The Convention of Evoramonte: how Portugal's war of two brothers ended

In Évora on 26 May 1834, José António de Azevedo Lemos wrote the letter that ended a war. Lemos was a lieutenant-general and commanded what was left of Dom Miguel's army, gathered in and around the old Alentejo city. Two divisions of the queen's troops were closing in from the west and the north-east, and one of their commanders, the Count of Saldanha, had just sent him copies of his orders from Lisbon and a bundle of proclamations signed by Pedro.2 sources2 sources

That night the two marshals of the queen's armies, the Duke of Terceira and the Count of Saldanha, met Lemos at Evoramonte, a walled village on a hill near Évora. In a house in the village they signed the terms in duplicate. The manuscript copy in the National Library of Portugal ends with the place and date, Evoramonte, twenty-sixth of May 1834, and the names of the three men.3 sources3 sources

The document is usually called the Convention of Evoramonte (Convenção de Évora-Monte in older spelling). It ended a civil war that had lasted almost two years, between the liberals fighting for the young Queen Maria II and the absolutists who had acclaimed her uncle Miguel as king in 1828. Within a week Miguel was on a British warship, and he never came back.3 sources3 sources

The war was a quarrel inside the royal family that split the country. When King João VI died in 1826, his elder son Pedro, already Emperor of Brazil, gave Portugal a Constitutional Charter and abdicated in favour of his daughter Maria, aged seven. His younger brother Miguel, the hope of the absolutists, was to marry her and govern as regent. Instead, in 1828, he dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, had himself proclaimed king and annulled the Charter. Those stories have their own articles.2 sources2 sources

Liberals who escaped arrest fled to Galicia, France and England. In 1831 Pedro gave up the throne of Brazil to lead them, and in July 1832 his small army landed near Porto and took the city, where Miguel's forces besieged it for a year. In June 1833 a liberal expedition sailed south, its ships under Charles Napier, a British officer commanding Pedro's fleet, and its troops under the Duke of Terceira. It landed in the Algarve, marched north and entered Lisbon on 24 July 1833.3 sources3 sources

Miguel still held much of the interior, with his headquarters at Santarém on the Tagus. Abroad, the liberals gained the Quadruple Alliance, signed in London on 22 April 1834 by Britain, France, Spain and Pedro's government. Spain, whose own pretender, Don Carlos, had taken refuge with his nephew Miguel, agreed to send troops into Portugal to expel both princes, and a Spanish corps under General Rodil crossed the border. By then, the historian Fátima Bonifácio notes, the war was in practice already decided.3 sources3 sources

The last battle was fought in the hills east of Tomar. On 15 May Terceira, whose northern division had occupied Tomar the evening before, intercepted a letter from the Miguelist general Guedes ordering guns coming from Santarém to halt at Golegã. Terceira read it as a sign that Guedes meant to withdraw, and decided to attack before he could.1 source1 source

On the morning of 16 May he marched out of Tomar by the Atalaia road and found the enemy drawn up on the heights and in the valleys of Asseiceira, about a league and a half from the town. He formed three columns: Colonel Queirós on the right, João Nepomuceno in the centre, Colonel Vasconcelos on the left. The Miguelists held strong ground, used their artillery well and charged repeatedly with their cavalry, but the columns kept their formation and carried the heights.2 sources2 sources

The pursuit did the damage. Liberal cavalry broke the enemy squadrons and chased the infantry down the roads towards Punhete (today Constância), Torres Novas and Golegã. Napier, following Terceira's report, counts 1,400 prisoners, among them 74 officers, four standards and the whole of the Miguelist artillery, eight guns. He gives no figure for the dead, only “an immense number” killed and wounded. Napier, who arrived at Tomar that night with his own column, called it the only decisive action of the war that was fought and then followed up.1 source1 source

Asseiceira made Santarém untenable. On 17 and 18 May Miguel's army crossed the Tagus so quietly, Napier says, that Saldanha, watching the town, did not notice until it had gone. He got there in time to stop the enemy taking 11 guns with them, and scribbled a note to his wife on a half-sheet of official paper on which someone had begun one of Miguel's despatches: “I am writing to you in D. Miguel's cabinet.”2 sources2 sources

Miguel reached Évora on 22 May, where Don Carlos and his family had arrived before him. Pedro, who had come up to Santarém to take nominal command, sent his two marshals after him: Terceira crossed the Tagus at Santarém and marched on Estremoz, Saldanha crossed at Salvaterra and marched on Évora. Napier gives each about 9,000 men.2 sources2 sources

Napier reckoned that Miguel had gathered about 10,000 men at Évora, with 3,000 more ordered up from the Algarve and 1,500 brought by the French general Louis de Bourmont. Bourmont proposed picking 8,000 of the best troops and falling on one of the two liberal divisions before the other could arrive. At a council of war Miguel's senior officers refused. They were, Napier wrote, worn out and tired of war, and thought they had done enough.1 source1 source

From 22 May Lemos wrote to both marshals proposing a suspension of arms, and on the 23rd he offered Terceira a meeting at any hour and place. Terceira answered from the road that he would reply once he reached Estremoz. Saldanha halted for a day at Montemor-o-Novo and told Lemos about the Quadruple Alliance. Lemos replied that his government accepted an armistice and had asked the British minister in Lisbon to mediate.2 sources2 sources

Saldanha would have none of it. In the letters his biographer printed, he had promised to wait one day, not to agree an armistice, and his orders were to accept nothing less than a surrender. Napier, writing in 1836, says Saldanha did grant a 48-hour suspension of arms. Saldanha enclosed copies of his orders and announced that he would march next to Arraiolos and then, with Terceira, on Évora.2 sources2 sources

He added that Lemos would answer for the lives of the royal family in Évora if he exposed the city to an assault. Many men in the liberal ranks had seen relatives and friends put to death under Miguel, and Carnota, Saldanha's biographer, thought Lemos understood what a sack might mean. The reply accepting the terms came the next day.2 sources2 sources

The manuscript copy kept by the National Library of Portugal runs to four folios. It has two parts. The first is a grant, not a bargain: Pedro, Duke of Bragança, regent in the name of Queen Maria II, “moved by the desire” to end the shedding of Portuguese blood, grants to the forces gathered at Évora, and to anyone who submits to the queen, a list of nine articles. The second part is four articles in which Lemos, having accepted the grant for everyone covered by it, agrees how to carry it out.1 source1 source

The soldiers were sent home by the shortest safe route. Men from Beira Baixa were to march under their officers to Abrantes, from Beira Alta to Viseu, from Trás-os-Montes to Vila Real, from Entre Douro e Minho to Porto and from the Algarve to Faro, drawing bread and rations on the way and receiving passes for their homes on arrival. Alentejo men, militiamen and volunteers got their passes at once.2 sources2 sources

Miguel said goodbye to his army in a proclamation dated at Évora on 27 May. He praised his soldiers' valour and loyalty and blamed the foreign powers that had joined the government in Lisbon to force him out. Carrying on, he told them in the English version Napier printed, “can only lead to the useless effusion of Portuguese blood”.1 source1 source

The convention set 31 May for the troops at Évora to give up their weapons. Carnota says 16,000 men laid down their arms there, more than Napier's figures for the whole Miguelist force in the south, and, citing the historian Luz Soriano, that 138 of them were Spanish officers. The first day of June found Miguel at Sines, the small Alentejo port he had chosen, boarding the British frigate Stag under Captain Lockyer. Napier says the embarkation was managed with some difficulty and danger amid the jeers of a crowd that seemed ready to kill him, and Carnota describes insults and threats on the road.4 sources4 sources

The Stag called at Cascais Bay, where Admiral Parker arranged Miguel's passage to Genoa, the city he had chosen to live in. On 20 June 1834, soon after landing, Miguel issued a public protest: everything he or his agents had signed before leaving had been extracted by force, and the capitulation was null and worthless.3 sources3 sources

Lisbon replied with a law dated 19 December 1834. As Carnota summarises it, Miguel and his descendants were excluded for ever from the succession, his pension was revoked, and if he set foot in Portugal a military commission of seven officers was to order him shot within three hours of proving his identity, the whole process to take no more than twenty-four hours. It was turned on his followers too: in May 1837, Mesquita shows, the war minister, Sá da Bandeira, ordered army commanders to proceed under it against Miguelists caught in arms.2 sources2 sources

Miguel lived the rest of his life in exile, the later part in Germany. He married Princess Adelaide of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg, and they had six daughters and a son. He died in 1866. His remains, and Adelaide's, now lie in the Braganza pantheon at the monastery of São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon.2 sources2 sources

In Lisbon the terms looked too generous. When the news arrived on the night of 27 May, Pedro was at the São Carlos opera house with the empress and the queen. There were loud outcries against the leniency of the terms, inside the theatre and in the street, and the regent himself was insulted. One writer called for “eternal hatred” of whoever had advised such a convention. Mesquita notes that many people saw the amnesty as whitewashing what they had suffered under “the usurpation”, as the liberals called Miguel's reign.3 sources3 sources

The winners rewarded themselves quickly. A decree of 27 May made Saldanha a marquis and gave Terceira the honours of a relative of the royal family. On 28 May another decree declared that the peers who had petitioned Miguel to abolish the Charter had given up their seats, and the defeated side had no place in the House of Peers until the 1850s. Four days after the signing, a decree of 30 May abolished the religious houses of the male orders and took their property for the state, a measure with its own article.3 sources3 sources

Pedro did not live to see much of the peace he had won. On 18 September 1834 the Cortes declared Maria II of age, at 15, and on 24 September her father died at Queluz, in the room where he had been born. He was 35.2 sources2 sources

Not every Miguelist laid down his arms. In the Algarve, José Joaquim de Sousa Reis, known as the Remexido, took to the hills after the convention and led a guerrilla war in Miguel's name across the Algarve and the southern Alentejo, at its fiercest between 1836 and 1838. To the winners he was simply a rebel who had refused the amnesty. Government columns caught him near São Marcos da Serra at the end of July 1838; a court martial at Faro condemned him, and he was shot there on 2 August. With him, Mesquita argues, the Miguelist cause died too.1 source1 source

Evoramonte settled the quarrel over the crown in Maria's favour. The liberals' victory brought back the Charter of 1826, and with interruptions Portugal was a constitutional monarchy, with an elected chamber, until the republic of 1910. The Charter's later story, and the quarrels among the liberals themselves, have their own articles.2 sources2 sources

The settlement ended the war with an amnesty for the rank and file, ranks kept for officers, and the losing claimant paid to go away. It did not heal the division. Miguelist peers were kept out of the House of Peers until the 1850s, and Miguel's line kept its claim. Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza, today's pretender to the vanished throne, is Miguel's great-grandson and also descends from Pedro.3 sources3 sources