A Wind From the North (24 page)

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Prince Peter’s regency ended in 1447. Prince Affonso was fourteen, an age at which he was considered old enough to govern by himself. He was married to Isabel, Prince Peter’s daughter, and with his father-in-law at hand to call on for advice, and with the good wishes of the nation, he was formally declared of age in the palace at Lisbon. Prince Peter and Prince Henry were both present. So too was their half-brother, the Count of Barcellos, now aged seventy. But if King John’s illegitimate son was an old man, he was active as ever in his quest for power. Old age may deaden the lusts of the flesh, but the lust for power is something that nothing but death can extinguish.

All his life he had been jealous of his half-brothers, and now, with a youth on the throne, he saw his chance to strengthen the House of Braganga. The dukedom of Braganga was an honor that he owed entirely to Prince Peter. Peter had sensed, perhaps, that the Count of Barcellos had always resented King John’s omission to make him a duke after the battle of Ceuta (as he had done for both Prince Peter and for Henry). But far from healing old wounds, this act of consideration was probably regarded by the Count of Barcellos as a piece of insufferable patronage. It is always hard to love those to whom we are obligated. Now that the old man saw Prince Peter retiring from the office of regent, he felt it was time that the influence of his own party was strengthened in the court. This was not so difficult to achieve as it may seem, for the young Queen was little more than a child, Affonso was known to have a pliable character, and Prince Peter had many enemies.

It is difficult at any time to rule justly and honestly in the name of another, but it was doubly difficult in a fifteenth-century country where every nobleman was scheming to aggrandize his own family. Prince Peter had never sought the office of regent, but had had it thrust upon him by the Cortes, and by the people of Lisbon and Porto. During the six years of the regency the country had prospered and the power of the nobles had been kept in check. The success of Prince Henry’s recent expeditions had added a new luster to the name of Portugal, and it was felt that the disaster of Tangier had almost been erased by these new conquests. In theory, there seemed to be no reason why this prosperity and stability should not continue.

But there was one fact that boded Peter’s downfall: the hostility of the great families to a strong central rule. Peter was not a man of iron as his father had been—a type of man the nobility feared as well as respected. He had been a man of action in his youth, but for many years now his principal interests had lain in his library, his family, and the progress of his brother’s work. If the powerful nobility did not find him simpatico as a man, they had resented even more a regent trying to carry on the repressive policies of King John. They saw their chance, now that a fourteen-year-old boy was proclaimed king, and they found a natural leader in the Count of Barcellos, Duke of Braganga.

It is not difficult to trace the hand of the Duke in the long sequence of tragic events that followed. For many years now he had bided his time. Where there had once been five strong brothers allied together, and united in the defense of Portugal and of its throne, there were now only two. King Edward, Prince John, Prince Fernando—all were dead. There remained the young King, the fifty-four-year-old Regent, and the recluse of Sagres. In any struggle for power, Prince Peter was clearly the man who had to be eliminated. Prince Henry scarcely stirred from the province of Algarve, and his knowledge of politics and court intrigue was hardly greater than that of his nephew. It was true that Prince Henry had great prestige, but with whom? Sailors and sea captains, and merchants. Many of the nobility had hardly ever seen him, and when they did meet, his brown eyes had an uncomfortable way of looking right through them. Braganga and his friends knew that Henry had been a fire-eater in his youth, but the failure at Tangier seemed to have altered him.

During the months that followed Prince Peter’s resignation from the office of regent—months that seem to move forward as inexorably as an Aeschylean tragedy—how could Henry have failed to realize what was happening? While the country slipped into a state of civil war, and while his brother’s fall was being cunningly contrived, Henry spent most of the time at Sagres. To understand his blindness to what was happening, it is essential to realize that he was fully occupied with what to him seemed the most important thing in the world. Once before, during the crisis which preceded the regency, he had been constantly summoned north to act as peacemaker. The present course of events may well have seemed to him somewhat similar, another quarrel over pride and position, which would blow over just as the previous affair had done. In any case, although in 1440 he had been able to spare the time to attend to affairs of state, it was quite different seven years later. At last Africa was beginning to yield its secrets. He had been entirely dedicated to his quest for so many years now that it was impossible for him, at the age of fifty-two, to take an active interest in home politics. In the past there had been King Edward, Prince Peter, or Prince John to look after the affairs of the kingdom. It was they who had given Henry complete liberty to devote himself to that world whose pulse he felt when he leaned from his window at Sagres.

The years from 1447, when Peter resigned the regency, until the battle of Alfarrobeira in 1449 were years when Henry was completely engrossed in external affairs. He was involved in leasing Langarote in the Canaries from its ruler Maciot. He was also being drawn to the verge of war with Castile over the conflicting rights to the island and the Canaries generally. He was beginning to build the fort in the Bay of Arguim. He was also trying to establish a policy of friendly trading with the natives of the coastline. In addition to all this, he was absorbed in the progress of his ships, which were now sailing beyond Cape Verde. During these years they were bringing him back regular news about the newly discovered land of Guinea, and he thought that he was on the verge of establishing communication by sea with the Indies. It is hardly surprising that by the time he realized what was happening, his brother’s fate was sealed.

Within a few days of formally accepting the responsibility of government, Affonso stated to the Cortes that he wished the Regent to remain in office a little longer, since he did not feel that he “could as yet manage so heavy a task.” The Cortes were quite agreeable—the regency had been well managed in the past six years, and an extension of it for another year was perfectly logical. Whatever Prince Peter felt on the subject (and it is quite likely that he was in sympathy with the fourteen-year-old boy’s reluctance to assume office at once), the reaction of the Duke of Braganga was immediate and violent. He chose to see in the action a deep-laid scheme, whereby the Regent would retain his hold on the country. He was afraid that by the time Affonso really assumed power, the policy of repressing the nobility would have become so fixed that nothing could change it.

He came out into the open and protested to the Cortes against the decision. When this had no effect, he began to play on Affonso’s vanity—never a difficult thing with an adolescent. Braganga also had an ally among the King’s entourage, a court secretary named Barredo, who daily prepared for the young man two sinister intellectual poisons: flattery of his own abilities and mistrust of his uncle.

It was not long before the combined influence of Barredo and the Braganga faction among the courtiers began to produce the desired effect. Affonso gradually became convinced that Prince Peter was not only trying to keep him from ruling his kingdom, but that he was a tyrant who had mistreated the people during the regency. It was time, said the voices around him, that he claimed the authority to rule on his own behalf. He was a king, he must start to be a king—not a child listening respectfully to his uncle and his father-in-law. The Count of Ourem, eldest son of Braganga, was largely instrumental in what followed. He advised Affonso to go at once to Prince Peter and demand his rights. If his uncle refused, or argued that the further year of regency was not yet at an end, then Prince Peter should be expelled from the kingdom.

“It is time,” said the Count of Ourem, “that you prove yourself a man in the eyes of the court and of all Portugal.”

Betrayed by his youth and his soft-speaking circle of insincere friends, Affonso went to see Prince Peter. If he expected, from what he had been told, that he would meet with any resistance to his plans, he was mistaken; and if the Braganga clan had expected any show of reluctance on Peter’s part, they were to be disappointed. Immediately and willingly, Prince Peter resigned his authority.

“In your interest,” he said to Affonso, “I have neglected my own for ten full years now. I am happy to surrender my position. All I ask is that I may be allowed to go in peace to my estates and look after them.”

There seems no doubt of Prince Peter’s sincerity in these words. If this young man felt that it was now time to assert himself and set his own house in order, so much the better. Even so, Peter was well aware that the growing influence of Braganga and of the nobles was not in Portugal’s best interests. In the fifteenth century, strong rule by a single man was the secret of a country’s prosperity.

Prince Peter had visited the courts of Italy and France, and he knew how much Portugal had benefited by his father’s firm autocratic rule. Many of the finest navigators, sailors, cartographers, and scientists were in the courts of Italy, yet it was Portugal that was beginning to reap the benefit from the exploration of the Atlantic. This could never have come about if Portugal, like Italy, had been divided into a mass of petty states, each one warring against the other. Prince Peter knew the secret strength that had enabled his brother to continue with his voyages of discovery—it was the internal security of Portugal. Unfortunately, Henry on Sagres had had his eyes fixed for so long on the sea and Africa that he had become unaware of the roots that sustained him.

With Prince Peter’s resignation, the Braganga faction became all-powerful at court. Peter was slandered, accused of innumerable crimes—among them the exile of Queen Leonora. His enemies harped on the Queen’s unhappy fate, her years in Seville, and her death in a foreign country far away from her son Affonso, who was now king. Gradually the young man began to hate his uncle as the persecuter of his dead mother. It was not enough for the nobles to have had Prince Peter removed from the office of regent; they longed for his complete downfall. When that happened, his lands and the lands of all his followers would be available for redistribution among themselves.

After a time, the rumors from court were so persistent that they even reached Prince Henry. He was busy with an expedition to the Canaries, and with a further voyage of exploration to the Guinea coast. But the news was so disturbing that he left Algarve at once and rode north to the court at Santarem.

The historian Ruy de Pina, who wrote the life of King Affonso, says that Henry at this time did not defend Prince Peter “with the fortitude that his brother deserved.” But Ruy de Pina’s evidence can have been only hearsay, for at the time of these events the future historian was only seven years old. The fact is that the events leading up to the death of Prince Peter were such a stain on the young King’s reputation that they were never quite effaced. It was natural, therefore, that his biographer should try to pass some of the blame on to Prince Henry’s shoulders. This bias is quite clear in de Pina’s history, and for this reason his evidence should be treated with reserve. Azurara’s evidence (which would have been biased in favor of Prince Henry) does not exist, for his work ends in 1448—the year before Prince Peter’s death. After saying that there was always great love between these two brothers, Azurara tells us that he intends to reveal all the circumstances leading up to Prince Peter’s death, and that “Henry did everything he could to save him.” Unfortunately, this account, which would have been of the greatest value, was never written.

When Henry reached the court, he found his nephew set in his hostility toward Prince Peter and surrounded by sycophants and self-seeking nobles. Henry quickly abandoned any attempt at personal influence. He realized that if the young King was poisoned against Prince Peter, whose son-in-law he was, it was unlikely he would listen to his other uncle. He sent instead for Alvaro Vaz, Count of Avranches, who was in Ceuta. He hoped that this was one counselor who would be able to instill some sense into the young monarch’s head. It seemed likely that he would pay some regard to Portugal’s foremost soldier. Alvaro Vaz had fought with Henry at Tangier, had been given the honor of the Garter by King Henry V of England for his part in the battle of Agincourt, and was at the moment prosecuting the war against the Moors from Ceuta. He was a legendary figure in his own country, and his arrival in court must have temporarily upset the plans of the Duke of Braganga. Alvaro Vaz was a man whom a youth of fifteen was bound to idolize.

Prince Henry, thinking perhaps that he had neutralized the opposition to his brother, returned once more to Sagres. If he was blameworthy in the events that followed, it was because he had no conception of how corrupt the court of Portugal had become. The court in which he and Prince Peter had grown up, modeled by his father’s strength of character and his mother’s Christian virtues, had been superseded by one that might have found its parallel in any of the small kingdoms of Italy.

Alvaro Vaz’s influence on the King did not last long. Before many months were out, he was branded as one of Prince Peter’s men. Peter himself was forbidden access to the court, the office of constable was taken away from his eldest son, and even Alvaro Vaz found himself deprived of the castle of Lisbon, which had been his for nearly ten years.

It was at this time that Prince Peter wrote to the younger son of the Duke of Braganga, who was not involved in the intrigue, and who was, in fact, one of the few who were trying to make peace. The letter gives us a good insight into Prince Peter’s character and into the motives of his opponents. “… Many were ill-content during my tenure of office, some because of jealousy and others because they could not circumvent justice… . While I was Regent, I said several times that I would abdicate willingly if the King asked for it. I said, though, that I would not do so while there were so many planning and scheming to get rid of me—not for the good of the State but to further their own interests.” It is a sad letter, for one sees in it the eternal tragedy of the honest man who has no means to protect himself from his detractors.