ties, and guarding the liberties of
the towns against noble usurpers.

We shall see the results of this in the life of Prince Henry; at present
there is only space to notice the general fact. The other lines of
John's home government--his reform of criminal procedure, his sanction
of the vernacular in legal and official business in place of Latin, his
attempt to publish the first collection of Portuguese laws, his
settlement of the Court in the true national capital of Lisbon--are only
to be linked with the life of his son, as helping one and all of them
towards that conscious political unity on which Henry's work was
grounded.

The same was the result of his foreign policy, which was nothing more
than the old state-rules of Diniz. Systematic neutrality in Spain and a
commercial alliance with England and the northern nations, were but the
common-sense securities of the restored kingdom; but they played another
part than one of mere defence, in drawing out the seamanship and worldly
knowledge, and even the greed of Portuguese traders. In the marts of
Bruges and London, "the Schoolmasters of Husbandry to Europe," Henry's
countrymen met the travellers and merchants of Italy and Flanders and
England and the Hanse Towns, and gained some inkling of the course and
profits of the overland trade from India and the further East, first as
in Nismes and Montpellier they saw the Malaguette pepper and other
merchandise of the Sahara and Guinea caravans.

The Windsor and Paris treaties of 1386 and 1389; the marriage of John
himself with Philippa, daughter of old "John of Gaunt, time-honoured"
and time-serving "Lancaster," and the consequent alliance between the
House of Aviz and the House of our own Henry IV., are proofs of an
unwritten but well understood Triple Alliance of England, Flanders, and
Portugal, which had been fostered by the Crusades and by trade and
family politics. And through this friendship had come into being what
was now the chief outward activity of Portuguese life, an interest in
commerce, which was the beginning of a career of discovery and
colonisation. Lastly, besides good government, besides saving the
kingdom and keeping it safely in the most prosperous path, Portugal owed
to King John and his English wife the training of their five sons,
Edward the Eloquent, Pedro the Great Regent, Henry the Navigator, John
the Constable, Ferdinand the Saint--the cousins of our own Henry V.,
Henry of Azincourt.

Edward,