HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 283

ance between the forces of the Left and the
Right until his death in 1826. His elder son,
who had remained in Brazil, chose to
become emperor of that newly independent
colony as P EDRO I and to pass the Portu-
guese crown to his daughter Maria da Glória
(M ARIA II). Pedro's brother, M IGUEL , backed
by Portuguese conservatives, insisted that a
female could not rule and claimed the suc-
cession for himself. He was appeased for a
time by Pedro's proposal to have him wed
Maria da Glória and exercise a regency dur-
ing her minority. By 1828, however, the
agreement had broken down, and the Tra-
ditionalists proclaimed their leader king, as
Miguel I, and forced Maria da Glória to flee
to Britain. Miguel's supporters (commonly
called Miguelites) included aristocratic,
clerical, and landowning interests and their
rural adherents, principally in the north. As
political, religious, cultural, and social con-
servatives, they were opposed to “modern-
ism” and the “atheism” that they perceived
rising up around them. Their political phi-
losophy centered on reversing whatever
change had come into the Iberian Penin-
sula as a result of the French Revolution,
particularly the democratic elements of the
constitution that had been forced upon
John VI. They shared these sentiments with
the nascent Carlist movement in Spain and
with reactionary factions in Vienna, Berlin,
St. Petersburg, and Rome, who also feared
a new wave of revolutionary disruption
throughout the Continent.
In 1831 Emperor Pedro yielded his throne
in Rio de Janeiro to his son and sailed for
Europe to take up his daughter's cause. The
Miguelite War that followed was waged by
the young queen's liberal adherents and the
allies whom her father rallied in Britain and
France with the aid of the newly installed

liberal governments there. They were
opposed by Miguel's loyalists, with some
indirect help from European conservative
governments. Liberal refugees had already
established a foothold in the A ZORES , where
Pedro found a warm welcome, and from
this archipelago he launched a series of
attacks against the Portuguese mainland.
Miguelite warships were defeated off Cape
St. Vincent by vessels flying the flag of Maria
II and manned by British crews on nominal
leave from the Royal Navy. O PORTO was
captured in 1832, and Lisbon fell the follow-
ing year. By 1834 Maria's advisers (her
father had died shortly before) won recog-
nition of her title. Their principal induce-
ment was a guarantee of existing rank and
privileges to Miguelite army officers and
pensions (although not existing jobs) to
Miguelite civil servants. Dom Miguel left the
country, but his descendants would main-
tain their pretensions to the throne through
the 20th century.
The Carlist uprising in Spain, which arose
from a similar conflict over male versus
female dynastic succession and antagonistic
sociopolitical philosophies, began just as the
Miguelite War was drawing to a close.
Although there was definite sympathy and
evidently some support exchanged between
Miguelites and Carlists, they represent par-
allel rather than intersecting movements in
the history of Iberian conservatism.

Millán Astray, José (1878-1954)
Spanish military officer
The career of Millán Astray, one of the most
famous Spanish soldiers of the 20th century,
began in 1896-97 when he served as a teen-
age lieutenant in the Philippine insurrection.
On the strength of his battlefield experience