The death of Empress Leopoldina in Rio de Janeiro, 11 December 1826

At four in the morning of 8 December 1826, in the palace of São Cristóvão on the Quinta da Boa Vista outside Rio de Janeiro, the Empress of Brazil dictated a letter to her sister Marie Louise in Parma. Her friend the Marquesa de Aguiar wrote it down.2 sources2 sources

Leopoldina asked her sister to protect her children and to send money for her poor and for her debts. She complained bitterly of Domitila de Castro, who she said had seduced her husband, and named the Marquesa as her only friend.1 source1 source

Her husband was not there. Emperor Pedro I had sailed south in late November to the war in the Cisplatine province, today's Uruguay. In the room next to the sickroom, his ministers and the Austrian envoy kept watch, and when Domitila tried to visit, the navy minister, the Marquês de Paranaguá, made her leave the palace.2 sources2 sources

Leopoldina died at a quarter past ten on the morning of 11 December. She was 29. The ministers wrote to Pedro the same day, and they were worried: the people of Rio, they warned, put the Empress's illness down to moral causes, not physical ones.1 source1 source

Leopoldina was born in Vienna on 22 January 1797, a daughter of Francis, who took the title Emperor of Austria in 1804. Her elder sister Marie Louise was married off to Napoleon in 1810. Francis gave his children a scientific education, and Leopoldina grew up with a passion for the natural sciences, especially botany and mineralogy.2 sources2 sources

The marriage was agreed on 28 November 1816. For João VI it was a diplomatic coup, an alliance with one of Europe's great houses that loosened Portugal's dependence on Britain; for Vienna it was a link to the riches of Brazil. Leopoldina began learning Portuguese. In April 1817 a portrait of the groom reached her, and she wrote to Marie Louise about it.1 source1 source

The wedding took place by proxy in Vienna on 13 May 1817, João VI's birthday. She sailed from Livorno in mid-August aboard the Portuguese ship D. João VI, first set foot on Portuguese soil at Madeira on 11 September, and reached Rio on 5 November. The marriage was blessed in the city's royal chapel the next day.3 sources3 sources

Emperor Francis turned his daughter's wedding into a scientific expedition. Prince Metternich, Austria's leading statesman, was in overall charge, and Karl von Schreibers, director of the imperial natural history cabinet, wrote the instructions. Two Austrian frigates, the Austria and the Augusta, carried scientists to Rio.2 sources2 sources

Fourteen researchers and painters took part, among them the expedition leader Johann Christian Mikan, a Prague professor, the mineralogist and botanist Johann Baptist Emanuel Pohl, the gardener Heinrich Schott, the landscape painter Thomas Ender and the taxidermist Johann Natterer. They had no limit on money or time, which the Vienna museum calls unique in the history of expeditions.2 sources2 sources

Three scientists from outside Austria went along: the Bavarian zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix, the Bavarian botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and the Italian botanist Giuseppe Raddi. Spix and Martius wrote Reise in Brasilien, and the journey is known worldwide as the Spix and Martius expedition. The Vienna museum calls that an irony of fate, since the two came along as guests.2 sources2 sources

Natterer stayed 18 years, until 1835, much of it in the Amazon. More than 150,000 objects reached Vienna, where a Brazilian Museum opened in 1821 in the Johannesgasse to hold them. When it closed in 1835 most went to the natural history cabinet, forerunner of today's Naturhistorisches Museum; part went in 1928 to what is now the Weltmuseum.2 sources2 sources

Leopoldina collected too. She rode out to the Corcovado and the Tijuca forest to gather and draw plants and animals, and sent parakeets, a monkey, seeds and animal skins to her sister. In June 1822, fearing revolution, she told her father that if the worst came she would go home with her daughters, and hoped for the post of mineralogist he had once promised her.3 sources3 sources

Her first letters from Rio were happy. Then came the heat, the insects and a court with little to do. It was easier, she told Marie Louise in December 1817, for a stone to turn into milk than to get permission to go to the theatre. Her mother-in-law, Carlota Joaquina, made her uneasy, and Pedro came to control the allowance her father sent her, so that she had to borrow to pay her servants.3 sources3 sources

She was pregnant almost without pause. Between 1819 and 1825 she bore six children who lived past birth and lost at least two pregnancies early. The heir she was expected to produce came last, on 2 December 1825.1 source1 source

The liberal revolution in Porto in August 1820 demanded a constitution and the king's return. João VI first proposed to send Pedro to Lisbon and keep the pregnant Leopoldina and their daughter in Rio. Neither would accept the separation, so the king sailed himself in April 1821 and left Pedro as regent.2 sources2 sources

The Cortes in Lisbon then set about dismantling the Rio government and ordered Pedro home. Leopoldina, by her own conservative lights, saw sooner than her husband that the Bragança crown could only be kept in Brazil if he led the movement for autonomy. With her backing he refused to leave on 9 January 1822, the Dia do Fico. In May, 186 women from Bahia sent her a letter thanking her for her part in his decision.3 sources3 sources

In August Pedro rode to São Paulo to settle a quarrel in the provincial government. A decree dated 13 August set out her powers. At the council session of 14 August he proposed, and the councillors agreed, that the Princess Royal should preside over the council of ministers and state in his absence. She was 25.3 sources3 sources

On 2 September dispatches arrived from Lisbon: the Cortes planned to send more troops to Brazil and had insulted Pedro. Leopoldina called the council together and chaired the session. Lucas José Obes, the procurator for the Cisplatine province, read a speech, which the minutes summarise.2 sources2 sources

The council ordered the funds of the Douro Wine Company seized in reprisal, called for defence plans and asked the military men for a plan of campaign. The minutes say nothing more, but according to the editor of the published minutes the session also decided, under José Bonifácio's influence, to send word to Pedro at once. Two couriers, Paulo Bregaro and António Ramos Cordeiro, rode for São Paulo with letters from Leopoldina and from the chief minister, José Bonifácio. They found Pedro on the afternoon of 7 September near the Ipiranga stream, outside São Paulo, and after hearing the letters read he declared the break with the Cortes. He was acclaimed emperor on 12 October, his 24th birthday, and crowned on 1 December.3 sources3 sources

The new empress urged her father to accept an alliance with the empire, and told him where her loyalty would lie if he refused. Recent historians stress her conservatism. Andréa Slemian of the Federal University of São Paulo told Pesquisa FAPESP in 2022 that Leopoldina dreaded social upheaval and fought for a moderate independence that kept the prince on the throne, which is what happened in 1822. Others give her a smaller part. The historian Moacyr Flores found nothing in her published letters to show that she provoked the break, and saw her regency as closely guided by José Bonifácio.3 sources3 sources

On the same trip to São Paulo in 1822, Pedro met Domitila de Castro Canto e Melo, who had left her husband, an army officer, in 1819 after he attacked her with a knife. In 1823 Pedro brought her whole family to Rio. They had five children, of whom two daughters reached adulthood, and he made her a viscountess on 12 October 1825 and Marquesa de Santos a year later. Ambiel reads the title as another snub to José Bonifácio, whose family came from Santos.1 source1 source

Leopoldina had to accept Domitila as a lady of her household, which gave her the right to travel with the imperial couple. She did, on the visit to Bahia in early 1826. Her few friends had gone: the Andrada brothers had lost favour, and Maria Graham, her daughter's English governess, had left the court. In September 1826 she wrote that princesses were thrown like dice, their luck depending on how they fell.3 sources3 sources

In 1826 Pedro also became, briefly, King of Portugal. João VI died on 10 March, and Pedro gave Portugal a constitutional charter and abdicated the Portuguese crown in favour of seven-year-old Maria da Glória, who was to marry her uncle Miguel.1 source1 source

In October 1826 Domitila's father fell ill, and Pedro spent almost a month at his bedside, away from home, which led to a fierce quarrel with Leopoldina. Around 8 November, pregnant again, she had a bout of what she called bilious fever.1 source1 source

Before Pedro left for the south there was a beija-mão, the royal hand-kissing ceremony. Leopoldina refused to attend, saying she was unwell. Pedro, who thought she was avoiding Domitila, was angry, and they argued. He sailed on 22 or 23 November, depending on the account, and she took over the regency again.2 sources2 sources

Her physician was Vicente Navarro de Andrade. Bulletins went to Pedro from the ministers, the Marqueses of Inhambupe, Baependi, Caravelas and Paranaguá, and the bulletin of 2 December noted that the foetus seemed to have died only very recently. She was treated in her own room, about forty years before doctors began to use antisepsis.1 source1 source

While she lay ill, a story spread that Pedro had kicked his pregnant wife in the belly and caused the miscarriage. Another, a palace legend that Ambiel found in no published work, had him push her down the stairs so that she broke her thigh. People in Rio blamed the emperor and his mistress for her death, and word of his treatment of her reached Europe, where he struggled to find a second wife.1 source1 source

Not every historian believed it. Pedro Calmon, in his 1943 life of Pedro I, called the kick a mere rumour and put her death down to the miscarriage. Others repeated it, among them Isabel Lustosa's 2006 biography of Pedro I. The dates count against it: Pedro had left Rio more than a week before the miscarriage, and the bulletins describe it as spontaneous.1 source1 source

Leopoldina was buried in the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Ajuda in Rio. In 1911, when the convent was demolished, her remains went to the Franciscan convent of Santo Antônio, and in 1954 to the imperial crypt under the Independence Monument in São Paulo, later joined by Pedro and his second wife, Amélia.1 source1 source

In 2012, with the consent of the imperial family's descendants, the archaeologist Valdirene do Carmo Ambiel and doctors at the University of São Paulo studied all three. Leopoldina's skeleton went through a CT scanner. The report lists dislocated joints and a rib cage deformed after death, but no fractures in the skull, spine, pelvis, thigh bones or any other bone examined.2 sources2 sources

Ambiel's doctoral thesis of 2023, supervised by the pathologist Carlos Augusto Pasqualucci, reads the bulletins alongside the scans. Bones cannot show an infection, so the diagnosis rests on the bulletins: a miscarriage at about twelve weeks, then bleeding, fever and convulsions, in a sickroom without antiseptic practice. Pasqualucci's conclusion is puerperal sepsis, the infection that killed many women after childbirth or miscarriage at the time, in line with part of the older literature.1 source1 source

Leopoldina's death left seven-year-old Maria da Glória without a mother just as she became Portugal's queen in name. In 1828 her uncle Miguel was acclaimed king in her place. Her father gave up the Brazilian throne to his five-year-old son in 1831 and sailed to Europe to fight for her, and the civil war of 1832 to 1834 put Maria II on the throne. She reigned until her death in 1853.1 source1 source

Her son reigned in Brazil as Pedro II until the monarchy fell in 1889. Through Maria II and Pedro II, both Bragança crowns of the nineteenth century passed to Leopoldina's descendants.1 source1 source

Her letters, 315 of them in the 2006 edition, were gathered from archives in Brazil, Austria and Portugal. They record life at the court in Rio, the crisis of 1821 and 1822 as seen by a Habsburg, and a marriage that went wrong. In Vienna, the specimens from her wedding expedition are still used by researchers.2 sources2 sources