"A short story of 1st December" by José Miguel Sardica
"According to its supporters, the 1st December holiday is the most important in the entire national calendar because, without the historical event it commemorates, there would be no 5th October or 25th April: without independence, the Portuguese province of Spain would have followed the political course of Madrid; the republic would have been the Spanish republic of 1931; and the transition to democracy would have been a compromise rather than a revolutionary one.
On 1 December 1640, Portugal put an end to 60 years of Spanish domination by the monarchy of the Filipes.
A candidate for the throne of Portugal in 1580, against D. António, Prior of Crato, Philip II was enthroned at the courts of Tomar in April 1581, where he swore to maintain and ensure "the privileges, graces and mercies of the Portuguese nation". Contrary to the commonplace, it was not at this time that Portugal lost its independence, because the new Hispanic monarchy was dual, maintaining the separation of the two kingdoms under the same crowned head. Portugal's submission to Spain was mainly the work of the reign of Philip IV (III of Portugal), from 1621 onwards, when his all-powerful valedictorian, the Count-Duke of Olivares, launched an aggressive policy of "Castilianisation" of the Peninsula, strengthening Madrid's power of administrative control, fiscal exaction and military recruitment, which irritated both the Lisbon nobility and Catalonia, Navarre and other autonomous parts of the Hispanic periphery.
The Catalan Segadores revolt broke out against Madrid in the summer of 1640, when the region came under the protection of Louis XIII of France. Olivares dispatched a military force to put an end to the secessionism, giving the Portuguese conjurers the opportunity to act. Madrid succeeded in suppressing Barcelona's separatism, but not Lisbon's, and the story goes that the Portuguese did to the Castilians what the Catalans would have liked to have done to them! On 1 December, forty conjurors imprisoned Duchess Margarida de Saboia of Mantua - the Viceroy of Portugal, Philip IV's cousin - and assassinated the hated Miguel de Vasconcelos, the Valido de Olivares who was acting as Prime Minister in Portugal, by defenestrating him from one of the windows of the Terreiro do Paço. The 8th Duke of Bragança, a great-great-grandson of King Manuel I, ascended the throne on 15 December as King João IV, the first monarch of the new Bragantine dynasty (deposed in 1910). His entire reign (1640-56) and half of that of his son, Afonso VI, were spent fighting and winning the Restoration War, which was only concluded by the Treaty of Lisbon in February 1668, under which Spain recognised Portugal's regained independence.
The 1st of December is the oldest Portuguese civil holiday. The date had its first official commemoration in 1823, with a ceremony in Belém, presided over by King João VI and capitalised on by the absolutist faction of his son, Prince Miguel, in the struggle that the legitimists were waging against the liberals. The holiday was consecrated in 1861 by the then-created Historical Society of Portuguese Independence, very much in reaction to the Iberianising federalism that permeated some of the intelligentsia on both sides of the border. As a result of this revived nationalism, the Restauradores square was embellished in 1886 with an obelisk commemorating the 17th century battles against Spain.
In the post-1910 republican calendar, 1st December was the only secular holiday that carried over from the previous regime. The Estado Novo always preferred it to the 5th of October; and democracy kept it, although the date suffers from the same civic erosion that affects other commemorations and ephemeris. It shouldn't be like this. In the amnesiac presentism in which we live, remembrances of the milestones of a long history are occasions to enliven patriotism. And that the word seems to have a negative connotation today is a bad sign for a country that is wrongly ashamed of its history."