Battle’s Flood

by J. D. Davies

  The boy looked at him through wet eyes, and mouthed a silent thank you.

  The Spaniards were very close now, but Drake and Hawkins had abandoned them to their fate.

  Jack watched the Minion manoeuvre away from the carnage in the anchorage, praying that his Tom was somewhere aboard her despite all; praying that, against all the odds, his son was safe.

  The few dozen desperate Englishmen left on the deck of the shattered flagship were still screaming vainly at the receding ship. A few looked to Jack for leadership, but he had none to give. None of them would see England again, he reckoned. For his part, he would never see another Dunwich dawn, nor the smile on the face of his daughter Meg, nor the grave of—

  The first Spanish soldiers emerged onto the upper deck, their morion helmets and sword blades glistening in the brilliant sun.

  Jack Stannard muttered the Lord’s Prayer and prepared himself for death.

  But in his heart, he knew that death was not the worst fate the Spaniards could inflict.

  * * *

  As the last of the day’s sun sank in the western sky, Captain Antonio Delgadillo emerged onto the upper deck of the huge but broken English flagship. He saw the little huddle of men and boys over by the remnants of the fo’c’sle, but they were making no attempt to resist; how could they, when more and more Spanish troops were emerging from the hatches? Instead, Delgadillo signalled to a pair of trusty men he had briefed for this very mission. They strode to the ensign staff, pulled down the filthy remnants of the heretical flag, and hoisted in their place the pristine scarlet and gold banner of Castile and King Philip. Delgadillo’s men cheered wildly, and the young captain himself raised his sword to salute the colours. God willing, the viceroy would have seen the deed through the twilight, and both promotion and Isabella Bergara might lie within reach once again.

  One of the Lutherans started to walk towards Delgadillo. He was an old man, with leathery skin and wild hair, and he carried a sword. Several of Delgadillo’s men had their guns trained on him, but there was no need for them to fire. The Englishman reversed his blade, presenting it hilt first to Delgadillo. A pity it was not Juan Aquines himself, but an English sword would still make a fine gift for the viceroy.

  The Englishman spoke, and to Delgadillo’s surprise, his words were in Latin, a tongue he had thought extinct in a realm of pestilential heretics.

  ‘Miserere, in nomine Dei,’ he said. Mercy, in God’s name.

  Delgadillo nodded, took the proffered sword handle, and accepted the surrender of John Stannard of Dunwich.

  Epilogue

  January 1569

  The snow was sweeping in from the south-west as the Minion finally came into Plymouth Sound, over fifteen months after she had sailed from the same harbour. Tom Stannard stood on deck and reflected on all that had passed since the fateful battle at San Juan: how the men aboard the Minion had woken at dawn in the outer reaches of the harbour to find that Drake’s Judith had mysteriously vanished in the night; how the Minion herself had escaped the anchorage in the teeth of a storm that threatened at every moment to wreck her upon the reefs; how quarrels and fights had broken out among an overlarge crew forced to eat rats and boiled hides; how half the men aboard preferred to abandon the ship and its apparently slender prospects of crossing the ocean in order to take their chances ashore further up the Mexican coast. Only then had the Minion finally set sail for England. Leaking, stinking and foul, she had wallowed her way across the Atlantic, each mile a very purgatory. Men died of disease, sometimes several of them in one day, so that by the time the ship reached the coast of Spain – ironically, the nearest landfall – only half of those who had sailed from Mexico’s shore, in turn a quarter of those who had fled from San Juan, remained alive.

  Tom Stannard looked out at the familiar landscape of Plymouth, now blanketed in white and glimpsed only occasionally through the snowstorm. God willing, Catherine and the boys were alive and well, and would be glad to see him. The men of the Minion had learned of the state of the kingdom while they were revictualling at Vigo, from English merchantmen in the harbour there; word of Hawkins’ activities in the Indies had evidently not yet reached that remote corner of Spain, or else the Minion and the survivors aboard her would certainly have been arrested. So they learned that Queen Elizabeth was well but still unmarried, talks with the Archduke Charles of Austria, King Philip’s cousin, having failed; Queen Mary, it was said, was also well, but in prison in the north. What his sister Meg would make of that, Tom could only imagine. He prayed that his sister’s tongue, and her adherence to the old ways, had not led her into trouble.

  As the battered, rotten and ancient hull of the Minion finally edged towards the Cattewater, Tom Stannard turned his thoughts once again to one of the two principal subjects that had consumed them during the long, hideous voyage across the ocean: Francis Drake, and how he could have revenge upon him.

  * * *

  At exactly the moment when the Minion was saluting the fort on St Nicholas Island, Meg de Andrade was entering the ruinous precinct of Dunwich Blackfriars. She could scarcely credit that it was almost a year to the day since she had encountered Stephen Raker in the very same place. So much had happened, and in a sense, it was even stranger to think that she now stood within the property of John Day, bought with the profits from the most obnoxious, most untruthful book ever written in English.

  In the ruins of the old chapel, where the good, honest friars had worshipped God for so many centuries, she genuflected instinctively towards the now non-existent altar at the east end, and said a prayer for her father and brothers. Her prayers were more perfunctory now. There had been no word from either of them since letters sent from the coast of Africa over a year before. She had received these just after the event upon Hen Hill, when the true colours of her half-sister Mary had finally been revealed. In her mind’s eye, she still saw the flames, heard the crackling of the burning wood, and saw the flush of triumph and hatred upon Mary’s cheeks as she sought ways to convince the assembly that her sister was guilty of treason.

  Poor Mary, so utterly confident in her victory, so exultant that day at the summit of Hen Hill.

  Meg walked over to the roofless wreck of the south transept, approached a stout door, and opened it with a key she took from her bag, gazing at the familiar sight of the flight of stairs leading down into the crypt. She took out a candle, struck a flint upon the wall, and lit the wick. Then she began to descend into what had once been the crypt of the Blackfriars.

  It was dark and cold. A rat scurried across the floor, but Meg hardly flinched. Instead, she went directly to the large panel of whitewashed wood propped against the corner of the crypt, laid her hands upon it, and grinned like a little girl.

  The Doom was safe, and she prayed that both her play-acting upon Hen Hill and John Day’s indifference to demolishing the old Blackfriars would keep it so. That, and her foresight when her half-brother Ned had begun to come more often to the harbour, as part of her stepmother’s transparent scheme to replace Meg in the management of the Stannard affairs. She had known that it would only be a matter of time before he found the Doom, and he was sure to report it to his mother, who would take great delight in destroying the precious relic before Meg’s eyes. So it needed to be moved to a place of greater safety, and as she thought upon this in her cottage upon the heath, Meg decided to add one simple refinement.

  She wrote to Philip Grimes, persuaded him to come to Dunwich, and commissioned him to make a copy of the Doom.

  Out of love both for her and for what the great painting represented, he concurred.

  ‘There are ways of making a painting look older than it is,’ he said when they met at an alehouse in Blythburgh to discuss the proposition, ‘but anyone who knew it well will see through the disguise in an instant.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ said Meg. ‘My stepmother has never seen it. Aye, many are alive who remember it, but they only viewed it from a distance, from the floor of John’s
church when it was high up in the rood loft. Neither of the priests we have in Dunwich now has ever seen it. Better, there are only a handful who have seen it close to, or have touched it. I am one, my father is another. A third died on the Mary Rose. So if my stepmother or half-brother, or anyone else for that matter, should ever find your copy, Phil, I’m certain as God is my judge that they’ll take it for the real Doom.’

  So they had. The Doom painting dragged out of the Stannard boat shed and burned upon Hen Hill was Philip Grimes’s copy, little more than a few weeks old, while the original had been taken away in broad daylight at the bottom of a cart of timber and thatch, ostensibly going from the harbour to Meg’s cottage to provide material for its repair. Hugh Ebbes knew none of this, for even though Meg was then unaware of his jealousy for Philip, she had seen how, more and more by the day, he looked at Mary Stannard.

  She wanted so much to tell her stepmother and half-sister of the trick she had played on them, but it would remain her secret; she was, after all, the guardian of the Doom. It would have been Philip Grimes’s secret, too, had he not died in November of a sudden bloody flux, which not even Meg’s best and most desperate remedies could cure. Meg mourned him still, not least because she had resolved that, if her father and brother failed to return from the Indies, she would finally accept his offer of marriage.

  As she prayed over the Doom of Dunwich, Meg regretted more than anything else that she had not been able to tell Philip of her decision before he died.

  * * *

  Tom Stannard’s feelings about Francis Drake had changed during the course of the voyage home. In the immediate aftermath of the debacle at San Juan, he had thought of revenge, pure and simple, and in its most straightforward form. If Drake got back to England, and if the Minion returned home too, then Tom would seek him out and kill him. Perhaps he might dress it up as a duel, or perhaps he would just run a sword into his guts and have done with it.

  Hawkins was more sanguine. Several times, he seemed to hint that Drake’s apparent desertion was inexcusable, although he seemed unwilling to accept that his kinsman had deliberately refused fellow Englishmen sanctuary aboard his ship. But he always qualified such remarks immediately, talking of circumstances that might be unknown to him, reasons that might yet amply explain why Francis Drake did what he did. Tom gave such comments a hearing; he could do little else, for he was one of only a half-dozen of the Suffolk men of the Jennet who had survived the expedition, with every other man on the Minion being a follower of Hawkins, or Drake, or both.

  Time, and the prospect of the endless ocean, helped to bring him to a different view of the matter. He was a man with responsibilities. Whether his father lived or not, Tom was now the head of the Stannard family, and he needed to return to Dunwich as soon as he reasonably could. No doubt Meg would have coped well enough, but ultimately, only a man’s authority could keep all in order, and keep their stepmother in her place; a loathing of Jennet Stannard and her brood was one thing that Meg and Tom shared. Even more importantly, though, if Tom hanged for the murder of Francis Drake, as he surely would, what would become of Catherine and the boys?

  So he thought of more subtle strategies, as he knew his father would want him to. He would go at once to London to speak to Will Halliday, and perhaps go through him to Master Benjamin Gonson, or even to the mysterious Master Walsingham of whom his father had spoken.

  But more days passed, and even this stratagem crumbled in his mind. Assuming that the Judith had got safely across the ocean and made directly for England rather than following the easier course for Spain, Drake would have returned well before the Minion, and would have had plenty of time to assemble and present his case. Above all, whatever Tom’s own private doubts about Francis Drake’s conduct, John Hawkins was surely bound to lend the weight of his own word to that of his most favoured kinsman. Drake’s would be the truth that the great men who had invested in the voyage would accept, and Tom doubted whether he had the abilities or the connections to undo that. This Walsingham and the rest of his kind would care about two things only: the amount of profit accruing to them from the voyage (a bitter disappointment, Tom reckoned), and the damage done to England’s relations with Spain. There was no war as yet, and those with whom they had conversed at Vigo were convinced that capturing the bullion from the flota was the only act that would compel King Philip to declare war on England. Oh, he would rage and send letters of protest to his erstwhile sister-in-law Elizabeth, but the King of Spain had more important matters to contend with.

  Despite the Duke of Alba’s vicious persecution, the Dutch were still in armed rebellion against their monarch, with the rebels being aided by subsidies from Queen Elizabeth. Open warfare was raging in France once again, with Spain providing troops to the Catholic armies and England providing aid to the Huguenots, just as Jack and Tom Stannard had done. Most importantly, the Turks were advancing against Christendom once more, and King Philip, treasuring above all his title of the Catholic King, was leading the resistance to them. Three wars at once, and three powerful enemies; Philip certainly would not want to fight England as well, the men at Vigo reckoned. But Tom Stannard had now witnessed the power of Spain at first hand, and he knew that if ever King Philip was free of one or more of his conflicts, he might choose to punish England for its so-called heresy, for its assistance to his enemies, and for the depredations of men like John Hawkins and Francis Drake. He might even seek to take back the throne he had once occupied, and reign once again as Philip, King of England.

  No, when all was said and done, Drake would have to wait, for both England and Tom Stannard had more important fish to fry. Revenge, Tom reflected, would be sweet enough whenever and however it came. Indeed, perhaps it already had for all he knew, and by a far greater hand than his. Mayhap the sea had claimed Drake and the Judith; after all, unlike Tom, the Devon man was utterly inexperienced as a navigator and ship handler. But deep down, Tom knew it would not be so. Whatever else he might be, Francis Drake was the sort of fellow who possessed the most outrageous good fortune.

  Finally, as the Minion edged towards her berth in the Cattewater, Tom turned his thoughts once again to his father, as he had done during every hour of the voyage, praying that he still lived, and possessed of a curious certainty that he did.

  During the whole course of the passage, most notably during this, the very last leg of it, the one thing he had not prayed for, nor even dreamed of, was the unexpected gift that Catherine presented to him during their tearful reunion: a lusty boy of some eight months in age, a new brother whom Adam Stannard clearly resented mightily. Peter, though, even livelier and more forthright than he had been before the fleet sailed, doted upon the baby, seemingly regarding him as his best friend in the world.

  When the Stannards took the child to be christened, Catherine having delayed that ceremony until her husband returned or was known for certain to be dead, there was no doubt what name his parents would bestow upon him.

  He was called John.

  Historical Note

  To address this book’s not inconsiderable ‘elephant in the room’ at the very beginning: the Drake/Hawkins expedition of 1567–9, upon which much of this story is based, was primarily a slaving voyage. There is simply no way of glossing over this, nor of concealing the fact. Therefore, from the moment I conceived this trilogy and knew that these events would provide the backdrop for the second book, I wrestled with the question of how to address contemporary attitudes to slavery.

  It was impossible to give the Stannards and the other characters twenty-first century ‘woke’ sensibilities about the subject; that would have been patently unhistorical, to say the least. In this sense, the past really is a foreign country, and people definitely do things very, very differently there. Having said that, it would be disingenuous to claim that all sixteenth-century people were indifferent to, or uncritically accepting of, the nature of slavery. Judging by some of his writings, John Hawkins probably was; he bracketed slaves indiscriminatel
y with other ‘merchandise’ and said of ‘the Negro’ that in his ‘nation is seldom or never found truth’. For him, slaves were simply one commodity among many in his cargoes, albeit a particularly lucrative one. On the other hand, one of his gunners aboard the Jesus, Job Hortop of Bourne in Lincolnshire, clearly considered the act of buying and selling human beings to be a somewhat strange notion, and one worthy of special comment. Francis Drake’s attitude to black people was ambivalent. He accorded respect to those who were of use to him, but treated others with utter callousness, notably Maria, the black woman taken from a ship encountered during his voyage of circumnavigation, who was raped (quite possibly by Drake himself) and abandoned to die on an island when she was heavily pregnant.

  More generally, slavery was simply not an issue in sixteenth-century England: as Miranda Kaufmann demonstrates in her excellent book Black Tudors, Hawkins’ three slaving voyages to the Caribbean in the 1560s were not repeated by the English until the 1640s, so he was very far from being the instigator of the transatlantic slave trade (especially because the French and Portuguese had got there long before him, and on a far larger scale). There was a widespread assumption, supported to a degree in law, that slavery simply could not exist in the ‘pure air’ of England, and there was always a small but significant number of free black people in Tudor England, some of them in quite prominent positions. Thus not all Africans were slaves (my fictional Bruno Santos Cabral is by no means an impossible, nor even an unlikely, figure), not all African slaves were traded by white people, and certainly not by English people (as Hugh Bicheno points out, the Muslim slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa was always much larger than the transatlantic one), and not all slaves were African, a point well made in an excellent blog by Professor Adam Nichols at http://corsairsandcaptivesblog.com.