Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

It was not just that the Spanish were outnumbered. They were brave soldiers and skilled sailors, but they won their battles by ramming and boarding, and the English had figured out how to prevent them from doing that. Instead, they had been forced into a shooting battle, in which they were at a disadvantage. The English had developed a rapid-fire technique that the Spanish could not match. The larger Spanish guns were difficult to reload, sometimes requiring the gunners to hang from ropes outside the hull to insert the shot, and in the thick of a battle that was almost impossible.

The result was disaster.

As if to make defeat more certain, the wind had veered to the north, so there was no escape in that direction. To the east and south were only sandbanks, and the English were pressing them from the west. The Spanish were trapped. They were holding out bravely, but in time they would either sink under the English guns or run aground on the sandbanks.

There was no hope.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the weather changed.

An unexpected squall blew up from the south-west. On the deck of Lord Howard’s Ark Royal , Ned Willard was buffeted by strong winds and soaked by rain. He could have put up with that cheerfully, but what bothered him was that the Spanish armada was now hidden behind a curtain of rain. The English fleet moved tentatively to the place where the Spanish ought to be, but they had gone.

Surely they would not escape now?

After half an hour the storm moved on as quickly as it had arrived and, in the abrupt afternoon sunshine, Ned saw to his dismay that the Spanish ships were now two miles north and moving fast.

The Ark put on sail and gave chase, and the rest of the fleet followed, but it would take them time to catch up, and Ned realized there would be no more battle before night.

Both fleets stayed close to the east coast of England.

Night fell. Ned was exhausted and went to sleep, fully clothed, on his bunk. When dawn broke the next day he looked ahead to see that the Spanish were the same distance away, still racing north as fast as they could.

Lord Howard was in his usual place on the poop deck, drinking weak beer. ‘What’s happening, my lord?’ Ned said politely. ‘We don’t seem to be catching up.’

‘We don’t need to,’ Howard said. ‘Look. They’re running away.’

‘Where will they go?’

‘Good question. As far as I can see, they’ll be forced around the northern tip of Scotland, then they’ll turn south through the Irish Sea — for which there are no charts, as you know.’

Ned had not known that.

‘I’ve been with you for every hour of the last eleven days, yet I don’t understand how this has happened.’

‘The truth, Sir Ned, is that it’s very difficult to conquer an island. The invader is at a terrible disadvantage. He runs short of supplies, he is vulnerable as he tries to embark and disembark troops, and he loses his way on unfamiliar territory, or in unfamiliar seas. What we did, mainly, was to harry the enemy until the inherent difficulties overwhelmed him.’

Ned nodded. ‘And Queen Elizabeth was right to spend money on her navy.’

‘True.’

Ned looked across the water at the retreating Spanish armada. ‘So we’ve won, then,’ he said. He could hardly believe it. He knew he should jump up and down with joy, and he probably would when the news sank in, but for now he simply felt stunned.

Howard smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve won.’

‘Well,’ said Ned, ‘I’ll be damned.’

Pierre Aumande was awakened by his stepson, Alain. ‘There’s an emergency meeting of the Privy Council,’ Alain said. He seemed nervous, no doubt because he had to disturb the sleep of his snappish master.

Pierre sat up and frowned. This meeting was a surprise, and he did not like surprises. How come he had not known about it in advance? What was the emergency? He scratched his arms, thinking, and flakes of dry skin fell on the embroidered bedspread. ‘What else do you know?’

‘We got a message from d’O,’ said Alain. The unusual name of François d’O belonged to King Henri III’s financial superintendent. ‘He wants you to make sure the duke of Guise attends.’

Pierre looked at the window. It was still dark and he could see nothing outside, but he could hear torrential rain drumming on the roof and spattering the windows. He was not going to learn more by lying in bed. He got up.

It was two days before Christmas 1588. They were in the royal château of Blois, more than a hundred miles south-west of Paris. It was a huge palace with at least a hundred rooms, and Pierre occupied a magnificent suite, the same size as that of his master, the duke of Guise, and almost as large as the king’s.

Like the king and the duke, Pierre had brought with him some of his own luxurious furniture, including his voluptuously comfortable bed and his symbolically enormous writing table. He also had a treasured possession, a pair of wheel-lock pistols with silver fittings given to him by King Henri. It was the first and only time he had received a gift from a king. He kept them beside his bed, ready to fire.

He had an entourage of servants headed by Alain, now twenty-eight, whom he had tamed completely and turned into a faithful aide. Also with him was his pleasantly cringing mistress, Louise de Nîmes.

Pierre had made Duke Henri of Guise one of the most important men in Europe, more powerful than the king of France. And Pierre’s own status had risen along with that of his master.

King Henri was a peacemaker like his mother, Queen Caterina, and had tried to go easy on the heretical French Protestants called Huguenots. Pierre had seen the danger in this right from the start. He had encouraged the duke to establish the Catholic League, a union of ultra-Catholic confraternities, to combat the drift to heresy. The League had been successful beyond Pierre’s dreams. It was now the dominant force in French politics, and controlled Paris and other major cities. So mighty was the League that it had been able to drive King Henri out of Paris, which was why he was now at Blois. And Pierre had managed to get the duke appointed lieutenant-general of the royal armies, effectively removing the king from control of his own military.

The Estates-General, the national parliament of France, had been in session here since October. Pierre advised the duke of Guise to pose as a representative of the people in negotiations with the king, though in fact he was the leader of the opposition to royal power, and Pierre’s real aim was to make sure the king gave in to all demands made by the League.

Pierre was somewhat concerned that his master’s arrogance was going too far. A week ago at a Guise family banquet Duke Henri’s brother Louis, the cardinal of Lorraine, had proposed a toast to ‘My brother, the new king of France!’ The news of this insult had, of course, reached the king in no time. Pierre did not think King Henri had the nerve to do anything in retaliation but, on the other hand, such gloating tempted fate.

Pierre dressed in a costly white doublet slashed to show a gold silk lining. The colour did not show the white dandruff that fell constantly from his dry scalp.

Midwinter daylight came reluctantly and revealed black skies and relentless rain. Taking with him a footman to carry a candle, Pierre walked through the dim passages and hallways of the rambling château to Duke Henri’s quarters.

The captain of the duke’s night watch, a Swiss called Colli, whom Pierre was careful to bribe, greeted him pleasantly and said: ‘He was with Madame de Sauves half the night. He got back here at three.’

The energetically promiscuous Charlotte of Sauves was the duke’s current mistress. He probably wanted to sleep late this morning. ‘I have to wake him,’ Pierre said. ‘Send in a cup of ale. He won’t have time for anything else.’