Maria Pia on the warpath – Fifty years of Portuguese history – Assassination of D. Carlos – the Portuguese Republic – Miguelists and Constitutionalists – Salazar and the Monarchists — The Braganza estates – Queen Maria III –

Rome was undoubtedly the place that suited most the volatile and multiple personality of Maria Pia. The fifties were when Fellini filmed the sweet and cruel life of a schizophrenic world of duchesses and cardinals, actresses and paparazzi. This slightly eccentric princess with an impeccable military husband found herself welcome there. A well-off woman, cultured and cosmopolitan, with an imperious charm enhanced by a growing myopia, she engaged in a great deal of charitable socialising. She lived at 25, Viale Mazzini, in a modern, comfortable part of the town, North of the Vatican. Before and during the war she had formed the acquaintance and acquired the protection of that conglomerate of pious lays and mundane clerics, that formed, in the finishing reign of Pope Pius XII, the sweet outer crust of the ruling body of a Catholic Church which had not yet begun the formidable aggiornamento that came with the following Pontiffs. Many women would have been perfectly happy with such a life. Not Maria Pia. The French press had been profuse about her adventures in Morocco. Not the failed expedition of the journalist, but the romantic ride across "the desert" of the adventurous Princess. So she wrote in French and published in Paris her Mémoires d'Une Infante Vivante, which met with some success as a social curio. It was, as we said, a charmingly insincere book, but it publicly established her claim to be the secret daughter of King Carlos I. From then on, she engaged in an extraordinary quixotic crusade, a war that gained in ferocity throughout her lifetime. As the Man of La Mancha, we believe she was deceived, misled, swindled, betrayed, and finally sadly ridiculed by the last windmills she encountered. The goal of her epic quest was no more nor less than being declared rightful Head of Name and Arms of the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg Braganza, Duchess of Braganza and legitimate Pretender to the Throne of Portugal.

To explain these circumstances, we must leave the good lady and dig into History, to focus on the half-century — 1907 to 1957 — through which she had already passed. Those fifty years saw two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, Nazism, the Holocaust, the dramatic materialization of nuclear weapons, and the splitting of the World along the Cold War lines. Personal histories, however princely, mattered very little and could be summed up as survival tactics. In these tragic fifty years, Portugal had lived its own particular tragedies: the regicide in 1908, the proclamation of the Republic in 1910, several failed attempts of monarchic restoration, sixteen years of chaos and the insidious seizure of power by Dr. Salazar. The Royal cause itself suffered from irreconcilable differences between the monarchist parties and the ambiguous policy of the Government as to the political force they represented. And finally, the death of King Manuel II created the problem of the family heritage and the estates of the House of Braganza.

The assassination of King D. Carlos and Crown Prince Luis Filipe, in Lisbon, at the corner of Terreiro do Paço and Rua do Arsenal, in the afternoon of February 1^st, 1908, has never been fully investigated, as the two gunmen were killed on the spot, allowing for several hypotheses as to who was behind the crime, particularly shocking in a country where the death penalty had been abolished many years earlier.

It can be supposed that the destiny of Maria Pia would have been clearer if her putative father's life had gone to its legitimate biological term. The destiny of Portugal, probably, would have followed another course. Perhaps a democratised constitutional monarchy, British-style, might have grown out of the modernizing action undertaken by the King and his Prime Minister. Perhaps not. We are here in the frustrating realm of speculation, and there is nothing to do but to accept the reality of a disaster.

D. Manuel II, the new king, aged 18, had in no way been prepared for his new responsibilities. On the advice of his mother and of the very men whose incompetence had brought on the crisis, he rashly dismissed Prime Minister João Franco. Franco's energetic action tended to transform and moralise government, answering to a deeply felt need of the people, and it was much less unpopular in grassroots Portugal than it was in Lisbon with the profiteers of the regime. Young Manuel was a good man, intelligent and dedicated, but he lacked both authority and astuteness. His U-turn did not lessen the tensions, quite on the contrary. Moreover, being inexperienced in more than one way, he fell into the honey trap that nature springs to young men, befriending and bejewelling the buxom French dancer Gaby Deslys, thus infuriating all the hypocrites in his kingdom. Finally, on October 5, 1910, he had to sail away with his family — and the Republic was proclaimed.

The installation of the new regime was, however, far from answering the unanimous will of the people, or even a positive majority. In fact, the 1^st Portuguese Republic never found its balance and, during sixteen years, violence following violence, on a background of World War and economic crisis, the successive governments proved incapable of solving the very problems that had caused the fall of Monarchy, the most important being an abyssal deficit of the budget. Portugal gradually sank into chaos, through a succession of civil wars and military coups, until a last coup, on May 28, 1926, started the process that was to put absolute power in the hands of a conservative professor of economics, Dr António de Oliveira Salazar, who was to remain in office for half a century.

The Monarchists never accepted the Republican government — or non-government, as it really should be called. They made unsuccessful attempts in the North of the country in 1911 and 1912, and again in January, 1919. In fact, the counter-revolution was doomed from the first, because of the deep divisions existing between the monarchists, and the lack of a coherent leadership.

The rift amongst the monarchists goes back to the death of King João VI in 1826 and the rivalry between his two sons. Pedro, the eldest, had proclaimed himself the Emperor of an independent Brazil, intending the Portuguese crown to pass to his own daughter Maria, aged seven. The youngest son, Miguel, wanted Portugal for himself. Pedro was a liberal, supported by the Freemasons; Miguel was an absolutist, supported by the Church. He proclaimed himself king Miguel I and refused any compromise with his niece. Pedro had to come back, abdicating the Brazilian crown in favour of his younger son (emperor Pedro II) and finally routed his brother's troops. The civil war ended with the Covenant of Evoramonte (May 26, 1834) by which Miguel accepted to exile himself. A subsequent law (Dec. 19, 1834) confirmed by the Constitution of 1838, deprived him and his descendants of any claims to the Portuguese crown, and even of their nationality, banning them forever from the lands of the realm. Pedro, as Pedro IV, lived only a few months more, and his daughter, Maria II, reigned until 1853. She married prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg (A close cousin of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria), who became King Fernando III of Portugal. Maria II and Fernando III were the grandparents of King Carlos I.

The memory of that civil war is still very much alive among those attached, sentimentally or philosophically, to the Portuguese crown — one of the oldest in Europe, having been founded in 1143. The Miguelists believed that divine right is the essence of monarchy. The Constitutionalists — in our opinion closer to Portuguese tradition — held that the King derived his power from a pact with the Cortes (the congress of chieftains, and now parliament) as Primus inter pares of the barons of the realm.

The matter was simple enough, although painful, while the King ruled. It became more complicated when the proclamation of the Republic threw the "Constitutionnalists" into opposition themselves. Total ideological and moral disorder reigned in the monarchist camp. Some had convictions rooted in medieval tradition and chivalric attitude. Others, survivors or heirs of the 1870 generation of Eça de Queiroz, were more liberal, and less sectarian, than many republicans; some were closer even to the socialists. The clash of personalities, amplified by family and clan loyalties, made the reunion of the monarchist party an impossible dream in spite of the endeavours of many experienced politicians. Moreover, you cannot make a monarchy without a monarch, and there was no charismatic leader capable of controlling their forces.

The young exiled King, D. Manuel II, still very much under the influence of his mother Amélie d'Orléans, was beloved by his supporters and respected by all as a person — but he was in no condition to impose his will to the party that his action had already weakened. In front of him, D. Miguel Maria, the son of Miguel I, though a wise and generous man, could not suddenly, at sixty or so, take up the part of war-chief. He would hesitate and dither, refusing at the same time to submit to his young cousin or even fight him.

A small group of men dedicated themselves to the cause of reconciliation. They saw it as politically necessary and dynastically unavoidable, for a simple reason: the stock of male heirs was rapidly dwindling. There were some doubts about the procreative qualities of king Manuel — who had married a German cousin (Princess Augusta Victoria de Hohenzollern, a great-grand-daughter of Queen Maria II) in 1913. His only uncle, D. Alfonso, who was perhaps not quite suitable to reign, had forfeited his rights by becoming the fourth husband of an American lady, Ms Nevada Stoody Hayes. As to the Miguelist branch, it was a large family, principally composed of daughters, and the first Don Miguel could be called one of the grandfathers of European royalty today. But the second Don Miguel died in 1921, after his eldest son, D. Miguel, the Duque of Viseu from 1878-1926, had made an unequal marriage, renounced his rights to the throne and moved to the USA. His second son, D. Francisco José had died in 1919 after a somewhat dissipated life. The only remaining heir was D. Duarte Nuno, the exact contemporary of Maria Pia, aged fourteen. So the family quarrel was bound to end — for lack of participants, if Maria Pia had not started it again. The men of goodwill failed, however, in their attempt to reconcile the Princes — whose advisors were not all willing to play the game. Conferences in London and Dover in 1909 only resulted in accusations of ill-will and treachery. A half-hearted agreement was reached later in Paris (April 17, 1922), by which the authority of Manuel II was recognized by all parties, under the provision that the Cortes (never clearly defined as an elected Parliament or a gathering of Barons) would designate his successor in the absence of a direct heir, establish the Political Constitution of the country, and ratify a solution to the religious question negotiated with the Holy See. But this so-called "Pact of Paris" was never fully implemented nor accepted by the various Monarchist factions, whose disarray added to the national confusion.

The advent of Salazar, in 1926, raised false hopes in the royalist camp. The majority of those concerned saw his regime — the "Estado Novo" — as a doomed hybrid of Republic and Monarchy, and scrambled to prepare their comeback. Salazar, however, was here to stay, and he was not interested in restoring the monarchy. His main, and perhaps at that time only, objective was to restore the country's finances. And in this he succeeded, gaining the world-wide reputation of a wizard of economy, by a few commonsense and housewifely measures, imposed with an inordinate energy and obduracy against the impotent gesticulations of a few 19^th Century-style verbal politicians and pantomime soldiers. When King Manuel died suddenly in 1932, the Republican Government gave him a royal funeral, and his body, returned from his English exile onboard HMS Concord, was solemnly buried in the Royal necropolis of Lisbon (S. Vicente de Fora). In Salazar's mind, the magnificent ceremony, followed by huge crowds, was to close definitively the book of the Portuguese monarchy. On the following year, by agreement with the widow Queen Victoria-Augusta and the Queen-mother Amélie, next-of-kin to the deceased monarch, the estates of the House of Braganza were amalgamated into a Public Trust, the Fundação da Casa de Bragança. D. Duarte Nuno called this act a confiscation and protested formally. Salazar merely shrugged and said, "The King died without an heir". And that was that.

During the following years, Salazar confirmed his "grey" dictatorship, and rallied to his "National Union" a great number of moderate monarchists, while followers of Don Duarte Nuno were still divided into "the Monarchic Cause" — a rather well structured party, and small extremist groups, often attracted to radical forms of totalitarianism. Portugal greatly benefited from its neutral position in WW2, particularly in comparison with Spain, bled dry by three years of Civil War, but Salazar did not understand to what extent the world had changed after it. He accepted the invitation to be a founding member of NATO, but refused to endorse the Marshall Plan, intending to go on guiding his country "alone and proud". As the people felt a greater urge for freedom and democracy, as the political police became more and more ruthless and inquisitive, the "Doctor" who had been twenty years in office already, found he needed a stronger conservative base. Conscious of the ambiguity of his regime, he thought that "the question (of a monarchic restoration) should not been raised... and... should be left suspended as a later possibility, faraway and indefinite... to satisfy the monarchists and justify in their own eyes the support they granted (to the Estado Novo)". Having weighed the character of Don Duarte Nuno and decided that the Prince could constitute no threat to Civil peace and order, Salazar struck a deal with him. In consequence, the Parliament passed a law on May 27, 1950, to revoke the 1834 Law exiling Don Miguel and his descendants and the 1910 Law exiling all the Royal family. The Prince returned to Portugal and was permitted to receive a modest allowance from the Braganza Trust. He lived mostly on other sources of private income, including grants and legacies from wealthy followers. For Salazar, who deluded himself into believing that his regime was for ever, the case was closed.

It was solemnly re-opened on July 15, 1957 when a group of Portuguese citizens, led by a man called João António da Costa do Cabedo, addressed a petition to Maria Pia, which reads as follows:

We, the undersigned, considering

1. the precarious and anguishing situation in which lives, presently, the people of Portugal;
2. the absolute lack of freedom and rights of the Portuguese People, originating in the present police state;
3. the existing difficulties to the moral, intellectual and artistic development of our People;
4. the failure of the human results proclaimed by the idealists who contributed to the implantation of the Republic, which idealists were later substituted by opportunist elements.

The ten signatures that follow are hardly representative of a great surge of monarchic opinion. Some of these worthy people, however, bear names suggesting good connections. Costa Cabedo himself comes from a good family of the island of Madeira. We do not know if he himself took the initiative of creating the petition, or whether it was prompted by Maria Pia herself. It marks, however, the beginning of a war she was to fight for almost another half century, and make her, until now a smiling character in the social comedy, the protagonist of a strange drama, a sort of Queen Lear, stalking through an errant life and times that perhaps were not quite her own.