Why was Tiradentes the only conspirator executed?

Eleven men, one rope

The plot to turn Minas Gerais into a republic, the Inconfidência Mineira, collapsed in 1789 before a shot was fired. Its members spent almost three years in jail while two rival inquiries, one in Rio and one in Vila Rica, piled up testimony. In 1790 Queen Maria I of Portugal sent a special court, the Alçada, to try them all.

On April 18, 1792, the judges signed their sentence, and it was read to the prisoners the next day. Eleven defendants were condemned to the gallows. The priests in the plot had been tried apart, in secret, and were shipped to Lisbon as prisoners. The poet and former judge Tomás Antônio Gonzaga got exile in Mozambique.

The letter in the judges’ luggage

What the condemned men did not know was that their fate had been settled long before. On October 15, 1790, at the palace of Queluz, outside Lisbon, the queen had signed a royal letter. Anyone sentenced to death would be sent into exile instead, with one exception: a leader who had also spread the revolt with speeches, in public as well as in private. The judges brought that letter across the Atlantic and kept it to themselves for eighteen months. They produced it on April 20, 1792, two days after the sentence.

Ten of the eleven were sent to perpetual exile in the Portuguese garrisons of Angola and Mozambique, to be put to death if they ever returned. Several died there. The ruling of April 20 named the one man left out: Tiradentes, the ensign, “the only one who, under the said letter, made himself unworthy of royal mercy.”

How he fitted the exception

The queen’s condition had two parts, and he met both. No one had preached the revolt more openly. The judge accused him of inviting everyone “so wildly that he chose neither people nor occasion.” And he had confessed to being its author. At three sessions in the island fortress of Ilha das Cobras, in Rio, he denied everything. At the fourth, his story changed.

It is true that the uprising was being plotted, and that he, the respondent, confesses to being the one who devised it all, with no other person moving him to it or inspiring anything in him.

The wealthy defendants did the opposite. They denied to the end and, when brought face to face, blamed one another. A confessed author who had talked revolution to anyone within earshot was exactly the man the letter excluded. Whether he truly led the plot is another question.

Courage, or the weakest link?

Why did he take the blame? He himself said he had acted in despair after being passed over for promotion four times. One reading sees courage and loyalty: he drew the guilt onto himself to shield his friends. Another points out that he was the weak link of the group, with no fortune, no powerful family and no patron at court, the easiest man in the dock to hang. The two readings do not cancel each other out.

One more detail sharpens the story. By the time the letter was read, its author no longer ruled: in February 1792, ill, Maria I had stopped taking part in government, and her son, Prince João, governed in her place. The mercy she signed in 1790 and the single exception it left were applied in her name. For the morning of April 21 itself, see How did Tiradentes die?.