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XVI
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THE TROUBLES OF
THE REGENCY AND THE FALL OF DON PEDRO.1440-1449.
Don Pedro had been
nominated sole Regent of Portugal on November 1, 1439, and by the end of the
next year all the unsettlement consequent on the change at court seemed to be
at an end. But a deep hatred continued between the various parties.
First of all, the
Count of Barcellos, natural son of John ., created
Duke of Braganza by Affonso V, had taken up a
definite policy of supplanting the Regent. The Queen Mother had not forgotten
or forgiven Don Pedro's action at Edward's death, and the young King himself,
though engaged to the Regent's daughter, was already distrustful, was fitting
himself to lead the Barcellos party against the
Prince.
On February 18,
1445, died the Queen Leonor, with suspicions of poison, diligently fostered by
the malcontents. Next year (1446) Affonso, now
fourteen, came of age, and his uncle proposed at once to resign all actual
power and retire to his estates as Duke of Coimbra. But the King was either not
yet prepared to part with him, or still felt some gratitude to his guardian, the
wisest head in Spain.
He begged him to
keep the chief direction of affairs, thanked him for the past, and promised to
help him in the future. More than this, he protested that he wished to be
married to his cousin, Pedro’s daughter Isabel. They had been formally
betrothed four years; now Affonso called on his
nobles and the deputies of Cortés to witness the marriage.
In May, 1447, this
royal wedding was celebrated, but coldly and poorly, as nephew and uncle had
now drifted quite apart. The more the younger disliked and suspected the elder,
the more vehement became his protestations of regard. But he bitterly resented
the Duke's action in holding him to his promise, and he made up his mind before
the marriage that he would henceforth govern as well as reign.
The Regent just
prevented his dismissal by laying down his offices; the King seemed almost to
relent in parting from his guardian, who had kept the kingdom in such perfect
peace and now resigned so well discharged a duty; but even his wife could not
prevent the coming storm. She struggled hard to reconcile her father and her
husband, but the mischief-makers were too hard for her. Persuaded that the Duke
was a traitor, the King allowed himself to be used to goad him into revolt. “Your
father wishes to be punished”, he said fiercely to the Queen, “and he shall be
punished”.
If Henry, who in
the last six years had only once left Sagres, to
knight Don Pedro’s eldest son at Coimbra in 1445, had now been able, in
presence as well as writing, to stand by his brother in this crisis, the Regent
might have been saved. As it was, Pedro had hardly settled down in his exile at
Coimbra, when he found himself charged with the secret murders of King Edward,
Queen Leonor, and Prince John. The more monstrous the slander, the more absurd
and self-contradictory it might be, the more eagerly it was made.
Persecution as
petty and grinding as that which hunted Wolsey to death, at last drove Pedro to
take arms. His son, knighted by Henry himself for the high place of Constable
of the Realm, had been forced into flight, the arms of Coimbra Arsenal seized
for the King's use, his letters to his nephew opened and answered, it was said
by his enemies, who wrote back in the sovereign's name, as he would write to an
open rebel. All this the Prince bore, but when he heard that his bastard
brother of Braganza, who had betrayed and maligned and ruined him, was on the
march to plunder his estates, like an outlaw's, he collected a few troops and
barred his way. At this Affonso was persuaded to
declare war.
Only one great
noble stood by the fallen Regent, but this was his friend Almada, the Spanish
Hercules, his sworn brother in arms and in travels, one of the Heroes of
Christendom, who had been made a Count in France and a Knight of the Garter in
England. It was he who now escaped from honourable imprisonment at Cintra, joined Pedro in Coimbra, and proposed to him that they
should go together to Court and demand justice and a fair trial, but sword in
hand and with their men at their back. Was it not better to die as soldiers
than as traitors without a hearing?
So on May 5, 1449,
the Duke left Coimbra with his little army of vassals, 1000 horse and 5000 foot
and passed by Batalha, where he stopped to revisit
the great church and the tombs of his father and his brothers. Thence he
marched straight on Lisbon, which the King covered from Santarem with 30,000
men. At the rivulet of Alfarrobeira the armies met; a
lance thrust or a cross-bow shot killed the Infant; a common soldier cut off
his head and carried it to Affonso in the hope of
knighthood. Almada, who fought till he could not stand from loss of blood, died
with his friend. Hurling his sword from him, he threw himself on the ground,
with a scornful, "Take your fill of me, Varlets," and was cut to
pieces.
Though at first
leave could hardly be got to bury Don Pedro’s body, as time went on his name
was cleared. His daughter bore a son to the King, and the proofs of his
loyalty, the indignant warnings of foreign Courts, the entreaties of the Queen,
at last brought Affonso to something like repentance
and amendment. He buried the Regent at Batalha and
pardoned his friends, those who were left from the butchery of Alfarrobeira.
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