The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  “With this ring I thee wed,” I said. “This gold and silver I thee give. With my body I thee worship and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” I placed the ring on her thumb. “In the name of the Father.” I moved it to her first finger. “And of the Son.” I looked at her now and she was looking at me, eyes glinting in the coloured light, black fringe held under the gold circlet, finely modelled nose, high cheek bones, lips, reddened with madder, slightly parted and smiling. In her eyes I seemed to see all my past. I moved the ring to the second finger. “And of the Holy Ghost.” This was the moment to walk out, to dash the ring on the stone steps, to begin a life entirely of my own creating, building on what I now knew of my ancestry, my mistakes. Above all on my mistakes. Mistakes in perception of the character of the only two women for whom I would ever care.

  Yet if I did that now, knowing the impossibility of retreating through time, did I not flee from the destiny of my own making? Of my own choosing?

  I moved the ring to her third finger and slipped it on. “Amen.”

  We took communion. Then, while still at the altar steps, friends were around us, plucking at the favours from Sue’s dress. Smiling she unpinned them one by one.

  In a haze I was drinking muscatel from the shallow mazer bowl which she had passed me. I handed it on to Philip Killigrew and took a piece of the cake.

  Everyone was talking and chattering, moving around us and wishing us well. The music began again, from the lutes which Thomas’s friends had brought. By chance they were playing the tune that Victor Hardwicke had played so often in the prison in Lagos.

  “Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee;

  When thou art old there’s grief enough for thee.”

  POSTSCRIPT FOR PURISTS

  This has been a novel primarily about the Killigrews, a not unimportant Cornish family whose history appears and disappears tantalisingly among the records of the time. Sometimes the bare facts of their existence are recorded, sometimes the facts are richly and revealingly clothed, sometimes there are frustrating and impenetrable silences.

  Bibliographies in the historical novel are pretentious—it cannot matter to the reader, or should not, whether a novelist has read 30 or 300 books on a subject—but perhaps I ought to say that in research for this book I have wherever possible gone back to original sources, and I have not wantonly distorted the known facts.

  For the misdemeanours of the Killigrews I have relied on the Lansdowne MS., the Salisbury MS., the Acts of the Privy Council, etc., not on Hals, who was wrong as to this family in several respects, nor on the so-called Killigrew MS. which was not written until 1737. The only reliable modern summary of all this—except for scattered of illuminating references to them in A. L. Rowse’s books—is in D. Matthew’s contribution to the English Historical Review for July 1924.

  The account of the kidnapping of John Killigrew’s base son by Captain Richard Burley and a Portuguese freebooter, and his being placed as a page at the Spanish court is to be found in a report in the Calendar of State Papers for February 1596.

  Blavet, in Brittany, frequently mentioned in these pages, was Port-Louis opposite the modern port of Lorient. Throughout the book I have used the modern calendar. On the Spanish landing at Mousehole I have kept to the contemporary reports in the Salisbury MS. and elsewhere and to the almost contemporary Carew—father of Gertrude—who got it direct from Sir Francis Godolphin.

  That Ralegh’s sudden warm, reconciliation with Essex at the end of 1595 came about through the marriage of his close friend Northumberland to Essex’s sister, has not before been put forward, but it would seem to have the justification of high probability.

  There are a number of eye witness reports of the raid on Cadiz, most famous, no doubt, Ralegh’s own. But in the main I have relied on an unpublished MS. in the Lambeth Palace Library, probably written by someone on Ralegh’s flagship; and it is on this MS. that I have depended for the account of Ralegh’s adventure the night before the battle—an adventure which, at least in detail, seems to have escaped his numerous biographers—and also for the story of the loss of the Peter of Anchusen. The treasure fleet at Cadiz was in fact not burned until twenty-four hours later than stated in this book.

  The extent to which John Killigrew became committed to the Spanish cause is perhaps arguable, but the evidence which exists does seem to me conclusive. Not only Facy’s report on William Love’s statement, mentioned in the novel, but many other reports of a like nature which filtered in at the end of 1597 and continued to do so through much of the following year. William Astell’s testimony, 22nd February, 1598, was that it was rumoured at the Groyne (Coruña) that John Killigrew had been executed for treason. Peter Scoble reported 5th May ’ 98, that while a prisoner of the Spaniards he was constantly questioned as to whether John Killigrew had been put to death or was in prison. But the conclusive testimony comes from the Spanish side—hints and references in various letters—and perhaps most of all in the order issued by the Adelantado that those at Falmouth were to be well used during the landing, all others put to the sword.

  I have no evidence that Ralegh spoke up for John Killigrew when he was brought to London to answer for his behaviour, but it is not out of keeping with his character that he should have done so.

  For details of the Second Spanish Armada—technically it should be the third if one counts the abortive sailing of the previous year—I have gone, apart from English sources, of which perhaps the most informed is Ralegh’s despatch of late October 1597, to the Calendar of State Papers (Spanish), the Calender of State Papers (Venetian), the Adelantado’s own despatches, letters from Father Sicilia S. J., de Soto’s letters, and the King’s letters to various of his commanders at that time. I have strayed from fact in making de Soto secretary to the Adelantado as early as 1594—he was officially appointed in May ’ 97—but he worked behind the scenes for long enough, and this seemed a useful simplification. The profound secrecy attaching to the destination of this Armada has not been exaggerated; the only ones likely to have known anything of it, before the sealed orders were opened, were the King himself, Don Juan de Idiaquez, Don Cristoval de Moura, and the two secretaries, de Ibarra and de Prada. (See the contemporary report by Vendramino; Alberi’s Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, vol. 13; and Gregorio Leti’s Vita del Catolico Re Fitippo II, Cologne, 1679.)

  As for the future of these people. John Killigrew survived until 1605, in prison—or sometimes, when the Privy Council relented, out of it, in company with a jailer to see to his chaotic affairs. The mystery of Jane Fermor’s dowry has never been cleared up, but the one reasonably well-grounded account is that the whole dowry came with her on her wedding day and was buried secretly by her two servants at Gyllyngvase—in the Arwenack grounds about a mile from the house—where she contrived to have access to it in time of need while denying it to her husband and her father-in-law. John Killigrew, her husband, in a career of many vicissitudes—including a decade-long battle to divorce his wife—obtained from James I permission to found the town of Falmouth; and his brother Peter, walking a successful tightrope between King and Parliament, procured a charter for it in 1661.

  Jack Arundell of Trerice became Sir John Arundell and was governor of Pendennis Castle in 1646 when with a tiny garrison it held out against Fairfax for five months, being the last place in England to fly the royal standard for Charles. Thomas Arundell married his Bridget Mohun, sold Tolverne and moved to London. He was knighted at Greenwich in 1603, inherited Truthall from his uncle and, after losing money in an unwise speculation, returned to Cornwall and made his new home there. Gertrude Arundell (nee Carew) soon remarried. Her second husband was William Carey of Clovelly, brother of Jack Arundell’s wife.

  Lord Henry Howard was of course one of the principal movers behind Cecil in bringing King James smoothly to the throne. He was also largely responsible for poisoning James’s mind against Ralegh and was a judge at Ralegh’s trial in 1603. During James’s lifetime undeserved honours were heap
ed upon this man.

  Finally perhaps I should say that I have attributed to Maugan certain characteristics of one, Robert Killigrew, who became a close personal friend of Ralegh’s, who was highly skilled in the mixing of medicines and herbal remedies, and who was later innocently involved in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. But this is—or some day may be—another story.

  Copyright

  First published in 1963 by Hodder & Stoughton

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-5665-6 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5662-5 POD

  Copyright © Winston Graham, 1963

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