The government failed to understand that these sympathizers would not be able to follow the example of the French revolutionary leaders, so long as the general population of Portugal was contented and happy, and like all the absolutist monarchs of Europe, Dom John heard with the utmost horror of the events passing in Paris, and feared that they would be imitated in Lisbon. In his terror of the spread of “French principles,” he began to persecute their admirers although they had never dreamed of acting or conspiring, and he thus made martyrs of the holders of the new opinions, which were only propagated the more rapidly by his tyrannical behaviour. In his crusade against the sympathizers with the French Revolution, Dom John found his chief ally in Diogo Ignacio de Pina Manique, the Intendant of Police, who believed that by his vigour he should obtain the ascendency formerly held by Pombal, and who proceeded therefore to work upon his master’s fears. His first measure was to issue an edict against aliens, under which he expelled two Frenchmen, Pierre Noel and Pierre Louis Fontaine, and kept a strict and irritating surveillance over Edward Church, the United States Consul, and Jacome Ratton, a merchant of Lisbon, whom he declared to be the fomenters of discontent and the leaders of a conspiracy. Against Portuguese subjects, Pina Manique acted with still more severity; Francisco Coelho da Silva, the father of Portuguese liberalism, was thrown into prison; other men of letters were suspected and often prosecuted, including the poets, Nascimento and Du Bocage, the botanist Avellar Brotero, and the historian Correa da Serra; many noblemen of liberal principles were watched by spies, and the Duke of Lafoẽs, the great patron of literature, was expelled from Court, because he was a friend of Broussonet, the French chemist. The men whom the Intendant of Police most abhorred were the Freemasons whom he hated, because their society was secret, and by his attempt to suppress all their lodges he made them actively democratic, and the chief promoters of “French principles.” It was no wonder that this conduct excited attention in France, and when in January, 1793, three months after the proclamation of the French Republic, the Girondin deputy, Kersaint, inveighed against England in the Convention, he abused Portugal also, and spoke of that country as a province of England.