The small and plain hall of audience or justice has at the end a seat of tiled brick upon which the Sovereigns sat, and here tradition says the Council met, summoned by the rash young King Sebastian in 1578, to sanction the crusading attack upon Morocco upon which he had set his heart. All his fiery zeal and imperiousness were needed to persuade his nobles to agree to an adventure from which many foresaw disaster. But the ambitious youth had his way, and his mysterious fate, never solved when he disappeared for ever from the eyes of men at the battle of Alcacer Kebir, ended the male line of the house of Avis which John I. had begun at Aljubarrota two hundred years before. In this gloomy chamber the die was cast, and with the loss of Sebastian his uncle Philip II. and his descendants became kings of Portugal for a century. A more modern tragedy was enacted within these ancient walls. The vicious young debauchee, Affonso VI., was deprived of his crown and his wife by his brother Dom Pedro, in 1667; and here in the palace, in a room called after him, the wretched king passed the last twelve years of his imprisonment, shut off entirely from the sight of men. The windows of his prison-chamber still show the sockets wherein the strong bars were set, and a deep groove worn in the brick floor along one side marks the spot where the footsteps of the caged king, as he paced up and down for years before his bars, have worn his enduring epitaph. Up in a little closely barred cell overlooking the choir of the chapel, where Affonso used to hear mass, he died suddenly in 1683.