Viana did not actually achieve this – but this was not in fact his objective at all. In this work he assumed the role of editor, the organizer of the publication, rather than that of interpreter, narrator or historian. Providing a certain continuity to liberal historiography (especially that of Luz Soriano), Viana excelled at interweaving the documents he published with annotations and long narrative and argumentative digressions to safeguard the historical memory of moderate Chartist liberalism.

This did not prevent him though from intervening and polemicizing about his understanding of José Liberato Freire de Carvalho and the Count of Carreira. In fact the view that António Viana gives us of the (hypothetical) enmity and political disputes between Silva Carvalho and Liberato, on one side, and Carreira, on the other, has to do with a much vaster and more extensive subject: that of the interrelationship between the different forces within Portuguese liberalism between 1820 and 1834.

As is widely known, this depends greatly – even today – on what the eminent Oliveira Martins has told us in Portugal Contemporâneo. Indeed the criticisms that he was a Miguelist that were directed at him, according to what Martins himself relates in the Explicações (Explanations) to the second edition of the work dated November 1883, seem to be covertly reproduced by Viana in the first volume of Silva Carvalho e o seu Tempo published in 1891 (Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins, Portugal Contemporâneo, Op. Cit., vol. I, pp. 15 e 21 and António Viana, José da Silva Carvalho e o seu Tempo, vol. I, p. 17, n. 2).

What is curious is that the criticisms directed by Viana at Liberato and Carreira could appear to have an explanation, especially given that there was a certain moment when a political turning-point occurred among the liberal exiles in the years 1830 to 1834. This is primarily true of those criticisms that define the factions of Saldanha and Palmela/Carvalho, with the resultant controversies in the press, at the Duke of Braganza’s court and in the Masonic alignments.

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