Legacies and Liberties

In 1821 the devoted royal chronicler Luiz Gonçalves dos Santos resolved to suspend the writing of his monumental Memórias of Dom João’s reign in Brazil. It had become too difficult, he explained, to “commemorate events that happened in the midst of such a restlessness of spirit and interests difficult to reconcile.” ¹ The most “extraordinary” of these events to which Gonçalves dos Santos referred was Dom João’s pledge of allegiance to a new constitution in February of that year. The concerted and ultimately successful demand for a written constitution had emerged only a few months earlier in August 1820. At that time, a diverse group of property owners, merchants, low ranking military officers, magistrates, clergy, and some members of the nobility in Porto, Portugal called on the king to return to Lisbon and proclaimed the “regeneration” of the Portuguese nation by convoking the Cortes, a formerly consultative institution representative of the kingdom as manifest in the reunion of the three estates (clergy, nobility, and the people), for the deliberative task of writing a new constitution. ² “Long Live our Good Father,” read one proclamation from 1820, “Long Live the Cortes, and with them the Constitution.” ³ The slogan made clear both the movement’s loyalty to the monarchy and the fact that this loyalty depended on the king’s own allegiance to the Cortes and a new constitution that, in turn, would circumscribe royal power and restrict it to the role of executor. The nation rather than the crown would be sovereign. The crown then recognized the legitimacy of the movement and the Cortes after constitutionalists in Rio de Janeiro staged a rebellion in February demanding Dom João’s allegiance to the new “constitutional system.”