Suffering, like his mother, the dowager Queen
Maria Pia of Savoy, from debilitating mental and emotional health after the
Regicide of 1908, Afonso de Bragança married civilly in Rome on 26 September 1917, a twice-divorced and once-widowed, American heiress
Nevada Stoody Hayes. This was a politically significant event, at least to those Portuguese royalists who clung to the hope of a restoration of the
House of Braganza: as significant funding for any power grab was urgently needed. As of 1917, the Portuguese
pretender, Manuel II, was living in England with his wife of four years, Princess
Augusta Victoria of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, but they had no children. The royalists were apprehensive about the prospects for a legitimate Braganza heir, and their anxiety redoubled at the news of Afonso's marriage to a commoner, especially one of such a dubious reputation. In Portugal, a
morganatic marriage for an
infant and
infanta was not forbidden, and only the heir of the Portuguese crown, inducted as such, could need the royal consent. So, any legitimate child of Afonso and Nevada could become the lawful heir to the Portuguese throne. Nearly as disturbing was the prospect that both Manuel and Afonso would fail to produce an heir, the claimant to the throne of Portugal could be a descendant of
Miguel I, the absolutist king who, in 1834, lost the Portuguese
War of the Two Brothers and be barred from the line of succession. Dom Afonso was the fourth husband of Nevada Stoody Hayes. The latter being a commoner and a divorcee, they were unable to marry religiously in Italy, where the validity of their previous civil marriage in September in Rome, yet registered, has been publicly recused by King
Victor Emmanuel III, and in front of some resistance of
Pope Benedict XV. She convinced Afonso to marry her once again in a civil ceremony, performed by a consular officer of the
Portuguese Republic: They were thus married for a second time by Dr. Félix de Carvalho, Consul of the Portuguese Legation in Madrid, on 23 November 1917, at the
Hotel Ritz Madrid, The same day, a religious wedding ceremony was performed by a priest in a church of Madrid. Princess Nevada [also called
Maria das Neves] of Braganza, Duchess of Porto, aka
Dona Nevada de Bragança. After the death of Manuel II, in July 1932, Dom Afonso's widow demanded that the Portuguese government recognize her rights to a substantial part of the
House of Braganza's patrimony. Her husband had named her his sole legal heir in his last will. As the marriage, and the will, was legally disputed in Lisbon, Nevada was briefly arrested shortly after she arrived at Lisbon to claim her inheritance. Eventually, however, she proved a substantial portion of her claim, and she was officially granted the right to remove many objects of art and expensive goods from the Portuguese royal palaces. The Duchess of Porto traveled from Naples to Portugal with the mortal remains of her late husband, and she arranged for its installation in the
Braganza pantheon, located in the
Monastery of São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon. ==Honors==