The Távora Executions

been set up. King jose often anglicized to Joseph the First 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 in cognito. His carriage was unmarked, and none of his footmen wore palace livery, and they were taking a particular lead, 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 driver what was going on. A shot ring 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 at Hunt 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 the 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 Apocryphalle 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 to the Wire, who said succinctly, when you come at the king, you best not miss I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. The story of the Taveras family's downfall actually begins with

an earthquake. One of the most significant earthquakes ever to hit Portugal, the seventeen fifty five Lisbon earthquake, hit on a Saturday morning. The sky up until then had been of scenely blue, the type of clear blue that only comes in early fall, when the sunlight knows exactly how to hit the ocean and reflect on to the city. It was All Saint's Day, November first, and though it had been unseasonably warm, there were still candles lit all

around the city, in churches and in homes. At nine thirty five 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 eight point four. A fissure fifteen 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

finished 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 a wave that reached a height of eighteen feet, turning over boats and carrying away with that everything and everyone in its path. The dock outed 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 leaped from house to house, leveling entire neighborhoods. Between the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami and fires, more than twelve thousand people died in Lisbon alone, over ten of the population, and that's a conservative estimate. Some write that the number

might have been as high as thirty thousand 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 on shaking legs and looked to one

of his ministers, Sebastio Jose Carvallo Melo. Later Carrio would become the Marquis de Pomball, 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, Pomball replied, let us bury the dead and help the living. From that moment, Pomball 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 the scientific level,

Pomball'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 Jose 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, Pomball was more than willing to step in. Born to a lowly country gentleman, Pomball worked his way up to the upper echelons of Portuguese idy, 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 barely 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, we're 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 King's and, by extension, Pombal's leadership, but he didn't have to. It was implied, and the Jesuits continued to be a thorn in Pomball's side. He suspected them for blocking an earlier

marriage match he wanted. 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, Pumbault 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 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 Tavara family, the elite group of nobles who hated Pomball and knew that the only way to get rid of him was to get

of the king who loved and trusted him. Before word of the would be assassination had even been made public, Pombal sprang into action. He opened an investigation and swiftly arrested two men who allegedly had been the one 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, Pombal put together a special court to investigate whether the assassination had been under the

orders of the Tavara family. Officers arrested the entire Tavara family, the Marquise, 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 Leonora's personal confessor.

Pombal additionally came for the Duke of a Viral. King Jose only had daughters, and for a while people believed that the Duke of a Viro 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. Pomball's court was granted special dispensation to use torture to find out and lo and behold under torture, the Duke and to Tavara servants confessed to

the entire plot. The servants would later retract their statements, but it was too late. The entire Tavara family was guilty, and Pombal would make sure that everyone in Portugal knew it. For organizing an attempt to kill the king, the courts sentenced seven nobles to death, the Marquis and his wife, their sons and two sons in laws, and the Duke of a Viro. There would be usurper Three servants were also sentenced, and all ten were killed on a single

massive stage erected in Lisbon. The scaffold was eighteen 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 marchioness Leonora. 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 twenty one year old son came next. He was tied to a cross for 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 Tavora patriarch was bound on a Saint Andrew's cross and beaten with an iron rod before he was stabbed through the chest. The Duke of a Viro 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, Pombal 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 traders. Pombal 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 Tavara 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. Pombal also implicated the Jesuits in

the Tavara plot. He couldn't outright accuse them of treason, but he had nine prominent Jesuits imprisoned at the infamous Unchariafort, including Father Malagrida. The Jesuits were among fifty prominent members of Portuguese society that Pombal had imprisoned under increasingly thin pretenses 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 inky made by scraping paint off the woodwork on his jail cell and dissolving it in vinegar that came

with his meals in isolation. Gabriella 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 Pomball's brother. The charges were lengthy and elaborate. Malagrida was accused of

sacred religious utterances, hypocrisy, imposture, and more. When Malagrida was forced to answer for his crimes during the inquisition, the old man, then seventy three years old, was so disoriented and mad that he 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. Pomba would complete his final revenge against the Jesuit when he expelled them all from Portugal on September three, the anniversary of the ill fated assassination

attempt that ignited it all. For nineteen years, Pombal 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 Jose finally died in seventeen seventy one, his daughter Maria the first 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 Pombal, 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 seventies. Pombal was stripped

of his position and banished from Lisbon. In fact, Maria insisted that her father's former prime minister remained more than twenty miles away from her at all times, in what some might consider to be history's first restraining order. Now nearly three hundred 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 Is 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 that. Obviously, there's no real proof that the Tavaras 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 fashions under torture. But I will say this, if the Tavoras 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, your best not miss. There's still a plaque if you go to Lisbon written in stone at the place where the Duke of a 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 Jose Masquerins, stripped of the honors of Duke of a Viro and others, convicted by sentence proclaimed in the High Court on the twelfth of January, put to justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous upheavals that on the night of the third of September was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the King, Joseph, the first in this infamous land.

Nothing may be built for all time. The plaque wasn't exactly heated. Google Earth is an amazing thing. If you look up the alley of the salted Earth Becco Desha 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 Grimm and

Mild from Aaron Minky. The show was written and hosted by Danis Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, 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 dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M