It must be remembered that this is a time when the political-military interference of the Portuguese Crown in the province of Cisplatina (future Uruguay) and French Guyana served to counterbalance the Spanish refusal to return Olivença and the successive waves of French invasions. Furthermore, in Rio de Janeiro D. João was appointed Regent without a meeting of the cortes being held since D. Maria I was deemed unfit to govern. In Madrid, Joseph Bonaparte reigned while Charles IV, Ferdinand VII and the rest of the male line of succession were held prisoner. Dona Carlota Joaquina sought to prove her personal right to the Crown, which she tried to do at the Cortes of Cadiz (1812).

It is within this political-diplomatic context, which lasted until the death of the Count of Linares in 1812, that Santarém developed his real passion for diplomacy, for history and for sources. Giving such neo-classical value to historical documents and monuments could be seen in Portugal in the few decades following the Pombaline reform of education (1772) and the foundation of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (1779). However, the exile of Abbot Correia da Serra (1795) and the invasion commanded by Junot (1807) meant an end to the process of collecting and compiling inventories of the archives dispersed throughout the kingdom and, in a clear backward step, even led to the relocation of archives and Lisbon libraries to Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil the organisation of the Crown Manuscripts, that is, all the documents that had come from the Necessidades Library, which contained a wealth of information (much of it secret), became the focus of increased attention by the Regent, Linhares and Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, the librarian in charge of the operation. In addition, the doors of the Rio de Janeiro Public Library and its collection of printed works from the Ajuda Library were opened in 1814.

Using this wealth of sources and studies as his basis, the future Viscount of Santarém was able to not only substantiate his works on the diplomatic and parliamentary history of Portugal (a term later used by William Walton) but also to demonstrate he had the intellectual ability to enter the diplomatic career. However, to do this, he had to wait for António de Araújo de Azevedo (Count of Barca) to join the Portuguese Foreign Office once more, since it was thanks to this patron of culture and the arts, this patron of academics and diplomats, that the Viscount of Santarém would serve this institution unofficially and informally throughout a diplomatic and historiographical path that was as tortuous as it was dependent on circumstances.

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