A Column of Fire

by Ken Follett

  Tears came to her eyes. ‘None at all?’

  ‘You can wear shoes.’

  She managed not to cry, but it was a struggle. ‘Do you have any other requirements?’

  ‘No. Just serve us.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Her distress made him horny, and he was tempted to stay longer, but he wanted to see Duke Henri as soon as possible. He turned away and left the room. As he closed the door he heard her sob, and smiled with pleasure as he went down the stairs.

  *

  NED WAS ELATED to receive a letter from Alain de Guise in Paris giving the battle plan of the king of Spain.

  The Spanish armada would sail through the English Channel and anchor off Dunkirk. There they would rendezvous with the Spanish army in the Netherlands, led by Alessandro Farnese of Parma, the most successful general ever sent to the Netherlands by the king of Spain. Then the reinforced armada would turn around and sail due west, straight into the estuary of the river Thames.

  Ned also got a letter from Jerónima Ruiz saying the Spanish armada had one hundred and twenty-nine ships.

  Jerónima was in Lisbon, and she had seen the armada with her own eyes and counted the vessels in the harbour. She had gone there with the cardinal, who was one of a large contingent of priests needed to bless the ships and individually absolve each one of the twenty-six thousand sailors and soldiers for the sins they would commit in England.

  Queen Elizabeth was devastated. Her entire navy consisted of thirty-eight ships. She did not see how she could defeat the invasion, and nor did Ned. Elizabeth would be destroyed, King Felipe would rule England, and the ultra-Catholics would dominate Europe.

  Ned was mortified. He felt it was all his fault, for encouraging the execution of Mary Stuart.

  Jerónima’s information was corroborated by other spies. The numbers changed only a little from one message to the next.

  Elizabeth wanted to know how many troops the duke of Parma had in the Netherlands, and how he planned to get them across the Channel. Ned had reports from several spies, but they disagreed, so he decided to go and see for himself.

  He would be risking his life. If he were caught, and discovered to be an English spy, then hanging would be the best fate he could look forward to. But he had helped to create the catastrophe that loomed, and it was his duty to do what he could to avert it, including risking his life.

  He took a ship to Antwerp. He found it a lively, cosmopolitan city: anyone was welcome, he guessed, as long as he paid his debts. ‘And there’s no nonsense about usury being a sin,’ said Carlos Cruz.

  Ned was intrigued to meet Carlos, the distant cousin about whom he had heard so much. He was fifty-one and heavy, with a bushy beard going grey. Ned thought he looked like a jolly peasant in one of those Dutch paintings of yokels merrymaking. It was hard to imagine that Carlos and Barney had killed a sergeant in a fight over a card game.

  Carlos lived in a large house near the waterfront with a huge ironworks in the backyard. He had a pretty wife, Imke, with a big welcoming smile. A daughter and son-in-law lived with him, plus two grandchildren. The men dressed sombrely but the women were draped in gorgeous colours, bright blue and scarlet, peach and lavender. The house was full of costly objects: framed oil paintings, musical instruments, mirrors, decorative jugs and bowls and glassware, leather-bound books, rugs and curtains. The Netherlands people seemed home-centred, and they showed off their wealth in a curiously domestic way that Ned had not seen elsewhere.

  Ned needed Carlos’s help for this mission, but he was not sure of getting it. Carlos was Spanish and Catholic. On the other hand, he had been forced by the Church to flee his homeland. Would he work against the armada? Ned would soon find out.

  On the day Ned arrived, Carlos’s long-time business associate, Ebrima Dabo, came to supper with his wife, Evi. Ebrima was seventy, and his curly hair was white. Evi wore a gold necklace with a diamond pendant. Ned remembered Barney saying that when Ebrima was a slave, he had been the lover of Aunt Betsy. What a life that man had led: first a farmer in West Africa, then a soldier, a prisoner of war, a slave in Seville, a soldier again in the Netherlands, and at last a rich Antwerp iron maker.

  Carlos poured wine generously and drank a great deal of it himself. As they ate, it emerged that both Carlos and Ebrima were apprehensive about the Spanish armada. ‘It’s partly because of Queen Elizabeth that the Spanish have failed to pacify the Netherlands,’ Carlos said, speaking French, which they all understood. ‘Once the king of Spain has conquered England, he’ll be free from her interference here.’

  Ebrima said: ‘When priests get to run the government, it’s bad for business.’

  Carlos said: ‘And if our independence movement is defeated, there will be nothing to stop the Holy Inquisition.’

  Ned was encouraged. It was good that they were worried. He judged this was the moment to make his proposition.

  He had thought hard about it. He would be safer here if he travelled with Carlos, who spoke fluent Dutch, knew the country, and was himself known by hundreds of people in the region. But Carlos would be risking his life.

  Ned took a deep breath. ‘If you want to help England, there is something you could do,’ he said.

  ‘Go on,’ said Carlos.

  ‘I’m here to assess the strength of the Spanish forces getting ready to embark for England.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ebrima in the tone of one who is suddenly enlightened. ‘I wondered.’

  Carlos said: ‘The Spanish army is mostly around Dunkirk and Nieuwpoort.’

  ‘I wonder if you would consider selling the Spanish a consignment of cannonballs. They must need thousands of them for the battle ahead. And if you and I arrived with several cartloads of ammunition, we’d be welcomed instead of suspected.’

  Ebrima said: ‘Count me out. I wish you well, but I’m too old for such adventures.’

  That was a bad start, Ned thought grimly; it might encourage Carlos to decline.

  But Carlos grinned and said: ‘It will be like the old days.’

  Ned relaxed and drank some more wine.

  Next day Carlos loaded his entire stock of cannonballs onto carts, then scoured Antwerp for more. In the end, he had eight cartloads. He joined the carts in pairs in line, each pair pulled by two oxen. They set out on the third day.

  The road to Nieuwpoort ran along the coast, and soon Ned began to see what he had come to look at: the preparations for the invasion. All along the shore were moored new flat-bottomed boats, and every boatyard was busy building more. They were crude, unwieldy craft, and they could have only one purpose: to move large numbers of men. There seemed to be hundreds of them, and Ned reckoned each would carry fifty to a hundred soldiers. How many thousands of troops did the duke of Parma have waiting? The fate of Ned’s country depended on the answer to that question.

  Soon Ned began to see the soldiers, camped inland, sitting around cooking fires, playing dice and cards, as bored as armies usually were. A group passed them on the road, saw the loaded carts, and cheered them. Ned was relieved by this confirmation that the cannonballs would be their passport.

  He began to estimate numbers, but the camps seemed never to end. Mile after mile, as the plodding oxen pulled the heavy carts along the dirt road, there were more and more troops.

  They bypassed Nieuwpoort and went on to Dunkirk, but the picture did not change.

  They had no trouble gaining entry to the fortified town of Dunkirk. They made their way to the marketplace on the waterfront. While Carlos argued with an army captain over the price of the cannonballs, Ned went to the beach and looked across the water, thinking.

  The number of troops here must more or less match the numbers embarking in Lisbon, he guessed. In total there must be more than fifty thousand men about to invade England. It was a vast army, bigger than anything Europe had seen for decades. The largest battle Ned could remember hearing about had been the siege of Malta, which had involved thirty or forty thousand Turkish attackers. He felt
overwhelmed by the sense of an almighty power inexorably bent on the destruction of his home.

  But they had to get to England first.

  Could the flat-bottomed boats take the troops across the open sea to England? It would be hazardous – they would capsize in anything but calm water. More likely, their purpose must be to transport the soldiers to larger ships anchored near the shore – a process that would take weeks if all the galleons had to dock normally.

  Ned stared at the harbour and imagined thousands of men being carried out to the galleons at anchor off the coast – and he realized that this was the weak point in the battle plan of the king of Spain. Once the army was embarked, the invaders would be an unstoppable force.

  It was a gloomy prognosis. If the invasion succeeded, the burnings would resume. Ned would never forget the dreadful squealing sound Philbert Cobley had made as he burned alive in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral. Surely England would not go back to that?

  The only hope was to stop the armada in the Channel before the troops could embark. Elizabeth’s navy was outnumbered, so the chance was slim. But it was all they had.

  26

  Rollo Fitzgerald saw England again at four o’clock in the afternoon of Friday 29 July 1588. His heart lifted in joy.

  He stood on the deck of the Spanish flagship San Martin, his legs adjusting to the rise and fall of the waves without conscious effort. England was just a smudge on the horizon to the north, but sailors had ways of checking where they were. The leadsman dropped a weighted rope over the stern and measured its length as he paid it out. It was just two hundred feet when it hit the sea bottom, and its scoop brought up white sand – proof, to the knowledgeable navigator, that the ship was entering the western mouth of the English Channel.

  Rollo had fled England after the collapse of his plot to free Mary Stuart. For several nail-biting days he had been only one step ahead of Ned Willard, but he had got out before Ned caught him.

  He had gone immediately to Madrid, for it was there that the fate of England would be decided. Continuing to call himself Jean Langlais, he had worked tirelessly to help and encourage the Spanish invasion. He had a good deal of credibility. The reports of Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Spain’s ambassador first to London, then to Paris, had made it clear to King Felipe that Langlais had done more than anyone to keep the Catholic faith alive in Protestant England. He was second in status only to William Allen, who would be archbishop of Canterbury after the invasion.

  The launching of the armada had been postponed again and again, but it had at last sailed on 28 May 1588 – with Rollo aboard.

  The king of Spain presented this as a defensive war: retaliation for the attacks of English pirates on transatlantic convoys, for Queen Elizabeth’s help to the Dutch rebels, and for Drake’s raid on Cádiz. But Rollo felt like a crusader. He was coming to free his country from the infidels who had seized it thirty years ago. He was one of many English Catholics returning with the armada. There were also 180 priests on the ships. The liberators would be welcomed, Rollo believed, by Englishmen who had stayed true, in their hearts, to the old faith. And Rollo had been promised the post of bishop of Kingsbridge, his reward for all those years of difficult and dangerous secret work under the nose of Ned Willard. Once again Kingsbridge Cathedral would see real Catholic services, with crucifixes and incense, and Rollo would preside over it all in the gorgeous priestly vestments appropriate to his status.

  The admiral of the armada was the duke of Medina Sidonia, thirty-eight years old and prematurely bald. He was the richest landowner in Spain and had little experience of the sea. His watchword was caution.

  When the position of the armada had been confirmed, Medina Sidonia hoisted a special flag on the mainmast, one that had been blessed by the Pope and carried in procession through Lisbon Cathedral. Then he flew the king’s flag, a diagonal red cross, on the foremast. More flags blossomed on the other ships: castles from Castile, dragons of Portugal, the pennants of the noblemen aboard each vessel, and the emblems of the saints who protected them. They fluttered and snapped bravely in the wind, proclaiming the gallantry and strength of the fleet.

  The San Martin fired three guns to signal a prayer of thanksgiving, then furled her sails and dropped anchor, and Medina Sidonia summoned a council of war.

  Rollo sat in. He had learned enough Spanish in the past two years to follow a discussion and even to take part, if necessary.

  Medina Sidonia’s vice-admiral was the handsome Don Juan Martinez de Recalde, commanding the San Juan de Portugal. A lifelong naval officer, he was now sixty-two and the most experienced commander in the armada. Earlier today he had captured an English fishing vessel and interrogated the crew, and he now revealed that the English fleet was holed up in the mouth of the river Plym. This was the first large harbour on the south coast. ‘If we dash to Plymouth now and surprise them, we could destroy half the English navy,’ Recalde said. ‘It will be revenge for Drake’s raid on Cádiz.’

  Rollo’s heart leaped in hope. Could it really all be over that quickly?

  Medina Sidonia was dubious. ‘We have strict orders from his majesty King Felipe,’ he said. ‘We’re to head straight for our rendezvous with the duke of Parma and the Spanish army of the Netherlands at Dunkirk, and not get diverted. The king wants an invasion, not a sea battle.’

  ‘All the same, we know we’re going to encounter English ships,’ Recalde argued. ‘They will surely try to prevent us making our rendezvous. Given a perfect opportunity to devastate them, it would be foolish to ignore it.’

  Medina Sidonia turned to Rollo. ‘Do you know this place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Many Englishmen would now regard Rollo simply as a traitor. If they could have seen him, on the flagship of the invading force, helping and advising the enemy, they would have sentenced him to death. They would not understand. But he would be judged by God, not by men.

  ‘The mouth of Plymouth harbour is narrow,’ he said. ‘Only two or three ships can pass through abreast, no more. And the entrance is covered by cannons. But, once inside, a few galleons could wreak havoc. The heretics would have nowhere to run.’

  Spanish ships were armed with heavy, short-barrelled cannons, useless at any distance but destructive at close range. Furthermore, the decks of the armada were teeming with soldiers eager for action, whereas English warships were manned mainly by sailors. It would be a massacre, Rollo thought eagerly.

  He finished: ‘And the town of Plymouth has a population of about two thousand – less than a tenth of our manpower. They would be helpless.’

  Medina Sidonia was thoughtful and silent for a long moment, then he said: ‘No. We’ll wait here for the stragglers to catch up.’

  Rollo was disappointed. But perhaps Medina Sidonia was right. The Spanish were overwhelmingly stronger than the English, so Medina Sidonia had no need to take risks. It hardly mattered when or where they engaged Elizabeth’s navy: the armada was sure to win.

  *

  BARNEY WILLARD was at Plymouth Hoe, a park on top of low cliffs that overlooked the entrance to the harbour. He was one of a small crowd of men accompanying the admiral of the English fleet, Lord Howard. From the Hoe they could see their fleet, many of the vessels taking on supplies of fresh water and food. The few warships of the royal navy had been augmented by smaller armed merchant ships, including Barney’s two vessels, the Alice and the Bella, and there were now about ninety craft in the harbour.

  The breeze was from the south-west. It smelled of the sea, which always lifted Barney’s spirits, but its direction was, unfortunately, perfect for the Spanish armada coming into the Channel from the Atlantic and heading east.

  Queen Elizabeth had taken a huge gamble. In a meeting with her naval commanders – Lord Howard, Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins – she had decided to send most of her navy to meet the Spanish armada at the western end of the Channel. The eastern end – the ‘Narrow Sea’, where the duke of Parma planned to cross with his invading army –
was left weakly defended by a few warships. They all knew how risky it was.

  The atmosphere on Plymouth Hoe was tense. The fate of England was in their hands, and they faced an overwhelmingly stronger enemy. Barney knew that in a sea battle all expectations could be upset by the unpredictable weather; but the odds were against them, and they were worried – all but one: the vice-admiral, Drake, whose famous insouciance was on display now as he joined a group of local men in a game of bowls.

  As Barney looked anxiously across the water, a pinnace appeared in the Sound. A small ship of about fifty tons, she had all sails raised, and flew across the water like a bird. Barney knew the ship. ‘It’s the Golden Hind,’ he said.

  There was a murmur of interest among the assembled company. The Golden Hind was one of several fast vessels assigned to patrol the westernmost approaches to England and watch for the invaders. There could be only one reason for her to dash back here, Barney thought, and apprehension prickled his skin.

  He watched the ship enter the harbour, drop her sails, and moor at the beach. Before she was even tied up, two men disembarked and hurried into the town. A few minutes later, two horses moving at a brisk canter came up the slope to the park. Drake left his game and came across the grass, limping from an old bullet wound in his right calf, to hear what they had to say.

  The senior man of the two introduced himself as Thomas Fleming, captain of the Golden Hind. ‘We met the Spaniards at dawn,’ he said breathlessly. ‘We’ve been running before the wind ever since.’

  The admiral, Charles Howard, was a vigorous fifty-two-year-old with a silver-grey beard. ‘Good man,’ he said to Fleming. ‘Tell us what you saw.’

  ‘Fifty Spanish ships, near the Scilly Isles.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Mostly big galleons, with some supply ships and a few heavily armed galleasses with oars as well as sails.’

  Suddenly Barney felt possessed by a bizarre sense of calm. The event that had been threatened so often and feared so long had at last happened. The most powerful country in the world was attacking England. The end of doubt came as a strange relief. Now there was nothing to do but fight to the death.