Martin Stephen - The galleon's grave

Andalusia was a military province for Spain. The troops, albeit mostly local militia, were there precisely to repel raids from corsairs, and he had hopes of getting three hundred cavalry and nearer three thousand troops ready to march and ride within hours. The problem was assembling them from their various garrisons. Would it be best to make his home at San Lucar the rendezvous? Or get them to join him on the road? Or send them straight to Cadiz? Speed, he decided, speed was the primacy. The troops could march for their lives, straight for Cadiz. He would not make it before midday; many of them would be there by dawn. What matter if he was not there to command them? A half-smile flickered across his face as he struggled into the snug-fitting doublet. They were probably better off being commanded by the Captain of the fortress in Cadiz, the Duke thought, than by a farmer whose family owed more than nine hundred thousand ducats. Any more delay and Drake could have landed men, sacked the town and his sailors impregnated enough women to bring up a whole new city of heathen bastards.

He pushed back the urge to grab a drink and some meat and run for his horse. Instead he allowed himself to be sat in the ornate dining room while varieties of cold meat from last night's supper were paraded before him. He picked at them, allowing himself a maximum of twenty minutes for the charade to go on, before elegantly wiping imaginary grease off his moustache and beard, and rising. The footmen stood back and bowed deeply. The retinue was small, only thirty mounted men as guards and fifteen servants, but it would have to do. The mounted soldiers who normally provided his escort were the best riders, and the best mounted. It would have been madness not to send them to the outposts and garrisons to direct the troops and the militia to Cadiz.

He did not give a backward glance to the orange groves he so loved. He simply nodded to his family, hastily assembled to bid him farewell. To show too much emotion would be to show weakness, reducing the distance between himself and the ordinary men and women over whom he ruled. He pushed out of his mind the urge to turn to lock eyes with his wife. They said he was hen-pecked, married to a Portuguese harridan. How little they knew. Nevertheless, once out of sight, he dug his golden spurs into the side of his horse, feeling it rear up and surge forward like the fine beast it was. Not even the great Duke was safe from the wrath of King Philip if he arrived to find Cadiz a smouldering ruin. Involuntarily, he looked to the skyline, damning himself immediately for a fool, knowing the distance was much too far to see any smoke, unless Drake had set the whole world alight.

May-June 18th, 1587 The Netherlands; The Capture of the San Felipe

Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Governor of the Netherlands, read the letter from his kinsman Philip II of Spain with total concentration. His aides waited silently by his side. He was a handsome figure. He had been called from sitting for his portrait. As a result he was extravagantly dressed, with no bonnet or cap but a vast, fashionable ruff angled forward so that its back was halfway up the back of his head. The doublet was picked out with gold lace inlays, the puffed sleeves of a different colour. Yet despite all the finery it was his face that commanded attention: angular, the nose straight,' the fine head of close-cropped dark hair, the beard and moustache perfect of their kind. It was the eyes that drew one to him: dark, yet with a mysterious depth to them, the eyes of a man who had seen and felt too much. Strange, newcomers thought. Here was a man, a grandson of King Charles V of Spain, a nephew of King Philip II, born not so much with a golden spoon in his mouth as born with the world at his feet. To add to his birth came striking good looks, a high intelligence and the body of a fine, wild animal. Why did his eyes speak of such sadness? The head of the House of Farnese commanded respect in Europe, not just in Italy. Yet from the start the Duke of Parma had chosen the military life. At twenty-six years of age he had been an aide-decamp at the Battle of Lepanto. Many young men had died in that epic battle. Those who had survived had an honour no man could ever take away from them and no man equal. Was it not at Lepanto that the infidel hordes had been stopped in their tracks, a victory won not for man but for God?

And then at the ridiculous age of thirty-eight years he had been placed in command of the King of Spain's Army of Flanders, that most troubled of provinces where the local Dutch were not only fighting Spain, their temporal master, but fighting God with their Protestant heresy. He had recaptured most of Flanders by his wits, his unconventional tactics and by his capacity to command the fierce loyalty of his soldiers. They had said Antwerp was a general's grave, crowed in advance at the humiliation the young Duke of Parma would meet there. They had swallowed their words when Antwerp had fallen. If Drake was a god of evil to many Spaniards, a man whose success could only have been achieved by the sale of his soul to the Dark Lord, then Parma was the equivalent to the English.

He finished reading the letter, carefully folding it and handing it back to his secretary. 'We are to invade England,' he announced to his men. They looked at each other, questions on their brows. 'The King will send a great Armada, is assembling it even now. It will occupy the English fleet while we sail over the Channel to England.' His tone was flat, giving nothing away. He had thirty thousand men under his command, the finest army in Europe, in the world. No one doubted that if they could be landed in England they would cut through its heart like a crossbow bolt through paper. There was silence. Finally, one of his aides found the courage to speak. He had served the Duke from the days of Lepanto, was the most trusted of all. He often acted as spokesman for the others.

'We have no deep water port,' he said. 'The Dutch have shallow-draft vessels that can patrol the coast, vessels that can come inshore in a manner that no great Portuguese galleon can.' It was no secret that the recent conquest of Portugal meant that the core of any Spanish navy would be the fine seagoing vessels of Portugal. Spanish galleys were designed for the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Portugal's empire, now subsumed to Spain, had been built on ocean-going galleons, some said the strongest and most durable in the world.

Silence. Parma gazed at the man, but said nothing.

'Those Dutch fly-boats could blast our shallow barges out of the water before we came within sight of a Spanish armada,' the aide continued.

'And we would never take Antwerp,' Parma said, after another long pause. Yet they had taken Antwerp. The implication was clear. They did the impossible.

'How?' It was a senior officer, another man Parma had total trust in. He had been stranded with him for hours behind enemy lines — Parma shared the dangers and rigours of his men. He was as often in the front line with his men as he was found at base. It was one reason why they loved him so much.

'How did we take Antwerp?' Parma replied. 'I thought you knew. Actually, I thought you planned most of it.' There was laughter round the table, an easing of the tension.

‘Not Antwerp, my Lord,' said the man with a smile and a deferential bow 'of his head, acknowledging the joke. 'How to get our soldiers over to England and past the Dutch?'

'There are canals, old and new,' said Parma dreamily. He had shown a savage capacity to cut new canals through the flat lands of the Netherlands in days, getting his men where no one had expected them to be. 'There are empty boats to be sent to the coast, drawing off the damned Dutch in the face of their real enemy. There are embarkations at night-time when not even the Dutch can see what is happening, if it happens fast enough.' He stood up, unexpectedly. His men bowed their heads. 'But most of all, we have an army. What say we take Sluys? Ostend? All of Flanders? Even Walcheren?'