The Twelve of England

)[4] The twelve were scheduled to set out by ship from Porto, but one of them, Álvaro Gonçalves Coutinho, nicknamed o Magriço told the others to go ahead without him, that he would make his way overland via Spain and France.

The eleven knights set sail from Porto and landed in England, where they were well received in London by the Duke of Lancaster and the ladies, but there was great nervousness about whether Magriço would arrive on time.

When the day of the tournament arrived, legendarily held at Smithfield, London,[5] there was still no news of Magriço, leaving the damsel destined to be defended by him (named 'Ethwalda' in one version) quite distraught.

In Canto VI, Stanzas 40-69, while Vasco da Gama's fleet was crossing the Indian Ocean, a soldier named Fernão Veloso[6] regales his fellow Portuguese sailors with the story of the "Twelve of England" to pass the time and inspire their bravery.

[8] Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos's 1567 Memorial das Proezas da Segunda Tavola Redonda (which precedes Camões by a few years) briefly mentions that 'thirteen' (not twelve) Portuguese knights were dispatched to England "to defend the ladies of the Duke of Lancaster".

[32] The early 1390s also marks a difficult period in John of Gaunt's political life, at a low point in his fortunes, trying to navigate an England riven with great tension between King Richard II and the English nobility.

With the humiliating failure in Iberia still stinging, it was not unlikely disgruntled English knights might have taken to poking at the Duke of Lancaster and his household, in particular the Castilian Duchess who could be blamed for the hare-brained Iberian adventure to begin with.

[34] News of the feats of various Portuguese knights abroad in different countries - filtered back home in the early 15th century and somehow, inchoatly and anachronistically, congealed in popular memory into a single English tournament set around 1390.

[35] The story of the "Twelve of England" evokes the image of John I of Portugal, as some sort of Portuguese King Arthur, sending out his knights of the Round Table in feats of chivalry, saving distant damsels in distress (a marked change from the old reconquista tales of battling Moors.)

In the 1820s, Portuguese Romantic poet Almeida Garrett worked for many years on an extended poem, Magriço ou Os Doze de Inglaterra, which used the story of the twelve as a device for wider philosophical meanderings, which was never completed.

[37] Many decades later, in 1902, Teófilo Braga composed his own more straightforward poetic version of the story of the twelve, with a more nationalist tone, apparently inspired by his research into Camões and Garrett, but also possibly motivated by the 1890 British Ultimatum, which had provoked a strong anti-British feeling in republican-nationalist circles in Portugal at that time.