Maria Screams September 13, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
A WIBT moment from early nineteenth-century Portugal. Thousands of well dressed but harassed men and women are milling and pushing in Lisbon harbor before a score of great British and Portuguese ships. The tense silence is suddenly broken as a piercing scream begins from behind. The woman’s voice, from a royal carriage is continual. Maria I, Queen of the Portuguese empire, intones, with desperation, ‘Ai Jesus, Ai Jesus!’
29 November 1807, three weeks of waiting ended when the news came that Napoleon’s invading armies had reached the edge of Lisbon. The royal family had debated its position through this period, uncertain of what to do. Should they flee abroad, perhaps to their possessions in Brazil, or should they stand and treat with the French as their Spanish cousins had decided to do?
On the morning of the 29 the royal family decided. They would flee. As many as fifteen thousand courtiers rushed to the harbor and were brought on to waiting ships. With a British escort they would pass into the Atlantic and over to the new world. The tail was about to wag the dog. Brazil was to become the capital of a global empire. But what of the woman in the carriage?
Meet, poor mad Queen Maria I of Portugal. Maria (1734-1816) had been ‘melancholy’ all her life: but from the late 1780s, in her fifties, she had begun to show signs of mania, a mania that got steadily worse. She was convinced that the world was out to get her and her family: she had a particular fear of ‘the people’ and believed that it was her destiny to be ripped apart by the masses, before being lowered into hell.
One psychological assessment of Maria politely notes how ‘[t]he high prevalence of consanguinity and insanity among the Portuguese monarchy and their antecedents probably contributed to their mental health problems.’ But Maria wasn’t helped by living in a revolutionary age. By most assessments an impressive monarch, she lived through assassination attempts and read of gruesome rebellions in nearby countries, accounts that would have done nothing to calm her nerves.
And so we come again to November 1807. As the long chain of carts and coaches approached the harbor Maria started her banshee howl: a habit well known to her intimates but something that must have chilled the more occasional courtiers and the British and Portuguese sailors there. Was she screaming for her country, herself or for the new age Napoleon’s storm troopers were ushering in?
Interestingly it has been argued that Maria was decisive in the decision to leave Portugal. Her son, John VI, the prince regent was a decent man, but a ditherer and considered sending only part of the royal family abroad and remaining to talk to the French after a token fight. Maria who had moments of lucidity, demanded, instead, that the family go all together or remain in Lisbon together. A few hours later she was bundled into a carriage and taken screaming to Lisbon harbor. At sea she was quiet and then she became hysterical arriving in Brazil, imagining the Brazillian loyalists greeting her to be demons set to entrap her soul…. The strongest argument against monarchy has always been against cruelty to those poor men and women who have to wear the heavy crown and become our living symbols, Maria among them.
Other WIBT moments from history: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
