Dragged Before the King
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Traziam-na os horríficos algozes Ante o Rei, já movido a piedade: Mas o povo, com falsas e ferozes Razões, à morte crua o persuade. Ela com tristes e piedosas vozes, Saídas só da mágoa, e saudade Do seu Príncipe, e filhos que deixava, Que mais que a própria morte a magoava,
The horrifying executioners were dragging her before the King, who was already moved to pity; but the people, with false and ferocious arguments, persuade him to her cruel death. She, with sad and piteous cries that issued only from her grief and her longing for her Prince and the children she was leaving behind—which grieved her more than her own death—
The climax of the Inês de Castro episode. Her killers haul Inês before King Afonso IV, who is already softening; but the crowd's cruel arguments push him toward her execution while she pleads.
The stanza sets the machinery of Inês's killing in motion. Her captors haul her before Afonso IV; the king is already bending toward mercy, and only the crowd's brutal reasoning tips him back toward the sentence. Camões keeps her almost silent until the last lines, where her weeping is not for herself but for the prince and children she must leave.
What a first reader misses is that Inês never actually pleads her innocence. Her grief is entirely outward-facing—saudade for those she loves more than she fears death. That is the turn Camões wants: he strips the political crime down to a mother's parting, so that when Pedro later takes his vengeance, we have already been made to feel the wound rather than judge the treason.
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