Sebastião de Carvalho, Marques de Pombal (1699-1782), was the virtual ruler of Portugal for more than a quarter of a century during the reign of King José I. A ruthless moderniser, he undoubtedly learned much from his previous seven-year stint in England as Portuguese ambassador to the court of George II. When he took control in Lisbon after José’s accession to the throne in 1750, Pombal set out to rein back the power of the landed aristocracy and build up Portuguese industry and commerce. To do this it was necessary to confront the Inquisition, the most powerful arch-conservative force in the country. In 1751 he made all sentences passed by the Inquisition subject to review by the crown, and so began to draw the institution’s teeth. The Inquisition had been established in Portugal since 1547, on the Spanish model. Its apparatus of officials and informers, its courts and dungeons and torture chambers, its carefully stage-managed show trials and horrific burnings at the stake, inspired the same dread as the later secret police of totalitarian systems in Portugal and elsewhere. Its function was to wipe out religious dissent, but it was rootedly hostile to innovation of any kind and it was supported as an engine of conservatism by the landed aristocracy. The Inquisition bore especially hard on Jews, many of whom had been more or less forcibly converted as ‘New Christians’. It was also fiercely opposed to industrialisation and business, which it linked with ‘Jewish capital’, and many middle-class business people and traders fell into its claws.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 14:53:53 +0000
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