Palmela (Duke of)

The Duke of Palmela, Dom Pedro de Sousa Holstein, visited Madeira in November 1820, during his voyage to Brazil. He was warmly received on the island by the governor, Sebastião Xavier Botelho, who gave a ball in honour of the illustrious diplomat that was attended by more than two hundred people.

Of the short time he spent in Funchal, he says in a letter written here: ‘there were so many visits, so much business, so many outings, etc.,... that I have no time for everything.’ He went to the Quinta do Palheiro Ferreiro (‘blacksmith’s hayloft estate’), belonging ‘to the richest landowner on the island and perhaps in Portugal’, where he found ‘an English-style park of the finest kind’.

The Duke of Palmela visited Madeira again in October 1847, this time to accompany his wife, who was suffering from a serious lung disease; her condition did not improve on the island.

On 27 January 1848 the duke was still in Madeira, but shortly afterwards he left for Lisbon with his wife, whose condition had grown considerably worse. ‘On a litter (maca) softened with cushions and pillows,’ says Dona Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho in Vida do Duque de Palmella, ‘sailors carried her from her house on the island to the ship that brought her, and from that ship to the house at Rato where she died. Beside the litter, on foot, as close to it as possible, came the duke and their youngest daughter, the only unmarried one, who had accompanied her devoted mother to Madeira. Behind them, also on foot, followed the other children, the closest relatives and the most intimate friends.’

The Duke of Palmela outlived his wife by not quite eighteen months, dying at his house at Rato on 12 April 1850. Thirty years earlier he had written to the duchess, then in the bloom of youth and exceedingly beautiful, enclosing a sprig of myrtle in the letter, ‘as a protest’, says Dona Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, ‘against that tropical flora whose violence of colour and perfume oppressed him without speaking to his heart.’