him a body guard. But the king himself was exposed to one of
the most remarkable plots of regicide on record--the memorable Aveiro
and Tavora conspiracy.

On the night of the 3d of September 1758, as the king was returning
to the palace at night in a cabriolet, attended only by his valet,
two men on horseback, and armed with blunderbusses, rode up to the
carriage, and leveled their weapons at the monarch. One of them
missed fire, the other failed of its effect. The royal postilion, in
alarm, rushed forward, when two men, similarly waiting in the road,
galloped after the carriage, and both fired their blunderbusses into
it behind. The cabriolet was riddled with slugs, and the king was
wounded in several places. By an extraordinary presence of mind, Don
Joseph, instead of ordering the postilion to gallop onward, directed
him instantly to turn back, and, to avoid alarming the palace, carry
him direct to the house of the court surgeon. By this fortunate
order, he escaped the other groups of the conspirators, who were
stationed further on the road, and under whose repeated discharges he
would probably have fallen.

The public alarm and indignation on the knowledge of this desperate
atrocity were unbounded. There seemed to be but one man in the
kingdom who preserved his composure, and that one was Pombal.
Exhibiting scarcely even the natural perturbation at an event which
had threatened almost a national convulsion, he suffered the whole to
become a matter of doubt, and allowed the king's retirement from the
public eye to be considered as merely the effect of accident. The
public despatch of Mr Hay, the British envoy at Lisbon, alludes to
it, chiefly as assigning a reason for the delay of a court
mourning--the order for this etiquette, on the death of the Spanish
queen, not having been put in execution. The envoy mentions that it
had been impeded by the king's illness,--"it being the custom of the
court to put on _gala_ when any of the royal family are blooded. When
I went to court to enquire after his majesty's health, I was there
informed that the king, on Sunday night the 3d instant, passing
through a gallery to go to the queen's apartment, had the misfortune
to fall and bruise his right arm; he had been blooded eight different
times; and, as his majesty is a fat bulky man, to prevent any humours
fixing there, his physicians have advised that he should not use his
arm, but abstain from business for some time. In conseque