Noble Blood - The Távora Executions

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

In the words of Omar Little, "When you come at the king, you best not miss." A possible bungled assassination attempt on the King of Portugal in 1758 gave his prime minister the excuse he needed to unleash a bloody reign of terror on the nation's nobles. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. It was September 3rd, 1758, just as it was crossing over into the early morning hours of September 4th. The King of Portugal was riding in a carriage down a dark back road, returning from the outskirts of Lisbon back towards the tents of a Judah where court had been set up. King Jose, often anglicized to Joseph I, was a man fond of heavy powdered wigs that reached down to his back and wearing brocade clothing that allowed him to stand out in a crowd. But this night he was traveling incognito.

His carriage was unmarked, and none of his footmen wore palace livery, and they were taking a particularly dark and sparsely traveled road, because on this night the king was returning from a rendezvous with his mistress, his very married mistress, Teresa. Suddenly, his carriage jolted to a stop, a horse whinnied, but then there was silence. Just as the king was readying himself to ask the drive, what was going on. A shot rang out through the night. Then another shot. And the king pulled the curtains of the carriage open to reveal two highwaymen before a third shot pierced the silence,

and the king screamed. The bullet had hit him in his side, in his arm, and another shot had wounded the driver. Without taking anything, the highwayman rode off. King Jose survived the bullet wound, but that night would have deadly consequences nonetheless. We don't know if those highwaymen were an assassination attempt or whether they were just two petty thieves who happened to come across the wrong carriage. But King Jose's prime minister would use that evening to wipe out Portuguese nobility in an elaborate conspiracy that would cause the nation to fall into a decades-long reign of terror and paranoia. Ralph Waldo Emerson apocryphly has said,

When you strike at the king, you must kill him. But I think more people are familiar with a quote from the character Omar Little from television's The Wire, who said succinctly, When you come at the king, you best not miss. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The story of the Tavura's family's downfall actually begins with an earthquake. one of the most significant earthquakes ever to hit Portugal. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake hit on a Saturday morning.

The sky, up until then, had been obscenely blue, the type of clear blue that only comes in early fall, when the sunlight knows exactly how to hit the ocean and reflect onto the city. It was all Saints Day, November 1st, and though it had been unseasonably warm, there were still candles lit all around the city, in churches and in homes. At 9.35 in the morning, there was a low rumble, and then the city was torn in half. It had just been a gentle shaking for about a minute, but then the shaking became violent.

For five full minutes, the earth shook with an earthquake that seismologists estimate had a magnitude of 8.4. A fissure 15 feet wide emerged in the city center. The aftermath was chaos. Every major church in Lisbon had collapsed, killing the worshippers inside. In small buildings constructed close together, the Portuguese population panicked. Those who weren't immediately trapped under the collapsing rubble of their homes rushed out into the street. many people ran to the flat expanse of the shoreline where at least there was no rubble falling from the sky a few hundred people crowded onto a dock to watch the city finish shaking but the disaster wasn't over yet the sea pulled back revealing the skeletons of shipwrecks that had been lost in the bay and then the tsunami became visible curling over the horizon from up the tagus river came to a wave that reached a height of 18 feet, turning over boats and carrying away with that everything

and everyone in its path. The dock crowded with people, sank and disappeared in silence. The fires destroyed what was left of the city. Candles and cooking fires knocked over by the shaking, quickly engulfed flammable wooden houses, and then the flames leapt from house to house, leveling entire neighborhoods. Between the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami and fires, more than 12,000 people died in Lisbon alone, over 10% of the population. And that's a conservative estimate. Some write that the number might have been as high as 30,000 souls. Lisbon became a shell of a city, broken buildings and people gutted by flood and fire. In the royal palace in the suburbs of Lisbon,

the royal family huddled together in fear. The king, Jose, huddled with his wife, Mariana Victoria, and held his three daughters close. All of their cheeks were wet with tears. When at last the shaking stopped, and it became clear that they all had survived, the king pulled himself up, shaking legs and looked to one of his ministers,

Sebastio Jose and Carvallo and Melo. Later, Carraillo would become the Marquis de Pombal, but that's the title most history texts refer to him by. So for clarity, that's what we'll call him this whole time. The king was still ashen-faced when he found his minister, impossibly poised, impossibly standing. What do we do? The king asked through pale,

lips. Your majesty, Pombol replied, let us bury the dead and help the living. From that moment, Pumball became the central authoritarian power in Portugal. He handled the aftermath of the earthquake with decisive and comprehensive action, rebuilding the city and disbanding the groups of looters who were stealing possessions from the dead in the streets. On a scientific level, Pombol's leadership was invaluable. He distributed questionnaires to the citizens of Portugal about the duration and damaged of the quake that they experienced. And those records are still available. One of the first seismology reports of its kind in history. King José was not a leader who liked to lead.

He was the type of leader who preferred to lounge with his family or his mistresses in nice, well-appointed rooms, while other people took care of the boring matters of running a nation. Fortunately for him, Pombal was more than willing to step in. Born to a lowly country gentleman, Pombol worked his way up to the upper echelons of Portuguese society, but he never dropped his intrinsic resentment of the noble families, the people who were born into power and looked down on him for his low birth. How could he not resent them? It was obvious the nobles hated him.

When he married the niece of a prominent official, her family could bear it. contain their disappointment at her social falling. But it wasn't just the nobles. The Jesuits in Portugal, too, were a threat to him and his political ambitions. Prominent Jesuit priests like Father Gabriel Malagrida were going around town after the earthquake, implying that it was the consequence of God's disfavor with the direction of the country. Malagrida didn't outwardly say it was God punishing the kings,

and by extension Pombal's leadership, but he didn't have to. It was implied. And the Jesuits continued to be a thorn in Pambal's side. He suspected them for blocking an earlier marriage match he wanted, and they blocked his motion to grant privileges to Jews in Portugal if they helped with the rebuilding efforts. And that's to say nothing of what they were doing down in Brazil, making expansion more difficult by organizing and converting natives.

The earthquake was the moment Pambal cemented his control over King Jose, but he wouldn't have complete domination over Portugal until a few years later when he saw an opportunity and knew exactly how to exploit it. After the earthquake in Lisbon, King Jose suffered from paranoia and claustrophobia. He refused to remain inside his palace, and so court was moved to a tent city on the outskirts of Lisbon, where King Jose wouldn't have nightmares of rocks collapsing in on him while he slept. It was on his way back to his royal tent, after a visit with his mistress, that King Jose ran into the two would-be assassins that held up his carriage.

King Jose was shot in the arm and shoulder, and his driver was badly wounded, but both survived and made it back to court bloodied and terrified. How had this assassination attempt happened? The carriage was unmarked from the outside, with no indications that it contained the king. He had been driving on a dark back road, and more importantly, nobody knew where he was. Well, almost nobody knew where he was. The king's mistress had known where he was, didn't she? They had planned their rendezvous in advance, and the mistress, Teresa de Tavora,

was married to a man named Louis Bernardo, heir to the Tavora family. Who else could have organized the assassination attempt, but the powerful taver of family, the elite group of nobles who hated Pombal and knew that the only way to get rid of him was to get rid of the king who loved and trusted him. Before word of the would-be assassination had even been made public, Pumball sprang into action. He opened an investigation and swiftly arrested two men who allegedly had been the ones who had tried to kill the King. The two men were hanged before anyone could ask any more questions. But who had hired them? By December, Pumbal put together a special court to investigate whether the assassination had been

under the orders of the Tavaa family. Officers arrested the entire Tavara family, the Marquis, his wife, Lenore, their sons, and several grandchildren. And they also arrested the Jesuit, Gabriel Malagrida, who was a close friend of the family and Leonor's personal confessor. Pumbal additionally came for the Duke of Avaira. King José only had daughters, and for a while, people believed that the Duke of Avaira was going to be the next in line to take the throne, until the king had decreed that his daughter Maria would be next in line. The Tavora plot was surely an attempt to make the Duke king. Pombal's court was granted special dispensation to use torture to find out. And lo and behold, under torture, the Duke and two Tavaa servants

confessed to the entire plot. The servants would later retract their statements, but it was too late. The entire Tavaar family was guilty, and Pombal would make sure that everyone in Portugal knew it. For organizing an attempt to kill the king, the court sentenced seven nobles to death, the Marquis. He and his wife, their sons and two son-in-laws, and the Duke of Avaira, their would-be usurper. Three servants were also sentenced, and all ten were killed on a single, massive stage erected in Lisbon. The scaffold was 18 feet high so that everyone would be sure to get a good view. The king himself was in the audience that afternoon, and all other Portuguese nobles were required to attend, so that the fate of the Tavoras would be a lesson to them.

First to die was the Marcioness, Lenora. She was led up the scaffold by a rope around her neck, with her hands tied behind her back. Because she was a woman, she was permitted a quick death, sitting in a chair and an executioner slicing off her head. Her 21-year-old son came next. He was tied to a cross, before his arms and legs were broken, with iron clubs. He was finally strangled to death before his corpse was flattened upon a wheel.

The same fate befell his brother and his brother-in-laws and three servants, until all of their bodies were broken and bloodied on their own individual wheels on the scaffold. The Tivora patriarch was bound on a St. Andrew's cross and beaten with an iron rod before he was stabbed through the chest. The Duke of Avaira was similarly tortured, beaten until his arms, thighs, and calves were all broken, and then beaten on the chest until he was dead. Each one of the ten Tavara conspirators was forced to watch all of the deaths of those who preceded him. When it was finally over and the blood dripped beneath the scaffolding, all of the bodies were burned at the stake

and the entire scaffolding then was set on fire. The flames of all of it and the greasy black smoke coughed into the sky for hours until only ash was left. The ash they swept into the river. But public execution wasn't enough punishment for the Tavaras. Pumbal banned their family crest and had their palaces raised to the ground stone by stone. Salt was sprinkled on the earth so that nothing could grow there ever again.

Plaques were erected in stone, forbidding anything to be built upon the cursed ground that had belonged to traitors. Pambal had wanted to go further, had wanted to execute more of the Tavara women and children as well. But King Jose's wife and daughter intervened, and so instead the Tava'a women and children were all just banished and imprisoned to various convents. Among the imprisoned was the king's former mistress, Teresa. She lived out the rest of her life in a convent.

The king protected her enough so that she was granted a pension and was permitted to receive visitors in her cell. They say that for the rest of her life, whenever the king's barge went by, and the nuns and servants would rush to the windows to catch a glimpse of him, Teresa would break down, weeping. Pombol also implicated the Jesuits in the Tava'ra plot. He couldn't outright accuse them of treason, but he had nine prominent Jesuits imprisoned at the infamous Uncariah fort, including Father Malagrida.

The Jesuits were among 50 prominent members of Portuguese society that Pombal had imprisoned, under increasingly thin pretences through the jurisdiction of the Tribunal of High Treason. The tribunal did not disband after the mass execution of the Tavaras. It continued on, locking up nobles for perceived slights

and possible disloyalties, for the wrong whisper of a piece of gossip at a cafe overheard in Lisbon. All we know from what it was like to be imprisoned in the fort of the isolation and the misery, is from a marquis who wrote an account of his imprisonment using ink he made by scraping paint off the woodwork on his jail cell

and dissolving it in vinegar that came with his meals. In isolation, Gabriel Malagrida's devotion turned to fanaticism, turned to madness. He raved, speaking to himself and claiming that saint and God himself were talking to him. As a member of the clergy, he was above secular law. enforcement, and so a special inquisition presided over his arrest and trial. Conveniently enough, the Grand Inquisitor happened to be Pombal's brother. The charges were lengthy and elaborate. Malagrido was accused of sacrilegious utterances, hypocrisy, imposter, and more. When Malagrida was forced to answer for his crimes during the

Inquisition, the old man, then 73 years old, was so disoriented and mad that he could couldn't respond to the questions. One of the judges, a Dominican priest, quietly remarked that these proceedings weren't right, that they shouldn't be doing this to a man who clearly wasn't in his right mind. It was strongly suggested that that Dominican priest relocate to an overseas bishop position.

Before Malagrida was executed, the reading of his charges took two hours. At the request of the Inquisition that no blood be shed, he was strangled to death and then burnt at the stake. His ashes were scattered to the wind. Pumbal would complete his final revenge against the Jesuits when he expelled them all from Portugal on September 3rd, the anniversary of the ill-fated assassination attempt that ignited it all.

For 19 years, Pombol would rule Portugal as an Enlightenment-era despot, an authoritarian ruler who imprisoned all who challenged, him while fancying himself a modern and benevolent ruler for a new era. But his power would only last as long as the king did. When King José finally died in 1771, his daughter, Maria I took power as queen. Maria had no problem with the Jesuits and liked the nobles. She reopened the Tavara case and vindicated almost everyone involved. those who still survived in prison or convents were released.

As for Pumball, she took no real punitive action against him for what really, in effect, had been an act of treason. Maybe she thought he had been acting on her father's orders, or maybe she just took pity on a man who, by then, himself, was in his 70s. Pumball was stripped of his position and banished from Lisbon. In fact, Maria insisted that her husband, father's former prime minister remain more than 20 miles away from her at all times, in what some might consider to be history's first restraining order. Now, nearly 300 years later, it's impossible

to know the truth of the case, whether there had been an elaborate conspiracy on the part of the Tavara's to kill the king, or whether the king riding in an unmarked carriage on a dark road just happened to be set upon by highwaymen. There's a lot of evidence for it. for that. Obviously, there's no real proof that the Tavares were guilty. None of them fled town after the king survived the gunshots, which, you know, they might have wanted to do if they had organized it. And the only proof that led to their execution were confessions under torture. But I will say this. If the Tavores had tried to take down Pombal via the king, can you really blame them? But you know what they say? When you come at the king, you best not miss.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wadam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.

I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot in luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be the odds. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and. and director, Eva Langoria.

I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me

from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the MyCultura podcast network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. There's still a plaque, if you go to Lisbon, written in stone, at the place where the Duke of Viro's palace once stood. The letters are hard to make out, and of course it's in Portuguese, but you can see it alongside a tiny side street called the Alley of the Salted Earth.

The plaque reads, In this place, were put to the ground and salted, the houses of José Mosquerainis, stripped of the honors of Duke of Aviro, and others, convicted by sentence proclaimed in the high court on the 12th of January 1759, put to justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous upheavals that, on the night of the 3rd of September 1758, was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the King Joseph I. In this infamous land, nothing may be built for all to. The plaque wasn't exactly heated.

Google Earth is an amazing thing. If you look up the alley of the salted earth, Beco de Chau Salgado, you'll find that something has been built there. Pombal's revenge wasn't entirely carried out. Now, at that corner of an alley, stands, who would have guessed, a Starbucks? Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz

and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best. best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't

feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah. It would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks dad on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-heart podcast, guaranteed human.