was changed. The government refused him leave to take the waters, at Caldas by Azevedo's account and at Coimbra by Carnota's, and he was too weak to move to a house near Coimbra that the bishop offered him. He outlived the decree by almost nine months and died at Pombal on 8 May 1782.3 sources3 sources

Even the funeral was punished. Azevedo says the preacher, Santa Clara, was moved to the monastery of Tibães for his praise; Carnota says he was confined in a convent in Cape Verde and that the bishop was reprimanded. The government refused to let the family take the body to the Mercês chapel in Lisbon, where Pombal had asked to lie, and according to Carnota it ordered his epitaph erased from the tomb.3 sources3 sources

His body stayed in the convent church, known as the Cardal, for 74 years. When Masséna's French army retreated through the town in 1811, soldiers broke open the coffin and stripped the skeleton; someone gathered the bones and closed the tomb again.2 sources2 sources

Rehabilitation began with the liberals. In the civil war that ended absolute monarchy, a decree of 10 October 1833 ordered his bronze medallion put back on José I's statue, calling him the Portuguese who had most honoured his nation in the previous century. In 1856 his remains were brought to Lisbon, arriving on 1 June, and laid in the Mercês chapel, where he had been baptised, in a coffin resting on two carved elephants.3 sources3 sources

The centenary of his death made him a hero. Students in Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto organised civic processions, lectures and literary evenings, and smaller towns joined in: at Valença, on the Minho, a poem in his honour was recited at the local theatre on 8 May. On 6 May 1882 Lisbon council named the new roundabout at the top of the Avenida da Liberdade the Praça Marquês de Pombal.3 sources3 sources

The festivities were political. Republicans and freemasons, campaigning against the return of the religious orders, celebrated the expeller of the Jesuits; the students' programme in Porto, echoing Lisbon's, asked the government to enforce strictly the laws of Pombal and of the liberal minister Joaquim António de Aguiar against the religious orders. In Porto the Catholic paper A Palavra called the students' procession a “civic masquerade” that mocked Catholic ritual, and traditionalists called Pombal a tyrant. The novelist Camilo Castelo Branco answered the praise with a hostile Perfil do Marquês de Pombal.2 sources2 sources

The Grande Oriente Lusitano, the main masonic body, proposed a monument in 1882, but the idea stalled until a competition in 1913, won by the architects Adães Bermudes and António do Couto with the sculptor Francisco dos Santos. The first stone was laid in August 1917 and again on 13 May 1926. In 1923 Pombal's remains left the Mercês chapel for the Igreja da Memória in Ajuda, the church built where José I had been shot in 1758.4 sources4 sources

The statue was finally unveiled on 13 May 1934, the 235th anniversary of his birth, paid for by public subscription. By then Salazar's Estado Novo dictatorship was in power, and it was choosing other heroes. According to Luiz Eduardo Oliveira, Lisbon council had voted in 1926 to make 13 May a municipal holiday; 1934 was the last year it was kept, and the city chose instead 25 October, the anniversary of the Christian conquest of 1147.2 sources2 sources

Pombal is still argued over. To his admirers he was the modernising reformer who rebuilt Lisbon and took on the Church; to his critics he was a despot who jailed hundreds without trial and enriched his family. The decree of 1781 branded him a criminal in the queen's name; the centenary of 1882 turned him into a national hero.3 sources3 sources

Azevedo thought the legend got the man backwards: after years of silence, he wrote, the grim despot was transfigured into a leader of liberty. Yet the name stuck. Most people in Lisbon still call his square the Rotunda, and the Metro station there was renamed Marquês de Pombal in 1998.3 sources3 sources