184 PROSPECTS OF PORTUGAL. 



the Cortes de Lamego, regulating the succession of the crown, is, by 

 some of the most profound Portuguese jurists, held to be strictly va- 

 lid. But it is not in a revolutionary age like the present that kings 

 must erect their thrones upon legitimacy or divine right. By what 

 right we would ask does Louis Philippe of Orleans sit on the throne 

 of France ? By what right did Leopold of Coburg leave the solitude 

 of Claremont to encircle his brows with the regal diadem of Belgium ? 

 By what right again, is the reigning Duke of Brunswick, Augustus 

 Louis William Maximilian Frederic, seated in the ducal chair of his 

 elder brother ? By the will of the people. Yet even by this admitted 

 principle proceeding, we acknowledge, from a less elevated and 

 more impure source than in the three instances we have enumerated 

 is Don Miguel king of Portugal, proclaimed by the voice of at least 

 four-fifths of the nation by whom he has for the last seven years been 

 supported, in spite of foreign aggression from without, and conspi- 

 racy and faction within. We must impress on our readers that it 

 would be difficult to eradicate from the minds of the Portuguese 

 themselves the intimate conviction, that Don Pedro is aiming at the 

 throne himself, and it is well known that, among the liberals, there 

 does exist a party who have that object in view. Miguel may be the 

 monster, the perjurer he has been represented, but if he violated his 

 oath as regent, and usurped his throne, so did Don Pedro. He 

 wrote, in his own blood, an oath, to be faithful to his father ; yet ere 

 the blood in which the impious oath was written had dried, he was 

 Emperor of Brazil. Don Miguel overturned the constitution which 

 he had sworn to defend. Don Pedro did the same with the first 

 charter of Brazil, surrounding the house of assembly with troops, and 

 threatening to blow it into the air if they did not dissolve their sitting. 

 Between these precious scions of the house of Braganza it would be 

 difficult to choose. When, in addition to what we have advanced, it is 

 recollected how impolitic have been all the measures of Don Pedro 

 since he entered Oporto that he has returned to Portugal at the head 

 of a body of foreign mercenaries, who are to be recompensed for their 

 services by the confiscated property of the church,* and moreover 

 that the honesty of his own views is more than questionable, we are 

 no longer surprised at the apathy of the nation or his want of success. 

 It is needless to repeat that in the conduct of the expedition, as well 

 as in its original conception, nothing like great or comprehensive 

 views were displayed ; but the most glaring error by far committed, 

 was overlooking the electric effect which the presence of the young 

 queen would have produced in Portugal. She was an element of 

 certain success. Her youth and innocence would have been an irre- 

 sistible appeal to the generous sympathies of the nation. Had Don 

 Pedro, with his daughter in one hand, and the constitutional banner 

 in the other, have landed in the bay of Cascoes, at the head of only a 

 few hundred native followers, we are firmly convinced that not a 

 trigger would have been drawn he would have entered the ancient 



* This may be unfounded, but it was the language held out by Don Pedro's 

 agents or their subordinates in London. 



