Alvares de Nobrega (Francisco)

Francisco Alvares de Nobrega is today an almost entirely forgotten name, yet in his own time he enjoyed great renown as a poet and was even known by the epithet of Camões Pequeno (‘Little Camões’). Misfortune pursued him mercilessly from his earliest years to the tragic end of his troubled life. He was, in all truth, what is usually called an unhappy man, and it seems that not the faintest gleam of good fortune ever shone on him. Francisco Alvares de Nobrega was born in the parish (freguesia) of Machico, ‘in a poor, yes, but paternal home’, as he himself tells us in one of his sonnets. The distinguished Madeiran Jaime Moniz states that he discovered the certain date of the poet’s birth, which was 30 November 1772, while Januario de Nobrega assigns him the year 1773, without indication of the month and year. From an enrolment record (termo (municipal jurisdictional district, a subdivision of the comarca)) at the Funchal Seminary (Seminário do Funchal), which we had occasion to examine, we see that he was born on 30 November 1772, which corroborates the date given by Jaime Moniz; the record also states that he was the son of Domingos de Nobrega. Leaving his native parish, he came to this city, where he found employment in the drapery business of Marcos João de Ornelas, in whose house he received his first education, as he himself relates in one of his poems. It was there that his poetic gift revealed itself and he began to become known as an admired devotee of the Muses.

Through the patronage of Marcos de Ornelas, he was admitted as a pupil to the Diocesan Seminary, which was then housed in the College of São João Evangelista (St John the Evangelist) (Colégio de São João Evangelista). ‘There, as we have read somewhere, giving little attention to practical religious studies, he went on writing poems, some of them satirical, above all against Bishop Dom José da Costa Torres. By this way of life he earned the enmity of the prelate and of his superiors, and, caught up in the persecution the bishop waged against freemasonry, he was expelled from the seminary, taken to a dungeon and then sent to Lisbon, where he lay in prison for some time longer’.

It is known that Bishop Torres, acting on the instructions of the central government and backed by the governor of Madeira, waged a relentless persecution of the secret societies that had been organised in Madeira in the last quarter of the 18th century. This resulted in many arrests and in the clandestine embarkation of several individuals and their families on the night of 19 July 1792. The prelate went too far and committed acts of violence and arbitrariness, which forced him to leave this island in circumstances most humiliating to him. Francisco Alvares de Nobrega was caught in the meshes of this persecution, and even in Lisbon he continued to feel the persecuting hand of the Bishop weighing upon him.

The passage we have transcribed above seems to contradict what Januario de Nobrega writes, when he states that the poet completed his studies in Funchal and then went to Lisbon to pursue his career, and that he was imprisoned there as a result of the persecution that Dom José Torres continued to wage against him.

When he was transferred to Elvas, he was succeeded in this diocese by Bishop Dom Luís Rodrigues de Vilares, who became a devoted protector of Alvares de Nobrega and went to rescue him from the dungeons of the Limoeiro, where he lay. The poet refers to this with eloquent and heartfelt words on page eleven of his Rimas. We transcribe what his nephew says in the passage already cited:

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He was set free, but the rest of his life, save for brief intervals in which, as a poet, he went on gaining fame, was one long chain of misfortunes. An opponent of the fanaticism that then prevailed, he was persecuted by the Inquisition, languishing, like Bocage, in its prisons, and for a second time in the Limoeiro, from which he was released thanks to the fifteen famous sonnets with which he knew how to move the heart of the monarch. By this time he was already afflicted by the fatal disease that forbids its sufferer to offer a friend his hand or to mix with his fellow men. Weary of life, tired of struggling against adversity, enduring bitter anguish far from his own people amid painful privations, at the age of 34 he decided that he must cut the thread of his existence, carrying out what he had already revealed to his friend and benefactor Manuel José Moreira Pinto Baptista. In the silence of the night he raised his own bier; he surrounded himself with the books to which he devoted his long sleepless hours, placed his writings at his bedside and, drinking the fatal draught like Socrates, fell asleep in the bosom of the Creator’.

Speaking of Francisco Alvares de Nobrega, Inocêncio Francisco da Silva says in his Diccionario Bibliographico: ‘This poet, who cannot be denied happy gifts and a natural talent for poetry, followed no particular school, for some of his verses recall the manner of Bocage, others that of Francisco Manuel. In the sonnet few among us have equalled him, except Bocage himself, who never knew a rival in this kind of composition. Nobrega’s language, though not excessively abundant, is pure and correct, and his verses are on the whole fluent and harmonious. He undoubtedly deserved a better fate’. In volume IX of the important review O Instituto, Jaime Constantino de Freitas Moniz wrote an extensive appraisal of the poetic works of Francisco Alvares de Nobrega, which also contains some biographical notes.

The ‘Camões Pequeno’ published the Rimas de Francisco Alvares da Nobrega, natural da ilha da Madeira, Lisbon, 1804, and the Rimas offerecidas em sinal de reconhecimento ao Sr. Manuel José Moreira Pinto Baptista, Lisbon, 1804, which were reprinted in Funchal in 1850 by his nephew, the esteemed poet and journalist Januario Justiniano de Nobrega.

When, in 1806, the familiars of the Inquisition entered the room in which Alvares de Nobrega’s body lay, they found many of his writings there, and these were completely destroyed. It is said that he had a new collection of poetic works ready for printing when he sought in death rest from the tribulations of earthly life.