INES DE CASTRO
INES DE CASTRO
1325-1355
           Inês de Castro was a Galician noblewoman and courtier, who became the mistress of King Pedro I of Portugal, who made her his queen after she died.
           Pedro was the son of Afonso IV of Portugal who ruled from 1325-1357. Pedro was married to Constanza Manuel but fell in love his wife’s lady-in-waiting, Ines. After his wife died giving birth to their third child, he started living openly with Ines, and openly declared that he was the father of her children and refused to remarry unless he could marry Ines. King Afonso wanted Pedro to remarry a princess and wouldn’t allow him to marry Ines, so Pedro married Ines without his father’s permission.
           At the end of Afonso’s life, he was worried about what would take place after his death so he ordered Ines to be imprisoned and then had her murdered in 1355 by a group of royal councillors, she was aged 29. He did this in the hope that his son would marry a princess, but Pedro was enraged when he learned that Ines was decapitated in front of their youngest child.
           Afonso died and Pedro became king, one of his first actions was to have Ines assassins tortured, had their hearts torn from their bodies whilst they were still alive, and he became known as ‘Pedro the Cruel’. Now that he was king he wanted to make Ines his queen. He had her body exhumed, dressed in royal robes, and taken on a ceremonial, candlelit procession to her coronation, where she was anointed and then crowned. He demanded that his subjects swear allegiance to their new queen, and one by one each noble came forward, knelt, and kissed her hand.
           She was later buried at the Monastery of Alcobaca in a beautiful marble tomb, opposite Peter’s so in legend that they can rise from their graves and look at each other. On the marble coffin there is a promise by Pedro that they would be ‘together until the end of the world’.
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