Tomás (Manuel)

According to the Nobiliarchia Portuguesa, volume 2, page 212, Manuel Tomás was born in Guimarães in 1585, the son of the physician Luís Gomes de Medeiros and Dona Gracia Vaz Barbosa.

We know nothing at all of the particular circumstances of his life before he settled in Madeira, nor of the reasons that led him to leave mainland Portugal, the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal), and make his permanent home in this city, where he remained until his death.

The distinguished annotator of ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra) is inclined to suppose, on good grounds, that Manuel Tomás was a member of the chapter or even a dignitary of Funchal Cathedral (the Sé) (Sé do Funchal). He bases this on the reference made to him by the licentiate Bartolomeu do Vale Cabreira in his censor’s report on the poem ‘The Island Epic’ (Insulana), which says that ‘over the course of many years he acquired the benefice with which he is also endowed’.

We too have reason to accept the opinion of Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo, who believed that the author of ‘The Island Epic’ and of the Phenix da Lusitânia was a canon of Funchal Cathedral (the Sé).

We know little of the life of this esteemed poet and respected writer. Inocêncio Francisco da Silva, following the Bibliotheca Lusitana (‘Portuguese library’), says ‘that he was murdered by the son of a farrier on 10 April 1665, when he was 80 years of age, although the motive that led the murderer to commit such an atrocity has not been revealed to us’.

Dr Azevedo says that Manuel Tomás, ‘having become involved in the dissensions from which the ecclesiastical sedition of 18 September 1668 later arose, was for that reason murdered on 10 April 1665 by the son of a farrier’.

We do not know on what grounds the distinguished professor based this assertion, nor how a man – and an octogenarian at that – could have been killed because of events that took place three and a half years after his murder. Manuel Tomás died on 10 April 1665, and the sedition broke out on 18 September 1668, as Dr Álvaro de Azevedo himself states and as can also be seen in the article ‘A deposição d’um governador’, published some years ago in the Diário do Commercio (‘Commercial Daily’).

It should be noted – and this is of the greatest importance in the present case – that the sedition was raised against the governor, Dom Francisco de Mascarenhas, over grievances, supposed or real, suffered at his hands. This governor and captain-general of Madeira took office on 28 November 1665, that is, seven months after the murder of Manuel Tomás.

It therefore seems to us very difficult to link the illustrious poet’s death to the sedition of 1668, unless historical evidence not yet known should come to change this opinion of ours.

The epic poem that bound Manuel Tomás to Madeiran history, and made him greatly loved by the sons of this archipelago, is well known, at least by name. With the fictions and hyperboles of poetry, and still more of the poetry of its time, it narrates the discovery of Madeira, which it attributes originally to Robert Machin, the island’s gradual development, the various phases of its history and, above all, the deeds and actions that brought renown to many Madeirans. Although it is a poem in which the author gave free rein to his imagination, it nonetheless contains some valuable and far from negligible information on the history of Madeira. The work, published in Flanders in 1635, enjoyed great popularity and for a long time was the favourite reading of all educated Madeirans. Quotations from it and references to it are very frequent in various manuscripts, memoirs, nobiliaries and many other writings dealing with Madeiran matters.

On the literary merits of Manuel Tomás and the value of his poem ‘The Island Epic’, let us hear the authoritative opinion of Inocêncio Francisco da Silva, who is not usually lavish with praise:

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Manuel Thomaz was a poet of the Gongorist school, whose precepts he always followed as a fervent disciple. Although his style is, as befitted that school, turgid and emphatic, and abounds in hyperbolic ideas, amplifications and conceits, etc., he nonetheless possesses real merit, as a man endowed with a fertile wit and a lively imagination. Most of the defects noted in him are not his own, but those of the century in which he lived and of the poor doctrines in which he was schooled. The learned Francisco José Freire, in his Arte Poética, cites the Insulana with praise, and more than once, as one of our most notable epics; and indeed this appears to be Manuel Thomaz’s most valuable composition. Its greatest sin is perhaps its excessive length, for it could well have been reduced to five or six cantos, which would certainly have made it more balanced.

Manuel Tomás also wrote the poem Phenix da Lusitânia, which deals with the liberation of Portugal from the Castilian yoke, as well as other writings listed in the Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez.

Similar in subject to ‘The Island Epic’ is the poem ‘The Zarco Epic’ (Zargueida), published in 1806 and written by the Madeiran poet Francisco de Paula Medina, whom we have already discussed.