The Lisbon Earthquake

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Kendrick

The Lisbon eaxthgualse

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THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE

T. D. KENDRICK

THE LISBON
EARTHQUAKE

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Philadelphia ------ New York

Authorized American Edition

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 57-6239

PREFACE

.his book, written in the bicentenary year of the
Lisbon earthquake, is not, as its rather ambitious title may
suggest, a full history of the event. In fact, it is concerned
mainly with the related themes of eighteenth-century
earthquake-theology and the end of optimism. "Musings
in the Carmo" such a book would probably have been
called in 1855, the centenary year, a name that would
have better indicated its limited content. The making of
my own small collection of earthquake-pamphlets and
sermons started me writing this work, but I could not
have completed it if it had not been for the abundant
help of friends most generously given. In Portugal these
are Dr. Jos6 d'Almada, Dr. Carlos Mascarenhas de Aze-
vedo, Mr. Martin Blake, the British Council's Represen-
tative in Lisbon, Eng. Castelo Branco of the Services
Geol6gicos, R. Academia das Ci^ncias, Dr. Carlos Estor-
ninho, librarian of the British Council, and Dr. M. Santos
Estevens, Director of the Biblioteca NacionaL Outside
Portugal I have especially to thank Mr. Theodore Bester-
man, Director of the Institut Voltaire, Les D^lices, Ge-
neva, for valuable help with my Chapter Seven, which he
was kind enough to read in typescript, and also Professor
F. L6pez Estrada of Seville University for help concerning

5

6 Preface

my Spanish digression in Chapter Three. In this country
I have many friends to thank among whom are Professor
E. N. da C. Andrade, Professor C. R. Boxer, Sir Gavin de
Beer, Mr. Marcus Cheke, Mr. L. C. G. Clarke, Mr. C. R.
Dodwell, Mr. H. V. Livermore, Sir Alfred Munnings, Sir
Lewis Namier, Senor Xavier de Salas, and several very
kind colleagues in the British Museum. I have left to the
last Mr. George West of the British Council whose de-
tailed knowledge of eighteenth-century Lisbon is indis-
pensable to anyone in this country writing on the subject.
I cannot sufficiently thank Mr. West for the interest he
has taken in this book and for the constant help he has
given me.

T. D. KENDRICK

British Museum, W.C.i
October 1955

CONTENTS

1 LONDON, 1750 11

2 THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE 45

3 MEN OF ACTION AND MEN OF SCIENCE 71

4 THE WKATH OF GOD (i) 113

5 THE WKATH OF GOD (2) 142

6 THE INJUSTICE OF GOD 170

7 OPTIMISM ATTACKED 180

8 LONDON, 1755-56 213
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE #47
INDEX 251

PLATES

Grouped in this order following page 128

I Earthquake fright in London, 1750

II Lisbon before the earthquake

III The Lisbon Earthquake: painting by Stromberle

IV The Praga da Patriarcal after the earthquake

V Lisbon c. 1785: detail from a map by A. F. Tardieu
VI The Marques de Pombal
VII Voltaire: manuscript of poem and holograph letter

VIII London and the Lisbon Earthquake: the Inquisi-
tion blamed: a London cartoon, 1755

TEXT FIGURES

i The earthquake area: Portugal 48

2. The earthquake area: Peninsula and North

Africa 49

3 The Arms of Portugal 131

Chapter One

LONDON, 1750

I

-n October 1777 John Wesley said in a letter to
his friend Christopher Hopper, "there is no divine visit-
ation which is likely to have so general an influence upon
sinners as an earthquake/* and in this matter he spoke
with experience and authority. In their correspondence at
this time the two clergymen were no doubt referring to
the earthquake that had recently alarmed Manchester and
the neighbourhood on Sunday morning, 14 September;
but Wesley, who was then seventy-four, was thinking also
of the many past occasions on which he had seen a fright-
ened people crowding into the churches after an earth-
quake in the last-minute hope of turning aside the wrath
of God by urgent contrition and promises of future piety;
for in his day the majority of the people believed that
by the shuddering of the supposedly solid ground beneath
their feet they were supernaturally commanded to listen
in dread and shame to the holy voice of God.

Wesley, of course, had in his mind what we should call
only light shocks; otherwise he would not have gone on
to say in this same letter that an earthquake might be
**no undesirable event." The Manchester earthquake ex-
actly illustrated his point. It had done no real harm at

11

12 The Lisbon Earthquake

all; but it had rumbled like thunder, shaken churches
where folk were at morning service, so that some mem-
bers of the congregation ran out of them in fear, and it
had burst open doors and windows, brought a few chim-
neys down, and had made itself felt over a large area
extending from Preston to Macclesfield. It caused great
alarm, and was generally recognized as a dreadful an-
nouncement of divine vengeance likely to fall on the un-
happy city. When nothing happened, and the short-lived
fright was over, Dr. Beilby Porteous, the Bishop of Ches-
ter, published a letter to the people of Lancashire and
Cheshire in which he exhorted them not to let the mem-
ory of their providential escape fade without proper re-
flection upon its significance. Divine admonitions were
serious. "When the Almighty speaks in such tremendous
language, he must not speak in vain." The Mancunians
and their neighbours were too prosperous, and they had
become sinful; but they had been spared the fate of Lis-
bon. God in His mercy had given them time to consider
their position, and in a straightforward, manly way the
Bishop called upon his people to give more thought to
their spiritual lives. He suggested that there should be a
revival of the neglected practice of family prayer.

All this was twenty-two years after the great Lisbon
earthquake, but that terrible event was still remembered
with awe, and was commonly mentioned, as the Bishop

of Chester had done in his address, as something with
which everybody was familiar. Possibly, the recollection
of the murderous damage done in Lisbon on the mom-
ing of i November 1755 ma 7 ^ iave increased the fears
caused by the light shock in Manchester in 1777; but it

London, 1750 13

did not need a great earthquake to cause terror; in the
eighteenth century a very mild earthquake indeed was
frightening enough, even without a recent and close-at-
hand example of the appalling results of a really serious
earthquake. That this was so can be proved by the ex-
ample of the two London earthquakes in February and
March 1750, five years before Lisbon was destroyed.
Very probably these were also in John Wesley's mind
when he was writing to Hopper. He and Whitefield are
said to have conducted all-night services on a shameful
evening when London's earthquake-nerves had become
almost uncontrollable.

The first occasion was a shock, or perhaps two shocks
following each other in close succession, that was felt
about noon on Thursday, 8 February. The Lord Chan-
cellor, Hardwicke, sitting in Westminster Hall with the
Courts of King's Bench and Chancery, and the counsel-
lors with Mm, experienced a severe jolt. They thought for
a moment that the great building was going to collapse
on their heads. Newcastle House in Lincoln's Inn Fields
so trembled that the Duke sent out to inquire what was
happening. His servant went to the house of a neighbour,
Dr. Gowin Knight, afterwards first principal librarian of
the British Museum, and found him investigating the
signs of disturbance in his own house; a grate that had
been seen to move, a fire-shovel thrown down, a bed
moved from its proper position, and so on. A lamp-lighter
in Gray's Inn very nearly fell off his ladder. At Leicester
House, where the Prince of Wales lived, it was believed
that the foundations were sinking. Generally, throughout
the City and in Westminster there was sudden consterna-
tion. People writing felt their desks lurch; chairs shook,

14 The Lisbon Earthquake

doors slammed and windows rattled; pewter and crockery
clattered on the shelves. A timber slaughter-house in

Southwark collapsed, and chimneys fell in Leadenhall
Street and elsewhere.

At first it was not believed that London was the vic-
tim of anything so awful as an earthquake, and there
were theories, usual in such circumstances, about cannon-
fire and powder-mills exploding. Then, when the truth
was inescapable, it was said, reassuringly, that Sir Isaac
Newton had known that this was going to happen, as he
had calculated that Jupiter was going to approach so
close to the earth in 1750 as possibly to brush it. "Jupiter,
I think, has jogged us three degrees nearer the sun," said
Horace Walpole, making a bad guess about this astronom-
ical explanation, and it was found necessary to protest
in the papers against the great philosopher's name being
linked with such nonsense.

It was also thought by some people to be disgraceful
that the London Evening Post for 10-13 February, as soon
as most people had realized that the shock was caused
by an earthquake, published only a bleak scientific note
on the cause of such phenomena without making any ref-
erence to God, and the usual sequel of moralizing and
pamphleteering began; but there was not time for much.
controversial talk to be published before London suffered
another earthquake. Indeed, the whole event of Thurs-
day, 8 February 1750, and its immediate aftermath, would
have been of negligible importance were it not for the
portentous fact that exactly four weeks later, on Thurs-
day, 8 March, the blow fell a second time.

Even this was a feeble shock, though everyone agreed
that it was much more violent than the first. It occurred

London, 1750 15

in the early hours of the morning about 5:30 A.M.., just
as it was beginning to get light. Lord Chesterfield, who
was in a deep sleep, was woken up with a bump. Horace
Walpole thought there was somebody moving under his
bed. People ran out into the streets, mostly in their night-
clothes. Church bells were ringing of their own accord.
Some chimneys had fallen. A pot-house in Gravel Lane,
Lambeth, had lost part of its roof. Elsewhere two old
houses had collapsed. A maid-servant in Charterhouse
Square fell out of bed and broke her arm. There was an
enormous smash in a china shop in St. James's Street,
and a collection of valuable china belonging to a lady
who lived in Piccadilly suffered heavily. In the high
grounds of Grosvenor Square the shock was badly felt,
and kitchen utensils were flung from shelves and dressers.
Things were just as bad in outlying districts. The bailiff
of Henry Fox, afterwards the first Lord Holland, telling
his sheep about a quarter of a mile from Holland House
actually saw the dry, solid ground move like a quagmire
or quicksand, to the great alarm of the sheep and of the
crows nesting near by.

This time the popular alarm was very much greater.
It was all very well for scientifically minded persons to
speculate about the physical cause of these recent blows,
and to suggest that the last shock was not an earthquake
at all, but an air-quake, as did the General Advertiser on
13 March, presumably basing their view on a letter by
John Flamsteed, first Astronomer Royal, written in 1693
and now (in 1750) issued as a pamphlet; it was all very
well to publish histories of earthquakes and classifications
of them, proving that they are really frequent and familiar

16 The Lisbon Earthquake

natural events; it was all very well to show how lightly
London had escaped, to show that even in the most
ghastly disasters, for instance the earthquake in 1692 that
destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, God does mercifully and

miraculously preserve many of His children. Londoners
were not disposed to calm themselves by such considera-
tions. Something was going wrong with the country. There
had been the rebellion of 1745; there had been for some
years a terrible cattle-plague causing serious loss; there
had been "a sparing scourge" of locusts; and now, bang,
bang, came two earthquakes neatly spaced four weeks
apart. Londoners wanted to know what they ought to
think and what they ought to do. It was the Church that
gave them the required direction.

The most important of these pronouncements was the
letter addressed by the Bishop of London, Thomas Sher-
lock, to his clergy and people. It was published on 10
March. "Little philosophers/* he said, "who see a little,
and but very little, into natural causes/' might try to ex-
plain earthquakes without reference to God, but the
Bishop recognized the recent shocks as a divine warn-
ing that the time had come for Londoners to consider
their faults. The Gospel was rejected in spite of Protes-
tant advantages; books were published that disputed or
ridiculed the great truths of religion, and such books were
not only welcomed in the wicked metropolis, but widely
circulated, even to our plantations ia America* Blasphe-
mous language was used openly in the streets. Lewd pic-
tures illustrated all the abominations of the public stews,
and were tolerated. There was much homosexuality. Peo-
ple were cra2y for amusement, and in one single news-

London, 1750 17

paper the Bishop had counted no less than fifteen adver-
tisements for plays, dances, cock-fights, prize-fights, and
so on, and this in Lent. Dr. Sherlock called for serious
consideration of these shortcomings, but not for despair.
God had not forgotten how to show mercy. We must now
be genuinely sorry for our sins, and the Bishop showed
how important it was that responsible people should set
an example in good behaviour. Our rulers, magistrates,
the clergy, heads of families, and parents generally, should
recognize their duty, and a special attempt should be
made to see that all young people received proper reli-
gious instruction.

The pamphlet was exactly right for the occasion. Some
people, it is true, made a great deal of fun of it, and there
was serious criticism to the effect that the Bishop should
have remembered Chrisf s words about those killed by
die fall of the tower in Siloam think ye that they were
sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? But gen-
erally the letter was accepted thankfully as the message
of a brave and wise pastor. Men saw that the Bishop's
rebuke was deserved, and they appreciated his conclud-
ing comfort and advice. A "Very primitive discourse, and
what is more, a very good one/* said William Warburton,
the future Bishop of Gloucester, at that time Preacher to
Lincoln's Inn. In their pitiful state of earthquake-nerves
and uneasy fear of an extremely severe impending dis-
aster, ordinary folk found the Bishop of London's sharp
medicine a steadying draught, and the pamphlet sold in
enormous numbers, having several times to be reprinted.
An anonymous supplement to it, by an author who
thought the Bishop had not adequately covered the cur-
rent vices, also went into a second edition.

i8 The Lisbon Earthquake

Those who attended church had also been plainly di-
rected in sermons, preached mostly on the Sunday after
the second shock, 11 March. Thomas Seeker, then Bishop
of Oxford and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury,
preached in St. James's, Piccadilly, the church of which
he was still Rector. He said that God had interwoven
in His original grand creation various incidents that would
alarm us and be lessons to us, and if one of these inci-
dents came sharply upon us in the form of an earthquake,
we must recognize it as specially applied to us, in this
unhappy case London, the headquarters of wickedness
and the shameful example thereof to the whole island.
He had heard that people were considering leaving Lon-
don to avoid what now seemed to be an imminent dan-
ger, and he asked if by such cowardice they hoped to fly
from God, Fly from your iniquities, he said, if you would
be safe. He urged his congregation to continue calmly
with their daily occupations, remembering that the sea-
son was Lent, so that excessive pursuit of amusements
must be avoided. What was needed most of all was a
serious practical attention to their spiritual state.

The Reverend Dr. William Stukeley, MD., F.R.S.,
preached on this same subject in his church, St. George's,
Queen Square, Bloomsbury. He showed that earthquakes
are singled out above all natural phenomena by their maj-
esty and dreadful horror to mark an immediate operation
of God*s hand exercised in His divine anger. He was ready
to discuss the physical causes of an earthquake with his
fellow-scientists in the Royal Society; indeed, by 22 March
he announced a theory that they were due to electricity,
and three papers by him on this subject ( the Society could
not properly follow his meaning in the first one) are pub-

London, 1750 19

lished in the Philosophical Transactions for 1750; but in
his pulpit Stukeley had something much more important
to say. Holy Scripture makes it quite clear that whatever

their natural causes may be, earthquakes are God*s in-
struments. This is why they always strike at populous
cities, and not at uninhabited territories; and it is why
they are specially frightful, inasmuch as they are sudden,
unavoidable, and threaten us with a peculiarly dreadful
form of death. God, therefore, was singularly merciful,
considering the nature of London houses that sometimes
collapse of their own accord, in merely giving London a
good shake without toppling down one single inhabited
house or killing one single person. The preservation of
London was a miracle. God deliberately stopped the sec-
ondary causes that were producing the earthquake from
producing the kind of earthquake that would have de-
stroyed London.

What is God going to do next? asked William Agate,
Lecturer of St. Lawrence Jewry, in a sermon preached
in that church after the first shock. "Will he order winds
to tear up our houses from their foundations and bury
us in the rains? Will he remove the raging distemper
from the cattle and send the plague upon ourselves? Or
(the Lord in his infinite mercy save us!) he may com-
mand the earth to open her mouth, and, the next time
he ariseth to shake terribly the earth, command her to
swallow us up alive, with our houses, our wives, our chil-
dren, with all that appertains unto us/*

The Reverend James Cox, D.D., until 1746 Master of
Harrow School, a post from which he was dismissed as
a result of his drunken and generally disgraceful behav-
iour, preached sermons in Hampstead and in Kensington

2o The Lisbon Earthquake

that must have greatly frightened the congregations that
sat under him. "We are now deservedly alarmed/' he said,
"and, for aught we know, may receive a peremptory sum-
mons that we cannot play with ... to walk into eternity
in the twinkling of an eye, whether sleeping or waking,
who can tell?'* What might be coming would prove a se-
vere ordeal for the righteous, though they had the con-
solation of hope for better things in another world; but
the unrighteous "are in a deplorable case indeed; they
have nothing to feed upon but anguish and despair; they
have nothing to raise their spirits; everything to deject
them; their fears will carry them in sight of those cham-
bers of darkness where the abuse of their reason and their
evil deeds have led them, and must make them inexpress-
ibly unhappy, because they will whisper the certainty that
they will be for ever miserable.'* These thoughtless and
abandoned people cannot ever expect to have the merits
of Christ's precious blood applied for the pardon and ex-
piation of their grievous transgressions. "Damnation will
have its numbers, and come time enough, come when it
will" His hearers may not have understood this bailing
statement, but at least it sounded dreadful, and doubtless
added to the terror of this solemn jeremiad.

Modern prophets had gone out of their way to multi-
ply die reasons for dreading earthquakes. A remarkable
book by Thomas Burnet (c. 1635-1715), Master of the
Charterhouse, called The Sacred Theory of the Earth, first
published in Latin in 1681, had reached its sixth edition
by 1726, and was still read and discussed in the middle
of the eighteenth century. 1 Bumet was of the opinion that
this present earth, a very unsatisfactory second version of

1 There was a seventh edition in 1759.

London, 1750 21

a first earth more or less destroyed by the Flood, was go-
ing to end in a great conflagration that would burn it
right up, and when this happened, though the fire would
naturally begin at Rome, the headquarters o Antichrist,
England was going to be a particularly unpleasant spot
because of its extensive coalfields that would burn so
easily. The fact that from the smoke and ashes a vastly
improved earth would be formed on the model of the
first was not likely to be a consolation to the victims of
the great fire, who could do nothing except look out anx-
iously for the signs that the awful day was approaching.
Bumet said:

The future combustion of the earth, according to the
representations of scripture, is to be usher'd in and ac-
companied with all sorts of violent impressions upon
Nature; and the chief instrument of these violences will
be earthquakes. These will tear the body of the earth
and shake its foundations; rend the rocks, and pull down
the tall mountains; sometimes overturn, and sometimes
swallow up towns and cities; disturb and disorder the
elements, and make a general confusion in nature.

Burnet was dead, but living prophets of some scholastic
importance and recognized position were likewise fore-
casting extreme woe to come that would be preceded by

monitory earthquakes. One of these prophets was that
most outspoken person, William Whiston (1667-1752), a
divine and a scientist with a special bent for mathemat-
ics, who had for seven years been the successor of Sir

Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at
Cambridge, a position he lost owing to his unorthodox
views on the Trinity. Whiston had evolved his own theory

22 The Lisbon Earthquake

of the earth that he constantly developed in sermons, lec-
tures, newspaper articles, and letters to the Press.

In Whiston's opinion the end of the world was fairly
close at hand, but it was to be preceded by the restora-
tion of the Jews to Jerusalem, and this event in turn was
to be announced as imminent by ninety-nine tokens or
signals, "vastly the greater part of which" had already
been fulfilled. Prediction No. 92 was that there will hap-
pen a very terrible, but to good men a very joyful, great
earthquake, when a tenth part of an eminent city will be
destroyed. Seven thousand men of name and note are to
perish. 2 The shock felt in February therefore presented
this muddled-headed divine with an opportunity to ex-
pand his views (the great earthquake was to happen in
London), and he gave a series of three lectures in Lon-
don, the first of which on 6 March was on, the ninety-
nine signals, and the second, on their fulfilment, on 8
March, the day of the second shock. Lecture 3 on xo
March on the horrid wickedness of the present age
highly deserving such terrible judgement (a subject on
which Mr. Whiston spoke with startling frankness and a
great zest for naming culprits) was of a kind calculated
to leave Ms hearers with the impression that in spite of
earnest exhortations to repentance and prayer, sinful Lon-
don was too far plunged in iniquity for there to be any
real hope of averting disaster.

The attendance in London at these throe lectures* were
twenty-seven, sixty-five, and forty-three respectively; but
a repetition at Tunbridge Wells was a failure, for on per-
ceiving from Lecture No. i that the preacher was* going

2 Cf. Revelation xi. 13.

London, 1750 23

to discourage the place's major industries "gaining and
other fooleries" nobody turned up to the following dis-
courses. In London, too, Whiston was no doubt rather a
comic figure. "The greatest mischief the earthquakes have
hitherto done is only widening the crack in old Will Whis-
ton's noddle," remarked Warburton in a letter; but there
was at the time a great interest in Biblical prophecy, and
though some people might laugh, Whiston's views were
talked about; after all, they came from a man of immense
learning who had an established reputation as a theolo-
gian, Biblical historian, editor of Josephus, and an astron-
omer, mathematician, and physicist. He might be right,
and his vehement utterances contributed sensibly to the
prevalent malaise.

Most of the general earthquake-literature published at
the time was of the kind to spread further despondency.
Painful accounts appeared of the 1692 earthquake that
had destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, described in one pam-
phlet as "the most terrible earthquake that has ever hap-
pened since the creation of the World," and in the mid-
dle of February a new edition was published of the True
and Particular Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake
at Lima and Callao, a translation from the Spanish
in a handsome 5$. book that described a catastrophe in
Peru that happened in 1746, only four years previously,
which was "one of the most dreadful, perhaps, that ever
befel this earth since the general Deluge." It had caused
great destruction in Lima and had virtually obliterated
the port, Callao, by gigantic seismic inundation, There
five thousand people perished and only two hundred were
saved. "Not the least sign of its former figure does now

24 The Lisbon Earthquake

appear; on the contrary, vast heaps of sand and gravel
occupying the spot of its former situation, it is at present
become a spacious strand."

This disquieting book was followed early in March by
a second edition of the Practical Reflections on the late
Earthquakes by John Shower, the Nonconformist divine,
originally published in 1693, a decent, careful, but exces-
sively gloomy little book costing is. 6d. It ends with a
forcible expression of the view that whatever God in His
mercy may do in the way of sparing the nation, for all
unrepentant sinners nevertheless "it is most certain that
security is a presage of ruin." Such people cannot be long
out of the grave or out of Hell, and are in danger of
damnation every hour, terrible remediless torment under
the everlasting curse of God.

It is sad to hear of this, sad to foresee it, to consider
it, to think of it; but it will be much sadder to suffer,
and to feel it. And be not deceived, it is not the less
certain, because it is yet future. You are now alive, and
do not see the grave digged for you, and yet you must
die. And as certainly do I know from the word of God,
who cannot lie, that except you repent, you must perish,
and that forever.

There was little in the numerous cheaper pamphlets,
written for the occasion, that could have made any sort
of contribution to the nervous reader's peace of mind.
Nor were the Verses on the late Earthquakes: address d
to Great Britain in any sense consoling. The poet was
"strongly apprehensive of something yet more disastrous
at hand/* It was understandable that other wicked lands
should suffer earthquakes.

London, 1750 25

Jamaica shoud be shook! a Land
Like Sodom, all impure!

That Earthquakes rock Italic Ground,
Scarce strikes us with Amaze!

And so on. But now Britain, because of its wickedness, is

running a similar risk.

Own it! (but with a blush} "No Realm
Like ours! so vile! so vain!
See! to the Dunghill from the Helm
Extends the moral stain!"

Benjamin Stillingfleet also gave the Londoners a poem,
Some Thoughts occasioned by the late Earthquakes, for
the benefit of those who, while they might be inclined to
read verse, were not likely to wade through the prose of
the Bishop of London's letter with proper attention. He
too said the sinful people were in the greatest possible
danger. Britain had thought herself immune from disas-
ters such as affect other nations, but now she knows from
recent convincing and alarming events that God:

Wanteth not stones to execute His wrath

Wherever Vengeance calls: the gaping Gulph
Shall overwhelm us if He give the word.

Understandably, after all this there were a good many
people in London who were really nervous and appre-
hensive. And this time, instead of their fears quickly dis-
appearing, as usually happens after a light shock, they
lingered and increased. The tidiness of an interval of ex-
actly four weeks between, the two shocks was now con-
sidered to be unpleasantly mysterious. It is in fact this
coincidence that in the end gave these two very mild

26 The Lisbon Earthquake

earthquakes an unexpectedly discreditable importance in
London history, for in consequence of their remarkable
timing a lunatic Mf eguardsman called Mitchell went about
the town circulating a prophecy that at a further interval
of four weeks, that is on the night of Wednesday, 4 April,
or on the morning of Thursday, 5 April, London was go-
ing to be destroyed by a third, and this time completely
devastating, earthquake. This at once eclipsed the vaguer
lucubrations of all the other prophets of woe. London's
time was up, and the date of its obliteration settled. In
their long history Londoners have not shown themselves
to be a characteristically nervy and timorous people,
but on this occasion earthquake-fright caused an ignoble
panic. As the supposedly fateful day approached, the
general alarm grew greater and more hysterical; there
was much talk of leaving the capital, and some people
did indeed begin to pack up and go.

The clergy spoke out bravely against this cowardice,
led by Thomas Seeker in his sermon on n March in St.
Jameses, Piccadilly; but the most urgent rebuke, preached
on Sunday, i April, when the panic was approaching its
height, was the inspiring sermon of Roger Pickering,
F.R.S., pastor of a church of Dissenters in Silver Street
and Lord's Day Evening Lecturer at Salter's Hall, a ser-
mon that he succeeded in getting into print before 5 April,
the day of the expected shock. His theme was the omni-
presence of God. "If I take the wings of the morning, and
dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: even there shall
thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."
The psalmist, said the preacher, knew that no distance
could separate him, no velocity remove him, from divine

London, 1750 27

vengeance if guilty, nor put him beyond the protection
of God, were he a righteous man.

Pickering was a scientist, and he asked what maximum
flight the lovely words quoted could be fancifully as-
sumed to mean. Perhaps a speed that was that of the ve-
locity of light, and a distance of a full half -circle of the
globe; 10,800 miles at something like 10,000,000 miles a
minute. The longest possible flight on earth in the short-
est possible time, say one-thousandth of a minute. But it
would be no use; so what good could be this pitiful emi-
gration to places a few miles from London? The preacher
then recited to his people the great hymn to creation con-
tained in the 104th psalm; he showed that God was uni-
versally present throughout His creation, today as at the
beginning, and presided over its destiny in all particulars,
and that all men were under the constant government and
influence of God. Christians must not be afraid. We must
trust God. In the magnificent end to his sermon, Picker-
ing said:

I adjure you, by the Interest of that Gospel you pro-
fess, by the Credit of that Faith on which you rest your
Souls, that, with humble Hearts, but with Christian
Confidence, in your respective Stations ON THE SPOT
where Providence has placed you, YE WAIT the WILL
OF GOD.

It was, however, too late for this noble command to
steady the nerves of a thoroughly frightened people. The
exhortations of so many clergy, the example of men of
high position, and the derision of the wits, did not suc-
ceed in preventing the shameful exodus. After all, the
people had been told plainly enough that the warning

28 The Lisbon Earthquake

of the shocks was specially directed to the inhabitants
of the cities of London and Westminster; they were the
guilty culprits; they were told too (Dr. Stukeley had
made a special point of this ) that earthquakes strike only
at densely populated places; and they were told that they
bury indiscriminately both the righteous and the unright-
eous. Under these circumstances who was going to be
foolish enough to stay in a doomed town? The obvious
thing to do was to get out of London as soon as possible,
So nervousness increased, and finally there was a truly
shameful panic. On the eve of the prophesied disaster
Horace Walpole said, "This frantic fear prevails so much
that within these three days 730 coaches have been
counted passing Hyde Park Corner with whole parties
removing into the country/' The roads were crowded
with refugees. Lodging was unobtainable in safe places
like Windsor and other outlying towns and villages. Some
who did not go right out of town camped in near-by
fields or sat in coaches or in boats for the night. Women
made "earthquake gowns'* for a vigil in the open. A con-
temporary cartoon (PL I) is a fair comment on what
must have been a deplorable scene, though it is spoilt
for us by the fact that the refugees passing the top of
St. James's Street are going eastwards instead of, as is
more likely, westwards. We hear that a third of the in-
habitants of London fled, no doubt a great exaggeration; 8
but people certainly escaped from the town in very large
numbers. And when nothing happened on 5 April, many

8 This is Stukele/s estimate. "Publicws" in the General Evening Tost t
17-19 April, said that "perhaps 100,000 persons*' left their houses to
take refuge in Hyde Park on the night of Wednesday, 4 April

London, 1750 29

stayed away until after Sunday the eighth, in case the
sequence was to be 8 February, 8 March, and 8 April.
One of the refugees explained her conduct. This was
Lady Bradshaigh, who escaped to Reading and wrote
from there to Samuel Richardson, who, she hoped, had
at least left his town house in Salisbury Court, Fleet
Street, together with Mrs. Richardson, for his house at
North End, Hammersmith,

I could not help reflecting [she wrote on 25 March],
how many valuable people I left in a situation threat-
ened with a calamity I was flying from; which gave me
infinite pain. The Bishop of Oxford, I hear, in his ser-
mon . . . called it a presumption in any one who left
London on this occasion. A presumption it would be in
those who remove with an assurance of safety; but, if
a person's mind will be more at ease in one place than
another, it may argue a weakness, but I know no harm
in chusing that place. I religiously believe God's provi-
dence is over all His works; and on that every serious
person must depend, whatever situation he may be in.
He has also given us means to provide for our safety,
and permits us to fly from danger, though, from our
erroneous judgement, we may run into a greater. God
hath warned us to flee from the wrath to come, and if
we take that for a warning, which, in reality, is not one,
surely in that we sin not.

Lady Bradshaigh did not wish to compare London with
Sodom, for London BO doubt contained many good peo-
ple; but because of its size it also contained a propor-
tionately large number of bad people, so it was just as

well to keep away, and, setting aside all other considera-

30 The Lisbon Earthquake

tions, London, by reason of its crowded and insecure
buildings, "is, of all other places, to human appearance,
the most dangerous/* The Richardsons refused to budge.
Lady Bradshaigh pointed out that there was never any
long space of time between shocks, and it was obviously
prudent to keep at a distance from the place of alarm.
She was glad, however, to be able to say that the pre-
sumptuous prophecy of the lifeguardsman had not influ-
enced her at all.

After they had at last considered it safe to return, the
refugees found they had come back to face a very bad
Press. The Remembrance called their behaviour irrational
and impious, and was much concerned for the national
dignity. The Daily Advertiser observed in verse that "low
stupid panics speak a pigmy race 9 *; the London Magazine
observed that such imaginary fears should not have taken
the place of the proper reflections due ou such an occa-
sion, and the Gentleman's Magazine said *so far, even to
their wit's end, had their superstitious fears, or their guilty
conscience driven them/" The London Evening Fost, un-
der reproof for tardiness in recognizing God's personal
intervention on the occasion of the first earthquake, now
spoke out bravely about these cowards. "Let such weak
minds consider that when God resolves to punish a sin-
ful nation, He alone knows the proper time of doing it
... a time that no human sagacity could ever foresee
or foretell/"

The lifeguardsman was sent to the madhouse. The pub-
lic fright was quickly forgotten, and folk resumed uncon-
cernedly their ordinary lives. In the preface to the pain-

London, 1750 31

phlet edition 4 of his Philosophy of Earthquakes, Natural
and Religious, a paper read to the Royal Society in De-
cember 1750, Stukely said he was continuing his investi-
gation in order that the two recent shocks should not be
so quickly forgotten, as they seemed to have been, by
"the giddy multitude/* But thoughtful people did not
easily forget the controversy between those who believed
God had purposely given London two sharp jolts in or-
der to remind the city of its iniquity and those who did
not think God had shown any immediate interest in Lon-
don in this remarkable way. This dispute did not de-
velop unexpectedly in magnitude or bitterness in 1750.,
nor did it even remotely approach the painful urgency
that the problem presented after the Lisbon earthquake
in 1755. But it was there, and it rankled, disturbing or-
thodox clerical minds that had become singularly sensi-
tive to any doctrine that seemed to belittle revealed re-
ligion and to be in agreement with deistic thought.

Some of the clergy merely asserted the immediate di-
vine origin of earthquakes without theological or philo-
sophical comment. That it is God who shakes the earth
"is as great and evident a truth as that he doth exist/'
said the Dissenter Thomas Newman, preaching at Crosby
Square, and he dismissed all the talk about subterranean
caverns, inflammable vapours, and so forth, as irrelevant
prattle. Theophilus Lobb, Nonconformist theologian, de-
clared in his Sacred Declarations (1750) that "earth-
quakes are the productions of the almighty power of
God, and happen only when and where He commands

4 Stukeley's sermon at St. George's and his two Royal Society papers
were published together as a pamphlet in 1750; they were re-issued
after the Lisbon earthquake with an additional paper read to the Royal
Society on 15 January 1756.

32 The Lisbon Earthquake

them to happen." In other words, as Dr. John Allen put
it, since nature is God-created and God-governed, "the
philosophy of nature is but knowledge of the art of God."

But many of the clergy had much more to say on this
particular subject than a simple declaration of opinion,
knowing that if they assured their hearers that God had
a part as an immediate agent in these or any other earth-
quakes, an enlightened and inquisitive mid-eigliteenth-
century society would expect from the preacher a rea-
sonable theodicy, a justification of the God who was al-
leged to govern His people by the sharp threat of an
impending earthquake and, indeed, by the appalling sav-
agery of a great earthquake itself.

The clergy were quarrelling with philosophers and not
with scientists; indeed, clergy and scientists could not
even be marshalled in opposite camps. Whiston was a
scientist and had held Newton's chair; Theophilus Lobb
was a physician and F.R.S.; Pickering was F.R.S,; and
Chandler became one in 1754. Stukeley, also F.R.S., lec-
tured to the Royal Society, and his friend Stephen Hales,
the Curate of Teddington, was another famous scientist
divine, F.R.S. , and D.D., who addressed the Society on
the subject of earthquakes, saying he could pass without
delay to a scientific discussion of their cause, as the other
side of the matter had been adequately treated in the
Bishop of London's letter. Indeed, it is the case that many
clergy agreed that some earthquakes were best explained
by their natural scientific causes and not as an act that
was supernaturally controlled, for God had created this
world in such a way that its perfect ordering, arrange-
ment, and development made earthquakes necessary as
part of His original plan for its physical behaviour. The

London, 1750 33

Archbishop of Dublin, William King (1650-1729), had
written in his Essay on the Origin of Evil: 5

Neither are Earthquakes, Storms, Thunder, Deluges
and Inundations--Aigarnents against the Wisdom and
Goodness of God. They are sometimes sent by a just
and gracious God for the punishment of Mankind; but
often depend on other natural Causes, which are nec-
essary, and could not be removed without greater Dam-
age to the whole. These Concussions of the Elements
are indeed prejudicial, but more Prejudice could arise
to the Universal System by the Absence of them.

The scientists had in their own right a considerable
public in the learned world accustomed to their views.
The entry made under the heading "earthquake" in
Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopedia (second edition, 1738)
begins, "in natural history a vehement shakeof the earth;
from natural causes/* and there is no suggestion that these
"greatest and most formidable phenomena of nature"
could possibly have any other cause; and the account of
earthquakes in the first volume of Buffon's already pop-
ular Histoire Naturelle ( 1749 ) was a part of his system-
atic explanation of nature solely in terms of natural cause
and effect. The clergy, therefore, had a good opportunity
for accepting a changing view about the significance of
earthquakes and attempting to calm their agitated con-
gregations by an assurance that the two earthquake-
shocks might after all have been natural phenomena.
But there were strong reasons for not doing so. They
did think the sins of the age merited divine rebuke; they
found the majority of the people tearfully ready to ac-

6 Third edition (Cambridge, 1739), p. 188, trims, by Edmund Law,
King's De Origins Mali was first published in 1702.

34 The Lisbon Earthquake

cept the earthquakes as such a rebuke; and, above all,
the common interpretation of them in this sense enor-
mously strengthened the apparent case of the Church
against the deism of the 'little philosophers."

This was still an important consideration. In the middle
of the eighteenth century it was not the forgetfulness of
unheeding people, not the sturdy unbelief of the atheist,
nor the ribaldry of flippant folk that constituted separately
or together the worst danger the clergy had to oppose.
They knew well enough how to deal with such ordinary
enemies of the faith. It was against the followers of nat-
ural religion that the earthquake-panic offered a crushing
argument, if it were agreed that God was by means of
these earthquakes directly speaking to His sinful children
on earth; for in natural religion an aloof and unapproach-
able God stands coldly away from His creation, letting
it work itself according to originally established natural
laws, and this kind of God had to be challenged and
denounced by the ministers of a revealed religion based
on the central doctrines of the Incarnation and Atone-
ment, and the use of sacramental worship. Natural reli-
gion could not be anything else than a subtle and very
serious menace to orthodox Christianity, and the hostility
shown to Matthew TindaFs outspoken book, Christianity
as Old as the Creation, published in 1730, is a proof that
the danger of deism had not by this time passed harm-
lessly away.

Therefore, in addition to the pastoral care expected
from them, the clergy had to assert convincingly that
God loved His people and presided over their destinies
to the extent of warning them by sharp punishment when
they had been, as now, excessively wicked. The necessity

London, 1750 35

for punishment was not difficult to explain with so many
sinners already on their knees. But a severe earthquake
as a just punishment of mankind is not so easily explained.
In fact, before asking why such an indiscriminately cruel
event is used by God for the purpose of His moral gov-
ernment of the world, comes an understandable question
about the competence of a Creator who made a world
so imperfect that such horrible proofs of its faulty struc-
ture were thus revealed. Nevertheless current optimistic
thought of the period had a ready answer to both ques-
tions, one that was no longer to be found only in the
lofty thought of Leibniz, Bolingbroke, and Pope, and
other of the more illustrious philosophers, but was or-
dinary preacher's material. In the first place, an earth-
quake may seem to be a disastrous event overthrowing
the essential basic security of a settled order of nature,
and may therefore appear to be a proof of the imperfec-
tion of God's work at the creation of the world; but this
is because we cannot even dimly comprehend the colossal
plan involved in the act of creation. This thought was
stated many times at many different levels of society in
various ways. As an example, John Clarke, afterwards
Dean of Salisbury, said in his Boyle Lectures in 1719: 6

In the ordinary Works of human Art and Contriv-
ance, we see how difficult it is to account for any par-
ticular Part in most of them, without knowing the whole
Composition: As in a Clock or a Watch; He who should
go about to condemn the Shape or Use of any partic-
ular Wheel, the Situation or Design of which was not

Clarke's sermons were called An Enquiry into the Cause and Origin
of Evil, Lctsome and Nicholl. Boyle Lectures, ni, pp. 168-69. London,
1739-

36 The Lisbon Earthquake

at all understood by Him; it would but discover his
own Ignorance and not at all reflect upon the Work-
man. We need not therefore be surprised, if in our Sur-
vey of the Universe, we be often at a loss to account
for many Things that we observe there.

And, further:

We judge of the Knowledge and Skill of the Work-
man by his Performances; or by what we experience of
his Skill, we judge what is likely to be the Effect of it:
and these mutually assist each other. So likewise in the
System of the World, or the whole Frame of Nature;
we know that a Being infinitely wise, all-powerful and
good, cannot be the Author of any Thing, but what
is worthy of those Perfections to create: And conse-
quently, since every Thing that is, was made by Him,
it must originally and as He made it, be very good;
that is, fit for that End and Purpose for which it was
designed.

An earthquake may not therefore be, as an imperfec-
tion in the natural order, an evil thing; and, arguing on
the same lines, it may not be morally, if used as a pun-
ishment, an unjust thing. In 1736 in one of the greatest
English theological works of the first half of the eight-
eenth century, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Re-
vealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, Joseph
Butler, who in this year, 1750, two years before his death,
had just become Bishop of Durham, wrote:

Suppose then, that there are things in the system of
the world, and plan of Providence relating to it, which
taken alone would be unjust: yet it has been shown

unanswerably, that if we could take in the reference,

London, 1750 37

which these things may have to other things present,
past, and to come; to the whole scheme, which the
things objected against are part of; these very things
might, for aught we know, be found to be, not only
consistent with justice, but instances of it.

Indeed, it has been shown not only possible that this
may be the case, but credible that it is. 7

The two earthquakes of 1750 were accordingly re-
garded by Bishop Seeker in his aforementioned sermon
as examples of incidents intended to alarm us from time
to time that for our benefit had been woven by God into
His original scheme of creation. Another preacher, the
Nonconformist Samuel Chandler preaching in Old Jewry
on 11 March, said that earthquakes and like disasters are
operations of the laws of nature determined by God, their
"proper agent/' at the time of the first origin of nature,
and are constantly maintained in their activity and vig-
our by Him in order that they may exert themselves and
produce their effect at those predetermined periods in
which God foresaw they would best promote the purposes
of His moral providence and government. In effect, then,
what people were told was that, having due regard to
the infinite wisdom of God, earthquakes, however terri-
ble, must be accepted as something beneficial in two
ways: physically beneficial to the earth as a purge or
as an enrichment of local mineral resources; and bene-
ficial morally, on a long view, to the human race that
had to endure the temporary suffering they caused.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Even an earthquake. And this was the Leibnizian view,
preached by Chandler and others in London in 1750, that

7 Part II, Ch. VIII, p. 306, ed. Halifax, new edition 1844.

38 The Lisbon Earthquake

had to be examined just over five years later in desperate
moods of anxiety, pity, and terror, when an earthquake
happened that by its savage destruction of a famous city
and its unheeding massacre of the inhabitants most pro-
foundly shocked not only London but all the world.

In this turmoil of rumours, prophecies, panicky fears,
sermonizing, and pamphleteering, there were, as is to be
expected, many who preferred to stand aside from the
commotion and watch the spectacle of their fellow-citi-
zens making fools of themselves. There was much flip-
pancy. Some ladies of Westminster were alleged to be
"so deliberately, so ludicrously profane in these awful
judgements'" as to send each other invitations to earth-
quake-parties. 8 The members of White's were described
by a parson as such an impious set of people that, if the
Last Trump were to sound "they would bet puppet-show
against Judgement." Moreover, as they deserved, the ref-
ugees were mocked mercilessly, and the clergy blamed
for taking an unfair advantage of the people's alarm,

I think the parsons have lately used the Physicians
very ill [wrote David Hume to John Clephane, a Scot-
tish medical man], for in all the common terrors of
mankind you used both to come in for a share of the
profit: but in their new fear of earthquakes, they have
left you out entirely, and have pretended alone to give
prescriptions to the multitude. I see ... a pastoral
letter of the Bishop of London, where, indeed, he rec-
ommends certain pills, such as fasting, prayer, repent-
ance, mortification, and other dings, which are entirely
to come from his own shop.

8 Old England, Saturday, 7 April 1750, An anonymous letter signed
Eubalus (? written by Winston).

London, 1750 39

Horace Walpole said in a letter that the clergy "who
have had no windfalls of a long season," have "driven
horse and foot" into the opinion that the two earthquakes
were a divine judgement.

There has been a shower of sermons and exhortations.
Seeker, the Jesuitical Bishop of Oxford began the mode.
He heard the women were all going out of town to
avoid the next shock; and so, for fear of losing his
Easter offerings, he set himself to advise them to await
God's pleasure in fear and trembling. But what is more
astonishing, Sherlock, who has much better sense, and
much less of the Popish confessor, has been running a
race with him for the old ladies and has written a pas-
toral letter of which 10,000 were sold in two days; and
50,000 have been subscribed for since the first two edi-
tions. You never read so impudent, so absurd a piece!
This earthquake, which has done no hurt, in a country
where no earthquake ever did any, is sent, according
to the Bishop, to punish bawdy prints, bawdy books
. . . gaming, drinking (no, I think, drinking and ava-
rice, those orthodox vices are omitted), and all other
sins, natural or not. . . ,

The Devil (in an anonymous pamphlet) wrote a let-
ter of congratulation and advice to the inhabitants of
Great Britain, particularly those of the two cities of Lon-
don and Westminster, in the matter of their conduct be-
fore and after the late earthquakes. Before then he had
been delighted with the British: "we know not which is
most worthy of our admiration, whether your unparal-
leled refinements in all kind of luxury and debauchery,

g Letters of Horace Wdpole, ed, Toynbee, n, p. 435,

40 The Lisbon Earthquake

or your sagacity in reasoning away every principle of vir-
tue and honour. . . . France and Rome compared to you
are but petty candidates for Hell"; but after the first
quake the Devil feared the British would take fright and
truly repent their evil ways, and he was accordingly over-
joyed to discover that they were only momentarily scared.
The second shock was a new risk from his point of view.
"Fear drove you to your temples, and the few enemies
we have among your priests improved the occasion and
thundered repentance from the pulpits, and fear or shame
even influenced the rest to the like practice"; but, once
more, Hell was reassured. As soon as the day of the pre-
dicted third shock was safely past, the people recovered
their equanimity, and Hell smiled at their renewed wick-
edness. "Return then, my dear children, to your wonted
course . . . laugh at them who would be serious with
you. Confound them with second causes"

A "Gentleman in Town/* Walpole's friend Richard Bent-
ley, in another pamphlet published anonymously, de-
scribed in the form of a letter to a country friend a pre-
tended third earthquake. When it happened the first man
sunk was the Bishop of London, though he might have
escaped if he had not been so busy distributing copies
of his letters. The Duke of Newcastle was next, the place
of his disappearance being marked by scatterings of pa-
pers and red tape. Then followed a long list of other no-
table casualties, and the news that Mr. Whiston had set
out on foot for Dover on the way to Jerusalem to meet
the millennium.

The joke proved so popular that a second letter was
published. White's was swallowed up, Mr, Tuff wagering
that all the members were going to Hell; the Inns of

London, 1750 41

Court were all sunk, and it was ordered that no lawyers
were to be rescued, though they had since begun to
swarm as usual. The Speaker was dug up with the mace
in his hands. A wide breach opened between St. James's
Palace and Leicester House (the residence of the Prince
of Wales, who had quarrelled with the King). Brown
Willis was dug up by order of the Antiquarians. Mr.
Gideon in the City (Sampson Gideon, the financier)
threatens still another quake if his brethren do not sub-
scribe their four per cents quick enough. The Commis-
sioners of Westminster Bridge have ordered the earth-
quake to be entered in their books as a glorious excuse
for the next sinking pier (the sinking of a pier had been
prominent news in 1748 ) . The Middlesex justices, having
been asleep for many years, have woken up and con-
demned a masquerade at Ranelagh, advising young peo-
ple not to attend it; but in order not to offend the pro-
prietors, they kept their advice secret till the day before
it took place, so that the tickets might all be sold before
the young people knew it would be improper to use them.
This was the Venetian Masquerade announced for 17
April, Tuesday after Easter, and the intention of hold-
ing it seemed to some very indignant people to mark that
wholehearted return to London's evil practices on which
the Devil had commented with so much satisfaction. It
was postponed till 24 April, and then to the twenty-fifth,
and as a result of the Middlesex magistrates" action took
place without gaming tables and "other instruments of
fraud"

It is said that the first half of the eighteenth century,
with its enlightenment, its optimism, its cult of happiness,

42 The Lisbon Earthquake

and its content with the status quo, was a fortunate age,
so much so that it might be preferred to all other times
in the past as the one in which a sensible man might
elect to live. Referring to the positive stimulus of a new
manner of thinking, Professor Willey has said that in the
early and middle years of the century "the wealthy and
educated of Europe must have enjoyed almost the nearest
approach to earthly felicity ever known to man/' 10 and
in England the reign of the first two Georges has been
described by Professor Williams as an "oasis of tranquil-
lity," "an age of stability in politics, in religion, in litera-
ture, and in social observances/' 11 In that comfortable
world it may have been the case that an earthquake was,
except for the Day of Judgement, the most terrible thing
that could happen to man, and from the story of the
two London earthquakes of 1750 we see plainly what
great alarm could be caused even by light shocks and
no more than the fear of a greater earthquake to come.
For, truly, an earthquake is a terrifying thing, even with-
out a death-roll and destruction. Almost all the ordinary
actions of our lives demand as an essential prerequisite
that the ground should remain firm and motionless under
our feet and beneath the foundations of our houses. The
total overthrow of mental security that results from any
perceptible indication that it will not do so is itself in
the highest degree alarming; and if to this be added the
unpredictable suddenness of the event, the instant con-
sideration that one is powerless in its presence, and the

10 Basil Willey: The Eighteenth Century Background, p. 44. London,
1 9S3- n ^his subject see also p. 18:2 in/fa.

11 Basil Williams: The Whig Supremacy, p. i, Oxford, 1939.

London, 1750 43

dreaded possibility of its recurrence, we can understand
why there should be fright at even a mild tremor.

From the first century to the present day men have
felt much the same about an earthquake, 12 but for the
ordinary people of the middle eighteenth century the spe-
cial horror of the event was still the awful belief that an
earthquake was a deliberate sign to them from a wrath-
ful God. No attempt at a scientific explanation had as
yet made an earthquake in the general consciousness an
understandable happening, like a flood or a fire. Even an
eclipse was still supernaturally awe-inspiring to many peo-
ple. Stukeley said in his sermon at St. George's, Queen
Square:

We saw not long ago, what an effect was produced
by a solar eclipse, tho* it was expected long before. We
had the prediction, and calculation about it in all our
almanacs; yet there was an universal seriousness that
followed it. All that morning, we could walk the streets,
without hearing an oath, and the churches were full, in
time of prayer. 13

An earthquake remained therefore for the majority of
people an event "instinct with deity/" terrible because of
the holiness of God. If it aroused pity, sympathy, and
charity towards those who suffered in such a disaster, it
aroused also a violently emotional theological reckoning,
expressed in hysterical repentance and agitated specula-
tion about man's relation to God and about God's pur-
pose for this world. The sinner stood sharply rebuked, and

C Seneca: Natur. Quae$t, vi, i.

18 William Stukeley; Philosophy of Earthquakes, p. 40. London, 1750.

44 The Lisbon Earthquake

terrified; the churches filled, and the parson had to chide
and comfort his congregation. That was the result of two
light shocks of 1750, And the religious apprehensions of
the people and the concern of the clergy were also dom-
inant emotions when in the second half of November 1755
the terrible news arrived in London that on the first day
o the month the city of Lisbon had been destroyed by
a great earthquake with enormous loss of life.

Chapter Two

THE LISBON
EARTHQUAKE

.he Lisbon earthquake lasted about ten minutes.
It began about 9:30 A.M. on All Saints' Day, Saturday,
i November 1755, ^^ ave ^ e town three distinct shocks
separated by intervals of about a minute. The first alarm
was a rumbling noise that many people said sounded
like that of exceptionally heavy traffic in an adjacent
street, and this was sufficient to cause great alarm and
make the buildings tremble; then there was a brief pause,
and a devastating shock followed, lasting over two min-
utes, that brought down roofs, walls, and faades of
churches, palaces, and houses and shops in a dreadful
deafening roar of destruction. Close on this came a third
trembling to complete the disaster, and then a dark cloud
of suffocating dust settled fog-like on the ruins of the
city. It had been a clear, bright morning, but in a few
moments the day turned into the frightening darkness of
night, and when the dust began to settle ten or fifteen
minutes later and people began to crawl about in the
wreckage, it was seen that fires had broken out in sev-
eral parts of the shattered town and threatened the city

45

46 The Lisbon Earthquake

with a huge consuming conflagration; and then as these
fires grew there occurred a dreadful event on the water-
front about an hour after the first triple shock; for the
waters of the Tagus rocked and rose menacingly, and then
poured in three great towering waves over its banks,
breaking with their mightiest impact on the shore be-
tween the Alcantara docks and the Terreiro do Pago.

To make worse this cruel day in which so many un-
fortunate people were crushed to death, burnt to death,
or drowned, the earthquake was followed by several after-
shocks, which were generally taken to be warnings that
an even more awful disaster might at any minute com-
plete the destruction of the town. In fact, they were not,
it seems, very serious quakes, but one of them that hap-
pened about 11 A.M., just before the breaking of the seis-
mic waves over the Lisbon quays and foreshore, did heavy
damage in the western town, shattering the Church of
Santa Catarina on the hill close to the river and bring-
ing down the east end of the Church of S3o Paulo, where
a large number of refugees lost their lives. There was
also a frightening after-shock about noon, felt sharply in
northern Lisbon; but the principal ruin of the famous city
was the work of the triple quake before 10 A.M.

The Lisbon earthquake, if measured by the destruction
caused and its death-roll, was not one of the greatest dis-
asters of its kind that have ever happened. India, China,
and Japan have experienced earthquakes much more ter-
rible, for example the dreadful Kwanto earthquake of
1923 that came near to destroying the whole of Tokyo
and Yokohama and killed one hundred thousand people;
but die earthquake of i November 1755 was nevertheless
a colossal seismic disturbance that was felt over so large

The Lisbon Earthquake 47

an area that it caused general alarm and astonishment
and a great output of scientific speculation. It shook, for
the most part severely, the whole south-west corner of
Portugal, doing great damage to Setiibal and Sdcavem,
and in the southern coast of the Algarve the towns of
Lagos, Faro, and Tavira (Fig. i). There was also a tre-
mendous earthquake in North Africa in the area of Fez
and Mequinez, where the destruction was catastrophic
and there was a heavy loss of life; less severely it was
felt as far away as Algiers on the African coast, and all
over south-west Spain and Portugal from Coimbra to Se-
ville and C&diz; outside that area it was felt at many
other places in central and southern Spain from Madrid
to Granada, Guadix, M dlaga, and Gibraltar. It caused no-
ticeable shocks in northern Spain, and in France certainly
as far as Bordeaux, and probably farther north (Fig. 2).
Evidence of the full extent of the earthquake is unsatis-
factory; but shocks were reported at places like Lyons
and Strasbourg and in Switzerland and North Italy, and
also in Normandy and Brittany and the Scilly Islands. It
was said, probably erroneously, to have been felt in Der-
byshire and in Scotland. The sea-waves caused by the
earthquake certainly reached England and Ireland, where
they were recorded about 2 P.M., and they reached the
West Indies about 6 P.M. Almost all over Europe, includ-
ing Scandinavia, the water in rivers, canals, lakes, and
ponds and springs was seen to be suddenly disturbed or
to rise and fall in an abnormal manner.

But the attention of the whole of the relevant civilized
world was focused on the ruined capital of Portugal. Lis-
bon is not an easy place to describe to those who have

LISON

10 20

Fig. i. The earthquake area: Portugal

The Lisbon Earthquake

49

tOO WO 300

Fig. 2. The earthquake area: Peninsula and North Africa

never seen the city, and an uncontoured map is a poor
guide; for, apart from a fine broad axis of level or gently
sloping ground, Lisbon is bumpily and abruptly hilly, so
much so that the extremely steep slopes that sometimes
face the visitor when trying to make his way from the
lower city either to the east or to the west are among
the town's unforgettable features. The Cidade Baixa is,

50 The Lisbon Earthquake

however, flat from the Tagus shore to the top of the Ros-
sio Square, and beyond this the Avenida, running in a
south-east to north-west direction from the Restauradores,
rises gradually towards the Praga do Poinbal and the Par-
que Eduardo VII, which leads up to a level ridge of much
higher ground; but on each side of the Cidade Baixa are
tall cliffs of houses and gardens, bordering the hilly lateral
districts, Lisboa oriental and Lisboa occidental, which are
themselves broken up into steep-sided promontories, small
plateaus, and deep valleys, so that Lisbon, seen from its
famous miradoufos (viewpoints), such as the Castle or
Graga on the eastern heights, or die Alameda de Sao
Pedro de Alcantara on the western ridge, appears as a
city with a low-lying central area that is set in an en-
compassing cup-like frame of broken hilly country, now
as crowded with buildings as the lower town itself,

Lisbon was not, before the earthquake, a city of great
architectural beauty in plan or style, and apart from a
large open space by the river, flanked by the Royal Pal-
ace (PL II) and government buildings, it must have had
a jumbled partly medieval appearance, very pleasant with
its handsome water-front with biggish ships in dock al-
most under the palace windows, and rising behind this
great square an agreeable forest of towers and spires, evi-
dence of the fact that most of the important buildings in
Lisbon were churches or convents. It was not a very large
city, but it had over forty parish churches, several non-
parochial churches, and about ninety convents. Writing
twenty-five years before the great earthquake, a French
observer said it was dirty and not lit at night, but his pic-
ture is nevertheless of a charming city; for lie found much
to admire. Not only the palaces and churches; lie said

The Lisbon Earthquake 51

the fish-market was the best in the world, and the meat-
market, he observed, was spotlessly clean and lined with
the famous azulejos (glazed tiles) of the country; both
these two buildings were on the front, the meat-market
in the palace square, the Terreiro do Pago. He observed
that the chief building material used in the palaces and
bigger houses was a marble that cracked a great deal and
had often to be patched up with mastic; this pretty pink-
ish stone can still be seen in quantities, for in spite of its
cracks it is very good building material.

Appearance apart, the most important thing about Lis-
bon was that it was staggeringly rich, rich in the almost
fabulous contents of its palaces and churches, rich in the
great stores of bullion and jewels and costly merchandise
in its wharves and business premises, rich in its tremen-
dous commercial importance. Portugal, the country, was
not rich: for its finances were badly run and the extrav-
agances of Joao V (1706-50) were of the kind that would
exhaust even Eldorado; moreover, the very powerful Brit-
ish Factory in Lisbon had a grip on Portuguese com-
merce and Brazilian gold that the Portuguese had already
begun to resent. But Lisbon itself was justly famous for
its wealth, and because of its commercial activity it was
one of the best-known cities in the world. Protestant vis-
itors and traders, particularly the English and the Ger-
mans who did most of the business in the town, also knew
Lisbon as a city of the Inquisition, and this influential sec-
tion of the outside world knew much more about autos-
da-fe in Lisbon than in Spain; they also knew a great
deal about what was called the superstitious idolatry of
the Lisbon people. Wealth, the Inquisition, and the wor-
ship of images: to an appreciably large section of the

52 The Lisbon Earthquake

outside world Lisbon was famous for these three things.
Other Latin countries were not likely to object to the
exuberant religious observances of devout Portuguese; but
the Portuguese were not on very good terms with France,
were traditionally suspicious of Spain, and not unreserv-
edly devoted to the Vatican. At the time of the earth-
quake Portugal was an aloof, proud, happy, spendthrift
country, forced to buy things that it should itself have
produced, and slipping fast into financial dependence on
London and Hamburg.

The amount of damage done to Lisbon by the earth-
quake on i November was very great. Some of the finest
buildings in the city were in the greater part ruined and
hundreds of the smaller houses and shops were completely
destroyed. Observers in ships on the Tagus and on the
higher ground round Lisbon talk about the city seeming
to sway like com in the wind before the avalanches of
descending masonry hid the ruins under a cloud of dust.
In the huge basilica, So Vicente do Fora, the priests in
the choir, on reaching the words of the introit Gaudeamus
omnes in Deo, said that they felt the great grey marble
church suddenly rock and sway like an unsteady ship at
sea.

The area of severe shock that included Lisbon, as
mapped by Pereira de Sousa (see Bibliography, p. 47),
extended along the north shore of the Tagus at the Lis-
bon bend from a point close to the present Santos sta-
tion on the Cascais line to Bra<jo de Prata, half-way be-
tween Lisbon and S&cavem, and is a belt of country six
or seven miles long extending inland to a depth of about
one and a half miles. Inside this area there were clis*

The Lisbon Earthquake 53

tricts in which the shocks were of greater intensity and
did more damage than elsewhere. Pereira de Sousa used
a modified Mercalli scale in order to measure the effects
of the earthquake. IX denotes bad damage, churches
wrecked but repairable, houses totally ruined or rendered
uninhabitable, and casualties light; X represents very bad
damage, churches so ruined that they had to be com-
pletely rebuilt, cracked ground and landslides, and heavy
casualties. He was thus able to give a useful, though only
approximate, indication of the state of affairs in Lisbon.
It seems that damage was very severe (X) all along the
Tagus shore from (using modern landmarks) the Pracja
de D. Luis and the Cais do Sodre to the Museu de Artil-
haria; the western boundary of this heavy damage lay
along the north-south line of the Rua de O S6culo that
descends from the little plateau of the Praga do Principe
Real, rises up to the parish church of Nossa Senhora das
Merces, which was not seriously ruined, and then goes
down into the Calgada do Combro, across which the line
continues up the steps to the Santa Catarina hill and then
down to the shore west of the old Mint, a building that
also escaped heavy damage. The central area of devasta-
tion on this same scale (X) extended in a north-south di-
rection from the top of Rossio to the Tagus, westwards
nearly to the line of the Rua do Alecrim and the Rua da
Misericordia, and eastwards to the Rua dos Douradores.
In eastern Lisbon there were two areas of major ruin,
one the castle hill and its southern slopes as far as the
Igreja da S^ (the Cathedral, then known as the Basilica
de Santa Maria) and then down the hill to the Cais de
Santar<m; the other the high ground on which stand
Graa and So Vicente de Fora with its southern and

54 The Lisbon Earthquake

eastern slopes. The earthquake was also felt on this same

heavy scale round the Campo dos Martires, and farther
to the north-east on the hill of Nossa Senhora de Penha
de Frana.

The damage was on the lower scale (IX) on the west-
ern slope of the Castle hill above the Rua da Madalena
in a belt that curves round eastwards past and including
the S6 1 and down to the Igreja da Conceicao Velha,
which preserves the elaborate ManueMne (sixteenth cen-
tury) portico of the wrecked Misericordia Church for-
merly on the site. The damage was also less severe on the
east slope of the Castle hill, where much of the Alfama
district to a great extent escaped both earthquake and
fire. In western Lisbon there was another area marked at
scale IX which ran southwards from Sao Roque, includ-
ing the Rua da Misericordia, the Praga de Camoes, and
the Rua de Alecrim,

The fire greatly increased the destruction begun by the
earthquake. The Royal Palace and the magnificent new
Opera House, completed in March of this same year,
many of the government offices, and the fantastically
splendid Patriarchal Church, might all have survived with
not a great deal of harm done if the fire had not con-
sumed them, and this is also true of many other notable
buildings and churches; but subsequent disaster does not
alter the fact that the earthquake alone did enormous

1 The engraving by Le Bas of the Igrcfa da S$ after the earthquake
shows an almost complete ruin, but these prints (sec PL IV) are un-
trustworthy, and Pereira de Sousa thought that structurally it was not

so seriously wrecked as this picture suggests; he therefore Includes the
S< in a Scale IX area. The Cathedral was burnt out in the fire, and tho
conflicting accounts of what actually happened to this building on i
November 1755 show how difficult it is to measure the effect of the

earthquake on that day by a modern scale of seismic intensity.

The Lisbon Earthquake 55

damage and killed a tragically large number of people.
Over twenty parish churches were ruined; many palaces
and fine houses, and some of the largest convents were
wrecked before the fire completed their destruction; the
home of the Inquisition at the top of the Rossio Square
was tumbled to the ground; the Castle and Santa Cruz
do Castelo suffered heavily. But the earthquake's main
damage was done to the ordinary houses and the rows
of shops. Right through central Lisbon and on the flank-
ing slopes these lesser buildings were for the most part
shattered beyond recovery.

This terrible fire, fanned by a north-east wind, burnt
strongly and was not finally extinguished until nearly a
week after the earthquake; it gutted the whole of the
central, low-lying part of the city and also much of the
town on the adjacent hill-slopes. The contemporary ac-
counts say it started almost at once in various parts of
the ruins, for example in the Carmo and the Trindade
convents, and also in the palace of the Marques de Lou-
rigal in the Largo da Anunciada on the east side of the
Avenida; but it quickly became a general conflagration,
spreading from the top of Rossio towards the river, and
also over the western and southern slopes of the Castle
hill, and, on the other side of the Cidade Baixa, right
over the Carmo ridge down to the Rua do Alecrim and
beyond this up to the top of the hill on which stands the
Chagas Church. Taking a line along the shore of about
a mile from the Church of Sao Paulo near the Cais do
Sodr6 station to the east end of the Rua Cais de Santa-
rem, the fire burnt up the whole of central Lisbon north
of it, on the west up to, though not including, Sao Roque,
in the centre up to the top of Rossio, and on the east

56 The Lisbon Earthquake

right up to the southern wards of the Castle (c PL V).
It was as savage a gutting of the heart of a city as can
be found anywhere in the previous history of Europe,
and after this ferocious blaze had done its work the
richest and most thickly populated district of Lisbon was
a charred desert of smoking ruins with the dead bodies
of hundreds of the inhabitants lying beneath the ashes
and cinders of their homes.

It was this fire that led to the heaviest loss of the city's
material wealth, much of which might otherwise have
been recovered from the earthquake ruins; but the flames
spared little or nothing of the pictures, furniture, tapes-
tries, and plate in the churches and in the palaces and
great houses, or of the great libraries, or of the vast stocks
of merchandise in the shops, where die losses of jewel-
lery, plate, and silks were said to be, and no doubt were,
enormous. Some of the merchants in the Rua Nova dos
Mercadores and the Rua da Confeitaria dragged what
they could of their goods out of their wrecked premises
after the earthquake and began to organize salvage dumps
in the Terreiro do Pao, but later on the fire reached the
great square and burnt the whole lot. The losses in goods
suffered by the foreign traders were estimated at 48,000,-
ooo Spanish dollars (about 12,000,000 sterling), of
which 32,000,000 was the British share; next in the list
come the Hamburg merchants whose losses were esti-
mated at 8,ooo 3 ooo dollars.

The palace of the Marquds de Louri^al stood well clear
to the north of the main area of the fire; but the rich
contents of his home, all destroyed, show the kind of
thing this loss of property meant: two hundred pictures,
including works by Titian, Correggio and Rubens, a li-

The Lisbon Earthquake 57

brary of eighteen thousand printed books, one thousand
manuscripts, including a history written by the Emperor
Charles V in his own hand, a herbal formerly belonging
to King Matthias Hunyadi (1440-90) of Hungary, a huge
family archive, and a great collection of maps and charts
relating to the Portuguese voyages of discovery and colo-
nization in the East and in the New World. It is said that
seventy thousand books perished in the burning of the
King's palace in the north-west corner of the present Ter-
reiro do Pago; the Bragana archive was burnt in the
Palacio dos Duques de Braganga at the bottom of the
Rua Antonio Maria Cordoso, and a valuable library of
Marian literature, including many incunables, was de-
stroyed in the Oratory on the site of the Grandes Arma-
zens at the east end of the Chiado at the crossing of the
Rua do Carmo and the Rua Nova do Almada; the fire
also burnt another fine library, carefully catalogued and
open for public use, in the convent of the Dominicans at
the north-east corner of the Rossio Square.

All descriptions of the earthquake by those who were
near the shore or in boats on the Tagus tell with horror
of the great waves that suddenly came pouring over the
north shore at about eleven o'clock; for ships were torn
from their anchors, crashed against each other and against
the quays, and all the light shore structures were washed
away. The seismic waves started out at sea and, coming
in towards Lisbon from the south-west, were to some ex-
tent resisted at the river bar; but even so they were for-
midable enough, fifteen to twenty feet high, it was said,
and three times they flung themselves at the whole six
miles of river-coast from Lisbon to the mouth of the Ta-
gus, as also along the south-facing coast to Cascais and

58 The Lisbon Earthquake

Cabo Raso, and against the west coast at least as far as
Ericeira. It seems, however, that In their fullest violence
they struck against the low-lying Sao Paulo district of Lis-
bon and the Terreiro do Pago, and here their force was
such that they greatly damaged the Alfdndega buildings
(Customs House) and completed the destruction of the
fine marble-faced Cais de Pedra in front of the Alfn-
dega, a magnificent new quay built by Joao V, the stones
of which had already been loosened and partly dislodged
by the earthquake. 2 Here a large number of people, prob-
ably over a hundred, who had taken refuge on what
seemed to be a safe open place convenient for escape
across the river, were washed away and drowned, as many
other people were drowned up and down the coast. The
waters, however, had spent their force with the third
wave, and gradually the river became quiet. Boats had
begun again to cross the Tagus with refugees by about
two o'clock in the afternoon.

No one will ever know the number of people who lost
their lives in the Lisbon earthquake. First accounts un-
derstandably gave wildly exaggerated estimates, and it
was extremely difficult to replace the early guesses by
convincing official statistics. The confusion caused by the
frantic evacuation of the ruined area of the city made
an immediate worth-while roll-call impossible, for nobody
could tell whether a missing person was lying dead un-
der the rubble or had escaped into the suburbs or the

2 The commonly repeated story that the Cais tie Pedro, was suddenly
swallowed up in an earthquake chasm was disproved by Portuguese en-
gineers shortly after the earthquake. See Morciru de Mcndonv il lllstorfa
Universal dos Terremotos, p. 134, and for modern opinion on, this point,

Harry Fielding Reid, Bull. Seisniological Society of America, xv, 2 (June
PP- 54-55-

The Lisbon Earthquake 59

country; there was no means of ascertaining the numbers
of lodgers and strangers in the town, and most of the
civic records on which some sort of census could be based
had been burnt. The first attempt to count the casualties
was a questionnaire sent out to the parish priests through-
out the country, but the returns are only available for
certain country districts, and those for Lisbon, now miss-
ing, are said to have been made too soon; for there had
not been time to trace refugees and to let the people set-
tle down in the camps on the outskirts of the ruins so
that they could be asked about the fate of their families
and their friends. What seem to be the best and most
careful estimates agree that probably between ten thou-
sand to fifteen thousand people lost their lives in Lisbon
out of a population, in the neighbourhood of 275,000, and
a very sensible historian of the earthquake, Joachim Jos 6
Moreira de Mendonga, thought that not more than five
thousand people were killed on i November, the casual-
ties being doubled or trebled during the course of the
month. A large number of the inmates, it is said as many
as four hundred, were burnt to death in the Hospital
Real, and a great many were killed in the churches, not
only because of the big attendances at the morning Masses
on All Saints* Day, but because those that were not com-
pletely ruined were used for sheltering the wounded and
as places of refuge before they were burnt out.

The figures given in many accounts and often quoted
are not accurate, but some of the estimates are a measure
of the terror of the day. It was said that not one hundred
but nine hundred people lost their lives when the great
waves poured down on the Cais de Pedra and the Alf 4n-
dega do Jardim do Tabaco behind it in the Terreiro do

60 The Lisbon Earthquake

Pago; six hundred people are said to have been crushed
to death in the church of the Franciscan convent and
twenty of the monks; four hundred were reported to have
been killed in the church of the Convento de Santa Trin-
dade; three hundred out of eight hundred morning com-
municants were believed to have died in the church of
the Convento de Nossa Senhora da Penha de Frana, and
137 people were burnt to death in the parish church of
Santa Maria Madalena. The last figure is probably cor-
rect, the others guesses that may be in need of whole-
sale cutting. A statement, for instance, that two hundred
people perished in the Oratory was quickly corrected to
fifty by one of the Fathers (see p. 91 ) : the dreadful events
in the parish church of S5o Paulo killed by earthquake
and fire about a hundred persons, and not six hundred,
as rumour said. But the earthquake was horrible and in-
discriminately murderous; thousands of people were killed
by the collapsing city and hundreds were burnt to death
in the ghastly conflagration that followed.

Of the swarming population of monks, friars, and nuns
in Lisbon about two hundred were killed in the earth-
quake. There was no very serious loss of life among the
foreign commercial population in Lisbon. The British Fac-
tory did not lose many of its members, and the total
British killed, including some unfortunate casualties of
whom almost nothing was known but their names, came
to seventy-seven. Of these forty-nine were women. There
were very few casualties among the Portuguese nobility
and persons of distinction, probably less than twenty in
all, and in the whole of this great disaster that struck so
hard at Portugal and Spain only two deaths have become
memorable, in Lisbon that of the Spanish Ambassador,

The Lisbon Earthquake 61

the Conde de Peralda, who was killed escaping from the
front door of his embassy, and, in Cadiz, that of the young
Racine, great-grandson of the famous dramatist.

The descriptions of the misery and suffering of the un-
happy people of Lisbon on i November and the follow-
ing days are the common tales told of such disasters; but
they do not seem less terrible because of that. There are
accounts of folk creeping out of the wreckage, bleeding
and with broken limbs, stumbling about in search of the
rest of their family, of cries for help, of screaming chil-
dren, and of the frantic agonies of the wounded animals,
mules, horses, and dogs; of suicidal attempts to escape
from the upper stories of partly wrecked houses; of ob-
stinate people who could not be persuaded to seek safety
and had to be abandoned; of little groups of terrified peo-
ple forming together and setting off on aimless expedi-
tions, turning about whenever some rumour of a safe
place reached them or whenever they were threatened
by fire or collapsing walls; tales of bolting into churches,
dossing down in the squares, and also of the great per-
sistent exodus to the open country. Tales also of great
bravery and resignation shown by the sufferers.

The first night after the earthquake was terrible, for
now the roaring flames had a firm grip on the town, and
there was still a pitiful background noise of groans and
cries and the howling of dogs. The dreadful waves had
done terrible damage, and no one knew whether it was
safe to be near the river; fires and crashing walls were
blocking some of the main roads leading to the country;
most of the narrow lanes, alleys, and steps between the
buildings on the hill-slopes were impassable; thieves and
galley slaves had escaped from the prisons and already

62 The Lisbon Earthquake

started robbing the dead and wounded, and plundering
in the ruins; a rumour that the powder magazine in the
Castle was at any minute likely to blow up, which had
been widely spread during the day, was still tormenting
those who knew of the possibility. The scenes in the big
squares, especially Rossio and the Terreiro do Pago, must
have been truly appalling. In Rossio the palace of the
Inquisition, Sao Domingos and the adjacent Ennida of
Nossa Senhora de Escada were in ruins, and fires were
still burning s on all sides and in the skeletons of the great
convents on the western hill; the roads leading out of it
from the south side were choked with ruins and smashed
traffic; and in the square the miserable sick inmates of
the burning Hospital Real had been dumped down, ex-
posed and helpless, while little groups of the refugees
from the surrounding buildings camped there with their
wounded in discomfort and dread. And among them all
the time moved priests, confessing and giving absolution. 4
Of all the horrors of the Lisbon earthquake no horror was
worse than the supreme terror of dying unconfcsscd and
unforgiven.

The great exodus from the central area of the city be-
gan at once, and was joined by crowds of people from
the built-up areas on the perimeter of the wrecked part

8 The fires in Sao Domingos and the hospital were at their height
about 3 P.M.

4 This caused alarm to one or two Protestant casualties. The miserable

young Mr, Chase, act, 26, helpless from his injuries* was in the Terreiro
do Pac.o, and at the approach of priests pretended to be unconscious In
case the zealous papists might deem it meritorious to burn a heretic in
the approaching flames. One English clergy man, unable to spouk Portu-
guese, found himself hemmed in by a crowd and baptized by Portuguese
priests.

The Lisbon Earthquake 63

of the town. It was in part a sensible and in part a dis-
graceful flight. The contemporary accounts of the earth-
quake say bluntly that there was a desperate scramble to
get out of Lisbon by frightened mobs of hysterical peo-
ple, clutching crucifixes and images of saints, and bits and
scraps of their belongings, all trying to reach open coun-
try. Almost every section of the population was repre-
sented among the refugees. For example the greater part
of the garrison of the Casa da Moeda (the Mint) near
the Cais do Sodre, in which was a big store of newly ar-
rived gold from Brazil, joined in the flight, only a young
lieutenant and four soldiers having the courage to remain
at their posts and protect the building as best they could
from fire and from robbers. Many writers have described
the terrified streams of people trying to get away from
Lisbon and the misery and suffering of the flight. Our
example here, however, shall be the comparatively un-
sensational adventures of Father Manuel Portal of the
Oratory, quoted from a manuscript source by Pereira de
Sousa.

For this holy man the day of i November began un-
happily as he had had a bad dream during the night, in
which, he says, there were two earthquake shocks, no-
ticed also by other people. He awoke greatly distressed,
for he had been warned in his dream that he would never
see again the beloved crucifix on the wall of his cell, and
he attended Mass in a state of penitent alarm. Then came
the great earthquake, and he found himself partly buried
in the wreckage of one of the corridors of the convent;
eventually he was with some difficulty extricated by his
comrades, and when he was set free, though he was badly
injured as one of his legs had been crushed, he did his

64 The Lisbon Earthquake

best to minister to those of his brethren who were also
in distress, hearing their confessions and giving them ab-
solution, and in turn himself confessing and receiving ab-
solution. He could not walk properly and had to get two
men to support him, but with their help he struggled
over the rubble and dead bodies out of the convent into
the Rua das Portas de Santa Catarina (the present Rua
Garrett); there he found one of the Oratory Fathers
preaching to the people who had collected in the street,
and a little farther on, looking north up the steep Cal-
ada do Sacramento, he saw a cousin of his, a priest of
the Church of the Santissimo Sacramento, cloakless and
holding up a crucifix that he had rescued from the
church's ruins, also exhorting passers-by and giving ab-
solution. This kind man told the maimed Portal to take
shelter in his house, but he refused and insisted on help-
ing his cousin minister to the people; then he moved on
again, leaving the wrecked church and the huge burning
ruin of the Carmo behind him, picking his way westwards
and northwards to the gate of a large and partly ruined
palace close to the wrecked Convent of the Trinclade.
Here again he stopped to minister to those of the es-
caped occupants who were collected outside the build-
ing, and when he tried to proceed he found the narrow
road leading up to the Trindade blocked with debris, so
that he had to turn and go downhill to the Italian Church
of Nossa Senhora do Loreto (at the west end of the Rua
Garrett on the north side), which was only very slightly
damaged,

His intention now was to get to the Neeessidades,
where the Oratory still maintained its old convent; but
he could find no usable road leading to the west or sou tin-

The Lisbon Earthquake 65

west, so he changed his mind and decided to journey
northwards to their quinta of the Vale do Pereiro in the
upper Cotovia, a short distance beyond the Rato in the
Campolide direction. 5 He therefore struggled up the Rua
Larga de Sao Roque and at last reached the Convent of
Sao Pedro de Alcantara, which he found in ruins, and at
this point his strength began to fail. He had to rest and
it was with great difficulty that his friends got him to
move on, though he had now reached level ground and
had a downhill walk to the Rato in front of him. When,
a little farther on, he came to the little plateau, now the
Praga do Principe Real, then a wilderness dominated by
the ruins of the Conde de Tarouca's unfinished palace, he
collapsed and had to be put on a pack-horse; but this
did not end the miseries of his escape, for just as he came
to the silk factory on the south side of the Rato there
was another alarming earthquake, and the terrified crowds
all around him, suddenly began to press backwards in the
direction of Lisbon, jostling the poor Father and clamour-
ing for words of comfort and absolution, which he gave
them willingly and as best he could. When he had freed
himself, he had still a quarter of a mile to go before he
got to the outer and higher part of the quinta, and when
at last he reached it, he was put in a chair out in the
open, wrapped round with a cloak, and left; and while
he was sitting there he witnessed the arrival in a sedan
of the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, one of the Oratory's
most distinguished refugee-guests. At night a little shelter

5 A quinta is a country estate with a residence and farm-buildings,
vineyards, orchards, vegetable-garden, etc. The residence of the Oratory
quinta was near the junction between the present Rua de Sao Felipe

Neri and the Rua de Atilharia I.

66 The Lisbon Earthquake

of some sort was made for him, but he had to give this

up to another Father and camp under a tree. Eventually
he was discovered by friends and removed to a hut in

the southern part of the quinta, where the wretched man
remained for some days, very ill and in great discomfort.

The Cidade Baixa was not deserted, though few peo-
ple dared to live in the houses that were still serviceable
as dwellings. Some, however, refused to leave the neigh-
bourhood of their destroyed houses and places of busi-
ness, and some were too poor to afford to build a hut
and live in the suburban camps; the parish priests stuck
to their posts, and some members of the religious orders
insisted on staying on in the ruins of their convents; more-
over, useful men were soon made to return to the de-
stroyed part of the town, particularly technicians and
craftsmen who could help in the work of reconstruction.
Rossio, Terreiro do Pao, and the Praa da Ribeira were
crowded with temporary offices and shops, and there was
a constant coming and going of the military called in to
maintain order and help with the burying of the dead,
and also of engineers and government officials. Stalls were
set up for selling food and other necessities, and a town
life of a kind went on. But the population had to a con-
siderable extent shifted, and there were now strange new
settlements in the open spaces east and west of the de-
stroyed area, and on the high ground encircling the city.
The Oratory quinta at Cotovia, to which Manuel Portal
had escaped, and the surrounding properties formed one
of these encampments, and the parish of Santa Isabel in
which it was situated is said to have had a refugee pop-

The Lisbon Earthquake 67

ulation of twenty-five thousand. 6 The Campo de Ourique,
the Campo de Santa Ana, the Campo Grande, the Campo
Pequeno, and the Campo de Santa Barbara in the Castle,
were also filled by little towns of tents and huts; so also
the Estrela district in the west and the Campo de Santa
Clara on the east side of the town were full of squatters.
Right away to the west there were large encampments
around Nossa Senhora da Ajuda and at Belem. It was
estimated that about nine thousand wooden buildings
were put up during the first six months after the quake,
a fine achievement, for wood was very scarce indeed in
Lisbon and much of it had to be brought to the city for
this special purpose.

The King and the royal family were staying, when the
earthquake happened, at a royal residence in Belein, but
they moved at once into a suite of tents in an open space
close at hand, and there they stayed for nine months un-
til a big quadrangular wooden lodging, with twenty-five
windows a side, had been erected for them on the Ajuda
hill, north of Belem where the great stone palace, built
in the early nineteenth century, now stands. His minister
Pombal (see p. 73) had a hutment lodging at Bel6m while
the King was there; but he probably made use also of his
house in the Rua de O Seculo near the parish church of
Nossa Senhora das Merces, which, though on the fringe
of a badly ruined area, seems to have been more or less
undamaged. 7 The general desire was to get out of build-
ings into tents or huts, and to sleep in the garden rather
than indoors, even if one's home still stood safe and

6 Matos Sequeira, Depois do Terremoto, x, 32, reduces the figure to
"more than 6,ooo/*

7 Pombal had also some newly built property in the parish of Sao
Juliao in the Cidade Baixa that escaped damage.

68 The Lisbon Earthquake

sound, and for this reason the great camps on the hig!
and open places round the city were for a long time
crowded communities, in spite of the initial discomfort
and squalor of the miserable bivouacs of matting, planks,
and sail-cloth under which many of the squatters spent
their first few nights.

The most remarkable concourse of these campers was
that in and around the quinta of the Oratory in Cotovia.
The company included the Patriarch and his staff, some
members of the nobility, and a number of nuns from the
ruined Convento das Trinas do Rato which was close to
the present Praga do Rato. The farm and vineyards of
the quinta suffered badly, but in a little while an ordered
settlement of wooden huts was established, and some of
these, built for nobles and high officials, began to be quite
luxurious bungalows with glass windows and tapestry
hangings and good domestic offices. The Patriarch built
a properly furnished chapel, and the Oratory also built
themselves decent wooden premises with a small church.
The Patriarch made a daily distribution of food and en-
tertained charitably on a very large scale. The clergy
from the Patriarchal Church had been transferred to the
Ermida of Slo Joaquim and Santa Anna in Alcdntara; but
they were frightened out of this by an earthquake on 21
December; later on a very grand wooden church was
made for them on what had been the Condc do Tarouca's
property on the side of the road leading from Sao Iloque
to the Rato. The Patriarch himself, after a year in the
quinta of the Oratory, moved into the palace of the lately
disgraced minister Diogo de Mendonga C6rte Real. The
Marques de Louri$al, whose town palace had been burnt,
also built a fine wooden house in this neighbourhood on

The Lisbon Earthquake 69

the Estrada do Rato, and before long most of the rich
people in temporary lodgings were as comfortable as they
could be under such circumstances and were behaving in
an ostentatiously gay and cheerful manner. In fact, they
were considered to be a little too high-spirited. The ladies
began to go about in their prettiest and most expensive
clothes, and in February 1756 the Patriarch thought it
proper to correct this ostentation by forbidding them to
wear coloured hats in church in place of the customary
dark veils.

It was inevitable that some imperturbable folk should
begin to joke about the whole adventure, and mock in
private the superstitious fears of the majority, for it
seemed that God was persistently flouting the prayers
of his devoted Portuguese worshippers; but that was not
the common mood, and throughout Lisbon there was still
a mood of anxiety. The dreadful thing was that the earth-
quakes continued. They were mostly brief after-shocks
that did no damage, but they kept hysterical fright alive
and seemed to justify the predictions of the numerous
prophets of woe who said that God had not yet com-
pleted the punishment of the sinful city of Lisbon, It
was alleged that there were nearly thirty earthquake
shocks in the week after i November, and before the
end of the year there were certainly some that caused
very great alarm, a violent shock at 5:30 A.M. on 8 No-
vember, three more shocks in the middle of the month,
and a really thunderous quake, causing panic and evac-
uation, in the early morning of 11 December. There was
another earthquake that caused excessive alarm on 21
December. "Will your Earth never be quiet?" asked Sir
Benjamin Keene, the British Ambassador in Madrid, on

yo The Lisbon Earthquake

31 July 1756, in a letter to Castres, British Envoy in Lis-
bon. In August 1756 it was said that there had been five
hundred after-shocks since the dreadful day of i Novem-
ber 1755. No wonder most of the Lisbon people remained
wretchedly apprehensive; no wonder vehement orators
pursued them with exhortations, scoldings, and threats;
no wonder they believed that the anger of God against
Lisbon had not been turned aside. Where was it all to
stop? Who could find safety? What other sinful commu-
nity was God going to punish next? No wonder that the
clergy of many nations had to go up into their pulpits
and answer as best they could the question that their
suddenly serious congregations now asked in conscience-
stricken alarm, "Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto
this great city?"

Chapter Three

MEN OF ACTION AND
MEN OF SCIENCE

JLn his sensible little Commentary * on the Lisbon
earthquake published in 1756, Ant6nio Pereira of the Or-
atory (afterwards Ant6nio Pereira de Figueiredo) men-
tioned four people who had greatly contributed to the
restoration of order and confidence after the disaster.
Monsenhor Sampaio of the Patriarchal Church, who
worked so hard at burying dead bodies that he is be-
lieved to have assisted personally at the interment of 240
people; Dom Joao de Braganga, cousin of the King and
younger brother of the Duque de Lafoes, who distin-
guished himself in the rescue work without any regard
to his own safety; the Duque de Lafoes himself, who did
so much to preserve order and prevent looting, tirelessly
devoting himself to his duties and neglecting sleep and
meals in order to get on with his task; and finally the
aged Patriarch, Cardinal Jos6 Manuel (1686-1758), who
did his best to arrange that his clergy could continue to
perform their spiritual and practical tasks. In 1758 in his
much fuller account 2 of the earthquake, Joachim Jos6

1 p. 90 infra. 2 p. 247 infra.

71

J2 The Lisbon Earthquake

Moreira de Mendonya praised the same four distinguished
people, mentioned the signal generosity of the three Pal-
hava princes, illegitimate sons of Joao V, 3 and the ad-
mirable handling of the earthquake-crisis in general by
King Jos4 assisted by his Secretary of State, Sebastiao
Jos6 de Carvalho e Mello, a wise and active minister.

In 1764 there was published a little potted history of
all that had happened in Lisbon from the earthquake to
the expulsion of the Jesuits/ also by Antonio Pereira de
Figueiredo, and in it we read that everything written, or-
dered, or done in the name of His Most Faithful Majesty
in respect of burying the dead, restoring morale, collect-
ing provisions, calling in troops, dealing with looting, pro-
viding protection against African pirates, stopping and
controlling refugees, maintaining a strict military disci-
pline, protecting nuns, averting God's wrath, preserving
the King's person, punishing traitors, suppressing Jesuits,
restoring commerce, encouraging the arts, clearing the
ruins, planning and rebuilding the city, all this, we arc
told, was in the greater part due to the foresight, wis-
dom, and authority of the Conde clc Oeiras. The Conde
de Oeiras was the new title, created in 1759, f Sebastiao
Jose de Carvalho e Mello, the future Marques do Pom-
bal, a title conferred on him in 1770 (PL VI),

That was the proper way to write about a great cite-

8 O$ meninos de Paffiav8 t so called because they were brought tip in
the Balhava palace, now the Spanish embassy, north of the city, close
to the present Fcira Popular on the Benfiea road. They were officially
recognized by King Jos as his brothers at the beginning of the earth-
quake year,

4 Rerum Lusitanarum Ephenwrides . . . , Lisbon, 3,761. And Didrio
dos successor de Lisboa dcsdc o terremoto at& o exterminio do$ Jezu-
itas* Traduzido do idiom a Latino por Mathias Pereira de Azevedo Pinto,
Lisbon, 1766.

Men of Action and Men of Science 73

tator such as Pombal had by then become. He towered
above everybody else in ability and authority, and no-
body could any longer approach him in any distribution
of credit. After a due lip-service to the King, he took it
all. Moreover, some of those praised in 1756 for their
distinguished services in the earthquake-crisis had disap-
peared. The Patriarch, Jose Manuel, and the first Duque
de Lafoes were dead. Pombal had exiled Dom Joao of
Braganga, second Duke of Lafoes, who, after being made
F.R.S. in London in 1757, was now in Austria; he had
disgraced the two Palhava princes, Antonio and Jose, and
the third, Caspar, the Archbishop of Braga, was living in
a state of toadying apprehension. The dictator stood alone
as the earthquake-hero.

Pombal was born in 1699. His career as Dictator of
Portugal lasted throughout the whole of the reign of Jose
I, who became King in 1750 and died in 1777, and is a
brilliant, startling, and sometimes lamentable and terrify-
ing, chapter in the history of his country. When King
Jos6 died his famous minister was disgraced and ended
his days in exile in 1782 in a house in the market-square
of the little town of Pombal between Coimbra and Leiria,
from which he took his title. He was the son of a simple
country squire, and though he was from the beginning a
thruster, he was also a troublesome and touchy person,
and he did not make any substantial advance in politics
until he was thirty-nine years old. He owed his first con-
nexions with the court to an uncle who was an official
in the Patriarchal Church, but his career really began
with his marriage to the widow of a nobleman and niece
of the Conde de Arcos, a match strongly opposed by the

74 The Lisbon Earthquake

bride's family. Having inherited money and now attained
a social position, he lived bravely and showily, aided in
his political ambitions by an important relative, eleven
years his senior, Marc Ant6nio de Azevedo Coutinho
(1688-1750), whom in 1739 he succeeded as Minister
Plenipotentiary in London. In 1745 he was sent on a
mission to Vienna, where his first wife having died, he
made another splendid match by marrying an Austrian
lady of famous lineage, a union that was a lifelong hap-
piness to him and also one that greatly increased his pres-
tige in the Portuguese court, for Queen Maria Ana was
an Austrian. He was stiU a climbing man, financially
ruined because of his heavy Vienna expenses and angry
at the loss of his London appointment as he had wanted
to return to England to recover his losses; but when he
was back in Portugal in 1749 he found he had two pow-
erful friends in the Queen Regent, for Joo V was dying,
and Coutinho, now Secretary of State, and on the acces-
sion of Jos^ I he obtained a post in the Cabinet as Min-
ister for Foreign Affairs and War. Very quickly he estab-
lished himself as the dominant figure in, Portuguese poli-
tics, and as quickly he made himself hated by a jealous
group of noblemen whose prestige he flouted and whose
formidable influence he had already begun to undermine.
Then came the earthquake.

The obsequious paragraph in Ant6nio Pereinus* little
history of 1761 comes near enough to being a fair tribute
to a man of exceptional ability, for there is so much to
be said against Pombal, that this one thing at least should
be left indisputably to his credit, namely that his bravery
and common sense rescued ruined Lisbon, inspired its
citizens with the courage that resolute leadership can,

Men of Action and Men of Science 75

give, and in a large measure prevented Ms country from
suffering an appalling economic and social disaster. He
was in undisputed command from the day of the earth-
quake, and letters and dispatches written in Lisbon in the
following days by foreigners reporting the terrible events
contain sincere and admiring tributes to Senhor de Car-
valho's firm handling of the situation. It is a well-known
story that when the unhappy young King ( Jos6 was thirty-
six ) in his first misery on learning the dreadful nature of
the catastrophe asked despairingly what was to be done,
Pombal replied: "Bury the dead and feed the living/' It
is an apocryphal saying, and in anti-Pombal literature is
attributed to the Duque de Aveiro or the Marques de
Alorna; but it is so likely to be in some near form what
Pombal really did say, so succinctly expresses the prac-
tical measures he at once caused to be carried out, that
it has rightly become immortal as a classic example of
the blunt common sense of a man of action breaking
roughly and abruptly through another man's mood of
dithering emotional helplessness.

In 1758 a handsome folio volume was published 6 in
Lisbon containing the principal directives whereby Se-
nhor de Carvalho had controlled the earthquake emer-
gency and had restored order and confidence in Lisbon
and throughout Portugal. It is fulsomely dedicated to
King Jos6, who is extolled as the immensely brave and
immensely wise saviour of his country, and it is a mag-

G Memorias das principaes Providendas que se derdo no Terremoto,
que padeceo a Corte de Lisboa no anno de 1775 . . . per Amador Pa-
tricia de Lisboa. The author is said to be Francisco Jos< Freire ( 1719-
73), later a distinguished poet and literary man, and, like Ant6nio Pe-
reira, a member of the Oratory; both were in the Convento do Espirito
Santo at the time of the earthquake.

j6 The Lisbon Earthquake

nificent book, of which Portugal may justly be proud; but
the compiler remained discreetly anonymous, and it is
really a monument to Pombal by Pombal, as noble as
the big bronze medallion of himself that he caused to be
fixed on the plinth of the great equestrian statue of King
Jose in the Terreiro do Pago, which he unveiled in 1775,
and as showy and impressive as the great twentieth-cen-
tury marble monument to the dictator that now domi-
nates the Avenida from its central position in the Praga
do Pombal. Politically, Pombal did need a monument as
early as 1758, for enemies, jealous of his power, had al-
ready begun to intrigue against him, and even his meri-
torious services at the time of the earthquake, of which
in this book he pointedly reminded the Portuguese, even
these had not erased the detestation with which his quick
climb to power and the brutal ruthlessness of his methods
of doing so were regarded by many of the nobles, while
the Jesuits had already good reason for using their in-
fluence in every possible way against him. But, even with
this discreditable background, and in spite of the anti-
Pombal judgement that his earthquake-administration was
a series of belated measures desperately following a sit-
uation beyond his control, no impartial person can read
the Providencias without a warm respect for the strong
realistic administration whereby Pombal did deal firmly
with conditions dangerously liable to degenerate into a
state of lawless panic. In a clearly expressed and con-
sistent series of documents, beginning on the clay of the
earthquake itself, Pombal is revealed handling with uu-

6 The medallion was removed after Pombal's disgrace and the inten-
tion was to destroy it; but the artist hid it and handcx! on the s<er<;t of

Its whereabouts, so that it was possible for a Liberal government to re-
place it in 1833.

Men of Action and Men of Science 77

ruffled determination one after another of the anxieties
and crises inevitably attending a major disaster of this
kind.

Nevertheless, it was really the Portuguese people who
saved the situation, for the best of them behaved bravely
and performed their duties calmly in the dangerous days
of November 1755. Pombal could have achieved little in
the earthquake-crisis if he had not been strongly and will-
ingly supported, and a complete account of the events
after the disaster would give credit to the invaluable serv-
ices of many of the Portuguese whose parts in this ago-
nizing drama may now seem to be only minor roles sup-
porting the dominant performance of the chief actor.
First, Dom Pedro de Bragana, Duque de Lafoes ( 1718-
61), the Chief Justice, who was responsible for the civil
government of the kingdom; next, the third Marques de
Marialva, Dom Diogo de Noronha (1688-1761), Grand
Master of the Horse, and responsible for the military gov-
ernment; then, Fernao Telles da Silva, Marques de Ale-
grete, Monteiro-M6r (King's Huntsman), President of the
Senate, and responsible for the economic administration; T
the second Marques de Abrantes, Commander-in-Chief,
and many other high-ranking officers of the forces; then
the members of the able and active Camara Municipal in
Lisbon, who presided jealously over the interests of the
citizens, even if it was necessary to oppose or criticize
Pombars measures; then the specially appointed magis-
trates of the twelve bairros, and the engineers and sur-
veyors headed by Manuel de Maia (1680-1768), chief
engineer and officer-in-charge of the Torre do Tombo,

7 The first three names are somewhat coldly mentioned as the prin-
cipal executive officials in the Providenclas, pp. 39-40.

78 The Lisbon Earthquake

Carlos Mardel, a senior engineer, and Eug6nio dos San-
tos, names best known during the subsequent planning
and building of the new Lisbon, though each did work
which was as valuable in the first and worst days of the

crisis. All these men, and there were many others, can
be identified in action through the directives addressed
to them; but there must have been also a heroic company
of folk whose names do not figure with deserved em-
phasis in the contemporary accounts of the earthquake.

The part played by the Church does require proper
honour because later events have, with some reason, made
Pombal appear in history as a violently anti-clerical states-
man who in the earthquake-period was driven to exas-
peration by the obstruction and non-cooperation of cer-
tain sections of the Lisbon clergy. We shall see in later
chapters how bitter, and how understandable, was the
conflict between him and the preachers who in his view
exploited the earthquake in an alarmist and anti-social
manner; but that quarrel must not spoil a tribute to the
general body of the clergy whose conduct immediately
after the earthquake was both helpful and heroic.

The Cardinal Patriarch's conscientious direction of the
Church has been fairly recorded, and also the magnif-
icent work of the religious orders, particularly the Ora-
tory Fathers, the Jesuits, the Benedictines, and the Austin
Friars; but insufficient tribute has been paid to the or-
dinary parish priests of the worst-damaged area of the
city; for no one reading the earthquake-accounts can fail
to be impressed by the bravery and devotion of these
men who remained at their posts in conditions of great
danger and terrifying confusion. They did their best to
carry on their parochial duties ia whatever makeshift ac-

Men of Action and Men of Science 79

commodation they could contrive as close as possible to
the ruins of their churches, and in huts and tents right
among the ruins and the fires they stayed on duty where
their people could find them and where in some form
or other the accustomed worship could be maintained.
They were present to act as the main agents in estab-
lishing a roll-call after the disaster and to deal with the
official inquiries about their surviving parishioners, the
casualties, the number of the folk who had fled from
the town. The action of these brave men is only briefly
recorded, but in most cases their emergency measures are
known. For example, the pdroco of Sao Juliao moved into
the Terreiro do Pago and worked there for two years in
a wooden cabin which for a time he shared with the
parish priest of the burnt-out Santa Maria Madalena; the
parishes of SS. Justa and Rufina and of Sao Nicolau had
their headquarters in huts in the Rossio Square, where
the Inquisition had also set up a temporary wooden of-
fice; the pdroco of the ruined Church of Santo Cruz do
Castello continued his ministry in a hut built in his church-
yard, and the parish priest of the destroyed Church of
Sao Pedro, south of the Castle hill, used for a time a ware-
house on the river-side as his church.

What Pombal had to do, and succeeded in doing, with
all this strong support is, in brief summary, as follows.
On the day after the earthquake he told the Duque
de Lafoes to appoint the special magistrates mentioned
above, one for each of the twelve bairros or wards of
the city, with overriding powers for the administration of
their districts in accordance with the government's emer-
gency directions, which he saw to it thereafter descended
upon these officials in a reassuringly ample supply. His

8o The Lisbon Earthquake

immediate concern was to prevent a plague, and it was
imperative to get rid as quickly as possible of all the

corpses, human and animal, that lay in the ruins, and to
get rid of the pools of stinking, stagnant water. On 2
November, Pombal suggested to the Patriarch that the
quickest and safest method of dealing with the human
bodies was that they should be collected in barges, towed
out beyond the Tagus bar, and then weighed and sunk.
The Patriarch agreed immediately 8 to this proposal, and
he was subsequently told to order his clergy to do every-
thing they could to get the corpses buried or removed.
The remaining civil population also joined in the work,
which was to be assisted in every possible way by the
troops called to Lisbon. 9 The next urgent matter was that
of food supplies. Stores had to be commandeered wher-
ever there were big depots within reach of Lisbon, and
there was a rather rough seizing of whole cargoes and
of surplus supplies found on the ships in the harbour,
even though the cargoes were destined for other coun-
tries. Transport, particularly wagons, had also to be req-
uisitioned and some sort of traffic through the ruins es-
tablished, so that supplies could move freely. Food cen-
tres had to be organized and camp-kitchens and ovens

** The numerous contemporary Portuguese accounts of the strenuous
efforts made in disposing of the dead do not make any reference to the

procedure, IF it was carried out at all, it was probably clone in a way
that attracted no public notice.

g In August 1756 Caleb Whitefoord said the ruins of the Trindade, iu
which many people had been killed, stunk abominably, and many Por-
tuguese accounts refer to the smell of the corpses. Whilefoord says there
was an outbreak of spotted fever, as indeed there may have been; but
his description is much exaggerated, e.g. "there are not three houses left
entire in all the city of Lisbon. In the suburbs indeed there are a few
standing, but they are so rent and shattered as not to be inhabitable,"
Whitcfoord Papers, pp. 126-31, Oxford, 1898.

Men of Action and Men of Science 81

constructed; millers, bakers, and cooks had to be pre-
vented from leaving the city and made to get on with
their work as best they could. Prices of foodstuffs had
to be strictly controlled in order to prevent profiteering,
and every vexatious hindrance in the way of a quick food
supply was removed; for instance, the fish from the Tagus
could be sold anywhere on the fifty-mile stretch between
Belem and Santarem free of duty. Another urgent mat-
ter was that of the hospital and shelter services for the
wounded and destitute, which had to be rapidly devel-
oped and helped by supplies of beds and medical neces-
sities; also prisons and all institutions where there were
helpless people needed inspection and aid.

It was essential to do everything possible to stop loot-
ing and robbery at once. No mercy could be shown, and
the immediate public execution after summary trial of
any thief caught in the act was authorized on 4 Novem-
ber. Ant6nio Pereira says that within a few days of the
earthquake thirty-four people were executed for looting,
eleven Portuguese, ten Spaniards (there were a large
number of Spanish deserters in Lisbon), five Irishmen,
three Savoyards, two Frenchmen, one Pole, one Fleming,
and one Moor. Regional depots under guard were set up
for the storage of valuables deposited by the homeless or
recovered from uninhabited ruins. Householders and mer-
chants were discouraged from attempting the salvage of
lost belongings without carrying with them unimpeach-
able proof of their identity and right to retrieve posses-
sions. Ships had to be searched for escaped criminals, and
all small river traffic watched carefully and permitted to
move under a licence valid for a day only; the crews of
the bigger shit>s were not allowed ashore, and the ves-

82 The Lisbon Earthquake

sels themselves not allowed to leave the Tagus until crews
and cargoes Lad been examined by Portuguese officials.
For a long time the most strict disciplinary control was
necessary; in February 1756 the Patriarch had to threaten
with excommunication persons of either sex who were
caught masquerading as monks and nuns in order to ob-
tain alms and assistance under false pretences, and almost
a year after the earthquake it was necessary to order the
arrest of the people who were going about prophesying
that there was going to be another great earthquake on
i November 1756, for this was done in some cases de-
liberately in order to make frightened people leave their
houses for the open spaces, thus creating conditions in
which pillaging was as easy as it was in November 1755.

A particularly difficult problem was the control of the
refugees from the city. They were finding their way all
over the country, and among them were thieves, escaped
prisoners, and rascals of all kinds, in addition to a large
number of able-bodied craftsmen and labourers who were
needed in Lisbon. A system of passes had to be intro-
duced, and the provincial governors instructed to send
back to the capital all those who had escaped to a dis-
tance without very good reason.

Another urgent business was the provision of tempo-
rary shelter for the homeless and the collection of mate-
rial for making huts. Profiteering in wood, of which there
was a shortage, was stopped, and all available supplies
were commandeered for Lisbon. Rents of land used for
the erection of emergency hutments were controlled. Peo-
ple were encouraged to return, where possible, to their
homes, and landlords were not allowed to evict their ten-
ants from surviving dwelling-houses, and those who kept

Men of Action and Men of Science 83

lodgings were not allowed to put up their prices. Par-
ticular attention had to be paid to the protection and
housing of homeless and scattered nuns, for the physical
distress of many of these holy women and the brutalities
to which some of them were subjected, deeply upset and
demoralized the ordinary pious folk of the city. The
rehousing of the nuns whose convents were destroyed
proved in fact to be one of the hardest tasks in the re-
organization of Lisbon, for whole communities had to be
reassembled and decent accommodation found for them,
so that it was many months before the problem was on
its way towards solution.

Fire-fighting, with the aid of soldiers hurried into the
capital, began at once, as did the clearance of streets
and passages through the ruins, the demolition of dan-
gerous structures, and first-aid to buildings still worth
saving. Salvage was ordered wherever important collec-
tions of materials could be rescued, and the recovery of
royal and official archives was given a high priority. On
29 November a detailed survey of the ruins was ordered
to be made so that the extent of the properties destroyed
would be on record to prevent future litigation about their
exact sites and exact size. The engineers were made to
control the disposal of debris, particularly the routes
whereby it was to be shifted, a necessary precaution in
the hilly city, and to arrange the siting of the rubble
dumps and the levelling operations in the squares. Then,
as soon as building could start again, limekilns for mor-
tar and ovens for baking bricks and tiles had to be pro-
vided on a large scale, and in addition to the work on
the public buildings about one thousand private houses
were restored to a usable condition in the first year. It

84 The Lisbon Earthquake

was, however, at once realized that Lisbon must be re-
built according to a master plan, and from the very be-
ginning of 1756 unauthorized building in stone or brick
on sites in the ruined area was stopped. What this plan
was and the nature of the economical Pombaline archi-
tecture can still be studied in the Terreiro do Pago and
the grid of streets running out of it to the north (cf.
PL V). As a result Lisbon provides today a classic exam-
ple of eighteenth-century town-planning, influenced by
Turin and by Covent Garden, and this famous rebuilding
is Pombal's most magnificent achievement.

Pombal had, of course, to consider the situation outside
Lisbon, and to provide relief for other towns that had
suffered in the earthquake, in particular Setiibal, where
the damage was bad. Another danger was that, taking
advantage of the disorganization of the kingdom and a
concentration of troops in the capital, the occasional raids
of African pirates on the coast of Algarve, the southern
littoral of Portugal, might develop into a serious rav-
aging of this vulnerable and earthquake-shaken district.
Pombal therefore sent five companies of horse, to be
based on Loul6 and Faro and to patrol the danger-points,
a measure that no doubt gave great comfort to the fright-
ened inhabitants of this area.

The dislocation of trading and money transactions was
soon one of the worst troubles in the emergency, and
Pombal demanded that those engaged in essential occu-
pations should continue to conduct their business, if it
were possible to do so. This applied to all the useful
trades, and to banking and exchange. The continuation
of the printing-presses was also important, partly for the

Men of Action and Men of Science 85

innumerable proclamations and orders that had to be
posted over the city, and also to keep tip a supply of
general news about the world outside Portugal. The
weekly Gazeta de Lisbon appeared on 5 November with-
out its publication being interrupted, and the Spanish
gazettes were soon on sale again. It was also necessary
to restore the trade with the Portuguese colonies over-
seas, where the vastly exaggerated rumours about what
had happened to Lisbon were causing merchants to sus-
pend the dispatch of their ships with goods ready to ex-
port to Portugal; for this reason Portuguese warships,
which could with great difficulty be spared, were sent to
Brazil, India, and Africa to restore confidence. The first
of these ships left for Pernambuco on i January 1756,
and on its return did something to alleviate the shortage
of sugar which was making the Portuguese particularly
miserable.

The earthquake provided an opportunity for reducing
the trading-privileges of the British; these depended on
obligations imposed upon the Portuguese by treaty and
were the jealously guarded rights of the Factory in Lis-
bon and of the British wine-merchants in Oporto. Pom-
bal considered that these concessions were too generous.
Immediately after the earthquake, the Junta de Commer-
cio (Board of Trade), re-created by King Jos6 at Pom-
bars suggestion in September 1755, was briefed to pro-
tect Portuguese trade against English interests, if indeed
that was not one of the principal reasons for its re-estab-
lishment, and the four per cent Donatwo, the Junta's con-
tribution to recovery of the city and costs of rebuilding
the official and business quarters, was a direct tax on all
imports into Lisbon of any origin, a tax that members

86 The Lisbon Earthquake

of the British Factory considered to be in their case an
illegal imposition. They claimed exemption, and were re-
fused. In fact, they were far too eager in the period im-
mediately following the earthquake to consolidate their
former position as specially privileged merchants, and this
gave Pombal an opportunity to snub them, which he did,
as we must now admit fairly enough. The establishment
in September 1756 of the Upper Douro Wine Company
was another of PombaFs moves against the English priv-
ileges in Portugal, and, clumsy and inopportune though
it proved to be, it further embittered relations between
England and Portugal, in spite of traditional friendship
many centuries old and the genuine and practical sym-
pathy wholeheartedly offered to the Portuguese by the
English at the time of the Lisbon earthquake.

At this point the outside opinion of Monsieur Ange
Goudar, a young French writer on political economy,
becomes sinisterly significant, though he overplayed his
hand. He had been in Portugal in 1752 and had formed
a very bad opinion of that country because of its fooHsh
economic dependence on England, to whom in his view
the Portuguese gold mines in Brazil now virtually be-
longed. The purpose of the little book he published in
1756 10 was to explain to the Portuguese that even a dis-
astrous earthquake could be turned into a positive bless-
ing if it were made the occasion of a definite break with
the rapacious country that had been meanly exploiting
Portugal for so many years. He had already written a
long book u on French economics, criticizing almost every

10 Relation historique du Tremblement de Term . . . prdc6d6
Discours politique, A la Haye, 1756,

11 Les intSrSts de la France mal entendus, par un Citoycn. 3 vols.
Amsterdam, 1756. Also a Paris production.

Men of Action and Men of Science 87

aspect of die political administration of his country, and
in it lie had commented sharply on the failure of the
French to advance their business interests in Portugal.
Now he explained why. England had conquered Portugal
without the bother of a war, and a feeble, bankrupt Por-
tuguese government accepted the situation. England now
sold Portugal essential commodities at prices that made
It not worth while for Portugal to produce them for them-
selves; for this reason Portuguese agriculture was ruined,
and the Portuguese had to buy nearly all their cloth from
England. They bought very little indeed from the equally
good French market, and it paid the English to see that
Portugal did not trade in a large way with anyone but
themselves. England took the main output of the Brazil-
ian gold mines, and England's prosperity was to a great
extent dependent on this shameless scoop. The portrait
of the Portuguese King, Joao V, on Brazilian gold coins,
was better known in London than the portrait of King
George II on English coins. If anything went wrong with
the economic situation In England, a few bad harvests,
for instance, Portugal would be completely ruined, and
the earthquake should now bring this foolish sycophantic
country to its senses. It was mentally backward; it was
indifferent to science and the arts, and had become one
of the most barbaric countries of Europe; but there was
still a last chance.

To give point to his remarks Monsieur Goudar pub-
lished with this discours politique a short account of the
Lisbon earthquake and a summary of the heavy losses in-
volved. He said the Inquisition was to blame for sup-
pressing Industry in Portugal and preventing the proper
increase of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge.

88 The Lisbon Earthquake

He said that what Portugal needed was not hordes of
priests and monks, but many more labourers, craftsmen,
business men, and soldiers. The Inquisition very naturally
banned the book in a proclamation dated 8 October 1756,
denouncing it as seditious, provocative, likely to disturb
the peace and Portugal's foreign relations, and also offen-
sive and abusive, insulting, contemptuous, and libellous
in its references to Portugal. This was an inevitable ver-
dict and sentence from the Church, but if the reckless
young author kept Anglo-Portuguese relations under close
observation during the next few years, he might have
suspected that the Portuguese government, which was
Pombal, had come very nearly to the same conclusions
as himself.

In his directive of 3 November to the Patriarch about
the quick disposal of the dead bodies, Pombal asked the
Cardinal to do his best to stop the dreadful alarmist ser-
mons that were terrifying the already nervous people of
Lisbon by prophesying even greater disasters to come be-
cause of the enormity of the city's sins; for these passion-
ately delivered discourses not only incited their hearers
to panic and renewed attempts to escape from the neigh-
bourhood of the city, but also suggested that the appro-
priate spiritual exercises should take precedence over the
practical business of restoring order in Lisbon, and seemed
to be reasons for resisting, as an irrelevant and wordly
waste of time, the sensible endeavours of the government
to provide for their bodily needs. This request by Pom-
bal went straight to the heart of one of the most serious
difficulties of the post-earthquake situation in Lisbon, as
the next chapters will show. Pombal felt that what the

Men of Action and Men of Science 89

people of Lisbon really needed was a strong, comforting
assurance that the earthquake was not necessarily an an-
gry God's chastisement of His sinful children, but, more
probably, just an accidental natural occurrence. There
does not seem to be any evidence that he desired to in-
terfere with the Church's proper duties or the people's
penitence and prayers; but he did not want the inhabit-
ants of Lisbon frightened out of their plain duties to their
neighbours and to the community of which they formed
a part. For this reason good factual reporting of the dis-
aster was an essential requirement, and it was also de-
sirable that, however vehement the opposition might be,
the scientists should be allowed to discuss their theories
about the earthquake's cause.

Apart from the brief notices in the Gazeta de Lisboa,
the first printed account of the earthquake in Portugal to
attract attention was the Carta of Jose de Oliveira Tro-
vao e Sousa, dated 20 December 1755 and published in
Coimbra in that year. 12 It is a small pamphlet cast in the
form of a letter to a friend who had asked particulars of
the disaster from a writer who was in no mood for any
belittling of the horrors he had witnessed. The earth, we
are told, had opened in great yawning caverns; the seis-
mic waves were so tremendous that the very sea-bed was
exposed; the population gave way to violently emotional
religious agonies expressed in tears, confessions, and acts
of penitence; heretics became suddenly converted to the
Roman faith. The loss of life was colossal, totalling about
seventy thousand killed; practically the whole of Lisbon
was uninhabitable. The damage elsewhere in Portugal

12 Carta em que hum amigo dd noticia a outro do lamentavel successo
de Lisboa. Coimbra, 1755.

90 The Lisbon Earthquake

was appalling. Setubal was almost totally ruined and two
thousand people were killed there; 120 died in Sintra;
Santarem had lost most of its fine buildings. Only in Co-
imbra, where the author lived, was everything different.
Coimbra suffered a violent shock, but the mighty arm of
God was protecting the city, and the damage was neg-
ligible; Coimbra, conscience-stricken, at once devoted it-
self to the most elaborate religious exercises, so fervently
and piously that Coimbra set an example to the whole
of Portugal. Lisbon, on the other hand, one must sorrow-
fully infer, had received its deserts; for Lisbon was a very
wicked city.

This preposterous account of the earthquake annoyed
the sensible Portuguese, who understood how foolish it
was to exaggerate a situation already very bad indeed.
Protests were published quickly by two writers; the first
a Franciscan, Antonio dos Remedies, whose reply 18 is
dated 20 January 1756, challenged the nonsense about
the earth opening in great chasms and the sea-bed be-
ing exposed, and also the reckless statements about the
numbers of the killed; the second, Bento Morganti (see
p. no), writing under the name Jos^ Acursio de Tavares
in a pamphlet dated 13 February 1/56, 14 said it was ab-
surd to describe Lisbon as totally destroyed, since, except
for a small part of the Alfama, and a considerable part
of the districts of Rua Nova, Rossio, Remolares, and the
Bairro Alto, Lisbon was still habitable.

The first sensible piece of reporting by a Portuguese
author that was widely read is the Commentary by An-

18 Resposta a carta de JosS de Oliveira Trovao e Sou$a. Lisbon, 1758.
^Verdade Vindicada, ou resposta a huma carta escrUo de Coimbra,
Lisbon, 1756.

Men of Action and Men of Science 91

tonio Pereira (afterwards Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo),
a young priest of the Congregation of the Oratory who
later became one of the most famous theologians of eight-
eenth-century Portugal (see p. 165). His account of the
earthquake was published in Lisbon in 1756 in Latin and
Portuguese/ 5 and in London in Latin and English. 16 The
Chevalier de Oliveira, a Portuguese exile in London who
had become a Protestant, was greatly and unfairly of-
fended by this publication (see p. 162), for it was col-
oured by a warmhearted Roman Catholic thought and
spoke of miracles and the fate of sacred images, subjects
that the author knew would be of great interest to the
Roman communion all over the world. The little pam-
phlet began with the remark that the Lisbon earthquake
was such a terrible event that one would think God had
decided to punish the sins of many ages in a single day,
and in a few vivid sentences Ant6nio Pereira gave a grue-
some picture of what had happened; but he said that
there had been a number of amazing rescues of a mirac-
ulous nature, and on the practical side great credit must
be given to the authorities for the care given to the
wounded and the efficient disposal of the dead. Readers
must be cautioned against exaggerated estimates of the
numbers killed; in his own Oratory church where the Co-
imbra pamphlet said two hundred people had died, An-
t6nio Pereira had learnt from his brethren present at the
time that at the most not more than fifty people had per-
ished. He had made inquiries about casualties throughout
all the religious orders, and he did not think more than

15 Commentario Latino e Portuguez sobre o terremoto e incendfo de
Lisboa. De que foy testemunha ocular $eu Autor . . , Lisbon, 1756-

iA Narrative of the Earthquake and Fire of Lisbon by Anthony
Pereira. London, 1756,

92 The Lisbon Earthquake

two hundred professed members had lost their lives, and
the total casualties of the earthquake he put at about
fifteen thousand. He then gave a list of the buildings de-
stroyed, correcting some of the statements in the Coim-
bra letter, and mentioning the rescue of the archives from
the damaged Torre do Tombo; he then described the dam-
age done by the fire, and lamented the disastrous loss of
Lisbon's art collections and libraries; next, he spoke of the
practical measures whereby a chaotically difficult situa-
tion had been quickly brought under control, and he said
that the admirable work of the civil administration had
been equalled by the inspiring direction of the Patriarch
in religious matters.

That is a typical contemporary description of the Lis-
bon earthquake by an honest Portuguese writer, and there
are several of its kind. On the other hand, the pamphlets
suggesting that the Lisbon earthquake was a natural hap-
pening, like eclipses, thunder, rain, or anything else that
was alarming or disastrous in man's celestial or terrestrial
environment, are far fewer in number. To advocate this
view openly was a bold act likely to shock most devout
Portuguese people and anger their religious instructors,
and it is at first only in short and rather carefully worded
publications that this view, even though it had PombaFs
full support, was advocated by Portuguese scientists resi-
dent in Portugal. One of the earliest to venture an opin-
ion on. this dangerous subject was the Marquesa de Ta-
vora's doctor, Jose Alvares da Silva, whose work is dated
from the Campo Pequeno 17 on 6 December I7S5- 18 The

17 The Paldcio Galveias, now the Biblioteca Municipal Central, in the
Campo Pequeno, was a Tavora residence,

18 Investigapao das causas proximo^ do Terremoto, succedido em Lis-
boa no anno de 17-^55. For J. A. da S, Lisbon, 1756.

Men of Action and Men of Science 93

earthquake, he said, might be a judgement of God upon
the Portuguese; but da Silva insisted that earthquakes
could also be naturally caused, and he explained that
there were several scientific theories suggesting how and
why they happened; compressed air, for instance, is a
likely explanation, and electricity may be an important
factor. It is true enough that God must be ultimately the
cause of every earthquake, but that is not a sufficient
reason for supposing that the Lisbon earthquake was a
result of Lisbon's wickedness. It is ridiculous to compare
Lisbon with Babylon, and if God intended by this exam-
ple to show His anger against atheists and free-thinkers,
there were obviously other countries far more deserving
of His divine chastisement. The real point is that it is a
duty to find out how nature works, before we decide that
what may be natural events are supernatural; we must
study experimental physics seriously and learn what nat-
ural forces can perform. The world would be spiritually
poorer without the results of the researches of men like
Descartes or Newton, and it was, said da Silva, a very
fortunate thing for Portugal that some of the Portuguese
nobility, particularly the fourth Conde da Ericeira ( 1673-
1743), had realized that the physical sciences must be en-
couraged.

Another author who stood shoulder to shoulder with
da Silva was Miguel Tiberio Pedegache Brandao Ivo, a
young military man of Swiss descent who was a native
of Lisbon and was well-read in science. He gave, first
of all, a purely factual description of the disaster and a
long dissertation about subterranean fires, but his final
suggestion was that the moon may have something to do
with the cause of an earthquake, as also the heat of the

94 The Lisbon Earthquake

sun. 19 Yet another writer who was concerned exclusively
with scientific causes, and even dared to rebuke the alarm-
ist preachers, was Verissimo Antonio Moreira de Men-
donga, a great advocate of the central fire theory and
brother of Joachim Jose de Mendonga, whose longer study
of earthquakes and description of the Lisbon one, pub-
lished in 1758, with an alternative scientific explanation,
will be presently mentioned. Immediately, however, we
come to a book of far greater significance than any of
the brief scientific papers of which we have been speak-
ing, a medical treatise by a celebrated Portuguese doctor
of European fame who was living in France, Ant6nio
Nunes Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783).

The Portuguese had not neglected the medical aspects
of the earthquake. They dreaded the outbreak of a plague,
a calamity well known to Lisbon, and their frantic con-
cern about getting rid of the corpses and restoring some
sort of drainage system was a sensible expression of this
fear. The medical men available in Lisbon were no doubt
far too few in numbers and were not properly trained to
deal with this emergency; but they did their best and
understood the danger that threatened the city. The Ta-
vora house-doctor, Jose Alvares da Silva, whose scientific
Investigagdo has been already mentioned, wrote another
pamphlet, 20 dated 16 March 1756, in which he showed
that the risk of infection from the putrefaction of the
corpses was not as serious as might be thought. He said
there was good reason for supposing, as Dr. Mead in

10 Nova e Fiel Relacao do Terremoto que experimentou Lisboa e todo
Portugal no i de Novembw 1755, com algumas observacions curio$a$ e
a explicacao das suas causas. For M. T. P. Lisbon, 1756,

20 "PrecauQoes Medicas contra algumas remotas con^equendas t que $e
podem excitar do Terremoto de 17-^55. Lisbon, 1756.

Men of Action and Men of Science 95

England had suggested, that plagues start in Africa and
nowhere else, and even if conditions in Lisbon were ob-
viously disquieting, at least it should be remembered that
the dreadful consuming fire had compensating purgative
properties, having performed wholesale sanitary crema-
tions, and also that a mercifully persistent north wind had
cleared the city seawards of all noxious odours; moreover,
as it was winter, some corpses had been protected from
doing harm by partial refrigeration, and others had been
to some appreciable extent mummified by copious de-
posits of tar and ashes. On the other hand, though plague
does not come from rotting bodies, a large number of
lesser ailments may do so, and it is extremely important
to observe certain fundamental rules of hygiene, partic-
ularly those that keep the blood pure; da Silva then ex-
plained what sensible people ought to do in the matter
of diet and exercise and the use of disinfectants and fre-
quent changes into clean clothes. He stressed the value
of mental confidence and refusal to panic, and he sug-
gested that music was very important as a sedative; he
then prescribed various medicines to cure the preliminary
disorders that might seem to be the beginning of a much
more serious illness. Finally, he paid a most respectful
tribute to his great friend Ribeiro Sanches, who had writ-
ten to express his approval of what da Silva said, and that
is a deserved introduction to the book that was shortly
to arrive in Lisbon written by this famous man, one of
the foremost physicians in Europe.

Ant6nio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783), who was
of Jewish origin, had taken his degree in Coimbra, had
worked in a plague in Lisbon in 1723, and had after-
wards studied in Geneva, London, Paris, and with Boer-

96 The Lisbon Earthquake

haave in Leiden, and had been an honoured physician in
the Russian imperial court. His contribution to his coun-
try's needs in the hour of its agony was the publication
in 1756 in Paris of a long book 21 on the maintenance of
the public health. It was anonymous and had a dedica-
tion to the Duque de Lafoes by Pedro Gendron, 22 but it
was on sale in Lisbon as well as in Paris, and there does
not seem to have been any mystery about the identity of
its author. The book is said to have had the warm ap-
proval of Pombal, as is indeed likely, for the manual was
plainly intended to be of practical use to the authorities
responsible for the recovery of Lisbon, and it was indeed
the best possible antidote to an unsettling religious hys-
teria. Ribeiro Sanches said that the medical control of
a community depended on the observation of certain
simple rules and regulations safeguarding the health of
the people, and he thought that every responsible person
ought to know what these rules are and the principles
underlying them; he had specially in mind heads of re-
ligious institutions, hospitals and prisons, military and na-
val commanders, and fathers of families. Ribeiro Sanches
was particularly anxious that architects should also study
the handbook, so that new buildings should be sanitary
and well-aired, and he also emphasized how important
it was for the Portuguese to study the health of their
sailors, for the capital was exposed to risk of diseases
brought by ships from their world- wide dominions. Fresh

21 Tratado da conserva$ao da Saude dos Povos: obra util> c igualmente
necessaria a os Magistrados, Capitaens Generais, Capitaens de Mar e
Querra, Prelados, Abbadessas, Medicos, e Pays de Familia; com hum
Appendix. Considerations sobre o$ Terremotos . . , Paris, e se vencle
em Lisboa, 1756.

22 A Parisian bookseller, later known as an editor of Camoes.

Men of Action and Men of Science 97

air and cleanliness were his main requirements, and he
had a great deal to say about ventilation and sanitary
regulations, diseases common in barracks, camps, and
ships, and suitable dietary treatment. Finally, Ribeiro
Sanches said that medical schools in Portugal needed en-
couragement and improvement, and he urged that young
medical men should not be allowed to practice without
adequate previous experience of clinical work. Then came
an appendix about earthquakes and their causes. He re-
viewed the principal ancient and modern scientific theo-
ries in order to make it quite clear that all who have con-
sidered the matter carefully treat earthquakes as natural
events, for which reason ignorant, timid, superstitious peo-
ple should be strongly discouraged from regarding them
in terror as supernatural events. Their attitude spreads
alarm and a sense of hopelessness. We are not afraid any
more in that way of thunder or lightning; we do not re-
gard violent tempests as terrifying prodigies with moral
implications; we have got used to horrors like war, which
man makes every bit as destructive as anything nature
can do; we accept gunpowder, fire, and poison as ordi-
nary hazards of life, and we do not believe these things
strike at us under supernatural instruction as a punish-
ment for our sins. Only when earthquakes are concerned
do we slip back into our panicky primitive fears. We must
now try to get used to thinking of earthquakes as we think
of storms, and to realize that they are really very com-
mon occurrences. God may use an earthquake to punish
mankind. That must be admitted. But the majority of
earthquakes cannot possibly have a moral significance,
and we are very foolish to worry about them on the

98 The Lisbon Earthquake

grounds that they are punishments and warnings of fur-
ther impending disasters.

It was in Spain and not in Portugal that the contro-
versy about the cause of earthquakes had its oddest air-
ing in print. It began when an ingenious scientist, Juan
Luis Roche of Puerto de Santa Maria in the Gulf of
Cadiz, published an account of the effects of the earth-
quake of i November in that little town. This is in the
form of a letter, dated 12 November, to the various learned
academies with which he was connected, and in these he
gave a very careful description of the shock and the sub-
sequent seismic wave. 23 He studied the positions of the
fallen masonry, using a compass, and had theories about
the direction in which the earthquake had moved, and he
measured as far as possible the extent of the flooding
that did so much damage in the lower part of the town.
He said he had no new explanation to offer of the cause
of earthquakes, as much had already been written on the
various scientific explanations of them; but he did not
think any of them was entirely satisfactory. He was con-
cerned simply with a record of what happened, and as
this is unfolded we find that while Dr. Roche was a good
scientist writing for fellow-scientists, he was also in rea-
sonable agreement with much that the more superstitious
clergy were saying about the earthquake. His view seems
to have been that though science can explain how an
earthquake happens, nevertheless when one does take

23 Relacitin y Observations physicas-mathematicas^ y morales sobre el
general Terremoto y la Irrupcidn del Mar . . . que comprendid a la
Ciudad y Gran Puerto de Santa Maria, y a toda la Costa, y Tierra frme
del ret/no de Andalucia. Es una Carta que escrivio DJ.L.R. Puerto de
Santa Maria, 1755.

Men of Action and Men of Science 99

place it is in spite of its natural causes supernaturally
controlled. He had no difficulty in accepting a variety of
miracles that took place in Puerto de Santa Maria in con-
nexion with the events of i November, and he believed,
for example, that the seismic wave was checked and re-
pulsed by the Virgin Maiy. In fact, Roche held that an
earthquake could not be dismissed as a purely natural
event, for one could actually observe what could only be
the providential control of the shock's effects. Take Se-
ville, for instance. Why did the Giralda remain standing
after the earthquake on i November? It is 350 feet high
with a heavy belfry and bronze finial at the top; its walls
have to take a strain in an earthquake ten times greater
than a thirty-foot tower, and oscillate over an arc ten
times greater. Yet, whereas many smaller towers did col-
lapse in this earthquake, the Giralda was not destroyed.
Why? Because God had protected it.

The next event, which seems to have startled Spain al-
most as much as the earthquake itself, was the publica-
tion by Roche of a pronouncement on the cause of earth-
quakes by the most respected and most outspoken of all
the learned men in Spain, the famous Benito Jeronimo
Feyzoo y Montenegro (1676-1764), a Benedictine living
in Oviedo and then eighty years old, Feyzoo referred to
Roche as his intimate and ingenious friend, and that was
a great honour for the Andalusian, as the prestige of the
celebrated old man was by this time enormous. He was
renowned for his fearless denunciation of medieval habits
of thought, dubious miracleshe had written a poem de-
nouncing an alleged miracle in Roche's Puerto de Santa
Maria, pointing out that it was just due to reflection 24

24 Feyz6o : Adiciones d las O"bras, p. 17. Madrid, 1783.

loo The Lisbon Earthquake

the superstitious teaching of the clergy, obsolete educa-
tional methods, the cold-shouldering of modem scientific
knowledge, and almost everything that was unprogressive
and backward in Spain; but because of his piety he had
escaped any severe official condemnation and because of
his skill and sincerity in confounding those who were im-
prudent enough to challenge him, his influence was very
great indeed and his lightest word listened to with a gen-
uine respect. As we see it now, Feyzoo was not an im-
portant scientist, and his remarks on the cause of earth-
quakes are nothing more than some modest and casual
speculations of a learned old man put forward in the
course of writing a few letters on a subject that much
interested him; but Roche regarded these letters as a lit-
erary and scientific scoop that would cause a sensation in
Spain, and he published them in Puerto de Santa Maria
in 1756 with the impressive title, A New Theory about
the physical cause of Earthquakes, now explained by elec-
tric phenomena, and specially adapted to the shock felt
in Spain on November ist i/55. 25 This arresting work is
packed out with a variety of prefaces and preliminary es-
says by Roche himself and some young scientific friends
in Seville.

The letters were written by Feyz6o in Oviedo in De-
cember 1755 and January 1756, and the first four were
addressed to Josef Diaz de Guitian of C&diz, and the
fifth to a canon of Toledo Cathedral who had asked Fey-

25 Nuevo Systhema sobre la causa physica de los Terremotos, explicado
por los phenomenos electricos, y adaptado al que padecid Espana en i
de Noviembre del ano antecedents de 1755. Su autor El Illmo. y Rmo,
Senor Don Fray Benito Geronymo Feyz6o, Ex-General de la Religion de
San Benito, del Conseio de su Majestad, etc. Puerto de Santa Maria,
1756.

Men of Action and Men of Science 101

zoo to say something that would lessen the general alarm
caused throughout Spain by the earthquake o i Novem-
ber. In the first letter Feyzoo wondered if the frequent
earthquakes of the eighteenth century could be due to
a gradual contraction of the earth's substance, a crum-
bling and cracking-up of the globe that was bound to end
up in a portentous calamity; but he went on to say that
if the earthquake in the Iberian peninsula on i Novem-
ber had been felt also in France, foreign scientists would
have had quite a good case for attributing the cause to
the newly fashionable cause of everything, namely elec-
tricity. In his third letter he returns again to the strange
fact that earthquakes happen simultaneously at points far
distant one from another, and by this time he had col-
lected a considerable amount of information on the sub-
ject. In the case of the last earthquake both Cadiz and
Oviedo experienced the shock at precisely the same time,
9:45 A.M., a matter on which Feyzoo could speak with
some certainty as in Oviedo the Cathedral clock and the
Benedictine College clock were excellent timekeepers.
Yet Oviedo and Cdiz were nearly five hundred miles
apart. Interior conflagrations and explosions cannot pos-
sibly explain this, so that the electricity theory had to be
taken seriously, and he said he was now prepared to sup-
port the idea, on the supposition that materia electrica,
though deeply embedded in the earth, could reach in-
stantly to the earth's upper caverns, however far apart
they might be situated and explode at the same moment
the combustible gasses that had been collecting in them. 26

26 This was not a new suggestion, for William Stukeley in England
(see p. 18) and Andrea Bina in Italy, Ragionamente sopra la cagione
de" Tremuoti, first published in 1751 and repubMshed in 1756, had pro-
posed similar theories.

io2 The Lisbon Earthquake

In the fifth letter Feyzoo left this gentle scientific specu-
lation in order to explain that the popular fear of earth-
quakes was rather ridiculous. There was no reason to
dread earthquakes in the way that people do. There is
a much greater risk of sudden death from other causes,
and this should be realized and we should all of us so
order our lives that we are prepared for sudden death.
As a grim warning to the heedless, Feyzoo mentioned the
dreadful end of an adulterous couple who were found
dead in each other's arms in an inn in Galicia.

Juan Luis Roche was impressed and also a little jealous
when he read these letters. Electricity was his subject, and
he believed he was the first person to experiment with
an electrical machine in Spain. He had said in his Rela-
cion that he was doubtful about die current scientific ex-
planations of earthquakes, and he now felt it should have
been understood that he was already considering whether
electricity might not be their real cause. Some of his sci-
entific friends were inclined to take his side, and his pub-
lication of the Nuevo Systhema is not only a tribute to
Feyzoo, whom he did sincerely admire, but also a fairly
plain hint that Seville had very little to learn from Oviedo.
In fact, scientific Seville had something very important to
say, not particularly about Feyz6o and the electricity
theory, but about a proper attitude towards earthquakes.

Roche called to his aid two young scientists in, Seville,
and all three no doubt considered that under the shelter
of Feyz6o*s letters science could now state its case with
great confidence and show how absurd it was for the
people to be terrified by the common talk that God
caused earthquakes in order to punish those who had of-
fended Him. The first of the two young men who con-

Men of Action and Men of Science 103

tributed essays to the Nuevo Systhema was Jose Cevallos
(1726-76) of Seville University, a man with a brilliant
career ahead of him as theologian, scientist, academician,
and Rector of the University. He was full of praise for
Feyzoo, and sure that it was right to do everything pos-
sible to discover the scientific cause of earthquakes, for,
after all, common safety depended on the possession of
much more accurate information about their cause and
effects; but he did not feel at all sure that Feyzoo had
solved the problem. He objected to the theory that Se-
ville and Lisbon were connected by an earthquake-track,
as historical records did not support the view that these
two cities generally suffered earthquakes simultaneously,
and he did not by any means trust the electricity theory.
He did not think people really knew much about it yet.
Feyzoo was impressed by Musschenbroek's painful exper-
iment with the Leiden jar in which he had nearly electro-
cuted himself; 27 but Cevallos had tried it for himself, and
he had got no result worse than a shock in the arm, the
effect of which lasted for a fortnight. Cevallos then went
on to say how much he liked Feyz6o's fifth letter, and he
turned rather abruptly on the Seville clergy; they should
show themselves much more ready to give absolution in
cases of accidents and emergencies; their record on the
day of the earthquake was very bad. Here the young man
makes his main point. Earthquakes are part of the or-
dinary hazards of life, like accidents in the street. God

27 Feyz6o probably got his information about the jar experiment from
the Abb6 Mangins, Histoire g6nerale et particuliere de TElectfidte, Paris,
1752 (published anonymously). He had also the M<$moires of the Aca~
demie des Sciences (annee 1746, p. 2) and the Abbe^ J. A. Nollet's works
on electricity, one of which had been translated into Spanish by J. Vaz-
quez y Morales, Ensayo sobre la Electncidad de los Cuerpos, prefaced
by a brief Historia de la Electncidad. Madrid, 1747-

104 ^ e Lisbon Earthquake

may be their ultimate cause, but that does not mean that
the earthquake-dead have been supernaturally executed
on special divine instruction. Ignorant preaching on the
supernatural origin had done great harm, and theologians
who would not acquaint themselves with modern thought
are much to be blamed.

The second essay on Feyz6o's letters in this extraor-
dinary publication was written by Francisco de Buendia
y Ponce (1721-1800), a young medical man in holy or-
ders who, like Cevallos, afterwards became a famous
scholar and writer. He wanted to express his view of a
doctor's responsibility in the matter of confession and ab-
solution; 2S for he was deeply concerned about the haz-
ards of sudden death, and he capped the Oviedo story
of the adulterous couple with a tale of two couples of
young Andalusian adulterers who got imprisoned in a
cave on the shore of the Guadalquivir into which they
entered in order to indulge their wicked passions; a fall
of rock shut them in, and they were not found until a
week or so later when dogs scented their rotting bodies.

Then Juan Luis Roche himself introduced the master's
letters in a long preface. He was now writing as a cou-
rageous scientist, full of praise for his pet electricity and
its formidable powers; he felt it his duty to denounce the
popular attitude to earthquakes, which took the form of
a mood of hysterical and superstitious religious fear fol-
lowed quickly by forgetfulness and flippancy. Today's
tears are quickly replaced by tomorrow's dances, and lam-
entations give way to insolent jesting on sacred subjects.
In Seville, at the time when he wrote, one could find fans,
ribbons, shoes, songs, and dances, all with frivolous earth-

28 Cf. Feyz6o on this subject, Cartas Eruditas, v, Carta XII

Men of Action and Men of Science 105

quake-allusions, and that sort of thing, said Roche, is an
insult to the proper fear of God.

Feyz6o's pronouncement, published under these wordy
and enthusiastic auspices, made a very great impression,
and argument about his views continued into 1757. Dr.
Miguel Cabrera of Seville and the aged Bishop of Gua-
dix, Miguel de San Jose, refuted this new electricity the-
ory, and the Bishop spoke somewhat sharply about the
reluctance of Dr. Cevallos to recognize the operation of
the divine hand in an earthquake. He was quite prepared
to meet the scientists on their own ground. Science was
no mystery; it was a subject taught at the theological
colleges, and the clergy were quite capable of exposing
fallacies such as those evident in Feyzoo's electricity the-
ory and in the presumption of Copernicus, who had tried
to halt the sun and move the earth. They had, however,
the additional advantage of being trained in a superior
science, pneumatologia, the science of spirits. Frankly, the
Bishop believed that earthquakes were caused by evil
spirits who had obtained, God permitting it, a temporary
malevolent control of those forces of nature that people
like Dr. Cevallos now supposed to be the exclusive prov-
ince of scientific speculation.

Feyz6o had indeed alarmed conservative Hispanic
thought. From Toledo the Licenciado Juan de Zuniga
protested to the great man himself; he said that earth-
quakes were God's most frightful way of showing His
anger and that man's sins were undoubtedly their real
cause. Feyz6o replied kindly that it was a pious duty to
bear such considerations in mind. This was not considered
a very satisfactory answer, and Portugal intervened in the
person of a young lawyer, Feliciano da Cunha Franga,

106 The Lisbon Earthquake

who wrote a disapproving pamphlet o fifty pages on the
misplaced interest of Feyzoo and others in the scientific
causes of the earthquake. He knew for certain that what
had happened in Lisbon had been directly ordered by
God in order to punish sin.

In Seville Dr. Jose Cevallos decided to answer Miguel
de San Jose, the Bishop of Guadix. He said he was not
prepared to defend the electricity theory. Electricity was
a new-fangled thing, made by a machine, not mentioned
in the Bible, and there is really no evidence that in an-
tiquity, or at any time in Spain, there was such a force.
He agreed wholeheartedly that God is rightly regarded
as the original cause of all earthquakes; but God may
have many motives in permitting earthquakes to take
place, and of ten possible reasons anger against sinners
is the last. All the evidence suggests that the great earth-
quake of i November 1755 was a natural earthquake. It
was, of course, right to fear earthquakes, to pray God to
deliver men from them, and to try to improve one's con-
duct as a result of them. He cited with admiration Bishop
Caspar de Villaroel of Santiago, Chile, who had experi-
enced the great earthquake there in May 1647; this prel-
ate had been so disgusted by the lies, false miracles, reve-
lations, prophecies, and so on, that had followed the dis-
aster, such as had disgusted Cevallos in Seville, that he
boldly declared before all the world that he saw no
reason to suppose that earthquakes were always punish-
ments for the sins of the people who lived in the towns
destroyed by their agency. 29 Cevallos said the clergy had
a heavy duty laid upon them at the time of an earth-

29 Caspar de Villaroel: Govierno Ecdesiastico Padfico, H, p. 581. Ma-
drid, 1738.

Men of Action and Men of Science 107

quake. They should Instruct the public on behaviour, con-
fession, prayer, and divine providence, and they should
discredit, instead of spreading, silly stories about devils
lurking over the city, and about worse destruction to
come, and also about the miraculous behaviour of images.
Lies such as that there had never been an earthquake in
Rome, or in Toledo, the second Rome, could be and
should be disproved. The really important thing, said
Cevallos, was to make it generally known that the pub-
lic welfare required a scientific investigation of the causes
and behaviour of earthquakes in order that there should
be in the future warnings before they happened, houses
built to withstand their shock, an escape-drill, and train-
ing in fire-fighting.

Some of the Portuguese were of the same opinion, and
the best example of this kind of sensible study of the
Lisbon earthquake was published in 1758. It was the work
of Joachim Jose Moreira de Mendonga, an official of the
Torre do Tonibo archive In the Castle, who was in the
Castle precincts when the earthquake happened. His ac-
count Is a document of great value for it was compiled
with a controlling regard for accuracy, and it was Moreira
de Mendoncja who first corrected the story of the total
engulfing of the Gals de Pedra, Joao V's fine new marble
quay in the Terreiro do Pago, a story still repeated as
one of the most frightful occurrences on the earthquake
day. The main interest of his book, however, is that it
is designed on a grand scale and has the imposing title
HiMoria Universal das Terremotos; for he thought that a
full history of all the recorded earthquakes of the past
would show them to be common events and so diminish

io8 The Lisbon Earthquake

the horrors of the disaster that had lately befallen Lis-
bon. At the same time he believed that a demonstration
of the frequency of earthquakes would warn his readers
of an ever-present danger, so that, firstly, they should do
their best to lead good lives and keep their consciences
clear, in order that, whatever happened, their souls would
not perish, and, secondly, so that they should learn to
build stronger houses in the reasonable hope that they
need not even lose their lives. Moreira de Mendona*s
concern for souls was prudent as it made it possible
for the Inquisition censor to decide that he was a good
philosophe and a good historian who could write about
the natural causes of earthquakes without forgetting the
moral lessons they are meant to enforce, and without in
any way offending against the teaching of his most holy
faith.

Moreira de Mendona, who said he was an extremely
busy man with little time to spare for writing, was ob-
viously well-read in science before the earthquake and a
thoughtful man well-qualified for the task he set him-
self. When he came to his dissertation on geo-physics,
Moreira de Mendonga said that though we could not pos-
sibly hope to comprehend all the mysteries of the uni-
verse, God did make the world we live in for us men,
and it is presumably His wish that we should try to find
out all we can about its nature. Men have dwelt on the
earth for a long time, and still the world is full of ap-
parently unfathomable secrets, and many would say that
earthquakes are among the inexplicable phenomena; but
on another view they are a challenge to our intelligence
that we must accept. Admittedly, it is difficult to investi-
gate their causes by direct observation and testing, but

Men of Action and Men of Science 109

it is nevertheless our duty to think out an explanation that
is based on what little we do know about geology and
mechanics and is also in agreement with the observable
laws of nature.

After a short summary of the older explanations of
earthquakes, Moreira de Mendonga turns suddenly to an
exposure of what he considered to be the feeble and mis-
leading views on this subject of his contemporaries in Por-
tugal. He is made angry by any theory based on the sole
agency of a perpetual fire raging in the bowels of the
earth, and nothing really pleased him in the Portuguese
pamphlets on the science of earthquake causes; even his
own brother, since dead, was in his view on the wrong
track. The Spanish literature he liked better, and he sin-
gled out for praise the Disertacion fisica of Dr. Francisco
Martinez Moles of the University of Alcala, who, though
he did believe in the subterranean fire, nevertheless
thought that earthquakes were caused by its effect on
air and water under the earth. Moreira de Mendonga
rightly understood that the grand old man Feyzoo was
not putting forward his electricity theory in a serious way;
he was just speculating about possible causes, and both
Father Miguel Cabrera of Seville and the learned Bishop
of Guadix had convincingly demolished his case; never-
theless, electricity was a new subject, and very interest-
ing, so that Feyzoo Nuevo Systhema should be mentioned,
if only to introduce to Portugal the opinions of such dis-
tinguished people as Feyzoo and Juan Luis Roche. After
all this, Moreira de Mendonga gives us his own view
about the actual causes of an earthquake, 80 which is that

80 The contemporary earthquake-theories of Hispanic writers mentioned
by Moreira de Mendonga are: ( i ) Portugal. Joao Ant6nio da Costa, Con-

no The Lisbon Earthquake

suggested by the Spanish writer, Moles, namely the ex-
plosive force of imprisoned air and water when heated by
fire inside the earth. According to Moreira de Mendona
air and water circulate everywhere in the interior caverns
of the earth, and in the earth there is an enormous amount
of latent fire in the form of inflammable elements inter-
mixed in all the materals of which earth, air, and water
are made. All these materials are penetrable by, and kept
in a state of movement by, ether, and they are contin-
ually acting upon each other. Fire therefore may originate
accidentally at any time inside the earth either by spon-
taneous combustion or by fermentation, and it is these
sudden conflagrations, however caused, that turn air and
water in contact with them into the enormously powerful
explosive force that is capable of causing an earthquake.
Some writers who explained what they believed to be
the physical causes of the earthquake were also anxious
to acknowledge that such a dreadful event might also be
interpreted as God's moral judgement on a sinful city.
There is, for instance, an account of the disaster, dated
16 December 1755, by Bento Morganti (b. 1709), a Lis-
bon priest of half -Italian parentage with numismatic, ar-

versacao Erudita (see p. 111); J. Alvares da Silva, Investigagao (see p.
92); Jose Xavier de Valadares e Sousa, Terraemotus . , . Poetica De~
scriptio, whose unscriptural view that the earth was once a planetary
ball of fire is particularly to be condemned; Verissimo Ant6nio de Mo-
reira de Mendonca (d. 1756), Dis$erta$ao Philosopliica sobre o Terre-
moto de Portugal, the author's brother, another mistaken advocate of the
central fire theory; and FeHciano da Cunha Franca, ExtengSo de Dicta-
men . . . do , . . Feyzdo (see p. 105), who is severely handled as he
was imprudent enough to criticize the accuracy of Verissimo Ant6nio.
(2) Spain. In addition to Moles, Feyz6o, Cabrera, and the Bishop of
Guadix, Moreira de Mendonc,a refers to a carta of Ant6nio Jacobo del
Barco y Gasco, published in Discwsos Mercuriales XIV; Juan de Zurliga
(see p. 105) and Francisco Mariano Nifo y Cagigal, Explicad6n physico
y moral de las caitsas , , . cfe los terremotos. Madrid, 1755.

Men of Action and Men of Science 111

chaeological, and scientific interests, in which the author
had much to say about the miracles that happened dur-
ing the earthquake, particularly those connected with the
images of Our Lady (cf. p. 119), and the reasonableness
of imploring God to restrain the natural forces whereby
He chastised His sinful children; yet, Bento Morganti said,
really and truly earthquakes are nothing but natural phe-
nomena caused by the violent explosions of mixed fire and
air in the bowels of the earth. 31 Similarly, Joao Antonio
da Costa e Andrade, a lawyer of Santarem, in an elab-
orate discussion 82 about the effects of the earthquake in
his native town and its neighbourhood, introduces a phi-
losopher to explain the actual causes of the earthquake
and a priest to argue strongly that the earthquake was
primarily a supernatural portent. In the same way the
learned Nifo of Madrid said in the introduction to his
excusively scientifical study S3 of earthquakes that so far
as the last one was concerned, shockingly bad behaviour
in church and some quite unmentionable sins explained
satisfactorily in his view why God had allowed the dis-
aster of i November 1755 to happen.

Joachim Jose and Verissimo Antonio Moreira de Men-
donga, on the other hand, did not agree about what was
happening in the interior of the earth, but they were
united in their contempt of the notion that the Lisbon
earthquake was the consequence of Lisbon's sins. They
did not even entertain the idea. Verissimo Antonio in the

81 Carta de hum amigo para outro em que se dd succinta noticia dos
effeitos de Terremoto , . . com alguns principios fisicos para se conhecer
a origem e causa natural de similhantes phenom&nos terrestres. Lisbon,

1756.

82 Conversagao Erudita, Discurso Familiar, Conferencias Asceticas, His-
toricas, Politicas e Philosophical. Lisbon, 1756.

83 See footnote, pp. 109-10.

112 The Lisbon Earthquake

preface to his little pamphlet said it was praiseworthy
that other writers should refer to the moral causes of the
earthquake, but he personally had no intention or incli-
nation to preach a sermon on this subject. No sermon
could be more effective than the immediate fear of God
that the earthquake itself occasioned. He and other sci-
entists (though here not his brother) believed that it was
Hell fire, or something very like it, that caused the earth-
quake, and therefore there was quite enough for every-
body to be frightened about without any pious persua-
sion. Joachim Jose thought that even this mild concession
to the current theological ravings was rather silly. He ex-
plained to the best of his ability the physical causes of
an earthquake. All he had to say after that was let us
adore the omnipotence of the Creator who causes all these
secret happenings of nature, and let us recognize the in-
competence of our finite understanding in the presence
of the inscrutable operations of an infinite Being. Joachim
Jose Moreira de Mendona had nothing to say about Lis-
bon's abominable sins; nothing to say about the wrath of
God.

Chapter Four

THE WRATH OF GOD (1)

T

JLhe first effect of so shattering a disaster on tie
minds of most of the ordinary people is a complete sur-
render to the feeling that men and women are powerless
puppets in a for ever broken world. It seems that there
is nothing to be done but to run away from the blazing
ruins and lament, aimlessly and hopelessly, a calamity
beyond human comprehension and beyond human rem-
edy. This mood changed quickly in Lisbon under the im-
mediate comfort of PombaFs firm handling and bustling
orders; but directly opposed to his steadying influence
and to the straight-forward task of reorganization and re-
pair was the bitter religious despondency caused by the
common belief that the origin of the great earthquake
was supernatural. If this were a deliberate chastisement
by God of a sinful people, as was generally asserted by
the clergy, the mechanical task of recovery was of little
importance compared with a first and pressing duty of
making peace with God and imploring Him not to punish
further His now penitent people. It is understandable that
in a deeply religious land this should quickly become a
dominant thought, and to sustain it there came from all
sides abundant evidence of miraculous happenings that

113

H4 The Lisbon Earthquake

attested the supernatural character of the earthquake;
moreover, it was not long before elaborate public acts of
contrition gave open expression to this feeling and ac-
knowledged the wickedness of a population thus humbled
beneath the scourge of a still wrathful God.

An indication of the public attitude was the appoint-
ment of St. Francis Borgia, who had died in 1572, as spe-
cial patron and protector of the realm against further
earthquakes and similar disasters, it being already known
that the Jesuit saint was proficient to a high degree in
warding off such horrors. 1 At the special request of the
King, submitted through Pombal, the Pope, Benedict XIV,
made the appointment in May 1756, and people felt much
comforted thereby. St. Francis, fourth Duke of Gandia,
on the east coast of Spain, and third General of the Jes-
uits, great-grandson of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI,
had had a Portuguese wife, Leonor de Castro, and dur-
ing his lifetime he had on occasion been closely con-
nected with Portuguese affairs. Now, the King of Portu-
gal claimed relationship with him, and in Coimbra, where
there was the earliest Jesuit college in Portugal and where
the university was believed to be the object of his spe-
cial care, the new patron was welcomed with elaborate
religious celebrations and described as a saint who was
"in large measure" Portuguese. With St. Francis as pro-
tector, it was felt that nothing could go wrong, and,
though Lisbon continued to suffer alarmingly from re-
peated earthquakes over many months, in Coimbra at

1 Even so, he did not get the post without competition from St. Theo-
tonius and the Martyrs of Morocco; St. Agatha, enormously successful in
dealing with Sicilian earthquakes and eruptions of Etna, was also rec-
ommended; see Vida Prodigiosa da grande Virgen, e Martyr Bta Agueda
espedalissima Advogada contra os Incendios, e Terremotos. Lisbon, 1756.

The Wrath of God (i) 115

any rate nothing much did happen in the way of further
shocks.

There were many stories of miraculous happenings dur-
ing and after the earthquake, of wonderful healing with-
out the aid of doctors or medicines, and particularly of
escapes from death so marvellous that it could only be
supposed in these cases Heaven had arrested the laws of
nature. People emerged unharmed from painful imprison-
ment in the ruins that lasted several days; one little girl
of fifteen who had been trapped clutching an image of
St. Anthony was found safe and unhurt by Cardinal Sam-
paio of the Patriarchal Church in the wreckage of her
home in the Rua dos Canos behind Sao Domingos after
nine days without food. The bodies of officiating priests
who had been killed were sometimes found in a state of
miraculous preservation. In the Hermitage of Nossa Se-
nhora da Vitoria in the parish of Sao Nicolau in the
lower town the vested body of a Carmelite priest who
had been celebrating Mass was found completely un-
crushed or damaged after three or four months of burial
under the rubble, though there was a charred, corrupted
body close beside him.

One very important and consoling discovery was that
the catastrophe of i November was not a cruelly sudden
stroke that fell without warning; however wicked they
might have been, the people thought God should have
given them some advance notice of the punishment to
come in order that there might be an opportunity for re-
penting; and, in fact, it was found that Lisbon had been
told of the coming disaster by prophecies to which in-
sufficient attention had been paid. Christ Himself had
told Maria Joanna, a nun living in Lourial, that He was

116 The Lisbon Earthquake

deeply offended by the wickedness of Portugal, particu-
larly the sins of Lisbon, and that appropriate punishment
was shortly to be inflicted on this graceless people. The
saintly lady died in March 1755, but the warning of her
vision had become well known by 1754. It was now re-
alized that her prayers alone had caused the expected
punishment to be delayed until after her death; but by
that time the accumulation of sins, added to the blatant
disregard of her message, made the chastisement, when
it did come, the more severe. Another nun had five times
told her confessor of the impending disaster, imploring
him to bid the people mend their ways and pray to be
spared from their awful fate; but her message was ig-
nored. The most desperate efforts were made to turn the
unforeseen into the foreseen. In 1752 a Sebastianist, that
is to say a believer in the messianic return of King Se-
bastian, whose death at the battle of Alcazar-Kebir in
1578 was the prelude to the CastiHan usurpation, had
prophesied that on All Saints* Day a formidable event
would herald the arrival of the messiah at Cacilhas and
Lisbon on two stated dates in the following spring. Noth-
ing happened on All Saints' Day in 1752, and the proph-
ecy was circulated again for 1753, and then, after a
second failure, for 1754. When an earthquake did happen
on All Saints 7 Day, 1755, the prophecy was recalled with-
out its Sebastianist context or memory of its previous
failures, and the people said Portugal had had a won-
derful prophet who had foretold the earthquake.

There were also prophecies, after the event, of even
worse misfortune to follow that would complete the pun-
ishment of Lisbon, prophecies to which the continuing
series of earth-tremors gave a most unpleasant signif-

The Wrath of God (i) 117

icance. It was rumoured that as on the first day of No-
vember so on the last day of that month there would
be another colossal quake. As this did not take place,
the second earthquake was promised for the fortieth day
after the first, and then for other dates in December and
January. On the night of 30 April 1756 timorous people
stayed awake all night in gardens and open spaces, dread-
ing an awful earthquake that a priest had said would
take place on i May. He was imprisoned, but the foolish
prophecies continued. The approach of i November 1756,
the first anniversary of the great earthquake, was likewise
dreaded as an obvious occasion on which Lisbon was go-
ing to be finally obliterated. A nun of Semide, close to
Coimbra, is named as one of the culprits whose prophe-
cies spread alarm at this time, and the Jesuits, rightly
or wrongly, were also blamed. By 29 October the scare
had become so great that a proclamation had to be is-
sued forbidding anyone to leave Lisbon under any pre-
text during the next three days, and the city was ringed
with troops. A light shock on the night of the twenty-
ninth naturally made matters worse. This deliberate agi-
tation of nerves already seriously upset seems to have
been a persistent nuisance, and it was done sometimes
quite deliberately by robbers who wanted to pillage the
premises they had frightened people into evacuating; but
there was also a steady supply of religious eccentrics tell-
ing the people that there was going to be an even bigger
earthquake, or a colossal flood, or a total burning-up of
the land by the sun. The worst offender was known as
the Prophet of Leiria, but one sensible Franciscan who
was protesting against these harmful prognostications also
blamed "letters from Rome" and the activities of priests

n8 The Lisbon Earthquake

in Lisbon, Another wise writer traced the Sebastianist
prophecy back to its source; but the scared inhabitants
of Lisbon paid no attention. Most of them were in a mood
to believe anything. 2

To all this was added in the first days after the earth-
quake distress at many reported cases of the destruction
of the consecrated Host and of sacred images in the
churches and in the homes of the people. There were
some brave and successful escapes from ruined and burn-
ing churches by priests who, abandoning all other duties,
risked their lives in order to get the Host to a place of
safety; but rescue was not always possible, and an ago-
nizing consciousness of brutal sacrilege committed made
the horrors of the earthquake worse.

The fate of the images caused equal pain, for all were
loved, and many were famous objects of veneration be-
lieved to be endowed with miraculous powers. At least
twenty figures of Christ could work miracles, and two or
three of them could speak; there were over a dozen cel-
ebrated images of the Virgin with notable miraculous
powers; and some of the hundreds of images of St. An-
thony of Padua, the patron saint of Portugal, who was
born in Lisbon, had very remarkable endowments, includ-
ing surprising powers of movement. One was known to
have jumped down a weU in order to retrieve some stolen
offerings, and it was quite a small thing that another of
them should have been found weeping after the earth-

2 The alarms were riot all based on hysterical or deceitful prophecies.
A Tagus pilot had observed that on the night before the great earth-
quake, 3* October, the turn of the tide was two hours late, and he no-
ticed that this occurred again on 10 December, so he warned people in
Lisbon that it was inadvisable to sleep indoors that night, and he was
justified to the extent that there were two sharp shocks about 5 A.M. on
the morning of n December.

The Wrath of God (i) 119

quake. The renowned image of the saint in the church
of his birthplace, next to the Cathedral, with his chapel
and all its furnishings escaped the ferocious fire that burnt
out the greater part of the building, a fire so hot that it
melted the silver and bronze ornaments therein.

Many other images were miraculously preserved. A cel-
ebrated figure of Christ Carrying the Cross (Senhor dos
Passos) from the large Augustinian Convent of Graga,
crowning one of the hills on the east side of the city
(now in part a barracks), was rescued unharmed from
the church after it had been buried under fallen ma-
sonry for a week; it was an image to which the Portu-
guese royalties were particularly devoted, and it was dis-
interred at royal command by a party of grandess. The
image Nossa Senhora da Graga in the same church was
broken to pieces, but her head and hands survived for
making up into a new image, and a particularly cele-
brated crucifix was excavated unharmed. In the Church
of Nossa Senhora da Penha de Franga, farther to the
north, the miracle-working image of the Virgin was re-
covered on Sunday, the day after the earthquake, from
the ruins of the Capella Mor and displayed to the peo-
ple to their great comfort and joy, and the Host was
found intact on the Monday. The image of Nossa Se-
nhora do Carmo was rescued from the ruined convent
and set up in a tent on the Campo Grande, where it at
once became the object of fervent devotion. In the hope-
less ruins of the Franciscan church, which at the time
of the earthquake was being rebuilt after a fire, the im-
age of Nosso Senhor dos Desemparados (Jesus of the Des-
titute) escaped damage, and in May 1756 a fiery sermon
was preached in a temporary wooden church erected by

120 The Lisbon Earthquake

the order in their quinta adjoining the Rato demonstrat-
ing that this astounding miracle was a sign that Our Lord
had not deserted the Portuguese people, even in the hour
of bitter punishment with which He had chastised them.
In the Igreja da Se (the present Cathedral) a raging fire
stopped suddenly on approaching the holy image of Nossa
Senhora a Grande, leaving her safe with her background
curtains, her rich robes, and even the flowers in her hand.
Other images of the Virgin wept over ruined Lisbon, and
it was said that in the Hieronymite Church at Belem the
figure of Our Lady that was crouched at the foot of the
Cross sunk even lower towards the ground, and, overcome
with grief at the terrible punishment of the Lisbon peo-
ple, cried aloud, "It is enough, my Son, it is enough/'
All over the afflicted areas there were many tales told
of this kind, and this happened also in Spain in the towns
badly hit by the earthquake. For example, at Huelva in
the ruins of a convent the Host was discovered unbroken
and unharmed, miraculously protected by a single tile
that was able to withstand the enormous weight of broken
masonry pressing down upon it.

At the time of the earthquake many people escaped
into the streets clutching images of the Virgin or of the
saints from which they would not under any circum-
stances be parted; but many of these precious domestic
possessions inevitably perished in the earthquake itself
and in the fire. The devotion of the Portuguese to the
figures in their private oratories was not much less than
that paid to the celebrated miracle-working images in the
churches, and they lived with these domestic lares on the
most loving and intimate terms; in fact, they inflicted
little punishments on some of them if they were unduly

The Wrath of God (i) 121

slow in answering prayers. Figures of Lisbon's patron
saint, St. Anthony, had a specially close connexion with
the household fortunes, as he was charged with the duty
of recovering anything that was lost, and it was not un-
common for his image to be reproached by being bound
with ribbons, or put into the corner, or banished to a
dark cellar, or even suspended in the garden cistern un-
der threat of immersion. Whenever what was lost was
found, the saint was restored in honour to his proper
place, and there was a little family celebration. 3

The destruction of so many of these household images
was, in relation to the damage done in the churches, a
very small matter, but it added to the general religious
discomfort and unsettling of a naturally pious folk, and
increased their consciousness of the earthquake's super-
natural significance. How long, after the first terror was
over and there had been some time for reflection, the
wretched people continued to feel keenly that a sinful
Lisbon had been punished by God, there is now no means
of telling, and several writers allege rather bitterly that
the determination to lead a reformed and pious life evap-

8 The Chevalier de Oliveira (see p. 155) says this was the custom in
his mother's house, and he described how he himself treated his own
two favourite images of St. Anthony and St. Gonzales de Amarante when
these two saints, being occupied with other matters, would not soften
the heart of a girl with whom he was in love; they went into disgrace
under his bed and finished up in the water tank, and would have been
drowned if the young lady had not unexpectedly saved them by writing
the Chevalier an encouraging letter. He said he had a friend who pos-
sessed an image of St. Anthony with a movable head, and if the saint
did not grant the favours required, the image's head was twisted round
so that he could not see the child Christ in his arms, and this treatment
nearly always produced results; but the best way to make St. Anthony
answer prayers, said the Chevalier, was to take the infant Jesus out of
his arms. He could never bear that punishment for long. F. Xavier de
Oliveira, Amusement p6riodique, i, pp. 347-57. London, 1751.

122 The Lisbon Earthquake

orated very quickly indeed; but this was not for lack of
chiding, and we know that in the days following the
earthquake and for many months afterwards the people
were constantly reminded by repeated earthquake-shocks
of their danger, and in sermons and pamphlets of their
wickedness and of the justice of the city's fate.

In Lisbon the frantic preaching and exhortations be-
gan almost at once after the earthquake, but the catas-
trophe itself was of such a kind that official gestures of
repentance on a large scale could not be arranged until
nearly a fortnight had passed. There were, however, two
solemn penitential processions organized by the Patriarch
with the approval of the King, one on Sunday, 16 No-
vember, and the other on 13 December, a Saturday, ex-
actly six weeks after the disaster. They took place on the
western outskirts of the city, well away from the con-
gested ruins of the central burnt-out area, starting at the
Ermida de Sao Joachim in the Alcantara district, a re-
cent building that had escaped harm and was temporarily
a headquarters of the staff of the displaced Patriarchal
Church, and proceeding thence up the hill to the church
of the Palace of the Necessidades. The King and Queen
and the princesses took part in the first. After the second
procession, attended by all the leading ecclesiastical and
civic officials, there was a ceremony of footwashing con-
ducted by the Papal Nuncio and the Oratory Fathers. A
large number of the monastic establishments that had not
been put completely out of action by the earthquake or-
ganized processions of their own. One arranged by the
Theatine Fathers of the ruined Convento de Nossa Se-
nhora da Divina Providencia (also known as the Con-
vento dos Caetanos) took place on the Campo Grande,

The Wrath of God (i) 123

where the order had an hospicio, on a dark stormy eve-
ning after incessant rain, those taking part trudging bare-
foot through the mud and puddles.

Lisbon, the people were told, had been a very sinful
city indeed. It was greedy, devoted to material wealth,
immoral, licentious, and irreverent, the behaviour in some
of the churches being, it was alleged, outrageously scan-
dalous. For permitting this misuse of sacred buildings, the
clergy had to, and did, take their share of the blame, and
in doing so they were able to explain why God in His
anger had destroyed so many churches, great and small,
for in His disgust God had been forced to the extreme
course of abandoning His own altars, even as once long
ago He had for somewhat similar reasons (Hophni and
Phineas are mentioned as relevant examples of evil-doers )
allowed the Ark of the Covenant to be captured by the
Philistines. In no other way could the Almighty prove the
really terrible nature of His anger. Thus, it was under-
standable that God should not only have destroyed His
own churches, but have spared a street full of brothels;
for God pitied the miserable creatures that frequented
such places, but could not pardon those who profaned
the buildings set apart for the worship of Himself and
for the religious instruction of the faithful. This theme
was elaborated again and again, and is also to be found
in many of the earthquake sermons outside Portugal. The
Archbishop of Mexico, for instance, spared his own clergy
nothing in his pastoral letter of March 1756. Hophni and
Phineas again; allegations that church funds were mis-
used; the churches themselves used as shops and as places
for making love; it was indeed to be expected that in

124 The Lisbon Earthquake

Central America, just as in the Old World, God would
strike these polluted temples crashing to the ground.

The classic example of the way in which God has thus
pointedly expressed his displeasure was provided by Se-
ville. After the earthquake on i November the Cathedral
had had to be evacuated, and its dearly loved image,
Maria Santisinia de la Sede, removed, and it was not
until 28 February 1756 that Our Lady returned to her
shrine in great pomp and with much rejoicing, on which
occasion a ferocious sermon was preached by a renowned
orator, a canon of the Cathedral, Francisco Joseph de
Olazaval y Olayzola, one that is outstanding in interest
even in a comprehensive survey of the remarkable earth-
quake-sermons of that time. Why had they all, with their
beloved image, to go into exile, he asked? Here was a
second cleansing of the Temple, and one only too well
deserved. There had been deplorable and scandalous mis-
behaviour within its holy precincts; that was why, though
their protectress the Virgin had seen to it that God did
not wreak a full vengeance on the city over which she
presided, the Almighty had spoken His mind in an un-
mistakable way by striking at the Cathedral and its fa-
mous tower, the Giralda, leaving the rest of the city more
or less unharmed. A victory over the Church for the sec-
ular buildings of Seville! The Audiencia, the Ayuntami-
ento (Town Hall), and the Casa Lonja (Exchange) had
all escaped without damage, and indeed the town had on
the whole suffered very little and there had been very
few casualties. It was the Cathedral that was the special
object of God's anger. In view of the deplorable misde-
meanours Olazaval mentioned in considerable detail, his

The Wrath of God (i) 125

case was obviously a strong one; but the congregation no
doubt knew that the Canon's standards for behaviour In
church were exceptionally high. Within the choir and
sanctuary, he insisted, no mundane thought at all is per-
missible, and he told his hearers o the sad lapse o the
seventeenth-century Juan de Palafox, Bishop o Osma,
who so far forgot himself as to want to know the time,
the worldly time, when taking part in a service in the
choir of his Cathedral in order to keep an appointment
elsewhere that was a proper part of his pastoral duties.
He felt for his watch, but it was not in his pocket, and
he thought he must have left it at home. When he was
leaving after the service he put his hand in his pocket
again, and there was the watch. God had miraculously
removed it and replaced it, in order to teach him that
no worldly consideration at all should have entered his
mind while he was engaged in his devotions.

Some of the clergy did try hard to discourage this dol-
orous harping on the sins of the time and the accompany-
ing warnings of dreadful punishment that might still fall
on the sinners; for instance, in Lisbon a Franciscan, F.
Antonio de S. Jose, who had worked in India, seeing what
were likely to be the undesirable effects of this continual
hullabaloo about the city's wickedness, published a tiny
pamphlet which he described as a Discurso Mordl, and
in this he wisely distinguished between teaching folk to
fear God and alarming them into downright panic. God
is close to a penitent person, he said, and does not de-
sire to hurt him. There was no real reason to suppose
that Lisbon was going to suffer another great earthquake.
And so on.

But other preachers tried to show that all things con-

126 The Lisbon Earthquake

sidered Lisbon had got off lightly. This was a mistake.
The people, in spite of all the rantings on the contrary
side, were not persuaded that the punishment inflicted
was less than the wicked city of Lisbon deserved; they
thought, knowing that there was a very large number of
ordinary good men and women in Lisbon, to say nothing
of a great many innocent children, that Lisbon had suf-
fered more than it deserved. The truth is that the Lisbon
earthquake had forced many of the survivors and those
that sympathized with them to ask themselves if God
really was a loving Father. It was a question asked with
greater insistence outside Portugal; but it was asked in
Lisbon too, and it was one to which, under the painful
circumstances of an earthquake of great severity, the
clergy did not find it easy to give a convincing affirma-
tive answer.

In this context a sermon preached fifteen months after
the earthquake in a temporary church of the Franciscans
in Campolide, a high outlying district in north-west Lis-
bon, is of great interest. The preacher called it an Ex-
hortagdo consolatoria de Jesus Christo, and it was pub-
lished in the spring of 1757, a time when Lisbon was al-
ready making a strong recovery, both in rebuilding and
in commerce, and there were justifiable hopes that the
city would later on be completely restored to its former
prosperity. It was a time in which it was appropriate to
assess the whole tragedy of the earthquake in retrospect,
and to sum up its spiritual significance. The preacher was
Antonio do Sacramento, and his address took the form of
an imaginary speech by Jesus Himself to a congregation
consisting of the entire Portuguese nation. The text put
into the mouth of Our Lord was:

The Wrath of God (i) 127

O my people, what have I done unto thee? and
wherein have I wearied thee? testify against me. (Mi-
cah vi. 3. )

Jesus said that the Portuguese nation might be proud
to think that its people were specially singled out, above
all other nations, as the object of His love. The earth-
quake, always remembering that God's wisdom is beyond
the comprehension of men, was an act of love, not just
a chastisement; for its purpose was to bring Portugal, as
a beloved child, back into the comforting arms of Jesus
Himself. Portugal had indeed been sinful, and Our Lord
had been deeply offended; but, even so, the punishment
He had inflicted had been relatively light. Just think, for
instance, what the Flood must have been like! Portugal
really deserved to be swallowed up completely and all
its people sent to eternal damnation. Jesus had therefore
been most merciful, sparing the lives of most of the city's
inhabitants. He had not wanted to scare the Portuguese
out of their wits, for that was not His loving way of
dealing with mankind; but He had wanted to prevent His
chosen people from further foolishness and to change their
hearts. It was true that they had suffered; but Jesus had
suffered much more horribly Himself in His Passion. If
someone lost a fortune in the earthquake, it was because
men must learn somehow or other not to overrate riches.
Those who lost their lives were lucky people, the recipi-
ents of Our Lord's special favour, for they died quickly
and mercifully, unburdened by all the sins they would
have committed had they lived. The Portuguese were rec-
ommended to read Isaiah xxix and Revelation xviii if they
were in any doubt about the justice of the earthquake,

128 The Lisbon Earthquake

or were deluded by philosophers into thinking it was
merely a natural accident. There must be no mistake on
this point, and Lisbon, the modern Babylon, could, and
perhaps should, have been destroyed like Sodom and Go-
morrah. The Portuguese must try to recognize what Jesus
had done for Portugal. He had made it a world power,
a State universally feared for its strength, wealth, and far-
flung dominions. It was Jesus who had rescued the Por-
tuguese from the Spanish usurpation. Jesus had lived on
earth, had been a man, and knew how to establish a na-
tion in security. The Portuguese must stop lamenting, and
trust in Him. The earthly punishments He inflicted were
no more than the corrections of a loving father, and not
the sentences of an angry judge. Come again into my
arms, said Jesus.

Today this sounds at least ridiculous, if not actually
blasphemous, but Antonio do Sacramento was sincere in
thus presenting to the people what was intended to be
an acceptable theodicy, a justification of the God who had
it seemed so cruelly hurt them. And in his ardent out-
pouring of comfortable words we can see the theodicy
taking shape. The reason why God had overthrown Lis-
bon was not only because He intended to shock the whole
of Christendom into a state of penitent obedience to
Him by the staggering destruction of such a celebrated
and wealthy city, one that was perhaps, thanks to its
maritime trade, the best-known city in Europe; but also
because Portugal was a kingdom under the special and
principal care of Heaven, so that according to the rules
of the divine discipline, the Portuguese, for their own
good and as a result of the heavenly priority that was
their due, were singled out for the honour of being the

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The Wrath of God (i) 129

first to be punished and those who were punished most
severely. The warrant for this heavenly favouritism, to
which the opening passage of Antonio do Sacramento's
sermon alludes, was the message delivered by Christ Him-
self in a vision vouchsafed to the first King of Portugal,
Afonso Henriques, on the eve of his famous victory over
die Moors at the battle of Ourique in 1139. After the
earthquake, the Portuguese were many times reminded of
the comforting relevance of this extraordinary happening,
just as they were reminded of it again in the dark days
of the Napoleonic oppression.

The battle of Ourique is an embarrassing subject for
an historian, even without the encumbrance of a stupen-
dous miracle. It is not known for certain where it took
place, and the traditional site of the battle, near the town
of Ourique in the southern end of the Alentejo province,
south-west of Castro Verde on the main road to Faro, is,
as most modern writers agree, probably not the real scene
of the contest; at least two more likely "Ouriques" are
to be found much farther north; but the Portuguese of
the time of the earthquake accepted the site in the south,
and there is a church at Castro Verde decorated with
early eighteenth-century azulejos illustrating the battle
and the vision. The contemporary or nearly contemporary
medieval chronicles give us very little information about
the actual campaign, but it seems unlikely that the vic-
tory won by Afonso Henriques was a decisive event in
the war of liberation, for the Moors were fighting again
north of the Tagus in the following year; Ourique did,
however, have some considerable political importance.
Before it Afonso Henriques was a prince; after it he

130 The Lisbon Earthquake

styled himself King of the Portuguese. The battle was
therefore a proper subject for the most highly imagina-
tive development as a legend.

The story of the miraculous appearance of Christ at
the battle of Ourique is as old as the middle of the fif-
teenth century, but the form in which the Portuguese
knew it best was the relation of it in the Juramento
(Oath) of Afonso Henriques, a document first published
in 1602 on the authority of a manuscript discovered at
Alcobaa in 1596. This manuscript was suspected to be
bogus even in the seventeenth century, but its defenders
were tough and numerous, and in fact, right up to and
including the twentieth century, the controversy about its
historical value has from time to time flared up into one
of the most passionately disputed rows in Portuguese his-
tory. Anyone who doubts whether the tale was still gen-
erally believed in the middle of the eighteenth century
should look at the thick harvest of pamphlets published
on the subject in the middle of the nineteenth century
after the historian Alexandre Herculano (1810-77) had
inserted at the end of the first volume of the Histdria de
Portugal a seemingly inoffensive note 4 in which he re-
ferred to the story of the apparition as a fable and the
Alcobaga document, by that time in the Archive Nacional,
as a forgery. He was almost overwhelmed by a raging
flood of either sad or angry reproach, and was called the
"Luther of the Ajuda" (he was librarian in the Ajuda
palace). In the eighteenth century the tide against this
honest man would have run even stronger. He would
probably have been burnt. After all, as was commonly

4 Histdria de Portugal, i, pp. 486-87. Lisbon, 1846.

The Wrath of Cod (i) 131

known, the arms of Portugal (Fig. 3), familiar and to be
seen all over the city, were visible proof that Christ's
message to Afonso Henriques had been delivered and its
commands obeyed.

In his Juramento Afonso Henriques swore that with his
unworthy eyes he had actually seen Jesus Christ on the
Cross. It happened this way. He was with his army on

Fig. 3. The Arms of Portugal

the plain of Ourique in Alemtejo about to fight a con-
federation of Moorish kings who opposed him with a huge
army. The Portuguese had become alarmed at the pros-
pect of such an unequal contest, and Afonso was there-
fore greatly perturbed; but on opening his Bible he read
the comforting story of Gideon who, encouraged before
battle by a dream, overcame with his small force the
great army of the Midianites, and he prayed to Christ
to strengthen him and his army so that he might van-
quish the heretics assembled against him. In his sleep he,
too, had a dream and it was that an old man visited him
and promised him victory and, what is more, a vision of
Christ Himself. On waking he found that the old man of

132 The Lisbon Earthquake

the dream was there in real life to see him, and he re-
peated the two promises to Afonso, adding that Christ
would look favourably on him and his royal house up to
his sixteenth descendant, when the succession would fail,
though, even then, Christ would continue His special pro-
tection of the Portuguese people.

The next night at an arranged signal (the ringing of
a bell in the old man's near-by hermitage) Afonso Hen-
riques left the camp by himself, taking his sword and
shield, and he saw suddenly a splendour in the eastern
sky, gradually growing more and more brilliant until in
its centre shone out the Cross itself, floating about ten
cubits height from the ground and more dazzling than
the sun, and stretched on the Cross was the Lord Him-
self, and all around was a host of white figures, whom
Afonso imagined to be angels, Flinging aside sword and
shield and casting off his cloak and his shoes, he flung
himself prostrate before the vision, dissolved in tears; but
courage came and he cried out to Jesus, asking why the
Lord showed Himself to one who believed in Him so
completely and not to the heretic forces, who needed just
such a vision to convince them of the truth of Christi-
anity. In gentle tones Christ answered that His purpose
was to secure the establishment of Afonso's kingdom. He
would win the forthcoming battle and all others fought
by him against the infidel, and Afonso's warriors would
immediately beg him to assume the title of King. "I,"
said Christ, "am founder and bestower of kingdoms and
empires, and it is my wish to create through you and
your descendants an illustrious state that shall carry my
name all over the world, even to the most distant nations.

The Wrath of God (i) 133

And in order that your descendants may know who has
given them this kingdom, you shall take as your arms
a shield blazoned with my five wounds, the price with
which I redeemed mankind, and also with the thirty
pieces o silver, the price for which I was sold to the
Jews. Everyone will know that your kingdom is specially
dedicated to me, and it shall maintain the faith in purity
and always be notable for its piety/' Afonso then asked
for a blessing on himself, his descendants, and his peo-
ple, and he asked that if Christ should ever want to
punish the Portuguese, he would turn His wrath on the
King and his royal line, rather than on the people them-
selves. Jesus promised that He would never desert the
Portuguese.

Then Afonso returned to his captains, and it was as
Christ had said; they had recovered their courage, and
they insisted he should call himself King. And then Afonso
related Christ's promise, and swore on the Bible that the
story was true, and in token thereof he commanded that
his descendants should always bear the divinely blazoned
arms of Portugal, the chagas or wounds, set crosswise,
having upon them the thirty pieces of silver, and for
crest the serpent of Moses, representing Christ. All this
is set down in the famous Oath or Juramento, finally
drawn up at Coimbra on 29 October 1152, signed and
sealed by the King, and witnessed and sealed by a very
imposing list of people.

An exacting historian cannot be expected to like this
document. Among many reasons for doubting its authen-
ticity he would fasten on the prophecy that the royal
line would fail at the sixteenth generation, and assume

134 The Lisbon Earthquake

therefrom that the Juramento was composed after the end
of the house of Avis in 1590, for after the reign of Af onso
Henriques there were sixteen kings ( Sancho I to Cardinal
Henry) before the Spanish usurpation in the reign of
Philip II; 5 but the Juramento was not commonly sub-
jected to this kind of criticism, and the fact is that for
a long time it was commonly accepted as a plausible
document, one that describes with substantial accuracy a
heavenly vision that was seen by the first King of Por-
tugal and a divine promise that was actually made. More-
over, Christ's prophecies had been fulfilled. The Portu-
guese had spread the Christian faith over the whole world;
they had enormous colonial possessions; Brazil with its
seemingly inexhaustible wealth was still theirs; they had
indeed reaped the benefit of Christ's gracious favour. To
settle the matter, everybody knew that the arms of Por-
tugal were (with a simplification in the number of the
pieces of silver) exactly as Christ had ordered and as
Afonso Henriques had in consequence accepted for him-
self and for those who came after him.

Those, therefore, whose business it was to chide the
Portuguese people in these days of calamity used the
legend of the battle of Ourique to show that the sense
of guilt expected of so sinful a nation should be indeed
both bitter and profound. Christ's own people had failed
Him, and they on whom He had loaded His favours stood

5 The brief reign of Antonio I, Prior of Crato, for a few weeks in the
summer of 1580 is understandably not included. By counting all male
sons of each king up to the son that actually succeeded to the throne,
a case lias been made out for supposing that the prophecy refers to the
two-year interregnum (1383-85) between Fernando, the last Burgundiaa
king, and the first King of the house of Avis, John I ( an illegitimate son
of the Burgundian Pedro I); but the Spanish usurpation is much more
likely to be the kind of break to which the Juramento so anxiously refers.

The Wrath of God (i) 135

now signally disgraced before all the world as principal
offenders against Him, as ringleaders in sinful ingratitude.

Again and again we ask ourselves how much ordinary
people listened to and were affected by these exhorta-
tions during the months following the earthquake, and at
what pace and in what stages the mood of helpless sur-
render to fear changed to a recognition that it was a
proper duty for man to show courage and try to take
possession of, and repair, his ruined environment. The
true state of affairs cannot now be exactly determined,
but it is, however, quite certain that the continued ser-
monizing and reproach did have a seriously disturbing
effect on the people and was a positive hindrance to re-
covery. One reason for saying this is that in an extreme
case authority was compelled to put a stop to what was
considered to be unwholesome and subversive nagging.
This is the banishment from Lisbon of the Jesuit, Gabriel
Malagrida, a brave, saintly, and at that time rather crazy
man, whose revoltingly cruel execution in the Rossio
Square in 1761, for which Pombal has been held respon-
sible, shocked people inside and outside Portugal not
much less than the news of the Lisbon earthquake itself.

Malagrida was an Italian, born in 1689, but he had
become in part Portuguese as his chosen work had made
him one of the most celebrated missionaries of Brazil, fa-
mous for his inexhaustible energy, the moving eloquence
of his preaching, and his astonishing miraculous powers.
He first went to Portugal in 1749 to ask for money to
build a convent at Para (now Belem at the mouth of the
Amazon), and he was received by King Joao V with the
honours and humble reverence that might appropriately

136 The Lisbon Earthquake

have been paid to a reincarnation of one of the Twelve
Apostles. He was present at the death-bed of the King,
and the Pope, Benedict XIV, said Joao V was indeed for-
tunate to have died in the arms of this holy man. He left
Portugal in 1751, after having promised to return when-
ever it should become necessary to prepare Joao V's con-
sort, Maria Ana of Austria, for death, and it was for this
purpose that he did come back to Portugal in February

Once again he had a position of dominating spiritual
influence, but in the new reign his power was opposed
by Pombal and the courtiers of his party, and the exces-
sively tactless and impetuous missionary was in the end
denied unrestricted access to the Queen Mother. When
she died in August 1754, Malagrida depended afterwards
upon the patronage of Prince Pedro, and the friendship
of the Tavora family and many of Pombal's enemies at
court. He still had an enormous prestige for holiness, but
he was at this time a wild, white-bearded eccentric whose
power resided not in his political opportunities but in his
unquenchable religious candour. He was a specialist in
conducting retreats, which he advocated as necessary for
all, and his great hope was to supplement the existing
Jesuit houses in Lisbon with another building specially
set apart for the purpose.

PombaFs loathing of the Jesuits and their colossal po-
litical and educational power throughout all the Portu-
guese territories, especially Brazil, and their palace pres-
tige in Portugal, had nothing to do with the earthquake;
but they were even more objectionable to him after the
disaster because he thought the Society was responsible
for most of the alarmist preaching and frightening proph-

The Wrath of God (i) 137

ecies. Pombal wanted the 1755 earthquake written off as
a natural event, and he particularly resented the mischie-
vous warnings of an earthquake to happen on i Novem-
ber 1756; yet at the very time when these rumours, at-
tributed to Jesuits, were circulating, Malagrida, who had
already deeply offended the chief minister and must have
been the most detested preacher on his list of culprits,
committed in PombaFs eyes the outrageous offence of
publishing in the late autumn of 1756 a pamphlet called
Juizo da verdadeira causa do terremoto&n opinion on
the true cause of the earthquake that was obviously a
printed version of the sermon he had been preaching
again and again in the first months after the earthquake
happened, exactly the sort of sermon that Pombal con-
sidered to be most monstrously harmful. The fame of the
preacher, miracle-working, holy, passionately eloquent,
and a priest with an enormous personal following, gave
the little pamphlet of some thirty pages a special signif-
icance. It could not be ignored, nor could anyone fail to
recognize it as a challenge to the minister himself; for
Malagrida flatly contradicted PombaFs view about the
natural cause of the earthquake, and then did his best
to destroy the peace of mind of the people assisting in
the necessary business of recovery.

Malagrida said: "Learn, O Lisbon, that the destroyers
of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause
of the death of so many people and of the flames that
devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins,
and not comets, stars, vapours and exhalations, and sim-
ilar natural phenomena. Tragic Lisbon is now a mound
of ruins. Would that it were less difficult to think of some
method of restoring the place; but it has been abandoned,

138 The Lisbon Earthquake

and the refugees from the city live in despair. As for the
dead, what a great harvest of sinful souls such disasters
send to Hell! It is scandalous to pretend the earthquake
was just a natural event, for if that be true, there is no
need to repent and to try to avert the wrath of God, and
not even the Devil himself could invent a false idea more
likely to lead us all to irreparable ruin. Holy people had
prophesied the earthquake was coming, yet the city con-
tinued in its sinful ways without a care for the future.
Now, indeed, the case of Lisbon is desperate. It is nec-
essary to devote all our strength and purpose to the task
of repentance. Would to God we could see as much de-
termination and fervour for this necessary exercise as are
devoted to the erection of huts and new buildings! Does
being billeted in the country outside the city areas put
us outside the jurisdiction of God? God undoubtedly de-
sires to exercise His love and mercy, but be sure that
wherever we are, He is watching us, scourge in hand."
Malagrida reminded the people of their monstrous sins,
their wicked love for theatres, music, immodest dances,
obscene comedies, bull-fighting, and so on, and he said
how particularly distressing it was that people who ought
to know better did not mind being seen at these profane
spectacles. Lisbon's vaunted piety was a fake, a dunghill
covered with snow. Neighbouring cities, scarcely harmed,
duly performed the most severe exercises of repentance
with scourging and fasts, and were astonished that Lis-
bon failed to make comparable demonstrations; but Mala-
grida said he could forgive inadequate public and indi-
vidual repentance if only the wretched Lisbon sinners
would recognize an obligation to go into retreat for six
days in a Jesuit house wherein they could be properly

The Wrath of God (i) 139

instructed by expert conductors in the method of making
their peace with God. People do not know anything about
the mechanism of true repentance, and think that loud
lamentation and ejaculatory prayers are all that is re-
quired. The Lisbon people, both ordinary folk and the
leaders of society, are, frankly, irreligious. It is absolutely
essential that all of them must learn that only in retreat,
silent and apart, under properly qualified Jesuit instruc-
tion, could they learn the rigjtit way in which to achieve
the salvation of their souls.

Mr. Marcus Cheke has rightly said that Malagrida's
pamphlet put in its final and most painful form the ques-
tion that post-earthquake Lisbon had somehow or other
to answer. Who was right? Ought the ordinary man to
try to help in the work of recovery that was directed
by Pombal and executed by a diligent team of officials,
aided by the army and in a large measure by the clergy
themselves, or ought he to set all this miserable worldly
business aside and seek in what might well be his last
hours to save his soul? There must be no mistake about
the seriousness or urgency of Malagrida's case. If God
watched Lisbon, scourge in hand, what could anyone pos-
sibly find to do more important than to placate His wrath
by the exercise of true repentance? Time was short. The
people might have only weeks, indeed only days, in which
to live on this earth. Could anything be more urgent at
this very moment than to take a last opportunity, hav-
ing deliberately set all worldly affairs aside, of preparing
calmly and thoughtfully for the future life?

There is no conceivable compromise here between the
men of action and the men of God. The parish priests
with their loving parochial work, and the religious orders

I4 o The Lisbon Earthquake

with their diligent care of wounded and homeless, were
acceptable and, indeed, indispensable collaborators with
civil authority; but Malagrida, and those who preached
like him, were mdennixiing the patient work of these men,
His accusation came very nearly to the charge that the
people were being misdirected and deprived of the proper
opportunity of saving their souls. He made no attempt to
seek some kind of middle course. He preached his fan-
passioned doctrine wherever he found opportunity, in-
sisting on the absolute necessity for meditation in retreat;
he sent copies of his pamphlet to members of the royal
family, and to Pombal himself and other high officers of
state. He became in official eyes a public menace, and
Pombal, understandably angry, persuaded the Papal Nun-
cio to banish his troublesome countryman from Lisbon,
which Filippo Acciaiuoli obligingly did ? sending him into
retirement at Settibal, where he had already been resid-
ing and was occupied with the planning of a nunnery,
made possible by a bequest from the late Queen.

Banishment to Settibal did not end the nuisance caused
by Malagrida and his objectionable pamphlet. He con-
ducted retreats for both men and women, boasted of the
number of souls he was saving from Hell, and continued
his stormy exhortations, wild prophesying and terrifying
revelations, all justified in his view by persistent super-
natural promptings. Moreover, lie was soon in very seri-
ous trouble, the cause being the supposed attempt of 3
September 1758 on the King's life, as letters of his writ-
ten after the event for Brazil came into the hands o
Pombai, and it was discovered that before the shooting
he had prophesied that harm was likely to befall Jose L
Probably he had nothing to do with the actual occur-

The Wrath of God (i) 141

rence, but Pombal had now everything he wanted for the
final attack on this very nearly crazy saint. He was put
into prison in December 1758, and the case against him
was made to appear so bad that three years later in his
obituary notice it was said of him in the Scots Magazine
that he "had rendered himself very famous for the deep
concern he had in the plot for assassinating his Portu-
guese Majesty." He escaped condemnation with the Ta-
vora family; but he was not allowed to leave the coun-
try when the Jesuits were expelled. Instead, Malagrida
was handed over to the Inquisition by whom he was sen-
tenced in January 1761 as a heretic, on charges that he
had recently written certain blasphemous and painfully
disgusting books, full of details about the uterine life of
St. Anne, the Virgin, and Our Lord, that he had uttered
false prophecies and had pretended to have converse with
spirits, and that he had behaved with gross indecency in
prison of which charges it can be said that, if true, they
merited no more in the way of punishment than the mer-
ciful condemnation of a lunatic to a madhouse; but Mala-
grida was found guilty, 6 and on the night of 21 Septem-
ber 1761 he was put to death by strangling in horrid pub-
licity in the torchlit end of an auto-da-fe in the Rossio
Square that had lasted all day. As soon as he was dead
his body was burnt and the ashes were thrown into the
sea. He was seventy-two/

6 An account of the trial was published in English. Proceedings and
Sentence of the Spiritual Court of Inquisition of Portugal against Gabriel
Malagrida, Jesuit. London, 176^.

7 This was not the end of the Juizo da verdadeira causa do terremoto.
The pamphlet still circulated and troubled the conscientious reader, and
long after the wretched author had been put to death, it was found nec-
essary to publish a royal decree banning the work as heretical. The text
of this decree, undated, is given in the Memoires du Marquis du Pom-
bal, rv, p. 247 (1784). In the text, p. 37, the suggestion is that it was

' "

Chapter Five

THE WRATH OF GOD (2)

od in His anger had destroyed Lisbon. It was
a constant theme in sermons, tracts, and moralizing po-
etry, throughout all Europe.

Je reconnais, helas, a ces terribles coups,

Un maltre, un juge, un Dieu qu'anime son courroux.

So wrote the Chevalier Joseph Cuers de CogeHn, and
the charitable way of explaining God's terrifying punish-
ment within the limits of a short poem was to say that
Lisbon had been too proudmistress of the seas, a world
market controlling vast possessions abroad, stupendously
wealthy. Now, poetically at least, there is nothing left of
this magnificent city.

Ou te trouver, Heu plein de charmes,
Cite de mes Rois, de mes Dieux?
Est-ce le voile de mes larmes
Qui te cache a mes tristes yeux?

A Portuguese refugee from the ruined city is imagined
by a Bordeaux poet as addressing thus the site where
Lisbon had once stood. The poor wretch can only wish
that he too had been killed:

The Wrath of God (2) 143

Flamme infemale et souteixeine,

Je vis encore, rallume toi.

Mer devorante, qui farrete?

O Ciel! brise toi sur ma tete,

Tombe, fond sur elle en eclats;

Et toi, grand Dieu, vengeur du crime,

Sauve ta demiere victime

De Fhorreur de ne mourn* pas.

The downfall of pride is the theme of a little fable
in verse written by the Abbe J. L. Aubert He describes
an ants' nest, a complacent and thriving community for
whom everything seemed to go well, so much so that
they accepted all the gifts of Heaven as their proper
due and never bothered to be grateful to their Creator;
but one day the wind shook an acorn down on the nest
and it killed several of the ants. The rest of them, ter-
rified by this awful event, regarded the calamity just in
the same way as we should regard an enormous and wide-
spread earthquake, and their pride and self-satisfaction
vanished at once, for they knew now that their lives de-
pended on the goodwill of God, and that henceforth they
must be truly thankful for all the blessings they received
and fear the just anger of God:

Ce que les dons du Ciel n'avoient pu sur leur coeur y
Un coup de vent en eut Thonneur.

We men and women, the Abbe observed, are insignificant
little creatures just like the ants, and we behave in just
the same ungrateful way. We do not give proper thanks
for the abundant gifts we receive from Heaven and it is
only an unexpected disaster like an earthquake that suc-
ceeds in humbling our wicked pride.

144 The Lisbon Earthquake

It may, however, have been pride in a curious form
that brought all this suffering on the people of Lisbon;
for one view was that they ought to have been living
somewhere else, since they were greatly to blame for not
heeding the plain warning given them by the awful earth-
quake that overthrew their city on 26 January 1531. They
should have recognized that they lived on a site under
which lurked most potent subterranean fires that had ob-
tained means of access to the surface, so that at any time
they might explode again with shattering violence, just
like an enormous sapper's mine destroying a fortification.
But the Portuguese persuaded themselves into a false se-
curity, and lead astray by a deep love for their charming
flower-bedecked country, they failed to recognize what a
dangerous place it was. In a little while unhappy Lisbon
would doubtless be rebuilt again. But there was a strong
probability that in due course God would destroy it once
more with a third earthquake.

In most of the quickly produced poems and tracts that
have as their theme the wrath of God, the writers sel-
dom reminded their readers that God also loved His chil-
dren. When God's love is mentioned, it is often some-
what grudgingly done, sometimes with a hint of reproach.
A typical poem of the kind that does at least remember
the sacrifice of the Son of God is one by the Abb6 de
St. Martin de Chassonville, who had been at Madrid
in the household of the Portuguese diplomat Mendonga
Corte Real, and at the time of the earthquake was in
the service of his son, Diogo de Mendoncja Corte Real,
the foreign minister of King Jose whom Pombal was so
soon to remove from office. Most of the poem is about

The Wrath of God (2) 145

God's anger and the terrible punishment recently visited
on mankind; but it finishes with a prayer:

Assez de ta juste colere

Nous avons senti les effets;

Daigne te montre notre Pere,

DIEU vangeur, donne-nous la paix.

Tu nous a fait a ton image,

Reois nos voeux, et notre hommage,

Finis notre calamite:

Prens le Sang de ton Fils pour gage,

II nous en a perinis Fusage

Quand nous implorons ta bonte.

But all this kind of simple thought about the wrath
of God, and it can be multiplied over and over again in
only slightly divergent forms, is small conventional stuff
compared with the ferocious broodings of the men who
really did believe that the Lisbon earthquake was a heav-
enly punishment directed against special enormities of sin
that now at last stood exposed in their true nature to an
abashed and conscience-stricken world. A horrifying ex-
ample of this sort of interpretation of the earthquake is
given us by a Jansenist, Laurent-Etienne Rondet ( 1717-
85), a Parisian who eventually made a small name for
himself as a Biblical scholar of formidable industry and
erudition, and also as editor of the Abb Racine's AbregS
de THistoire ecclesiastique. When he was a young man
he had studied under the much-respected Charles Rollin
(1661-1741), the historian of the ancient world and a
famous educationalist, who had suffered for his Jansenist
views by being deprived of the rectorship of the College
de Beauvais of Paris University while Rondet was still a

146 The Lisbon Earthquake

child. His thought was therefore embittered by this and
no doubt other instances of the persecution of his co-
religionists, and the fact that he belonged to a party
labelled as heretics and regarded as enemies of the State.
Of the majority of Ms party it could be said that they
were really very ordinary French citizens, and wanted to
be nothing else, and that they desired to be peaceable
members of the Roman communion; but their unforgiv-
able faults in high places were that they were bitter op-
ponents of the Jesuits, the most dangerous enemies that
could be found against them in the religious world, and
also that their conscience forced them to challenge cer-
tain aspects of the Pope's sovereignty; doctrinally they
erred, or were told that they erred, in preferring the Gal-
vinistic severities of St. Augustine's teaching on grace to
the much more lenient Jesuit teaching. They were above
everything God-fearing folk, many of them noble in
thought and saintly in character; but there was a hard
puritanical element in the make-up of some of them, and
Rondet was a man in whom this was developed into a
totally unsympathetic and unloving hatred of the ene-
mies of his faith. Those enemies had indeed been active
in the last years of Louis XIV. The Jansenist headquar-
ters, the Convent of Port Royal des Champs in the coun-
try south-west of Paris, had been savagely obliterated, its
occupants dispersed as prisoners, and even the graveyard
cleared of its bodies; and after this Jansenism had again
incurred papal condemnation through the issue of the Bull
Unigenitus x in 1713.

1 The Bull takes the form of a condemnation in various terms of 101
propositions in the Moral Reflexions on the New Testament by Pasquier
Quesnel, first published in 1671. Only twelve of these are actually de-
scribed as heretical.

The Wrath of God (2) 147

By the time Rondet wrote his book on the Lisbon
earthquake it was amid a storm of troubles that were
good reason for the bitterness in what he had to say;
yet it is also true that his message has at the same time
a sinister exultant note. The Bull Unigenitus had had re-
sults far exceeding the intentions either of Pope Clement
XI, who did not want to persecute the Jansenists, or of
Louis XIV, who certainly did; the Bui had, in fact,
caused a deeply felt quarrel that came near to being a
schism between the French and Roman communions, and
also such serious political tension that it has been held
to be in some measure responsible for the French Revo-
lution. To the Jansenists the doctrines implied by the con-
demnations of the Bull were denied in the Bible and in
the teaching of St. Augustine; but it was generally rec-
ognized at once that, whether this were so or not, the
condemnations in Unigenitus far exceeded a reasonable
denunciation of the central Jansenist faith, and many
Frenchmen without any Jansenist sympathies hated the
Bull as intolerable interference with their own religious
practice and belief. Led by some of the bishops and large
numbers of clergy, there was a strong Gallican protest
against the attempt of the Pope to force by such means
as this doctrinal instruction on the French Church, and
there was talk of an appeal to a General Council of the
Church; Unigenitus was, in short, denounced with con-
siderable popular support as ultramontanism of the most
flagrant kind, and it led to so sharp a quarrel with the
Vatican that the principal protesting bishops were excom-
municated. But the Bull had also very powerful friends
in high places in addition to the assiduous support of the
Jesuits, and in 1730 it became the law of France. This

148 The Lisbon Earthquake

was followed by public scandals, above all by passion-
ate protests against official interference with the common
right to the sacraments, especially extreme unction; at the
same time the Jansenists were becoming a worse nuisance,
for the miracles of the St. Medard graveyard in the Quar-
tier Latin were followed by the hysterical performances
of the convulsionaries, whose fantastic behaviour and
apocalyptic denunciation of Unigenitus as the apostasy
heralding Antichrist made it necessary to close the cem-
etery in 1732. Depar le Roi, Defense a Dieu, De faire
Miracle, En ce Lieu.

On the whole the Jansenists got unexpected sympathy.
By the time of the earthquake there had been riots in
Paris, as a result of what seemed to be a cruel and quite
unnecessary heresy-hunt, while the King was openly quar-
relling with the magistrates and the Paris Parliament
about the enforcement of the Bull as law. Jansenism had
now acquired a political virtue, as though its main tenet
were the liberty of the subject, and in these circumstances
a fanatical Jansenist like Rondet saw the hand of God
crushing the enemies of his faith. The Lisbon earthquake,
he believed, was the final and unmistakable denunciation
of these enemies before all Christendom, that is, if men
would only read the signs of Heaven aright, signs that
Rondet now felt it was his duty to explain to all who
would read his book. 2

2 The book, over seven hundred pages in length, is in two parts, R-
flexions sur le Desastre de Ltebonne. En Europe. Aux d^pens de la Com-
pagnie, 1756, pp. xi, 543, and SuppUment aux Reflexions sur le D6sastre
de Lisbonne, 1757, pp. Ixii, 216, with preface dated 18 April 1757. "Ati
depens de la Compagnie" probably means that the publication was paid
for out of a Jansenist secret fund (the Botte a Perette) that had been
founded in the seventeenth century in order to maintain the fight against
the Jesuits by publications and to provide support for their Jansenist

The Wrath of God (2) 149

Rondet knew that when God strikes, He strikes hard.
Therefore it is useless to waste time on any unrealistic
lamentation or squeamish pity for the supposedly inno-
cent sufferers in a divine punishment of this kind. Nec-
essarily, the just are struck down in company with the
unjust. What, after all, does it matter? Everybody has
got to die sooner or later, and we are al of us sinners,
even little children. There is no need to worry about the
death of comparatively virtuous people. The really terri-
ble thing is that sudden death means the eternal damna-
tion of the hardened sinner. This awful thought should
make us understand and abjectly dread the colossal pun-
ishment that God inflicts upon mankind in a disaster of
this magnitude.

Monsieur Rondet made two points that gave him a spe-
cial advantage in studying divine retribution. The first is
that God's punishment may be inflicted a long time, per-
haps several hundred years, after the sinning that angered
God took place, and the second is that this punishment,
whenever it may be inflicted, is not necessarily inflicted
upon the actual place where the offence was committed.
God is patient. He told Abraham that the Amarites would
wait for four hundred years before the Israelites inflicted
on this wicked tribe the punishment intended for them.
Again, the evil done by Manasseh, King of Judah, was
remembered and punished in the reigns of his great-
grandson and great-great-grandson, without any allevia-

victims. The phrase is often used on Jansenist title-pages with the false
imprints of Cologne or Utrecht. Hondet's edition of the Abbe Racine's
Abrg& de I'Histoire ecclesiastique is an example. The Reflexions sur le
D6sastre de Lisbonne is probably a Paris book, and from the same press
as the 1748 and 1752 editions of the Abrgge. I have to thank my col-
league Mr. A. F. Allison for giving me this information.

150 The Lisbon Earthquake

tion on account of Manasseh's reported repentance or of
the religious reformation carried out by Ms grandson
Josiah; for the faE of Jerusalem in 597 B.C. and the sub-
sequent captivity were both the consequences of the
wickedness of Manasseh, who died about 641 B.C. And
we learn from this particular example that God does not
always punish in one decisive blow the people who have
angered Him; il les frappe par degres, said Rondet; thus
Nebuchadnezzar had to attack Jerusalem three times be-
fore he succeeded in destroying the city and burning the
Temple. There are many other examples of this kind of
delayed and protracted punishment. The destruction of
Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the Hadrianic banishment of the
Jews were punishments for the Crucifixion. The schis-
matic Greeks were punished in the fifteenth century for
sins dating back to the ninth century. Then, as regards
place: note that the penal earthquakes following the Cru-
cifixion took place in Asia Minor and not in Judaea; sim-
ilarly, earthquakes of about A.D. 468 in the Dauphine and
particularly in the city of Vienne were warnings of dis-
asters about to fall on Rome in the period from the re-
volt of Ricimer to the end of the Western Empire in A.B.
476. En frappant Vienne, Dieu menagoit Rome.

With all this in mind, Rondet turns to the case of Lis-
bon. It was a busy port, a centre of commerce known
everywhere in Europe, with a large population of for-
eigners of many nationalities; so, firstly, it is obvious that
when God destroyed it by an earthquake he was address-
ing Himself to the whole of Europe. Next, Lisbon was
the capital of Portugal, and Portugal, like Spain, is a
country infamous for the severity of its Inquisition. Only
a brief acquaintance with the history of this organization

The Wrath of God (2) 151

is needed in order to convince us that in punishing by
earthquake both Lisbon and Seville, God was deliberately
blasting two notorious cradles of this unholy institution.

Rondet has also another dreadful observation to make
about cradles of sin; for Portugal is a cradle of the Jes-
uits. There was a great earthquake in Lisbon in 1531,
as he had already said, in the reign of King Joao III,
and shortly afterwards, heedless of the divine warning,
the misguided King invited the Society of Jesus to Por-
tugal; he allowed them to establish themselves at Coim-
bra, Evora, and Lisbon, and it was he who first sent
Jesuit missionaries to Africa and Brazil. Deservedly, he
died of apoplexy in 1557; his children all died at early
ages, and the folly of his grandson Sebastian lost the
kingdom of Portugal to Spain. The Lisbon earthquake
was therefore a blow specially directed against the Jes-
uits; the city was the first place in which they were re-
ceived with enthusiastic royal favour, and so it was God's
principal target when His punishment fell upon Europe.
Triumphantly, but inaccurately, Rondet pointed out that
all the seven houses of the Jesuits in that city had been
destroyed, and he noted a report in the papers that the
original Jesuit College at Coimbra had also been dam-
aged.

The case against Lisbon was not, however, yet com-
plete; it was also the cradle of Molinism, for the Span-
ish Jesuit, Luis de Molina, published in Lisbon in 1588
his Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, etc., a
celebrated reconciliation of free will and predestination
through grace that occasioned a major theological con-
troversy and was a principal object of Jansenist hate.
Finally, added to this pile of Lisbon wrongdoing, was

152 The Lisbon Earthquake

the scandal of the Laxist Casuists, whose deplorable, In-
dulgent moral code was the product, according to Ron-
det, of Portugal when united with Spain as one kingdom.
The Jesuit Francisco Sudrez, a most celebrated Spanish
scholar, was involved in this perversion of moral theol-
ogy, and it could be said against him that he was a pro-
fessor at Coimbra for nineteen years and that he died
in Lisbon (1617). There was no room left for doubt. A
Jansenist of Rondet's sort knew that Lisbon was doctrin-
ally damned.

The whole matter is made worse by the timing and
manner of the earthquake, for there are ways in which
God adds special emphasis to His awful message. By de-
stroying Lisbon at a popular time for Mass on a solemn
festival, God condemned the general disgracefully irrev-
erent attitude to His services and holy days, and in choos-
ing All Saints' Day, God made known that it was the
saints themselves who had begged Him to punish Lisbon;
because of its wickedness they had cried to Him, "How
long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and
avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" 8
Then, again, the disaster took place at Terce, the hour
when the Church daily remembers the descent of the Holy
Ghost at Pentecost, the great gift of grace which Molina
and the Jesuits so shockingly misunderstood, which even
popes had shamefully insulted in outrageous briefs and
bulls.

A Jansenist's deepest feelings are now roused. Is it pos-
sible that there is a connexion between the Lisbon earth-
quake and the infamous destruction of the beloved Con-

8 Revelation vi. 10.

The Wrath of God (2) 153

vent of Port Royal des Champs on 29 October 1709? The
vile act began with the forcible removal of the nuns be-
tween Terce and Sext on that day, and it was reported
to the prefect of police as completed on All Saints' Day;
everyone knew the subsequent fate of the buildings and
the graveyard. The dust of this holy house, said Rondet,
demands vengeance, and now already we see that God is
striking a city that first fostered Port Royal's most bitter
enemy , the Jesuits. We are to note here that the Lisbon
earthquake happened precisely 150 years after the shame-
ful refusal of Pope Paul V to issue a Bull denouncing
Molina, the cowardly act that was the source of all the
subsequent troubles in the Church.

Molinisme! This scandalous doctrine must be the plague
of locusts of Chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation that
had power to hurt men for "five months/* an expression
that may mean 150 years, since the Biblical "day" often
means a year, and 5 X 30 = 150. St. John goes on to say
that "one woe is past; and behold, there come two woes
more hereafter/' and with this clue, being sure enough
that Molinism must be the first woe, the full meaning
of the vision of the seven angels can be explained in
terms of familiar Church history. The Lisbon earthquake
is the trumpet of the sixth angel announcing the sixth
plague, which is the second woe that is soon to fall upon
us. It is also highly probable that Molinists are prophet-
ically denounced in the four plagues of Joel (i. 4) for the
palmerworm, the locusts, the cankerworm, and the cat-
erpillar, refer (among other things) to the four major
appearances of false teaching in the Western Church,
namely the Albigensian heresy, the influence of Wycliffe
and Hus, the heresies of Luther and Calvin, and the Mo-

154 The Lisbon Earthquake

linists, obviously the caterpillars. Now, of these, the first
three have been decisively punished, so it is alarmingly
probable that the Lisbon earthquake is the warning of a
terrible fourth punishment that will soon astound the
world. Whatever form it may take, it will be something
very terrible, comparable perhaps with the punishment
the Greek Church received for its act of schism, that is,
conquest by Islam. Joel said, "Alas for the day! for the
day of the Lord is at hand, and as a destruction from the
Almighty shall it come." 4

This summary has not yet taken us a quarter way
through all that Rondet has to say. The whole of the
events connected with the earthquake had also to be
discussed in relation to Biblical prophecy. The shocks
felt in Africa show that God is also threatening Islam;
hitherto He used the Mohammedans as a rod whereby
to scourge the Christians; but, as Jeremiah foretold, the
rod itself shall be broken. 5 We are told why earthquakes
have lately alarmed both North and South America, and
also Kaschan in Persia, Constantinople and Cairo; but
here let us leave Monsieur Rondet and his loveless un-
sympathetic book. He had no sorrow for the sufferers; it
was in his eyes right that men, women, and children
should die miserably, crushed by blow after blow falling
everywhere on the earth from the scourge of an angry
God. Blow after blow dealt regularly throughout all his-
tory whenever men have erred. Rondet knew that men
must cringe without protest under the painful flogging
they had so richly deserved. Would that eighteenth-cen-
tury sinners had something of the wisdom and piety of

4 Joel i. 15.

5 Cf. Jeremiah xxv. 9-12.

The Wrath of God (2) 155

their forefathers; they did at least pay attention to the
dreadful signs of divine wrath; they winced under God's
chastisement dreading an even worse punishment, which
was, it is unhappily true, usually their fate. How dif-
ferent it all is now! How little the Lisbon earthquake
really means to us!

We cannot say that the Chevalier de Oliveka was un-
loving and had no sorrow for the sufferers in the earth-
quake. He was a Portuguese living in exile in London,
and his grief on hearing of the disaster that had befallen
his dear country, where his family lived and he still had
many friends, was obviously sincere. "With how many
tears have I not bedewed the Paper, on which I write
the Name of my August afflicted Sovereign, and those of
my near Relations, my ancient Friends, and, in one word,
of all the Portuguese?" 6 In England he could only worry
and lament, bitterly regretful that he could not offer to
take part in the rescue work on the site; he knew that as
long as he lived he would grieve over the present afflic-
tion of Portugal and the terrible fate of the lovely city
of Lisbon. Qui ria pas vu Lisbonne, na rien uu de bon,
it used to be said. Now there was no Lisbon.

It was in Lisbon that Francisco Xavier de Oliveira
(1702-83) was born, the son of a highly placed Treasury
official who spent much of his time abroad in the dip-
lomatic service. The son also received an Exchequer post,
and for many years afterwards he led a gay and pros-
perous life in Lisbon, receiving from the King in 1729
the honour of an appointment as a Chevalier of the Or-

6 A Pathetic Discourse, p. 5. Second edition. London, 1756. This is a
piratical English translation of the Chevalier's Discours PathStique.

156 The Lisbon Earthquake

der of Christ. He was a quarrelsome and profligate young
man, possibly under some slight suspicion of being un-
orthodox in his religious views; but he married happily in
1730, and though he lost his wife three years later, he
seemed to have a fine career before him when he was
sent to Vienna in 1734 to replace his father, who had just
died, as Secretary of the Portuguese Embassy. His stay in
Austria, however, was most unhappy, for he was slighted
by his chief, the Conde de Tarouca, who died suddenly
at a most unfortunate moment in their relations, and in
addition to a charge of treacherous conduct, he also in-
curred ruinous expenditure for which he considered he
should have been officially reimbursed. 7 Six years later he
moved to Holland, and though he claimed to have some
State business there, he was now chiefly concerned with
the presentation to his own government of his case for
redress. He stayed in Holland until 1744, and it was in
this Protestant country that he became convinced that he
would be spiritually happier as a member of a reformed
church than in the Roman Church in which he had been
brought up. So drastically did he revolt from his former
allegiance that he convinced himself that the Roman com-
munion was in error and blinded by superstition and idol-
atry. For family reasons, and because he was still trying
to recover his good name after the trouble in Vienna, he
kept his conversion to himself for a while; but the amus-
ing and informative books he wrote and published at this

7 For a brief and most unfavourable account of the Chevalier de Oli-
veira, see Alfredo Duarte Rodrigues, O MarquSs de Pombal e os sens
bidgrafos, pp. 337~3& Lisbon, 1947. This account refers Indignantly to
a proposal made in 1923 that one of the streets running north to south
between the Rua Morais Soares and the Rua Marque's da Silva should
be named after the Chevalier as one of Lisbon's distinguished literary
sons.

The Wrath of God (2) 157

time were indiscreetly outspoken on the subject of the
Conde de Tarouca and his family, and also on religious
matters, as one may see by reading the chapter on the
Inquisition in the first volume of his Memoires . . . con-
cernant le Portugal, and he now received a direct rebuff
from his native land because the Inquisition, probably
more for political reasons than on account of their heret-
ical content, refused to allow these works to be put on
sale in Portugal; this caused him serious financial loss as
he had had the greatest difficulty in getting them printed.
The Chevalier de Oliveira next moved to London, still
busy with his protest against the wrong done to him in
Vienna, and here he met Senhor de Carvalho, the future
Marques de Pombal and at that time Minister Plenipo-
tentiary in England, who received him kindly, though he
now naturally refused to become involved in the tiresome
suit of his visitor; here, too, in 1746 he finally renounced
Rome and entered the Anglican Church under the guid-
ance of Majendie of the Savoy Chapel, an act which,
when it became known in Portugal, naturally lost him the
little remaining sympathy of his scandalized family. How-
ever, in spite of serious financial troubles and eighteen
months* imprisonment for debt, he married for a third
time (a second wife had died in Vienna), and did a little
writing, producing in 1751 the Amusement Periodique in
instalments, 8 an exceedingly rare book in the diverting
gossipy style of his Cartas Familiares, published in Hol-
land in 1742. The Chevalier was a witty and amusing

8 The full title is Oeuvres M&Ues: ou Discours Historiques, Politiques,
Moraux, Litteraires et Critiques publics . . . sous le titre d f Amusement
Periodique. It appeared in three volumes, January-April, May-August,
September-December. A Portuguese translation (Recreagao Periodic^)
by Aquilino Ribeiro was published in Lisbon in 1922.

158 The Lisbon Earthquake

man, obviously a notable and most lovable chatterbox,
and these three volumes and the other works containing
his table-talk are extremely entertaining; but the Amuse-
ment Periodique attracted little attention in England, and
in Portugal it merely succeeded in angering the Inquisi-
tion further, as is understandable enough after even a
short perusal of its contents. In 1753 this unfortunate man,
still burdened by debts and bad health, and handicapped
by the fact that he knew no English, was able to rent
a tiny house in the country outside London at Kentish
Town, and he was living there when the news of the Lis-
bon earthquake arrived.

He was dismayed and unhappy, for he loved Portugal;
but he knew that he had now something very important
to say to the Portuguese, so he wrote his Discours Pa-
thetique au Sujet des Calamites presentes arrivees en Por-
tugal, which was published in 1756 (price is.). This slim
quarto volume of fifty-two pages sold so well that sev-
eral reprintings were necessary, and an English transla-
tion also appeared, though the author said it was with-
out his consent. Three copies of the French edition were
sent to Portugal with letters from Oliveira, one to Dom
Manuel, the King's uncle, one to Pombal, and one to the
Royal Academy of History, and another copy was sent to
Dona Maria Barbara, the Queen of Spain, King Jose's
sister. The copies addressed to Lisbon arrived late in June,
and by early July the Inquisition had decided to forbid
the reading of the book. On 8 October an official procla-
mation was issued by the Holy Office in Lisbon for gen-
eral distribution through Portugal condemning the Dis-
cours faihetique in company with Ange Goudar's Rela-
tion Historique (see p. 86) and two books containing

The Wrath of God (2) 159

some prayers listed as forbidden on the Index, one of
which was a 1753 Coimbra edition of a work by Fleury;
under pain of excommunication, these works were not to
be read and those possessing them were to hand the
copies over to the ecclesiastical authority. It is quite plain,
however, that the principal abomination denounced in
this wrathful document is the "scandalous attack on our
Most Holy Faith*" contained in the pamphlet on the earth-
quake written in London by the Chevalier de Oliveira. 9
There is nothing surprising about that. The Discours
Pathetique is a fiercely worded direct attack on the In-
quisition and the Roman Church in Portugal, and it is
addressed to the King himself, for the Chevalier (Sir
Francis Oliveira, as his English friends sometimes referred
to him) considered himself entitled by reason of his mem-
bership of his order and his former court connexions to
appeal direct to the sovereign. He said first of all that
the cause of the earthquake was the anger of God, and
his general reflections on this specially notable example
of divine punishment are those that were expressed over
and over again in the sermons and pious tracts of the
time; but these simple considerations are no more than
a brief introduction to his real message. He could not
bring himself to believe that the Portuguese were really
aware of the calamitous significance of what has hap-
pened, for surely they must see that God has angrily
discontinued His former loving protection of this country.

The edital was read publicly on Sunday, 17 October 1756 and on
this occasion there was a fine display of earthquake-nerves at Sao Rogue.
After the reading and on the appearance of the Host from the ruined
Church of the Encarnagao, which was kept in Sao Rogue, a woman had
screaming hysterics, and this made people immediately think that an
earthquake was taking place, or about to take place; so there was a
stampede to get out of the church in which many people got injured.

160 The Lisbon Earthquake

The earthquake shows that God's grace is withdrawn. He
has turned His back on the wailing petitions of the vic-
tims, because God never answers those who invoke His
aid in a manner He detests. God will have nothing to
do with superstition and idolatry. The Chevalier said one
could certainly be thankful that the life of King Jose had
been saved, but, having saved the King, God must now
be asked to preserve the King's feet from stumbling.

Hear and assist him by thy Bounty! [the exile
prayed]; add to the Days, thou hast allotted him a
longer period; that he may have time to recollect his
Error, and be convinced of his ill conduct; to rectify
the pernicious Principles of his People, and to put an
end to the Transgressions of thy holy Law; by which
he and his Subjects have drawn upon them the Chas-
tisements with which thou hast visited them in thine
Anger. Yes, sm, in spite of your own heart, you are in
a gross Error.

The Chevalier's case against his country is simple. First
of all he denounced the idolatrous adoration of images,
in his view "diabolical, infernal, and ridiculous, in all its
parts." There were no greater idolaters anywhere than the
Portuguese. The saints in Heaven did not expect to be
infuriated by incense and prayers offered to their images;
they required no more than that the living should join
them in offering to God the praise and worship due to
Him alone. His second charge is that the reading of the
Bible is prohibited. If a legislature wanted the State they
were governing to be properly and intelligently ordered,
would they prohibit the reading of the Statutes of the
Realm? Thirdly, and most violently, he attacked that "odi-

The Wrath of God (2) 161

ous Tribunal/' the Inquisition, who were deliberately re-
sponsible for the gross ignorance of the Portuguese in re-
ligious matters. Fourthly, the Chevalier considered the
treatment of the Jews in Portugal to be brutal and ex-
tremely foolish. It could be easily shown that the Jews
had made valuable contributions to the welfare of the
country. To persecute them was politically and financially
absurd. "Great King! is this the method to promote com-
merce, or to make arts and sciences flourish?'*

The Chevalier de Oliveira at this point plunged bravely
and foolishly into his final magnificent appeal. The King
must reform Portugal. There was no other hope for his
unhappy country. King Jose must put an end to the mis-
chief caused by the Inquisition. He must rid himself of
its influence, and in order to decide how best to carry-
out the reformation necessary if Portugal were to be saved,
the King would now be well advised to invite learned
theologians of other nations, especially of France and
Germany, to confer with him. "Then, SIR, being well in-
structed by yourself, of the pro and con, in this impor-
tant Controversey; you could easily recline the Balance
on the Side of Truth and Reason/'

One might well imagine that this pamphlet was really
written for a Protestant public, a timely tract that would
enhance the Chevalier's reputation in the country of his
adoption and prove the sincerity of so valuable a con-
vert. Yet, it was nothing of the sort. As Professor Gon-
galves Rodrigues has said, 10 there is a wild streak of van-
ity in Oliveira's writings suggesting that he really did
think his voice would be heard with respect in his na-

10 Cavaleiro de Oliveira. Opusculos contra o Santo-Oficio, p. vi. Coim-
bra, 1942.

162 The Lisbon Earthquake

live land, a land that was almost unapproachable and in
practice unpersuadable with regard to the intimate reli-
gious matters this despised apostate in exile wished to be
changed. His fantastic determination to make Portugal
listen to him is proved by his next publication, the Suite
du Discours Pathetique ou Reponse aux Objections et awe
Mnrmures que cet Ecrit s*est attire a Lisbonne, which he
wrote in the spring of 1757 and published in that year.
He had received through the many friends he still had
in Lisbon a summary of, or copies of, the "odious re-
proaches" made against him, and these he thought it right
to confute with the vigorous expostulation that is charac-
teristic of his polemical style; he then added a criticism,
absurd in its exaggeration and niggling anti-Popish stu-
pidity of the quite sensible account of the Lisbon earth-
quake by Antonio Pereira (see p. 91).

To show his mood the Chevalier printed a letter dated
2,2, December 1756 from his clerical brother in Lisbon,
Toms de Aquino, a sadly shocked Benedictine monk of
high official position in his order, whose first hope was
that Oliveira would disown the Discours Pathetique, or,
if he could not do that, admit his grievous sin in having
written it and return as a penitent to the Roman Church.
The letter concluded by announcing that their mother
had died on 24 April, perhaps Father Tonias sadly sup-
posed, to escape the blow caused by her son's cruel hu-
miliation of the family. To this appeal the Chevalier,
though he signed himself le frere le plus tendre et le
plus affectione, sent back a cold uncompromising answer
in a letter of 12 April 1757; he was a Protestant, he said;
nothing could alter his views. He referred to the death
of his mother, of which he had already been told, and

The Wrath of God (2) 163

to the alleged humiliation of Ms family that was supposed
to have hastened her end. This blow to your pride, this
humiliation, said the Chevalier, is not my work, but the
work of God; if my relations in Portugal have suffered
as a result of the views expressed in niy Discours Pathe-
tique, they have suffered deservedly, and no one can help
them but God.

The Inquisition had not, however, finished with this
rebel. On Sunday, 20 December 1761, the Chevalier de
Oliveira was burnt in effigy, with his heretical book added
to the bonfire, at the horrible auto-da-fe in Lisbon in
which Malagrida was executed (see p. 141). The insult
was more than he could silently endure, and he felt all
the bitterness such public humiliation in his native coun-
try might be expected to cause. As a result he wrote a
small book that is partly autobiography and partly a
strongly worded defence of his conversion and religious
convictions, Le Chevalier d'Oliveyra brule en Effigie:
Comment et Pourquoi? now a rare work of which there
is a copy in Lambeth Palace Library, lately republished
by Professor Gongalves Rodrigues. 11 This pamphlet is also
a hard and sometimes unreasonable book, of little value
as a critical essay in doctrinal controversy; but it is sin-
cere, and because of its earnest pleading it is an impres-
sive statement of a Protestant convert's unchangeable and
unappeasable hatred of the communion he had deserted.
Toutes les Religions qui employent le fer et la feu pour

11 Opuscules, pp. 53 ff. The original is a small volume, 6% X 3% in.,
of 124 pages. Printed by J. Haberhorn, Grafton Street, St. Ann's, Soho.
Professor Gongalves Rodrigues has had to reprint the text in 4, and
he has added two appropriate contemporary English engravings of an
auto-da-f^ and the Tavora execution, and a French engraving of Mala-
grida. A copy of the pamphlet has been recently acquired by the British
Museum.

164 The Lisbon Earthquake

contraindre les hommes a en embrasser les Dogmes, sont
certainement fausses, That is the heartfelt beginning to
the justification of his views.

The news of the ridiculous fate of the Chevalier de
Oliveira in this auto-da-fe at Lisbon did not pass unno-
ticed outside Portugal, for it lightened with a momentary
gleam of humour the horror of the announcement of the
brutal execution of Malagrida. From a Geneva press ap-
peared a tiny pamphlet called Epitre du Chevalier d'Qli-
veyra sur le dernier Acte du Foi whose author called him-
self Mr. de ***, and in this very witty Voltairean jeu
d 'esprit, after a devastating little preface comes a short

" * O vous de la triste figure

Preux Chevalier d'Oliveyra,
A Lisbonne votre peinture
Vient d'expier par la brulure,
Le grand scandale que causa
La peu catholique brochure
Que votre plume composa.

The miserable victim Malagrida is then represented as
crying out to the Inquisitors that they should think of
the taunts and reproaches the founder of his Company,
St. Ignatius Loyola, would hurl at St, Dominic, the orig-
inator of the Inquisition, when his soul arrived in Pur-
gatory. At the end of the tirade the Jesuit saint asks if
it were really necessary that Malagrida should be dis-
patched to his future life in the company of the effigy
of a vile renegade who was laughing at them all, Jesuits
included?

The Chevalier de Oliveira died in 1783 and was buried
in the graveyard of St. Augustine's, Hackney, close to the

The Wrath of God (2) 165

present parish church, St. John's. He had tried to inter-
vene again in Portuguese affairs in 1767, before his move
to Hackney, by publishing a tiny book in Portuguese un-
der the pseudonym of Felix Vieyra Corvina de Arcos, an
anagram of his own name, the purpose of which was to
praise the Tentatwa Theologica of Antonio Pereira de
Figueiredo, whose account of the Lisbon earthquake he
had so scornfully attacked in 1757; for the learned Por-
tuguese theologian's opinions now thrilled the exiled
Chevalier with hope, because this challenge to Rome
and ultramontanism, coupled with the certain news of
PombaFs anti- Vatican and anti-clerical policy, made him
think that the religious heart of Portugal might after all
be changing. 12 The Chevalier also wrote, a year later, an
apocalyptic study of the reign of Antichrist in which his
hatred of the Roman Church found its silliest and most
bitter expression. He had written in his lighter manner on
this subject in the Amusement Periodique; 1S but by this
time he was getting old, and it is easy to think of him
as a lonely disappointed man, hard-set and humourless in
his views like Rondet, another authority on Antichrist. It
is not fair, however, to dismiss the Chevalier too hastily.
He was a failure, and his works and views attracted a
very little attention in England; but he was in his prime

12 The suggestion that this book was actually commissioned by Pom-
bal is disproved by its contents, c. p. 7 of these Reflexions. London,
1767.

13 Tom. Ill, pp. 362 ff., Londres, 1751. The Chevalier tells us he com-
monly referred to the Bishop of Rome as Antichrist, and considered he
had far better reason for doing so than the Bishop of Rome had for
styling himself Pope or Universal Father; but the Pope himself is not
Antichrist, even though almost everybody knows he is as much anti-
Christian as Antichrist can possibly be; the Pope is only a sort of ad-
vance agent for the real Antichrist.

166 The Lisbon Earthquake

a most entertaining person, full of anecdotes and chatter,
and with a crowd of scientific interests that he maintained
throughout his life. He finished his days with only a small
circle of friends, mostly members of foreign families set-
tled in London; but they seem to have been a faithful
band., and one of them, Matthew Maty, the second prin-
cipal librarian of the British Museum, whose father was
a Huguenot from Provence, is known to have been greatly
attached to him. His obituary notice in the Gentleman s
Magazine is that of an interesting and respected Lon-
doner.

When Monsieur Rondet and the Chevalier de Oliveira
succeeded in identifying the objects of their fiercest the-
ological hatred among the grim portents of the Book of
Revelation, they were delivering final attacks on the foe
in the typical manner of their extravagant writings on the
sins that had provoked God into destroying Lisbon. From
such oversincere single-purposed Christians we cannot ex-
pect a thoughtful answer to the question why God had
permitted this dreadful disaster to take place, nor indeed
from any of the vituperative sermons preached in the
churches. In contrast, therefore, let us turn thankfully to
one of the men who spoke with a different and wiser
voice. He is Pastor Elie Bertrand (1717-97) of the French
Church in Berne. His message was bound to command
attention, because he was a naturalist of some fame, and
though still in the late thirties when the Lisbon earth-
quake took place, he was already a member of the Royal
Academies of Berlin and Gottingen; moreover, earth-
quakes were one of his subjects, and in 1752 he had pub-
lished a paper on the interior structure of earth.

The Wrath of God (2) 167

BertrancTs teaching on the subject of the Lisbon earth-
quake is simple. It must, he said, be regarded as God's
work, and though it is no doubt part of His physical gov-
ernment of the earth, on which subject there is a good
deal to be said scientifically, the overriding consideration
now must be that it is also part of God's moral gov-
ernment of the world. Here we must stand completely
abashed by our ignorance of God's mind and purpose, and
any suggestion by us that we know why He destroyed
Lisbon is merely wicked presumption. Nevertheless, our
minds are full of this disaster, and it is right that we
should carefully discuss its theological significance; hut
we must do this with theological completeness. We must,
for instance, view the Lisbon earthquake in the light of
the principal attributes of God. Thus a first certainty is
that we must fear God, for God is Holy. A wise man is
afraid of his moral judgements, and while we are on this
earth we must stand in awe of Him. "And unto man he
said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and
to depart from evil is understanding." 14 Secondly, we
must grope our way through our present alarm and grief
to a contemplation of God as immutable. Civilizations
come and go; mankind may be destroyed; even our earth
may be superseded by a new earth made for new in-
habitants. But God is eternal and He is unchanging, and
it is in His everlasting unchangeable care that man will
find an ultimate restful home. Thirdly, let us be led to
the thought that God is loving. There is proof of His
bounty all around us in His created world; how quickly
we forget in our present mood of distress the overwhelm-

14 Job xxviii 28.

i68 The Lisbon Earthquake

ing outpouring of benefits that He has bestowed upon us!

The pastor preached a course of four "earthquake" ser-
mons in Berne, the first on 30 November 1755 expressly
related to the Lisbon disaster, the second on 14 Decem-
ber on occasion of a shock that had been felt in Switzer-
land, the third on 28 December, and the fourth on the
General Fast-Day observed in Switzerland on Thursday,
19 February 1756. 15 He came boldly and immediately to
the point with his text, "And many nations shall pass by
this city, and they shall say every man to his neigh-
bour, Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this great
city?" 16 To find an answer to this question, he said, we
need first of all faith, charity, humility, and penitence.
Faith because we must trust in Providence. God caused
this earthquake, and however shocked we are, we must
still have a complete faith in God, Charity, because we
have become hard-hearted and frivolous; now we must
pray that our hearts be flooded with a warm love for all
our fellow-men, especially those who have suffered in the
earthquake, regardless of any considerations of race, lan-
guage, form of religion, or politics. Humility, because we
must stop thinking that God is favouring us, and that we
are a more virtuous people than those He has afflicted.
Penitence, because we must all now think of death and
the Last Judgement, and so consider how our lives should
be immediately amended.

"Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this great
city?" There is only one answer that man dare make, and
that is that God has by this act imposed a duty on all

15 They are published in BertrancTs M^moire sur les tremblemens de
Terre. Vevey, 1756.

16 Jeremiah xxii. 8.

The Wrath of God (2) 169

of us, the duty of becoming better Christians. Every line
of thought about the earthquake leads to some deficiency
in our conduct towards God, and so let us accept it as
a signal to all of us to try to draw nearer to God, who
is Holy, Immutable, and Loving.

Chapter Six

THE INJUSTICE OF GOD

V^/ne generation passeth away, and another gen-
eration cometh: but the earth abideth for ever," said the
Preacher. And now after i November 1755 man could
trust in nothing, not even in the solid earth. **O Earth,"
wrote the poet, "you mighty rock-like unassailable thing,
is it really credible that one so strong and massive should
be found to move in terrifying shudders? How can
wretched man find security anywhere if the strong earth
itself no longer offers security? Why do you tremble?"
Alas, the poet knew the answer only too well. Earth and
mankind stand in a divine relationship, for man is clay
made animate. The earth from which man was made was
inanimate and insensitive; but now man, the living sensi-
tive creature, is sunk in sinful sleep, unconscious of his
guilt, and it is the stolid earth, ashamed of man's lethargy,
which comes to life to rouse the sleepers on its surface,
to shake and terrify them, so that they may repent while
it is time and save themselves. In frantic paroxysms, the
earth cracks open; it cannot support further the rebellious
obduracy of man, and through its opened mouths it an-
nounces with brutal emphasis that man's sins have an-
gered God.

170

The Injustice of God 171

The sonnet POT castigar, Senhor, nossos insultos by Do-
mingos dos Rels Quita and the Parenesis (Ilagaiveaig =
exhortation) ao Terremoto of Francisco de Pina e Mello
( 1695-1773) are the best known of the contemporary Por-
tuguese earthquake-poems. The sonnet * says what we al-
ready know that God flung down His own temples and
reduced them to ashes rather than see them profaned by
the scandalous sinners of Lisbon. The Parenesis is a longer
poem with much more to say.

Pina e Mello 2 was born at Montemor-o-Velho, between
Coimbra and the coast, and he was living there at the
time of the earthquake, a man who had already become
in a minor and retired way a literary figure commanding
respect. He had published a stout little volume of agree-
able juvenilia in 1752, and in the earthquake year he
printed his Bucolica, a set of eclogues and sonnets in
what he called a rustic style, and he also wrote a long
poem, Triumpho da Religido, that was published in 1756.
It is this work that best illustrates his knowledge and
powers of thought, for it has a long prologue on the na-
ture of poetry that would be a credit to the scholarship
of any land, and the Triumpho itself, a defence of his
own orthodox Christianity against atheism, polytheism,
deism, free-thinking, Mohammedanism, Judaism, and Lu-
therism, is a fine essay in combative argument that could
only have been written by a scholar widely read in the
classics, the Fathers, and in general theology and Church
history. His work, however, was disliked by certain other
Portuguese literary men, because it was identified with

1 Oxford Book of Portuguese Verse, 1925. No. 156.

2 For this poet, see Ant6nio Ferrao in Academia das Cidncias de Lis~
boa, Boletim de 20, classe, xx (1926-29), p. 101.

172 The Lisbon Earthquake

the "modem'* school of French, writers, which at this time
meant that his recent verse was lively, sentimental, and
topical.

Immediately after the earthquake, Pina e Mello de-
livered a most eloquent oration in the chapel of the Hos-
pital Real at Montemor-o-Velho to the Confraternity of
Our Lady of the Conception, and his poem, the ParSnesis,
appeared in 1756. It began with an address to the fickle
earth in the manner already described; and adds as a
f urtlier reproach the lamentation that if, as now appeared,
the divinely sponsored immobility of the earth could not
be depended upon, the mad and impious Copernican the-
ory gained some apparent and highly undesirable support;
for Pino e Mello had no sympathy with or real knowl-
edge of contemporary scientific thought in Europe, and
he refused to believe, like the Bishop of Guadix and many
contemporaries in Spain and Portugal, that the earth
moved round the sun. Scientists, and their theories, must
be denounced. The earth did not move. God had said
so, and a natural explanation of the earthquake was there-
fore unbelievable. God made the earthquake, and was
speaking to wicked mankind through this awful happen-
ing, this supremely unnatural event. And so we pass into
the familiar theme of the sermons.

That much we have heard before; but there is another
thought expressed in this poem. Is God really merciful?
If He is, can He contemplate unmoved by tears this bit-
ter humiliation of His people? God is the Sovereign Au-
thor of Nature, surveying and governing the huge extent
of the globe from His heavenly throne; with His aid, spe-
cially promised at Ourique, He has given the Portuguese
mighty dominions and has led Portuguese missionaries

The Injustice of God 173

into the farthest corners of the earth in order to establish
there His Church. Now He has forgotten the Portuguese
achievements in His name; He has withdrawn His pro-
tection; in contempt He has struck at the Portuguese.
Poor Lisbon! Absorbed in revelry and vice, were you
really more odious in God's sight than Nineveh? We are
told plainly enough how wicked that city was, yet God
permitted Nineveh to be given proper warning by a
prophet and a fair chance to repent! Pina e Mello now
seems too amazed by his own audacity to continue this
line of thought. How dare he presume even to try to
comprehend the divine wisdom? It is his duty to sub-
mit; groaning and tearful he must humble himself before
Providence, for he does know God can be merciful even
in His anger; but a hint of his secret indignation is blurted
out. If you are, O God, so generous and long-suffering,
admit that the earthquake was an even more severe pun-
ishment than we deserved; say, at any rate, that it is
punishment enough!

In his discourse to the Confraternity at Montemor-o-
Velho the poet had already expressed this resentment in
a passage of dramatic eloquence. He recalls the splendid
history of his country achieved under the blessing of God
and with the help of His strong arm. And now it all
seems wasted endeavour, for if God remembered the
mighty deeds performed and the hardships endured in
His name, could He possibly be so angry with Portugal
today? Does God think the Portuguese have degenerated?
Were they not the same Portuguese to whom He made
His promise at Ourique? What is going to happen next?
May not even our Montemor-o-Velho be doomed? Is it
not indeed likely that we shall give God further grave

174 The Lisbon Earthquake

offence by hardening our hearts against Him under such
punishment, instead of repenting? But who are we, and
who are you, O God? You are the holiest in the height,
and we are poor rebels. You are firm of purpose; we are
irresolute. You are unchangeable; we are inconstant and
weak. And it is against such a paltry thing as man, man
as powerless as an autumn leaf in the wind, that you,
O God, let loose your omnipotent fury. Against man born
in sin and corrupt; against man who by his very nature
is inclined to do wrong. Job has said what the poet hardly
dare say. If 3 O God, you desire greater obedience from
me, why have you made me as I am? Why have you set
me in opposition to yourself? Why not cleanse me of my
innate weaknesses and my sins? At this point Pina e Mello
breaks~off. He is mad, he says, to question the divine wis-
dom, and he turns to a passionate and humble prayer to
God Almighty for mercy, and then to the Virgin. It is
the Virgin who will intercede for the Portuguese and
plead their case before God; it is Our Lady alone who
can turn away the divine wrath.

In the context of this whole discourse, as in the con-
text of the whole poem, Pina e Mello's grievance against
God is mildly put and quickly hidden away in the sooth-
ing assurances that he knows should be made. But that
the earthquake should so profoundly affect him that he
had to say these things is for eighteenth-century Portugal
a startling indication of the depth of his feelings. Here
was a poet, devotedly orthodox in his faith, hating heresy,
with a mind fully made up about sin and consequential
divine punishment, scorning science and absolutely refus-
ing to believe that the earth moved round the sun, who
was so shocked by the Lisbon earthquake that within a

The Injustice of God 175

few days of its happening he had asked aloud if God

was just.

The publication of the Parenesis created a flattering stir
in the small literary circle of Pina e Niello's contemporary
Portuguese writers, but the discussion was for the most
part confined to a captious squabble about its form. A
writer using the name Sigismundo Antonio Coutinho, who
disliked the modern French style, attacked the poem at
once, writing from the Arrabida district near Setubal to
which he had fled after the earthquake and where (he
says) he was busily repenting under religious guidance
his former frivolous life in Lisbon. He said he was un-
fitted to criticize the work of so great and so learned a
poet as Pina e Mello, who had already collected for him-
self a most useful claque of admirers; but he had to ad-
mit he found the poem lacking in taste and poor in com-
position. It did not even start right, for the poet ought
not to have given a poem in Portuguese a Latin (sic)
title. And he should not have written in verse at all, a
most unsuitable vehicle in which to say proper things
about such a tragic event as an earthquake; verse is sooth-
ing soft stuff, and one required here either rugged ora-
tory or a calm factual prose. Ambassadors and ministers
do not conduct their business in verse, said Coutinho, pil-
ing all the scorn of the "ancients" on this example of
modernity. In the very first page there is a mistransla-
tion of Ecclesiastes i. 4; the poet uses the verb descender
incorrectly and introduces non-Portuguese words; he is
guilty of pleonasm (for example, bdrbara ignordncia) and
a shameless prosopopeia in pretending that the earth
talks through earthquake-cracks; and there is a passage

ij6 The Lisbon Earthquake

in which Pina e Mello writes of a city as a world market
without making it plain to this critic whether he meant
Lisbon or Bahia in Brazil; he says there is now no more
left of it than a miserable memory. If he refers to Bahia,
how does he know it has been destroyed utterly? If he
is really talking about Lisbon, everyone knows he is exag-
gerating, and when he talks of Neptune raising his sceptre
over the emporium who gave Neptune authority to raise
his sceptre on land? What a lot of errors in five lines!
The Parenesis seemed to be a very silly poem to those
who did not believe that the earthquake was the action
of a suddenly furious God, deliberately and indiscrimi-
nately wreaking His frightful vengeance on a sinful city.
Another poem, written by Antonio da Silva Figueiredo in
advocacy of the theory of natural causes, quotes the pas-
sage in which Pina e Mello describes how the earth-
quake strikes alike at high and low, rich and poor, level-
ling all men to the common status of a miserable victim;
for in Silva Figueiredo^ view it is precisely this cruelly
unjust mass-slaughtering of good and bad alike that shows
God is not the immediate cause of the earthquake, even
though an earthquake has its origin in a natural order
that God Himself had permitted to be earthquake-pro-
ducing. This argument against Pina e Mello is simply that
God would have been an unjust God if He had delib-
erately wrecked Lisbon, and Silva Figueiredo does not
take advantage of the pessimism and doubt that are ex-
pressed in the Par&nesis; to discover this mood again,
more strongly and strangely presented, in these minor
Portuguese writings of the time we must turn to a pam-
phlet written in 1756 and published in 1757 by Joo Chris-
ostomo de Faria Cordeiro de Vasconcellos de S&, known

The Injustice of God 177

as the author of a little collection o congratulatory verses
addressed to King Jose that had appeared five years pre-
viously. The intention of this Defensam Apologetica was
to defend Pina e Mello against the attack of the writer
who called himself Coutinho, which was easy enough
since this author had nothing but silly quibbles to offer
as objections; but having dealt with these, Faria Cordeiro
took the opportunity of printing a poem of his own, ap-
parently with the idea that his readers might see by com-
parison between this and die Parenesis what a good poem
that was. It is an eclogue written before he had seen the
Parenesis. The story it tells is this:

MenaMo and Aonio, two shepherds, are about to attend
a village feast, but Aonio is in a depressed mood, for he
finds life very hard and he is gloomily preoccupied with
thoughts about the folly of careless optimism and the
overshadowing terror of God's frequently provoked an-
ger. Before the feast and the arrival of their friend Fron-
doso from the city, they go into the village church, and
while they are there an earthquake takes place, damag-
ing the church and killing many people who were in-
side it. The two shepherds escape, and find that the
whole countryside has suffered severely; as the tremors
cease Aonio exclaims that though God has temporarily
suspended the punishment He is inflicting on the people
for sins they have committed, the two shepherds are ob-
viously still in danger. They then come upon the wrecked
preparations for the feast, and now Menalio agrees sadly
that a world in which joy can be so quickly reduced to
sorrow and fright is indeed an appalling place. Every-
thing in life is uncertain, replies Aonio, and while they

178 The Lisbon Earthquake

are reflecting that God has at least spared their lives
Frondoso arrives in a state of great alarm and distress.
Frondoso had been in the town during the earthquake
and he has come to describe the appalling destruction
and the horrors he witnessed among the ruins of its build-
ings and streets. Aonio says he must at any rate thank
God for his escape from death., inasmuch as the disaster,
even though naturally caused, is a manifestation of the
Eternal Power. He then speaks of the damage and loss
of life that the earthquake has caused in the country and
describes the dangers he and Menalio have escaped, for
instance a rock crashing down from the mountain that
nearly killed him. The great mistake he and his friends
have made, he says, is that of being optimistic and for-
getting the real lot of mankind. Life is not an oppor-
tunity for personal advancement. It is a brief dream to
be endured without protest. Ambition and discontent are
fatal, and we run a continual risk of being punished by
Heaven if we do not meekly accept our appointed des-
tinies. It is indeed true that pride goes before a fall. The
only thing to do now is for all three of them to stay
where they are, accepting in full submission to divine
Providence the terrible warning they have had, Frondoso
is glad to take this advice and to remain in the hills, for
he thinks that country folk have a better idea of their
station in life than the townsmen. Menalio agrees; at any
single moment the joyful assurance of the thoughtless man
may be turned into bitter anguish. And then Aonio con-
cludes that to avoid such tragedy we must set aside all
thought of riches and advancement. He who is a shep-
herd, let him contentedly remain a shepherd, and let lords
look after their own dignities and power; but for us, let

The Injustice of God 179

it suffice that we are content to look after our sheep and
lead a quiet village life.

Pois so e para nos bastante idea
Guardar oveihas, e viver na aldea,

It is not a forced compliment to Faria Cordeiro that
after describing his poem we should now turn at once
to Voltaire. Faria Cordeiro felt about the earthquake what
Voltaire felt; indeed, had Candide taken part in the dis-
mal discussion between Aonio, Menalio, and Frondoso he
might have suitably interjected at almost any point the
celebrated remark with which he concludes the novel in
which he appears. The shepherds substituted looking after
their sheep for Candide's cultivation of his garden; but
they all four thought alike; in such a dangerous world
attempt nothing but one's simple and immediate way of
earning one's living. It is certainly notable that in the
context of this heavily censored and unpretentious Por-
tuguese literature Faria Cordeiro should have given un-
ambiguous expression to that variety of pessimism which
found its most famous utterance in Voltaire's novel and in
his Pome sur le desastre de Lisbonne. Pina e Mello had
momentarily given way to the impatience of Job; but he
had himself brushed aside as impious his outcry against
the injustice of God; Faria Cordeiro allowed no softening
of his shepherds* grievances; the earthquake had taught
them they lived in a cruel world. After the earthquake
they were not going to admit that everything that hap-
pens happens for the best, that whatever is, is right.

Chapter Seven

OPTIMISM ATTACKED

JL ilow we pass from Portuguese to French liter-
ature, 1 to Voltaire and to Rousseau, beginning at once
with Voltaire's poem on the Lisbon earthquake, which he
wrote very soon after hearing the news of the disaster. 2
In his preface to it he says that its purpose was to ex-
pose the folly of the popular optimism derived from Pope's
Essay on Man (1733-34), an optimism that he calls the
tout est bien philosophy. If, he asks, when Lisbon, Me-
quinez, Tetudn, and so many other towns were destroyed
with multitudes of their inhabitants in November 1755,
the philosophers had said to 4 the wretched survivors,
"Whatever happens is for the best; the heirs of the dead
will benefit financially; the building-trade will enjoy a

1 On the subject of French thought concerning the Lisbon earthquake
see B. Rohrer, Das Erdbeben t?on Lissabon in der franzosischen Liteta-
tur des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, Heidelberg, 1933; also W. H. Barber,
Leibniz in France; from Arnauld to Voltaire, Oxford, 1955, I am sorry
I did not read this important book before I wrote the chapter that fol-
lows. I am, however, indebted to Mr. Theodore Besterman's Voltaire et
le d6sastre de Lisbonne: ou la mort de I'Optisme, which the author was
kind enough to show me in advance of its delivery and publication in
the Travaux of the Institut et Musee Voltaire.

2 The main idea expressed in the poem was in his mind by 3,4 No-
vember 1755; cf. his letter to Robert Tronchin of that date. Lettres in-
6dites aux Tronchin, i, cix. Geneva, 1950. The first version of the poem
had been written by 7 December.

180

Optimism Attacked 181

boom; animals will grow fat on meals provided by the
corpses trapped in the debris; an earthquake is a neces-
sary effect of a necessary cause; private misfortune must
not be overrated; an individual who is unlucky is con-
tributing to the general good" would not such a speech
be as cruel as the earthquake itself was destructive? We
cannot turn our backs on the suffering this calamity has
caused and pretend it is all some kind of benefit in dis-
guise. We must admit there is evil, positive and inex-
cusable evil, in the world, and that in short, said Voltaire,
was the message of his poem. Let men henceforth think
of ruined Lisbon and stop deluding themselves with the
silly cliche tout est bien; the truth is otherwise. Le mal
est sur la terre,

Today we wonder that it should ever have been nec-
essary to conduct such an argument, but when Voltaire
wrote his poem the popular philosophy of optimism, the
tout est bien kind to which he referred, had forgotten, or
rather had chosen to ignore, the formidable significance
of the problem presented to man by the existence of
moral and physical evil. Evil was something that could
be left in the background, unattended, a disagreeable and
grating, but all the same necessary, part of the machinery
that worked the world. This kind of optimism was not
a variety of thought confined to readers of the learned
periodicals, to scholars acquainted with Leibniz's Th4o-
dicee and Monadologie, and to the intelligentsia who dis-
cussed Pope's Essay on Man; it was a force generally in-
spiring a contentment with the world as men then found
it, a universal mood that had become, as Professor Basil
Willey has said, **in essence an apologia for the status

182 The Lisbon Earthquake

quo/' 3 It was not even mainly an aristocratic mood, a
kind of extravagant Versailles carelessness, but a popular
creed. Almost every generalization about eighteenth-cen-
tury thought can be strongly contradicted, but there is
good reason for saying that most men at the time of the
Lisbon earthquake were comfortably sure that the world
was a good place in which everything that happened was
on a long view likely to be "for the best/' and so they
lived their lives as happily as they could, very little trou-
bled by any responsibility for the alleviation of collective
unhappiness.

It is true enough that Voltaire first of all attacked this
optimism in the form in which he found it in Pope's poem,
for the famous passage at the end of the First Epistle be-
ginning "Cease then, nor ORDER Imperfection name," con-
densed into a conspicuous bull's-eye precisely the senti-
ments to which he objected; and later he made Leibniz
the butt of his novel Candide. But he was not conduct-
ing an academic argument, and it is certainly true that
the Lisbon earthquake-controversy in France did not de-
pend upon a thorough re-examination of the theodicy of
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), which was im-
perfectly understood in that country and disliked by the
Church as fatalistic. Voltaire really did not know much
about what Leibniz had actually said, but with some jus-
tification he took the cliches of the Leibnizian theodicy
as symptomatic of popular optimism and poured upon
them in Candide his own brilliant variety of destructive
scorn. 4

8 The Eighteenth Century Background, p. 48. London, 1953. On this
subject cf. pp. 41-42 ante.

4 Leibniz said that God, perfect in love, wisdom, and power, after
considering all the logically possible worlds, created the world in which

Optimism Attacked 183

The importance of Voltaire's part in the moralizing over
the Lisbon earthquake is that he had something to say
to which a large audience would pay attention; for he
was addressing contemporary European society on a gen-
eral matter of conscience, knowing that the news of the
earthquake was likely to have made his hearers in an un-
expected measure vulnerable. Long before the earthquake
took place, he had himself lost faith in this general op-
timism, and he felt that this calamity provided an incon-
testable and grisly proof that he was right in rejecting
the tout est bien doctrine. He believed that everyone
would now have to admit that man dare not hope for
a safe life in this world under the benevolent protection

there was the greatest excess of good over evil. God had therefore de-
cided that a world containing no evil would not have been so good a
world as this world, which does contain evil. Once this world was created
and evil of various kinds admitted into it, God cannot logically intervene
to prevent evil from fulfilling its appointed role, because to do this would
imply that God had not chosen the best possible world. The theory of
the pre-established harmony, which is the subject of much jesting in
Candide, is a consequence of the theory of the monads which had forced
Leibniz to the conclusion that at the time of the creation once and for
all God had ordered everything that was ever going to happen ( Theodicy
9). Therefore, we can be sure that a world in which there were no such
things as disastrous earthquakes would not be so good a world as one
in which they do occur. Leibniz, however, did not rate earthquakes
very high as evil tilings. "One Caligula alone, one Nero, has caused
more evil than an earthquake," he said (Theodicy 2,6). What we have
to remember is that if we could understand the universal harmony, we
should see that what we describe as a completely evil thing is a proper
part of the plan most worthy of being chosen; in a word, we should
ourselves understand that what God has done is the best (Dissertation
44). Leibniz, however, would not have said that the Lisbon earthquake
was a disguised blessing, for he admitted that what was "best" in the
infinite wisdom of God may seem to us to be only a painful and waste-
ful act of destruction, however much we may try to see some good in
it; nor would he have said that the earthquake was a suddenly contrived
punishment of the Lisbon people. Yet we are led to grace by the ways
of nature (Monadology 88), and the mechanism of the physical world,
determined at the creation, works in harmony with the course of its
moral government, also determined at the creation.

184 The Lisbon Earthquake

of a Providence that could be counted on to reward vir-
tuous behaviour. Man was weak and helpless, ignorant of
his destiny, and exposed to terrible dangers, as all must
now see; the optimism of the age must be replaced by
something that is not much more than an apprehensive
hope that Providence will lead us through our dangerous
world to a happier state. Un jour tout sera bien should
be the new limit of optimistic thought.

Later, commenting on the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire
said that its effect was to make men introspective, by
which he meant apprehensive about their mortality and
ultimate destiny, and that wise observation should always
be the first answer to the question in what way did the
Lisbon earthquake influence European thought? Dread-
ful doubts and fears chilled the hearts of men when they
considered what the Lisbon earthquake must really have
been like to those who died in it and to those who lived
through it. No doubt, in their full intensity these doubts
and fears were short-lived, and in many cases of the most
superficial kind; but Voltaire knew that, and he regretted
the way in which the world turned quickly again to its
pleasures, trying to forget the earthquake as soon as pos-
sible, in the excitements of dancing, the theatre, and the
lottery. Yet the tremendous shock that the news had
caused could not be completely absorbed by such feeble
defences. Men were frightened. They asked what really
was the part they had to play in God's scheme for the
universe; what really was the nature of the Providence
under whose protection they thought they lived; what, in
fact, was their relation to God?

The Po&me sur le dsastre de Lisbonne is addressed di-
rectly to men in this mood, and, once in circulation, it

Optimism Attacked 185

was widely read and discussed, for it was the comment
of one of the wisest men in Europe on a disaster that had
shocked Western civilization more than any other event
since the fall of Rome in the fifth century. As the poem
was written so soon after the earthquake, Voltaire inevi-
tably made some use of the earliest reports about the
calamity; but he did not need gruesome overstatements
to make the effect he wanted, and he knew quite well
that the first accounts of the earthquake that reached
Switzerland would need revision. "It is said that half the
town is still standing/' he wrote on 16 December. "There
is a tendency to exaggerate both good tidings and bad
tidings on their first announcement/* B His poem obtained
its hearing, because it dealt directly with the perplexity
filling the minds of his readers, and because it is mov-
ingly inspired by sorrow for the people of Lisbon. Con-
dorcet, his biographer, said that though Voltaire was over
sixty when he wrote this poem, his soul, deeply stirred
by the suffering of humanity, had all the zest and all the
fire of youth. Voltaire's melancholy is indeed strongly ex-
pressed, and it is all the more powerful a force because
he has so little comfort to offer humanity in place of the
brittle optimism he was now determined to destroy.

The poem is addressed to the deluded philosophes who
tell everybody that all is for the best. They are told to
look at tragic shattered Lisbon and its smoking ruins, and
to think of the excruciating fate of the hundred thousand
victims of the earthquake. Hearing their cries, seeing
them being burnt alive or suffering other unspeakable tor-
tures, are the philosophers going to tell us that all this

11 Voltaire gives a revised reference to the Lisbon earthquake in the
Precis du sledc de Louis XV (Moland), xv, 335-36.

i86 The Lisbon Earthquake

is part of the good providence of a benevolent God? Are
we going to be told of these pitiful heaps of corpses that
they are the bodies of sinners who are justly the victims
of God's anger because of their crimes?

Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants
Stir le sein maternel ecrases et sanglants?
Lisbonne, qui n'est plus, eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices?
Lisbonne est abimee, et Ton danse a Paris.

The fine philosophers, comfortably far away from all
this suffering, would talk very differently if such a dis-
aster had befallen their own towns; then we should hear
them crying out at the horrors that had afflicted them,
and then they would recognize that a great earthquake
brings nothing but miserable evil on man. Le bien fut
pour Dieu $eul. B

Croyez-moi, quand la terre entr'ouvre ses abimes,
Ma plainte est innocente et mes cris 16gitimes.

Are you going to tell me that pride is deceiving me,
that pride makes me rebel against suffering?

Allez interroger les rivages du Tage;
Fouillez dans les debris de ce sanglant ravage;
Deraandez aux mourants, dans ce s^jour d'effroi,
Si c'est Forgueil qui crie: "O Dieu, secourez-moi! T
O Ciel, ayez pitie de Thumaine miserel"

We are told that all is for the best and that everything
that happens must happen, but would the universe really
be a worse place if it had not been found necessary to

6 From a variant passage in a Geneva edition of 1756.

7 In the final version, "O Ciel, secourez-moi."

Optimism Attacked 187

destroy Lisbon? Could not an omniscient and omnipotent
God achieve His purpose otherwise? If there must be
earthquakes why could not the ghastly things happen in
the middle of the desert?

Je respecte mon Dieu, mais f aime Fimivers.

Will the wretched victims die consoled when you tell
them that the earthquake happened for the general good?
that Lisbon will be rebuilt? that it will become populous
again? that northern Europe will become rich as a result
of their losses? that all evil things that happen to us are
according to the "general law" good things? that these
poor people in their death-agonies and the worms that
are about to devour them are alike playing their proper
part in God's master plan? What horrible talk!

Voltaire will have nothing more to do with the dread-
ful doctrine of unchangeable laws of necessity. He be-
lieves God is free, just, and merciful, so why do we have
to suffer as we do? It is all very well to launch the furies
of Heaven against rocks and trees; they do not feel. But
man is alive and sensitive. He cannot help crying out in
his misery. A pot, liable to be broken, does not ask the
potter why it was made such a poor, coarse, brittle thing;
for the potter did not give it a heart or feeling. Man will
not be satisfied by being told that his misfortune is for
somebody else's good.

De mon corps tout sanglant mille insectes vont naitre;
Quand la mort met le comble aux maux que f ai soufferts,
Le beau soulagement d'etre inang^ des vers!

It is easy to say that one suffering man is negligible in
relation to God's whole design for the universe, but all

i88 The Lisbon Earthquake

living creatures seem to be condemned to existence in a
ferocious world of pain and mutual slaughter. How can
anyone say with conviction tout est bien? The world
around us denies it, and the secret terrors of the phi-
losophers must have told them a hundred times that it
is not true.

Elements, animaux, humains, tout est en guerre,
II le faut avouer, le mal est sur la terre:

And where has this evil come from? Can it possibly pro-
ceed from the Author of all good things? One cannot
stomach the idea that a benevolent God., loving His peo-
ple and prodigally bestowing His benefits upon them, at
the same time pours down every possible misfortune on
their wretched heads* We listen to all the confusing and
contradictory theodicies, and while we are arguing Lis-
bon crashes into smoking dust, and the shock of a great
earthquake shatters towns all the way from the Tagus to
Cadiz.

Voltaire shows that no theory resting on optimism and
a belief in a kind and loving God can explain why man-
kind should have been afflicted with such sorrow and suf-
fering as the earthquake caused. He turns upon Leibniz.
How does he explain the presence of all this misery in
his "best of all possible worlds"? How does he account
for the fact that the innocent suffer equally with the
guilty? And now the poem moves to its terrible conclu-
sion. We know nothing; nature has no message for us;
God does not speak:

On a besoin d*un Dieu qui parle au genre humain.
II n'appartient qu'a lui d'expliquer son ouvrage,
De consoler le faible, et d'eclairer le sage.

Optimism Attacked 189

Men are weak, grovelling, ignorant creatures, their bodies
made for decay and their minds for grief. They know
nothing of their origin or purpose or destiny:

Atomes tourmentes sur cet araas de boue,
Que la mort engloutit, et dont le sort se joue,
Mais atomes pensants, atomes dont les yeux,
Guides par la pensee, ont rnesure les cieux;
Au sein de Finfini, nous elangons notre etre,
Sans pouvoir un moment nous voir et nous connaitre.
Que faut-il, o Mortels! Mortels, il faut souffrir,
Se soumettre en silence, adorer, et mourir.

Before it was printed Voltaire was curious to know what
the effect of his poem would be when it was read in hos-
tile or suspicious or easily offended religious circles. Of
the first draft he had suggested in a lighthearted letter
of 19 December 1755 to his most trusted old friend the
Comte d'Argental that these verses were really only suit-
able for private circulation among the philosophes; 8 he
did not want to be thought mauuais thSologien, and he
was prepared to take some trouble to alter his poem so
that it should not offend the heresy-hunters or the timid
thinkers. Later on, in April 1756, he wrote of this poem
and of the deistic La Loi Naturelle, published with it,
to another very old friend, Cideville, "I had to make my
way of thinking clear; it is not that either of a super-
stitious person or of an atheist. I am inclined to think that
respectable folk will share my view." With the Lisbon
earthquake-poem, the main trouble was the ending. Ber-
trand, the pastor of the French Church at Berne (see p.

8 MS. Louis Clarice. ". . . ils (ces vers tragiques) pourront exercer
votre philosofie, et cette de votre Soci&6. Je les crois aussi sages quel
est possible, et cle nature cependant a n'etre qu'en vos mains."

190 The Lisbon Earthquake

167), had told him that the pessimism of the last lines was
hurtful and too violently expressed. Voltaire met the ob-
jections by introducing "to hope" in the concluding line:

Mortels, il faut souffrir,
Se soumettre, adorer, esperer, et mourir.

That was in February 1756, and his friends did not think
it adequate; so, as he did not want his "sermon" to shock
orthodox theologians too violently, he composed a new
ending to it about the time the first printed edition of
the original version appeared in Geneva, that is, in March
1756. In this second and, so to speak, definitive version
of the Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne the last two
lines are omitted, and the poem is continued with the
observation that there is a great and often painful chase
after happiness in progress in this world; we can at least
say we are sometimes able temporarily to forget our sor-
rows, and there is always the blessing of being able to
hope.

Un jour tout sera bien, voila notre esperance,

Tout est bien aujourd'hui, voila Fillusion.

Les sages me trompaient, et Dieu seul a raison.

I shall not blame Providence, said Voltaire. I myself
used to write in a light, happy vein, but:

D'autres temps, d'autres moeurs: instruit par la

vieillesse,

Des humains egares partageant la faiblesse,
Dans une epaisse nuit cherchant k m'eclairer,
Je ne sais que souffrir, et non pas murmurer.

Once upon a time a caliph, dying, addressed this prayer
to the God he worshipped:

Optimism Attacked 191

"Je t'apporte, 6 seul roi, seul etre iUimite,
Tout ce que tu n'as pas dans ton immensite,
Les defauts, les regrets., les maux, et Fignorance,"
Mais il pouvait encore ajouter Tesperance.

There exists a copy corrected in Voltaire's hand that
turns the last line into a question, as if Voltaire felt that
his concessions to orthodox thought had gone a little too
far.*

The early history of the poem and its first effects on
French readers can be illustrated by reference to one or
two other poems on the earthquake of about the same
date. In the first place, almost anything might be expected
of Voltaire, and in fact the circulation of his poem in
Paris was preceded there by the appearance of some
verses, believed to be by him, which were really written
by his young friend the Marquis de Ximenez, an out-
spoken free-thinker whose poem caused much offence.
Ximenez was not prepared to say with Voltaire, Je re-
specte mon Dieu, and his main point was that the much-
advertised piety of the Portuguese had proved useless as
a protection against an implacable and inexplicable God
who had suddenly determined to obliterate Lisbon. He
asked of what use were the armies of monks, the bloody
labours of the Inquisition, the stores of relics, and the
endless offerings made to thousands of saints? They were
all now proved to be worthless as a means of propitiat-
ing God. Heretic England was now laughing at the de-
votions of the Roman Church. The pirates of Algiers could
now plunder Portugal happily; Heaven was on their side.

fl Mais pouvait-il encore ajcmter Fesp^rance? See George R. Havens:
Modern Language Notes, XLIV (1929), pp. 489 ff.

192 The Lisbon Earthquake

O Providence, if sometimes in despair we lose faith in

you:

C'est quand le bras qui frappe la vertu,
N'a pas au moins commence par le crime.

One of the consequences of the great earthquake that
had caused much distress in French literary society was
the death of the young Racine, son of the poet Louis
Racine, and grandson of Jean Racine, the dramatist. This
unfortunate youth was drowned in the seismic wave that
poured over the slender isthmus between the city of Cd-
diz and the mainland, with the result that his wretched
father, brokenhearted, went into complete retirement.
Several poets attempted to console him with offerings
of verse, and one of these pieces, by Jean Jacques Le-
franc, Marquis de Pompignan, was published in the Jour-
nal Encyclopedique next to the poem of the impious Mar-
quis de Ximenez as a wholesome corrective. This presents
us with the opposite point of view, the complacent at-
titude to disaster that Voltaire wished to disturb and
shame.

In fifteen verses this simple, serious man, who so hated
the philosophes that he described their work in this poem
as recherches pleines d'imposture and essais pusillanimes,
who, after his inaugural address to the Academie Fran-
gais in 1760 was so ridiculed, chiefly by Voltaire, that he
was forced into retirement, this godly man summarized
ineptly but with Christian bluntness the pious resignation
that most of all irritated his opponents. Young Racine is
at peace in Heaven. We on earth grieve, but at the same
time we know that the innocent are required to suffer
while in this world, and we do not complain, because

Optimism Attacked 193

Christians are sure that the sufferers will be recompensed
in their future life. Presumptuous philosophes who de-
pend on scientific explanations of calamities like the Lis-
bon earthquake have no such consolation; they try to shut
God out of their minds and to forget that an earthquake
may be the result of His anger. We, on the other hand,
have our faith, a faith that can overcome the very worst
griefs. Let us expect nothing as certain in this life but
the inevitable hour of death, death that is to be followed
by eternal happiness or eternal damnation.

Voltaire's Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne was
printed in a censored form in the Journal Encyclope-
dique for April 1756, with an introductory note explain-
ing that since the flame of his genius sometimes led him
to stray beyond the limits that a good Christian ought
to observe, a few short passages likely to cause offence
had been omitted., their place being marked by asterisks.
Immediately after this comes a Reponse a Mr. De V. ...
ou Defense de TAxiome, Tout est bien, a poem by an
anonymous author who thought that, though one may
grieve over the fate of Lisbon, it was blasphemous pre-
sumption to question God's goodness because of the earth-
quake, thus condemning as an evil thing an event that
God Himself had decided should take place. A slave has
no right to question a slave-master. God commands, and
man must obey in total submission, receiving the gifts of
Providence with gratitude and divine punishment in meek
and unprotesting shame. One of these gifts is hope. Even
the earthquake-victim's pitiful cry, "O God, help me," ex-
presses a hope that mercifully lessens the agony of death
in an earthquake. The truth is that we fear death too

194 The Lisbon Earthquake

much, said this poet, in company with other writers who
were shocked by Voltaire's pessimism.

We come to the heart of the controversy with Rous-
seau's letter to Voltaire of 18 August 1756. 10 Rousseau was
then forty-three, known as a musician and as the author
of a famous essay, Discours sur les arts et sciences, in
which he had delighted civilized France by proving the
superiority of the savage state; but his most celebrated
works had not yet been published. He had no open quarrel
with Voltaire, who had arranged for the little volume con-
taining La Loi Naturelle and the poem on the earthquake
to be sent to him; probably Rousseau was already envious
of Voltaire's fame and had smarted under his witty criti-
cism of the Discours; but the letter is not a display of
polemical fireworks set off merely to irritate the great
man; on the contrary, it is a sincere expression of some-
thing Rousseau felt he had got to say, and he began by
saying that he entirely approved of La Loi Naturelle. It
was the earthquake poem that had upset him.

Rousseau rejected Voltaire's gloomy picture of man's
unhappy fate on earth. He said that the optimism at-
tacked in the poem had helped him to endure the very
things supposed to be unendurable. Man must be patient,
recognizing evil as a necessary consequence of his own
nature and of the nature of the universe. A benevolent
God desired to preserve man from evil, and of all the
possible systems whereby His creation might be ordered,
He had chosen the one that contained the least evil and
the most good. Put bluntly, said Rousseau, the reason why
God had not done better for mankind was that He could

10 Lettre de J. J. Rousseau citoyen de Geneve & Monsieur de Voltaire.
First published 1759.

Optimism Attacked 195

not do better. Voltaire, on the other hand, argues that
an omnipotent God could have prevented evil from tar-
nishing His creation, and the fact that He did not do so
means that the only discoverable reason for our existence
on earth is that we are here in order to suffer and to
die. That view Rousseau could not accept. He maintained
that moral evil originated in man himself, and that, even
though physical evil is a necessary part of the creation,
the majority of physical evils are man's own fault. This
did not dispose of Voltaire's argument; indeed, Voltaire
agreed that man was responsible for much of the evil in
the world; xl but Rousseau wanted to put the case in its
most extreme form.

Consider Lisbon, for example. It was not nature that
had congregated twenty thousand houses of six or seven
stories on that particular site. If the inhabitants of the
city had not chosen to crowd themselves together in dan-
gerous buildings, the damage would have been much less.
Had they dwelt properly distributed and in smaller houses
they could have escaped easily at the first shock and have
been far from the danger-centre by the next day; but
they stayed obstinately on the spot, worrying about their
money and their possessions, and many were killed in con-
sequence.

Everyone would agree with Voltaire in wishing the
earthquake had taken place in the middle of a desert
rather than at Lisbon. There are earthquakes in deserts,
but we do not hear much about them as they do no harm

11 In a letter to Pastor Allamand of Bex of 16 December 1755, re-
ferring to the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire said, "Je plains comme vous
les portugais; mais les hommes se font encore plus de mal sur leur pe-
tite taupiniere que ne leur en fait la nature. Nos guerres 6gorgent plus
d'hommes que les trernblements de terre n'en engloutissent."

196 The Lisbon Earthquake

to the precious town-dwellers, and merely frighten a few
savages who are sensible enough to live scattered over a
large area and do not have to fear falling roofs and burn-
ing houses. What does Voltaire really mean? Are the town-
dwellers 7 requirements to alter the laws of nature? Man
cannot talk in this way. We cannot so arrange matters
that to prevent an earthquake at a certain place, we have
only got to go and set up a town there!

Rousseau's general case in favour of the tout est bien
school of thought depends on the usual arguments. It is
not always a misfortune to be killed suddenly. Providence
is a universal supervision of God's creation and is not
concerned with what happens to an individual creature
during his brief appearance on earth. And so on. The im-
portant part of the letter is Rousseau's perception of the
fundamental difference between the kind of man who is
a pessimist, and the kind of man who is an optimist,, in
regard to the circumstances of our mortal life. Voltaire is
accused of thinking that few people would wish to be
reborn to live again the same kind of life they have al-
ready lived. He got that idea from Erasmus, said Rous-
seau, and he went on to ask whom Voltaire had actually
consulted on this point? Bored, stupid, frightened rich
people? Or his fellow-writers, a sedentary, unhealthy, un-
happy lot of men? He ought to have consulted an honest
bourgeois, a good craftsman, or one of his Swiss peasants.
Rousseau said there was probably not one single high-
lander of the "haut Valais" who was tired of his simple
existence and would not exchange Paradise for the chance
to be reborn time after time so that he could go on liv-
ing his accustomed uneventful life for ever and ever.

In a famous passage at the end of the letter Rousseau

Optimism Attacked 197

presents the problem as the personal difference between

himself and Voltaire:

Je ne puis m'empecher, Monsieur, de remarquer a ce
propos une opposition bien singuliere entre vous et moi
dans le sujet de cette lettre. Rassasie de gloire et des-
abuse des vaines grandeurs vous viviez libre au sein de
Fabondance, bien sur de llmmortalite vous philosophez
paisiblement sur la nature de Tame, et si le corps ou le
coeur souffre vous avez Tronchain pour Medecin et
pour Ami; vous ne trouvez pourtant que mal sur la
terre; et moi, homme obscur, pauwe, et tourmente d'un
mal sans remede, je medite avec plaisir dans ma re-
traite, et je trouve que tout est bien.

And how is this difference to be explained? The an-
swer is to be found in the word hope with which Voltaire
ended his poem. His variety of hope is vague and dubious,
and without anything better than that, worldly happiness
and prosperity, such as he enjoys, is worth nothing; there-
fore he is a pessimist. But Rousseau possesses hope of
another kind, strong and certain, a hope that illumines and
beautifies everything in his life. He can tolerate no doubt
on the subject of the immortality of the soul and the
heavenly recompense that he will receive for his suffer-
ing on earth. God is kind. Tout est bien. Rousseau was
absolutely sure.

We see now that the arguments about God's providence
that were the result of the Lisbon earthquake are in de-
tail not very important. As Rousseau had said earlier in
this same letter, for the pious Providence is always right
and for the philosophes it is always wrong. Men have a

198 The Lisbon Earthquake

conviction one way or the other, and this conviction can-
not be altered for one party by pointing to the unjust
death of innocent people, or for the other party by ob-
serving that premature death saves its victims from a
gruesome death-bed agony in old age and sends them
to Heaven unembarrassed by a load of sins that they
would have committed had they lived. Therefore, we need
not examine in full the small pros and cons of this un-
availing dispute; but we cannot leave the matter with-
out noting one or two more expressions of opinion. And,
finally, there is Candide.

First there is Immanuel Kant, aged thirty-one, at the
beginning of his great career and still closely adhering to
the optimistic philosophy of Leibniz. When the news of
the Lisbon earthquake reached Konigsberg the townsfolk,
as was generally the case in Germany, were exceedingly
alarmed and also full of sympathy for the Portuguese; but
young Kant seems to have been first of all more inter-
ested in the event as a scientific problem than as a tragedy
that had destroyed a city and led to great loss of life.
He published three short papers on the subject in 1756,
reviewing theories of the causes of earthquakes and re-
cording all the attendant phenomena of the 1755 shock,
the widespread nature of which had strongly impressed
him. He even includes a note on the beneficial aspect of
earthquakes. Just as we complain of ill-timed or exces-
sive rain, forgetting that rain feeds the springs necessary
in our economy, so we denounce earthquakes, refusing to
consider whether they, too, may not bring us good things.
Are they, in the first place, really as bad as we make out?
We lament the dead; but all men must die. We grieve
over the loss of property; but property is not everlasting.

Optimism Attacked 199

Our cities of high houses will inevitably be destroyed if
we build them in places like Lisbon. Earthquakes are a
part of nature; and instead of expecting nature to suit
our convenience we must accommodate ourselves to na-
ture. On the credit side let us remember that the subter-
ranean fire that is the cause of earthquakes also gives us
hot springs and baths; it has also formed the valuable
mineral ores in the rocks; vegetation benefits by the re-
lease of subterranean substances; the escaping sulphur
fumes have a welcome sanitary effect. It is possible the
world itself would not really be a warm enough place to
support life properly without this subterranean fire. It may
occasionally do great damage, but it seems very likely that
we could not get on without it, and we ought to be grate-
ful for it.

Finally, Kant added a short note about earthquakes in
relation to God's government of the world. In this, his
pre-critical and Leibnizian period, he could offer only
small comfort, pointing out that at least we are not the
helpless victims of a dangerous natural order that may
irresponsibly destroy us at any time, because the course
of our lives in prosperity and adversity has been deter-
mined by God. However, his modest postscript is histori-
cally interesting. In his later life he rejected any theodicy
dependent on our reasoning about God's purpose, since
he maintained that human reason was powerless in this
respect, and even in this early footnote to a natural his-
tory paper he condemned the interpretation of the Lisbon
earthquake as the punishment of a sinful town, not be-
cause such an interpretation was uncharitable, but be-
cause it was a shocking act of impertinence to offer any
opinion at all on such a subject. We cannot possibly know

200 The Lisbon Earthquake

why God allowed this earthquake to happen. We must re-
member that man is not the only object of divine care;
God in His inscrutable wisdom presides over the whole
gigantic content of nature, and it may be necessary that
the ordering of the universe should include events unfa-
vourable to man. But at this point Kant makes an impor-
tant observation. In practice, he says, we are not left in
any uncertainty. We know what we must think and what
we must do. We know that this disaster teaches us that
we were not created for life in the present world only
and that we cannot expect our longing for happiness to
be fully satisfied here; we know also that it is now more
than ever our business to love our neighbours and do all
that we can to make this world a pleasant place. This is
the germ of Kant's subsequent view that the only pos-
sible theodicy is a practical act of faith in divine justice.
If our reason can assure us that there is a God, and that
He is good, then our lives must be lived in absolute loy-
alty to Him, however grievous the misfortunes of our-
selves or our fellow-men.

Another young man who wrote on this subject was
Louis de Beausobre (1730-83), son of a Protestant the-
ologian who had taken refuge in Berlin and won the fa-
vour of Frederick the Great. He had been sent to Paris
for his education, and there he wrote a book called Essai
sur le Bonheur, which was published in 1758. In this he
fought a fine battle on behalf of the tout est bien school
of thought. He said there was far too much crying out
about the horrors of a great disaster like the Lisbon earth-
quake; in fact, he thought the frwoles declamatews, wail-
ing about the tragedy in Portugal, were probably not so
grieved as they pretended to be, and that there was a

Optimism Attacked 201

great deal of exaggeration and insincerity. Men forget the
blessings and happiness of normal life when they are sud-
denly shocked by a great disaster; they think only of grief
and suffering, and say God's providence has failed them.
What does it all amount to? asked Louis de Beausobre.
The earthquake victims are dead; but death is not a
greater evil when it strikes many people simultaneously
than when it removes them one by one at intervals, so
why should death suddenly be deemed so awful when it
is accompanied by the quaking of the earth? Why is it
specially sad to die in a disaster? And what is so terrible
about a disaster like this earthquake? A lot of riches are
lost; but man can get on without them. Overthrown cities
can be rebuilt. A great calamity is just a multiplication
of the ordinary calamities that may happen to anyone
without causing any general alarm. Suffering simultane-
ously with others does not make suffering worse, and all
that can really be said about an earthquake as an evil
thing is that it causes a greater total amount of grief on
one occasion than a single accident. At which we may be
sorry; but, after all, plagues, war, famine, and earthquakes
are divine punishments on mankind., and we cannot ex-
pect them to be pleasant.

If this young gentleman was thinking of Voltaire when
he referred to the frivoles dSclamateurs and believed he
had scored a point or two against the Poeme sur le d&-
sastre de Lisbonne, he was very quickly made aware of
his mistake, for in the following year ( 1759) Candide was
published, and the whole tout e$t bien philosophy was
thereby blown to pieces in company with poor Louis de
Beausobre's book and everything else of the kind to the

202 The Lisbon Earthquake

accompaniment of the derisive laughter of literary Eu-
rope. Voltaire had not changed his mind. He disliked more
and more the common version of Leibniz's theodicy now
that the earthquake had shown its obvious untenability,
and he knew there was confusion of thought on this sub-
ject since he himself had been classed as an optimist,
having once said that he considered it was proved that
there was more good than bad in the world. 12 He now
knew that there was much evil, unfair, undeserved, cruel
evil, for man in this world, and in the autumn and win-
ter of 1758 the thoughts that had been developing in his
mind over many years blossomed suddenly into the bril-
liant little novel that on publication instantly made every
glib optimist look a fool. It is the end of the controversy.
"After Candide, there was no more to be said; the case
was finished, and the case was lost/' 18

Candide is, as we have said, directed against Leibniz
rather than Pope, for Pangloss, the philosopher, is a Ger-
man primed with a complete apparatus of cliches and
jargon derived from Leibniz's TheodicSe; but the general
target of all this rapid-fire raillery is the uncritical pop-
ular mixture of his optimism and Pope's, and the inade-
quacy of providential protection. 14 The novel is so sim-

12 Cf. Vicomte d'Ales de Corbet, P.A. De Torigine du Mai, p. 50.
Paris, 1758,

13 Paul Hazard: European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, trans.
J. Lewis May, p. 322. London, 1954. Hazard adds, "Not that optimism
suddenly disappeared completely; a doctrine lives on for a long time,
even when wounded, even when its soul has fled/'

14 David Hume wrote on 12 April 1759 to Adam Smith, "Voltaire has
lately published a small work called Candide ou Uoptimisme, It is full
of sprightlmess and Impiety, and is indeed a Satyre upon Providence,
under Pretext of criticizing the Leibnitian System." New Letters, ed.
Klibansky and Mossner, Oxford, 1954. William Warburton's judgement
on this novel is also interesting; "The real design of Candide is to rec-
ommend naturalism (i.e. natural religion); the professed design is to

Optimism Attacked 203

pie in structure that its point could hardly be missed by
the most careless reader. Poor Candide, always hankering
after the equally unfortunate heroine, Cunegonde, pro-
gresses hopefully and trustingly and rapidly through a
world packed with every imaginable misery for him, in-
cluding excruciating physical hardships and cruelly delu-
sive periods of respite. From time to time Dr. Pangloss,
who has his own special ration of hardship to endure, ap-
pears as his companion and comforter, always ready to
justify every new horror befalling the characters in the
book as a necessary event in the pre-established harmony
of the universe. The story ranges round the world, but
early in the tale Candide sails for Lisbon with Pangloss
and also the Anabaptist James, who alone had befriended
him in Holland. Their ship is caught in a most dreadful
storm within sight of Lisbon, and at this point we can
have a short extract from the tale itself:

Half of the passengers, exhausted and violently sea-
sick, were too miserable even to worry about their dan-
ger; but the others kept crying out in terror and pray-
ing. The sails were torn; the masts broke; the ship be-
gan to leak very badly. Those who could tried to keep

ridicule the optimisme not of Pope, but of Leibniz, which is founded
professedly in fate, and makes a sect in Germany . . you will won-
der perhaps, the translation was made at my recommendation." War-
burton-Hurd Letters. 8 July 1759, No. cxxx. It is a tribute to this novel
that two English translations, one by William Rider, were published in
London in 1759. For the background to Candide, see the introduction
by Andr6 Morize to the edition published by the Soci&e' des textes fran*
gais modernes, Paris (Hachette), 1913; also introductions by Richard Al-
dington in Candide and other Romances (Broadway Translations), Lon-
don, 1927; by H. N. Brailsford in Candide and Other Tales (Everyman's
Library, No. 936), London, 1937, a volume that contains Smollett's
translation revised by James Thornton; by O. R. Taylor in Candide
(BlackwelFs French Texts), Oxford, 1942; and by John Butt to his
translation in the Penguin Classics, first published in 1947.

2O4 The Lisbon Earthquake

her under control, but nobody knew what ought to be
done and nobody gave any orders. The Anabaptist was
trying to help on deck when a brutal sailor struck him
hard and sent him sprawling, so hard that on the recoil
the wretch fell overboard headfirst and hung over the
waters hooked up on a bit of broken mast. The kindly
Anabaptist picked himself up and tried to rescue him,
and he did succeed in hoisting the sailor aboard, but in
the effort of doing so he was himself thrown into the
sea and was drowned in full view of the man he had
saved, who let him perish without even giving him a
look. Candide came up at this moment and saw his
poor benefactor appear for the last time and then dis-
appear for ever. He wanted to throw himself off into
the sea after him, but Pangloss stopped him, pointing
out that the Tagus approach to Lisbon had been created
on purpose for this Anabaptist to be drowned in it.
While he was proving this a priori, the ship went down,
and every single person lost his life except Pangloss,
Candide, and the brutal sailor. This villain swam ashore
very comfortably, and eventually Pangloss and Candide
also got there on a plank.

When they had recovered a little, they walked to-
wards Lisbon, hoping to get something to eat after their
ordeal, as Candide still had some money left; but they
had scarcely entered the city when suddenly the earth
shook violently under their feet. The sea rose boiling
in the harbour and broke up all the craft anchored
there; the city burst into flames, and ashes covered the
streets and squares; the houses came crashing down,
roofs piling up on foundations, and even the founda-
tions were smashed to pieces. Thirty thousand inhabit-
ants of both sexes and all ages were crushed to death
under the ruins. The sailor, whistling and swearing,

Optimism Attacked 205

cried, "We are going to make something out of this!"
Pangloss asked aloud, "Whatever can be the sufficient
cause of this phenomenon?" Candide said it must cer-
tainly be the Last Day. The sailor, however, plunged
recklessly into the ruins, risked death again and again
to get at money, found some and grabbed it, got drunk,
slept till he was sober, and then got hold of the first
whore he could find among the dead and the dying in
this dreadful pile of ruins. Pangloss tugged him by the
sleeve. "My friend," he said, "this is not right. You have
not properly taken into consideration the universal rea-
son; you are timing things badly." "Hell to you," roared
the creature. "I am a sailor, Java-born. I have been
four times to Japan, and have insulted the crucifix each
trip. YouVe got hold of the wrong man with this uni-
versal reason of yours!"

Some falling masonry had hit Candide, and he lay
flat in the street covered with debris. He said to Pan-
gloss, "I am dying. Get me a little wine and oil." "An
earthquake is nothing new," Pangloss replied; "Lima in
America had the same experience last year. Similar
causes, similar effects. Obviously, there is a train of sul-
phur running under the earth all the way from Lima
to Lisbon." "Nothing is more probable," said Candide;
"but for God's sake get me a little oil and wine." "What
do you mean by probable?" asked Pangloss indignantly.
"I maintain the case is proved." At this point Candide
lost consciousness, and Pangloss brought him some wa-
ter from a fountain close at hand.

The next day, having found some provisions by
scrambling about among the ruins, they felt a bit bet-
ter and were able to take part in the relief work. Some
of the survivors in return managed to give them a meal
of a sort, though it was a melancholy affair as every-

206 The Lisbon Earthquake

body was tearful and depressed, all except Pangloss
who comforted them with the assurance that things
could not have turned out otherwise than they had
done, "For/' he said, "all this is necessarily for the best;
because if there is a volcano under Lisbon, it could not
be anywhere else, since it is impossible that things
should not be exactly as they are. For tout est bienf

A little man in black, an officer of the Inquisition,
who was sitting beside him, observed politely, "Appar-
ently, Sir, you do not believe in original sin; for if
everything is for the best, what becomes of the Fall
and punishment for sin?" *1 humbly beg Your Excel-
lency's pardon," answered Pangloss, even more politely;
"the Fall and the consequent curse upon mankind en-
tered necessarily into the best of possible worlds/'
"Then you don't believe in free will?" asked the man
from the Inquisition. "Your Excellency must excuse me/'
said Pangloss, "but I assure you free will and absolute
necessity are not mutually contradictory terms; for it
was necessary that we should be free, because the de-
terminate will . , ." Here he was cut short as the In-
quisition official made a sign to his servant who was
that moment handing the great philosopher a glass of
port.

After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-
quarters of Lisbon, the Portuguese pundits could not
think of any better way of preventing total ruin than
to treat the people to a splendid auto-da-f, for the
University of Coimbra had declared that the spectacle
of a number of people being ceremonially burnt over
a slow fire was an infallible way of preventing an earth-
quake. So they seized for this purpose a Basque who
had married his godmother, and also two Portuguese
caught out in the Jewish trick of refusing to eat the

Optimism Attacked 207

bacon-part of a larded chicken. Pangloss and his pupil
Candide were also both arrested at the dinner in the
ruins, one for having spoken imprudently, and the other
for having listened approvingly. Both of them were
marched off and imprisoned separately in extremely
cold cells where there was not the slightest danger of
their suffering any inconvenience from the sun. A week
later they were each dressed up in a sanbenito (a her-
etic's robe) with a paper mitre as a hat. Candide's cos-
tume was decorated with lames pointing downwards
and devils without tails or claws; but Pangloss's devils
had both tails and claws, and his flames were shooting
upwards. Thus clothed, they were led off in a proces-
sion and listened to a very moving sermon, followed
by some nice music in counterpoint. Candide was
flogged in rhythm with the chanting; the Basque and
the two men who wouldn't eat bacon were burnt, and
Pangloss was hanged, though that was not the normal
practice at these ceremonies. The same day there was
another tremendous and very noisy earthquake that did
great damage.

Candide, terrified almost out of his wits, covered with
blood, and trembling violently, said to himself, "If this
is the best of all possible worlds, whatever must the
others be like?"

The sufferers in this novel are a very tough lot. Pan-
gloss, taken down when he was only half dead, recovers
consciousness when he is being dissected, and Cun^gonde,
believed to have been disembowelled by the Bulgars in
her ancestral home, turns up in Lisbon having suffered
nothing worse than a cut in the groin and frequent rap-
ing. At the end of the book, when at last all their trials
and disappointments are over, a little party finished up

2o8 The Lisbon Earthquake

on a small farm near Constantinople. The chief characters
assembled are Candide; Cunegonde, now a scraggy old
shrew; her ancient attendant, the Pope's daughter, who
had a buttock cut off and eaten by Turkish soldiers; Mar-
tin, a pessimistic old scholar picked up in America; and
Pangloss, now become a revolting, pimply syphilitic.

But Pangloss is still an unchanged tout est bien opti-
mist. Candide asked him, "When you were hanged, dis-
sected, beaten black and blue, and when you were row-
ing in that galley, did you always think that everything
in this world is for the best?" "I have not changed my
mind at all," Pangloss answered. "I am a philosopher, and
it would not be proper for me to do so; besides Leibniz
could not have been wrong." Candide, however, had been
thinking things over. He had come very bravely through
his sufferings; he had never really lost heart or given up
hope; but he had found that the commonly accepted
worldly ways of being happy did not bring happiness.
He is impressed, however, by the example of a happy
and sensible Turk who kept clear of politics and all
worldly affairs, knowing Constantinople only as a good
market for the produce of his tiny estate. "Work with-
out worrying," the pessimistic Martin had said; "it is the
only way to make life endurable." So the little group set
to work to develop their own small farm. Occasionally
Pangloss would remark, "There is a chain of events in the
best possible worlds. For if you had not been chased out
of the Baron's castle with a kick on the bottom for mak-
ing love to Miss Cunegonde; if you had not been caught
by the Inquisition; if you had not wandered about Amer-
ica on foot; if you had not run your sword through Miss
Cun^gonde's brother, and lost the gold you got in Eldo-

Optimism Attacked 209

rado, you would not be here munching preserved fruit
and pistachio nuts." "That may be quite true/' Candide
would reply. "Neverthless, we have got to work in our
garden" 15

So the novel ends on this quiet note. In spite of all the
evil on earth, hope does still remain, the unquenchable
hope of humanity for sufficiency and contentment. One
facile kind of optimism is dead, but Voltaire knows that
there is another humble, tough, and resilient human op-
timism that no adversity can completely extinguish. It is,
admittedly, a vulnerable attitude of mind; but, at least,
it is always there. The prospect for mankind is not hope-
lessly dark, provided that we all perform our immediate
duties quietly and efficiently, and undisturbed by ambi-
tion.

It is said of the Lisbon earthquake that it brought an
age to an end, and in the sense that the characteristic
popular optimism of the first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury did not long survive the disaster, this saying is as
tine as any such generalization can be about so self -con-
tradictory and complicated a subject as eighteenth-cen-
tury thought. After the earthquake pessimism became a
more familiar and understandable mood, while the unde-
featably hopeful minds occupied themselves more and
more with the idea of perfectibility, a gradual progress
by man under God's providence towards a full happiness
and perfection. In effecting this change, the influence of
Candide played a significant part; indeed, what the trag-
edy of the Lisbon earthquake had only partly achieved

15 On this famous passage, see the notes to Best, 185, Voltaire's Cor-
respondence, i.

2io The Lisbon Earthquake

by the resulting emotions of horror and pity, a novel
turned into a significant revolution of thought.

A young French poet gives an example of the changed
outlook. When the Lisbon earthquake happened, Ponce-
Denis Ecouchard Le Bran, already a budding literary
figure of some promise, was twenty-six. As soon as the
news reached Paris he wrote a poem on the disaster that
was published almost immediately, a prettily conventional
piece about the folly of pride. Lisbon was overproud; now
Lisbon, Queen of the Seas, is no more; puny, foolish man-
kind must reflect that it is God who rules the world. Then
came the further news of the death of young Racine, and
deeply grieved at the loss of this beloved friend, Le Brun
wrote a second poem, gloomily describing the physical
causes of earthquakes and the terrible effects the forces
of nature can produce. God seems to be always changing
the face of the world and the life upon it; He oppresses
in this way sea and land and all mankind; He mocks our
credulous happiness; there is ultimately no escape from
the forces He has unleashed against us. Smyrna, Pompeii,
Herculaneum, Lima, and now Lisbon! We are all in peril.

The world is a hard place for us poor mortals. What
have they really done to deserve such miseries? Dear Ra-
cine, cries Le Brun, if my complaints can reach you in
the shades, let my love for you make up for the cruel
injustice of fate.

In 1761, in the middle of the Seven Years' War, Le
Brun, who was newly married and had a good post
and no private reasons at that time for being excessively
gloomy, wrote an "Ode to the Sun on the Misfortunes
of the Earth since the Lisbon earthquake in 1755.** "O

Optimism Attacked 211

Sun/' he asked, "have you ever looked upon such awful
horrors as those now afflicting mankind?" The earthquake
at this moment seemed almost a minor disaster, for man
himself had begun to join with nature in wrecking the
world. There had been an attempt to assassinate King
Louis XV in 1757, and also an attempt on the life of King
Jose of Portugal in 1758, even while poor Lisbon still lay
in ruins. "O Sun! When you looked down almost into
Hell through the earthquake-chasms did you not see the
evil spirits escaping?" Three times in this century the
Turks have terrified Europe, and Europe itself is ablaze
with war; from the Dneiper and the Vistula to the Thames
and the Seine the rivers are crowded with assembling
fleets. And consider the New World! Tyrannical Europe
has inflicted every possible misery on America, and the
greed of white men has destroyed the happiness of the
native peoples. England is at war with us in North Amer-
ica; there are bloody battles in the territory where our
gallant Jumonville was killed eight years ago. War de-
stroys all the blessings that the sun gives, and gold brings
equal disaster; it is because of a shameless lust for gold
that African slaves are poured into Mexico.

Ah! perisse la memoire

De nos lainentables jours!

Grand Dieu! quelle ombre assez noire

En peut absorber le cours!

Si&cle infame! si^cle atroce!

Ou Fimpiet^ f eroce

Du ciel usurpa les droits!

The poet hopes that the sun will lead mankind to a
happy existence in the Fortunate Islands, very pleasantly

212 The Lisbon Earthquake

imagined; but we need not follow him further. It is
enough to know that in the space of about six years the
age of optimism had in Le Brun's opinion degenerated
into the Dark Ages. The eighteenth century: siecle in-
fame, siecle atroce.

Chapter Eight

LONDON,

news of the earthquake that had done so much
harm to Lisbon travelled slowly. It took a week or ten
days before it was generally known in Spain and in the
near Mediterranean world, well over a fortnight to reach
Paris and London, and nearly a month to get to Ham-
burg. In England the arrival of Sir Benjamin Keene's dis-
patch of 10 November from Madrid was the first intima-
tion of what had happened. The shock of the news, as
soon as the magnitude of the disaster became current talk,
was so upsetting that some people at first refused to be-
lieve in what seemed to be a preposterous rumour. On
#5 November, Horace Walpole wrote, "there is a most
dreadful account of an earthquake in Lisbon, but several
people will not believe in it," and on the following day
the Duke of Bedford was informed that "the terrible re-
port from Lisbon is not believed in the extent it is talked
of." Samuel Johnson was for a long time sceptical. And
the first accounts to arrive were, of course, exaggerated
and contradictory. Two-thirds of the city destroyed and
about one hundred thousand lives lost, was the announce-
ment in the London Magazine on 26 November, but "we
must wait for more exact accounts/* In the December

213

214 The Lisbon Earthquake

number the death-roll was given as seventy thousand,
though there were only ten or twelve English casualties.
In France the Due de Luynes had information from Lis-
bon that the losses numbered eight thousand to thirteen
thousand; but later he thought this was a deliberate un-
derstatement issued purposely in order to save the King
of Portugal pain; fifty thousand was more likely. This was
the figure the Gazette de France (22 November) had al-
ready suggested. On all sides people were thinking and
talking about the earthquake, and especially about the
poor King of Portugal, for the privations of King Jos6
seemed to epitomize the full horror of the earthquake.
That a king should suffer thus! A letter by him to his
brother-in-law. King Ferdinand VI of Spain, was quoted
as showing that for the first day or two the miserable
monarch did not even know if he was going to get enough
to eat, a dreadful thought that made a deep impression
both in England and in France. 1
There were four practical reactions to the news, and

1 The English had decided they liked King Jos6: popular verse lavished
praise on him:

A noble palace in whose bright domain,
A monarch loving as belov'd does reign;
Generous, humane, who scorns the servile art,
By ought but reason to engage the heart;
Who knows no pleasure but his country's bliss,
In that is centred every heart-felt wish;

A Poem on the Late Earthquake at Lisbon.

London, 1755.

Lo, the good king from out the ruin'd heaps,
By providence divine, like Lot escapes;

Like Job he grieved, like Job he kissed the rod,
And own'd the justice of his angry God,

A Poem on tJie Earthquake at Lisbon.
London, 1755.

London, 1755-56 215

the first was charity. Religious anxiety and concern over
financial losses and scientific speculation shared jointly a
second place. The charity was warmhearted and immedi-
ate, for in spite of all that was so soon said about the
chastisement of the wicked Lisbon people being deserved,
in general people were truly sorry for the Portuguese and
did not neglect their kindly duties as neighbours. 2 The
King of Spain made immediate presents of money and
food, and eased the frontier regulations so that the in-
flow of supplies would not be impeded; the King of France
offered money to be minted at his expense in Portugal,
an offer that was declined as was the main offer of finan-
cial assistance from Spain. Hamburg sent ships to Lisbon
laden with wood, which was desperately needed, and tiles,
lead, and tools and other goods that would be practically
useful in the emergency, and also a little personal gift,
a token present of wine and sugar, for the King. Three
ships were dispatched with this necessary material on 17
December, and a fourth ship was most considerately kept
in reserve to sail after Lisbon's requirements were better
known. England sent money, partly in Portuguese gold
coins and partly in Spanish silver dollars, meat, butter,
biscuits, rice, wheat and flour, smoked herrings, boots and
shoes, and picks and shovels. News that the gift was on
its way reached King Jos6 at BeMm on 21 December; but
a few days before this, H.M.S. Hampton Court, carrying
the money, had had to put back into Portsmouth because
of bad weather, and it was not until the last day of the
year that the supplies began to arrive.
There was a kindly thoughtfulness in the English gift.

2 The Genoese republic seems, perhaps accidentally, to have been an
exception. Giornale Ligustico (Anno., xiv, 1887), p. 69.

216 The Lisbon Earthquake

Meal and flour were included because it was feared that
there might not be enough mills surviving in and close
to Lisbon to grind quickly a large quantity of com. The
Earl of Halifax suggested to the Duke of Newcastle that
England should send out young surgeons and doctors, and
also plenty of blankets. It was Sir John Barnard, M.P. for
the City of London, who first thought of sending out a
good supply of ready cash. There was also a less gen-
erous suggestion that as much Irish beef as possible should
be bought for Portugal, because this would be a good
move against the French, suspected of wanting to use
Ireland as a base for victualling their fleet. The Portu-
guese were greatly comforted by this kindness and in-
sisted that destitute British in Lisbon should take a first
share of the gift. A nineteenth-century opinion, "They [the
Portuguese] received the English relief, but cursed the
heretical hands that afforded it," 8 is a false judgement in-
fluenced by later commercial quarrels between the two
nations, and stories of the wasteful mismanagement of the
gift come from anti-Pombal sources and are unproven;
also, there is no reason for believing Sir Benjamin Keene
was right in his guess when he remarked to Castres in
a letter of 16 February 1756 that he supposed that the
British Factory would expect preferential treatment be-
cause of the liberality of their nation. What is quite cer-
tain is that Newcastle's Government was supported by a
unanimous Parliament when, in response to His Majesty's
gracious message of 28 November, Britain sent help to
Portugal, generously, quickly, and with an unqualified
sympathy for a friendly nation in distress.

8 S. A. Dunham: History of Spain and Portugal, v, p. 257, (1832.)
The author is quoting **a modern historian of Portugal."

London, 1755-56 217

Yet the commercial losses caused by the earthquake to
nations other than the Portuguese was almost at once a
matter of great concern. One of Voltaire's first thoughts
on hearing the news was alarm about the fortune of his
friend, Jean-Robert Tronchin, the banker of Lyons, and
of the textile merchants of that city. Similarly, the heavy
losses of the British Factory, both real and fancied, greatly
shocked England. Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, who was
gloomily full of the noblest moral reflections on the dis-
aster, had also time to think of her friends' financial in-
terests. She wrote on 29 November, "Mr. MeUish's loss
will be very considerable from the earthquake; he is a
most worthy man; and his partner, now in England, has
lost friends, fortune, family, every connection in life. Mr.
Gore's loss is at least 30,000; Mr. Bristow, the mer-
chant . . . 100,000; the Bishop of St. Asaph 7,000,
part of his wife's fortune. 4 Every day will make, I fear,
some new unhappy discovery." In December of the same
year, 1755, the Reverend Josiah Tucker of St. Stephen's,
Bristol, afterwards Dean of Gloucester, wrote, "This city
of Bristol has suffered the least of any in the kingdom,
considering the extent of its trade, by the late dreadful
calamity at Lisbon, Only one person being concerned as
an exporter of cloth, a worthy industrious parishioner of
mine, who computes Ms loss at about 9,000." Letters
from Lisbon reaching London after the earthquake un-
derstandably emphasized this aspect of the disaster, for
the British Factory had indeed suffered severely; offices
had been destroyed, correspondence and ledgers burnt,

4 Robert Hay Drummond (1711-76), later Archbishop of York; his
wife was the daughter of a London merchant.

218 The Lisbon Earthquake

money and merchandise irretrievably lost; no one could
doubt that the earthquake had done great harm to British
overseas trade, and there were many justifiable and un-
derstandable laments. The great hope was that a recovery
of Lisbon's normal facilities for trading would put all this
right. An anonymous English poet understood the posi-
tion. Rebuked by his muse for questioning God's whole-
sale slaughtering of the Portuguese without warning, at a
time when many of these unfortunate people were doubt-
less

Unfit to stand their Audit dread,
With all their crimes upon their Head,
Perhaps, full-blown as May!

he was told to think of the future and was granted a
vision of Lisbon recovered from the disaster. Buildings
are being erected; merchandise is pouring into the splen-
did new city; the harbour is crowded with boats; there
is a pocket-filling economic boom:

The Sons of Commerce fill the Street,
In Hymns their great Restorer greet,
And hail reviving Trade.

Side by side with the mercenary consideration, there
was much fact-collecting and theorizing by scientists who
did their best to account for the earthquake according to
the seismological theories then current. Led by the Royal
Society, there was a creditable and a very prolific inquiry,
and John Bevis's History and Philosophy of Earthquakes,
the best known of the scientific publications of the time,
is a notable corpus of seismological material, containing
much useful contemporary information about the earth-

London, 1755-56 219

quake of i November 1755. 5 But the effect o the news
that most of all concerns this chapter and the chief in-
terest of this book is the religious consternation that so
quickly made itself apparent in England, as indeed in
other European countries.

People were seriously perturbed and felt that a solemn
supernatural message had been delivered to them. Pos-
sibly, this consternation was felt more generally in Eng-
land than elsewhere on the Continent. Treaty quarrels and
religious differences did not diminish England's basic af-
fection for Lisbon and the Portuguese; many Englishmen
knew Portugal well and had lived happily there, or had
friends who had done so; the nation had no such close
ties with any other independent foreign country. Samuel
Richardson wrote on 15 December 1755, 'What dreadful
news we have from Lisbon. The only city in the world,

5 Published, London, 1757. The work is described as by "a member
of the Royal Academy of Berlin." Another useful study is An Historical
Account of Earthquakes, Liverpool, 1756, by an anonymous author, pub-
lished with the Fast-Day sermon of Thomas Hunter of Weversham,
Cheshire, but not by him. A curious paper well worth reading is John
Winthrop's A Lecture on Earthquakes; read in the Chapel of Harvard
College in Cambridge, N.E., November 26th, 1755 on an occasion of
the great Earthquake which shook New-England the week before (Bos-
ton, 1755 ) . Winthrop was Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, and
his subject was an earthquake of 18 November that "so lately spread
terror, and threatened desolation throughout New-England." It does not
seem lo have done very much harm apart from breaking the spindle of
the vane on Faneuil Hall in Boston, but it created the usual consterna-
tion in full measure. Winthrop, however, had a good deal to say in
favour of earthquakes; they may be "of real and standing advantage to
the globe in general." They destroy multitudes, but much greater mul-
titudes may have been every day benefited by them. They loosen and
disunite the parts of the earth, and open its pores. They should be com-
pared with ploughing and the breaking up of the clods of earth. This
view ought to silence all complaints of sufferers and the objections of
sceptics. We are, said Winthrop, "in a miYd state." Nothing is simply
and absolutely evil.

220 The Lisbon Earthquake

out of the British dominions, by which so tremendous a
shock could have so much affected us. When the Al-
mighty's judgements are abroad, may we be warned/'
This is a statement of the normal reaction of the English-
man to the news of the Lisbon earthquake, just as part
of Isaiah xxvi. 9 was many times chosen as the appro-
priate text for a sermon on this occasion: "for when thy
judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world
will learn righteousness."

Moralizing poured forth in speech and writing. "What
a scene is this," Mrs. Delany continued in her letter of
29 November, "to awaken those who think of nothing but
greatness and wealth! and to those of a better turn it
will, I hope, strengthen their pursuit after immortal hap-
piness." She was aware that not everybody kept such no-
ble reflections persistently in mind. "Can those wretches
at Whites," she asked on Boxing Day, "read [sad accounts
of more earthquakes] like common paragraphs of news?
Surely no: at least it is to be hoped they cannot; and yet
I fear that those who least stand in need of such warn-
ings are most touched by them."

This was probably a harsh judgement, as the wretches
at White's may have been just as shocked by the earth-
quake news as Mrs. Delany. The young Captain Augustus
Hervey, afterwards third Earl of Bristol, who had recently
had a most gloriously happy time at Lisbon, would cer-
tainly have been considered by Mrs. Delany, had she
known of his goings-on, as a wretch deplorably in need
of warning; but, when he got the news at Malta, he wrote
in his diary, "The next day, the gth, we had the sacl news
of the fatal earthquake that happened at Lisbon, with

London, 1755-56 221

many particulars of that misfortune, and that it had been
felt in many places of Europe, and even across the ocean
to Barbary. . . . These are frightful events, and ought to
inspire reflections that should mend the lives of individ-
uals in order not to deserve such chastisements from
Providence/' 6 It cannot be said that the gallant sailor
himself made an impresive show of reform; but his im-
mediate sadness was genuine and his sentiment sincere.
The earthquake did produce, however, a marked change
in people's behaviour, lasting at any rate for some months.
Dr. Law, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University,
wrote from Peterhouse on 20 January 1756 to the Duke
of Newcastle, "We have been perfectly quiet here, nor
have I had any certain information of the least irregu-
larity among the scholars. It is rather become fashionable
to be decent/* After the public Fast-Day in February 1756
Horace Walpole wrote to Henry Seymour Conway, "Be-
tween the French and the Earthquake you have no no-
tion how good we are grown; nobody makes a suit now
but of sackcloth turned up with ashes/' The fast was kept
so devoutly, that Dick Edgecumbe, finding a very lean
hazard at White's, said with a sigh, "Lord, how the times
are degenerated! Formerly a fast would have brought
everybody hither; now it keeps everybody away/' Ordi-
nary folk and not only the clergy were much upset when
a masquerade was advertised to take place at the Hay-
market Theatre towards the end of January. The an-
nouncement was an affront to the nation's mood, the
Bishop of London told Newcastle on 20 January; the
Duke agreed, and he went at once to ask the King to

6 Augustus Hervey's Journal, ed. David Erskine, p. 189. London, 1953.

222 The Lisbon Earthquake

stop the ball, which was done, the King having also re-
ceived a protest from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Walpole was full of gossip on this subject of reformed
characters, not always accurate, but shrewdly sensing the
earthquake-mood. Even the fascinating speculation about
the Pompadour's rouge took an earthquake-turn.

In France the prosecution of the war was by no
means an unanimous measure. D'Argenson, the pro-
moter of it, was on ill terms with Madame Pompadour
whose interest was to lull the King and nation in pleas-
ures and inactivity, not to foment events that might
shake her power. It received a blow from another quar-
ter. The Cardinal de la Rochfoucault and Sassy/ the
King's Confessor, played off the earthquake on his su-
perstition. He promised to receive the sacrament at
Easter, and relinquish his mistress. She, who held more
by habit than passion, saw no reason why a woman
might not work the machine of religion as well as a
priest, and instantly gave in to all his Majesty's scru-
ples; offered up her rouge to the demon of earthquakes,
and to sanctify her conversion and reconcile it to Court-
life, procured herself to be declared Dame du Palais to
the Queen. 8

The best-known comment on the effects produced by
the preaching and moralizing after the earthquake was
that of Goethe, recalling his childhood. "The peace of
mind of a little boy [he was just over six years old] was
for the first time most profoundly disturbed by an event

7 Pere de Sacy, a Jesuit.

s Memoirs of the Reign of King George II (second edition, 1847), n,
p. 176.

London, 1755-56 223

of worldwide significance." The Lisbon earthquake, Goe-
the said, startled a more or less quiet and happy society
with a sudden terror, and he described the horrible na-
ture of the event with its reputed sixty thousand casual-
ties, and he told of the alarm caused in Germany and
elsewhere by reports of earth-tremors and the disturbance
of waters all over Europe. "Thereafter came a swarm of
theories from the pious, consolatory opinions from the phi-
losophers, and threatening sermons from the clergy." The
whole world was afraid.

Perhaps never before has the Demon of Fright so
quickly and so powerfully spread horror throughout the
land. The little boy, who heard everybody talking about
the event, was deeply impressed. God, the creator and
preserver of heaven and earth, God, said to be omnis-
cient and merciful, had shown himself to be a very poor
sort of father, for he had struck down equally the just
and the unjust. In vain the young mind sought to com-
bat this idea; but it was clear that even learned theo-
logians could not agree about the way in which to ac-
count for such a disaster,

"Embarrassing for the professors of physics and humil-
iating for the theologians" had been a first comment of
Edmond-Jean Barbier, the Parisian lawyer and diary-
writer, when he heard of the great earthquake. It was
a shrewd judgement. The scientists puzzled everybody
with the variety of their theories about the physical causes
of an earthquake, and the theologians found themselves
in a confusion of attack and defence, anxious on the one
hand to use the earthquake as a rebuke to sin, and forced

224 The Lisbon Earthquake

on the other hand to justify such an indiscriminately sav-
age act of a supposedly loving God. The clergy had to
preach to a cowed and at the same time a questioning
congregation.

There were a number of very peculiar views expressed,
and the laity had plenty to say as well as the parsons. In
England, for example, a Member of Parliament, who was
an Old Testament scholar, and presumably an admirer of
Warburton's Divine Legation, demanded a return to the
philosophy of Moses, who, he said, was a much wiser
man than either Descartes or Newton. The world was
paying now for its neglect of Moses's teaching. What
were the autos-da-fe of Portugal but orgies of human sac-
rifice conducted "amidst the acclamation of the most ig-
norant and bigotted race of men that ever pretended to
the name of Christians'? Moses had condemned idol-
atry, but idolatry was rampant in Portugal where the
Supreme Being could be seen represented in the figure
of an old man. Images of "He and She Saints" crowded
the churches, and incense and genuflexions honour these
senseless blocks of wood. And though God is at the mo-
ment punishing disobedience to the Mosaic rule in Por-
tugal how do we know that His earthquakes will not
progress round the whole globe, destroying us on the
way? For the English are every bit as bad in their neglect
of Moses's teaching; they are corrupt, and have an in-
satiable appetite for amusements like cards and the the-
atre; they live in the idlenes of a Sodom they have made
for themselves. Read what Gildas said about the Britons
before they were overrun by the Saxons, and see if that
scathing denunciation does not fit the Britons of the pres-

London, 1755-56 225

ent day. Back then at once to the proper austerity of the
rale of Moses. 9

It was easy enough in a Protestant country to heap re-
proaches upon poor Lisbon. Lisbon, stated the London
Magazine succinctly, "might be said to be at once the
most visibly rich, and the most abandonedly wicked and
superstitious city in the world/* A "Clergyman at Lon-
don/* addressing words of comfort to "the remaining dis-
consolate inhabitants of Lisbon/' told them that in spite
of all their religious magnificence and their show of de-
votion they had "surpassed the whole world in wicked-
ness"; "is there/* he asked them, "a scene of lewdness or
debauchery that was ever practised which hath not been
daily repeated in your religious houses?'* And as for mur-
der, a Lisbon priest could be hired as an assassin for a
mere trifle. The Inquisition; the idols; what could be
worse? "If you have not entirely lost your reason, by
being debarred the use of it/' you should now ask your-
selves how God could possibly overlook your wicked be-

s Reflections Physical and Moral upon the various . . . Phenomena
. . . which have happened from the Earthquake at Lima, to tJw present
time. In a series of Familiar Letters from a Member of Parliament in
Town to his Friend in the Country (London, 1756). The author was
probably James Dawkins (1722-57), a wealthy young Jacobite, M.P. for
Hindoo, Wiltshire, who was born in Jamaica; in the course of a short
life he had travelled widely, and it was he who accompanied Robert
Wood to Palmyra and Balbec, I owe this identification to the kindness
of Sir Lewis Namier and Mr. John Brooke of the History of Parliament
Trust. Another curiosity of the period is the Earnest Address to the peo-
ple of this country by Alexander Cruden (1701-70), author of the Bib-
lical Concordance, "the Corrector" appointed by heaven to censor the
morals of the British. He was at this time petitioning the House of Com-
mons to introduce his Bill for the "Reformation of the People," and he
wrote to the Duke of Newcastle to point out that the Lisbon earthquake
and the threat of war with France made it more than ever urgent to
get his Bill passed.

226 The Lisbon Earthquake

haviour, and do not let there be any grumbling talk about
the innocent perishing with the guilty; there were no
really innocent people in Lisbon. And, "if any English
residents remain," let them ask themselves if they were
not miserably debauched and unworthy Protestants, gam-
bling and drinking, and cheating at business just like the
dishonest traders among whom they lived. "I am sorry to
say it is a known truth that the English in general which
composed our several factories abroad are far from do-
ing honour to the Christian character by their exem-
plary lives." The Lisbon priests, with particularly unsym-
pathetic injustice, were sternly denounced. One writer 10
accused them of telling falsehoods, and even fathering
them upon God Himself, in order to plunder the earth-
quake victims. As for the Inquisitors, "the hottest Hell,"
said a preacher in Staffordshire, "will undoubtedly be
their portion." 1X

It was, most of all, the cruelty of the Inquisition that
even the merciful could not put out of their minds; blood-
guiltiness it was called (PL VIII). John Wesley asked;

Is there indeed a God that judges the world, and is
he now making an Inquisition for Blood? If so, it is not
surprising he should begin there [Lisbon] where so
much blood has been poured on the ground like wa-
ter? Where so many brave men have been murdered,
in the most base and cowardly, as well as barbarous
manner almost every day, as well as every night, while
none regarded or laid it to heart. . . . How long has
their blood been crying from the earth? Yea, how long
has that bloody House of Mercy, the scandal not only

10 S. Hayward: Letter to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, London
1756.
11 R. Watkins: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 13. Clifton Campville, Staffs.

London, 1755-56 227

of all religion., but even of human nature, stood to in-
sult both heaven and earth? 12

After the Inquisition, came idolatry and after that Por-
tugal's abject devotion to wealth. "Think, O Spain, O Por-
tugal of the millions of poor Indians that your forefathers
butchered for the sake of gold/* 13 Sometimes there is a
note of condescension in this type of denunciation. "The
Portuguese nation is remarked for many vices, though in
some qualities they are praiseworthy and some instances
of piety and virtue there are without doubt among them;
yet, in general, treachery and revenge, covetousness and
usury, theft, and frequent murders, and above all most
inhuman cruelty, are the character of that people." 14
There is also an occasional note of self-satisfaction. "And
when all the lofty temples and other Popish religious
houses have been thrown down and laid in ruins, a sin-
gle Protestant chapel, the only one in the place, hath
been left standing.'' 15 And again, "Let us here observe
the distinguishing arm of God, how effectually he sepa-
rates from these objects of his displeasure those who are
influenced by Christian principles; how, in their behalf,
he says unto destruction, thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther; how Protestants, who are safe in harbour, have
His favour a sanctuary on every side of them." 1G

12 Serious Thought occasioned btj the late Earthquake at Lisbon, pp.
4, 5. Second edition, Bristol, 1755. Wesley confused the Inquisition with
the Casa da Miseric6rdia.

n{ Thomas Hartley, Hector of Winwick, Northants: God's Controversy
with the Nations, p. 15. London, 1756.

14 R, Watkins: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 7. Clifton Campville, Staffs.

15 Thomas Alcock preaching at St. Andrew, Plymouth, 31 December
1755 and 4 February 1756.

ltj Exhortation . . . unto tJie People of London occasioned by the late
Proclamation for a Fast By a Clergyman of Gloucestershire, p, a6. Lon-
don, 1756,

228 The Lisbon Earthquake

Yet most preachers in England were neither smug nor
unrelentingly hardhearted. Thomas Alcock (1709-98),
who commented on the survival of the Protestant chapel,
did go on to say that such arguments really meant noth-
ing at all "If Popish superstition and cruelty made Lis-
bon fall, how came Rome to stand?" He asked if a Por-
tuguese bigot was really any worse an offender against
God than an English infidel or atheist? The Portuguese
have at least, he said, "a zeal of God," and he described
them as punctual and honest in their dealings, and by
their trade and alliance extremely beneficial to this na-
tion. "Their Royal family are decent and generally well-
spoken of." Alcock truly represented his Church in tak-
ing as his text, as so many of his fellow-clergy did, Luke
xiii, 2-5:

And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that
these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans,
because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but,
except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those
eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew
them, think ye that they were sinners above all men
that dwelt in Jerusalen? I tell you, Nay: but, except
ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

In fact, even the most ferocious denouncers of Lisbon
wickedness usually went on to make it plain to their
hearers that though the sins of the unlucky inhabitants
of that city were scandalous, even more shocking and
abominable were the sins of their own nation. What, for
instance, in these special circumstances could be more
deplorable than the behaviour of some of the refugees
from the earthquake, or better illustrate the general de-

London, 1755-56 229

pravity of the British? A party of them, whose obvious
duty it was to spend their first hours on return to their
own country in humble thanksgiving, arrived in Falmouth
when the church bells were ringing and, instead of go-
ing to say their prayers, they went to a tavern, sent for
whores and two fiddlers, and spent the night in riot and
debauchery. 17

The whole nation was easily shown to be in a miser-
able state of sin. "When was there less Fidelity amongst
Mankind? When was there less brotherly love? When
was gratitude less practised? When were Murmurings
more frequent? Malice more powerful? Envy more sub-
til? Vengeance more active? Or Hatred more rooted in
us?" 18 Drunkenness, perjury, profanity, desecration of the
Sabbath: "people of any consequence in civil life would
be ashamed to be seen at church, especially at the sacra-
ments; and, if they want to go a journey, no day so con-
venient and agreeable as the Sunday/' 19 Protestants had
won the precious right to read the Bible; they shame-
fully neglected the opportunity. In this country there is
"such an affront offered by us to Christ, as the heathen
do not offer to their idols, nor the Papists to their su-
perstitions/' 20 Cards, dice, the theatre, dancing, gluttony,
adultery, sodomy: "this nation has well-nigh filled up the
measures of its iniquities/' 21 We are "a discontented, frac-
tious, ungrateful, divided people/ 7 22 "It is almost a fashion

17 T. Jones: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 10. St. Saviour, Southwark.

18 Isaac Nieto ( Netto ) ; Fast-Day Sermon, p. 6. Portuguese Jews' Syn-
agogue.

10 Webster: Fast-Dai/ Sermon, p. 26. Ware, Herts.

20 Samuel Walker: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 11. Traro.

21 T. Jones: Sermon, i February 1756, p. 8. St. Saviour, Southwark.

22 James How: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 18. Milton-next-Gravesend, Kent.

230 The Lisbon Earthquake

to be thought wicked/' 23 What is to be expected of a
nation that habitually sends its youth to Popish countries
for improvement? Heresies are flourishing; a bold licen-
tious spirit of criticism newly sprung up, declares the
Scriptures to be uncertain and subject to correction. 24 Re-
ligion is subject to banter, ridicule, and sophistry; it is
persistently undermined by deism. Even the clergy are
culpable, many of them being imprudent, indiscreet, sloth-
ful, and idle. Britain's case was hard indeed, and there
was no time left. "Tomorrow's sun may never rise upon
us; this night may plunge us into the sleep of death . . .
every word I speak, and every breath you draw, may
be our last." 25

The people listened to a storm of warnings and threats
from their pastors. God "comes with many signal strokes
of vengeance to awaken a careless and sleepy world," said
William Romaine, Lecturer at St. Dunstan-in-the-West,
on 30 November, preaching to the text, "Prepare to meet
thy God/* Most of them were seriously frightened, but
not all of them were frightened enough. On 14 Decem-
ber this fine man had to speak more plainly to the peo-
ple. God

has arisen to shake terribly the earth, you are not
moved. He has come to take vengeance on a guilty
race, and has punished them with a most exemplary
destruction, but you are not affected. . . . This strange
stupidity and hardness of your hearts will soon bring
down some heavy calamity upon you.

23 John Fountayne, Dean of York: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 25.

24 Daniel Gittms: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 27. South Stoke, Sussex, and
Leominster.

25 Thomas Hunter: Fast-Day Sermon, p. 17. Weversham, Cheshire.

London, 1755-56 231

Another writer cried:

Wo unto thee Britain; wo unto thee Ireland; wo unto
thee London; wo unto thee Liverpool; for if the in-
structions, the admonitions, the warnings, the counsels,
which have from God been given unto you, in the pure
preaching of the Gospel, had been given to Lisbon, it
would long ago have repented and turned from all its
abominations, and remained to this day. Therefore it
shall be more tolerable for that ruined city in the Day
of Judgment than for you. 26

But all this was not part of the message that the Church
of England delivered in a responsible corporate voice; the
Church asked of its people a change of heart, and one
of the official measures taken in order to give opportunity
for a serious effort to understand what the Church had
to say was the appointment by royal proclamation on 18
December 1755 of Friday, 6 February 1756, as a general
Fast-Day. There had been many of these days of public
intercession and repentance before, mostly with the self-
ishly national intention that such occasions tend to have,
and 6 February was no exception, for fear of the ap-
proaching war with France had been added to the fear
of a great earthquake like that which had destroyed Lis-
bon. But even so the traditional wording of the procla-
mation is impressive.

Whereas the manifold Sins and Wickedness of these
Kingdoms, have most justly deserved heavy and severe
punishments from the Hand of Heaven; and the Al-

20 An Historical Account of Earthquakes, p. 129. Liverpool, 1756, This
lively anonymous work is published with Thomas Hunter's Fast-Day Ser-
mon preached at Weversham, Cheshire, and is attributed to him; but
there is strong internal evidence that the Account is not by Hunter.

232 The Lisbon Earthquake

mighty, out of His great Mercy, hath not only been
our Defence in Times of Danger, but hath protected
and preserved Us from imminent Destruction, espe-
cially at this Time, when some neighbouring Countries,
in Alliance and Friendship with Us, have been visited
with a most dreadful and extensive Earthquake, which
hath also, in some Degree, been felt in several Parts of
Our Dominions:

a public fast is to be observed in England and Wales, as
also by separate proclamations in Scotland and Ireland.

The proclamation ordered that special forms of prayer
should be published for the occasion. The principal col-
lect in the form for public use is a petition that expresses
exactly the theological significance of the Lisbon earth-
quake as it was generally understood and accepted in the
eighteenth century:

we, vile dust and miserable sinners, in a most awful
sense of thy amazing power . . , beseech thee, O Lord,
to awaken our consciences yet farther, that we may see
and duly consider thy hand, which, in the most aston-
ishing manner, hath been lifted up so near us. Pardon
those crying sins, which have produced these tokens of
thy heavy displeasure, and grant us all such a measure
of thy grace, that we may no more disobey thy laws,
abuse thy forbearance, or despise thy chastisements,
lest a worse thing come upon us. It is of thy goodness,
O Lord, that we were not all consumed, when thou didst
arise to shake terribly the earth, and that in the midst
of judgement, thou didst remember mercy. Let the deep
sense of this work in us such a thankfulness of heart
. . . that no calamity may surprise us, nor death itself

London, 1755-56 233

come upon us unawares, and that we may at length ar-
rive at that blessed Kingdom, which cannot be shaken.

. . . Amen.

A large number of the Fast-Day sermons have been
printed, and all of them have a central message calling
for repentance and a change of heart. "Thou also shall
perish. Behold me smoking! Remember and REPENT. This
is the short but very full sermon that Lisbon in ruins
preaches to London in sin." 27 It was the proper theme
for the occasion, and it was an expected message. "The
public fast was observed with a becoming decency by all
ranks of people. The churches and meeting-houses were
thronged, and there was, in appearance, an entire cessa-
tion from business throughout the city and suburbs, and
all over the kingdom.'* 28 The public mood dictated the
preacher's discourse; but the Fast-Day sermons were nev-
ertheless mostly fine and original messages of conscien-
tious pastors, and understandably so, for, preached as they
generally were to crowded congregations of attentive and
apprehensive people, these sermons had to be the very
best the preachers could prepare to fit so important an
occasion.

As an example, here is the substance of a sermon
preached on the Fast-Day at St. Paul's, Deptford, by the
rector, James Bate (1703-75), of Corpus, Cambridge, The
Lisbon earthquake, he said, "exceeds anything in history"

27 George Home: Fast-Day Sermon., p. 19. Oxford (City and Univer-
sity). Home was Fellow of Magdalen, and later President, and after-
wards Bishop of Norwich; the Lisbon earthquake happened on his
twenty-fifth birthday.

28 London Magazine, vol. xxv ( February 1756 ) . Three houses of the
Quakers in Lombard Street kept open and caused great affront, so much
so that in the afternoon an indignant crowd broke their windows. Pub-
lic Advertiser, 7 February 1756.

234 The Lisbon Earthquake

except the Flood, and we have to reckon with the fright-
ening fact that our own island has subterranean caverns
beneath its surface that could easily produce a similar dis-
aster here. But we do not understand "the Councils of
God," and we do not know what is going to happen. "It
is God alone who can dart his eye through futurity," and
all we can be sure of is that He has adapted the "ma-
chine of the Universe" to answer all His purposes. Earth-
quakes are part of His plan; but we have to remember
that this world is not a place of retribution, but a place
of probation, for God usually punishes sinners not here
but hereafter; therefore the sufferers in an earthquake are
not necessarily very evil people, and in the case of the
Lisbon earthquake we must recognize that God is speak-
ing to us all. The plain fact is that God has now no other
way of bringing us to our senses than by frightening us;
that is the purpose of this really dreadful calamity. Let
us then heed this obvious warning and humbly acknowl-
edge that we must immediately and genuinely mend our
ways. Yet our peril does not mean that we must despair.
We are not a hopelessly bad people; we have been very
generous to Portugal; we are improving in loyalty to our
Hanoverian King; we appreciate our present Government;
we tolerate dissenting Protestant brethren, and our in-
creasing political solidarity is adding to the confusion of
the encroaching, falsehearted and perfidious French.

In this multitude of sermons, alike in kind, but sur-
prisingly varied, indeed sometimes contradictory in em-
phasis and detail, it is to the credit of the preachers
that nearly all have some strong individual character.
For another example there is the opinion of the learned
and truculently argumentative William Warburton ( 1698-

London, 1755-56 235

1779), afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, who in 1756 was
a royal chaplain and preacher at Lincoln's Inn, where he
delivered his Fast-Day sermon.

Warburton had had something to say about the Lisbon
earthquake before he preached his Fast-Day sermon in
Lincoln's Inn Chapel. He thought that the calamity had
not really produced the effect it should have done, and
on 9 December 1755 he wrote:

Time was, when the imaginary displeasures of Heaven
in a comet or an eclipse have disarmed warring nations
when their swords were already lifted up for mutual
slaughter. But I do not hear that these marks of divine
displeasure on a sinful people are likely to abate our
and our neighbours animosities against one another. 29

To Richard Kurd, also in December 1755, he said:

To suppose these desolutions the scourge of heaven
for human impieties, is a dreadful reflection; and yet

to suppose ourselves in a forlorn and fatherless world,
is ten times a more frightful consideration. In the first
case, we may reasonably hope to avoid our destruction
by the amendment of our manners; in the latter we are
kept incessantly alarmed by the blind rage of warring
elements. 80

But Warburton also wondered whether the significance of
the disaster was overestimated.

And yet does not human pride make us miscalculate?
A drunken man shall work as horrid a desolation with
the kick of his foot against an ant-hill, as subterraneous
air and fermented minerals, to a populous city. And if

29 Letter to Joseph Atwell: Works, xiv, p. 257. London, 1841.
a <> Warburton-Hurd Letters, LXXXVU.

236 The Lisbon Earthquake

we take in the universe of things, rather with a philo-
sophic than a religious eye, where is the difference in
point of real importance between them?

The only difference lies in the merits of the two socie-
ties, for "the little Troglodytes" are superior to men in
organisation, behaviour, and industry; and in a passage
of bitter pessimism Warburton rejected the view that the
sovereignty of Reason gave man the advantage over the
ants.

To this I reply, that the common definition of man
is false: he is not a reasoning animal. The best you can
predict of him is, that he is an animal capable of rea-
son, and this too we take upon old tradition. For it has
not been my fortune yet to meet, I don't say with any
one man, but I may safely swear with any order of men,
who ever did reason.

Warburton's Fast-Day sermon has the title National
and Civil Events the Instruments of God's Moral Gov-
ernment. God, our moral governor, must be expected to
make His dominion manifest in any way He likes in what-
ever kind of world He has been pleased to station His
accountable and probationary creatures, and in inflicting
upon the world a great disaster it must be ordinarily as-
sumed that whether or no the disaster is a direct punish-
ment on a particular people for a particular offence, it
is quite certainly a warning to all mankind. The truth is
that great general calamities, which must be accepted as
evidence of God's displeasure at our sins, in fact display
"his glory in the fairest colours" and help to establish
"man's peace and happiness on the most lasting founda-
tions"; for to maintain, as was fashionable, that an earth-

London, 1755-56 237

quake had nothing to do with God's moral government is
simply to increase the disquiet and alarm of miserable
mankind thus abandoned by Providence. But i the cause
of natural events is pre-established in relation to a moral
government of the world, heresies such as that of Mani-
chaean "evil principle" that has a share in the direction
of the universe, are shown to be ridiculous, and a pious
person has a comforting glimpse of the generous wisdom
of God's rule. For it is a comforting thing to know that
a sincere purpose of amending public manners can avert
an approaching act of divine vengeance. The action and
prayers of good men have their part in the "pre-estab-
lished harmony" which God has willed to exist between
moral actions and natural events.

Such were the Fast-Day sermons, and the general les-
son allowed no misunderstanding. The Almighty's judge-
ments were abroad in the world, and the inhabitants of
the world must therefore learn righteousness. Except ye
repent, ye shall all likewise perish. It was for the times
a fair and sensible message, for the clergy did not have
to persuade a sceptical congregation that God was oper-
ating through the earthquake; on the contrary, a large
majority of the people who came crowding into the
churches were there because they were guiltily sure that
God was indeed threatening them. Nevertheless, the re-
ligious argument following upon the Lisbon earthquake
in England is not a plain quarrel between philosophers
who thought that earthquakes were natural events and
theologians who thought they were direct actions of an
angry God; for there intruded here, more than it did in
the Latin countries, the controversial element of religious
enthusiasm. An orthodox Anglican disputed two, as it

238 The Lisbon Earthquake

seemed to him, equally wrong views, protesting against
"One set of men, who, influenced by superstition rather
than benevolence, had taken greater liberties with the
judgments of God than was consistent with the amiable
spirit of Christianity"; and against another party, who,
"more free indeed from religious Enthusiasm than licen-
tious prejudices, had taken occasion from the late calam-
ity to treat the notion of a providential interposition with
very indecent mpckery." On the one hand, insulting liber-
tinism, on the other hand, "a spirit of malevolent en-
thusiasm" that had "hurried many persons to conclusions
very uncharitable and . . . unwarrantable/' 31

This conflict among the God-fearing is occasionally
mentioned in the Fast-Day sermons. The Bishop of Ex-
eter, George Lavington (1684-1762), a resolute enemy of
any sort of religious enthusiasm, preaching in the Ca-
thedral, having said all the right things about justifiable
fear of God's punishment and the urgent need for re-
pentance, warned his people against exaggerated dread
and hysterical panic. God's good providence would still
deliver us if each individual contributed his share to a
national improvement in behaviour. Men were not to be
terrified out of their wits by earthquake-fright, but must
continue to perform their normal duties calmly and sen-
sibly, refusing tq be driven crazy by apocalyptic alarms
and wild stories about Chrisfs immediate advent. It is
foolish to make the earthquake just "a shuddering topic
of conversation.*' Men must not be abjectly afraid of the
end of the world and of prodigies and portents. There is
something within ourselves, said the Bishop, more peril-

31 Peter Peckard: Dissertation on Rev. XI. 23, pp. i, 41. London, 1756,

London, 1755-56 239

ous than any fancied threats, namely the heavy sum of
natural wickedness. That is the evil from which we must
instantly fly.

An example of the kind of thing the Bishop of Exeter
so much disliked was the popular and fast-selling pam-
phlet by John Wesley, Serious Thoughts occasioned by
the late Earthquake at Lisbon, first published in London
in 1755 and kept on the market in at least six editions.
Wesley said it was directed not "to the small vulgar,
but the great to the learned, rich, and honourable hea-
thens, commonly called Christians," and He was deter-
mined to give them a fright they would not easily for-
get. People who believe in God, he said, believe the Al-
mighty is not well pleased with the scandalous behav-
iour of these heathens, for that is what they really are,
and think He has shown His anger very plainly. How
many hundred thousand men have lost their lives in war
during the last half-century in Europe alone? Think of
the dreadful earthquakes at Port Royal in Jamaica, at
Lima in Peru, and at Catania in Sicily, especially Ca-
tania, where "not so much as one Lot escaped out of
Sodom." Then Lisbon. Many think the British too have
been under the lash in their own country. We have had
civil war (the '45), a cattle-plague, and the recent af-
fair of Whiston Cliffs in Yorkshire, where there had been
alarming earth-tremors and falls of rock. Wesley had been
to see the effects of the great landslide here in March
1755, and he wondered how England dare ignore such
a portentous warning. No natural causes could account
for his phenomenon; it was plainly God's work. Wes-
ley turned angrily upon the presumptuous people who
thought earthquakes and related events were accidents of

240 The Lisbon Earthquake

nature. To think this is demonstrably absurd on the au-
thority of Scripture, and the theory is "extremely uncom-
fortable"; for if it were true, what hope is left for man-
kind? We are left defenceless in the power of the ele-
ments; there is no help for us. In a splendid passage
Wesley took the example of an earthquake:

It comes! The Roof trembles! The Beams crack! The
Ground rocks to and fro! Hoarse Thunder resounds
from the Bowels of the Earth! And all these are but
the Beginning of Sorrows. Now what Help? What Wis-
dom can prevent? What Strength resist the Blow? What
Money can purchase, I will not say Deliverance, but an
Hour's Reprieve? Poor honourable Fool, where are now
thy Titles? Wealthy Fool, where is now thy golden God.
If any Thing can help, it must be Prayer. But what wilt
thou pray to? Not to the God of Heaven: you suppose
him to have nothing to do with Earthquakes.

Wesley piled on the horror. Supposing we do not after
all have an earthquake, "what think you of a comet?"
What inded if Halley's comet burns the earth up in 1758!
Remorselessly this powerful man hounded his readers into
their duty of praying to God to save them, of fitting
themselves to pray. Only a good Christian can be happy,
for even if we are unhurt by storms, lightnings, earth-
quakes, and comets, "yet there is another grim enemy at
the door. And you cannot drive him away. It is Death."
But the Christian does not even fear death, for it is the
gate to the glories of Eternity; "he is so far from looking
upon death as an enemy, that he longs to feel his wel-
come embrace. He groans (but they are pleasing groans)
to have Mortality swallowed up in Life."

London, 1755-56 241

It was magnificent, passionate exhortation, but it was
the kind of thing that makes some people more embar-
rassed than impressed. There was, in fact, a stony resist-
ance to enthusiasm, and there were Anglicans who pre-
ferred quieter, calmer thoughts than this sort of vigorous
sermonizing reflects. One of them was the ailing Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, Thomas Herring ( 1693-1757), who,
if one may guess at his opinion from some references to
the wording of the royal proclamation in his correspond-
ence with his chaplain, did not attach undue importance
to the Fast-Day. He had been sent John Wesley's pam-
phlet, and privately, in a letter to his friend William Dun-
combe, he said this:

The author, in my opinion, with good parts and learn-
ing, is a most dark and saturnine creature. His pictures
may frighten weak people, that, at the same time, are
wicked, but I fear he will make few converts, except
for a day. I have read his Serious Thoughts, but, for
my own part, I think the rising and the setting of the
sun is a more durable argument for religion than all
the extraordinary convulsions of nature put together.
Let a man be good on right principles, and then im-
pavidum ferient ruinae; so far Horace was as good a
preacher as any of us. For myself, I own I have no con-
stitution for these frights and fervors; if I can but keep
up to the regular practice of a Christian life, upon Chris-
tian reasons, I shall be in no pain for futurity, nor do
I think it an essential part of religion to be pointed at
for any foolish singularities.

No enthusiasm. Many clergy of the Church of England
must have shared the feelings of the Archbishop of Can-
terbury and the Bishop of Exeter. "A presumptuous for-

242 The Lisbon Earthquake

wardness in pronouncing on extraordinary events we leave
to raving designing monks, methodists, and ignorant en-
thusiasts/ 5 32 They thought that the religious significance
of the dreadful event in Lisbon and the alarm caused
everywhere by the news of what had happened must not
be estimated in a hotly emotional mood of earthquake-
fright or distorted by the exultant triumph of a satisfied
prophet of woe. London had not suffered as Lisbon had
suffered. We must thank God for that. And clearly Lon-
doners, and all the British, must accept a sharp warning
from the Portuguese disaster. We must become a better
and more truly Christian people. But there the matter
must stop. We cannot answer the question, "Wherefore
hath the Lord done thus unto this great city?" unless it
be to warn us all, because we dare not accuse others of
being sinners above all men. In short, we do not know
why God allowed Lisbon to be destroyed. The great ser-
mons of filie Bertrand in Switzerland had summed up all
that eighteenth-century Protestant preachers had to say.
God is holy, so we must be afraid of Him. God is loving
and God is unchanging, so we must trust Him; even now
when Lisbon lies in ruins. No English sermon said this
so well. But Thomas Herring in his gentle way put it all
in a single sentence, "Let a man be good on right prin-
ciples, and then impavidum ferient fuinae?* Here is no
consolation for the bereaved; no explanation of the deaths
of innocent people. We do not understand. But, even so,
a good Christian should be in no pain for futurity. Psalm
XL VI: "God is our hope and strength: a very present help

32 Anon. (? S. Letsome): Fast-Day Sermon. The Power of God over
the Constitution of Naturewith a dedication to the younger part of the
Town, p. 30, footnote.

London, 1755-56 243

In trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth
be moved: and though the hills be carried into the midst
of the sea." In a form of private and family prayers for
the Fast-Day this was turned into a hymn "recommended
to parents for their children to learn by heart, in order
to impress on their tender minds an awful sense of their
Creator's omnipotence in the late melancholy destruction
of Lisbon."

Tho* Earth her ancient Seat forsake,

By Pangs convulsive torn,
Tho* her self-balanced Fabrick shake,

And rain'd Nature mourn:

Tho' Hills be in the Ocean lost,

With all their trembling Load,
No Fear shall e'er disturb the Just,

Or shake his Trust in God.

Few converts "except for a day." The Archbishop was
right. Very quickly the earthquake alarm and the Fast-
Day mood of repentance changed into different despond-
encies. War broke out; there were other things to think
about, and the country slipped back into its old habits.
"I am still alarmed about the invasion, but don't find peo-
ple are so apprehensive as at first," Mrs. Delany was writ-
ing on i April 1756. "Earthquakes are forgotten, assem-
blies and balls go on as briskly as if no such warning had
been given; indeed, if we stop there it might be innocent,
but luxury of all kinds and gaming run higher than ever."
This illuminating comment was not entirely accurate, for
some obdurate pleasure-lovers were still mourning Lon-
don's most notorious earthquake victim, the Masquerade;
"we have never recovered masquerades since the earth-

244 The Lisbon Earthquake

quake at Lisbon," said Horace Walpole in 1762. But, gen-
erally, Mrs. Delany was reporting the situation correctly.
By the early summer of 1756 the Lisbon earthquake had
lost in England its first tremendous emotional significance;
it had become a memory, a memory of an awful event
that was kept fresh by a stream of accounts of the state
of the ruined city and of its rebuilding from British mer-
chants and visitors in Portugal.

This memory, however, survived for a veiy long time
in the common consciousness because, quite apart from
the last chapter's story of the death of optimism, the Lis-
bon earthquake was a frequently mentioned event familiar
to one and all, like other generally well-known facts in
history. In England the "Adventures of Alphonso after the
Destruction of Lisbon" in Lady Sarah Pennington's Let-
ters on Different Subjects were being read in 1767 and
afterwards, and Oliver Goldsmith introduced the earth-
quake into the dialogue of The Good Natur'd Man ( 1768 )
as a topical allusion that everybody in the theatre would
understand. Mr. BraddocFs exciting eyewitness account
of the disaster was printed, long after its writer's death,
in Charles Davy's Letters . . . upon Subjects of Litera-
ture in 1787. There are many other references.

It is not easy to say when the Lisbon earthquake be-
came almost forgotten history, but it was probably before
Teodoro de Almeida published Lisboa Destmida in 1803
and the drama Le Desastre de Lisbonne was produced,
mSle de danse et de pantomime, in Paris in 1804. There-
after, its memory, outside Portugal, was kept alive in
guide-books and travel-diaries, and only occasionally in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. There are
many admirers of the works of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

London, 1755-56 245

who remember the Lisbon earthquake through the vivid
description of the disaster, based on the real adventures
of Agnes Surriage and Sir Charles Henry Frankland, 33 in
Lady Good-For-Nothing (1910), and there must also be
many American and British readers of Oliver Wendell
Holmes who have this two-hundred-year-old scrap of his-
tory fixed inescapably in their minds. Because on its hun-
dredth anniversary:

there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake day.

For, as we have been told,

It was on the terrible earthquake day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.

And then, a hundred years later, in 1855,

First of November the Earthquake-day
There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay,

and the end comes.

First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill,
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meetV-house clock-
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!

ss For this story, see Elias Nason: Sir Charles Henry Frankland, Bar-
onet: or Boston in Colonial Time. Albany, N. Y., 1865, and Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes, Agnes.

Bibliographical Note to Chapter Two

The numerous eyewitness accounts of the Lisbon earth-
quake are understandably confusing and contradictory,,
particularly in the matter of the timing of the events of
the first day. I have not attempted to make a new study
of the earthquake and its effects, and this chapter is
mainly based on two works:

F. L. Pereira de Sousa: O Terremoto do 1 Novembro
de 1755 e um Estudo Demografico. 4 vols. (espe-
cially vol. 3). Lisbon, 1919-32.

J. J. Moreira de Mendonga: Historia Universal dos Ter-
remotos . . . com uma narragam individual do Ter-
remoto do primeiro de Novembro de 1755 . . . em
Lisboa. Lisbon, 1758.

This second work is the best of the contemporary ac-
counts, and Indeed it is a book of outstanding merit, in
my view excelling all previous studies of great earth-
quakes. I have, however, also made use of some other
contemporary material mentioned in Chapter Three, and
a number of recent topographical works published by the
Academia das Ciencias de Lisboa and the Camara Muni-
cipal of Lisbon:

Eduardo Freire de Oliveira: Elementos para a historic
do municipio de Lisboa. Tomo XVI, pp. 133 ff. Lis-
bon, 1908.

Gustavo de Matos Sequeira: Depois do Terremoto. Sub-

347

248 The Lisbon Earthquake

sidios para a historia dos bairros ocidentais de Lis-
boa. 4 vols. Lisbon, 1916-34.

Julio de Castilho: Lisboa Antiga; Bairros Orientals. Sec-
ond edition. 12 vols. Lisbon, 1934-38.

Gustavo de Matos Sequeira: O Carmo e a Trindade. 3
vols. Lisbon, 1939-41.

A. Vieira da Silva: As Muralhas da Ribeira de Lisboa.
Second edition. 2, vols. Lisbon, 1940-41.

In addition, an important source of general, biograph-
ical, and topographical information is:

Esteves Pereira and Guilherme Rodrigues: Portugal.
Diccionario historico y etc. 7 vols. Lisbon, 1904-15.

As regards bibliographies of the Lisbon earthquake, the
most useful guide through the descriptive literature is the
great work of Pereira de Sousa, mentioned above, which
is packed with extracts from contemporary printed and
manuscript accounts, and is fully annotated. Other Portu-
guese and foreign works will be found listed in the fol-
lowing publications:

Hans Woerle: Der Erschutterungsbezirk des grossen
Erdbebens zu Lissabon. Miinchener geographische
Studien, ed. S. Giinther, vni (1900), pp. 6 fit., pp.
22 ff.

F. de Montessus de Ballore: Bibliografia general de
temblores y terremotos. Vol. i, 1570 ft; Vol. vn,
6738 ft, 8662 ft Santiago de Chile, 1915-19.

Catdlogo, second edition, of the Exposigao Comemora-
tiva do Terremoto de 1755. Lisbon, 1934.

Charles Davison: Great Earthquakes, pp. 27-28. Lon-
don, 1936.

For modern scientific accounts of the Lisbon earth-
quake in English see:

Bibliographical Note to Chapter Two 249

Harry Fielding Reid: The Lisbon Earthquake of No-
vember i, 1755. Bull. Seismological Society of
America, iv, No. 2 (June 1914), p. 53.

Charles Davison: op. cit., p. 27. Excellent for the Eng-
lish eyewitness accounts and contemporary scien-
tific discussion.

Three of the English narratives stand out above others
as vivid and informative accounts of the disaster:

Mr. Braddock: For his adventures, see John Athelstane
Smith, Conde da Carnota. Marquis of Pombal, p.
51. Second edition, 1871; also printed by Charles
Davy. Letters . . . upon Subjects of Literature, n

p. 12 (1787).

Thomas Chase: Gentleman s Magazine,, LXXXIH (1813),
pp. 105-10, 201-06, 314-17. The earthquake took
place on the twenty-sixth birthday of this young
man, who was very badly injured.

Mr. Fowke: A genuine Letter to Mr. Joseph Fowke
from his brother near Lisbon. London, 1755? This
vigorous and most interesting letter is dated 17
November 1755. Mr. Fowke (or PFowkes) lived
in the Cidade Baixa near the Church of Sao Nic-
olau.

To Dr. Davison's bibliography, keeping principally to
the English material, I would add:

Baretti, J.: Journey from London to Genoa, i, pp. 1372.

Third edition, 1770.
Boxer, Professor C. K: Pombal's Dictatorship and the

Great Lisbon Earthquake, 1755. History Today, v,

No. 11 (November 1955).
Cheke, Marcus: Dictator of Portugal, pp. 62 ff. London,

1938. This is the best general account of the dis-

250 The Lisbon Earthquake

aster in English, and the preceding chapters should
also be read as historical background to the earth-
quake.

Estorninho, Carlos: O Terremoto de 1755 e a sua
repercussdo nas relagoes Luso-Britanicas, Lisbon,
1956.

Keene, Sir Benjamin: Private Correspondence. Ed.
Richard Lodge. London, 1933.

Macaulay, Rose: They Went to Portugal, pp. 267 ff.;
also pp. 203 ff. London, 1946.

Walford, A. R.: The British Community in Lisbon c.
1755. Hist. Assoc. Lisbon Branch, loth Annual Re-
port (1946-50), p. 639.

Periodicals: In addition to the Philosophical Transac-
tions of the Royal Society and the Gentleman's
Magazine, cited by Davison, note also: London
Evening Post, No. 4375 (22-25 November) ff.;
London Gazette, No. 9532 (25-29 November) ff.;
London Magazine, vols. xxiv, xxv, passim.; Pub-
lic Advertiser, No. 6576 (25 November) ff,; Scots
Magazine, vols. XVH, xvin, passim.; Whitehall Eve-
ning Post, No. 1521 (22-29 November) ff.

Addendum to Bibliographies

Catdlogo, Exposigao iconogrdfica e bibliografica comemo-
rativa da reconstruao da cidade depois do terre-
moto de 1755.

PaMcio Galveias. Lisbon, 1955.

Publn. of the Camara Municipal de Lisboa.

INDEX

Afonso Henriques, 129 E.
Agate, William, 19
Agatha, St., 11411.
Alcock, Thomas, 227 n., 228
Allen, John, 32
Almeida, Teodoro de ? 244
Aubert, Abb6 J. L., 143

Barber, W. H., 180 n.

Barbier, E.-J., 223

Barco y Gasco, A. J. del,

lion.

Baretti, J., 166
Barnard, Sir John, 216
Bate, James, 233
Beausobre, L. de, 200-01
Bentley, Richard, 40
Bertrand, filie, 166-69, 2 4^
Besterman, Theodore, i8cT n.
Bevis, John, 218
Bina, Andrea, 101 n.
Borgia, St. Francis, 114, 121
Boxer, C. R., 249
Braddock, Mr., 244
Bradshaigh, Lady, 29-30
Brandao Ivo, M. T. P., 93

Brooke, John, 225 n.
Buendia y Ponce, F. de, 104
Buraet, Thomas, 20-21
Butler, Joseph, 36-37

Cabrera, Miguel, 105, 109
Candide, 179, 182, 198 ff.
Canterbury, Archbishop of;

see Herring, Archbishop

Thomas

Carnota, Conde de, 249
Carvalho, S. J. de; see

Pombal, Marques de
Castilho, Julio de, 248
Castres, Abraham, 70, 216
Cevallos, Jose, 103 ff.
Chandler, Samuel, 32, 37
Chase, Thomas, 62 n., 249
Chassonville, Abb6, 144
Cheke, Marcus, 139, 166
Clarke, John, 35-36
Clarke, L. C. G. ? 189 n.
Costa, J. A. da, 109 n.
Coutinho, S. A., 175-76, 177
Cox, James, 19-20
Cruden, Alexander, 225 n.

251

252

Cuers de Cogelin, J., 142
Cimha Franga, F. da, 105-06,
non.

Davison, Charles, 248
Davy, Charles, 244
Dawkins, James, 22511.
Deism, 34

Delany, Mrs., 217, 220, 243-44

Earthquakes:
Catania, 239

Crucifixion, after the, 150
Dauphine, 150
Japan, 46
Lima, 23, 239

Lisbon see Lisbon Earth-
quake

Port Royal, 16, 23, 239
Treatises on, 18, 24, 98 ff,,

108, 219 n.
Ecouchard Le Brun, P.-D.,

210-12

Electricity, 18, 100-02
Enthusiasm, 238 ff.
Estorninho, Carlos, 250
Exeter, Bishop of; see Lav-
ington, George

Faria Cordeiro, J. C. de,

176 ff.

Fast-Day, 231 ff.
Feyz6o, B. J., 99 ff., 109
Figueiredo, A. da Silva, 176
Flamsteed, John, 15
Fountayne, John, 230 n.
Fowke, Mr., 249
Freire de Oliveira, E., 247

The Lisbon Earthquake

Gittins, Daniel, 230 n.
Goethe, J. W., 222-23
Goldsmith, Oliver, 244
Gongalves Rodrigues, A. A.,

161, 163
Goudar, Ange, 86-88, 158

Hales, Stephen, 32
Hartley, Thomas, 227 n.
Havens, G. R., 191 n.
Hayward, S., 226 n.
Hazard, Paul, 202 n.
Herring, Archbishop Thomas,

241, 242-43
Hervey, Capt. Augustus,

220-21

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 245
Horne, George, 233 n.
How, James, 229 n.
Hume, David, 38, 202 n.
Hunter, Thomas, 219 n.,

230 n., 231 n.

Inquisition, in Portugal, 51,
87-88, 108, 141, 158, 163,
225, 226

Jansenists, 1455.
Johnson, Samuel, 213
Jones, T,, 229 n.

Kant, Immanuel, 198-200
Keene, Sir Benjamin, 69, 213,

216, 250
King, Archbishop William, 33

Lavington, George, 238-39
Law, Edmund, 221

Lefranc, J.-J., 192-93
Leibniz, G. W., 35, 181-82,

202, 208

Lisbon Earthquake:
Aftershocks, 69
Cais de Pedra, 58, 59, 107
Camps, emergency, 66-68
Casualties, 58-61, 213-14
Extent of, 47, 52-54
Fire, 54-57

Gifts from abroad, 215-16
Images, fate of, 118-21, 124
Losses, material, 56, 217-18
Medical precautions, 94 iff.
News of, 44, 213
Processions, penitential,

122

Prophecies, 115-18
Recovery measures, 79 ff.
Re-planning, 84
Seismic waves, 57-58
Trade, effect on, 84 ff.
Lobb, Theophilus, 31, 32
London, Bishop of; see Sher-
lock, Thomas

Macaulay, Rose, 250
Malagrida, Gabriel, 135 ff.,
163, 164

Index 253

Montessus de Ballore, F, de,

248
Moreira de Mendonga, J. J.,

58 n., 59, 71, 107-12, 247
Moreira de Mendon9a, V. A.,

94, non., 111-12
Morganti, Bento, 90, 110-11

Namier, Sir Lewis, 225 n.
Newcastle, Duke of, 40, 216,

221, 225 n.

Newman, Thomas, 31
Nieto, Isaac, 229 n.
Nifo y Cagigal, F. M., no n.,

in

Olazdvel y Olayzola, F. J. de,

124-25
Oliveira, Chevalier de, 57,

121 n., 155 ff.
Optimism, 41, 180 ff.
Ourique, Battle of, 129 ff.
Oxford, Bishop of; see Seeker,

Thomas

Patriarch, Cardinal, 65, 68-69,

7*, 73> 7 ? 80, 82, 122
Peckard, Peter, 238 n.
Pedegache; see Brandao Ivo

Manuel, Jose; see Patriarch, Pennington, Lady Sarah, 244

Cardinal

Masquerade, 41, 221, 243
Matos Sequeira, G. de, 67 n.,

247

Mexico, Archbishop of, 123
Moles, F. M., 109, 110
Molinism, 151 ff.

Pereira de Figueiredo, A., 71,
72, 74, 75 n., 81, 90-92,
162, 165

Pereira de Sousa, F. L., 52-53,
54 n., 247

Pickering, Roger, 26-27, 32

Pina e Mello, F. de, 171 ff.

254

The Lisbon Earthquake

Pombal, Marques de, 67,

72 ff., 136 ff., 157
Pompadour, Madame de, 222
Pompignon, Marquis de; see

Lefranc, J.-J.
Pope, Alexander, 35, 180, 181,

182, 202
Portal, Manuel, 63:8:.

Quakers, 233 n.
Quiller-Couch, Sir A., 244
Quita, D. dos Reis, 171

Racine, son of Louis Racine,

61, 192, 210

Reid, H. Fielding, 58 n., 249
Ribeiro Sanches, A. N., 94,

95-98

Richardson, Samuel, 29, 219
Roche, Juan Luis, 98 ff., 109
Rodrigues, A. Duarte, 156
Rohrer, B., 180 n.
Romaine, William, 230
Rondet, L.-E., 145 ff.
Rousseau, J.-J., 165, 166,

194-97

S. Jose, Antonio de, 125

S. Jose, Miguel de, 105, 106,

109

Sacramento, A. do, 126-29
Sampaio, Cardinal, 71, 115
Seeker, Thomas, 18, 26, 37.,

39

Seville, 99, 102 ff., 124 ff.
Sherlock, Thomas, 16-17, 39>

40, 221

Shower, John, 24
Silva, J. Alvares da, 92-93, 94-

95, non.

Silva, A. Vieira da, 248
Smith, John Athelstane; see

Carnota, Conde de
Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 25
Stukeley, William, 18-19, 28,

31, 32, 43, 101 n.

Theotonius, St., ii4n.
Trovao e Sousa, J. de O., 89,

90 n.
Tucker, Josiah, 217

Valadares e Sousa, J, X. de,

non.

Villaroel, Caspar de, 106
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 164,

179, 180 ff., 193, 194, 195,

201 ff.

Walford, A. E., 250

Walker, S., 229 n.

Walpole, Horace, 14, 28, 39,

213, 221, 222, 244

Warburton, William, 17, 23,

202 n., 224, 234-37
Watkin, R., 226 n. ? 227 n.
Webster, William, 229 n.
Wesley, John, 11, 226, #39-40

Index 255

Whiston, William, 21-23, 32, Winthrop, John, 219 n.

38, 40 Woerle, Hans, 248
Whiston Cliffs, 239

Whitefoord, Caleb, Son. Ximenez, Marquis de, 191,
White's Club, 38, 40, 221 192

Willey, Basil, 42, 181

Williams, Basil, 42 Zuiiiga, Juan de, 105, no n.

118691

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