Sacred Mysteries: Constable turned friend of the ragged poor
Sussex has its Battle Abbey, at the site of the Battle of Hastings, and Portugal has its own priory church at Batalha, built after the battle that confirmed its independence in 1385.
On the windswept paving outside the Gothic church there, between Lisbon and Coimbra, is an equestrian statue. The horse looks like the White Knight’s mount drawn by Tenniel for Through the Looking Glass. The rider in armour stands in the stirrups holding his sword point-up.
This is the “Saintly Constable”. He was not a policeman; the title referred to the commander of the armed forces. His name was Nuno Alvares Pereira. The statue was put up in 1961, the 600th anniversary of his birth. Then in 2009 he was canonised. I didn’t notice at the time, and was surprised when I found out. People don’t get canonised for fighting battles.
Despite the odd link with England, only aficionados of Portugal will know much of the Saintly Constable. Via his daughter, Nuno was the ancestor of Catherine of Braganza, the Queen of Charles II, credited with popularising tea-drinking in England. In his own time, Nuno was the right-hand man of John I of Portugal, who married Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt.
Both Nuno and the king he served were bastards. That status hardly exists today, but it entailed legal disadvantages in the 14th century. Later, Shakespeare was interested in the effect of bastardy on the attitude of those born illegitimate.
Once legitimated, Nuno got on rapidly, was drawn into military service aged 13 and at 16 married a young widow, with whom he had three children. When he was 23, war brewed over the succession to the throne. King John I of Castile claimed it for his wife, and the nobles of Portugal preferred their own John, the bastard son of Peter I.
The Spanish were defeated in battle in 1384, by plague in 1385 and, on August 14, decisively by a much smaller force led by Nuno at Aljubarrota. He was aided by 100 English longbowmen, sent under the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373. Nuno’s wife died in 1388, and he didn’t remarry. In 1423, he became a lowly lay brother of the Carmelite monastery in Lisbon that he had endowed 30 years earlier, as he had the priory of Batalha.
His change in life was not entirely unsignalled by his past. His personal banner bore a red cross with the four quarters crowded with saints: George and James, with Mary and John by the cross of Jesus. His great sword was engraved with the name of Mary. This might sound like having a saint’s name on your gun, but in chivalric epic, swords themselves were honoured and personified: Tizon, the sword of El Cid, or Durendal, the sword of Roland.
More demanding than the romance of chivalry was Nuno’s decision to give away most of his money to the men who had fought under his command. After he withdrew to Carmel as Brother Nuno of Saint Mary he chose to serve the poor, distributing food daily. He died on Easter Day 1431 and the people acclaimed him as O Santo Condestavel. Yet it was not until 1918 that he was beatified, by the peace-loving Benedict XV.
Nuno’s tomb in the Carmelite church in Lisbon had been lost in the earthquake of 1755. A silver reliquary of remains was stolen in 1961 and never recovered. Only in 1996 did archaeologists rediscover his tomb in Lisbon.
A miraculous cure was attributed to Nuno in 2000 and on 26 April 2009, the day of his canonisation, a tapestry was hung out in St Peter’s Square showing him not as a knight but as a Carmelite brother, reaching out to the aged and ragged poor.
