Buckingham grinned at him. ‘A man such as you can do a dozen,’ he said sweetly. ‘Show me your plan, John.’
John unfolded the paper and spread it on the little table before his master. ‘The fort is built like a star,’ he said. ‘And only half-finished on one side. Our trouble will be that the north side, on the strand, is facing La Rochelle over the sea and can be easily relieved by the French troops who are camped around the besieged city on the mainland. We hold the island, right enough, they will get no help from here. And the town of La Rochelle is holding out against the Papist French army. But there are sally ports all along the base of the St Martin’s fort wall and they have boats moored ready. We will have to cut them off from the mainland before they can be reduced.’
Buckingham looked at John’s sketch. ‘What about a direct attack? Never mind starving them. An attack against the walls?’
John’s mouth turned down. ‘I don’t advise it,’ he said briefly. ‘The walls are new-built and high. The windows look very deep. You can’t hammer your way in, and you will lose half your men trying to scale it.’
‘They have to be starved out?’
John nodded.
‘So if we put our army all around them on the landward side, can you build me a barrier to span the seaward side to prevent them getting ships in and out?’
John thought for a moment. ‘I can try, my lord,’ he said. ‘But these are high seas. It’s not like building a raft across the Isis, it’s like building a raft across Portsmouth harbour. The waves come very high, and if there is a storm, anything we built would be smashed.’
‘Surely if we have enough wood, and chains …’
‘If the summer weather remains calm it might hold,’ John said doubtfully. ‘But one night of high winds would smash it.’
Buckingham got up swiftly and strode forward, looking down on the fort. ‘I tell you, John, I cannot stay here seated before a little fort, looking at it forever,’ he said, his voice so low that no-one but Tradescant could hear him. ‘I am laying siege to them, and they are trapped inside the fort, right enough; but all I have to feed my men is what I brought in my ships. I need support as much as the fort. Their army and their suppliers are over a small channel of water, while my army and suppliers are many miles away. And their king is commanded by Richelieu, while my king …’ He broke off, and then saw John’s uneasy face.
‘He will not forget me,’ he said firmly. ‘Even now he will be preparing a fleet to come after us and revictual and supply us. But you see that I am in a hurry. I cannot wait. The French in the citadel of St Martin must starve and surrender at once. Otherwise we will beat them to it. We will starve and surrender even though we are supposed to be laying siege to them.’
‘I’ll plan something,’ John promised.
There were no tents for the men nor for the poorer officers; no-one in England had thought that the expedition would need tents. John laid his soldier’s pack on the ground beside the other men, heeled in his new gillyflower in his little nursery bed, and then set about planning his blockade of St Martin.
Within an hour or two he had his drawing of ships’ timbers and a couple of spare masts chained together. The senior shipwright and John supervised the throwing of the wood in the water and watched the sailors leaning out from little boats and struggling to chain them together.
‘Those were our spare masts and timbers to repair the ships,’ the shipwright observed dourly. ‘Better pray we don’t lose a mast on the way home.’
‘We can’t go home until the citadel falls,’ John reasoned. ‘First things first.’
‘And have you heard when they will come to relieve us?’ the shipwright asked. ‘The lads were saying that a great fleet is coming behind us, now that the king knows that the duke has been successful, now they know that we are at war.’
‘It will come soon,’ John said, with more confidence than he felt. ‘My lord told me that the king had promised it.’
John was right about the fragility of the timber barrier. The high wind blowing over their camp in the next week warned him of the storm that was coming. He crawled out of his makeshift shelter and looked out to sea. In the darkness he could see nothing. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Buckingham, sleepless too.
‘Will your blockade hold?’
‘Not if this wind keeps up,’ Tradescant replied. ‘I am sorry, my lord.’
He could feel the warmth of Buckingham’s breath as he leaned forward to be heard above the storm.
‘Don’t ask for pardon, John,’ he said. ‘You warned me of the danger and I told you of the need. But at first light tomorrow get out there and build me another barrier. I must have St Martin cut off.’
John’s next attempt was to use the landing-craft ships, lashed together prow to stern across the channel before the St Martin citadel. Two small camps of soldiers were set up at either side, to guard the barrier and to take the occasional pot shot at those citizens of St Martin who were bold enough to peep over the half-finished walls. The building work on the fort had almost ceased, although the need to finish the citadel had never been greater.
‘They’re weary and hungry,’ Buckingham said with satisfaction. ‘We will outlast them.’
Within a week of the new barrier being in place there were more high winds, and the stormy waters, pushing the landing craft in opposite directions, broke through. Some of the officers were openly contemptuous of Tradescant at the council of war.
‘I am sorry,’ John said dourly. ‘But you are asking me to build a barrier in what is almost open sea. I can rebuild it. I shall bring the ships closer in to shore and run hawsers one from another. The men on board ship can keep watch, and if a hawser breaks we can replace it. But the weather is getting worse, I can think of nothing which will withstand the autumn storms.’
Buckingham’s face was grave. ‘The king’s fleet will arrive this month,’ he said. ‘It will come without fail. His Majesty loves me and I have his solemn promise of a fleet in September. I have asked him to send more hawsers and timber as well as munitions, money and food. And three thousand more fighting men. As soon as it arrives we will take the castle and move on to La Rochelle itself. Once we’re on the mainland all our troubles will be over.’
There was a brief dispirited silence. Only John dared voice what they were all thinking. ‘If he is delayed …’ he began cautiously. ‘If the king cannot raise the money for the fleet …’
Buckingham’s sharp gaze warned John to be silent; but he doggedly continued.
‘I beg your pardon, my lord, but if His Majesty is delayed in sending succour then we will have to withdraw for this year,’ he said stoutly.
‘You are afraid,’ one of the Frenchmen declared. He whispered something behind his hand about gardens and easy lives.
‘I know that we are running short of food and munitions,’ John said steadily. ‘And the men are on half-pay. If there was anywhere for them to go they would have deserted already. We cannot make them fight if they are hungry. They cannot shoot their muskets if they have no powder.’ He looked at Buckingham, past the gentlemen who were openly laughing at him. ‘Forgive me, my lord. But I am much with the common soldiers and I know what they are thinking, and I know that they are going hungry.’
Buckingham glanced at his table where a flagon of red wine gleamed beside a plate of biscuits. ‘Are we short of food?’ he asked, surprised.
‘We’re not starving; but rations have been cut,’ John replied. ‘The Protestants are sending us all they can from La Rochelle – but it is not justice for us to eat their supplies. We came here to relieve them, not to devour their stores. And they themselves are surrounded by the Papist French troops, they cannot go on supplying us forever.’
‘I will speak with the French commander,’ Buckingham said thoughtfully. ‘He is a gentleman. Perhaps we can make some sort of terms.’
‘We should starve them to death and drive them into the sea,’ Soubise said hastily. ‘We have raised t
he siege, we should smash them into nothing!’
‘Next year,’ Tradescant said hastily. ‘When we come back with another fleet.’
A package of letters for the English troops had got safely through. The king had written, Buckingham’s wife Kate had written, and his mother, the cunning old countess. None of them had sent money to buy food or pay the troops, and there was no news of the fleet being equipped and setting sail. The duke kept the bad news to himself but no-one seeing the way he thrust the letter from the king inside his embroidered waistcoat could doubt that Charles had sent fond words but no news of an English fleet ploughing its way through stormy seas from Portsmouth to relieve his beloved friend.
The letter from the old countess was even more ominous. She urged her son to come home and reclaim his place at court. No man could risk being too far from one of the Stuarts, they had notoriously short memories. Buckingham himself had replaced Rochester, the previous Favourite, in the affections of King James, and now King Charles was coming under the sway of new advisers. William Laud, a new bishop, a common red-faced little man, was advising him at every turn. Buckingham must hurry home before he was forgotten.
Charles wrote to his dearest friend that he had no money but that he was raising funds by every means possible. He wrote that he was thinking of nothing but ways to get money to send a fleet. The old countess wrote to Buckingham in their private code that Charles had just bought the Duke of Mantua’s entire collection of pictures for fifteen thousand pounds – enough to equip and send two fleets. He had been unable to resist them at such a bargain price, and now he was penniless again. The money for the fleet had been squandered twice over – Buckingham need not hope for support.
Buckingham tore up her letter and scattered the tiny pieces over the stern of the Triumph. ‘Oh, Charles,’ he sighed. ‘How can you love me as you do and yet betray me like this?’
The pieces blew in an eddy of wind, like flecks of snow. Superstitiously, Buckingham looked up at the September sky. There were thick clouds on the horizon, the fair weather was due to break. ‘He is a sweet man,’ he said to himself. ‘The sweetest man that ever lived, but the most faithless friend and king that could ever be.’
He wrapped his cape around him a little closer. He knew that any time his name was mentioned at court, Charles would think of him with love. He knew that he would return to an open-hearted welcome. But he knew also that a collection of pictures like the Duke of Mantua’s would be irresistible to a man who from boyhood had been able to have what he wanted at the instant he had wanted it. Charles would think that Buckingham, that the English fleet, that the full-scale war with France could wait while he amassed yet more money from the hard-pressed taxpayers of England. He would never understand that it was he who had to do without. He had no practice in self-denial. For all his sympathy and charm and sweetness, there was a core of pure selfishness in Charles that nothing could penetrate.
‘I will have to win and return home or I will be left here to die,’ Buckingham said. The last pieces of his mother’s letter blew, sank into water, and then slipped away. Buckingham watched them go down into the heaving greenness, and realised that he was facing his own defeat and death, and that he had never thought before that his life and his charmed career could end in despair.
He looked up at the horizon at the dark layers of cloud. The wind was blowing the rain towards the Triumph and towards the string of English ships moored as a thin barrier between St Martin and the sea of La Rochelle.
‘I will win and return home,’ Buckingham vowed. ‘I was not born and raised so high to die in a cold sea off France. I was born for great things, for greater than this. I will see St Martin razed to the ground and then I will go home and I shall have that fifteen thousand pounds poured into my hands for my pains; and I will forget I was ever here, in fear and in want.’
He turned back to the waist of the ship and saw John Tradescant, standing a yard away, watching him.
‘Confound you, John! You startled me. What the Devil are you doing?’
‘Just watching you, my lord.’
Buckingham laughed. ‘Did you fear an assassin’s knife on my own ship?’
John shook his head. ‘I feared disappointment and despair,’ he said. ‘And sometimes a companion can guard you against them too.’
Buckingham slid his hand around John’s shoulders and pressed his face against the older man’s thick-muscled neck. John smelled comfortingly of home, of homespun cloth, clean linen, and earth. ‘Yes,’ Buckingham said shortly. ‘Stay by me, John.’
Autumn 1627
That very afternoon a messenger came from the fort. Commander Torres was suing for peace, and for terms of surrender. Buckingham did not let the messenger, an officer, see his smile, but took the news as if it were a matter of indifference. ‘I daresay you are weary,’ he said politely, as one gentleman to another. He turned to his servant. ‘Bring him some wine and bread.’
The man was not just weary but half-starved. He fell on the bread and devoured it in hungry bites. Buckingham watched him. The messenger’s condition told him all he needed to know of the state of the soldiers within the fort.
Buckingham unfolded the letter the man brought and read it again, carefully, sniffing at the silver pomander he wore around his neck.
‘Very well,’ he said casually.
One of his officers raised his eyebrows. Buckingham smiled. ‘Commander Torres asks for terms of surrender,’ he observed negligently, as if it did not much matter.
Taking his cue, the English officer nodded. ‘Indeed.’
‘I was told to take a reply,’ the messenger said. ‘The fort is yours, my lord.’
Buckingham savoured the moment. ‘I thank you. Merci beaucoup.’
‘I’ll call for a clerk,’ the English officer said. ‘I take it that we can dictate the terms?’
The messenger bowed.
Buckingham lifted his hand, the diamond winked. ‘No hurry,’ he said.
‘I was told to take a reply,’ the messenger said. ‘The commander proposes the terms in the letter, our full surrender without condition. He said I could carry a verbal reply from you – yea or nay – and the business could be finished tonight.’
Buckingham smiled. ‘I will write to your commander tomorrow, when I have considered what terms are agreeable to me.’
‘Can we not agree now, my lord?’
Buckingham shook his head. ‘I am going to my dinner now,’ he said provokingly. ‘I have a very good cook and he has a new way of doing beef in a thick red gravy. I shall think of you and Commander Torres while I dine, and I shall write tomorrow, after I have broken my fast.’
At the mention of meat the man gulped. ‘I was ordered to take a reply, sir,’ he said miserably.
Buckingham smiled. ‘Tell Commander Torres I am going to my dinner and that he shall dine with me tomorrow. I will send him an invitation to a grand dinner, along with his terms of surrender.’
The messenger would have argued but the French Protestant officers pushed him gently from the room. They heard his hesitant tread down the gangplank, and then one of the sentries giving him safe conduct back to the besieged fort.
‘We’ll let them sweat,’ Buckingham said cruelly. ‘They wanted to keep their weapons and safe conduct back to La Rochelle. They even wanted their cannon out of the fort. It was hardly a surrender at all. I want their weapons and their standards and then they can go. I have to have something to take home with me after all our trouble here. I want their cannon on my ships and their standards to show to the court. I need to lay the standards before the king. We need to have some gaudy props for the last act of this masque.’
At dinner the officers drank deeply. John had a couple of glasses of the Rochelle wine but then he went out on deck. The ship was moving uneasily on its moorings as the wind freshened. The darkening sky was thick with clouds and the horizon where the sun had set was rimmed with a yellow line, like a fungus on a felled tree trunk. John wondered how
the rest of the fleet, strung out across the bay, were faring in the wind.
He called to a sailor to bring him a boat.
The man reluctantly brought a little skiff to the foot of the ladder and John went down the side of the Triumph. The waves rose and fell under the keel of the little boat. John could see them, coming across the bay, frighteningly high from his low viewpoint in the water. The great swell of the Atlantic Ocean pushed them onward like an enemy to the little boats holding tightly to each other in a circle around the beleaguered fort.
‘Take me round the point,’ he said, raising his voice above the wind. ‘I want to see the barricade.’
The sailor leaned heavily on the oars and the skiff bobbed and fell as the big waves passed underneath. They rounded the point and John saw his barrier.
At first he thought it was holding. Squinting his eyes against the darkness he thought that the ships were still moored, nose to tail, and the unevenness of their rocking was the big waves passing through them, each one lifting and falling at a different moment. Then he saw that one had broken free.
‘Damnation!’ John yelled. ‘Get me on a ship! I have to raise the alarm.’
The sailor headed for one of the moored ships and John scrambled up the ladder. His bad knee failed him and he had to grab like a monkey with his arms and haul himself up the side. At the top he turned and shouted down. ‘Get you back to the Triumph. Tell the admiral that the barrier is breached. Tell him I’m doing what I can.’
The man nodded his agreement and set himself to row back to Buckingham’s ship while John flung himself on the bell and sounded the alarm. The sailors scrambled out of the waist of the ship, clutching their dinner – nothing more than a thin slice of rye bread and a thinner slice of French bacon.
‘Get me a light,’ John cried. ‘I need to signal to the ships to take that loose vessel up. The barrier is breached.’
‘I thought they had surrendered!’ the captain shouted as one of the men ran for a lantern.