Pedro VI

Pedro VI (Pedro Manuel Duarte Miguel, born 4 March 1998) is King of Portugal and, separately and in his own right, Emperor of Brazil. He acceded in 2027 at twenty-nine on the death of his grandfather Manuel II, who had reigned for fifty-two years. He is the youngest sovereign in Europe and the head of state of about two hundred and eleven million people, of whom eleven million live in the country he governs from.

He was not brought up to it. He was the second of three children of a prince who never reigned, in a family where the succession was expected to pass to his elder brother, and he spent nine years as an officer of the Portuguese navy in the reasonable belief that this was what he was going to do with his life. When his brother renounced in 2022 he asked to be allowed to finish his service and was allowed three more years of it. He gave up a submarine appointment in 2025 because the Palace finally told him he had to, and was King within eighteen months of leaving the sea.

Four months into the reign he had to exercise the only real power the Portuguese Crown holds, which is the appointment of a Prime Minister, in a Chamber where no party could govern and neither large bloc would serve under the other. He then did something no Portuguese sovereign had done, which was to explain in public exactly what he had done and why. He has given three interviews in a year, against the advice of a household he inherited from a man who gave four in fifty-two, and has used all three to teach the constitution rather than to discuss himself.

That is the shape of him. He is candid about the office to a degree that alarms his own court, and he is silent about his own life in a way that is beginning to be noticed. Both are the same instinct pointed in opposite directions.

Family and early life

A prince who was not going to reign

He was born at Lisbon on 4 March 1998, the second child and second son of Infante Duarte, the only son of Manuel II, and of a Brazilian mother whom Duarte had married five years earlier. His elder brother Miguel was three. His sister Isabel was born three years later.

The four given names are a family inventory rather than a programme. Pedro for the five kings of the name and for the emperors of Brazil; Manuel for the grandfather who was then twenty-three years into his reign; Duarte for his father; Miguel for his brother. Nobody choosing names for a second son in 1998 expected the first of them to become a regnal number.

The household in which he grew up was a working one rather than a court. Manuel II was King and lived at the Ajuda; Duarte and his family lived at a smaller property outside Lisbon and came in for occasions. The three children went to ordinary Portuguese schools, which was Duarte’s decision and had been his own experience, and were not required to undertake public engagements before adulthood.

His mother

The marriage was arranged in the loosest sense of the word. In the years after the Convention of Rio, when the two crowns had just come together and both chanceries were nervous about how little the Portuguese branch knew of Brazil, it was thought useful that the heir’s son should marry a Brazilian. He was introduced to several. He married one of them in 1993, and it was, by every account including his children’s, an entirely happy marriage.

She has never held a Portuguese title beyond her husband’s and has never sought one. She is the reason her second son is at ease in Rio, and the reason he speaks Brazilian Portuguese without either effort or self-consciousness when he chooses to, which no previous holder of both crowns has been able to do. She is popular in both countries in the particular way of somebody who has never given an interview and has never done anything to be criticised for.

After 2011 she raised three children alone. She is the single largest influence on the present King, she is understood to be the only person other than his brother whose advice he takes as a matter of course, and she does not appear in the court circular.

2011

Infante Duarte died in 2011 at fifty-two, of an illness of some months. Pedro was thirteen. Miguel was sixteen. Isabel was ten.

The death reordered the succession without anybody saying so out loud: Manuel II, then eighty-two, had outlived his only son, and the crown would now pass over a generation to a boy of sixteen. The Portuguese newspapers did the arithmetic at the time and then, in the way of Portuguese newspapers, left the family alone about it for the next eleven years.

What the death did to the three children is the thing the King has been most candid about, in the one part of the interviews that was not constitutional. He has described the following decade as the period in which the three of them became, in his phrase, a very small country with its own foreign policy. The closeness of the siblings, which is the most reliably reported fact about the present royal family, dates from 2011 and not from anything that happened afterwards.

The navy

The Escola Naval

He went to the Escola Naval at eighteen, in 2016, in the ordinary competitive entry and not by any arrangement, and there is no evidence that anybody in the family tried to arrange anything. A second son of a dead prince, with an elder brother in good health and a grandfather in his eighties, was about as far from the throne as a Braganza could be while still being one.

He was, by the accounts of everybody who served with him and by his own, straightforwardly happy. He was unbookish, physically confident, good at the practical parts and adequate at the theoretical ones, and he had no discernible interest in the constitutional position of anybody. The ease in public that is now remarked on in two countries is not a technique he was taught. It is what is left over from a young man who liked his job and his shipmates.

Nine years

He served in frigates and then in the Atlantic patrol work that is the Portuguese navy’s real business, and then asked for and got the submarine flotilla, which is the service’s smallest and most selective branch and which takes about the same number of officers a year as the Palace employs gardeners.

He was promoted lieutenant on the ordinary timetable. His confidential reports, which have not been published and which several people have described, are reportedly good without being exceptional in any way that would embarrass anybody. He was by 2024 in line for the second-in-command of a boat, which is the appointment that determines whether a Portuguese submarine officer will eventually command one.

The flotilla has never got over losing him, and says so more often than is quite proper.

The three years

Miguel renounced in 2022. Pedro was twenty-four and at sea.

The conventional thing, and the thing the household expected, was that he would come ashore immediately. He did not. He asked to be allowed to complete his service, argued it at some length, and was granted three more years by his grandfather, over the objection of most of the people whose business it was to object. The argument he made, which he has since repeated in public, was that he would be doing the other job for fifty years and this one for three.

He gave up the submarine appointment in 2025 and left the navy, because by then the Palace had stopped asking and started telling, and because he had come to accept that an heir presumptive who might be called at any hour could not be under the sea for eight weeks at a time. He was twenty-seven. He had eighteen months of ordinary royal apprenticeship before he was King.

Those three years are the most revealing thing he has ever done. They are the only occasion on which he is known to have fought the institution, they are the reason the navy regards him as one of its own rather than as a distinguished visitor, and they are why the phrase used about him in Portugal is that he did not want it, which is generally said with approval.

Miguel

The renunciation

Infante Miguel renounced his rights in 2022, at twenty-seven, on the ground of a chronic condition diagnosed some years earlier. He renounced for himself alone and not for any line of his.

What was unusual was not the renunciation but the announcement. The family named the condition, described its course, and said plainly that it made the duties of the office impossible to guarantee over a lifetime. There was no formula about private matters and no request that the subject be dropped.

What Miguel became

He then did the thing nobody expected, which was to make it his subject. He speaks about the condition publicly, campaigns on diagnosis and on the employment of people who have it, chairs a foundation, and gives a great many more interviews than his brother does.

He is a more visible figure in Portugal than the King. This is a genuine inversion and Portugal finds it delightful: the brother who gave up the crown is the famous one, and the one who took it is the one you have to look for. Neither of them has ever shown the slightest sign of minding.

The fixed day

The King goes to see him most weeks, on a fixed day, at the house outside Lisbon where Miguel lives with his family. It does not appear in the court circular. The Portuguese press knows about it, has known for six years, and does not follow, which is the single clearest illustration of how the Portuguese press works and of what it considers itself to be for.

It is also where a good deal of the thinking gets done. Miguel is the King’s only private adviser, in the sense of being the only person who talks to him about the office with no institutional interest in the answer, and the only one who was trained for it and then handed it back. Portuguese political journalists are aware of this, find it the most interesting fact in Portuguese public life, and have never been able to report a word of it.

Manuel II

Warm and unserious

The relationship with his grandfather was affectionate and taught him nothing.

Manuel II had acceded in 1975 and was ninety when Miguel renounced. He was fond of all three grandchildren in the manner of a very old man who has outlived his own son, he was pleased when Pedro joined the navy, and he was the one who granted the three extra years. What he did not do was train him, because he had spent thirty years expecting Miguel to succeed and then, having lost that expectation at ninety, appears to have expected to outlive the problem.

He nearly did. He died in the fifty-second year of his reign, at ninety-eight, having been King since before Pedro’s father was old enough to vote.

What he did not teach

The consequence is that the smoothness of the accession is not explained by preparation, because there was very little. Pedro VI learned the office from officials, from the papers, from his brother and from a short and intensive reading list he set himself, and there are officials who will say, carefully, that the gaps were visible in the first months and that some of them have not closed.

This matters to the reading of the appointment in November 2027, because the defence of what he did there has always been that it was the conventional act correctly performed. A sovereign who had been trained by his predecessor could have relied on that. One who had not had to work it out.

The last years

The monarchy shrank to fit its occupant, as monarchies do around the very old. In the last decade of the reign Manuel II undertook few engagements, travelled almost not at all, and went to Brazil twice in fifteen years. A great many Portuguese towns had not seen a sovereign since the 1990s and a great many Brazilian cities had never seen one.

The public half of the job therefore arrived on the new King’s desk as a backlog, and rebuilding it has been most of what his first year has actually consisted of.

The accession

The proclamation

He was proclaimed at the Ajuda on the day of his grandfather’s death and swore the oath before both chambers of the Cortes Gerais four days later, to observe the Constitution and the laws of the Kingdom. There was no coronation, because Portugal does not have them: the crown exists, is kept at the Ajuda, and has not been worn by anybody since 1646.

The uniform

He took the oath in the naval uniform of a lieutenant.

He was entitled to it, it was correct in every particular, and he had not worn it for two years. There was no statement about it and there has never been one. Every newspaper in Portugal noticed, most of them on the front page, and the general reading, which the Palace has never confirmed or denied, was that a man who had been told to give something up had found a way of saying so once, in public, without saying anything at all.

The submarine flotilla’s officers’ mess has a photograph of it.

The funeral

Then a state funeral for a reign of fifty-two years, which is a thing no living Portuguese official had organised and for which the written procedure ran to instructions last used in 1975.

Manuel II lay at the Ajuda and then at the Jeronimos, and was buried at the Braganza pantheon at Sao Vicente de Fora with his father and his grandfather. The turnout was very large and largely elderly, for the reason that a substantial majority of Portuguese had never known another king and a good proportion of the ones who came had been alive in 1975 and remembered doing it before.

The new King walked, did not speak, and was photographed once at the graveside in a way that the Portuguese press printed and the Brazilian press printed larger. The Viceroy of Brazil attended, which the Convention of Rio does not require and which was noticed in both countries as a courtesy rather than an obligation.

The first four months

Then a great many people to receive and the ordinary business of a new sovereign learning which papers matter. He was quiet, correct and almost invisible, and the assessment in Lisbon by the autumn was that he was a pleasant young man of no particular consequence who would grow into the job over twenty years.

The assessment was six weeks old when the election was called.

The appointment

November 2027

The general election returned a Chamber of Deputies in which the two large blocs were each some way short, the smaller parties would not combine with either on the terms offered, and neither of the two large parties would serve under the other.

The Portuguese Crown’s one substantive power is the appointment of the Prime Minister, and it is a real one precisely because the proportional system introduced in the settlement of 1908 has never produced a single-party majority. It had been exercised meaningfully perhaps a dozen times in a century. It now had to be exercised by a man who had been a naval officer three years earlier, in the fourth month of his reign, with two countries watching.

The twelve days

He took twelve days, which is long by Portuguese standards and was itself criticised.

The first round of audiences established what everybody already knew: the centre-right had the most seats and could not reach a majority; the centre-left was a dozen behind and could not either; the agrarians would go with the centre-right and were not enough; the left bloc would go with the centre-left and was not enough either; and the liberals, with twelve seats, could complete either combination and had said publicly before the election that they would not serve under a prime minister from either large party.

The conventional resolution would have been for one of the two large parties to abstain and let the other govern as a minority. Both were asked and both declined, in writing, which is the detail that decided everything that followed, because it converted a political impasse into an arithmetical one.

The second round of audiences was about what each leader could actually demonstrate. The King asked each of them the same question, which was whether they could produce, in writing, the signatures of a majority of the Chamber. Four of them could not. The leader of the liberal party could, because both large parties had separately signed an undertaking to support a liberal-led government on confidence and supply while refusing to support each other’s, which each had done believing it was the cheaper of two humiliations.

He also saw a number of people who held no office at all: two former prime ministers, the President of the Chamber of Peers, and the presiding judge of the Constitutional Court, whom he consulted on the propriety of the procedure rather than on its outcome and who declined to advise on either, correctly.

The appointment

He then sent for the leader of the small liberal party, a man of exactly his own age whose party holds about twelve seats, because that was the only person in the Chamber who could demonstrate a majority.

The method

The act was entirely conventional. The Crown sends for whoever can command the Chamber; the arithmetic said that this was the only person who could; the appointment followed. What was not conventional was the outcome, which was that the smallest party in the Chamber took the premiership, and that a twenty-nine-year-old king had appointed a twenty-nine-year-old prime minister who had come fifth.

The opposition’s charge was that he had chosen rather than found. The answer, which the Palace has given repeatedly since, is that the arithmetic was public, that every party had seen it, and that a sovereign who had sent for anybody else would have been choosing.

The argument

He was attacked for it for about six months and has never answered an attack directly. He has answered the question a great many times, which is not the same thing, and the distinction is the method of his reign.

The attack that had force was not that he had chosen wrongly but that he had chosen at all, and it came from people who argued that a sovereign faced with an undemonstrable majority should have sent the Chamber back to the country rather than resolve it himself. The answer to that, which the Palace gave once and has not repeated, is that a dissolution four weeks after a general election is a thing the Crown may do only on the advice of a Prime Minister, that there was no Prime Minister to advise it, and that a King who dissolved a Chamber on his own initiative in order to avoid appointing somebody would have been exercising a far larger power than the one he was accused of using.

That answer is correct and it did not entirely settle the matter, because the underlying complaint was never really constitutional. It was that the smallest party in the Chamber had ended up leading the country, which is a complaint about proportional representation, and which the settlement of 1908 answered a hundred and twenty years ago by deciding that this was a price worth paying.

The office

What he actually holds

The appointment is the whole of it.

Everything else the Portuguese Crown does, it does on advice and has done since 1908: he assents to legislation and has no power to refuse; he dissolves the Cortes when a Prime Minister asks him to; he appoints ministers, ambassadors, judges and officers on nomination; he commands the armed forces and exercises no command; he exercises the prerogative of mercy on the advice of the Minister of Justice; he ratifies treaties the Cortes has approved. He may not legislate, initiate, veto, or express a view.

He receives the Prime Minister weekly and may say anything he likes in that room, and what he says there has no force whatever and does not leave it. This is the sum of the influence attaching to the office, and it is worth less than the equivalent in most European monarchies for the simple reason that Portuguese governments are coalitions with short horizons and a king of thirty is not the most experienced person in the room.

The forms that were never abolished

The reason the office survived the twentieth century is that nobody ever got round to removing it. The machinery of 1908 was preserved through the forty years of the Long Ministry in which it did almost nothing, because Salazar governed by decree through a Cortes that met and voted and never assembled a majority against him, and he had no need to abolish forms that were not obstructing him.

The Constitution of 1970 then carried those forms over almost clause for clause. So the powers Pedro VI holds are the powers Carlos I conceded himself down to in 1908, unamended in substance for a hundred and twenty years, and the continuity is the point rather than an accident.

The Cortes

He opens the Cortes at the start of each legislature and reads a speech the government has written, which he has described in public as the one part of the job that is entirely theatre and which he performs without visible enthusiasm.

He has attended the Chamber of Peers once as an observer, which is permitted, unusual, and was interpreted by everybody as a courtesy to a chamber that does the Kingdom’s detailed legislative work and receives no attention for it.

The interviews

Three in a year

Manuel II gave four interviews in fifty-two years. Pedro VI gave three in his first twelve months.

His stated reason is that a modern monarchy which declines to explain itself will not survive being explained by other people. He has said that the office is small, defensible and easily misunderstood, and that the misunderstanding is the danger rather than the office.

What he explains

The interviews are not about him. They are about the constitution, and they are unexpectedly good.

He has explained what the appointment power is and where it comes from; why the Chamber of 1908 produces the arithmetic that makes it real; what he did in the twelve days of November 2027 and in what order; what he would have done had two people been able to demonstrate a majority; and what he will not do under any circumstances, which is a list he has given in public and which includes refusing assent, declining a dissolution requested by a Prime Minister with a majority, and expressing a view on any matter before the Cortes.

Portuguese constitutional lawyers have found the third interview in particular more useful than most of the academic literature, which several of them have said in print with visible irritation.

The three

The first, in December 2027, was given to a Lisbon daily three weeks after the appointment and was largely a narrative: what he had been asked, whom he had seen, in what order, and why twelve days. It was received as an explanation and was, by the standards of what followed, cautious.

The second, in the spring, was the one the chancery formally objected to in advance, and it is the one that contains the list. Asked what he would do if a Prime Minister with a majority requested a dissolution he thought unwise, he said that he would grant it. Asked what he would do if the Cortes passed a bill he thought wrong, he said that he would sign it. Asked whether there were circumstances in which he would refuse, he said that he could not construct one that did not amount to the Crown deciding a question the country had already decided, and that if such a circumstance existed he would rather meet it without having spent twenty years hinting that he might.

The third, given to a Brazilian broadcaster in the autumn, was the most substantial and the least reported in Portugal. It covers the union, the Viceroy, the ordinal, and the limits of what an absent emperor can properly do, and it is the only occasion on which he has discussed the Brazilian half of his position at any length. It is also, in the judgement of most people who have watched all three, the one in which he is least at ease.

What the court thinks

The household thinks it is a mistake, and the household is not stupid. The objection is the traditional one and it is serious: a power that everybody understands is a power that everybody can argue about, and a sovereign who has publicly enumerated what he will not do has given away the only thing a reserve power has, which is uncertainty about its extent.

The chancery at Necessidades put this to him formally before the second interview. He read it, thanked them, and went ahead.

Whether it worked

On the evidence of one year, it worked.

The November appointment stopped being a scandal at almost exactly the point at which people understood that it had been the only lawful option available. The argument moved from what the King had done to what the electoral system produces, which is where the argument belongs and where it has stayed. The Crown’s approval in Portugal, which is not high or low but simply steady and has been for decades, did not move.

The household’s objection has not been answered so much as postponed. It will be tested the first time he has to do something that cannot be explained.

The household

He inherited his grandfather’s court and has not replaced it.

They are professional, they are mostly over sixty, and they were formed in fifty-two years of serving a sovereign who did almost nothing in public and explained none of it. They disapprove of the interviews, of the travel, of the publication of the estate accounts, and of the days at sea.

He has sacked nobody. He is instead outlasting them, politely, by appointing his own people to new posts rather than to occupied ones and by waiting for retirements, of which there will be a great many in the next five years. It is characteristic and it is also a failure of nerve, and both readings are current in Lisbon.

The household divides in practice into two things that are not the same. The private office at the Ajuda handles the diary, the correspondence and the press, and is where the new appointments have gone; it is younger than it was and includes two people he served with. The chancery at Necessidades handles the constitutional business, the audiences, the instruments and the archive, and is very old indeed in both senses. It is the chancery that objected to the second interview, and the chancery’s institutional memory is genuinely valuable, because it is the only part of the Portuguese state that has handled a contested appointment before and written down what happened.

The Ajuda

He lives at the Palace of Ajuda, which his grandfather lived in for fifty-two years and his great-grandfather before that, and which is the most conspicuous building in Portugal for a reason that has nothing to do with its architecture: it was begun after the earthquake, left half-built for most of the nineteenth century when the money ran out, and completed in the twentieth by a monarchy that had not fallen. Every other European capital has an unfinished royal palace or a museum. Lisbon has a finished one with somebody in it.

He has changed almost nothing about it, which the household approves of and which is the one point on which they and he agree without discussion. The state rooms are as they were. The private apartments are those his grandfather used, which has been remarked on, because a man of thirty living in the rooms of a man who died at ninety-eight is a slightly odd thing and he has given no reason for it.

The crown of Portugal is kept there and is brought out for the accession and for the lying in state, and is placed on a cushion beside the sovereign and not on him. John IV laid it before an image of the Virgin in 1646 and declared her queen of Portugal on the understanding that no mortal monarch would wear it afterwards, and every Braganza since has kept to that, including several who kept to very little else.

Necessidades is the chancery and the working office and he is there most mornings. Queluz receives state visits and is otherwise open to the public. The Crown also holds the estates in the Alentejo that pay for all of it, and he goes there, and it is the only place he is ever photographed not wearing a tie.

Method

Openness as policy

The pattern is consistent and it is deliberate. He explains the office. He publishes more than he is asked to. He answers the constitutional question however many times it is put. He treats the Portuguese public as capable of understanding an arrangement that is, in fact, not very complicated.

The locked room

And he says nothing whatever about himself.

Not evasively; that is the strange part. He is warm, he is funny in a dry way, he answers the question in front of him, and at the end of two hours nobody has learned anything about what he thinks or wants or feels about any of it. He is, in the standard Portuguese formulation, the most open man in Europe and the least known.

What he is like

Tall, sunburnt from a career spent outdoors, and handsome in a way the Portuguese and Brazilian press will not stop mentioning, which he finds tedious and which is a considerable part of why two countries speculate about his marriage. He has the particular ease of somebody who has been shouted at professionally and did not mind. People who meet him expecting grandeur get competence, and report themselves pleased.

The Prime Minister

They are the same age. One appointed the other. They meet on a fixed evening each week and the relationship is correct, careful and entirely without warmth in public.

This is not coldness on either side. It is that two men of twenty-nine, one of whom owes the other his office, are both acutely aware that any visible friendship between them would be reported within the week as a court party, and that the charge would be extremely difficult to answer. The formality is armour and both of them know it is armour.

What passes between them is not known and both households are professional about it.

Infanta Isabel

Infanta Isabel, Duchess of Braganza, is heir presumptive to both crowns. She is in her twenties, she was born in the years after the Convention of Rio, and she was named for Empress Isabel II of Brazil, whose death without issue in 1986 brought the two crowns together in the first place.

She is much the more visible of the two. She does the engagements he cannot, she does a great deal of the work in Brazil, and she is, by common agreement including her brother’s, the better politician of the two. She is easier with crowds, better on a platform, and considerably more willing to be liked.

There is no rivalry, and the reason is simple: neither of them wanted any of it, and they both know exactly what the other one gave up. He relies on her. She has never been reported to have complained about it.

Brazil

The Emperor

He is Emperor of Brazil, of the Empire of Brazil, a title the house has held since the founding of the empire, and he exercises none of it in person. The Viceroy, elected by the Brazilian legislature and confirmed by the Emperor, does the constitutional work; the Emperor visits twice a year; and the Viceroy meets him at the aircraft and formally hands back the state for the duration of the visit, resuming it when he leaves.

Why it has gone better than expected

Because of his mother.

The Convention of Rio was negotiated in 1986 by a Brazil that had considered abolishing the monarchy instead, and the resentments it settled were real. The largest of them is the ordinal: Brazil had had a Pedro I and a Pedro II of its own, and in 1986 it adopted the Portuguese numbering as the price of continuity, which a substantial minority has never accepted.

The man who arrived in 2027 is half Brazilian. He has family in Rio, he spent long childhood periods there, and he speaks like it when he wants to. Brazilians who spent forty years objecting to a Portuguese emperor have found it unexpectedly difficult to object to this one, and the ordinal argument, which had been a reliable annual fixture in the Brazilian press, has been noticeably quieter since he acceded.

He has never said anything about the union’s purpose. Asked the constitutional question in Brazil, he gives a family answer, which is charming and is not an answer, and which is the second of his failings.

The progresses

He has made two in the first year of the reign, and between them they took eleven weeks.

The pattern is fixed by the Convention of Rio and by forty years of practice. The Viceroy meets him at the aircraft and hands back the state in a formula of about forty words; the Emperor is then the Emperor until he leaves; and at no point does he do anything the Viceroy could not have done, because the entire architecture of 1986 exists to ensure that a country of two hundred million is not governed at the convenience of a country of eleven.

What he actually does is travel. The first progress was the capitals and the second was deliberately not: Manaus, Belem, the interior of the north-east, and a great many places that had never seen a sovereign because his grandfather had been ninety. The crowds were very large. The Brazilian press, which had spent forty years covering the union as a constitutional curiosity, covered the second progress as a tour.

The Viceroy

The relationship with the Viceroy is the one piece of his position for which there is no precedent he can consult, because every previous holder of both crowns dealt with a Viceroy as an old man deals with a contemporary and he deals with one as a man of thirty deals with somebody at the end of a distinguished career.

By all accounts it works, on the basis that the Viceroy governs and the Emperor does not, and that both of them find this entirely satisfactory. The Viceroy attended Manuel II’s funeral, which was not required. The Emperor has twice declined invitations to do things in Brazil that would have been perfectly lawful and would have looked like governing.

The marriage question

What ended

There was a relationship of several years and it ended in the months around the accession.

Lisbon knows this. Nothing has been printed, no name has appeared, and the Register follows the Portuguese press in not naming her. What can be said is that the thing that ended it was the accession, that this is understood by everybody who knows anything about it, and that it is the most plausible available explanation for the containment of a man who by every account of his twenties was not a contained person.

The speculation

He is unmarried and the press of two countries has been relentless about it for a year. Candidates are produced at intervals and are uniformly invented. He finds it funny. His sister, on whom the succession rests while it continues, finds it markedly less so.

The succession

The heir presumptive is his sister, which is constitutionally tidy and has been so since both countries reformed to absolute primogeniture in the 1980s. There is no crisis and there will not be one for many years. There is, however, an arithmetic that gets more attention each year he remains unmarried, and it is the one subject on which he has declined to say anything at all, including in the interviews.

The navy now

He is commander of the armed forces and he is a sailor about it, which he tries and generally fails to conceal.

The promotion

He is a captain, and he did not earn it.

The rank came with the crown. A sovereign who commands the armed forces cannot remain a lieutenant, and the promotion on accession is a convention of every service in Europe that has a monarch at the top of it; the instrument was drawn up by the ministry within the week, signed on advice, and nobody consulted him about it in any meaningful sense.

He has never once referred to it. His officers understand exactly what it is, which is why the flotilla goes on calling him by the rank he actually held in the mess and in private, and why nobody on the Portuguese navy list has ever described him as anything but a lieutenant when not obliged to.

The irony is not lost on anybody. He spent three years fighting his own family to remain a serving officer, lost, came ashore, and was then handed in a single afternoon four rings he had not been to sea for. It is the neatest illustration available of what the office does to a person, and it is the one subject on which he and his brother are reliably reported to be funny in private and silent in public.

The state portrait shows the captain’s rings. The accession oath, four days into the reign and before the instrument was signed, showed two.

Going to sea is his one indulgence. He does it two or three days a year, aboard whatever is available and increasingly aboard submarines. The Palace tried to stop it in the first year and has given up. The newspapers love it. The security people do not, and say so.

He wears naval uniform by preference on occasions where uniform is worn at all, which is correct and is also noticed. The other two services have not complained, on the reasonable ground that in a country whose entire military identity is the Atlantic, a sovereign who is a submariner is not obviously a problem.

His time with the Royal Navy as a young officer, which Portuguese officers routinely do, has given the alliance of 1386 the least ceremonial content it has had in a generation: the King of Portugal has friends of that professional kind in the service of another country, and the two navies have noticed.

Money

The Portuguese Crown pays for itself. The Braganza patrimony was never confiscated because there was never a republic to confiscate it, and it consists of agricultural estates in the Alentejo, cork oak, pine and property in Lisbon. The Crown pays tax on all of it. The state pays for security, the aircraft and official travel, and publishes those accounts.

He inherited all of this at twenty-nine and immediately did something nobody had asked for: he extended the published accounts to cover the private estates as well.

The household advised against it. The argument against was that the private money is private, that publishing it invites a permanent argument about why the head of state is one of the country’s larger landowners, and that once published it can never be unpublished. He published it anyway, and the argument the household predicted duly arrived and is now an annual fixture.

It is the same instinct as the interviews, and it is not obviously wiser.

Security

Portuguese royal protection is light by European standards, and the reason is 1908.

On 1 February of that year a group of men waited in the Terreiro do Paco to kill Carlos I and his heir, and the royal party was twenty minutes late, and everybody lived. Portugal concluded from this, over the following decades and without ever quite writing it down, that the lesson of the Terreiro do Paco was that the King had lived rather than that he had nearly died.

The protection is real and it is deliberately unobtrusive, and Portuguese crowds get closer to their sovereign than any crowd in Europe. The assessment was reviewed on his accession, because a young unmarried sovereign is a different proposition from a man of ninety-eight, and was not materially changed.

Brazilian protection operates on entirely different assumptions, and the contrast between how he moves in Lisbon and how he moves in Rio is the most visible difference between his two lives.

Religion

He is culturally Catholic and not much more, which is entirely typical of Portuguese people of his age and which he has said so freely that older Portuguese found it startling.

The Church in Portugal is established in name and dead in practice, the accession involves no religious oath, and the King’s style is His Most Faithful Majesty by a papal grant of 1748 that the Kingdom has never relinquished and that has no content whatever. He keeps Christmas, attends funerals, turns up at the great saints’ days in June because they are street festivals rather than observances, and has declined to say more than that.

Abroad

Great Britain is the oldest connection and the warmest, and he has the professional link to it that his predecessors did not.

Spain is close, and the Spanish royal family’s debt to Portugal, which is that a pretender was allowed to publish from Lisbon for thirty years while the Montero regime lasted, is acknowledged at every state visit and has never been collected. He has continued that exactly.

The Lusophone Community takes a disproportionate share of his time because Portugal chairs it by courtesy and because he is the only head of state the whole community shares any connection with. He goes to the summits and says very little at them.

The United Kingdom of America is correct and unremarkable, which the Portugal article says and which is true of the personal relationship as well.

The African members of the Community are the part of the foreign work he has been least prepared for and has taken most seriously. Portugal left Africa in the 1950s by negotiation and without a war, which is why the relationships are good, and four centuries preceded the 1950s, which is why they are not simple. He has been to Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde in a year, which is more than his grandfather managed in fifteen, and has said almost nothing on any of the three visits beyond what was on the paper in front of him. Officials on both sides describe this as sensible for a man of thirty in his first year and as something that cannot go on indefinitely.

The two national days

Portugal keeps two, as it keeps two flags, and the sovereign has to be in two places.

1 December, the Day of the Restoration, is the Kingdom’s own and belongs to the Crown and the forces: the proclamation of John IV in 1640, the end of the sixty years of Spanish kings, and the beginning of the house he belongs to. He keeps it in Portugal and always will.

10 June, the Day of Portugal and of the Portuguese Communities, marks the death of Camoes and belongs to the language rather than to the state. It is kept wherever Portuguese is spoken, which is a great many places, and the convention is that the sovereign spends it abroad about half the time. He kept his first one at Lisbon and his second in Brazil, which was read in Rio as a decision and was, and about which the Palace has said nothing.

Sport

He attends the Portugal against Brazil fixture, which is played every few years and is the only football match on earth at which both sides share a head of state. A quarter of a billion people watch it. The protocol, which was settled in the 1990s and has never been improved on, requires him to sit in a neutral box, wear the colours of neither, and look at neither end when either scores.

He has done this once. He is by all accounts genuinely and inconveniently a supporter of one of the two, and the single most widely repeated story about his first year is that the camera caught him for about a fifth of a second when Brazil equalised and that the Portuguese and Brazilian press reached opposite conclusions about what his face had done.

His mother now

She is living, she is in her sixties, and she has no constitutional position of any kind. She is not Queen Mother, because her husband never reigned, and Portugal has never settled on what to call her beyond her husband’s title, which is the sort of thing the chancery finds restful.

She divides her year between Portugal and Brazil, appears at family occasions and at a small number of causes she has kept for thirty years, and has still never given an interview. Her second son sees her constantly and takes her advice, which is the nearest thing to an open secret in the Portuguese court, and she is understood to have been against the interviews and to have been overruled.

The islands

The Azores and Madeira stand in a relation to the Crown that no mainland district does: they are federal units with their own assemblies, governments and courts, and their competences are beyond the reach of ordinary legislation. Constitutionally this changes nothing about what the King does, since he acts on advice in both of them exactly as on the mainland.

In practice it means that island engagements are a different kind of work. He opens the two assemblies, which he is not obliged to do and which his grandfather stopped doing in the 1990s, and the resumption was the first thing he did that was noticed as a choice rather than a duty.

He is also a naval officer in a country whose islands are a thousand and fifteen hundred kilometres out in the Atlantic, and the Azorean reception of him has consequently been warmer than anything he gets on the mainland. He has been to Lajes twice, which is national rather than island territory and is the single largest source of friction between the archipelago and Lisbon, and has said nothing about it either time, correctly.

Before him

The Portuguese Crown he inherited is the one Carlos I designed for himself in 1908, and the four reigns since have used it in three different ways.

Carlos I (1889 to 1938) conceded it, survived an assassination attempt because his carriage was late, gave away proportional representation and a second national flag, and spent thirty years demonstrating that a monarch who had voluntarily reduced himself was very difficult to attack. He also appointed Salazar, which is the act his reputation has never quite recovered from.

Luis Filipe I (1938 to 1975) reigned through the whole of the Long Ministry and the Second Great War, restrained Salazar privately and constantly, and never once declined to reappoint him. The royal archives for the period were opened in the 1990s and the restraint is documented and real; so is the reappointment, and the argument between those two facts is the central argument of modern Portuguese constitutional history.

Manuel II (1975 to 2027) reigned longer than the other two combined, over the whole of the democratic period, the Convention of Rio and the return of Macau, and did almost nothing in public for the last fifteen years of it because he was extremely old. His reign is generally assessed as successful and almost entirely uneventful, which in Portugal is the same sentence.

Pedro VI has had one year, has exercised the one power the office holds, and has begun explaining it. Whether that is a fourth way of using the Crown or simply a young man talking will not be known for a decade.

In the press

The Portuguese press treats the monarchy with a restraint that foreign correspondents find inexplicable and that has a specific historical cause: the Long Ministry never censored anybody, so the Portuguese press has no folk memory of being silenced and no compensating appetite for revenge. It is free, it is old, it is not deferential, and it has simply decided which things are its business.

The King’s public acts are its business, and the 2027 appointment was covered exhaustively and largely critically. His brother is his own subject and gives his own interviews. The fixed day is not printed. The relationship that ended is not printed. His mother is left alone.

The Brazilian press operates on no such understanding, covers him as a celebrity, and prints all of it. The two coverages are available to the same readers, which is a problem nobody has solved and which the Palace’s press office, staffed by people formed under a sovereign who never gave interviews, is not well equipped for.

A working day

Boxes at Necessidades every morning, which he reads properly and about which his officials are unanimous. The Prime Minister on a fixed evening each week. Three or four public days, which is a great many more than his grandfather managed in the last decade and which is slowly overwhelming a household built for a slower reign.

And one day a week which does not appear in the court circular, on which he drives himself out of Lisbon to see his brother.

What his officials say

They are, on the record, uniformly complimentary and therefore useless. Off it, three things recur.

The first is that he reads everything, properly, and asks about the parts that do not make sense, and that this was not true of the last decade of the previous reign for entirely forgivable reasons and is a considerable change in the working atmosphere at Necessidades.

The second is that he is much harder to advise than he looks. He listens carefully, thanks people sincerely, and then does what he was going to do. The chancery’s note before the second interview is the documented instance; officials say it is not the only one, and that the courtesy makes the immovability difficult to argue with.

The third is that nobody knows what he thinks, including people who see him five days a week and have done for a year. The word used most often is a Portuguese one that translates badly and means something between contained and sealed, and it is said with more unease than affection.

The succession

The heir presumptive is his sister. After her, the line runs through the descendants of Manuel II in the ordinary way, and there is no shortage of them and no prospect of a vacancy.

The arithmetic that gets attention is narrower than that. Both crowns are held together only for as long as the two successions run in step, and they run in step because both countries reformed to absolute primogeniture in the 1980s and neither may amend its law unilaterally without engaging the machinery of the Convention of Rio. A King who marries and has children resolves a question for a generation. A King who does not leaves the union resting, for as long as he reigns, on a single life and a sister in her twenties.

Nobody in either country regards this as urgent and everybody in both countries can do the sum. He has declined to discuss it, including in the interviews, which is the one place where his method of answering the constitutional question however often it is asked has a visible exception.

The failings

He explains everything except himself

This is the real one, and it will be the charge against him eventually.

He has built a method out of transparency: the office explained, the accounts published, the question answered however often it is asked. In the middle of it is a locked room, and the contents of the locked room are the only things anybody actually wants to know. A sovereign whose entire public argument is that the Crown should be legible has a difficulty, in the long run, in being the one thing about it that is not.

At present this reads as dignity. It will not always.

Brazil

He has no articulated position on what the union is for. He is popular there, he is half of it, and asked the constitutional question he answers with his family. Two hundred million people are entitled to something better, and at some point in the reign somebody is going to say so in terms.

The household

He inherited people he cannot manage and is managing them by waiting. It is kind, it is characteristic, and it is costing him.

The reign is one year old

And the honest finding is that there is not yet enough to assess. The Portugal article says as much and this one says it again.

What he wants

He does not know, and he has said so in public, which is either refreshing or alarming depending on who is asked.

He was a lieutenant in 2025. Asked in the third interview what he wanted the reign to be, he said that he had been doing the job for a year, that anybody who had decided what to do with fifty of them after one was not to be trusted, and that he would rather answer the question later and mean it.

His officials, who would like an answer, report that this is not a pose.

Assessment

The first year has been better than anybody expected and the expectations were low, which is the most that can honestly be said after twelve months.

What can be said with more confidence is what kind of sovereign he is trying to be. Portugal’s Crown survived the twentieth century by being useless in a particular and deliberate way: the forms of 1908 were preserved through forty years in which they did almost nothing, and they were still there when they were needed. The temptation for a young King with one real power and a great deal of popularity is to find more to do. He has spent a year conspicuously not doing that, and the quietness is a policy rather than a temperament.

Against that, the one thing he has changed is significant. A Crown that explains itself is a different Crown from one that does not, and the household’s objection is the right objection even if it has not yet been vindicated. The 1908 settlement worked partly because nobody looked at it very hard. Pedro VI has invited the country to look, on the theory that an arrangement this defensible can stand the inspection, and the theory has survived one test.

The rest of it is a man of thirty who lost his father at thirteen, fought his family for three more years at sea, lost the argument, lost a great deal else in the same year, and has been extremely good about all of it in public. Whether that is strength or a postponement is the question the reign will eventually answer, and it has not answered it yet.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Kingdom of Portugal, the unbroken monarchy he inherited and the settlement of 1908 that gave him his one real power
• Karl III, the other young sovereign of this Europe, who acceded on an abdication and has taken the opposite view of explaining himself
• Kingdom of Spain, whose royal house owes Portugal a debt that Lisbon has never collected
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain, the other party to the Treaty of Windsor, and the navy he trained with
• The European Concert, which Portugal joined at its founding in the year he acceded
• The Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose Atlantic sentry is the service he came from

Categories

People · World People · Monarchs · Portugal · Brazil