Never satisfied for long with anything, Beckford was back in Sintra in 1793, having meandered around Europe in between. He was thirty-three by then, older but not wiser and even more extravagant. Things had changed in the meantime. Republicanism was in the air, the queen had quite lost what wits she had upon hearing of the fate of her French ‘cousin’ and when he finally obtained the long-desired audience with her she was of no interest to him, his former friends had clipped their wings accordingly and the ecclesiastics were nervous. Revolutionary France was a nuisance as far as Beckford was concerned, it limited travel and conduced to drabness, but he overcame that by arriving this time with a train of eighty-seven servants and functionaries, all “indispensable”: he’d gone a shade off his head too, it would be very interesting if some of their observations had been recorded. He plunged back into Roman ceremonial as an ironical diversion: the “fine stage-effects, glittering crosses … processions, perfumes, clothes and music, from the deep tones of the organ to the delightful squeakings of the Pope’s eunuchs…” Of this second occasion, though, there are no journals, just an extremely entertaining account of his travels published many years later and probably not by any means always sticking to the strict truth. His acquisition of Monserrate therefore remains obscured in a certain amount of mystery.
Beckford was a characteristically eighteenth century figure, yet at the same time there was nothing remotely ‘classical’ about him, and if that word as contrasted with ‘romantic’ means anything other than a convenient label to designate historical styles, he would have to called an arch-romantic in the sense that he valued and exercised his own individuality, will and imagination at the expense of any social considerations or recognition of an ordained orders of things. Beethoven and Napoleon, at the same time expanding the same convictions in music and action, were the great heroes of the moment. Another one, soon to become famous or notorious for the same reasons, turned up in Sintra too.
George Gordon Byron, having inherited a baronetcy which strictly speaking only entitled him to a very minor milordship, made provision for a regulation grand tour vaguely in the direction of Albania and Constantinople by having had tailored to his own specifications two preposterous ‘oriental’ costumes at enormous expense and which most admirably suited and flattered his handsome face and figure. Thus equipped, he took a boat to Lisbon in the summer of 1809, proposing to travel overland from there. He was enchanted by “the little village of Cintra … the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world”, though he was only twenty one and had never been anywhere else. He visited what was left of Montserrate and walked or rode to the Pena Convent – a much more interesting excursion than it is now, right up into the crags, and his youthful imagination quite got the better of him, supposing the monks to subsist entirely on oranges and that the stone crosses on the way marked the graves of wayfarers who’d been assassinated on the ascent. But something else went terribly wrong. He conceived a violent hatred for the Portuguese and never abated it. Three years later, when his poetic account of his travels appeared and made him into a literary lion overnight, several Portuguese historians and writers were so outraged they invented a story that he’d been involved in, and lost, some contretemps over a lady’s honour; but there was no evidence for that or any other indication of what had upset him. It was not, evidently, even allowing for the author’s passionate temperament and outspokenness, any ordinary aversion that might arise from some incidental travel accident. Certain lines from the first Canto in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are widely quoted in every tourist brochure and in most of the accommodations in the town:
Lo! Cintra's glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.
Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen,
To follow half on which the eye dilates
Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken
Than those whereof such things the bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlock'd Elysium's gates?
The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd,
The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrown'd,
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep,
The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch below,
Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow ….
And so on (stanzas XVIII and XIX)
Others are not; for example:
But whoso entereth within this town,
That, sheening far, celestial seems to be,
Disconsolate will wander up and down,
'Mid many things unsightly to strange ee;
For hut and palace show like filthily:
The dingy denizens are rear'd in dirt;
No personage of high or mean degree
Doth care for cleaness of surtout or shirt;
Though shent with Egypt's plague, unkempt, unwash'd, unhurt.
Poor, paltry slaves! yet born 'midst noblest scenes --
Why, Nature, waste thy wonders on such men?
(Stanzas XVII and XVIII)
And there’s quite a lot more in the same vein, which perhaps don´t bear too much scrutiny. As Rose Macaulay rather tartly observed, the word Eden tends to be used too casually by those who have never seen the deserts of Mesopotamia, and indeed if I see the words “Sintra’s glorious Eden” once more I’ll be sick. For all its ingenuities and wordsmanship, Childe Harold is very much the work of an exceptionally precocious and conceited young man, which is exactly what Byron was (a “scribbler”, as he said, he was too good to ever have any false pretensions as to his self-importance in that respect, and later in Don Juan he redeemed himself triumphantly by tempering an indolent sarcasm with a fine observation and a great generosity of spirit based on experience). All the English complained as a matter of course about the ‘dirt’ everywhere else (as tend to do people who themselves have something dirtier to conceal), but the fact was that he arrived in Portugal at a particularly unfortunate time, when Anglo-Portuguese relations were strained to say the least and when British soldiers on the rampage, and perhaps others, were being attacked or murdered – attacks they were all too prone to provoke - in the streets of Lisbon. Very possibly Byron’s dignity was offended in some such way and affected his impetuous judgment. To make a long story very short, Napoleon’s imperial ambitions had been set on bringing England to her knees by closing all continental ports to her trade. He issued an ultimatum to the Portuguese, prohibit English vessels from Lisbon or he’d invade – there were some devious negotiations going on in Spain at the same time to frighten them further. The English counter-attacked, and deeming the Regent (João, the second son of poor Maria, to whom had been passed over the reigns during her final dementia) too powerless and vacillating to resist they proposed to have him removed to Brazil and take charge of the Portuguese army themselves. Very much on the horns of a dilemma and with much hand-wringing, Joâo disgracefully if not altogether unreasonably was persuaded onto a British boat and abandoned his kingdom, followed by those of the alarmed nobility who saw themselves as candidates for the guillotine. In November 1807 Junot’s troops marched and occupied Lisbon for five days, the population resisting and quickly ejecting them. William Beresford took over-all control of the Anglo-Portuguese and Napoleon’s army was routed, but it was Portugal who was the loser again, because according to the Treaty of Cintra signed by the foreign combatants – and which to be fair to him also roused Byron’s honourable indignation - the French were allowed to help themselves to what they could pick up if they retreated. In the course of the Peninsular wars their armies laid waste to all of Iberia, dragging after them a lengthy baggage train of loot. Mme Junot, self-styled Duchesse de Abrantés, made off with the famous Portuguese Apricot, a large pink diamond. It was last seen around her neck at the Paris Opéra, and then never again. Two more offensives against Portugal were launched and thwarted under the over-all command of the Duke of Wellington, one just before Byron arrived and the next in the year after he’d left. The Portuguese remained wondering if they wouldn’t have done better after all under the French and were ready deeply to resent the British for high-handed interference. Wellington, as the ostensible victor, was himself in no hurry to depart, even with the heap of crafted silver the Portuguese had given him as a bribe to go and which, never used, still decorates Apsley House in London. Nor were the officers and gentleman and their good ladies who surrounded him. For a while the Portuguese were obliged to look through the windows of their Sintra houses as the English comported themselves within, as usual disparaging the natives and suffering agreeably from the disadvantages of being abroad. In any case, Byron didn’t stay more than a few days, nothing like enough to understand anything very clearly. He proceeded across Spain, which he thought much more sympathetic because he got a lot more attention there, and eventually found his own poignant destiny in the mystic east, in which region of the imagination he and Beckford, though they never met, had something in common.
Like all passing English travellers with no better invitations, Byron put up at Lawrence’s Hotel, a hostelry which had been doing a good trade for the last half century. Under the original Mrs Lawrence (or Lawrence Oram, exactly how or when she arrived here is not known) it seems to have been a jolly and well-run establishment, and it continued to be so under her descendents throughout the nineteenth century even when newer and larger local accommodations appeared. In 1949 the leasehold was acquired, surprisingly, according to the Inventário, by a Czechoslovakian who re-named it and, presumably, adorned it with the decoration announcing, more or less, that “Lord Byron stayed here”. It was permanently closed in 1961 and was about to fall down until 1999, when it was re-built and re-opened as Lawrence’s Hotel again. The commemorative sign remains as a draw, but His Lordship would have had an apoplexy if he could see to what purposes his name has been taken in vain. From the outside it’s very nice, thanks to the work of an architect I suppose appointed as befitted a listed monument, but the interior arrangements are a stern warning as to how fatal a woman’s hand can be when it ventures out of a domestic into a decorative sphere and when applied to sly economy obscured by cant. The restaurant says it all: minimal incongruous ingredients messed about with and unnecessarily advertised by fulsome descriptions – “garnished with a shrimp and half a sliced strawberry in a luscious yoghurt sauce with powdered ginger and sprinkled with ….” and so on. Ughh!
After that irritable little digression ….. No sooner had the French been removed than Portugal was involved in internal warring troubles of its own, another instance of chickens coming home to roost. A number of liberal exiles who had picked up abroad certain of the revolutionary ideas along with Free Masonry returned to Portugal and began to agitate for a constitutional monarchy, and were eventually to be more or less successful owing mostly to what the internet History discreetly calls “a crisis of royal leadership”. João VI, comfortably installed in Brazil, left things to William Beresford, who as the imposed commander of the Portuguese army summarily executed twelve of the liberal ring-leaders. He then (1820) went to Brazil himself, to try unsuccessfully to get the king back. In his absence there were army revolts and he wasn’t allowed to return. A civil war broke out in Portugal between Monarchists and Constitutionalists, at the same time as Brazil was demanding independence; things were in a complete mess and only temporarily resolved by an unsatisfactory compromise which left one of João’s sons, Pedro, Emperor of Brazil and intended to restore the younger, Miguel, as constitutional King of Portugal with powers limited by an elected Chamber of Deputies. That might have worked had Miguel, who was a loud-mouthed and arrogant youth, had any intention of accepting a constitution and if Beresford and the English Tories hadn’t interfered again, having no intention themselves of accepting one in a country they wished to dominate, or rather only of accepting one which they could manipulate to ensure that no ‘Jacobinism’ was any part of it .They supported and encouraged Miguel, who appears to have been a very bad egg altogether, so that when João VI died in 1826 the succession question split public opinion into two irreconcilable groups and initiated what is known as the War of the Two Brothers, a drawn-out and very disturbing affair into which various ‘liberal’ British interests, to spite their own government, entered as well. I won’t go on with these political details, which get rather complicated and tedious, except to point out that until the early 1840’s the country was torn apart first by the struggle between those who favoured a return to absolute monarchy and those who wanted a progression to a constitutional one and then by the upheavals caused by savage disagreements between moderates and radicals that followed an apparent liberal victory. In the meantime, the wretched Miguel having been banished for ever (and incidentally, the Emperor of Brazil, in spite of the preposterous title, turns up in several biographies as an extremely amiable and pleasant fellow, in complete contrast to his brother),. Pedro’s easy-going daughter, Maria da Glória, had been installed (1834) as Queen of Portugal, on a throne at times she only precariously maintained by enlisting foreign aid. During the same years similar revolutions and protracted periods of internal strife were going on all over Continental Europe as the old order very reluctantly gave way to the new; in a sense, Portugal could be said to have done not so badly in the end, relatively speaking, managing to keep a monarchy while admitting most of the reforms – at least for the time being. As history was to show, the seeds of discord, far from being eradicated, had merely been buried to lie dormant until the time was ripe again; dogged and stoical determination is a national quality, or defect, as one wishes to see it.
Few of the numerous English in Sintra would have heard of Byron when he was here, except possibly as the subject of distasteful rumours, though most of them would have agreed entirely with his sentiments regarding the place they had requisitioned. Later, after Waterloo, when travel was safe again, hordes of English tourists started to descend en masse, Childe Harold clutched to thrilled bosoms. Lord Byron was very wicked, “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, but his interesting affliction, his looks and above all his rapturous sensibility and exciting adventures amorous and otherwise put him into the role, in these fevered imaginings, of fallen angel rather than demon. Where his steps had taken him, thousands of others followed, in hopeful expectation of similar if respectably-diluted ecstasies.
By and large, they formed a series of cliques depending on social ranking but all of them enclosed within an isolating barrier to prevent contamination – they abhorred papish ‘superstition’ while being secretly terrified of it and went on instead about the deplorable habits and morals of the Portuguese. Robert Southey, an over-zealous and priggish ‘scribbler’ ridiculed by Byron, complained bitterly of the philistinism of his country-men and came to Çintra - “the most blessed spot in the habitable globe” he called it, though his knowledge of the globe was non-existent - to cut himself off in some unidentified cottage belonging to his uncle, the British chaplain, where he continued to complain that no-one took any notice of him; he was equally a dismal bore to the hearties and beneath the notice of the smart set, and it never occurred to him to make friends locally even while pursuing an interminable, unfinished and unreadable History of Portugal. The English, in their patronising way and when it suited them, liked to remind themselves that Henry the Navigator was half English, that Catherine of Braganza had been unwillingly espoused to Charles II by bringing with her Tangier and Bombay, and that Portugal was their “oldest ally”, but all that meant was that they wanted an open harbour, the port wine and a few other commodities for as cheaply as possible and an accessible place with a better climate than their own where they could rule the roost. They’d more or less forced the Methuen Treaty of 1703, allowing them commercial privileges and monopolies, onto their disadvantaged partner, and were extremely indignant later on at ‘ingratitude’ when Pombal tried to counter it. They meddled throughout the nineteenth century and would still, if they could, as anyone who’s ventured into one of two cafés in the vicinity of the British Institute can gather. I once met, or rather was obliged to speak to, a very ordinary pair who had the idea that they could supplement the cash they had already dishonestly acquired on their home ground by taking over an ex-Nazi estalagem here; they were terribly put out when they found that the local people they’d graciously employed to do the work they were too lazy or incompetent to do themselves expected to be modestly paid for it. Let them go back, as Ramalhão Ortigão said, to their own "fog-bound and indigestible island which only disgust prevents the sea from swallowing”. Well, he had made himself very cross for reasons of his own, but he had a point.
It is to an Englishman, however, that we owe the only really graphic impression of what Sintra was like at this period. The Portuguese, though extolling its beauties and so on in rather vague poetic terms, were imprecise or careless or just not interested in providing any sort of factual details; it’s a pity, for instance, that so few records are available, or were ever made, of social rather than political or courtly history, records over which the English have always been diligent (though I should be careful in saying that, because almost everything before the earthquake disappeared in it). It’s a pity, too, that landscape or architectural painting has never been a Portuguese forte. William Burnett, in his time a minor but if he’d lived now a major topographical painter, accompanied a friend to mainland Portugal via the Azores and in the early 1830’s and did a series of representations of Sintra which in reproduced lithographical form used to be seen adorning every local café and were available in mass-produced post-cards in every tourist shop. Apart from their being ‘pretty’, barely anyone ever looked at them, yet as masterly depictions of early nineteenth Sintra they’re by far the best records we have. However attractive in reality, the place does not ‘compose’ easily within a frame, and so Burnett’s illustrations, which compose very well, warrant close attention. . Unfortunately they’re rather hard to find now, or at least the one I want - from the Lisbon road in Stª Maria - is, and the best I can do is a rather poor photocopy taken from an original in the British Museum. None seems to be available in any museum in this country, by some strange oversight or other.
Almost the exact spot is identifiable, and the town palace would be visible more or less where it’s shown had not subsequent buildings hidden it. On the other hand, not one depicted local building is identifiably still there except the towers of Stª Maria and S Miguel, the latter of which was supposed to have fallen down in 1755 but of course is very useful as a ‘focus’ for the picture. Another view ‘taken’ in the town itself is architecturally plausible because it includes, rather surprisingly, a somewhat overpowering and ugly building, presumably an apartment block, still there but which one would have imagined of several decades later The mountain, as always, apart from being quite inaccurately drawn, is far too dramatically rocky and bare; that could perhaps be explained by the occasional fires that ravage it, yet Burnett undoubtedly exaggerated the rocks, very randomly sketched in, for artistic effect, as other more amateur painters did also. If he did that he almost certainly invented other details. In other words, it’s partly an example of nature following art, though none the worse for that; he made the image of Sintra that generations of eyes gazed only half-aware upon. What I can’t discover is the source of these prints, if such there ever was. A lot of Turner’s (contemporary) watercolours were done for the purpose of making what would now be coffee-table books of reproduced ‘views’. Someone told me that Burnett’s original artworks are in a museum in Funchal in Madeira, but when was I was there the place in question was closed so I haven’t been able to find out, and anyway it was an unlikely story to start with. Never mind, the images, once engraved, stand in their own right, that’s what icons are about and that’s why art is important. It was largely pictures, of which Burnett’s are the most influential, that made Sintra ‘romantic’ by determining the way that less observant people saw it while providing the ‘ground’ on which to project their own dreams There’s another very nice painting, labelled “English school anonymous”, in the local museum, where ‘regulations’ prevent its being photographed. It’s a little later, perhaps early 1840’s, but I think it’s very accurate, with minimal jugglings of perspective. It represents Sintra as a small country town beautifully positioned in a rich and strange landscape, the luxurious quintas decently obscured in folds and forest groves where they belong, and which is the way I prefer to think of it myself.
In spite of the Revolutionary Wars and succeeding upheavals, the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century, before the rot set in irretrievably, have always been particularly attractive to me. The world, in a way, was fresh again, it was “bliss to be alive” as Woodsworth said, and for a little while it seemed that the poor human race might at last have found the freedom – from tyranny, oppression, poverty, ignorance and most of all its own feeble consciousness - that it always protests that it wants. Alas no, it was on its way to far greater servitude, but in the meantime to the ravishing music of Beethoven and Schubert, to the soul-stirring heroics of Hugo and the ethereal visions of Turner, the individual will, the delusion that all could be attained with courage and cooperation, seemed almost a reality; the New World, from virgin forests to endless plains to sublime mountains, all untouched by the grubby fingers of civilization and waiting to be harmonized by kindly hands, personified it. Yet had something been lost in the passage? To revert to that English obsession with Latin dirt: the over-elaborate costumes of costly fabrics of the ancien régime were certainly filthy with ingrained sweat or worse, at least one guillotined head revealed a nest of mice flourishing within piles of hair thick with accretions of flour but once sprinkled with diamonds, in the veritable city that was Versailles there was not one lavatory and the courtiers performed their natural functions over the grand staircase, the kitchens that produced the endless dinners on gold plates and bejewelled vessels were unspeakable, and so on, and then we have to ask, why didn’t that seem to matter to them and why amidst that titillated squalor were they able to make or command or appreciate some of the greatest artefacts of civilization the world has ever seen? Romanticism, along with rejecting the ‘autocracy’ of the past, started to tidy things up: elementary high-waisted muslin gowns and the elegant severity of form-fitting black and white; seductive glossy curls; airy and sparsely ornamented retreats in imitation of Greek temples, the worship of Nature, became the vogue; as did, or was starting to be, machinery, science and the new religion of progress towards a planned utopia, disguised for the moment under a prettification that was even shoddier, as it turned out, than Marie-Antoinette’s, and escaping – this what it boils down to I think - into even further reaches of wishful thinking increasingly-insecurely connected to the mundane world of birth, death and animal survival. The eighteenth century, whatever else can be said against it, was at least firmly grounded on the facts of life with no sentimentality about them.
Study of the passing fashions of decorative style is usually regarded as a rather superficial and frivolous one, but since we are largely what we do and make in everyday life I think it can be much more informative than academic history, which is always an intellectual fiction grafted onto incidental dates and events. That’s why I like to look at architecture and other such products of ordinary existence, because there the evidence is right in front of one’s eyes. As I said, I like very much the artefacts and ‘style’ of the period I’m talking about, but I’d like them more perhaps without the knowledge of what they turned into, because that reveals an inner hollowness and dishonesty within what seemed a very brave attempt: when the frills and fuss came back they were just as superfluous and vain as they were before, only not anywhere near so well done. I’ll continue on that theme in the following chapters. We’ll have a look at Sintra between the end of the Peninsular wars and the start of its ‘decadence’ first.
Portugal’s troubles during this period ensured that not much evidence of the spirit of the times penetrated this peculiar region, at least not in forms that are very noticeable. However, the Count, later Duke, of Saldanha started building himself a country house in Sintra during the early 1830’s, not all that dissimilar - Portuguese taste being generally very conservative – in layout from eighteenth century quintas but making more exaggerated and ‘picturesque’ use of a fashionable gothicism: the windows vaguely emulate those of a cathedral and appropriate ornaments and follies, somewhat haphazardly mixed up with other references, decorate the grounds. The house rises very pleasingly above the town, it’s the highest one there, but it always looked rather neglected amidst the encroaching forest; the Duke had died in 1876, and it wasn’t until 1897, apparently, that it acquired a new owner, the Patriarchal Cardinal (I’m not quite sure how to say that in English, but never mind). This gentleman started rebuilding works, but he too died in the next year, perhaps just as well before any harm was done.
Adjoining this house, and bearing some complicated relation to it, is the more elegantly-beautiful so-called Casa Italiania, or Dowager’s House as its known locally, which true to its name has nothing very Portuguese about it. This belonged to the Duke’s mother, herself Pombal’s daughter, and although it looks newer it pre-dated the main building by perhaps a decade or more, being erected over the ruins of something else. It’s reminiscent of that sort of Northern Italian Napoleonic style, pared down and vaguely military while making use of the classical orders and painted a glorious ochre – I like it very much. And there’s nothing in the least bit abandoned and falling down here, it’s very much alive and kicking, with the most lavish extensions going on around it, though not all of them I think entirely agreeable to some of the town’s more conservative members.
The Duque de Saldanha was a very eminent personage of the time, and very much involved in the tumultuous events that were going on. As a young man he’d fought with dash and valour against the French not only in Portugal but throughout Iberia; tater, as a ‘Pedroist’ he was at the same time soldier, diplomatist and aristocrat; he popped up everywhere, a great patriot (as all the ‘romantics were), and in the square of his name in Lisbon he’s represented in bronze holding out a stern arm to repel invaders and quell trouble-makers. He lived a long and exciting life and died crowned with laurels. It used to be said, again according to local and usually inaccurate lore, that his quinta was a gift from a grateful nation; more likely, I should think, seeing that his mother was already there and in view of his genealogy, that it came by more straight-forward means. One hopes that in between everything else, he had some time to enjoy his patrimony.
Another very elegantly plain house of the same period, lesser than these and sombrely fronted but not so modest either, can be seen in that very posh part of the town leading to Seteais; I don’t know anything about it. The effect depends to some extent on the discreet attention paid to it in a riotously-exuberant profusion of nature.
A genuinely ‘romantic’ house exists, or existed, in Santa Maria, with the date, 1801, engraved on it. At that time it must have been rather an anomaly in that place, perhaps even ‘flash’, though it’s not pretentious. I had an affection for this house because of its occupant, a tiny and very old lady known locally as the Condessa, and she was loved by everyone around, most of them also old and not well off, for the kind deeds she’d been doing close to home – the best place to do kind deeds - all her life. At first she was still entirely independent, proceeding at snail’s pace either up or down the hill to get what she wanted. We once helped her with some small thing, and she asked us in to a number of rooms that hadn’t been changed for what could have been a century or more. She couldn’t remember how old she was, she said, but her father had bought the house when she was a child because she was consumptive and the ‘air’ was supposed to be good, and she hadn’t left it thereafter: evidently the air had worked. She really was a countess, but, she emphasized, not from ambition, because she had happened to fall in love with a count who had lived there too after they married. She couldn’t remember either how long ago that was. She was like a Belle-au-Bois Dormant who had forgotten to go to sleep; neither had the bois, it had gone completely wild so that giant camellia trees topped the house and boa-constrictors of rambling roses were supporting the little balcony. Sad to relate, as she got more infirm she took in a pair of housekeepers who were revolting slovenly and sinister, and it was always my suspicion that they’d disposed of her. They were themselves disposed of later, and in the last couple of years the house also has been as good as disposed of – I mean, it underwent a costly transformation, was fitted up with completely wrong ‘classical’ balustrading and so on, and the gardens were hygienically cleared, or just cut down, so that everyone could gaze in envy at the new swimming pool and the nasty little ‘Tahitian’ umbrella things around it. That’s not the sort of adornment we want here, but I suppose I shouldn’t be too sour, another hundred years will wear it all in.
At a lower level, there was a certain amount of unexpected expansion going on elsewhere. The house I had in Santa Maria was completely beneath any architectural notice, but the deeds recorded its origins in 1826. That might have indicated nothing more than the date at which deeds were ‘officialised’, but in any case half of it had been at some stage a carpenter’s workshop, so some sort of ordinary life had presumably gone on in that neighbourhood even while during the 1850’s or thereabouts it was becoming a full-blown ‘romantic’ enclave for jaded sophisticates. The walls, of solid stone almost a metre thick, seemed like a precaution against another earthquake. The house I presently inhabit, according to the deeds, was registered in 1863, so I was very surprised, and at first incredulous, when an unknown and not altogether reliable-looking woman appeared, wanting to be let in to have a look and saying that it was built in 1815. Her grandparents had owned it, she said, and she’d partly been brought up in it, so I suppose she knew and I couldn’t argue with her because she described completely accurately certain details of the top floor. The date 1815 put a rather different perspective on my view of this part of the town, which belongs to a subsequent chapter, and it also increased my admiration for its builders. Most of the woodwork - floors, ceiling joists and quite a few windows - is therefore nearly two hundred years old, and although to some extent suffering from woodworm, damp, and all the rest of it, still has a while to go if one isn’t too fussy or nervous. Properly matured good wood is the secret, that’s something else that’s disappeared.
The Quinta de Monserrate, as it was then, occupies an especially favourable site along the ‘high’ road between Sintra and Colares. The name is said to derive from a votive chapel put up to the Virgin of Monserrat by a sixteenth century friar on returning from a pilgrimage to the great Benedictine monastery of that name in Catalonia (and around which all sorts of legends to do with the Holy Grail and so on have always circulated). Subsequently the lease of the property was acquired by the Mello e Castro family, resident in Goa as administrators and managed by and sub-let to others in their absence for agricultural purposes. What houses or buildings stood there were so damaged in the earthquake that they were abandoned. In1790 the whole lot was leased to a certain Gerard de Visme, an English merchant and businessman dealing in valuable brazil-wood and who for reasons of health and pleasure wanted somewhere that reminded him of his native soil – pushing it slightly surely, as there’s nothing very English about it. Here the plot thickens. Beckford had envied Monserrate the first time, but only on the second visit did he manage to rent it. It’s not exactly clear what house was there, but according to those unreliable recollections Beckford published later Mr de Visme had pulled down the original one, whether built by himself or someone else, and put up another in “barbarous gothic” There are reasons to suppose that it was Beckford himself who was responsible for the ‘barbarity’ and then, embarrassed about a lapse of taste, disowned it and tried to blame someone else. While he was there however he enjoyed himself very much, throwing himself with great energy into landscaping and gardening, having exotic trees and plants brought from every corner of the globe and establishing the magnificent gardens that still exist. “I have been too much engaged with the Royalty of Nature, with climbing roses and corktrees, with tracing rills and runnels to their source, and examining every recess of these lovely environs, to think of lesser royalties”, he wrote in 1795; “not once have I left this enchanted Circle … which is as dry, as gloriously cheerful as the most classical spots in Arcadia”. These diversions were fairly short-lived. He was there on and off for a couple of years, also building or acquiring other houses in Lisbon, but by 1798 he had got bored with “this silly moonish country” and took himself back to Wiltshire where he started on his most ambitious project so far, Fonthill Abbey. This grotesque and fantastic pseudo-gothic edifice fell down not all that long after it was put up, because the owner – by then safely somewhere else - was too impatient to have it done properly. So, as a matter of fact, or to a certain extent, did Monserrate, probably for the same reasons, which is why it is tempting to see the latter as an experimental precursor of the former. The local Wiltshire yokels levelled every stone of fallen Fonthill to the ground in disgust – so much for unacceptable genius. The Portuguese version fared a little better. What of it remained changed hands again several times and was the subject of several fairly bad paintings and drawings until 1858, when it disappeared altogether to be replaced by the “barbarous orientalism … constructed in a Moorish delirium”, as Rose Macaulay rather unfairly says, of the present building. But that belongs to a subsequent epoch.
Beckford was a characteristically eighteenth century figure, yet at the same time there was nothing remotely ‘classical’ about him, and if that word as contrasted with ‘romantic’ means anything other than a convenient label to designate historical styles, he would have to called an arch-romantic in the sense that he valued and exercised his own individuality, will and imagination at the expense of any social considerations or recognition of an ordained orders of things. Beethoven and Napoleon, at the same time expanding the same convictions in music and action, were the great heroes of the moment. Another one, soon to become famous or notorious for the same reasons, turned up in Sintra too.
George Gordon Byron, having inherited a baronetcy which strictly speaking only entitled him to a very minor milordship, made provision for a regulation grand tour vaguely in the direction of Albania and Constantinople by having had tailored to his own specifications two preposterous ‘oriental’ costumes at enormous expense and which most admirably suited and flattered his handsome face and figure. Thus equipped, he took a boat to Lisbon in the summer of 1809, proposing to travel overland from there. He was enchanted by “the little village of Cintra … the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world”, though he was only twenty one and had never been anywhere else. He visited what was left of Montserrate and walked or rode to the Pena Convent – a much more interesting excursion than it is now, right up into the crags, and his youthful imagination quite got the better of him, supposing the monks to subsist entirely on oranges and that the stone crosses on the way marked the graves of wayfarers who’d been assassinated on the ascent. But something else went terribly wrong. He conceived a violent hatred for the Portuguese and never abated it. Three years later, when his poetic account of his travels appeared and made him into a literary lion overnight, several Portuguese historians and writers were so outraged they invented a story that he’d been involved in, and lost, some contretemps over a lady’s honour; but there was no evidence for that or any other indication of what had upset him. It was not, evidently, even allowing for the author’s passionate temperament and outspokenness, any ordinary aversion that might arise from some incidental travel accident. Certain lines from the first Canto in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are widely quoted in every tourist brochure and in most of the accommodations in the town:
Lo! Cintra's glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.
Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen,
To follow half on which the eye dilates
Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken
Than those whereof such things the bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlock'd Elysium's gates?
The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd,
The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrown'd,
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep,
The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch below,
Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow ….
And so on (stanzas XVIII and XIX)
Others are not; for example:
But whoso entereth within this town,
That, sheening far, celestial seems to be,
Disconsolate will wander up and down,
'Mid many things unsightly to strange ee;
For hut and palace show like filthily:
The dingy denizens are rear'd in dirt;
No personage of high or mean degree
Doth care for cleaness of surtout or shirt;
Though shent with Egypt's plague, unkempt, unwash'd, unhurt.
Poor, paltry slaves! yet born 'midst noblest scenes --
Why, Nature, waste thy wonders on such men?
(Stanzas XVII and XVIII)
And there’s quite a lot more in the same vein, which perhaps don´t bear too much scrutiny. As Rose Macaulay rather tartly observed, the word Eden tends to be used too casually by those who have never seen the deserts of Mesopotamia, and indeed if I see the words “Sintra’s glorious Eden” once more I’ll be sick. For all its ingenuities and wordsmanship, Childe Harold is very much the work of an exceptionally precocious and conceited young man, which is exactly what Byron was (a “scribbler”, as he said, he was too good to ever have any false pretensions as to his self-importance in that respect, and later in Don Juan he redeemed himself triumphantly by tempering an indolent sarcasm with a fine observation and a great generosity of spirit based on experience). All the English complained as a matter of course about the ‘dirt’ everywhere else (as tend to do people who themselves have something dirtier to conceal), but the fact was that he arrived in Portugal at a particularly unfortunate time, when Anglo-Portuguese relations were strained to say the least and when British soldiers on the rampage, and perhaps others, were being attacked or murdered – attacks they were all too prone to provoke - in the streets of Lisbon. Very possibly Byron’s dignity was offended in some such way and affected his impetuous judgment. To make a long story very short, Napoleon’s imperial ambitions had been set on bringing England to her knees by closing all continental ports to her trade. He issued an ultimatum to the Portuguese, prohibit English vessels from Lisbon or he’d invade – there were some devious negotiations going on in Spain at the same time to frighten them further. The English counter-attacked, and deeming the Regent (João, the second son of poor Maria, to whom had been passed over the reigns during her final dementia) too powerless and vacillating to resist they proposed to have him removed to Brazil and take charge of the Portuguese army themselves. Very much on the horns of a dilemma and with much hand-wringing, Joâo disgracefully if not altogether unreasonably was persuaded onto a British boat and abandoned his kingdom, followed by those of the alarmed nobility who saw themselves as candidates for the guillotine. In November 1807 Junot’s troops marched and occupied Lisbon for five days, the population resisting and quickly ejecting them. William Beresford took over-all control of the Anglo-Portuguese and Napoleon’s army was routed, but it was Portugal who was the loser again, because according to the Treaty of Cintra signed by the foreign combatants – and which to be fair to him also roused Byron’s honourable indignation - the French were allowed to help themselves to what they could pick up if they retreated. In the course of the Peninsular wars their armies laid waste to all of Iberia, dragging after them a lengthy baggage train of loot. Mme Junot, self-styled Duchesse de Abrantés, made off with the famous Portuguese Apricot, a large pink diamond. It was last seen around her neck at the Paris Opéra, and then never again. Two more offensives against Portugal were launched and thwarted under the over-all command of the Duke of Wellington, one just before Byron arrived and the next in the year after he’d left. The Portuguese remained wondering if they wouldn’t have done better after all under the French and were ready deeply to resent the British for high-handed interference. Wellington, as the ostensible victor, was himself in no hurry to depart, even with the heap of crafted silver the Portuguese had given him as a bribe to go and which, never used, still decorates Apsley House in London. Nor were the officers and gentleman and their good ladies who surrounded him. For a while the Portuguese were obliged to look through the windows of their Sintra houses as the English comported themselves within, as usual disparaging the natives and suffering agreeably from the disadvantages of being abroad. In any case, Byron didn’t stay more than a few days, nothing like enough to understand anything very clearly. He proceeded across Spain, which he thought much more sympathetic because he got a lot more attention there, and eventually found his own poignant destiny in the mystic east, in which region of the imagination he and Beckford, though they never met, had something in common.
Like all passing English travellers with no better invitations, Byron put up at Lawrence’s Hotel, a hostelry which had been doing a good trade for the last half century. Under the original Mrs Lawrence (or Lawrence Oram, exactly how or when she arrived here is not known) it seems to have been a jolly and well-run establishment, and it continued to be so under her descendents throughout the nineteenth century even when newer and larger local accommodations appeared. In 1949 the leasehold was acquired, surprisingly, according to the Inventário, by a Czechoslovakian who re-named it and, presumably, adorned it with the decoration announcing, more or less, that “Lord Byron stayed here”. It was permanently closed in 1961 and was about to fall down until 1999, when it was re-built and re-opened as Lawrence’s Hotel again. The commemorative sign remains as a draw, but His Lordship would have had an apoplexy if he could see to what purposes his name has been taken in vain. From the outside it’s very nice, thanks to the work of an architect I suppose appointed as befitted a listed monument, but the interior arrangements are a stern warning as to how fatal a woman’s hand can be when it ventures out of a domestic into a decorative sphere and when applied to sly economy obscured by cant. The restaurant says it all: minimal incongruous ingredients messed about with and unnecessarily advertised by fulsome descriptions – “garnished with a shrimp and half a sliced strawberry in a luscious yoghurt sauce with powdered ginger and sprinkled with ….” and so on. Ughh!
After that irritable little digression ….. No sooner had the French been removed than Portugal was involved in internal warring troubles of its own, another instance of chickens coming home to roost. A number of liberal exiles who had picked up abroad certain of the revolutionary ideas along with Free Masonry returned to Portugal and began to agitate for a constitutional monarchy, and were eventually to be more or less successful owing mostly to what the internet History discreetly calls “a crisis of royal leadership”. João VI, comfortably installed in Brazil, left things to William Beresford, who as the imposed commander of the Portuguese army summarily executed twelve of the liberal ring-leaders. He then (1820) went to Brazil himself, to try unsuccessfully to get the king back. In his absence there were army revolts and he wasn’t allowed to return. A civil war broke out in Portugal between Monarchists and Constitutionalists, at the same time as Brazil was demanding independence; things were in a complete mess and only temporarily resolved by an unsatisfactory compromise which left one of João’s sons, Pedro, Emperor of Brazil and intended to restore the younger, Miguel, as constitutional King of Portugal with powers limited by an elected Chamber of Deputies. That might have worked had Miguel, who was a loud-mouthed and arrogant youth, had any intention of accepting a constitution and if Beresford and the English Tories hadn’t interfered again, having no intention themselves of accepting one in a country they wished to dominate, or rather only of accepting one which they could manipulate to ensure that no ‘Jacobinism’ was any part of it .They supported and encouraged Miguel, who appears to have been a very bad egg altogether, so that when João VI died in 1826 the succession question split public opinion into two irreconcilable groups and initiated what is known as the War of the Two Brothers, a drawn-out and very disturbing affair into which various ‘liberal’ British interests, to spite their own government, entered as well. I won’t go on with these political details, which get rather complicated and tedious, except to point out that until the early 1840’s the country was torn apart first by the struggle between those who favoured a return to absolute monarchy and those who wanted a progression to a constitutional one and then by the upheavals caused by savage disagreements between moderates and radicals that followed an apparent liberal victory. In the meantime, the wretched Miguel having been banished for ever (and incidentally, the Emperor of Brazil, in spite of the preposterous title, turns up in several biographies as an extremely amiable and pleasant fellow, in complete contrast to his brother),. Pedro’s easy-going daughter, Maria da Glória, had been installed (1834) as Queen of Portugal, on a throne at times she only precariously maintained by enlisting foreign aid. During the same years similar revolutions and protracted periods of internal strife were going on all over Continental Europe as the old order very reluctantly gave way to the new; in a sense, Portugal could be said to have done not so badly in the end, relatively speaking, managing to keep a monarchy while admitting most of the reforms – at least for the time being. As history was to show, the seeds of discord, far from being eradicated, had merely been buried to lie dormant until the time was ripe again; dogged and stoical determination is a national quality, or defect, as one wishes to see it.
Few of the numerous English in Sintra would have heard of Byron when he was here, except possibly as the subject of distasteful rumours, though most of them would have agreed entirely with his sentiments regarding the place they had requisitioned. Later, after Waterloo, when travel was safe again, hordes of English tourists started to descend en masse, Childe Harold clutched to thrilled bosoms. Lord Byron was very wicked, “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, but his interesting affliction, his looks and above all his rapturous sensibility and exciting adventures amorous and otherwise put him into the role, in these fevered imaginings, of fallen angel rather than demon. Where his steps had taken him, thousands of others followed, in hopeful expectation of similar if respectably-diluted ecstasies.
By and large, they formed a series of cliques depending on social ranking but all of them enclosed within an isolating barrier to prevent contamination – they abhorred papish ‘superstition’ while being secretly terrified of it and went on instead about the deplorable habits and morals of the Portuguese. Robert Southey, an over-zealous and priggish ‘scribbler’ ridiculed by Byron, complained bitterly of the philistinism of his country-men and came to Çintra - “the most blessed spot in the habitable globe” he called it, though his knowledge of the globe was non-existent - to cut himself off in some unidentified cottage belonging to his uncle, the British chaplain, where he continued to complain that no-one took any notice of him; he was equally a dismal bore to the hearties and beneath the notice of the smart set, and it never occurred to him to make friends locally even while pursuing an interminable, unfinished and unreadable History of Portugal. The English, in their patronising way and when it suited them, liked to remind themselves that Henry the Navigator was half English, that Catherine of Braganza had been unwillingly espoused to Charles II by bringing with her Tangier and Bombay, and that Portugal was their “oldest ally”, but all that meant was that they wanted an open harbour, the port wine and a few other commodities for as cheaply as possible and an accessible place with a better climate than their own where they could rule the roost. They’d more or less forced the Methuen Treaty of 1703, allowing them commercial privileges and monopolies, onto their disadvantaged partner, and were extremely indignant later on at ‘ingratitude’ when Pombal tried to counter it. They meddled throughout the nineteenth century and would still, if they could, as anyone who’s ventured into one of two cafés in the vicinity of the British Institute can gather. I once met, or rather was obliged to speak to, a very ordinary pair who had the idea that they could supplement the cash they had already dishonestly acquired on their home ground by taking over an ex-Nazi estalagem here; they were terribly put out when they found that the local people they’d graciously employed to do the work they were too lazy or incompetent to do themselves expected to be modestly paid for it. Let them go back, as Ramalhão Ortigão said, to their own "fog-bound and indigestible island which only disgust prevents the sea from swallowing”. Well, he had made himself very cross for reasons of his own, but he had a point.
It is to an Englishman, however, that we owe the only really graphic impression of what Sintra was like at this period. The Portuguese, though extolling its beauties and so on in rather vague poetic terms, were imprecise or careless or just not interested in providing any sort of factual details; it’s a pity, for instance, that so few records are available, or were ever made, of social rather than political or courtly history, records over which the English have always been diligent (though I should be careful in saying that, because almost everything before the earthquake disappeared in it). It’s a pity, too, that landscape or architectural painting has never been a Portuguese forte. William Burnett, in his time a minor but if he’d lived now a major topographical painter, accompanied a friend to mainland Portugal via the Azores and in the early 1830’s and did a series of representations of Sintra which in reproduced lithographical form used to be seen adorning every local café and were available in mass-produced post-cards in every tourist shop. Apart from their being ‘pretty’, barely anyone ever looked at them, yet as masterly depictions of early nineteenth Sintra they’re by far the best records we have. However attractive in reality, the place does not ‘compose’ easily within a frame, and so Burnett’s illustrations, which compose very well, warrant close attention. . Unfortunately they’re rather hard to find now, or at least the one I want - from the Lisbon road in Stª Maria - is, and the best I can do is a rather poor photocopy taken from an original in the British Museum. None seems to be available in any museum in this country, by some strange oversight or other.
Almost the exact spot is identifiable, and the town palace would be visible more or less where it’s shown had not subsequent buildings hidden it. On the other hand, not one depicted local building is identifiably still there except the towers of Stª Maria and S Miguel, the latter of which was supposed to have fallen down in 1755 but of course is very useful as a ‘focus’ for the picture. Another view ‘taken’ in the town itself is architecturally plausible because it includes, rather surprisingly, a somewhat overpowering and ugly building, presumably an apartment block, still there but which one would have imagined of several decades later The mountain, as always, apart from being quite inaccurately drawn, is far too dramatically rocky and bare; that could perhaps be explained by the occasional fires that ravage it, yet Burnett undoubtedly exaggerated the rocks, very randomly sketched in, for artistic effect, as other more amateur painters did also. If he did that he almost certainly invented other details. In other words, it’s partly an example of nature following art, though none the worse for that; he made the image of Sintra that generations of eyes gazed only half-aware upon. What I can’t discover is the source of these prints, if such there ever was. A lot of Turner’s (contemporary) watercolours were done for the purpose of making what would now be coffee-table books of reproduced ‘views’. Someone told me that Burnett’s original artworks are in a museum in Funchal in Madeira, but when was I was there the place in question was closed so I haven’t been able to find out, and anyway it was an unlikely story to start with. Never mind, the images, once engraved, stand in their own right, that’s what icons are about and that’s why art is important. It was largely pictures, of which Burnett’s are the most influential, that made Sintra ‘romantic’ by determining the way that less observant people saw it while providing the ‘ground’ on which to project their own dreams There’s another very nice painting, labelled “English school anonymous”, in the local museum, where ‘regulations’ prevent its being photographed. It’s a little later, perhaps early 1840’s, but I think it’s very accurate, with minimal jugglings of perspective. It represents Sintra as a small country town beautifully positioned in a rich and strange landscape, the luxurious quintas decently obscured in folds and forest groves where they belong, and which is the way I prefer to think of it myself.
In spite of the Revolutionary Wars and succeeding upheavals, the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century, before the rot set in irretrievably, have always been particularly attractive to me. The world, in a way, was fresh again, it was “bliss to be alive” as Woodsworth said, and for a little while it seemed that the poor human race might at last have found the freedom – from tyranny, oppression, poverty, ignorance and most of all its own feeble consciousness - that it always protests that it wants. Alas no, it was on its way to far greater servitude, but in the meantime to the ravishing music of Beethoven and Schubert, to the soul-stirring heroics of Hugo and the ethereal visions of Turner, the individual will, the delusion that all could be attained with courage and cooperation, seemed almost a reality; the New World, from virgin forests to endless plains to sublime mountains, all untouched by the grubby fingers of civilization and waiting to be harmonized by kindly hands, personified it. Yet had something been lost in the passage? To revert to that English obsession with Latin dirt: the over-elaborate costumes of costly fabrics of the ancien régime were certainly filthy with ingrained sweat or worse, at least one guillotined head revealed a nest of mice flourishing within piles of hair thick with accretions of flour but once sprinkled with diamonds, in the veritable city that was Versailles there was not one lavatory and the courtiers performed their natural functions over the grand staircase, the kitchens that produced the endless dinners on gold plates and bejewelled vessels were unspeakable, and so on, and then we have to ask, why didn’t that seem to matter to them and why amidst that titillated squalor were they able to make or command or appreciate some of the greatest artefacts of civilization the world has ever seen? Romanticism, along with rejecting the ‘autocracy’ of the past, started to tidy things up: elementary high-waisted muslin gowns and the elegant severity of form-fitting black and white; seductive glossy curls; airy and sparsely ornamented retreats in imitation of Greek temples, the worship of Nature, became the vogue; as did, or was starting to be, machinery, science and the new religion of progress towards a planned utopia, disguised for the moment under a prettification that was even shoddier, as it turned out, than Marie-Antoinette’s, and escaping – this what it boils down to I think - into even further reaches of wishful thinking increasingly-insecurely connected to the mundane world of birth, death and animal survival. The eighteenth century, whatever else can be said against it, was at least firmly grounded on the facts of life with no sentimentality about them.
Study of the passing fashions of decorative style is usually regarded as a rather superficial and frivolous one, but since we are largely what we do and make in everyday life I think it can be much more informative than academic history, which is always an intellectual fiction grafted onto incidental dates and events. That’s why I like to look at architecture and other such products of ordinary existence, because there the evidence is right in front of one’s eyes. As I said, I like very much the artefacts and ‘style’ of the period I’m talking about, but I’d like them more perhaps without the knowledge of what they turned into, because that reveals an inner hollowness and dishonesty within what seemed a very brave attempt: when the frills and fuss came back they were just as superfluous and vain as they were before, only not anywhere near so well done. I’ll continue on that theme in the following chapters. We’ll have a look at Sintra between the end of the Peninsular wars and the start of its ‘decadence’ first.
Portugal’s troubles during this period ensured that not much evidence of the spirit of the times penetrated this peculiar region, at least not in forms that are very noticeable. However, the Count, later Duke, of Saldanha started building himself a country house in Sintra during the early 1830’s, not all that dissimilar - Portuguese taste being generally very conservative – in layout from eighteenth century quintas but making more exaggerated and ‘picturesque’ use of a fashionable gothicism: the windows vaguely emulate those of a cathedral and appropriate ornaments and follies, somewhat haphazardly mixed up with other references, decorate the grounds. The house rises very pleasingly above the town, it’s the highest one there, but it always looked rather neglected amidst the encroaching forest; the Duke had died in 1876, and it wasn’t until 1897, apparently, that it acquired a new owner, the Patriarchal Cardinal (I’m not quite sure how to say that in English, but never mind). This gentleman started rebuilding works, but he too died in the next year, perhaps just as well before any harm was done.
Adjoining this house, and bearing some complicated relation to it, is the more elegantly-beautiful so-called Casa Italiania, or Dowager’s House as its known locally, which true to its name has nothing very Portuguese about it. This belonged to the Duke’s mother, herself Pombal’s daughter, and although it looks newer it pre-dated the main building by perhaps a decade or more, being erected over the ruins of something else. It’s reminiscent of that sort of Northern Italian Napoleonic style, pared down and vaguely military while making use of the classical orders and painted a glorious ochre – I like it very much. And there’s nothing in the least bit abandoned and falling down here, it’s very much alive and kicking, with the most lavish extensions going on around it, though not all of them I think entirely agreeable to some of the town’s more conservative members.
The Duque de Saldanha was a very eminent personage of the time, and very much involved in the tumultuous events that were going on. As a young man he’d fought with dash and valour against the French not only in Portugal but throughout Iberia; tater, as a ‘Pedroist’ he was at the same time soldier, diplomatist and aristocrat; he popped up everywhere, a great patriot (as all the ‘romantics were), and in the square of his name in Lisbon he’s represented in bronze holding out a stern arm to repel invaders and quell trouble-makers. He lived a long and exciting life and died crowned with laurels. It used to be said, again according to local and usually inaccurate lore, that his quinta was a gift from a grateful nation; more likely, I should think, seeing that his mother was already there and in view of his genealogy, that it came by more straight-forward means. One hopes that in between everything else, he had some time to enjoy his patrimony.
Another very elegantly plain house of the same period, lesser than these and sombrely fronted but not so modest either, can be seen in that very posh part of the town leading to Seteais; I don’t know anything about it. The effect depends to some extent on the discreet attention paid to it in a riotously-exuberant profusion of nature.
A genuinely ‘romantic’ house exists, or existed, in Santa Maria, with the date, 1801, engraved on it. At that time it must have been rather an anomaly in that place, perhaps even ‘flash’, though it’s not pretentious. I had an affection for this house because of its occupant, a tiny and very old lady known locally as the Condessa, and she was loved by everyone around, most of them also old and not well off, for the kind deeds she’d been doing close to home – the best place to do kind deeds - all her life. At first she was still entirely independent, proceeding at snail’s pace either up or down the hill to get what she wanted. We once helped her with some small thing, and she asked us in to a number of rooms that hadn’t been changed for what could have been a century or more. She couldn’t remember how old she was, she said, but her father had bought the house when she was a child because she was consumptive and the ‘air’ was supposed to be good, and she hadn’t left it thereafter: evidently the air had worked. She really was a countess, but, she emphasized, not from ambition, because she had happened to fall in love with a count who had lived there too after they married. She couldn’t remember either how long ago that was. She was like a Belle-au-Bois Dormant who had forgotten to go to sleep; neither had the bois, it had gone completely wild so that giant camellia trees topped the house and boa-constrictors of rambling roses were supporting the little balcony. Sad to relate, as she got more infirm she took in a pair of housekeepers who were revolting slovenly and sinister, and it was always my suspicion that they’d disposed of her. They were themselves disposed of later, and in the last couple of years the house also has been as good as disposed of – I mean, it underwent a costly transformation, was fitted up with completely wrong ‘classical’ balustrading and so on, and the gardens were hygienically cleared, or just cut down, so that everyone could gaze in envy at the new swimming pool and the nasty little ‘Tahitian’ umbrella things around it. That’s not the sort of adornment we want here, but I suppose I shouldn’t be too sour, another hundred years will wear it all in.
At a lower level, there was a certain amount of unexpected expansion going on elsewhere. The house I had in Santa Maria was completely beneath any architectural notice, but the deeds recorded its origins in 1826. That might have indicated nothing more than the date at which deeds were ‘officialised’, but in any case half of it had been at some stage a carpenter’s workshop, so some sort of ordinary life had presumably gone on in that neighbourhood even while during the 1850’s or thereabouts it was becoming a full-blown ‘romantic’ enclave for jaded sophisticates. The walls, of solid stone almost a metre thick, seemed like a precaution against another earthquake. The house I presently inhabit, according to the deeds, was registered in 1863, so I was very surprised, and at first incredulous, when an unknown and not altogether reliable-looking woman appeared, wanting to be let in to have a look and saying that it was built in 1815. Her grandparents had owned it, she said, and she’d partly been brought up in it, so I suppose she knew and I couldn’t argue with her because she described completely accurately certain details of the top floor. The date 1815 put a rather different perspective on my view of this part of the town, which belongs to a subsequent chapter, and it also increased my admiration for its builders. Most of the woodwork - floors, ceiling joists and quite a few windows - is therefore nearly two hundred years old, and although to some extent suffering from woodworm, damp, and all the rest of it, still has a while to go if one isn’t too fussy or nervous. Properly matured good wood is the secret, that’s something else that’s disappeared.
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