Vieira was born in Lisbon, on February 5, 1608, and died at Bahia, in Brazil, on July 18, 1697. He was virtually a Brazilian, for he went out to the colony when still a child, and after finishing his studies in the Jesuit college there, entered the Society in 1623, when he was only fifteen years of age. At eighteen, he was teaching rhetoric and writing commentaries on the Canticle of Canticles, the tragedies of Seneca, and the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid, but it was twelve years before he was raised to the priesthood. The eloquence of his first sermon astounded everyone.
In 1640 Portugal declared its independence from Spain, to which it had been subject for sixty years. As the union had been effected by fraud and force, and as all the former Portuguese possessions in the East and a part of Brazil had been wrested from Spain by the Dutch and English; and as the taxes imposed on Portugal were excessively onerous, there was a strong feeling of hatred for the Spaniards. This hostility broke out finally in a revolution, and John IV ascended the throne of Portugal, but the change of government involved the country in a disastrous war of twenty years' duration.
Before the outbreak, the Jesuits were solemnly warned by their Superiors to observe a rigid neutrality. But in the excited state of the public mind, Father Freire forgot the injunction, and, in an Advent sermon in the year 1637, let words escape him that set the country ablaze. Crétineau-Joly says "the provincial promptly imprisoned him," which probably meant that he was kept in his room, for there are no prisons in Jesuit houses. But even that seclusion produced a popular tumult. The provincial was besieged by protests, and a delegation was even sent to Madrid to protest that the words of the preacher had been misinterpreted. The Spanish king accepted the explanation, and when the envoys returned to Lisbon, Freire had been already liberated.
Ranke asserts in his "History of the Popes" that as there was question of establishing a republic in Portugal at that time, it is possible that Spain preferred to see the innocuous John of Braganza, whose son was a dissolute wretch, made king, than to run the risk of a republic like those projected at that time by the Calvinists in France and by the Lutherans in Sweden. Later, however, an investigation was ordered, and a Jesuit named Correa was incarcerated for having predicted at a college reception given to John of Braganza some years earlier that he would one day wear the crown. Meantime the explosion took place, and in 1640 John of Braganza was proclaimed king of an independent Portugal.