'That's it!' said Mannion in total exasperation. 'Let the buggers line up and take turns at blowing us to bits! We'll just sit 'ere and be awfully brave…'.
The Duke's face on the quarterdeck was impassive. The English Commander had refused his challenge for combat, preferring instead to stand off and batter the San Martin to pieces.
The Duke had not dismissed Gresham. He stood, exposed, a yard or two away from the man who would be the target of every sharpshooter on board an English vessel, a man who had taken his flagship into combat with five or six of the enemy's best galleons.
He is still challenging the English Commander, Gresham realised. Was it Drake? Hawkins? Frobisher? Challenging him to take advantage of overwhelming odds and lay alongside the San Martin, trusting in God and his own men to turn the battle in their favour, to start the grappling melee that was the only way the Spanish could win this hopeless fight.
It was the longest hour in Gresham's life. Feeling like the target in an archery butt, Gresham found his fear vanishing to be replaced by an analytical calm. He saw the soldiers, straining in the tops and on the decks to find a target, firing hopefully as the English refused to come within range. Every now and then a figure would drop from the masts or collapse on the deck, a sudden rag-doll of silent stillness among the running men.
He watched the process of the men working the guns. Take the powder charge brought up from the magazine by the smoke-stained ship's boy, ram it down the barrel. Shove wadding home with the rammer. Roll the ball from the rack on the deck into the barrel, ram it home. Prick the touchhole clean, smear a powder charge from horn of flask over. Train the carriage to the left or right with the great metal lever, raise or lower the barrel by banging the iron quoins underneath it or ripping them out. Roll the carriage forward, secure it against the recoil with the thick, greasy ropes that were sometimes like snakes with a life of their own, rubbing at even the hardened hands of the sailors and soldiers. Then the gunner, with his glowing linstock, the end holding the slow-match forged in the shape of dragon's jaws or even a hand, bringing the flame down on to the touchhole. And then the monstrous anger of the gun… it became a ritual, almost soothing. And the whole thing in silence. It was as if the body saw no need for it to receive the smashing roar of the guns, the screams of men, almost rejected them and simply cut out hearing as a sense. The San Martin's sails were shredded now, rigging flailing across the heavens. There was only intermits tent noise from the carpenters' mallets. They left the holes in the great after-castle and anything which posed no. threat to a central member of the great hull or which was not letting in water. The winds had been light, the ship not heeling heavily, and so hardly a shot had landed below the waterline.
Eventually — an hour? Hour and a half? — a body of Spanish ships finally managed to come up alongside the San Martin and take her back to the main body of the fleet. The Duke offered no complaint. The battle was declining now, the noise of carnage being replaced by the familiar noises of the sea. The Duke turned to Gresham.
'They will not fight us,' he said simply, revealing for the briefest of moments in his face a depth of tiredness Gresham had never before believed could happen in a man. And speaking in English! Broken English, to be sure, but readily comprehensible. So he had understood all along… 'They seek only to delay us. I cannot fight and I cannot stand, and must drive on to my… rendezvous.'
'I am sure the Duke of Parma will await you there,' said Gresham, conscious how weak his riposte sounded.
‘It may be so,' said the Duke. 'Yet fifty men will not be alive to see it.' Fifty had died on board the San Martin in the day's engagements. The Duke's desire to be at the centre of the fighting, to grapple with the English, meant the brave, tough Portuguese-built ship had been by far the most fiercely engaged of the Spanish ships. The transports and their escort had taken a pounding but the English had been driven off. The Spanish had shown extraordinary discipline throughout the day, keeping their formation despite the ferocity of the cannonade they had been subjected to. The reports coming in suggested remarkably little damage to the Spanish ships.
'You may sleep on the deck here,' said the Duke. It was an honour. The command deck was kept clear, even gentlemen allowed on it were there only through direct command of the Duke. For the first time in weeks Gresham might be able to stretch out on the deck. 'The galleasses and my other vessels confirm your warning. Had we sent more ships they would have been dragged on to the shoals.'
The Duke nodded to Gresham and walked off, presumably to his great cabin. Ten minutes later a fine linen shirt and a boat cloak appeared in the hands of a servant, who mouthed something at Gresham.
'What did he say?' Mannion asked Gresham. 'He said, 'From the Duke. From his own private store of clothing.'
Would Cecil have sent a boat cloak to an underling? There were some commanders men would die for, Gresham reflected, and others they would simply wish to kill.
Wednesday 3rd August. Had Gresham slept at all? It felt as if he had been awake all night. His eyes were glued together, his feet felt like lead and there was an ominous ache in his gut. Was his stomach responding to the near-rotten food which was all they had to chew on?
Gresham supposed that there were men who did not feel fear. He had known from an early age that he was not one of them. For him, true courage lay in defeating fear, not pretending it did not exist And this morning he felt real fear. Could he bear another day of standing on a deck waiting to feel the crushing weight of cannon or musket ball tear into his flesh, maiming before it killed? It was different when one fought a man. It took far greater courage to stand and be shot at, and he was beginning to fear that it was courage he did not have.
He would have prayed then, for courage, if he had not felt so hypocritical. What God could respect a man who only prayed when he needed something? In any event, the prayer that lay fallow in his heart was answered that day. The English ships seemed unwilling now to close with the Spaniards and loose off shot, staying out of cannon range. Yet clearly they had been little damaged by the fire they had received from the Spaniards. What an irony it would be if the entire stock of cannon balls on the San Martin had come newly-foundered from the Lisbon armoury. Perhaps God did have a sense of humour.
"Near out of powder, that'd Be my guess,' said Mannion. He had rapidly become Gresham's military interpreter. 'Government's too stingy to give 'em enough, or always used to be, and these towns along the coast, they want to hang on to their powder and shot in case it's them as gets invaded. Problem with the English firing so fast,' he added, 'they-use up too much powder and shot.'
Then the wind died. The two fleets lay within sight of each, motionless, useless, the entrance to the Solent and the Isle of Wight creeping up with paralysing slowness as the current moved both fleets at perhaps half a mile an hour.
Thursday 4th August. An English squadron had been placed by the entrance to the Solent, to resist any attempt at a landing. A few puffs of wind off the shore were enough to send it moving down on the northern wing of the tightly-huddled Spanish ships. More firing broke out, and with so little wind the smoke hung ghost-like in the rigging, seeming sometimes to ripple and re-settle as two or three guns fired together.
'Oh God,' said Mannion. 'Here we go again.' Was he feeling the same strain? Was even Gresham's rock starting to shake and quiver?
The wind was fitful, playing with them, teasing one minute with its strength and then dying away to nothing. Somehow the San Martin was standing opposite a great English ship, the largest in their fleet. For a moment the Spaniards thought they had cut her off. Cheering broke out from the masts, mocking laughter as the English ship broke out her boats and tried to haul herself past the Spanish. A hail of musket fire swept from the Spanish ships, and down below the Gun Captains were hoarse at shrieking to their men to reload. Yet the great cannon spoke with tantalising infrequency, for all that the men's hands were slipping with the sweat that poured off their bodies. Men fell in the boats, but none gave
in, and suddenly the English ship let her full panoply of sails fall from her yards and swept ahead of the Spanish ships, whose pursuit in the face of her speed was derisory.
The fighting was now sporadic, across the whole front, an engagement here, an engagement there, the sullen thunder of guns insistent, unrelenting.
'Is it planned?' Gresham yelled to Mannion. They had both acquired an arquebus from a pair of dead soldiers, though they could have been firing into a vacuum for all that they had been able to see amid the smoke. 'Look, we're being pushed past the Solent, past any chance of mooring.'
'Next stop Calais!' grinned Mannion. There was nowhere else for the Armada to rest and anchor past the Solent except Calais, and that was a French port whose outer roads were notorious for currents, shoals and freak storms. 'I reckon it's accident as much as anything else. If there'd been a half decent wind he could have sailed in there and stuck regardless. It's the bloody wind that's done for the Spaniards. For Christ's sake, look 'ow much damage we haven't had after half an hour up opposite a bloody great English ship.'
It was extraordinary how much punishment a ship such as the San Martin could take. Her main timbers were immensely thick, and the lighter cannon simply failed to penetrate. The upperworks were splintered and smashed, and a cannon had been upturned when an English ball had gone through a gun port, but as a fighting vessel the San Martin was still highly effective, despite having stood off and traded fire with a series of great English ships.
"Ere,' said Mannion, 'Do you want history to repeat itself? Or do we really want these bastards sunk?' Mannion yelled into Gresham's ear, and he went to the side, straining his eyes to look ahead. What Gresham saw made him leap up onto the command deck, bow low before the Duke, who was standing without a cloak, his face revealing nothing. There were tiny, thin lines over it now, Gresham noticed, lines that had not been there before. Between his feet the deck planking was gouged, white splinters sticking up. A musket ball must have missed the Duke by inches. Had he flinched? Or hadn't he even noticed? Had the Duke taken any sleep? Was the slight swaying the motion of the sea, Gresham wondered? Or was it tiredness? *We're drifting east, my Lord,' said Gresham. 'In front of us is what the English call the Owers, hidden rocks and shoals that can rip the heart out of a boat. The English are shepherding us towards them.'
The Duke went to the side, strained to look ahead. There, to leeward, was a stretch of water of an angry green, its surface troubled with sharp, choppy waves unlike those around it.
Their pilot had been hit in the engagement with the San Martin. As Pilot on the flagship he would have been experienced, and have his own routier, a collection of compass courses, landmarks for entering various harbours and danger points, compiled from what other mariners had written. Many pilots scorned routiers, their scorn a cover for the fact that they could not read. Would the pilot have known about the Owers? Realised their proximity? Would another pilot have spotted the danger? Even if they had communication between ships, it was so slow and primitive that they might never have got warning out.
The Duke nodded, a strangely formal gesture, to Gresham. He ordered a gun sounded to attract the attention of the fleet, and the San Martin pulled round, leading the fleet to the south and away from the danger.
'Do you wish to become our pilot?' he asked Gresham. Was the man making a joke? Could he have even a vestigial sense of humour left after the pounding, the incessant strain? 'After all, this is the second time you have performed this service.'
'My Lord, the knowledge isn't mine. My servant here sailed these waters as a child. Alas, his knowledge ceases with this stretch of the south coast.'
The engagement had virtually ceased now, but boats were flocking to the flagship. Yet there had been no summons from the Duke. Two men were led up on to the deck, bowed low and spoke volubly to the Duke.
'They're out of shot,' Mannion translated to Gresham.
'It needn't be a real problem yet,' thought Gresham out loud. 'Some ships have been heavily engaged, others haven't fired a shot. If they distribute what's left they'll be alright for two or three days. After that…'
'Three more days,' said Mannion, 'and this shirt'll be so hard you could fire it at the Ark Royal and blow 'er apart.' Gresham had taken the Duke's shirt for himself, telling Mannion that it would be wrong for such a refined piece of clothing to go to a mere peasant From somewhere Mannion had acquired a rough tunic to replace his salt-hardened one, but it was made out of hard canvas and had rubbed parts of his back raw. He bore the pain, aggravated by salt water, phlegmatically.
There is a survival mode for combatants. Broken sleep, periods of intense boredom enlivened by moments of sheet terror, unhealthy food grabbed whenever possible all become normal. For the lucky ones, the mind learns to concentrate simply on the essentials, cutting or filtering fear, pain and worry. For those less lucky, the trembling hands, the haunted eyes, the endless threshing of the body in sleep told their own story. Such, men died in their minds several times every hour, each new dawn leaving them like a leaking ship, sinking inexorably deeper and deeper into the water.
'Funny,' said Mannion as the darkness settled over the San Martin, 'I didn't know which way you'd go, you bein' a thinker and such like. Wondered if you'd tip over the edge.'
'The only thing that might make me tip over the edge,' said Gresham, 'is smelling you for longer than I have to.' He turned over, his body used to the hard deck, offering the other half of the cloak for Mannion to climb under. 'It was bad enough in Cadiz. Now it's even worse. And try not to breathe on me until I'm asleep.'
Friday 5th August and Saturday 6th August Men had been working all night, and already a new sail had been hoisted on the mainmast of the San Martin. The divers, thin, shivering creatures with immense reserves of strength, had been over the side, plugging holes beneath the waterline, securing the ship. The ceaseless squeak and heave of the pumps was their litany now. Gresham had been woken in the small hours by Mannion's stentorian snoring. He had walked to the bow to relieve himself, then back down the deck where the sailmakers were at their work, eerily silent. There was a tap on his shoulder. It was one of the Duke's servants, motioning him to follow.
There were four or five officers on the deck with the helmsman, and the Duke was standing directly by the stern, gazing back to where he knew the English fleet was shadowing him. Did he ever sleep?
'You possibly saved this ship today,' said the Duke quietly. He had an extraordinary manner. He rarely raised his voice, yet it carried a massive authority, and even the most surly seaman seemed genuine in the bow he offered the Duke. Would Gresham ever command such respect, he wondered, respect that was offered without it ever seeming to be asked for?
‘I am grateful you think so,' said Gresham, 'but not sure it is so.' He was too tired to prevaricate. ‘I suspect your watchman at the bow or the masthead would have seen the Owers in time, or another ship read its routier properly.'
'Your modesty does you credit. I do not trust you, you realise?' The tone was soft.
'No one trusts a spy, my Lord,' said Gresham, 'and you cannot know if all this while I am working out who will win this battle, keeping my options open for a return to England, seeking to give you ill advice the moment I think your cause is lost.'
'And are you?' asked the Duke.
'I believe I'm working neither for England nor for Spain,' said Gresham. 'I believe I'm working for peace.'
'A grand claim,' remarked the Duke. 'And even if it were true, on what grounds do you claim peace as our right? Do we not scream when we are first brought into this world? Does not the plague, unrequited love, the pain of a foul tooth, the sickness at the loss of a wife or a son affect rich and poor alike? Surely God in His wisdom placed us in a world where to live is to suffer pain? And the only measure of a true man is to be willing to risk death for a just cause?'
'I'm sure that's true, my Lord,' said Gresham, 'for those of us with a brain between bur ears, for whom starvation is not an issue, those of u
s who have the luxury of time to think about why we are here on earth. And we reach, perhaps, for the sanctity of Christ, the purity and meaning that His vision offers.'
'You talk of "us",' said the Duke, not outwardly alarmed at his ancient lineage being grouped with that of the bastard son of a London merchant.
'Because as a bastard I was left to wander the streets of London and mix with those who do not have the luxury of time for thought, and because I've spent time on my father's country estates, sometimes even been asked into the filthy hovels of those my father deemed peasants, a sub-human species to be worked and used, but never known.'
The Duke of Medina Sidonia had no problem with recognising that not all humankind were born equal. 'God did not make all his creatures equal in their sight. He made them equal only in the sight of God,' said the Duke with finality. 'It is easy to be sentimental about the poor.'
The thousands of peasants under the Duke's command were not necessarily people, to him, thought Gresham. They were souls. Souls demanded respect, to be treated to a certain code, but not to be treated necessarily as people, as fellow humans, it is easy to forget that the poor wish to live as much as we do, that if you prick them they bleed as much as any human. Even easier to use them as pawns in monstrous games of power. I've lied to my Spanish masters. I've told them that I've acted for my faith. It's not true. I do not really care that Queen Elizabeth is a heretic'
He saw the Duke draw back slightly. Had he revealed too much?
‘I care that she has no heir, will have no heir. The Virgin Queen knows that while she is all that stands between England and civil war her advisers will do everything in their power to keep her alive. Elizabeth has opted to preserve herself while she lives, and doesn't care for what happens to her country when she dies.' He paused for a moment, ‘I think there'll be civil war when she dies. The contenders for her throne? A clutch of rapacious nobles with a pinch of royal blood and an overweening ambition. The warped King of Scotland, son of the Mary Queen of Scots we executed…' He had almost said I instead of 'we’. 'Scotland is, of course, England's oldest enemy. A stupid, vapid woman called Arabella Stuart whose blood gives her a claim and whose brains do not exist. And the King of Spain, our oldest enemy of all.' Gresham turned to look back to where the English ships were gathered in the dark. 'So I chose Spain. I chose Spain because I believe that Spain has the power to conquer those rapacious nobles, to conquer the impoverished King of Scotland, the pathetic Arabella Stuart. That it is so powerful that its success is inevitable. Spain will win. And will it matter to the peasant in the field and the woman striving to fill her children's bellies whether it is a Protestant Queen or a Catholic King who holds the final authority over them? I think not. I think what matters to them is that they are left in peace to scrape a bare living out of the earth, left without soldiers trampling down their crops and sticking their babies on the end of pikes as trophies of war. I decided Spain would win that war. And when I had decided that, the other decision was inevitable. Why go through with the war in the first place? Why not work to achieve the inevitable and cut out the need for war? Why not work to install Spain in England without the ritual of yet more senseless death? That is why I chose Spain, my Lord.' He bowed to the Duke. 'I did not choose my path for religion. I chose my path, I always choose my path, because I thought that in so doing fewer people would die.'
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