The House ought to pause before they acknowledged abloody usurper as the tyrant of a country so essential to England.

The ‘Portuguese Question’, as it may be defined stricto sensu, corresponds to the dynastic crisis following the death of D. Joao VI in 1826. More broadly, it covers the political, legal and theoretical issues surrounding the contest between D. Pedro, Duque de Braganca, and his brother, Infante D. Miguel, for the throne of Portugal. It may even extend to the final battle between the Ancien Régime and the new Liberal order, that is to say, between the old and contemporary Portugal. In 1834, under the terms of the Convention of Evoramonte, the ‘Portuguese Question’ was eventually decided in favour of Pedro's daughter, D. Maria, while D. Miguel was banished from Portugal ad æternum and his descendants excluded from the succession. In its earlier stages the ‘Portuguese Question’ was regarded as an essentially internal affair – despite the secret interference of Britain, Austria and Spain – but, following D. Miguel's usurpation in 1828, it developed into an international diplomatic conflict. Finally the ‘Portuguese Question’ became part of a much bigger conflict, the battle between the forces and principles of Absolutism and Liberalism. In the end it was the Liberals who won and their victory marked the end of what Lord Holland described in 1828 as the ‘associations called by the name of Holy Alliances […] which sat like an incubus upon the liberties of the world’. But while Canning had ‘shaken off the trammels and the shackles of the Holy Alliance’, as Holland also admitted, the final coup de grâce for Metternich's system came only with the perpetual banishment of his two chief agents in the Peninsula, infantes Don Carlos of Spain and D. Miguel of Portugal.

Liberal historiography usually present the years between 1826 and 1828 as dominated by a conspiracy to overthrow representative government in Portugal and to replace it by an authoritarian regime. The title of this chapter, ‘Road to Absolutism’, seems an appropriate description of the extraordinary events that led to Miguel's accession to the throne in 1828. At least in retrospect, the story resembles a Greek tragedy, in which history follows its course whatever the characters may want or seek to achieve. Thus Portuguese constitutionalism seems doomed, no matter what mortals may have done to save it.