Fernando II, the King-Artist, dies in Lisbon: 15 December 1885

On Sunday 13 December 1885 the old king was at the opera. The Teatro de São Carlos, Lisbon's royal opera house, was giving Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, and Fernando II was in a box. He was 69, and everyone in Lisbon knew he was gravely ill.1 source1 source

He had cancer of the face. The disease had damaged some of his muscles and, for some days, his sight: he saw everything twice. In one of the intervals he got up to leave the box and misjudged the way out.1 source1 source

At first it seemed nothing. He slept well, and Monday morning was one of the best he had had. Between four and five that afternoon, while taking a cup of broth, he suffered a haemorrhage of the meninges, the membranes around the brain. He lost consciousness and slipped into a coma.1 source1 source

That night, with the theatres full, a rumour that he was dead ran through the city. Few believed it until the bell of São Vicente de Fora, the church of the royal tombs, began to toll at an unusual hour. He was not yet dead. He died at a quarter past two on Tuesday 15 December, in his rooms at the Necessidades palace, with his family around him.3 sources3 sources

Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg was born in Vienna in 1816. His father, Duke Ferdinand, was a brother of the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg, ruler of a tiny German duchy; his mother was a Hungarian princess whose father, Prince Koháry, owned a fabulous fortune. His first cousins included Victoria, the future British queen, and Albert, who would marry her, and as boys he and Albert spent months together at the Coburg castle of Rosenau. In his teens his uncle Leopold was elected the first King of the Belgians.3 sources3 sources

Portugal needed a husband for its queen. Maria II had first been proclaimed queen in 1826, aged seven, and the civil war that put her back on the throne ended only in 1834. Her first husband, Auguste de Beauharnais, died of diphtheria two months after the wedding. Her advisers wanted a Catholic, liberal prince from a family too minor to alarm Britain or France.3 sources3 sources

They married by proxy on 1 January 1836 and in person in Lisbon on 9 April. Fernando was 19. The marriage contract said he would become king only when a son was born, and he took the title in 1837, after the birth of the future Pedro V. He was the second and last king consort Portugal ever had.4 sources4 sources

His first year brought the September Revolution of 1836 and a failed palace coup against it, the Belenzada, in which he played an unhappy part. The next fifteen years were full of conspiracies, risings and a civil war. Fernando learned to stay in the background as the queen's adviser. Seven of their children survived infancy, and the couple took great care over their education.3 sources3 sources

Maria II died in childbirth in November 1853, aged 34. Pedro was only 16, so his father ruled as regent until he came of age in 1855. “His regency was excellent,” his biographer Maria Antónia Lopes told Visão. “The country was at peace and, unless it was necessary, he did not intervene.”1 source1 source

After that he never held office again. In 1861, the year his biographer calls his dies irae, his day of wrath, the family fell apart: more of his children died, among them the young king, and his second son came to the throne as Luís I. Later Fernando turned down two crowns, those of Greece and Spain, and firmly rejected the idea of uniting Portugal with Spain.2 sources2 sources

He had taken drawing lessons since the age of nine and carried a sketchbook everywhere. He etched, painted, decorated ceramics and sang, and he signed his work “Fernando Saxe-Coburgo fecit”. The Christmas tree was a Coburg custom he brought to Lisbon; he drew himself as Saint Nicholas handing out presents to his children beside it.3 sources3 sources

He collected all his life. He had started buying old prints as a boy, and by his death they filled 114 folders. In 1836, newly arrived in Lisbon, he bought a Limoges enamel that is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. His handwritten inventory of more than 200 pieces of goldsmiths' work, ivories and enamels ends almost every entry with “Propriedade minha”, my own property, to keep his things apart from the Crown's.1 source1 source

In a country with almost no art buyers, he bought paintings from the Romantic generation, among them Tomás da Anunciação, Cristino da Silva, Metrass and Resende, advised them and found them government money for their studies. Every Portuguese Romantic painter owed him much of his success, the art historian António Mourato writes. When Fernando died, Resende wrote in his diary: “The best of men has died!”1 source1 source

He also fought for buildings that were falling apart. Once the religious orders were abolished in 1834, Portugal's convents stood empty and neglected. After visiting Batalha in 1836, Fernando persuaded the government to pay for repairs to a monument for which, he admitted, he had “a kind of fanaticism”. Restoration began there in 1840 and went on for the rest of the century.3 sources3 sources

Mourato credits him with the rescue of the Jerónimos monastery in Belém and of the convents of Tomar and Mafra as well as Batalha. The public gave him his nickname: the Rei-Artista, the King-Artist.2 sources2 sources

On a peak in the hills above Sintra, between Lisbon and the Atlantic, King Manuel I had founded the monastery of Our Lady of Pena in 1503 and given it to the Hieronymite friars. The 1755 earthquake damaged it. The friars stayed until the orders were dissolved in 1834, and then the building was abandoned.3 sources3 sources

In 1838 Fernando bought the ruin at public auction with his own money, with all the land around it. Because he paid for it himself, Pena was his private property, unlike the Necessidades palace, which belonged to the Crown. That difference would matter in 1885.2 sources2 sources

He first meant to restore it as a summer house. Instead, under the direction of Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, a German mining engineer living in Portugal, the king and queen added a whole new palace between 1842 and 1857. It has lookout towers, a drawbridge, a tunnel, and Manueline and Moorish details. The monks' cloister became the family's private rooms; the New Palace held the state rooms. ICOMOS's 1995 evaluation names a different designer, the Portuguese architect Possidónio da Silva, but Parques de Sintra credits Eschwege.2 sources2 sources

Around it Fernando laid out a park of winding paths, lakes, lookouts and follies, and planted trees from every continent. Parques de Sintra, which manages it, gives the park 85 hectares. ICOMOS, assessing Sintra for UNESCO in 1995, gave 210 hectares, a figure that included the Tapada do Mocho and the Moorish Castle on the next hill, which Fernando also owned.3 sources3 sources

Elise Hensler was born in Switzerland in 1836 and moved with her parents to Boston at the age of 12. She finished her training as a singer in Paris, had a daughter by an earlier relationship, and sang in Milan and Porto before reaching São Carlos in 1860. There she made a name as the page Oscar in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, and she and the widowed king fell in love.4 sources4 sources

They married nine years later, on 10 June 1869, after Fernando's cousin Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, made her Countess of Edla. The marriage was morganatic: she took none of her husband's rank and never became part of the Portuguese royal family.3 sources3 sources

The marriage caused a scandal. “There were brutal campaigns against the couple, who were booed when they appeared in public,” Lopes told Visão. The pair retreated to Pena, where since 1864 they had been building an Alpine-style chalet that Elise designed, on the western edge of the park. Together they filled the park with plants from around the world.4 sources4 sources

Fernando had written his will by hand on 13 January 1885 and sealed it. He left his wife everything the law allowed him to dispose of freely, and named the Pena estate with all its dependencies as part of that bequest. He asked his son, the king, to protect her and to let her live at the Necessidades if she wished. The rest went in legacies to his household, his servants and the junior staff of his palaces in Lisbon and Sintra.1 source1 source

Pena was already treated as a national treasure, and people had assumed it would pass to the royal family. The king's grandson and godson, the future Carlos I, was an adult who needed to marry and had almost nothing of his own, while his father Luís had serious money troubles.2 sources2 sources

The Lisbon newspaper Novidades claimed the countess had guided the old man's hand as he wrote and called hers a “hooked claw”. The satirical weekly Pontos nos ii mocked the paper, joking that it all but wanted her caged at the zoo once she had been plucked of her Pena, a pun, since pena also means feather. The idea that Elise had manipulated a failing old man stuck. Lopes rejects it: “I know letters from the time of the will that show he was well. He really wanted to do it.”2 sources2 sources

One friend spoke up for him. The writer Ramalho Ortigão argued in O Occidente that, as the reigning king's father, Fernando had kept faithfully to his “political duty of being obscure”, and that in his will he had acted as an artist, on emotional impulse, not as a political king, a patriot king or a father of a family.1 source1 source

When his embalmed body was carried to lie in state, the countess walked in the procession with King Luís and the queen. On 18, 19 and 20 December the public filed past in great numbers. The funeral, on Monday 21 December, crossed Lisbon on a wet, blustery day, the hearse followed on foot by deputations of performers from every theatre in the city and by the management and some of the singers of São Carlos. That afternoon he was laid in the royal pantheon at São Vicente de Fora, beside the coffin of Maria II.1 source1 source

The countess held out for four years against legal action and public pressure. Then she sold the palace, the park and the Moorish Castle to the state for more than 400 contos in government bonds (a conto was a million réis), keeping the use of her chalet and garden. Hugo Xavier, the curator of Pena, thinks the estate was a poisoned gift anyway: she could hardly have afforded to run it.3 sources3 sources

Carlos I and Queen Amélia spent summers at Pena from the 1890s. Amélia was there on 5 October 1910 when news came that the monarchy had fallen. The palace was classified a National Monument that year and opened as a museum in 1911. Elise died in 1929.3 sources3 sources

Portugal's nomination of Sintra for the World Heritage List put Fernando at the centre of the case: the shaping of the Sintra landscape, it said, reached its height under this “artist-monarch”, who turned the Pena monastery into a fabulous palace, ringed it with a park of rare trees and replanted the forests. ICOMOS agreed, recommending the site in 1995 as a pioneering example of Romantic landscaping with an outstanding influence elsewhere in Europe.1 source1 source

The palace Lisbon feared would be lost to the nation became one of its most visited places. In 2018 the Park and National Palace of Pena recorded 1,976,367 visits, second only to Lisbon's São Jorge Castle among Portugal's monuments. The Moorish Castle, which Fernando owned and left in the same will, came fifth.2 sources2 sources

Popularity brought its own trouble. In the 2019 high season the palace took up to 12,000 entries a day. By 2024 palace tickets were sold for a set date and time, with a maximum of 5,100 visitors a day spread over 17 slots, a cut of more than half.1 source1 source

His family reached across Europe. Of his eleven grandchildren, three became kings: Carlos I of Portugal, Frederick Augustus III of Saxony and Ferdinand I of Romania. The Portuguese royal line he founded with Maria II ended with the death of Manuel II in 1932. His many other descendants live mostly in Germany and Austria; as his biographer notes, none lives in Portugal.1 source1 source