Brazil's Emperor had heart
Pedro I became Brazil's first emperor in 1822
By Troy Lennon
In August this year a military plane landed in Portugal carrying a strange cargo. It was the embalmed heart - preserved in formaldehyde - of a man who died in 1834. That man was Pedro IV, who had served briefly as king of Portugal for two months in 1831, but before that he had spent nearly eight and a half years as the first Emperor of Brazil.
His heart made the trip to commemorate the bicentenary of Brazilian Independence from Portugal, which he declared in September 1822, before being crowned Emperor on December 1, 1822. His reign as emperor ended with abdication in favour of his five year old son, so that he could return to Portugal to ascend the throne there, only to abdicate again in favour of his daughter Maria da Gloria.
He was an unusual ruler. One who supported liberal ideas, who could also be autocratic, but who also did not cling tightly to power at all costs. He was never meant to ascend the throne, was never educated to rule, and his reign in Brazil only happened as a result of his family being thrown out of Portugal by the Napoleonic war.
He was born in the Queluz Royal Palace, near Lisbon in Portugal, in 1798, the fourth child and second son of Prince Dom John, of the ruling House of Braganza. Pedro’s father had taken over running the country since 1792 when Dom John’s mother Maria I (the first woman to rule in her own right in Portugal) became clinically insane due to the disease porphyria, but only officially became Prince Regent in 1799. At the time Pedro was third in line to the throne, but he moved up in the line of succession when his older brother Francisco died in 1801. Pedro’s mother, the Spanish Princess Doña Carlota Joaquina, was incompatible with his father in many ways, and there were rumours of her infidelity. The couple split in 1802, living in separate palaces, and Pedro came to despise her. In 1805 a plot by Dona Carlota to have Dom John arrested as incompetent to rule, like Maria I, was uncovered and the rift deepened.
The family was forced to flee Portugal when Napoleon’s army invaded in 1807. Dom John had prepared for the invasion, planning to move his court to the Portuguese colony of Brazil ahead of Napoleon’s incursion to avoid being deposed by the French. It was a massive operation involving moving around 10,000 people, aboard seventeen ships, with the assistance of the British Royal Navy.
They set sail in November 1807 and arrived in Brazil’s capital Rio de Janeiro in January 1808. Although Brazil was thriving, its population was still relatively small and it lacked a palace grand enough for the royal family. They were forced to live in cramped conditions in the ViceRegal Palace. Carlota hated Brazil and spent much of her time there plotting to take over Spanish dominions in South America. Pedro spent his time reading and writing, learning to speak or at least be able to read Latin, French, English and German. But although he spent two hours a day studying, he lacked a depth of learning, preferring instead to ride and train horses, becoming a skilled horseman but also learning to shoe horses. He liked to hunt in the Brazilian forests. But he also turned his hand to working with wood and even had a talent for music, writing his own compositions.
Despite a failed rebellion by Brazilians fighting for independence from Portugal in 1798, the king was well received when he and his family arrived. In one of his first popular moves he broke Portugal’s trade monopoly that had been vexing local traders. He also set about making Rio a fit city for a monarch, widening and paving streets, installing street lights and expanding the palace. But most importantly, Brazil began to operate as a sovereign state, no longer as a colonial arm of a foreign power but with its own government. In 1814 Napoleon was finally pushed out of Portugal, but John did not rush home to assume control. In 1815 John declared Brazil to be an equal partner in a United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.
In 1816 at the death of Maria I, John finally became King of Portugal, and he seemed content to rule his kingdom from Rio, but he was under pressure to return. In August 1820 a military junta in Portugal recalled the Cortes, Portugal’s parliament, wanting to introduce a more liberal constitution and demanded the king’s return. Pedro had not really been educated to take power, nor ever really consulted about affairs of state; that had always been the role of his older sister, Maria Theresa, who had been groomed as John’s successor. So he was surprised when his father asked him to go to Portugal to negotiate with the rebel junta.
John soon had doubts about where Pedro’s loyalties lie, so he delayed his son’s departure. In February 1821 Portuguese soldiers loyal to the ideas of the rebels in Portugal mutinied. Without being asked by his father Pedro went to talk to the mutineers, then took their concerns to his father to get him to grant certain concessions. Pedro also interceded in April when a meeting for the election of representatives to the Cortes was taken over by rebels calling themselves the government, he brought in troops to dispel the revolutionaries as his father wavered. Brazil was split between those loyal to Portugal who wanted John to return to Portugal and Brazilians who feared their new found autonomy would be lost if the king left.
In April John decided to return to Portugal, so he left Pedro as his regent in Brazil, knowing that there would likely be a move to become independent and warning him that “if Brazil breaks away, let it rather do so for you, who will respect me, than for one of those adventurers.”
In 1822 when the Cortes tried to dissolve Brazil’s central government and insist on Pedro’s return to Portugal he declared independence. He was crowned Emperor of Brazil, he even composed the music to the Independence Anthem, set to words by the poet Evaristo da Veiga, which is still sung on Independence Day every year. He was a popular ruler, but squandered his political capital by dissolving Brazil’s national assembly before they could introduce a liberal constitution in 1823. In 1824 he introduced a less liberal constitution, but it helped avert him being deposed.
King John’s death in 1826 meant that Pedro had become king, but to take the throne he would have to either give up the throne of Brazil or unite the kingdoms. Instead he brokered a compromise, putting his seven year old daughter, Maria II, on the throne, under the regency of his younger brother Miguel (an absolutist who had been exiled to Austria), who would become her husband and rule until Maria came of age. But Miguel reneged on his promise and deposed Maria, forcing Pedro to abdicate in Brazil, in favour of his five year old son Dom Pedro II, and return to Portugal in 1831 to fight for his daughter’s claim to the throne. In the civil war that followed, Miguel was forced to abdicate and Maria II restored to the throne in May 1834. Pedro died in September of that year from tuberculosis. Maria reigned until her death in 1853, while giving birth to her eleventh child (which was stillborn).
His son, Pedro II managed to hang onto power under a succession of regents during a period when the country teetered on anarchy. He reigned as Emperor until he was deposed in a military coup in 1889. He considered his deposition to be his retirement, knowing that with his sons dead and Brazil unlikely to accept one of his daughters as monarch, the Empire would end with him. He died in exile in Europe in 1891.