Beatrice was ten years old and already married to the king of Castile. Then her father died. The marriage meant to secure her kingdom became the best reason to refuse it to her.
On 22 October 1383, Ferdinand I of Portugal died, leaving Beatrice as his only surviving legitimate child. Her mother, Leonor Teles, assumed the regency under the settlement made for her daughter's marriage. Beatrice had a royal husband to support her inheritance and a mother authorised to govern it. The arrangements looked considerably stronger on parchment than they proved in Lisbon.
Beatrice had been part of her father's diplomacy almost as long as she had been alive. Marriage negotiations changed with his alliances, and the men proposed for her changed with them. As a small child she had been betrothed to a Castilian prince. By the spring of 1383, the marriage being prepared was to the king of Castile himself, John I, a widower. On 17 May they married at Badajoz. She was still ten.
The marriage contract, agreed at Salvaterra de Magos in April, had tried to provide for the difficulty the marriage created. If Beatrice inherited Portugal while married to its powerful neighbour, how was Portugal to remain a kingdom of its own? The agreement stipulated that the two kingdoms should remain separate. Leonor would govern Portugal until a son born to Beatrice reached fourteen, when he would take over the Portuguese crown and government.
They had settled the age at which her son could govern. His mother was four years younger than that herself.
For Leonor, the regency continued work she had already been doing. She had taken part in her daughter's marriage treaties and in the government of her husband's kingdom, and her name had appeared beside his in royal acts before she was a widow. Now the marriage settlement gave her authority to govern without Ferdinand, potentially for many years, while her daughter lived in Castile.
But the settlement had to be accepted outside the royal household. Leonor faced hostility towards her government and towards the favourites around her, above all the Galician nobleman João Fernandes Andeiro. Her daughter's marriage added another fear: that a Castilian king would turn his wife's inheritance into his own dominion. Beatrice had supporters in Portugal, but being Ferdinand's daughter could not by itself overcome opposition to the man she had married.
At her son-in-law's request, Leonor had Beatrice and John proclaimed queen and king of Portugal. A proclamation could announce a succession. It could not make a divided kingdom obey.
On 6 December, less than seven weeks after Ferdinand's death, his half-brother John, Master of Avis, and his associates killed Andeiro in the royal palace in Lisbon. The opposition to her government now had a leader from within the royal family. Two days later Leonor left for Alenquer, then went on to Santarém.
The widow who had been entrusted with Portugal could no longer command its capital.
John of Castile entered Portugal with troops to enforce the claim he held through Beatrice. On parchment, the regency was Leonor's until a grandson not yet born reached fourteen. In January 1384, at Santarém, she handed it to her son-in-law. Her daughter's husband now held the government that was supposed to remain in her hands. Their alliance soon broke down. Later that year he had Leonor taken to Castile and confined in the convent of Santa Clara at Tordesillas. She never returned to Portugal.
Beatrice was eleven that summer, when her husband's campaign brought her to the siege of Almada, across the river from Lisbon. Inside the castle, the defenders were running out of supplies. John learned from a prisoner how exhausted they had become. He could wait. Hunger would do what his army had not yet finished.
Beatrice asked him to accept their surrender. He refused at first, preferring to keep the siege in place. Three days later he yielded to her plea, accepted the keys and guaranteed the safety of the inhabitants and their possessions. The people inside were resisting the king who claimed to rule through her. She had asked him to spare them, and they were allowed to surrender without losing their lives or their belongings.
It was a concession she could obtain. The kingdom was another matter.
In 1385 the Master of Avis was chosen as king of Portugal. That August, John's army was defeated at Aljubarrota, ending his attempt to establish himself and Beatrice on the Portuguese throne. For those Portuguese who had supported her, defeat could mean leaving the country. Nobles and churchmen followed her cause into Castile. The disputed inheritance had acquired a household of exiles.
Beatrice remained queen of Castile until her husband's death in 1390, when she was seventeen. As a widow she kept lands and revenues in Castile, and she took a particular interest in the Portuguese followers who had lost their place at home. Leonor, too, spent the rest of her life in Castile. On parchment, the mother had been promised a long regency and the daughter a crown. Neither woman held either.
At ten, Beatrice's marriage had been used to arrange the future of a kingdom. As a widow, she still had an income, a household and people who depended on her. Some of them had followed her because they believed Portugal was hers. She could not give them back their country. She could keep them in the one she had been sent to as a bride.
