This is the biography of one of the most colourful and dashing young monarchs who ever lived. His shortcomings—impulsiveness, quick temper, weakness for women—were offset by his truly generous nature. He became a surprising liberal, the only reigning monarch to defy and outwit Metternich, “the evil genius of the reaction,” and he was at one time offered the thrones of Spain and Greece.
With a mad grandmother, a mother whose lovers and political intrigues were a court scandal, and a father who had little time to spare for his upbringing, Dom Pedro grew up in a dislocated family who had fled to the Portuguese colony of Brazil just before Napoleon’s armies overran the mother country. Formally uneducated, but brilliantly informed and acute, he separated the colony from Portugal and moulded it into a new nation, only to run counter to the still rising revolutionary tide and to abdicate his throne. Later he was to lead liberal-republican armies into Portugal itself and to secure the throne for his daughter, Maria da Gloria.
This exciting story is told as only an artist in words could tell it, with an accuracy of detail and a wealth of colour and emotion that give the book a unique place among recent biographies. Throughout its pages, Brazilian history is related against a larger background in which England, Austria, Greece, Russia, the United States and Spain played important roles.
Samuel Putnam, noted for his brilliant English version of Don Quixote, has translated the book into English.
