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THE writer of this delightful
book is a true lover of Portugal, and wishes to make the reader love that
beautiful country as he does himself, and by the charm of his style and his
enthusiasm he has his reader to a great extent in his thrall. He traces the
history of Portugal from the Roman times to the present, when, as oldest
ally of England, it is now fighting side by side with Britain in France. And
he shows why this is so. He tells how the alliance between England and
Portugal, then a struggling kingdom only recently carved out of Galicia and
the Moorish territories, began in 1147, and has lasted ever since.
English troops assisted the Portuguese in their crusades with the Moors, at
Aljubarotta in 1383 against the Spaniards, and have since helped them at
every difficult period, save when the religious differences interfered. The
first King of the House of Aviz, married Philippa of Lancaster, and the
royal line for a time was greatly under English influence. The writer
describes the great discoveries and conquests of Portugal under Prince Henry
the Navigator and King Manoel, and shows how the reign of the latter with
his policy of Spanish marriages, rich and prosperous as it seemed to be, was
really leading up to the moral bankruptcy of Portugal, when, after the loss
in Africa of the visionary King Sebastian, it fell, through the death of an
effete Cardinal, to swell the Spanish Empire of Philip II., and so, for a
period, lost its independence. One wishes that Camoens had had more
followers stirred by his song of the glories of the past to oppose the
Spanish yoke, and one wonders what might not have been had Queen Elizabeth
only supported Dom Antonio with more vigour.
The author is a little less
convincing when he describes the Portuguese 'revolt' or War of Freedom in
1640, for he does not explain the reason satisfactorily while writing of the
Portuguese captivity.' The reason we take it is very much the same as that
which prevented Scotland being merged in England. The Portuguese must have,
through Galicia or Lusitania, absorbed some forgotten race absolutely
hostile in mind to Spanish morgue^ and it was the spirit of this people
which time and again separated the two countries, which, geographically,
were almost one. It is strange how the marriage of Charles II. to the
Portuguese Infanta still unites their two peoples further, though through it
Portugal lost Bombay and much of its Indian territory, and its chief town in
Morocco. Into the latter history, the Methuen Treaty which almost gave the
pleasant city of Oporto to the British, the Napoleonic changes which forced
the Court to flee to Brazil, and the Peninsular War, we need not enter
except to praise the way they are dealt with ; we also pass the Civil wars
which led to the fall of the odious Miguel and the rise of the not romantic
Maria da Gloria. The Saxe-Coburg Kings are well described, and, except for
the excellent phrase, 'the Court and through it the country were controlled
by barons of finance, many of them German Jews, whose pillaging and
plunderings were all too recent to be respectable,' the writer is temperate
about their virtues and vices. He is also calm about their removal from the
Throne and the discomforts of their adherents. He is illuminating on the
Republic, its beginnings, policy, and doings, and we are grateful for his
political instruction.
We think he is a little too
insistent on the prevalence of the Jewish strain in Portugal, and not enough
so about the very mixed, Oriental and African, blood in the nation, which in
its native alliances has followed the deliberate policy of Albouquerque. We
think also he is not a very careful genealogist. One or two of his
statements need scrutiny, and Isabella the Catholic especially would be much
surprised to see herself (twice) called 'sister' of La Beltraneja!
A. Francis Steuart
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