A very strange statement – Amelia Laredó – More lying – A Sephardi saga – Maria Pia's investigation – Portugal in 1958 – The Humberto Delgado Case – The Red Princess –

The Costa Cabedo petition to Maria Pia as "Queen Maria III", dated July 1957, raises a few questions. There is no way to know how spontaneous it was, or if it had been more or less triggered by the good lady herself. Of course she had made friends and followers in Portugal in her past, and somewhat furtive journeys. Of course she had plenty of opportunity to meet the ever-growing Portuguese émigrés all over Europe. Costa Cabedo, who lived near London, and had spent many years in Brazil, visited her in Rome and in Paris. Of course, in her book "Memoirs of a living Infanta," she had laid the foundations to be acknowledged as King Carlos' secret daughter. But did she really plan to assert her rights in such a flamboyant and aggressive manner — or was she not quite satisfied to be only "Almost a Princess," in the words of Fernández Flórez? This is doubtful, because, in her book, published in 1957, far from claiming for herself the virtual crown of the Lusitanian Kingdom, she calls out for another heiress, completely unexpectedly, to receive the Braganza inheritance. In Maria Pia's own words, the rightful heir to her own father's throne would have been a distant cousin, Princess Isabella of France, the eldest daughter of the Count of Paris and Princess Isabella of Brazil. She makes it very plain in an awkward last chapter of her "Memoirs" where she bizarrely addresses Queen Amélie (the lawful wife of her putative father), begging her to declare herself in favour of Isabella, and closing her book with an extraordinary phrase: "I claim no sceptre but my pen, no crown but that bequeathed by my father and mother: my dignity."

This clear note of haughty detachment was soon replaced by the harsh sounds of a war trumpet, and in the subsequent years, Maria Pia fought relentlessly to be acknowledged as a formal pretender to the Throne of Portugal and the one and only Duchess of Bragança. The Costa Cabedo petition was certainly not enough to explain this change of mind. The political situation in Portugal, as we shall see later, was probably a factor, as was to be a painful family event: the death of Maria Pia's mother, that made her, from then on, the sole and only depositary of the secret of her birth.

Maria Amelia Laredó e Murça had spent the war years in Brazil and returned to spend her last years in Rome with her daughter, who had moved to 22, Via Panama, a quiet enough street bordering Villa Ada. Her death was registered on April 8, 1958, by the Parish church of San Roberto Bellarmino. She is named as Noble Dame Maria Amelia, from the Barons of Laredo (dei Baroni Laredó). Now this is frank imposture. Of course it is a pious and understandable lie, but it is a lie. To the risk of enormously disappointing our readers, we must say that there never was a Baron or Baroness Laredó of any ilk. Not in Portugal, not in Spain, not in Brazil. Not anywhere. Amelia's parents could be nothing but rich Brazilians, perhaps of the sort that were called "rubber barons" on account of the origin of their fortune. Of course it was enough for the personnel in luxury hotels and expensive restaurants on the Continent, as well as some indulgent gossip editors, to call them respectfully "Monsieur le baron" and "Madame la baronne," in expectance of healthy tips. But there could only be barons in a Republic, and no King, no Emperor, no Pope, had ever given them the most humble title.

The name of Laredó, however, is far from being unknown. It is an ancient name, essentially worn by descendants of a Jewish-Spanish community of the North coast of Spain (Laredo being the name of a town and port on that coast). The community was forced by the Inquisition, in the 15^th Century, either to convert as "new Christians" or to emigrate. Most held on to their faith and moved to Portugal, to Gibraltar — then Portuguese land — and to Morocco. When the Inquisition eventually came to Portugal and expelled them again, members of the Portuguese branch went to Brazil. We find, in the XVIII^th Century, one António José Laredo, architect of the Governor's palace in Santa Maria de Belén. The greatest part of the Laredos settled in the triangle of Tangiers, Tetuan, and Alcazarquivir; they were highly respected people, some of them Rabbis. In the XIX^th Century, they swarmed out to Algeria, France, and Brazil. The name of Laredo is still extant in these countries. Amelia's father was probably the grandson of one of those industrious and rapidly prosperous sephardi migrants, who sailed from Tangiers in the mid-1800s, and who founded a Jewish community in the state of Pará. So, they were a Brazilian bourgeois family, certainly honourable and distinguished, probably rich, perhaps very rich, but definitely not a baronial family. Of course the use of a fancy title is not a crime. It does not matter much that Armand Maurice Laredó was not a baron. But why did this woman give so much importance to her own fictitious nobility? The obvious answer is that she was building up the case that her liaison with her Royal lover had not been one of those sordid little affairs that the King, as many men, might have had in town — but an important and somewhat dramatic romance. We shall consider this point later on, as it was to gain greater importance in Maria Pia's presentation of her case.

Whatever Amelia said to her daughter before her death did not appease any doubts or hesitations that she might have had. On the contrary, there is evidence that, in that year 1958, Maria Pia engaged in a thorough investigation of her own case. In fact, she proceeded to reconstruct her story. Looking back, it is obvious that she had discovered that there was no physical proof of her origin that could be produced in any court. No birth certificate — nothing. Not even the merest love letter from the King to her mother. Or course she knew who she was, and many people above suspicion knew it and had always known it, but there was not a scrap of paper to show it. She had married at eighteen. Before that, being under age, she had no passport. She was not even a Portuguese national according to the law. The first identifying document giving her name as Saxe-Coburg Braganza may have been her Cuban passport. This was not enough to establish her claims in Portugal. So she proceeded to sort out her papers.

She went to Spain, because the first record of her existence had been on the day of her christening, in San Fermin de Los Navarros. We have seen that the church and its registry had been burnt in 1936. The act of baptism of Maria Pia had, however, been restored in 1939 at the request of the lawyer who had witnessed the ceremony, D. António Goicoechea y Cusculluela. This made matters rather simple in 1958. Goicoechea was no more, but Maria Pia talked with his niece and applied to the Bishop of Madrid-Alcalá. On May 27, 1958, Father Alejandro Martínez Mayordomo, in charge of the parish of El Carmén y San Luis, certified that D. Maria Pia of Saxe-Coburg-Laredo, of the house of Braganza of Portugal, had been baptized on April 15, 1907; that she had been born in Lisbon on March 13, 1907; and that her parents were D. Carlos de Saxe-Coburg-Savoy, of the house of Braganza in Portugal, and D. Maria Amelia Laredó y Murcia, from Cametá (State of Pará, Brazil). The matter had been settled by the Provisor, Ecclesiastical Judge and Lieutenant-Vicar-General of the Diocese, Dr. Moises Garcia Torres. Maria Pia took this precious certificate to the Archbishopric-Patriarcate of Lisbon, and had it transcribed to the parish registers of the church of St Isabel, on October 16, 1958. By this simple move, she believed she had definitively established her birth and parentage, and consequently secured her claims. The succession law to the Crown of Portugal followed the normal primogeniture line — as in England, and contrary to the exclusive male primogeniture or "salic" law followed in France. Since the troubled times when independence had been a dramatic issue, one formal condition was that the new monarch be born on Portuguese soil. Maria Pia, officially the last surviving daughter of King D. Carlos, officially born in Lisbon, qualified to become, in Costa Cabedo's words, Queen Maria III.

Now this was quite a different matter from being a Princess-in-exile, queening it with superannuated ladies-in-waiting and stiff-jointed equerries in the drawing rooms of war-profiteers and nouveaux-riches. This was a genuine political move, well timed, and onw that could find support in the discontented Portuguese people, as the year 1958, was to mark a major political crisis for the dictatorship. After meeting his first goal of cleansing the country's finances, Salazar had organized it on lines of heavy and omnipresent state intervention in the economy and narrow conservatism in politics. Which meant bureaucracy, authoritarianism, censorship, corruption, and inefficiency. Salazar opposed industrialization; the correlative introduction of unions was anathema to him because it was a risk of social disturbance and communist infiltration. The benefits of the first twenty years of his action were now dwindling, while the other European countries went through a phase of rapid growth, thanks to the U.S. Marshall Plan, and to migrant workforces. Considerable numbers of Portuguese workers employed in Western Europe regularly came back to their still medieval villages, and were able to draw comparisons in terms of consumption and freedom, that, despite their relatively harsh circumstances, were never favourable to the homeland. The dictator, meanwhile, clinging to his certainties, was more and more cut off from reality, and various cliques around him vied for influence — and for his succession. The stability of the regime depended, among other factors, on the balance of power between Salazar — the President of the Council of Ministers — and the President of the Republic, who had no executive role as Head of the State, but retained enough power to be, was he so minded, a very unpleasant dog in the manger. President Carmona's accession in 1951 had already provoked a crisis. Now Carmona's own successor, Craveiro Lopes, came to the end of his tenure and did not seek re-election (or, rather, was dissuaded from seeking it by Salazar himself). For the first time perhaps since the 1926 coup, Portugal saw the perspective of an open election to the highest seat of power. The official candidate was Admiral Tomaz, a headstrong nonentity who had been for years a very compliant Naval Minister. The opposition candidate was General Humberto Delgado, whose name is now largely honoured as that of a great democrat. Humberto Delgado was that very dangerous kind of character: the charismatic peacetime soldier. Born in 1916, he had never been in action, earning his nickname of "the Fearless General" the easy way. He had been one of the most enthusiastic followers of Salazar, and a willing agent of the fascist-style build-up of the Corporatist state. Now he wanted to "return to the pure ideals of the 1926 military coup." His politics were unclear, adding up to a few demagogic slogans about poverty and national prestige. His ambition was clear: to be the President and to oust Salazar and his team. From the beginning of his campaign, he was so popular that even the clandestine socialist opposition supported him. He had, however, all the makings of a fascist leader.

Maria Pia had felt no hostility towards Salazar in the beginning. Quite to the contrary, she had seen in him, as many others, the providential man who had saved the country from chaos. We have no record of her reaction when he had confiscated the Braganza Trust. But then she was very young, and busy with her Cuban husband and her Spanish press career. It was only gradually that she realized what the despoliation meant for her. Over the years, she became acutely conscious of the importance of money and of the immensity of the Braganza fortune. She wanted to provide for her daughters. She saw herself as the sole survivor of her royal branch, and the guardian of a tradition. When her half-brother's widow, Queen Dowager Augusta Victoria, had married a German aristocrat, Count Carl Robert Douglas, she had questioned her right to retain certain family jewels. Salazar's policy to the Monarchists and to Duarte Nuno did not suggest that the dictator was in any way sympathetic to her cause. In 1957, she had gone to Lisbon and interviewed Craveiro Lopes. The President, of course, had been polite and non-committal, but Salazar had refused to see her, and dismissed the matter with these unkind words: "I have no use for a second Pretender. The one I have already is quite enough for my headaches." The publicized retort was taken as an insult and Maria Pia sent into the fray whatever forces she had in support of Delgado. She probably fancied him as a modern-day Monk. She would give him her full support, he would be President, fire Salazar, and, as Franco had done in Spain, set down an Order of Succession organizing her comeback.

The presidential election was due on June 8, 1958. Delgado's bombastic declarations, at mid-May, triggered massive crowds demonstrating in his favour. Salazar reacted with massive police repression, and had the polls rigged. Delgado came up with 25% of the votes, against almost 75% for Admiral Tomaz. The General denounced the fraud and demanded cancellation. On the very day after the election, Maria Pia was in Lisbon, and met him. He greeted her as "a charming woman with liberal principles," listened to her story, and admitted it was a shame that she had been deprived of her rights by the "conspiracy" of Salazar and the Miguelist party, and that she had to hide behind dark glasses to visit him in their own country. (In fact, Maria Pia always had to protect her weak eyesight, and dark glasses are not uncommon in Lisbon on a bright June day). He declared himself a Republican, but promised that, under his rule, Portugal would be a country where she could enjoy the full rights of any citizen. This was the beginning of an alliance to which Maria Pia dedicated considerable effort. According to Mário Soares, "the relationship between Delgado and the Duchess, ever extremely cordial, would fill a volume of colourful and picturesque anecdotes." Obviously, these two charismatic egoists enjoyed playing a mutual game of seduction.

After a few hectic weeks during which the international press paid unwonted attention to Portuguese politics, the election was not called off, there was no coup, and Delgado left the country to avoid being taken by the political police (the PIDE) which had arrested a good many of his followers. He went to Brazil — the usual place of exile for the Portuguese — and from São Paulo chaired his party, imaginatively called the National Independent Movement. Maria Pia generously contributed to funding it and eventually offered hospitality in Rome. Then Delgado moved his headquarters to Algiers, a surprising choice for a man who had promised to guarantee the integrity of Portugal's empire, as independent Algeria was actively supporting various Marxist-inspired, Moscow-guided African liberation movements. But of course he had not much choice: his was a losing war. The Western Powers needed Salazar, his nice, clean, well-controlled little Portugal, with the Azores as a mid-Atlantic strategic stopover and the mouth of the Tagus as a unique mooring site for large tankers and aircraft carriers. The Communist Party, sparse and persecuted, but well organized and disciplined, had no confidence in the brass-hat demagogue and realized that his victory over Salazar would not help its fight in any way. The U.S.S.R., of course, monitored it closely, always with en eye on Spain where it could expect to regain, some time after Franco's death, the influence lost after the Civil War. Finally, in 1965, Delgado tried a clandestine return to Portugal, and he was assassinated at the Spanish border by agents of the Political Police, acting on information given by Communist secret sources.

Maria Pia had supported Delgado to the end. This is abundantly documented by their correspondence and by Delgado's own memoirs. It is extremely doubtful that the General's gratitude would have survived his eventual victory. He was, after all, a politician. Monarchic restoration was never on his agenda. As for returning to its "rightful owner" the Braganza heritage, he probably could never have afforded such a move, equally unpopular for the Republican base of his followers and for the diehard extreme-right miguelists. Moreover, the Braganza Trust had been now more than a quarter of a century in existence, and its dissolution would have meant disappointing the trustees — all good people who had acquired with their trust a good deal of access, respectability and influence.

The ill-fated Delgado experience nevertheless launched Maria-Pia into the turmoil of Portuguese politics, and she became a figure of Portuguese opposition, a part she was to play until the dictatorship fell in 1974, earning thus the reputation of a "Red Princess" Among the smart Left Bank set.