Sebastian of Portugal died unmarried and childless, aged twenty-four, at the battle of Alcazarquivir in 1578. His great-uncle Cardinal Henry, who took the throne briefly, was an understandably poor prospect for continuing the House of Beja, and when the aged celibate died in 1580 Philip II seized Portugal. Despite some opposition in favor of the illegitimate Prior of Crato the Portuguese grudgingly accepted this Hapsburg usurpation, but continued to hope for independence. As none of the few survivors of Alcazarquivir remembered seeing Sebastian die, a belief soon existed that he still lived and would presently return to reclaim his crown. This was Sebastianism, the Portuguese equivalent of the Hohenstaufen-Kyffhäuser legend.
After many decades Sebastian became endowed with physical immortality and belief in him took a new form, but during the years when he might normally still be living pretenders to his identity and throne appeared. Of the four who made some stir in history, Professor Brooks selected the one called Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry cook of Madrigal in Spain. Gabriel could behave like a person of quality and may indeed have been more highly born than his occupation suggested; beyond the fact that he was not Sebastian and in 1594-1595 was too old to pass close inspection as a pretender, no one today is sure of his identity. In the story also is Doña Ana, illegitimate daughter of the late Juan of Austria, thrust against her will into a convent and now believing Espinosa the rightful king of Portugal whom she expected to marry and thus exchange her habit for a crown. Perhaps most important of all is Fray Miguel dos Santos, seemingly the ringleader in the attempted Espinosa imposture. His motive may have been the patriotic, though Machiavellian, one of using the pastry cook to regain Portuguese independence on the death of the aging Philip II and then getting rid of him to enthrone the Prior of Crato. Professor Brooks skillfully reconstructs the characters and apparent aspirations of the guilty priest and baker, and the innocent Ana. She reveals the clever way in which the two males laid the groundwork and influenced people, though doing so rather by inference than by direct assertion. Finally comes their arrest, trial, torture and punishment; death for the men and deeper immersion in a convent for the woman.
This conspiracy has been described before, notably by Miguel D’Antas, but never with the detail and accuracy Professor Brooks now offers, her researches having included study of many unpublished documents in Spain and Portugal. An interesting concluding chapter reviews the treatment of the Madrigal episode in Spanish literature as well as the observation that it has curiously never interested Portuguese novelists and dramatists.
