D. José de Meneses e Távora Rappach da Silveira e Castro, 2nd Marquis of Valada ComC ComSE (13 February 1826 – 15 October 1895) was a Portuguese nobleman and politician aligned with the conservative Regenerator Party.

[2] By all accounts, Valada was of refined learning and unusual scholarship: he was well-read in the Greek and Latin classics, and frequently cited Homer and Virgil in his parliamentary elocutions; a possessor of a remarkable memory, he was remembered as a veritable repository of political history, both ancient and modern.

[3] On the night of 2 August 1881, the police caught the Marquis of Valada in compromising circumstances with a common soldier in Travessa da Espera, a narrow street in Lisbon's Bairro Alto.

[1] It seems that the Marquis of Valada began to regain his political prominence, however; by the summer of 1885, his rehabilitation appeared complete: the government appointed him civil governor of Braga, in northern Portugal.

The situation was viewed with alarm in Lisbon, as it caused considerable local political agitation, and that particular area had been the scene of a violent peasant uprising just forty years earlier.