A Wind From the North (25 page)

In the spring of 1449 the Duke of Braganga deliberately brought matters to a head by marching south, on the pretext of visiting the King. He had a whole army behind him, and his route was so designed as to involve passing through Prince Peter’s land. Alvaro Vaz by this time had left the court and had rallied firmly to Prince Peter’s side. His opinion was that if the Duke of Braganga persisted in crossing Peter’s land with armed followers, he should be met with force. By now even Prince Peter’s normally quiet temper had been tried beyond endurance. It was an unbearable position for him, with his enemies everywhere in control and even his daughter powerless to help him. Women’s advice was not greatly reckoned with in those days, and in any case she was too young to have any real influence.

Prince Henry wrote to his brother, warning him to give the Duke of Braganga no opportunity to say that he had been provoked. Throughout this tragic period, Henry’s counsel to Peter was always to “do nothing that could be construed as an affront to the King.” He advised him to stay quietly on his estates until the outcry against him had died down. What Henry failed to realize was that the party hostile to the ex-Regent had no intention of allowing him to remain in peace. Unfortunately also, although Alvaro Vaz was an outstanding soldier, he was no politician. His reactions were a soldier’s—if people were conspiring against you, subdue them with the sword. But there was nothing Braganga’s party wanted more than for Prince Peter to come out into the open and declare himself a rebel.

In any event, an open clash between Prince Peter and the Duke of Braganga never took place. Many of the Duke’s men were in sympathy with Prince Peter, and Braganga, finding himself in a position where he could neither attack nor retire without losing face, abandoned his followers. At the moment when it seemed inevitable that the two forces must come to blows, Prince Peter is reported to have said, “Please God that they may retire without fighting.” It seemed as if his prayer had been heard.

Alvaro Vaz did not share his elation. With their enemies’ army dispersing, and with the Duke himself taking the road back home, Alvaro Vaz advised Peter to make the most of his opportunity.

“Now,” he cried, “is the moment to follow up your enemy and take him prisoner!”

If Prince Peter had been as unscrupulous as his enemies had made him out to be, such would undoubtedly have been his action. Being what he was, a philosopher who had reluctantly become involved in affairs of state, he was happy to let his enemy go. He assumed, wrongly, that after such a sorry debacle the Duke of Braganga would leave him in peace. Alvaro Vaz’s advice was more to the point:

“He who spares his enemy dies at his hand!”

Shortly after this, Prince Henry came north again and went straight to Santarem to plead his brother’s cause with Affonso. His intervention proved futile. He found himself tarred with the same brush as his brother. The King’s mind was sealed against both his uncles, and Prince Peter was openly branded as a traitor. It was even being suggested that he had been responsible for the deaths of King Edward and Prince John, as well as for the exile of Queen Leonora. The atmosphere of the court must have sickened and repelled Henry. He stayed, though, for it seemed that the least he could do was try to protect his brother against these calumnies.

“I will not allow it to be said,” he protested on one occasion, “that any son of King John would conspire to do an injury to his King and Lord!”

Peter, ignorant that his brother was doing all he could to save him, thought that even Henry had betrayed him and had gone to Santarem to side with his enemies. The situation was further confused by the fact that letters between uncle and nephew were being intercepted. Prince Peter’s letters, couched in reasonable tones and asking that the charges against him be openly discussed at a meeting between himself and the King, were altered so as to convey a completely different impression.

The conspirators finally turned the knife in the wound by making the young Queen the means of conveying Affonso’s decision as to Prince Peter’s fate. It was from his own daughter that Peter now heard how the council had given him the option of three choices—death, imprisonment for life, or banishment from the kingdom. They had forced him into a situation from which there was no escape.

“I choose death,” he said.

Some of his advisers were in agreement with Prince Henry. The King, they said, was only a youth, and the crisis would pass in a year or two. Prince Peter should fortify his castle in case of any attack, and should remain quietly on his lands. Alvaro Vaz, on the other hand, was for war. If only they had killed the old Duke of Braganga when they had had him at their mercy!

“It is better to go down fighting than to live a life of ignominy,” he said. He felt that men like Prince Peter and himself, both knights of the Order of the Garter, could not, and should not, put up with unjust accusations of disloyalty and treachery.

Peter made one more attempt at reconciliation. He wrote to his daughter, saying that he was prepared to accept any blame rather than to allow the present situation to continue. The letter achieved nothing. The enemies of Prince Peter and of King John’s house were too powerful now. He was a dissident subject, a murderer—no calumny was spared.

As for Prince Henry, he had always been something of a wry joke to the elegant courtiers of Santarem. This old man with his dreams about Prester John, the Indies, Africa, and unknown islands—he would achieve nothing by continuing to insist on his brother’s innocence. Why did he not go back to that desolate land of his in the south, to that madman’s dream of a castle, perched on a rock, overlooking the Atlantic? Prince Henry with his abstemiousness that seemed to them an insult, with his devotion to the Church that mocked their irreligion, with his ascetic life and manner that were more suitable to a hermit than a prince—it cannot have been difficult to turn him into a figure of fun.

In the plot and counterplot, even the young Queen was not spared. She was charged with infidelity, but the conspirators had overstepped themselves, and the case against her supposed lover fell through. Affonso’s faith in his wife remained unshaken, but his faith in his uncles was now completely corrupted. He saw Prince Henry as an eccentric, possibly even insane, and he was convinced that everything he had been told about Prince Peter was true. This man who had trained him for kingship, his uncle and father-in-law, was the persecutor of his dead mother and a rebel who wanted the throne of Portugal for himself.

In the spring of 1449 King Affonso took the road with his army and marched north to Coimbra to beseige Prince Peter in his castle. Still determined to prevent bloodshed, and to reduce everything to a rational level, Prince Henry followed. Peter, despite Alvaro Vaz’s protestations that the whole thing could be settled only by the sword, seems still to have hoped for a peaceful outcome. These were the events leading up to the battle of Alfarrobeira, the battle that should never have been fought.

Hearing that the King was advancing on him, Prince Peter spent the night in prayer in the abbey of Batalha beside the tomb of his parents. It was here, in the Gothic church with its golden-brown limestone spires, that King John and Queen Philippa lay at rest. Here his father had prepared a place for all his family to be buried. Three of his sons were dead already (but the body of Prince Fernando lay far away in Fez), and now the fourth son knelt beside his parents’ tomb. Above his head shone the intricate stonework. It had been carved by English masons, whom Queen Philippa had brought over to give to her last resting place a memory of the cool Gothic of her native land.

On the morning of May 5 Prince Peter left Batalha. Together with his sons and about five thousand troops, he went forward to meet the King’s forces. If only he had stayed behind at Coimbra, the battle could never have taken place. If he had followed Henry’s advice, the worst that could have happened was a siege of his castle—during the course of which it might still have been possible for the two sides to come to terms.

He pitched his camp on a tree-lined bank near the river of Alfarrobeira and waited for the arrival of the King. Outnumbered by nearly ten to one—for the King had called up all the available royal forces—it does not seem possible that Prince Peter can ever have intended to give battle. What seems most likely is that he wished to meet the King in person, and answer the charges that were being made against him. Ruy de Pina, however, says that bets were being made among the royal troops on who should kill Prince Peter, so there can be no doubt that the Prince’s enemies had determined to conclude the matter with his death.

The fatal skirmish and the events that led to Prince Peter’s death are best described in the memoirs of Olivier de la Marche, a Burgundian noble who was not present at the battle, but who heard the reports of eye-witnesses. Unlike Ruy de Pina, he was not prejudiced in favor of either side.

“The Duke [Prince Peter, Duke of Coimbra], when he saw the King coming, closed his ranks and put his troops and artillery in good formal order… . And several Portuguese noblemen who were present have told me that he did this with no other intention than of sending some of his principal followers as emissaries to the King. They were to go in full humility, to recommend him to the King’s good grace, and to ask the reason why he found himself in dispute with His Majesty. They were to make his humble vows to him, and to remind him of the services he had done the King in his youth —as well as for the good of the realm—and in conclusion to offer him his services again. But it happened by chance that the crossbowmen of the King of Portugal came near his camp in large numbers. And in this way a fight began between the hotheaded on both sides. In the course of this, a crossbow bolt struck the Duke of Coimbra [Prince Peter] in the chest. He died of this wound within the hour. Not a single other man was wounded in this first affray, only the Duke… .”

So died Prince Peter. The friend of princes and kings throughout Europe and the East, he had been the only brother who had comprehended Prince Henry’s dreams. He had been too honest and too scrupulous for the age in which he lived.

His death was the signal for a confused and foredoomed action. In the battle that followed, Alvaro Vaz, Portugal’s hero and supreme soldier, was killed. Fighting to the last against the soldiers of his king, the hero of Agincourt was stripped of his armor and his head cut off. The forces of Prince Peter were overrun and cut to pieces. His castle and estates were seized, and his family forced to flee. In the years that followed, his widow and his sons wandered as exiles through the courts of Europe.

Prince Henry found himself surrounded by the men of Braganga and the creatures of the court, rejoicing over the death of his beloved brother. If he had sickened and died a little at the news of Fernando’s death, it was nothing to this moment of utter disgust.

The battle of Alfarrobeira severed his last link with the world of courts and courtiers, almost even with Portugal. We know nothing of his reactions, except that he asked that he might be permitted to leave the country forever, and to retire to Ceuta.

In Ceuta he had known his greatest happiness and triumph. In Ceuta there were no politicians. He asked that he might be allowed to end his days there, and devote his last years to fighting against the Moors. The simple world of the soldier, and even of the infidel enemy, was preferable to that of his fellow countrymen. His request was refused.

❖
 

Henry was now fifty-six. His life was set in grooves that were cut as deep as the wave-chiseled stone of the headland. As a young man of twenty-three he had dedicated himself to this life of sea and sky, where nature imposed a pattern as austere as any of the orders of the Church. But the youth who had come here so willingly had turned into a man who now found in this self-imposed isolation the only sanity and peace that were left to him.

Sagres was no longer a testing place for his character, but a refuge from the world of men. He saw tilings in simple terms of black and white, not the multitudinous shades of gray that, for most people, make up the palette of living. On the one hand there were the infidel Moors, and on the other the Christians. On the one hand there were the unhappy heathen, and on the other there was the Order of Christ designed to bring light into their darkness. It must have been with something of this feeling that he had applied for permission to withdraw to Ceuta. There, under the North African sun, life was like the noonday streets of the old town—a blinding vivid white, or shadows as dark and thick as tar. Refused permission to leave

Portugal and end his life in Ceuta, he rediscovered his peace at Sagres.

He was more alone now than ever before. The deaths of his brothers starred his years and marked the different phases of his life, much as the wooden crosses that his mariners erected marked the coastline of Africa. An outcome of his failure at Tangier had been the death of his eldest brother, King Edward. Then had followed the three troubled years when the question of the regency was in dispute. The death of Prince John from illness, followed shortly afterward by the martyr’s death of Fernando in Fez, had ushered in the beginning of the conquest of Guinea. Prince Peter’s death came at the end of this phase of exploration. If Henry had sacrificed himself to his quest, he had sacrificed others too. Edward, Fernando, and even Prince Peter might all be considered in one degree or another victims of his ambition. If he had not ventured on the capture of Tangier, two of them would probably still be alive. If he had not been so completely absorbed in Africa and his islands, his brother Peter would almost certainly have been saved. Greater than Alexander perhaps, Prince Henry like all conquerors left death in his wake—in his case the death not of thousands but of those nearest to him by blood and affection.

After the tragedy of Alfarrobeira he was rarely seen outside the Algarves. Between his villa at Raposeira, his town and fortress at Sagres, and the busy shipyards of Lagos, there moved this dark enigmatic figure of the last of King John’s sons. In the great painting by Nuno Gongalves, which shows the courtiers, the noblemen, and the seamen of King Affonso’s court kneeling before Saint Vincent, there is an unforgettable portrait of Prince Henry in these last years. It is a tribute to the whole of Henry’s life’s work that the dominant figure in one of the panels should be an old fisherman kneeling in prayer, with gnarled hands held up to a white-bearded face, and the mesh of a fishing net suspended behind him. In what other country at that time would it have been conceivable to introduce the figure of a workingman and the tools of his trade into a gathering of the nobility? Prince Henry had shown his country that its destiny lay on the sea.