The Enterprise of England (28 page)

I nodded. I had guessed that something like this must have happened. The Earl had trusted van Leyden and would have given him every chance to vindicate himself. I did not think the Earl was a good judge of men.

‘As you know,’ Sir Francis continued, ‘the Earl returned to England in December.’

‘Aye, sir, I had heard. And Baron Willoughby appointed in command of the English army there, in his stead.’ I paused. ‘Not Sir John Norreys.’

I knew, as Walsingham knew, that Sir John Norreys was England’s best and most experienced soldier. In his youth he was notorious for the slaughter of Irish women and children, carried out under the orders of the Earl of Essex, father of the present Earl. Nowadays he was most famous for his military strategy. If anyone could match Parma, it was Norreys.

‘Why was Norreys not given command?’ I asked.

Walsingham shook his head. ‘Do not play the innocent with me, Kit. Norreys is but a commoner, knighted for his services.’

He let that hang in the air. He too was a commoner, knighted for his services.

‘Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, outranks him.’

‘I had heard,’ I said cautiously, ‘that Lord Willoughby said that if he himself was sufficient for the task, then Norreys was superfluous.’

Walsingham laughed aloud, something he did not often do. ‘Best keep that to yourself. Now, the reason I called you here is this.’

He patted the packet again and I assumed a look of polite enquiry. I could not imagine what this was about.

‘The Earl arranged for a medal to be struck, when he left the Low Countries, to commemorate his service there, and his departure. His reluctant departure.’

I recalled all I had heard about the Hollanders’ increasing distrust and contempt for
Leicester, but said nothing.

‘He has sent one of these medals to me, to be presented to you in recognition of your service to him.’ Walsingham unfolded a stiff sheet of paper and held out to me something wrapped in a piece of red silk. I got up from my chair and he handed it to me.

Inside the silk was a heavy medal of solid silver, about the size of a crown piece. On one side was a bust portrait of the Earl, like a Roman emperor, but adorned with a beard and a fashionable modern hat. On the other, somewhat puzzlingly, a flock of sheep to the left and one solitary sheep to the right. Sheep?

Around the Earl’s head were the words:
robe. co. leic. et in belg. gvber.
1587. In other words: ‘Robert Earl of Leicester and Governor of the Low Countries 1587’. I turned it over again. The sheep on the right wasn’t a sheep. It was meant to be a dog, presumably a shepherd’s dog, looking over its shoulder at the indifferent sheep. This side bore the legend:
non gregem sed ingratos invitus desero
.

I looked up at Walsingham and gave him a wry look. ‘Unwillingly I leave not the flock but the ungrateful ones.’

‘Aye.’

‘The dog is meant to be the Earl?’

‘Aye.’

Neither of us made any further comment on the medal. We both knew that Leicester had been appealing to the Queen for months to be allowed to leave the
Low Countries. I wrapped the medal again in its piece of silk and stowed it carefully in my doublet.

‘I am most grateful to His Lordship,’ I said gravely, ‘and will write at once to thank him for his gift.’

‘Good,’ Walsingham said. ‘I have heard that the United Provinces have struck a counter medal.’ He allowed himself a small smile.

‘That would be interesting,’ I said.

He nodded and I returned to Phelippes’s office. It would also be an interesting letter to write, if challenging.

Chapter Twelve

F
or months most people in England had clung stubbornly to the belief that Drake’s raid on Cadiz had crippled Spain’s navy permanently. This was the gossip on the streets, in the ale houses, among our patients. Anything else was too terrifying to confront. But at last this collective wilful blindness was swept away as rumours spread and were accepted as the truth. The tangible reality of the ships being built in Spain became common knowledge and forced the whole country – not just those at the centre of power and those of us who worked for them – to understand that the prospect of a Spanish invasion was not simply some nightmare. It was real, and it was going to happen. England was a tiny country, ruled by a woman, however much we revered her. The Queen’s navy was pitifully small, the ships themselves small, though our great captains were amongst the finest in the world. Spain possessed the largest empire on the face of the earth. Her ships were huge, their fire-power vaster than anything we could muster. The man-power she could draw upon, to sail her ships and form her army, was many times what we could assemble. In the Low Countries, Parma’s army waited – a large, disciplined and experienced force.

To augment our sea power, every private ship, merchantman or privateer, was commandeered into the navy. All the fishermen in
England were bidden to join our navy, even the trinkermen who fished the Thames. Many did not wait to be summoned, but volunteered as a patriotic fervour swept the country. So many wherrymen pledged their service to the Queen that it was a problem to find a boat to transport you across the Thames.

It was more difficult to create an army out of nothing. Apart from the local militia bands, which were made up of citizen volunteers who enjoyed parading and ordering their fellow townsmen about, the only soldiers we possessed in England were the garrison at Berwick, to keep out the Scots, the garrison at the Tower, to protect London and the Queen, and the garrison at Dover, to guard the coast from attack across the Channel. For any of these soldiers to be deployed against the Spanish would be to risk attack elsewhere. The soldiers stationed at
Dover would at least be in position to face an invasion. Our soldiers in the Low Countries were a poor match for the Spaniards when it came to battles – poorly commanded, underpaid and disaffected – they could hardly be relied on even if they could be returned to England, leaving our flank to the northeast exposed.

There was little I could do to show my loyalty to my adopted country, other than sit at my desk in that cramped back room and rack my brains over the coded despatches and intercepted letters, but I was happier now than I had been nearly two years before, when I had taken an unwilling part in the entrapment of Babington and the Scottish queen. I had no scruples about the Spaniards, my people’s ancient enemies.

I sat back on my stool one day, flexing my cramped fingers.

‘I wish I could take a more active part against the Spaniards,’ I said to Phelippes. ‘They raped and burned my country. I would I could join the fleet when we sail out to meet them. Thrust my sword into one of those misbegotten scoundrels.’

It was bravado, but I was restless. I am not quite sure how serious I was in this masculine, bellicose talk. Perhaps I had become infected by the general mood on the streets. I had not, after all, enjoyed our skirmish with the traitorous Dutch peasants near the Spanish army a few months earlier.

Phelippes looked up from his work, then set aside his quill and polished his spectacles on a silk handkerchief.

‘Do not underrate the work you are doing, Kit. Perhaps you might kill a Spaniard or two, should it come to hand-to-hand fighting. But one day’s work of yours here will save more English lives and end more Spanish ones than you could ever hope to do as a simple soldier on board ship.’

‘Do you truly believe so?’ I had always felt there was something of a barrier between Phelippes and myself, but now that our mutual enemy was drawing so near, I needed reassurance, even if it meant revealing a glimpse of weakness in myself.

He put on his spectacles again and directed a sharp glance at me across the room. ‘I do. And you should believe it too.’ He gave me one of his rare brief smiles. ‘You are of value to England, Kit.’

I would never love this work as I loved my physician’s calling, but in that moment I did feel a burst of pride. So that he might not read it in my face, I leaned down and made much of scratching Rikki behind his ears. Of course I could never wield a sword on one of
England’s ships – I had no skill in swordsmanship in any case. I would have been cut down at once. It merely seemed that, after my journey into the Low Countries with Berden, my life now was very dull, especially when I knew that Walsingham’s agents were spread out all over Europe, from Spain and Portugal to the Holy Roman Empire, from the bleak Russian steppes to the mysterious streets of Constantinople, and from Cairo to Jerusalem. I had never thought I would envy them, and my experiences in the Low Countries had given me an understanding of the danger and discomfort their missions involved, but I was tired of my work of code-breaking, however important Phelippes might claim that it was.

Then one evening in early summer, when I had spent the day in Phelippes’s work, a servant arrived from Dr Nuñez asking if I might be released to dine with him, as he was awaiting a packet of letters on one of his ships, due on the evening tide, and he expected some of them to be in code. I knew by now just how closely both he and Dr Lopez worked with Walsingham, supplying him with intelligence and arranging the carrying of letters and the transport of couriers and intelligencers all over Europe, even as far as the Sultan’s empire.

Phelippes agreed that I might go, so I ran down the backstairs and out into the soft spring sunshine, taking Rikki with me and glad to be free of the close air in the small office. I walked along Seething Lane and around the corner to Mark Lane. Dr Nuñez greeted me kindly, as he always did, and we sat down alone to dine, for his wife was visiting an aged aunt, who was ailing.

‘You think important matters will arrive on this ship?’ I asked.

‘Word from Spain,’ he said.

I shivered. I could not help it.

‘The Spanish . . . they’re so powerful,’ I said in a small voice. ‘I remember how they marched into Portugal and we made no resistance. I was a child and did not understand how it could happen, how our Portuguese soldiers could vanish into the mist and leave us to face the Spanish. We stood in the street and watched the ranks of Spanish soldiers marching by, their faces full of contempt, their banners so arrogant, and we so humiliated. How can England withstand them? It will all begin again: the occupying army, the persecutions, the Inquisition.’

I could hear the panic in my voice. There are some memories that never leave you.

‘They will find us out and destroy us,’ I said.

Dr Nuñez ran his hand down his beard, which was turning white.

‘I know your family suffered, Kit. And my wife and I had come here to England before Spain invaded Portugal. But we too saw what the Inquisition could do, although my own family managed to escape it.’

He patted my hand, then poured me another glass of wine, and I drank it down without tasting it.

‘As for England withstanding the Spanish fleet . . . do you remember your Greek history? The battle of Salamis?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The Persians had bigger and stronger ships, but the Greeks out-manoeuvred them in their smaller, faster vessels.’

‘Exactly. I think you will find that Drake and Howard have also read their Greek history.’

There was a knock on the door and one of the servants came in, carrying a packet of papers secured with thin ribbon. Rikki sat up from his place beside the small summer fire and looked at me expectantly. Dr Nuñez untied the ribbon and began to sort through the papers.

‘Many of these are of no interest to us tonight. Dockets for cargo, personal letters we carry for friends and fellow merchants.’

He stiffened suddenly and laid his hand on one thin folded sheet of paper. I saw that his hand shook as he lifted the seal with a knife.

‘This will be the one. Bring the candle closer.’

I moved the candlestick between us and took the sheet from him. It held a bland, meaningless message about supplies of Rhenish wine, but the lines of ink were widely spaced. Another message would be contained in those spaces, written in lemon juice or milk or urine. I held it close to the candle to warm and the letters emerged, browned by the heat, hastily written. The code was the one used normally by Dr Nuñez’s agents. He could have deciphered it himself, but he was slow and his eyesight was failing.

A few minutes later we were back in Seething Lane, which I had left barely an hour before. I had to slow my impatient steps, for the old man’s knees were arthritic and he could not keep up my pace, while Rikki followed us soberly, as if he sensed that something was afoot. This time we went to the front door and were shown at once into the dining parlour where Walsingham was at meat. He started up from the table and looked from one to the other of us. Dr Nuñez pushed me forward and I held out the sheet of paper with my transcription at the bottom of it.

‘Well?’ said Sir Francis.

I looked at him, and my own hand holding the paper was shaking.

‘The Armada has set sail.’

The fleet had left Lisbon on the twenty-eighth of May. It was now the fifth of June.

For the next few days, I went very early to the hospital each morning, when the pre-dawn light was filtering through the river mist. Since that first message from Dr Nuñez’s agent, Walsingham had told me that I was to report to Phelippes every day, but I could not abandon my patients altogether, nor could I allow them to become a burden to my father. On that particular summer morning, less than a week later, I had given permission for two women to be sent home, applied fresh dressings to half a dozen injuries, fixed a new splint to a broken arm and given Peter Lambert instructions about medicines to be dispensed, all before I hurried away to Dr Nuñez’s house to collect any despatches which might have arrived on the previous evening’s high tide.

In Phelippes’s office I began to sort through them before I even sat down on my stool. ‘There is one here from
Bordeaux,’ I called to Phelippes, ‘I’d best transcribe that first.’

He came across the room while I warmed the paper at my candle. As it was written in Dr Nuñez’s familiar code I could read it straight off, as easily as if it had been written in English:

The fleet is seven miles across from end to end, like a gigantic crescent of huge ships bearing down towards England.

I stared blindly at him, trying to envisage a fleet seven miles across – the distance from
London to . . . where? I could not even begin to imagine it. And already the fleet had been sighted off Bordeaux. A sick panic seized my stomach. The Spanish, the loathsome Spanish! They had robbed me of home and family, imprisoned me, driven me into this life of lies and deception, and now they were pursuing me inexorably again.

No! I shook myself. Ashamed. What was I? Some insignificant creature, a mere beetle beneath the Spanish boot.
England was their prey. England and our Queen.

Phelippes said nothing, but even he, usually so severe and contained, turned pale.

‘Seven miles across,’ he said softly. ‘Is there anything else of note?’

I sorted through the remaining four despatches Dr Nuñez’s manservant had given me.

‘There’s one here from Antwerp.’

Walsingham had informers even in Spanish-controlled
Antwerp, but only rarely were they able to slip a message through enemy lines. It appeared, from several superscripts on the outside of the paper, that it had travelled via Paris, and then also on from Bordeaux.

I trembled as I read it out, deciphering as I went:

Here in the Spanish Netherlands, the Duke of Parma is preparing a second fleet, a fleet of barges, which will carry a trained army of thirty thousand men across the Channel to invade England, under escort of the warships now sailing up from Spain.

‘That perfidious scoundrel!’ I cried, forgetting for once to hold my tongue and hide my feelings. ‘All these last months he has been pretending to treat for peace with the Queen! How could she be so deceived?’

Despite the fact that Burghley himself, diplomat and peace-maker, had warned her that this time there was no escaping war with Spain, we had known in Walsingham’s office since early spring that the Queen had been negotiating for peace, offering in secret (as we discovered through our intelligencers in the Duke of Parma’s camp) to sacrifice the Protestant Netherlanders who were our allies, and even to surrender to Parma England’s own holdings in the Low Countries. I remembered the Penders family at the Prins Willem, the minister Dirck de Veen, and Sara’s cousin Ettore Añez. What would become of them if we deserted them? It was shameful. Shameful of the Queen, who had ignored both Burghley and Walsingham. I knew my words and my thoughts were disrespectful, but more than Parma were prepared to act treacherously in this affair. I had no doubt that Parma had never intended to make peace in the Low Countries, but merely used the Queen’s overtures to gain time for the Spanish invasion.

Phelippes did not answer me, but went at once to fetch Walsingham so that he might read the despatches for himself.