, 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 Cortes. 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 re