On the eighth of September 1720, a young nun named Paula Teresa da Silva e Almeida gave birth to a son inside the Monastery of São Dinis in Odivelas, near Lisbon. The father was King John V of Portugal, and the child would be called José. The king did not hide the boy away. He acknowledged him, gave him a title, and placed him among his other recognized illegitimate children.
For Paula, this birth was the moment her life changed forever, although at the time she could not have known the full extent of what was to come. She would become Mother Paula of Odivelas, one of the most powerful and wealthy women in Portugal, an abbess who bathed in solid silver, possessed gold statues, and enjoyed the favor of a king. Yet her story, marked by immense decadence, would later be touched by earthquakes, exile, and the complicated legacy of her son. Paula was born on the 17th of June 1701 in the Parish of Santa Justa, on the outskirts of Lisbon.
She came from a relatively well-to-do middle-class family. Her ancestor, Johannes Paul de Brute, was a German man who had served in the court of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, during the first half of the 16th century. De Brute subsequently settled in Portugal, a kingdom that briefly came under Spanish rule between the late 1570s and the 1640s. Through trade and imperial service, the family accumulated some wealth, and by the time of Paula’s birth, a century and a half later, they were considered affluent.
Paula’s parents, Adriel de Almeida and Josefa da Silva, had three daughters. Paula had an older sister named Maria Michaela and a younger sister named Juliana Cadia Felicia. In the autumn of 1704, when Paula was just three years old, her older sister Maria was admitted as an oblate at the Monastery of São Dinis, a prominent religious house near Lisbon. What was remarkable was that both Paula and her younger sister Juliana later joined her there as well.
At the time, the girls’ father was in financial difficulties and did not have the means to provide a good education for his daughters or the money for a dowry. Paula was also described as a rebellious girl, and so she entered the monastery as an oblate in January 1717, when she was 16 years old, and professed a month later. Life as a nun meant waking up early in the morning to pray, then spending the rest of the day in a variety of activities, including reading, writing, and caring for the poor and sick. As part of her religious dedication, Paula took three solemn vows: chastity, poverty, and obedience.
On top of her religious duties, she had to help with the running of the convent, which included tasks such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and even gardening. But her life would most certainly not follow the traditional arc of a nun or a member of a religious order. King John V had become king of Portugal in late 1706, when he was just 17 years old. His reign was marked by immense prosperity, as Portugal benefited enormously from the discovery of gold mined in its colony of Brazil, as well as the development of the sugar and Brazil wood industries there.
With 20 percent of all profits from activities in Brazil delivered directly into the hands of the royal family, the crown was immensely wealthy. In time, Paula would be a major beneficiary herself of this great wealth. It was not long after Paula entered the Monastery of São Dinis that she first met King John. The king was a major patron of the religious house and a frequent visitor.
For instance, in the early summer of 1719, he is recorded as arriving in Odivelas for the celebration of the festival for the relief of the Blessed Sacrament. A few months later, John was also present at a wedding ceremony for the Count of Santiago’s relatives at the monastery. Yet this was no ordinary convent, especially by the standards of modern times. Various nobles, and even the king himself, had another reason for visiting the establishment: forbidden relations with the young nuns, and they were willing to go to considerable lengths to do so.
The Monastery of São Dinis was home to around 300 nuns, many of whom were young and beautiful. Some rich and powerful men took a special liking to these women and used their influence to fulfill their carnal desires. The noblemen would read poetry, sing, and engage the nuns in flirtatious conversations to try to seduce them. Once this was accomplished, the men would bribe key holders, corrupt or threaten superior mothers, and use the aid of priests to open the necessary doors.
Some would even climb the walls or disguise themselves as nuns to sneak into the convent. Even the king partook, and he was known as a great nun lover. He often stayed at the monastery, and it is said he even had a secret passage from his residence to the convent. This promiscuity was not solely limited to São Dinis.
Throughout the 18th century, similar things were happening at countless monasteries across the country. In 1777, one man wrote the following regarding this: “The clergy, which is very numerous and powerful, is absolutely ignorant and debauched. Even the monks and nuns live in the most scandalous libertinism. The Portuguese love the statues of their saints and violate the holy laws of morality.
They wander ceaselessly from crime to penance and from penance to crime. They tremble at the mere name of the devil and hell, and indulge in all the excesses of the most base depravity. ”
Exactly when the king first began his relationship with Paula during his visits to São Dinis is unclear, but we know he had done so by the end of the 1710s. Initially, Paula had a brief affair with Francisco de Portugal, the Count of Imiosa.
But the king was blown away by the young woman’s beauty, and he made a deal with the count: he would stay away from her. By that time, the king had taken on various lovers from the convent, but Paula quickly became his favorite. Then, on the 8th of September 1720, she gave birth to a son named José de Bragança, one of several illegitimate children the king would have in his life. In tandem, the king decided to acknowledge the child and bestowed upon Paula the title of Abbess of São Dinis.
Consequently, as she entered her twenties, Paula became known as Mother Paula of Odivelas, Abbess of one of Portugal’s prominent nunneries and monasteries. Paula quickly became known for her enjoyment of her newfound position of power and wealth, though it is said she became extremely arrogant and was known to utter improper words incompatible with her religious status. In any case, John not only made her abbess of São Dinis but also gave her a large financial annuity and lavished her with gifts. This was a period of immense prosperity for the Portuguese crown and state thanks to the development of Brazil, and Mother Paula was a major beneficiary.
Thus, she received 210,000 reis coins in gold form every year from the crown’s treasury. Gold and silver were a common motif of her residence in Odivelas. We hear of solid gold statues found there, and even a solid bathtub allegedly made from over three and a half thousand ounces of silver and covered on the outside with gold. This piece had been commissioned by King John from a British goldsmith in 1724 and brought to Lisbon.
A description of the contents of Paula’s residence at Odivelas, written by an anonymous observer, sheds further light on the decadence in which Mother Paula lived in the 1720s and 1730s. It described a lavish set of apartments where everything seemed to be draped in expensive velvet curtains tinged with gold thread, beds dressed with the finest fabrics from the Dutch Republic and Italy, while walls, tapestries, mirrors, and other bits of furniture were all inlaid with silver and gold. The abbess did have an eye towards her responsibilities as a religious leader, and statues of the saints were located in various locations around the residence. Unsurprisingly, these were also made of gold.
It was not just Mother Paula who benefited from her relationship with the king. Other members of her family were appointed to positions where they were paid extensive amounts of money. Paula’s father Adriel, for instance, was made a member of the Order of Christ in 1722, the successor organization to the Knights Templar in Portugal, and was also knighted and given a sizable pension from the crown. Paula’s son José also benefited from the arrangement between the king and his mother.
José was one of several illegitimate children fathered by King John V. The monarch had six legitimate children with his wife Maria Anna of Austria, but of these, two died in infancy and another at 19 years of age. In any event, John was unwilling to renounce responsibility for his illegitimate children. Thus, Paula’s son José, along with another son of John’s named Antônio, born in 1714, and another named Gaspar, born in 1716, were raised collectively in a palace of the Marquis of Loriceal in the Barbadinhos area of what was then a suburb of Lisbon.
The trio became known as the “Children of Barbadinhos” as a result. They were well-educated along strict Roman Catholic lines by friars of the Order of Saint Dominic. As a consequence, all three became prominent figures within the Portuguese Roman Catholic Church, with Paula’s child José eventually being appointed as the General Inquisitor of the Portuguese Inquisition, making him a very powerful figure in his own right within Portuguese religious and political life. Although Paula’s position as a former mistress of King John and her role as the mother of one of his illegitimate children ensured her wealth and position in Portuguese life, this was briefly destabilized in the late 1740s as the king’s health deteriorated.
This was caused by dropsy, or edema, a serious form of fluid retention often caused by kidney or liver problems. It eventually killed John in the summer of 1750, at 60 years of age. His eldest son with Queen Maria Anna, Joseph, succeeded as King Joseph I. Yet he was initially uninclined to demote or persecute his father’s former mistresses and illegitimate children, and so Mother Paula remained a powerful figure at the Monastery of São Dinis.
As she entered her fifties, Paula continued as Abbess of São Dinis and continued to live a life of considerable wealth and ostentation. She was in charge there in 1755 when the enormous Lisbon earthquake struck the Portuguese capital. The quake, which measured 7. 7 magnitude or greater and is considered one of the deadliest earthquakes in history, destroyed much of the city and killed upwards of 12,000 people.
The religious house at Odivelas was badly damaged in the course of it, and much of Paula’s activities in the second half of the 1750s would have involved overseeing repairs and renovations. Her son José continued to act as head of the Portuguese Inquisition throughout the 1750s, notably overseeing the abolition of the Jesuit order in Portugal and its colonies from the late 1750s, and reducing the use of torture methods employed by the Inquisition. However, he and another of King John’s illegitimate sons were exiled to the mountainous Beira Baixa region of Portugal in 1760, due to a conflict with Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the first Marquis of Pombal and the most powerful minister within the government of King Joseph I. José would not be allowed to return to Lisbon until 1777, and consequently, Paula saw little of her son for the remainder of her life.
Eventually, Paula died at 67 years of age, on the 4th of July 1768. She was buried within the Chapter House of the monastery at São Dinis. Madre Paula is widely remembered in Portuguese society today, and her story has become more known in recent years owing to a 2017 television series based on her life.
