The destination of the fleet had occupied the councils of Europe for almost as long.

“Is it peace or war?” had come their inquiries, and to most of them King John of Portugal had returned a fair answer. But, even now, no one except the King, his sons, and a few ministers of state, knew against whom they were preparing to sail.

The secret had been well kept. The people of Lisbon, who had worked for and contributed to this armada, were as curious as any. But while they cheered the brave ensigns and the panoply of the anchored squadrons, they had another, and even greater, preoccupation. The plague had broken out in the city, and in Porto too—whence Prince Henry’s ships had sailed—the pestilence was raging. “How reluctant,” says the chronicler, “were the souls of the brave men who were dying of the pest to leave their bodies! It was not only that natural regret which seizes upon every soul when it leaves the flesh, it was above all regret that they must leave the world without seeing the conclusion of this great enterprise.”

Members of the court were waiting to greet the two young princes as they disembarked.

This was a moment of triumph for Prince Henry, for to him had been entrusted the whole ordering and commissioning of the Porto fleet. Whereas his brother Peter had been under the eye of his father at Lisbon, he—the younger of the two— had been allowed to organize the major part of the expedition on his own. It was evidence enough of King John’s trust in his twenty-one-year-old son.

Thickset, of medium height, with broad shoulders and powerful arms (like a seaman or a shipwright more than a prince), Henry already had the air of an older and graver man. In contrast to his brother Peter’s mercurial curiosity, there was about him a withdrawn and thoughtful air. Something of his mother’s English ancestry was revealed in his eyes and in his manner: something of the phlegmatic nature that belongs to the country of gray skies and rain-swept sea. He was his father’s favorite son. His mother, for her part, may well have seen in him traces of her own father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. For there was in Prince Henry an iron determination, evident even as a youth, and something of the same imaginative chivalry that had made John of Gaunt the protector of the reformer Wycliffe, and the patron of the poet Chaucer.

Of the three princes who had now reached manhood, Edward, the eldest, was quiet and sensitive; Peter was of an inquiring and volatile frame of mind; Henry alone had something about him that set him apart from other men. Born under the watery sign of Pisces, he would either succeed in a measure beyond most men’s dreams, or fail disastrously. Even his motto and device, which were portrayed on the livery of the serving men who surrounded him, revealed something of his character—Talent de bien faire, “talent” meaning not so much the power as the desire to do well. Talent de bien faire—it represented an aspiration and a dream, which would inspire him all his life. Even Peter’s device contained something of his nature—the one simple word Desir. It was a restless desire that would never leave him at peace. So the young princes stood there in the brazen sunlight of July, with their great enterprise ahead of them and with all their lives to make.

The messenger who spurred through the hot streets of Lisbon brought the first somber warning into their dreams. (“We must live as we must, and not as we would.”)

“Your mother, Queen Philippa, is ill.”

At that time, and in that month, there was no doubt that it was the plague.

The Queen had recently joined her husband at Odivelas. The royal family had left the hot stricken city for the cleaner air of their summer palace, some seven miles to the north, where the wind came off the Atlantic rinsed by thousands of miles of ocean. Queen Philippa was now in her fifty-seventh year, pious and devout, and with a deep practical strain. If her husband had passed on to his children the fire and sagacity that had made him ruler of Portugal, it was from Queen Philippa that they had inherited their chivalrous idealism. As the daughter of John of Gaunt, she was proud of the expedition upon which her husband and her three eldest sons would soon be engaged. As a woman she feared for them. But she had hidden her natural feelings and reproved her ladies in waiting, who had burst into tears on hearing that not only her sons but also her husband were going into battle.

She made only one request.

“My Lord,” she said to King John, “I ask you a favor before you leave. Knight your sons before me, with the swords that I shall give them. I know there are people who say that arms which are given by women weaken the hearts of noble knights. But as for me, I believe—in view of the blood from which I am descended—that this will never be the case.”

Now the moment that should have crowned the young princes’ lives—setting off to war in company with their father, and with the swords given them by their mother—was darkened. As they waited in the great palace, they heard from the physicians that there was no longer any hope of saving the Queen.