The mere failure to storm Tangier was brilliantly atoned for by the bravery of the army and the repeated victories over immensely superior force. But now either Ceuta must be exchanged for Ferdinand, or the youngest and favourite brother of the House of Aviz must be left to die among the Berbers. Many, if not most of the Cortés, summoned in 1438 to Leiria to discuss the ransom, were in favour of letting Ceuta go; but all the chiefs of the Government, except the King himself, "thought it not just to deliver a whole people to the fury of the infidels for the liberty of one man." Even Henry at last agreed in this with Don Pedro and Don John.
Edward was in despair; he was willing to pay almost any price to recover Ferdinand, and in hope of finding support he now appealed from his own royal house and his nobles to the Pope, the cardinals, and the crowned heads of Europe. All agreed that a Christian city must not be bartered even for a Christian Prince; Edward's offers of money and "perpetual peace" were scornfully rejected by the Moors, who held to their bond "Ceuta or nothing"—and their wretched captive, treated to all the filthy horrors of Mussulman imprisonment and slavery and torture, died under his agony in the sixth year of his living death and the forty-first of his age, 5th June, 1443.
Before this his loss had dragged down to the same fate his eldest brother, King Edward, and but for the inspiration of a great purpose, which again put meaning into his life, Henry might have died of the same "illness of soul." Every Portuguese burned to revenge the Constant Prince; the Pope was called upon to approve a new crusade, levies were made and vessels built, when the plague broke out with terrible violence, and ravaged every class and every district as it had not since the days of the Black Death. The King, seized by it in his misery and weakness and bitter disappointment, fell a victim. The wreck of all his hopes left him with hardly a wish to live, and on September 9, 1438, at the age of forty-seven, and after a reign of five years, he died at Thomar, in the act of breaking open a letter, but not before Henry had come to his side.
To the last he kept on working for his people, and it was in the fatigue of travelling from one plague-stricken town to another that he caught the pest. Among all the kings of Christendom there was never a better, or nobler, or more luckless, an Alfred with the fortune of "Unready" Ethelred.
By his last will there was fresh trouble provided for Don Henry and Don Pedro and the Cortés. His successor—the child Affonso V., now six years of age—was strictly charged to rescue Ferdinand even at the price of Ceuta; this was nothing to practical politics; but in naming his wife, Leonor of Aragon, along with Don Pedro and Don Henry, as guardian of his children and regent of the kingdom, he put power in the wrong place.
The Portuguese were always intensely suspicious of foreign government, and after the age of Leonora Telles they might well refuse a female Regent. On the other side King Edward's Queen, who had won his absolute trust as a wife and a mother, was not willing to stand aside for Pedro or for Henry. She began to organise a party, and she worked on her side, the nobles and the patriots counterworked on theirs. Don John was the first of her husband's brothers to take his natural place as a leader of the national opposition; Henry for a time seemed to waver between friendship and loyalty; all who knew the Queen loved her, but the people hated the very notion of a foreign female reign. Like John Knox they could not be fair to the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and their voices grew clearer and clearer for Don Pedro and his rights, real or supposed. The eldest of the young King's uncles, the right-hand man of the State since his return from travel in 1428, he was the proper guardian of the kingdom; Henry was a willing exile from most of Court life, though his support was the greatest moral strength of any government; John had begun the movement of discontent, but no one thought of him before his brothers; while they lived his only part was in helping them on their way.
Donna Leonor recognised her chief danger in Don Pedro, and tried to win him over. When she summoned Cortés, she pressed him to sign the royal writs; then she offered to betroth his daughter Isabel to her son; Pedro secured a written promise, and waited for the opening of the National Assembly in 1439. Here a fierce outcry was raised by a party of the nobles against the marriage-settlement of their King, but Don Pedro was too strong to be put down. He moved on by slow and steady intrigue towards the Regency he claimed. Henry had now appeared as peacemaker, and in his brother's interests arranged a compromise. The Queen was to keep the actual charge of her children, and to train the little King for his duties; Pedro was to govern the state as "Defender of the Kingdom and of the King"; the Count of Barcellos, soon to be Duke of Braganza, the leader of the factious and fractious party, was to be bought off with the Administration of the Justice of the Interior.
The Queen at first struggled on against this dethronement; fortified herself in Alemquer, and sent for help from her old home in Aragon. At this the mob rose in fury and only Henry was able to prevent a massacre and a war that would have stopped the expansion of Portugal abroad for many a day. He went straight to Alemquer (1439), talked Queen Leonor into reason, and brought her back with him to Lisbon, where she introduced Affonso to his people and his Parliament. For another year Henry stayed at Court, completing his work of settlement and reconciliation, and towards the end of 1440 that work seemed fairly safe. The fear of civil war was over; Don Pedro's government was well started; Henry could now go back to Sagres to his other work of discovery.
It was time to do something on this side. For in the past five years scarcely any progress had been made to Guinea and the Indies.
