Early Life
He was born to José Joaquim de Paiva Cabral Couceiro, a notable engineer in the Portuguese Army and Helena Isabel Teresa Mitchell, an Irish Protestant who converted to Catholicism (after being educated in a convent in France). Following her widowed father's death, the 20-year old Helena Mitchell worked for a time in Madrid, before taking residence in Portugal as the governess to the Viscount do Torrão's children. It was as the children's teacher that she met the engineer José Couceiro and later married, giving birth to two daughters (Carolina and Conceição) and their only son Henrique.
Helen Mitchell was a militant Catholic, and the young José was raised in a strict authoritarian environment, where he read little of the popular literature, never went to the theater, attended mass daily and similarly read Imitação de Cristo daily in preparation of the "ultimate sacrifice". Similarly, his life was quite regimented: he went to sleep at 11 and woke at 6 in the morning, fenced for an hour, went to mass, had two hours training on horseback daily, and regularly shined his boots, brushed his suits and cleaned most of his personal items. Helena Mitchell instilled in her son a religious zeal and military regime; at the age of 11 she gave him a copy of the History of the Crusades, Ivanhoe and he read and re-read a copy of Don Quixote, while fostering ethos of the medieval knight: austerity, valor, abstinence, service to God and to country.
Read more about this topic: Henrique Mitchell De Paiva Couceiro
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