Thus, from 1814 until his death in 1856, the Viscount’s link to the history of Portugal chiefly came through Foreign Affairs. When he started in 1814, there was no structured historical archive in this State Secretariat. Nor were there departments responsible for protocol or for documental support for the negotiations of territorial limits. Santarém filled some of these gaps in a somewhat piecemeal fashion in the years 1814 and 1817 to 1819.

In addition to this, thanks to the influence of two Secretaries of State, the Count of Barca and the Marquis of Aguiar (1814-1817), and to his own marriage into the family of the Count of Ponte (1816), the future historian had access to documents held in the offices of noble houses and statesmen’s archives – access which was essential in order to gather a collection of documents and historical interpretations of national politics and diplomacy. Given the absence of any formal training beyond self-taught knowledge and the private education given to the nobility, rulers and diplomats, scholars and those aspiring to public office were able to partake of this collection. Within it, the glory of the Crown and the blue-blooded political aristocracy were very much in evidence, but in a balanced and critical fashion without, however, the Viscount renouncing the diplomatic and chronological rigour of Frei Manuel do Cenáculo (1724-1814) and João Pedro Ribeiro (1758-1839), two of his chief intellectual influences.

For various reasons, his diplomatic appointment to the Vienna Congress, Stockholm, Paris, Washington or Berlin never materialised – only to Copenhagen, but even then he was not officially accredited to the Kingdom of Denmark. The years 1814 to 1823 are thus marked by a relative effacement of the diplomat and the diplomatist given the interests of the State Secretariat he unofficially served.

Public, cultural and political recognition only came when he was appointed first as interim (1824) and then as the official guarda-mor or Head Keeper of the Torre do Tombo archives (1827), and especially in the reign of D. Pedro IV (1826-1828) with his appointment as a Minister of the Realm and Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was only then that all the hard work and studying he had undertaken informally over almost twenty years bore fruit and gave him national and international status.

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