The Enterprise of England Read online

  It seemed hours before we reached the backstairs of Walsingham’s house, the way all of us who worked for him came and went. Cassie left me at the foot of the stairs and I climbed them, exhausted from battling the wind and snow. My sodden boots left wet patches on the fine Turkey carpets, which looked more worn than I remembered, while the portraits along the walls looked down on me as disapprovingly as ever. I wondered whether they were Sir Francis’s ancestors. No one had ever said. I tried to make out some family likeness, but the paint was dull and darkened. All that I could discern was that faint air of censure.

  My reluctant tap on the familiar door was answered by ‘Enter’ in Phelippes’s well-known voice. He was sitting at his usual desk, with its regimented piles of papers and writing materials. I saw that my desk had been commandeered to hold more papers, and had been moved away from the window to a dark corner. In the dim light of late winter no one could work there. The door to the little cubbyhole used by Arthur Gregory, the seal-forger, stood open and a band of candlelight stretched out from it to where I took my stand, frozen hands on hips, as I dripped all over Phelippes’s floor.

  ‘Well?’ I said belligerently. ‘Why have you called me away from my work? The hospital is overflowing with winter chest complaints. I’m needed there.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Kit,’ he said mildly, putting on his spectacles, which he had removed for close work. He gestured expressively toward the pile of papers on my old desk. ‘You see my problem.’

  ‘Your problem. Not mine. I don’t work here any more.’

  ‘No.’ He bowed his head in brief acknowledgement. ‘But I do not think you would refuse us your assistance in the present circumstances.’

  ‘I am truly sorry about Sir Philip,’ I said, in a milder voice. ‘It is a great tragedy for his family as well as for the nation.’

  ‘It is. And Sir Francis has made himself ill, riding to the funeral in the cold.’

  ‘I thought he did not look well.’

  ‘You were there? I did not see you.’

  ‘Only in the crowd outside the cathedral. I saw you. How is the Lady Frances?’

  ‘Distraught. She knew Sir Philip from the time she was a tiny child. Adored him.’

  I nodded. I had seen it for myself when they were together.

  ‘I am very sorry for it. And for the little girl.’

  ‘But that is not why I sent for you, though with Sir Francis ill, more rests on my shoulders.’

  ‘I did not suppose it was.’ I walked over to the small fire burning on the hearth and held out my hands to it. They were coming back to life, and painful. My cloak continued to drip.

  ‘Do take off your cloak, Kit,’ he said irritably. ‘And your wet boots. I don’t mind your stockings.’

  I hesitated. Removing my cloak and boots would imply I was staying. It was tantamount to capitulation.

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  I threw my cloak over a coffer near the door and prised off my boots. Set side by side in front of the fire they began to steam juicily. My stockings were wet through, but I had no intention of removing those. I wriggled my toes uncomfortably, and turned back to Phelippes.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what you really mean by “the present circumstances”?’

  He sighed.

  ‘A sudden flood of reports coming in from our agents all over Europe – Spain, France, Rome, Portugal, the Spanish Netherlands. Something is afoot, but until we can decipher and transcribe and translate them we can’t be quite sure what it is. Philip of Spain is up to his old tricks, but exactly what I cannot say. While the Scottish queen was alive and her cousin the Duke of Guise was planning an invasion last year, Philip was holding back. He has long wanted to seize England again, ever since it slipped through his fingers when Mary Tudor died.’

  He snorted in disgust. ‘King of England, he still calls himself! He wants to conquer the world.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘An arrogant and dangerous man.’ I moved a stool in front of the fire and sat down. My stockings began to steam as well. ‘Why do you say Philip was holding back last year?’

  ‘If the plot by Babington and his friends had succeeded and the conspirators put the Scottish queen on our throne with the military support of France, then England would have become a protectorate of France, a powerful alliance that would have threatened Philip’s possessions in northern Europe and many of his trade routes.’

  ‘So Philip didn’t want the plot to succeed?’ I hadn’t understood that before.

  ‘Exactly. But – as no doubt you’ve heard – Scottish Mary, in laying claim to the English throne herself, named Philip as her successor to the crown of England, in the event of her death.’

  I nodded. ‘Philip King of Spain, rather than her own son, James King of Scotland.’

  ‘Of course not. James is a Protestant. He doesn’t bow down to the holy Catholic church and kiss the feet of the Bishop of Rome.’ His tone was contemptuous. ‘So she graciously bequeaths the throne of England to that good Catholic prince, who thinks he ought to be king of England anyway.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So now he is beginning to move. King Philip of Spain does nothing in a hurry, but he has not forgotten the Enterprise of England. On this evidence,’ he waved his hand again at the packets of reports, ‘he is certainly planning something. From the few I have been able to decipher and read so far, envoys are buzzing around the Catholic nations and the Vatican like a swarm of bees. The sheer quantity of it amounts to a crisis. So this is where you come in.’

  I sighed, but before I could respond, Arthur Gregory emerged from his tiny office with a sheaf of papers in his hands. He beamed at me. Like Phelippes he looked tired, but he seemed cheerful enough.

  ‘Kit! I thought I heard your voice. It’s good to see you again. We’ve missed you.’

  It was just what the stable boy Harry had said. I had not thought my presence had been much felt here. I stood up and bowed to Arthur.

  ‘I’m glad to see you too.’

  He glanced at my stocking feet and smiled.

  ‘Master Phelippes fetched you across London in this terrible weather, did he?’

  ‘He did.’ I glared at Phelippes. ‘He seems to think he cannot deal with these reports himself.’

  ‘Indeed he can’t. He has even had me deciphering some of those in the easier codes, the familiar ones, and you know how slow I am. I have no head for breaking new codes, like you.’

  ‘It isn’t only reports from our own agents, then?’ I turned to Phelippes.

  ‘No. We have intercepted a number of messages passing between Madrid and Philip’s agents in his various domains. Including some to Mendoza in Paris. Mendoza always means trouble. One of our sea captains came in this morning with a fresh bundle of despatches he captured on a Spanish vessel heading for the Caribbean. We haven’t had a chance to decipher them yet. I thought you could start with those, given your fluent Spanish.’

  ‘I haven’t agreed yet to return,’ I said, although I knew I was in retreat.

  ‘It need not be for long.’ Phelippes’s voice had taken on a persuasive note I had not heard before. He must really need my help.

  ‘Tell my patients that,’ I said. ‘Are they to defer all illness until Master Phelippes says I may return to the hospital?’

  ‘It would be the same arrangement as before.’ He looked relieved. He knew he was winning. ‘You would still work at the hospital in the mornings, then come here in the afternoons. Sir Francis will arrange it all with the governors.’

  I put my head in my hands and sighed.

  ‘I’m sure he will. Very well,’ I said. ‘I will come.’

  Chapter Two

  Arthur Gregory helped me to move my table back near the window, for the benefit of the light, and we piled all the packets except the one from the Caribbean ship on to the table against the wall. All the time we were rearranging the office, Phelippes ignored us, his head down and his short-sighted eyes close to his papers. I felt a growing irri
tation that he could just assume I would take up my position as before in the corner of his office. During the final weeks of my service to Walsingham in the previous year I had often needed to work alone in dangerous situations. Then during the recent few months, free of them all, I had revelled in my rediscovered independence. Now, here I was, back like any junior clerk, scribbling away at my desk.

  ‘Will this do?’ I said finally, in a loud voice. ‘I am not in your way?’

  Phelippes looked up and peered at me across the intervening space. Then he put on his spectacles and looked vaguely around the room at what we had done.

  ‘Aye. That will do. Have you looked at the Caribbean despatches yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I snapped. I looked at Arthur and raised my eyebrows in despair. He simply grinned and clapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Good to have you back.’

  The papers he had previously been carrying he had placed on my desk while we were moving the furniture. Now he pointed toward them.

  ‘Perhaps you should look at these as well, to be sure I have made no mistakes. I’ll get back to carving some new seals. King Philip has been employing a lot of new agents and they all have their own seals. It’s difficult to keep up with copying them.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll check them for you.’

  Arthur’s real talent lay in his ability to carve exquisite forged seals that even the owners of the originals would not have been able to recognise as false. Without his skills, Walsingham’s activities must surely have failed long before now, for much of what we did involved intercepting enemy despatches, opening and deciphering them, then resealing them and sending them on their way. Without Arthur’s immaculate seals our interference would soon have been noticed. This way England’s enemies were not alerted by the disappearance of their despatches, but at the same time we kept abreast of their correspondence. I often thought it was fortunate that Arthur was an honest man. Had he turned his talents to crime, he could have become very rich indeed.

  As well as intercepting foreign correspondence, Phelippes’s office served as the centre point for the entire complex web of Walsingham’s informers, agents and spies. At its height, the service had five hundred agents, in addition to friendly sea captains and merchants in many countries, and England’s ambassadors, who kept their eyes and ears open and passed on any information they came across. Indeed, the service itself was the eyes and ears of the English state. Without it the Queen would have been assassinated long before this and the country overrun by foreign troops. I shuddered when I remembered the invasion of Portugal when I was ten. The Spanish troops had flooded across the country looting, raping and slaughtering with savage intensity. Their officers did nothing to restrain them. I had heard that some of those same officers had been shocked at the bestiality of their own soldiers, yet they had not tried to stop it. The cruelty inflicted upon the Protestant Netherlanders by the Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba, about the time I was born, had been on the same scale and it was said that in the New World the Spaniards had come near to wiping out the native people. I had no illusions about what would befall England if a Spanish army succeeded in invading.

  I helped myself to a handful of uncut quills and a pot of ink from one of the shelves on the wall above the coffer where my wet cloak lay in a heap, and chose several different types of paper from another shelf, then I sat down at my old desk and tapped the reports and Arthur’s papers into neat piles. Like Phelippes, I could work best when all the tools of my trade were in immaculate order. Taking my penknife out of the purse at my belt, I began trimming and shaping the quills to my satisfaction. Arthur had returned to his room. Apart from the scratch of Phelippes’s pen and faint sounds from Arthur’s miniature gouges as he carved a new seal, a comfortable silence fell over the room. Now and then the fire would spit or the coals would collapse inwards. My boots were still steaming, but my stockings were drying.

  I drew Arthur’s papers towards me. They dealt with activities witnessed by one of our agents in Rome. There had been much coming and going of Spanish envoys to the Vatican, who were clearly seeking papal support for whatever schemes Philip was currently plotting. The agent had managed to bribe one of the servants in the papal service to bring him news. It did not amount to much. Philip wanted gold for some great enterprise, but Pope Sixtus was as parsimonious as our own Queen and was resisting Spanish blandishments. Arthur had made a few minor mistakes in deciphering, but nothing which altered the sense of the two reports, which more or less repeated the same information.

  When I had corrected them, I carried them over and placed them in the pile on Phelippes’s desk where he gathered together the reports from our own agents. Back at my own desk I reached for the packet taken from the Spanish ship heading for the Caribbean. They were tied together with a bit of tarred string. This must have been done by the English sea captain, for they would never have been sent out from the Escorial like that. The smell of the tar brought back vividly my own terrible sea journey from Portugal and I held the string in my hand, my eyes closed, trying to push away the memories. I dropped it on the floor and gritted my teeth. I must concentrate on the task in hand.

  Without thinking, I reached behind me to the shelf where I had always kept my own keys to the codes our agents used and those codes of our enemies which we had broken. There they all were, just as I had left them late in the previous year. I felt a little jump of pleasure in my chest as I looked at the familiar sheets. Some of them represented many hours of work and I was proud of them. Despite my reluctance, despite my annoyance with Phelippes, I began to feel the old excitement of the hunt. Opening the first of the documents, I could see that it was somewhat water-stained. Hardly surprising, for the Spanish ship had been taken, it appeared, after a fierce though brief battle. A quick glance confirmed that it was written in a new cipher. I curled my toes inside my stockings, which were now nearly dry. A new challenge. I tipped my hour-glass over. Had I lost my touch?

  By the time the sand had run through the hour glass I had cracked the code and started to decipher the first despatch.

  ‘This is from King Philip himself,’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘Addressed to the governor of Mexico. He is ordering the return of two thousand experienced troops by the next ships back to Spain. Also supplies of dried corn and vegetables, and salted fish.’

  I rubbed the feather of my quill along the side of my nose.

  ‘A bit different from the usual cargo of gold and silver.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Phelippes. ‘I expect his men in the New World send gold and silver anyway, as a matter of course. So. Troops. Experienced troops. He may just want them for the Duke of Parma in the Low Countries. Since the battle at Zutphen the Spanish are pressing ahead, trying to consolidate their gains in some of the areas that France claims, as well as crushing the Protestant Dutchmen.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I think it’s likely he may want them for what he has been calling for many years the Enterprise of England.’

  ‘You mean the invasion.’

  ‘Aye. You know that we have been watching him for ten years or more, slowly building up his trained army and the great ships of his navy. One of his reasons for seizing Portugal was to secure the Portuguese navy and all her excellent ports along the Atlantic coast. They have given him a much stronger hold over the western trading routes, even if Drake and Hawkins and the others manage to pick off his ships from time to time. We know that he set his heart on conquering England long ago. Even that scoundrel Mendoza has us in his sights. When we expelled him from his embassy here three years ago he said, “Tell your mistress Bernardino de Mendoza was born not to disturb kingdoms but to conquer them.” Arrogant bastard.’

  ‘What makes you suspect Philip is planning anything other than his usual trouble-making?’

  ‘Just a feeling in my bones. And the time is right for him. As I said before, if an invasion by the Scottish queen’s Guise relations had put her on the English throne, Phi
lip would have feared the alliance against him. Now he has been named her heir and France is riven by civil war between the Catholic League and Henri of Navarre’s Huguenots, Philip has the ideal opportunity to bring his years of planning to fruition.’

  ‘These experienced troops of his?’ I pointed with my quill to the letter I was deciphering. ‘The Spanish troops in the Netherlands are a trained and experienced army as well, aren’t they? What troops do we have to fight them?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said grimly. ‘Save our troops raised for the campaign in the Netherlands. The Queen will not agree to a standing army. Too expensive, and possibly risky if they grew restless. We could no more resist a Spanish army if they made landfall in England than your people in Portugal did. Our only hope is our navy, and that is small enough, God knows. Philip is unscrupulous. He has been seizing every foreign ship that comes trading into any Spanish or Portuguese port, and adding them to his navy. The Venetians are furious!’

  Outside the window, the dark of the winter afternoon was drawing in. Thoughtfully I fetched a candle and lit it from Phelippes’s. When I had set it down on my table I looked at the packet of letters ordering supplies of food and troops to be sent to Spain.

  ‘So – it really is a crisis, then? Or could be?’

  ‘It could be. Or,’ he conceded, ‘it could be just more of Philip’s obsession about seizing England, playing itself out in his endless schemes. What we need is time, time to strengthen our navy against his monstrous ambition. Do you know what his motto is?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Non sufficit orbis.’

  ‘The world is not enough,’ I said.

  So it was that, despite my determination to break away from Walsingham’s service, I found myself back to my old routine, spending half my time at St Bartholomew’s and half at Seething Lane. The reports and intercepted messages all conveyed a similar picture: Spain was building and seizing ships, buying in supplies of food and armaments, training soldiers, hiring mercenaries, purchasing slaves for its galleys from north African corsairs, and continually pressing the Vatican for money. It was rumoured that there were English and Welsh slaves serving on the galleys which would be used to attack England, as well as Spanish and Portuguese ‘volunteers’, that is, men who had been unfortunate enough to be press-ganged into service in the Spanish navy. Just like the slaves, they would be shackled to their oars. If a galley was sunk, her chained oarsmen would perish with her.