Duke of Loulé
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Duke of Loulé is a Portuguese title that was originally granted to the family of Moura Barreto.
The dukedom was created in 1862 for Nuno José Severo de Mendonça Rolim de Moura Barreto, Marquis of Loulé and Count of Vale de Reis. The new duke descended from earlier Portuguese monarchs and belonged to the highest nobility.
Duke Nuno served several times as Prime Minister of Portugal.
On 5 December 1827 Nuno de Loulé married Infanta dona Ana de Jesus, youngest daughter of King John VI of Portugal. She bore him several children, but died before he was elevated to ducal rank.
When the deposed King Manuel II of Portugal died in 1932, Constance Maria was the representative of the House of Loulé (4th Duchess of Loulé, if one counts all the subsequent heirs of the original duke, including those that never registered the ducal title as required by law).
The current representative is the infanta's great-great-great-grandson, dom Pedro de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto. He is styled 6th Duke of Loulé in D. Filipe de Loulé's work on the "House of Loulé". But he is the 4th duke according to Portugal's post-monarchic titular convention, which considers the title only properly renewed in 1992 for D. Pedro's father, the 3rd (or 5th) duke (who also registered the style of dom, which the Loulés had not traditionlly used, although entitled to do so). According to its 1998 Boletim Oficial, a request for the third renewal of the ducal title was submitted to the Conselho de Nobreza, headed by the present duke of Braganza, on behalf of D.Pedro. That, of course, was mandatory, since accordingly to the Lei Mental (one of the fundamental legal sources quoted all throughout the Monarchy to oversee matters of nobiliarchic rights), the Loulé family had already had three breaches of male line.
During the exile of dom Miguel I of Portugal and his male heirs from 1834 until 1950, Infanta Ana's descendants remained domiciled in Portugal. Therefore, the claim of the current duke to the defunct throne, as the infanta's dynastic representative, has been contrasted with that of HRH the Duke of Bragança, great-grandson and heir of dom Miguel.[1] In "As Senhoras Infantas filhas de D. João VI", published in Lisbon in 1938, Ângelo Pereira quotes, on page 161, a letter from the infanta to her brother D. Pedro, assuming her marriage had not been authorized (although nothing in Portugal's law required a cadet infanta to obtain royal permission to marry). The Dukes of Loulé have not, in the past, pressed any claim to the throne publicly, whereas the Portuguese government and media have accorded some indications of recognition to dom Duarte Pio and his late father as the dynasty's royal representatives since the extinction of the Saxe-Coburg branch of the Braganzas in 1932.[2]
[edit] Dukes of Loulé (1862)
- Nuno José Severo de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 1st Duke of Loulé (1804 - 1875)
- Pedro José Agostinho de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 2nd Duke of Loulé(1830 - 1909)
- Maria Domingas José de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 3rd Duchess of Loulé (1853 - 1928)
- Constança Maria da Conceição Berquó de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 4th Duchess of Loulé (1889 - 1967)
- Alberto Nuno Folque de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 5th Duke of Loulé (1923 - 2003)
- Pedro José Folque de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 6th Duke of Loulé (born 1958)
