Dom**, of Portugal, Duke of Coimbra, was the fourth child and second surviving son of King John of Portugal, and was born on the 4th of March 1394. His father gave him an excellent education, which, joined to strong natural abilities and much application, rendered him one of the most accomplished princes of his time. He was not only very learned himself, but a great lover of learning, and also a patron of learned men. It was chiefly with a view to improve his knowledge that he spent four years in travelling throughout different countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, with a train suitable to his quality. There is a relation of these travels still extant, but so loaded with fabulous circumstances, that it wounds the reputation it was designed to raise. At his return he espoused Isabella, daughter to the Count of Urgel, and grand-daughter to Dom Pedro, the fourth king of Portugal; which was esteemed a very great advancement of his fortune. He was elected a member of the most noble order of the Garter on the 22d of April 1417, in the fifth year of the reign of his cousin Henry V., a grandson of John of Gaunt by the father's side, as our Duke of Coimbra was by the mother. In 1440 he was declared regent during the minority of his cousin Dom Alonzo V., son of King Edward, who died of the plague. He found some difficulty at first in the discharge of his office, both from the queen-mother and others. But, upon the whole, his administration was so mild and so just, that the magistrates and the people of Lisbon concurred in demanding permission to erect a statue to him. The regent thanked them, said he should be unwilling to see a work of theirs demolished, and that he was sufficiently rewarded by this public testimony of their affections. The queen dowager wished to raise disturbances in Portugal, by aiming at recovering the regency to herself; but the steadiness of the regent's administration, the attachment of the greater part of the nobility to him, and his enjoying in so absolute a degree the confidence of the people, not only secured the interior tranquillity of the state, but likewise raised the credit of the crown of Portugal to a very great height in the estimation of its neighbours. In the course of his regency he had made it his continual study to pursue the public good; to ease the people in general, and the inhabitants of Lisbon in particular, of several impositions; to maintain the laws in their full vigour; to give the king an excellent education; and, if that had been at all practicable, to diffuse a perfect unanimity throughout the court, by assuaging the malice and envy of his enemies. The king, when he came of age, and the cortes or parliament, expressed their entire satisfaction with the regent's administration; and all parties entirely approved of the king's marriage with Donna Isabella, the regent's daughter, which was celebrated in 1446. The enmity of his enemies, however, was not in the least abated by the regent's being out of office. They still persecuted him with their unjust calumnies, and unfortunately induced the king to hearken to their falsehoods.

The unfortunate duke, when ordered to appear before the king, was advised to take with him an escort of horse and foot. In his passage he was proclaimed a rebel, and almost immediately surrounded by the king's troops. Soon afterwards he was attacked, and killed in the heat of action. Nor was the envy of his enemies even then satiated. His body was denied burial, and at length taken away privately by the peasants. But his virtue, however hated in courts, was adored by the uncorrupt part of his countrymen. At length, by an inspection of his papers, the king saw, when it was too late, the injustice which had been done to the man who had behaved so well in a high and difficult office; and his papers discovered indications of further benefit contemplated for the king and his dominions. In consequence of these discoveries, the duke's adherents were declared loyal subjects, all prosecutions were ordered to cease, and the king desired the body of Coimbra to be transported with great pomp from the castle of Abrantes to the monastery of Batalha, where it was interred in the tomb which he had caused to be erected there for himself.