The Madeira Islands and the Azores were Portugal's money trees at this time; Ferdinand II did not even dare imagine the consequences of losing the two great archipelagos.
After the War of the Sixth Coalition and the civil war, Portugal had already suffered a grave blow to its vitality, and Pedro I, who had been thoroughly duped lame by the British, pushed the radical liberal Aguiar to the front of the stage.
Aguiar declared that he would turn Portugal into the Britain of the European continent. He ordered the dissolution of all knightly orders, expelled almost every religious group of the time, confiscated Church property, and halted missionary activity in Africa, earning him the title of "monk-killer" from some historians.
But very few people mentioned the other things Aguiar did and their consequences. His radical measures directly turned the colonies into cultural deserts, and completely shook the foundation of Portuguese rule.
In the name of helping the state repay its debts, Aguiar forcibly took over royal property, then sold it to private individuals at prices far below the market average.
But because corruption within the government was severe, after all the royal property in hand had been sold off, the national debt had instead grown even larger.
When Maria II began to rule in person, she decided to appoint the Marquis of Sá da Bandeira in order to revitalize Portugal. In the end, the latter directly and thoroughly crippled the Portuguese colonial economy, turning the overseas colonies into festering sores on the body of the Kingdom of Portugal; not only could they not provide fiscal revenue, they even had to suck blood from the homeland.
After that, Maria II began to give up and let things rot, dismissing Cabral at the critical moment of his reforms and causing those reforms