arrived in the Tagus with twenty English ships to take the bride to England. The marriage took place on May 31, 1662, and it was thus, upon the suggestion of the King of France, that the first step was made towards the revival of the old alliance between England and Portugal, which had existed under the kings of the House of Aviz, an alliance which was, in the indignant language of later French writers, to make Portugal a province of England. Before the English soldiers arrived and the final struggle with Spain commenced, a Court revolution took place in Lisbon. The king, Affonso VI., was now nearly nineteen, and he had grown up a debauched and vicious youth. A stroke of paralysis had disordered his intellect, and his mother, absorbed in the cares of government, had left him too much to servants. He was entirely under the influence of his valet, a young man named Conti, and his chief delight was to range the streets of Lisbon at the head of a troop of mulattoes and negro slaves, and to play pranks of which the English “Mohocks” of the eighteenth century would have been ashamed. The queen-regent, in disgust, banished Conti to Brazil, and two accomplished courtiers, Sebastião Cesar de Menezes, Count of Atouguia, and Luis de Sousa e Vasconcellos, Count of Castel Melhor, persuaded the angry young king to declare himself of age on June 21, 1662, and to take the government into his own hands. The queen retired into a convent, and all power fell into the hands of the two conspirators. Fortunately for Portugal the two counts were energetic and able statesmen, and they pursued in every point the policy of the queen. Castel Melhor formed the English veterans, who had arrived under the command of Murrough O’Brien, first Earl of Inchiquin, some French and German volunteers and mercenaries, and the newly organized Portuguese levies, into a powerful army, of which Schomberg was the real, though not the ostensible, commander-in-chief. With this army a series of victories were won, which caused Affonso VI. to be surnamed Affonso “the Victorious,” though his own successes, such as they were, were confined to the streets of Lisbon. On June 8, 1663, the Count of Villa Flor, with Schomberg by his side, utterly defeated Don John of Austria, an illegitimate son of Philip IV., at Ameixial, and afterwards retook Evora; on July 7, 1664, Pedro Jacques de Magalhães defeated the Duke of Ossuna at Ciudad Rodrigo; on June 17, 1665, the Marquis of Marialva and Schomberg destroyed a Spanish army under the Marquis of Carracena, at the battle of Montes Claros; and Christovão de Brito Pereira followed up this victory with another at Villa Viçosa.