Historical Note

The Baixa Conspiracy is a work of fiction built on a scaffold of documented fact, and readers sometimes want to know where one ends and the other begins. What follows is that account.

The earthquake itself needs no invention. It struck Lisbon at around 9:40 on the morning of All Saints' Day, 1 November 1755, while the city's churches were full for Mass — three shocks in ten minutes, fissures wide enough to swallow a horse, and then, forty minutes later, the sea itself withdrawing from the harbour before returning as a wave that drowned the crowds who had gone down to the exposed riverbed to gather up the fish and lost cargo lying in the mud. Fire did the rest, burning for the better part of a week. Between the earthquake, the tsunami and the fire, perhaps a third of the city's people died, and something close to all of it burned or fell. The Baixa — the low commercial quarter by the river, dense with counting-houses and warehouses and the modest fortunes of people like Henrique Vasconcelos — was the worst hit of all, and it is the ground this novel stands on, literally: the new grid that closes the book is the same grid you can walk today.

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo is real, and his rise is barely exaggerated. In November 1755 he held the comparatively modest title of Secretary of State — not yet Count of Oeiras, and not Marquis of Pombal for another fifteen years — which is why he is called "the Secretary" or "Carvalho" throughout this novel rather than by the name history remembers him by. Readers coming to the book expecting "Pombal" from the opening page are meeting him, correctly, before he had earned it. His apocryphal instruction on the day of the disaster — bury the dead, and feed the living — the parish questionnaire that asked only for facts and made no mention of God, the gallows built at the city's high points to deter looting, the army ringing Lisbon to press the able-bodied into clearance labour: all of this happened, substantially as described. So did his reconstruction of the Baixa as a rational grid of identical, earthquake-resistant buildings — one of the first purpose-built seismic-resistant urban plans in European history, and also, unmistakably, a mechanism of control: wide streets an army could move through, uniform façades that gave the old nobility nowhere to display its rank. Manuel da Maia, the elderly Chief Engineer who rode into the ruins to save the royal archives and who presented the four rebuilding options a month later — including the sweeping fourth option that was chosen — is drawn from the historical record with very little embellishment; so is Eugénio dos Santos, the plan's principal architect, who died in 1760 without seeing it finished.

The destruction of the Jesuits and the Távora family — the spine of the novel's second half — is the best-documented and least-settled part of this history. Carvalho's animus against the Society of Jesus predated the earthquake; Gabriel Malagrida's sermon attributing the disaster to divine punishment for Lisbon's sins gave him the pretext he needed, and the process against the Jesuits that followed, in which a newly appointed papal investigator delivered a guilty verdict within weeks of receiving his commission and without visiting a single Jesuit house, has the shape of a managed outcome whether or not it was engineered as one. The attack on King José's carriage on the night of 3 September 1758, as he returned from a visit to his mistress, the young Marquesa de Távora, is historical; so is the extraordinary tribunal that followed, empowered to use torture, and the executions of the Távora family and their alleged co-conspirators on 12 January 1759 — burned, broken on the wheel, or beheaded, depending on rank. Malagrida, tried separately because a priest could not be executed without the Inquisition's consent, was held for over two years in the Belém Tower dungeon — Carvalho installed his own brother as Grand Inquisitor to secure the conviction — and was garrotted and burned in 1761, the last person executed by the Portuguese Inquisition. Whether the Távoras were guilty of anything beyond being an obstacle to Carvalho's consolidation of power is a question historians still argue, and the novel's decision not to answer it is deliberate. The theory that Diogo, Croft and Teresa converge on — that the king was meant only to be wounded, and the attack used to destroy a rival faction — is not the novel's invention. It appears in the surviving English diplomatic correspondence of the period, reported as rumour at the time. This book treats it as a live possibility, which is exactly the status it has always had.

Against that history, three lives are invented. Diogo Mendonça, Edward Croft and Teresa Vasconcelos never existed; nor did the small conspiracy of expropriated leases and buried payments that binds their stories together, though the mechanisms it depends on — pre-earthquake land grabs re-legalised under cover of the reconstruction, Jesuit confessors serving as intermediaries between noble families and merchants, the general chaos of a court where nobody could quite prove what had been lost — are exactly the kind of arrangement 1750s Lisbon made possible, and the kind no surviving document happens to describe in full. Father Inácio Pereira is also invented, standing in for the network of confessors and go-betweens who did exist and whose private dealings, by their nature, left no trace for a novelist or a historian to find. John Bristow and Abraham Castres, the British merchant and envoy who move through Croft's chapters, are real; Bristow's ruin in the earthquake, his old personal loan to Carvalho from his ambassadorial years in London, and the British Factory's financial collapse are all documented.

The result, I hope, is a novel in which every character you could look up is telling something close to the truth, and every character you can't is telling the truth the record couldn't preserve.