He unlocked a small box clamped with iron which stood upon a side table and fetched out from beneath an orderly pile of letters a few small sheets of paper covered with minute, clear writing. Sir Francis laid the papers in front of Sylvia upon the table and turned away so that she might have that moment to herself. He turned away so quickly that when a smothered cry broke from her lips, he was halfway across the room to the window.
Sylvia laid the papers against her heart, without a glance at what they said. It was the handwriting which caught her breath away.
“Anthony,” she said, in a whisper of wonderment. She looked at them again, and again deciphered no words. But she pressed her lips upon them.
“Anthony!”
No cabalistic plaster scribbled over by a professor of Mumbo- Jumbo could have eased the wound of a savage more swiftly than that writing brought a solace to Sylvia. A few hurried letters written in that fine, small hand during the crowded week at Cowdray — and then nothing until tonight.
She looked at the sheets of paper, her eyes dewy with tears, and here and there a word took shape. “Santa Katherina,” she read, and “Our Lady del Pilar de Zaragossa,” and “John Martinez de Ricalde” and “the Galleasse San Lorenzo,” and against these names in another column, the names of Provinces— “Guypuscoa” and “Castille” and “Biscay” and “Portugall.”
With a shock she understood she was reading a list of the ships of the Spanish Fleet, the Provinces which had provided them, the names of their Generals, the numbers of the soldiers, Spaniards and Italians, the mariners, the galley slaves and King’s Gentlemen, of the surgeons and the priests, the cannon and their calibre. There were items enough to make a hard head dizzy. The last page was covered with quotations — the written advice of Philip of Spain to his High Admiral, Medina Sidonia. The English were a cowardly people who would want to fight at a distance with their guns instead of closing and grappling as gentlemen should. They would shoot low, too, into the hulls instead of high to bring the masts down — a devilish practice.
Sir Francis came back from his window.
“But for that report, our fleet would still be guarding Chatham Church,” said he, “and our coasts at the mercy of these Pontificians,”
He held out his hand for the papers, but Sylvia tightened her fingers on them.
“In a little while,” she said, and then, plaintively, “I want to be told.”
Sir Francis was all for finishing then and there. Bedtime was past.
“But you have been told.”
“On one sheet of paper,” said she.
The rejoinder was apt enough to please him, and he sat down at the table close to her.
“Long ago I thought of Anthony. I made a journey into Cornwall to make sure, when he was a boy. There was no one so fitted, a gentleman with knowledge of Italy and Spain and their languages and a creed of service worthy of old Rome. In a few years, I thought, I should have the perfect instrument. But in a few years so modish a young gallant was quite out of my poor reach.”
“Until he came to Cowdray and met me,” said Sylvia, accusing herself
“Until he came to Cowdray and suffered the fleeting favours of Her Highness,” Sir Francis corrected, and hurried on: “I sent for him that night.”
“So Henry Browne told me.”
“This is where I owe you amends. Anthony Scarr had a plan in his thoughts, which, if it had succeeded, would have blotted all that disgrace and scandal out. And it might have succeeded. He had the spirit for it and the means.
He told her of the ships which Anthony had meant to arm to interrupt the Plate Fleet. “But this,” and he pointed to the papers which she still held, “was the greater service, all the more, perhaps, because it carried no great name as a reward. Knowledge out of Spain was worth a hundred galleons loaded to the decks with gold. I held him to it.”
Sylvia was silent for a few moments. Then she said, looking the Secretary in the eyes: “He sent me not a line of farewell, not a message by his friend. You held him to that, too.”
Walsingham was the father of MI5 and NID and all the Intelligence Services and Divisions and Departments which later centuries were to create. His meddlesome fingers were in all the Cabinets of Europe, turning keys, copying papers, his eyes were at every chink, his ears where every word threatening his realm was spoken. Secrecy was the reason of his success, secrecy even where no cause for it seemed sensible. At times, of course, he was jockeyed by false information, at times, too, his servants suffered torture and execution. But not so often. He kept his agents under his own hand so that none knew the other, until the moment useful for such knowledge had come. A careless word could travel far, and Spain had her agents in England, too. Anthony Scarr, a young gentleman of means in disgrace at Court, could loiter from town to town in Italy, could even enter Spain. There was much to be learnt of the preparations for the enterprise of England, as Philip termed his expedition, in Venice and Florence, in Malaga and Madrid. Anthony, speaking Italian and Spanish from his birth, could disappear as a young gentleman and come to life again in the arsenals of Lisbon and Cadiz.
“I have a friend,” Walsingham continued. “He is the Duke of Tuscany’s Ambassador to Spain. Through him Anthony was placed as a Groom of the Chamber with the Grand Admiral at Lisbon. That which you hold is a copy of the dispatch sent by the Admiral to Philip before he sailed. We sit here in our fine houses, thinking highly of our great place and the work we do. But under God, this solitary service exceeds us all. When these last anxious days are over I’ll see to it, my dear, that honour shall not be wanting.”
He got up from his chair and held out his hand for the papers which she still held. The assumption that an interview was ended often ended it and saved one from embarrassing questions. But Sylvia, to Sir Francis Walsingham’s regret, was not to be hustled. She sat still in her chair, looking up at him.
“Where is Anthony now?” she asked.
Yes, that was the question which he had wished to avoid. Gazing down into her grave and quiet eyes, he understood that there had never been a chance that he could avoid it. If he could only postpone it for a few days. Perhaps he had been a little too forward in speaking about Anthony Scarr. He reproached himself. The cold heart was the properest organ for a man who had to ruffle it with the Pontificians… What? Must he be waving a wand like a fairy in a Masque?… But whilst these reproaches chased one another through the Secretary’s mind, Sylvia’s eyes held him to her question.
“You must tell me please, where Anthony is. You owe me that.”
Francis Walsingham acknowledged the debt by a nod, a little resentful like nine debtors out of ten. Then gently he took the sheaf of papers from her hand. She was puzzled and angry. He was evading her, practising with her. He would turn her off, would he? He would talk to her about the Grand Fleet and Don This and Don That? Let him try!
But Walsingham did not try. A look of pity softened his face. He saw the flash of spirit in her eyes, and it was he must quench it. He turned over the leaves, folded them back, and laying them thus folded upon the table in front of Sylvia, pointed to a line. Wondering, she read:
“The Fleete of Guypuscoa D Michell de Quendo. The Admirall, called the Lady of Roses, of nine hundred forty-five tunne, with two hundred and thirty souldiers, eighty mariners and thirty canons.”
She looked up at Walsingham, and read again the description of that ship. A terror was whispering in her ears. She shut them against it. She would not listen. She would not understand.
“The Lady of Roses,” she repeated, using words so that the sound of them might hold her fears in check.
“The Señora de la Rosa, the flagship of the Guypuscoan Squadron, Oquendo’s ship.”
Oquendo! She had never heard of Oquendo. That he was the finest sailor and the boldest fighter in the whole of the Armada, that he carried with him upon his flagship all the best of the young chivalry of Spain, she knew nothing. Walsingham told her. Sylvia refused to know. It all meant nothing
to her, she insisted. All these details, so many evasions.
“Where is Anthony now?” she clamoured, the beating of her heart distracting her so that she could hardly breathe. Walsingham’s finger touched again the name of the ship upon the paper.
“No!” she cried violently. She sprang to her feet in a blaze of anger. “You daren’t ask for a service so fatal!”
But even while she uttered her cry; she knew that he dare ask, that he had asked, that there was no sacrifice in the world he would not claim even from his wife and daughter, if it served England. He outreached the Jesuits in his bow, old Dr Morgan Evans had cried. He might have added: “He outdoes the Grand Inquisitor in his fanaticism.”
“He is there,” Walsingham declared, and there was a rumble of thunder in his voice. Let none gainsay him!
“A boy!” Sylvia wailed, clasping her hands together, and the word and the picture it called up struck the anger out of her. Under the gay coxcombry of the boy a spirit burned in him like a flame. There would have never been a need to ask him for service. He would have rushed to it. He would have thought that, in rushing to it, he honoured her. Walsingham read her thought.
“It is so. I never asked him. He had enlisted as an Italian soldier on the Señora de la Rosa before word came to me. But I should not have hindered him.”
The Lady of Roses! The fine name. Sylvia turned towards the window, as though, by straining her eyes, she could see across field and Down the big galleon rolling on in the darkness of the sea.
“God help us both!” she prayed. “He is there.”
But Anthony was not there. For, half an hour before, some devil-ridden infidel among the Italian soldiers had thrown a lighted torch into the powder magazine and blown the Lady of Roses into innumerable petals of blazing wood. Of her crew and her soldiers, most had already met their death in the explosion, some were drowned, and a remnant were struggling for their lives in the swift tide-race of the Channel.
XXIV. NEWS FROM TOBERMORY
...I know not whether strife
Or peace was with me in some earlier life.
Philip in a worse prison has me pent
These three days past — but not without God’s will.
Stay we as God decrees: God doth not ill.
— T. Campanella
At sunrise on the Sunday morning the Grand Fleet was opposite Rame Head. Ahead of it and to leeward, just outside the Mewstone, Lord Howard, the High Admiral, with eleven of the Queen’s ships, was manoeuvring to catch the wind.
To windward and astern Drake closed in with forty privateers. Medina Sidonia ran up to his masthead his great consecrated banner — Christ on the Cross with Our Lady on the one side and Magdalen upon the other — and braced his yards and stood in between the two divisions. But the devil apparently was out that day and working miracles for his children. Howard sailed his ships within five points of the wind, tacked past the Grand Fleet, and joined Drake before a shot could be fired. It was not right nor fair, nor according to the rules. It was not brave. It was not possible. But the English had the advantage of the wind now, and used it. The first shots were fired in a rising sea, and all that day the muffled thunder of the artillery rumbled across the water.
On the Monday morning the great galleon, Capitana, flagship of the Andalusian squadron, sailed into Dartmouth under a prize crew, with her bowsprit broken and her foretopmast dangling down over her side. Much treasure was on board of her, a chest of jewelled swords for the faithful amongst the English peers, and, more valuable than all the treasure, barrel upon barrel of gunpowder. Don Pedro de Valdez, Vice-Admiral of Andalusia, was in the great cabin, extremely exasperated. Medina Sidonia had deserted him deliberately. Medina Sidonia was a coward and a disgrace to the Grandees. The English, too, were an unspeakable people.
“What was the Armada for?” he cried bitterly. It was not built for long-range actions. Its ships were fortresses. Its guns only fired high to disable masts and sails, so that they could close and pour from their towering decks their thousand soldiers onto the low English craft. But the English were incorrect. They stood off and stood in, they had heavy guns, they fired low and riddled the great hulls, they made the decks slippery with blood, they blew the great water butts into smithereens. They stung and stung again like wasps, whereas they should have grappled and stung once and died like bees and gentlemen.
The English weren’t gentlemen. That was the sad truth which a year’s residence in Dartmouth before his ransom arrived, brought home to Don Pedro. They were civil, certainly, they never insulted him, but they stood about and looked at him humorously. They seemed to think him comical and odd. Mother of God, he an oddity! But there! They were possessed by ten thousand devils, and when you had said that you had said everything.
He would have been still more convinced of their devilry if Medina Sidonia had gone about and saved him from capture. The Grand Fleet lumbered on to Portland with Drake and Howard and Frobisher and Martin raking them from windward. At Portland the wind fell light but not so light but that Howard’s flagship, the Ark, being caught to leeward, could sail through the very centre of the Armada and come out unhurt. Off Portland and off St Alban’s Head the running fight went on. There was anxiety in England now. Would Medina Sidonia make for the Solent, anchor in the roads of St. Helen’s, occupy Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, or would he run for Calais and the flat-bottomed boats filled with Parma’s veterans from the Netherlands? If he took the former course, he could dictate his terms. Even Walsingham shook his head.
“Ever the strongest giveth the law to the weaker,” said he.
But Medina Sidonia wanted the comfort of Parma’s veterans. He ran for Calais and the Narrow Seas and his chance was gone. News of his progress was brought constantly to the household at Barn Elms. They heard of the fireships at Calais, the great battle of Gravelines, the danger of the shoals by Dunkirk, and the flight of the Armada into the North Sea. But they heard not a word of Anthony Scarr.
“I have sent messages to our fleet,” said Walsingham. “Drake himself has not forgotten his cabin boy. He bids you not lose hope, Sylvia. One of our volunteer ships may have picked him up. Or a boat from a Spanish galleon. In the press of these times we should be little likely to have news of him so soon.”
Sylvia said very little during these days. She made an effort to bear her part in the rejoicings now that the great Spanish threat was dispersed. It might be that Anthony would come back to her. She was one living, quiet prayer that he would, and though her cheek thinned, there were hope and courage in her eyes.
Drake and his privateers hung onto the heels of the Grand Fleet, shepherding it beyond the Firth of Forth to the Northern Islands. Then, his provisions and his powder all consumed, he gave up the chase. Left to itself the remnant of the Grand Fleet, the Invincible, rolled round Cape Wrath and the Hebrides and Ireland and set their course for Spain. But galleon after galleon went ashore as far north as the Faroe Islands and on the outer coasts of Sligo and Donegal. Others lost in the mists of those tumbled waters, drove in amongst the Scottish islands.
Towards the end of August a letter came to Sir Francis Walsingham from his friend, Giovanni Figleazzi, the Tuscan Ambassador at Madrid. The letter began with many condolences and expressions of friendship which Sir Francis was at first rather at a loss to understand.
“I hope that the peace will not be too grievous a burden,” it went on. “Alas, the hatred against Her Highness goes beyond all bounds. There are no words too black for her, and it is said she must burn. Meanwhile, of course, the rejoicings in every town are such that a stranger might think the people had gone mad and we know nothing but processions and thanksgivings.”
Walsingham smiled as he read. There would be a moderation in those ecstasies when the first of the splintered and decimated galleons limped miserably into Coruña with the true story of its defeat.
“I enclose a letter which CD left with me, asking me to forward it to you with a prayer that you should concern your
self to make sure that it reached the proper hands. I have had no opportunity before.”
The letter was addressed in Anthony’s handwriting to Sylvia Buckhurst, and Walsingham held it for a time in his hands. Then he struck a bell and sent for his daughter.
“Frances,” he said, and he gave the letter into her hand, “she must be told now. We have kept our secret too long. You will use her tenderly, having known great griefs yourself. I will send her to you here.”
But as he made to go to the door, he saw that it was open and that Sylvia stood upon the threshold.
“I am here,” she said.
She came forward into the room, having closed the door behind her.
“I must be told, but your faces have been telling me these two days past. It was kindly meant, but I am at the end of my strength and I must know.”
Her voice died away into a whisper before she had ended, and she sat down in a chair as though her knees had given under her.
Frances Sydney put the letter in her hands, but she only turned it over and over and did not open it.
“You shall tell me first,” she said. “Then I will open it.”
Walsingham made his voice as dry as he could, lest one distress should increase unendurably another. He said: “The Rata Coronada, a galleon of eight hundred and twenty tons, belonging to the Levantine Squadron, losing her way and badly crippled, fled into the Sound of Mull and coming into Tobermory Bay, sank.”
So far he had been very precise and smooth. But here he came to a stop, and Frances Sidney moved up close behind Sylvia’s chair.
“Yes,” said Sylvia in a voice quite toneless, but her eyes looked out in torment from a face of stone.
“There was swinging from her yardarm the body of a young Italian soldier. The captain declared that it was he who had thrown the torch into the magazine of the Señora de la Rosa. He had been picked up out of the water when he was trying to swim away to the English ships. He had been kept in confinement during the days of battle, brought to his trial when the pursuit had ceased, and duly put to death after sentence. His name was Antonio Manucci,” Walsingham lowered his eyes to the table in front of which he stood. “By that name,” he added, “Anthony Scarr was known to me.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 629