al of Portalegre, where they are piled above
each other in three stories, huge and tall below, short and thinner
above, and in endless churches all over the country. Later still they
degenerated into mere angle strips, as in the cathedral of Angra do
Heroismo in the Azores and elsewhere.

Such a building as Santa Engracia is the real ending of Architecture in
Portugal, and its unfinished state is typical of the poverty which had
overtaken the country during the Spanish usurpation, when robbed of her
commerce by Holland and by England, united against her will to a
decaying power, she was unable to finish her last great work, while such
buildings as she did herself finish--for it must not be forgotten that
Mafra was designed by a foreigner--show a meanness of invention and
design scarcely to be equalled in any other land, a strange contrast to
the exuberance of fancy lavished on the buildings of a happier age.

CHAPTER XIX

THE RESTORATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

When elected at Thomar in 1580, Philip II. of Spain had sworn to govern
Portugal only through Portuguese ministers, a promise which he seems to
have kept. He was fully alive to the importance of commanding the mouth
of the Tagus and the splendid harbour of Lisbon, and had he fixed his
capital there instead of at Madrid it is quite possible that the two
countries might have remained united.

For sixty years the people endured the ever-growing oppression and
misgovernment. The duque de Lerma, minister to Philip III., or II. of
Portugal, and still more the Conde duque de Olivares under Philip IV.,
treated Portugal as if it were a conquered province.

In 1640, the very year in which Santa Engracia was begun, the regent was
Margaret of Savoy, whose ministers, with hardly an exception, were
Spaniards.

It will be remembered that when Philip II. was elected in 1580, Dona
Catharina, duchess of Braganza and daughter of Dom Manoel's sixth son,
Duarte, duke of Guimaraes, had been the real heir to the throne of her
uncle, the Cardinal King. Her Philip had bought off by a promise of the
sovereignty of Brazil, a promise which he never kept, and now in 1640
her grandson Dom Joao, eighth duke of Braganza and direct descendant of
Affonso, a bastard son of Dom Joao I., had succeeded to all her rights.

He was an unambitious and weak man, fond only of hunting and music, so
Olivares had thought it safe to restore to him his ancestral lands; and
to bind him still