Benefits were conferred upon the Portuguese allies; their nation was declared exempt from taxation of every description for a period of three years, and their priests were permitted to preach the gospel in every part of the Kingdom. His son was proclaimed King, and the joy of seeing his successor in power rendered him indifferent to the pangs of death. As soon as the monarch was dead the chief officers of State handed over the reins of government to the Queen of whose misdeeds they were unaware. Her liaisons which could no longer be kept secret, revealed her unchastity, but hardened to crime and with a conscience untouched by remorse, she acted her part with perfect calmness, and, to make matters worse, she openly lived with her guilty paramour. After this act which was the cause of a certain amount of dissatisfaction, but did not create any actual rebellion, she determined to elevate her lover to the throne, and to dispose of the young King by the same method employed in the case of his father. The disaffection both of the nobility and of the common people, checked her in her career of crime, and the national outcry was favourable to her designs. She pretended to fear that attempts would be made against her son's life, whereas in reality she was his sole enemy; and, to frustrate such attempts, she desired to have a body-guard to protect his august head from the wicked plots of which she said she had had information. She was granted 12,000 foot soldiers and 500 mounted men for his safe keeping. It was an innovation, that there should be a permanent guard in a State which hitherto, had called up soldiers only in time of external danger, but, it is the means usually employed in all ages to intimidate the lives and liberties of citizens who support their oppressors. No sooner had she found herself in power, but she used it to wreak vengeance on all those who had opposed her, or, who had grumbled at her ill-regulated life. The most distinguished citizens were the first victims. Two of the leading nobles perished by torture on frivolous charges. This Princess, headstrong in her loves and hatreds, imagined that she could retain her position by force, but the shedding of so much blood was a seed from which new opposition to her tyrannical rule sprang up. The confiscation of the property of those innocent victims enabled her to maintain a certain number of partisans, but those whose friendship it was expedient to purchase gave their allegiance only on condition of being supplied with whatever appealed to their greed. She soon found out that instead of friends, she had but traitors pledged to serve their own interests. It was then that she placed her paramour on the throne and declared him to be her consort, considering that a man, rather than a woman who had given so many examples of the frailty of her sex, would be more capable of overawing the disaffected.