A Wind From the North (17 page)

On October 15 the treaty was concluded, and two days later the Portuguese began their retreat to the sea. Unfortunately—and it was to have an important bearing on later events —the terms of the treaty were not respected by the Moors. Unable to control the tribesmen whom he had summoned from the desert in his defense, Sala-ben-Sala watched his enemies fight their way slowly back to the shore. The Portuguese, for their part, had complied with the terms, and Prince Henry had seen his brother ride back to Tangier, accompanied by several of his servants, into captivity. There was no treachery by Sala-ben-Sala (the Portuguese had his own son as hostage with them), but the fact remains that by contesting their departure the Moors had given them the opportunity of saying that the treaty had been broken. It need no longer be respected.

Under the biting lash of arrows and javelins they gained the shore. Behind them the ruins of their encampment smoked and burned as the Moors carried off the equipment that had been abandoned. The walls of Tangier were thronged with the victors. Inside them the youngest of Henry’s brothers was a prisoner. Prince Fernando was never to gain his knighthood with honor. He was never to know the bright moment of victory as Henry, Edward, and Peter had done so many years before at Ceuta. If Ceuta were not handed over, nothing remained in front of him but long years of imprisonment and an ignominious death.

On October 20 the Portuguese fleet weighed anchor and sailed for home. Prince Henry did not accompany it. Unwilling, perhaps, to face King Edward, or determined to effect his brother’s liberation by an exchange of further hostages, he sailed for Ceuta. It was there, for the first and only time in his life, that his iron will and his immense reserves of physical strength deserted him. He savored the bitter knowledge that even the most ambitious and determined of men are subject to fate and failure.

It is difficult for a man to be completely dedicated to a dream, or to an idea, without sacrificing something of his humanity. In Prince Henry’s attitude and conduct during the years immediately following the disaster of Tangier, the struggle between the man of simple human feelings and the man of ambition is painfully apparent. For he was far from being cold and insensitive by temperament. Incidents in his early youth show that he was more sensitive than most men of his time. After the capture of Ceuta, for instance, he had hardly been able to face the mother of one of his companions who had been killed in the struggle. His distress had been so great that the bereaved mother had herself to comfort the man who brought her the news. There is every evidence that he was more gentle and compassionate in his relations with other persons than was considered normal in that age. Azurara’s comments on this aspect of his nature are very relevant to the tragedy of Tangier and the fate of Henry’s youngest brother.

“Hatred or ill will toward others was never known in him, even though heavy faults had been committed against him. In this matter his generosity was such that practical men reproached him with weakness in dispensing justice, for he made no distinctions among persons. They thought this particularly the case because he inflicted no punishment on some of his servants who had abandoned him during the siege of Tangier. But, more than this, he even received them back into his service and gave them privileges, as many or more than those he gave to the men who had served him well. This is the only weakness which I have found possible to relate of him. …”

If this was his attitude toward servants who had left him on the field of battle, it can be imagined what his feelings must have been in connection with Prince Fernando—the young brother entrusted to his care, who was now a hostage of the Moors. It was true that such things were the normal fortune of war, but Prince Henry was intelligent enough to realize that it was he alone who, by neglecting to “keep his flank on the sea,” had jeopardized the Portuguese army. Added to the bitterness of failure, he was now faced with the terrible problem of weighing Ceuta in the balance against his brother.

He hoped at first that in some way or another an exchange of hostages might be made with Sala-ben-Sala. The Moorish Governor’s son was held by the Portuguese, and surely he would be willing to effect an exchange if gold was added to the balance. Sala-ben-Sala quickly disillusioned him on this score. One son meant little to him; he had plenty of sons, he assured the envoys. If King Edward and Prince Henry set so great a store by this brother of theirs, then they must hand over Ceuta as they had agreed to in the terms of the treaty. But the treaty had not been kept, Henry protested. The Portuguese had not been given safe passage to the sea. They had had to cut their way back to their ships, losing a great many men in the process. During the long months of negotiations, while envoys and emissaries passed out of the gates of Ceuta to contact Sala-ben-Sala, Prince Henry hoped desperately that some ransom other than Ceuta might be found acceptable. Sala-ben-Sala remained adamant.

The first of these negotiations was undertaken by Prince John. He had arrived with reinforcements on the very day that Henry, broken and dispirited, retired to Ceuta. Prince John took Sala-ben-Sala’s son aboard his ship and sailed at once for Tangier. The second Portuguese fleet arrived off the triumphant walls of the Moorish fortress only to find that Sala-ben-Sala had already transferred the royal prisoner and his attendants to Arzila on the Atlantic coast. The weather was worsening as they set out for Arzila, rounded Cape Spartel, and came out into the long rollers of the ocean. They anchored in the exposed roads opposite the small port, and Prince John immediately attempted to effect the exchange. Sala-ben-Sala maintained that he was interested only in the return of Ceuta, but—with one eye on the weather—he protracted the negotiations. After a few days, as perhaps he had expected, a southwest gale came rolling up out of the Atlantic, and the Portuguese, exposed on a lee shore, were compelled to up-anchor and stand out to sea. The autumn weather was now growling into winter. Prince John had no choice but to save his ships and run back to the coast of southern Portugal. The first of the many attempts to rescue Prince Fernando had failed.

The return of the defeated army to Lisbon was a crushing blow from which King Edward never recovered. Never over-enthusiastic about the expedition, he had been swayed in its favor mainly by Queen Leonora, by Fernando’s eagerness to win his spurs as his brothers had done, and by Prince Henry’s desire to add Tangier to Ceuta. Now it seemed as if even Ceuta must be sacrificed. Prince Peter, who had opposed the scheme from the start, was quite clear what action should be taken— hand back Ceuta. It was only a drain on the Portuguese purse in any case, keeping a garrison there. King Edward would have liked to consult with Henry, but there could be no easy communication with a man hundreds of miles away in Africa.

Early in 1438 Edward convoked the Cortes, the representatives of the nation, and asked for their opinion. The Cortes were divided but, on the whole, their verdict was against returning the city. Another doubt now harried King Edward— had he the right, in any event, to hand back Ceuta to the Moors? Its capture had been hailed as one of the great achievements of Christendom in the long war between cross and crescent, and Ceuta had been the greatest glory of his father’s career. He applied to the other kings of Europe, and they answered with one accord that Ceuta must never be surrendered. The Pope, as might have been expected, pointed out that Ceuta was more than Portuguese, it was a Christian possession. Its consecrated churches and its importance as a Christian bastion in infidel Africa were things that could not be exchanged for the life of one man. Unless some other means could be found to effect his release, Prince Fernando was elected to martyrdom.

Throughout the winter Henry remained in Ceuta. Grief, illness, and nervous strain had at first prostrated him. But gradually he won through to a balanced estimate of the position. All was not lost, only a battle. He had been at fault in the means whereby he had tried to capture Tangier, but not in the object itself. He would gladly have taken his brother’s place as the hostage, but such a comparatively easy road had not been marked out for him. He accepted his destiny, as willingly as he would have accepted his brother’s. One thing he knew—under the circumstances, he would never have countenanced the return of Ceuta for his own life.

“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman” are words with which he would have agreed. In the long months of that North African winter he had tried to effect his brother’s release, and had failed. He still believed that it could be achieved, but he knew now that the task would not be easy.

He returned to Sagres in the spring. King Edward had been pressing him to come back—for how could he come to a decision about Ceuta without consulting the principal actor in the drama? But it was not until Henry had spent nearly three months at Sagres that, in June, 1438, he agreed to come north and meet the King.

Henry’s behavior throughout the months and years that followed the tragedy of Tangier was never that of the hardhearted man of ambition to whom a brother is only a pawn in the great game of power. This was immediately apparent on his return to Portugal where, rather than face his brothers Edward and Peter, he had taken refuge at Sagres. His behavior may be called cowardice, but certainly not unfeeling arrogance. The fact is, he had come to the conclusion that nothing short of a further—and successful—expedition against the Moors could save Fernando. When Prince Henry finally journeyed north to meet King Edward at Portel, some 70 miles from Lisbon, he had made up his mind.

King Edward saw that his brother was in deep mourning. (It may have been for the death of many brave men at Tangier, or it may have been for Fernando. Perhaps he already knew he would never see him again.) Henry listened to all the arguments that had been put forward on the subject of exchanging Ceuta for the young prince, and when King Edward had finished, he made his reply. It was simple, and to the point. Ceuta must never be given up. There was only one answer, he said. If Sala-ben-Sala would not treat (which appeared unlikely) , then they must prepare a bigger expedition. Only this time, let the King and the Cortes of Portugal give him what he had asked for in the first place—a large army and a large fleet. With twelve thousand foot soldiers, six thousand crossbowmen, and an equal number of cavalry, he would guarantee not only to take Tangier, but to subdue the whole Moroccan coastline.

King Edward was appalled at his brother’s attitude. To talk of a further expedition at a moment when the country was still reeling from the loss of the last one! The fact remains that in theory Prince Henry was right, even if his theory was impracticable. Given a well-equipped army and fleet, such as his father had had for the taking of Ceuta, he would more than likely have succeeded with Tangier. Whether he would have ever recovered his brother from captivity is another question. What he forgot —and he was blind to it all his life—was that a small country with a population of about three million could not afford to wage large-scale wars. The loss of a few thousand able-bodied men, who might have been employed on the land or in coastal fishing, was of grave importance to Portugal.

Meanwhile, Prince Fernando—“the Constant Prince,” as he was to be immortalized in Calderon’s play El Principe Con-stante—had been transferred from Arzila to Fez. He had been ill throughout the winter, and now his fate was sealed. The kingdom of Fez was administered by a violent anti-Christian, the Vizier Lazurac, who derived great pleasure from having among his slaves and servants a son of the same Portuguese king who had humbled Moorish pride at Ceuta. He determined to degrade his princely and Christian hostage. At night Fernando was compelled to sleep in a cell that housed ten others. Verminous, weak from dysentery, and aware that with every day his prospects of deliverance lessened, he bore his lot with a fortitude that seemed praiseworthy even to his captors.

He had been a prisoner for nearly a year when in the late autumn of 1438 the news reached Fez that King Edward was dead. The Vizier personally showed the document containing the news to Prince Fernando. Lazurac knew that his chances of reaping a rich reward were now greatly lessened, and Fernando’s reaction confirmed his views.

“If he is dead, then I shall remain a captive till the end of my life!” the Prince cried.

Fernando was well aware that the succession of Edward’s six-year-old son would lead to many problems in the court and country. His own importance was inevitably lessened, now that his brother was dead. He knew perhaps that Prince Peter would still try to save him, but as for the feelings of Prince John or his half-brother, the Count of Barcellos, he could only hazard a guess. Where Prince Henry was concerned, he knew that this brother would have suffered any torture rather than have Ceuta handed back to the Moors.

It was the failure of the expedition to Tangier and the loss of his brother that largely contributed to King Edward’s death. “An unparalleled sorrow, and acute distress resulting from the misfortunes of Tangier” were the reasons given by his doctors for a death that might nowadays be described as due to a broken heart.

Edward had been too gentle, too weak perhaps—certainly too sensitive—for the position to which fate had called him. A prey to conflicting opinions, he had spent most of his brief reign listening to the advice of brothers and ministers, of his wife even, and failing of his own accord to make the firm moves required of a king. His character is most clearly revealed in his treatise 0 Leal Conselheiro, the Loyal Counselor, where he paints a moving picture of the dignity and affection that existed among Queen Philippa’s sons. He had many of his mother’s virtues, but the great thing that he lacked was his father’s strength of character. At the time of his coronation astrologers had prophesied a brief and unhappy reign. He had been king for five years only, and he died leaving his youngest brother a prisoner of the Moors and a child as heir to the throne.