Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

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.

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.