The astute Dom John saw that the time of waiting was nearly over. Queen Leonora was unpopular not only because of her daughter’s Castilian marriage, but also because she herself was conducting a liaison with a Castilian nobleman, Fernando Andeiro, the Count of Ourem. The Portuguese saw the Castilian influence invading their country, not only through the Queen’s daughter Beatrice, but also through the Queen’s lover.

Within two months Dom John assassinated the Count of Ourem and forced Leonora to leave Lisbon. The forces of Castile immediately intervened to protect their own interests and those of their King and Queen Beatrice. Nothing could have served better to unite the people of Portugal behind Dom John. On August 14, 1385, on the battlefield of Aljubarrota, he and his Portuguese army under the command of the great general Nuno Alvares Pereira defeated the Castilians. It is significant that helping the Portuguese in their hour of need was an English mercenary force, consisting mainly of archers. The bowmen of England had established their mastery at Crecy, and would dominate Continental warfare from Agincourt onward. It was they who were largely responsible for giving Dom John, master of Aviz, the victory that secured for him the crown of Portugal.

Frequent treaties with England had marked the rise of Portugal from what had once been a Moorish state to a European power. This friendship between two struggling maritime nations was further consolidated in 1387 by King John’s marriage to Philippa of Lancaster, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of John of Gaunt. John of Gaunt, who was fishing in the troubled waters of the Castilian succession, had hoped perhaps that King John would marry his eldest daughter, Catherine, heir presumptive to the throne of Castile. But John of Aviz showed his usual astuteness by marrying Philippa. He had no wish to embroil himself in further and future complications. He had only just gained one throne, and he was a realist who perceived that one step at a time is enough for most mortals. He was pleased to have the friendship of the powerful House of Lancaster, but he had no desire to further John of Gaunt’s designs on the kingdom of Castile.

This then was the course of events that led to the marriage of the illegitimate son of Pedro I of Portugal with an English princess of the House of Lancaster. From this marriage stemmed the dynasty of Aviz, those brilliant monarchs and princes under whom Portugal rose from a small obscure power to the greatest maritime nation in the world. King John’s sons —and above all Prince Henry—contributed so much to Portugal’s development that it has truly been said: “… In her triumphal maritime progress Portugal discovered the whole world; she shattered the medieval bonds that fettered the knowledge of mankind… .”

The Queen who lay dying in the palace at Odivelas on July 18,1415, was no ordinary woman. She had inherited much of the virtue and strength of her grandmother Philippa of Hainaut, wife of King Edward III of England. (It was that Philippa whose piety and generosity had made her loved by all her people, and whose kindness is recalled by the famous occasion when her prayers saved the citizens of Calais from Edward Ill’s vengeance.)

Philippa, the wife of King John, inherited this kindness and piety. During the twenty-eight happy years of her marriage to King John, she made the court of Portugal one of the most respected in Europe. It is true to say that she found it an epitome of the medieval courts of Europe—where drinking, wenching, gallantry, and the chase filled in the long day’s idle hours. She left it a court of distinction, respected by the greater powers, and a center toward which men of learning and ability were glad to make their way.

Writing of this court, her son Prince Edward later remarked, “If it be said that few were virtuous I say that many became so; for neither do I hear, nor do I know, of any nobleman who is other than loyal, notwithstanding that more than a hundred have been ordered in marriage by my father the King, and my mother the Queen.”

Queen Philippa possessed the puritanical temperament that is a peculiar product of her native island. It is one that has often been mocked, but which, when united with a Latin vitality and joie de vivre, may sometimes produce remarkable characters. She possessed “that unconscious mixture of pride and convention which, though much below the level of religious duty, is nevertheless the opposite of hypocrisy. It was a feeling that kept Philippa above all attempts at subterfuge. There are no more despotic characters than those possessing such a temperament. The Queen came to rule the King with a rod of iron … and when Philippa fixed him with her cold blue eyes the King felt bound to do whatever she wished him to. Fortunately she was as sensible as she was good. Under her tutelage the King became another man.”

Prior to his marriage, King John had been far from averse to the natural pleasures of a young man of rank and fashion. His English wife’s puritanism may have changed him greatly, but not before he had already fathered an illegitimate son, the Count of Barcellos, founder of the future House of Braganga.