I did not understand this, until Phelippes explained.

‘Stafford is a rogue,’ he said. ‘Constantly in debt. He is an inverate gambler and falls more and more into debt with every passing week. He needs money and will sell his soul to the highest bidder. Look at this.’

He tossed a report on to my desk. It was in one of our own ciphers, one so familiar I could read it without recourse to the key.

‘It is from Gilbert Gifford.’

‘Aye.’

I had worked with Gifford the previous year, when we had been unravelling the plot by Babington and his fellow conspirators. Gifford had posed as a Catholic sympathiser, though he worked for Walsingham. When the conspirators were rounded up, he was so afraid for his safety that he had fled to France and had been working there ever since. To maintain his disguise, Walsingham and Phelippes continued to pretend that they believed him to be one of the conspirators. He lived a dangerous life, threatened on all sides. I ran my eye quickly over the report.

‘He says he has followed Mendoza and seen him entering Stafford’s house secretly by night.’

‘Aye, and staying for some considerable time. Long, secret discussions by night.’

‘Stafford is a traitor?’

‘He is.’

‘But why does the Queen not recall him?’

Phelippes shrugged. ‘She has been warned. She refuses to recall him. Sir Francis is not sure why. Perhaps she does not believe Stafford is a traitor. Perhaps it is because he is the stepson of her aunt, Mary Boleyn.’

‘That has never stopped the Tudors in the past,’ I muttered.

‘You may think such thoughts, Kit. It were better you did not voice them.’

Even so, I found it hard to believe that the Queen would allow a man known to be a traitor to continue as her ambassador in such an important posting as Paris. Sir Francis himself had been ambassador there many years before, at the time of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The horrors he had witnessed then had marked him for life. After such a distinguished predecessor in the post, why was the traitor Stafford not summoned home to answer for his conduct? Yet Walsingham, knowing Stafford for what he was, could now make use of him.

Having taken Ruy Lopez’s plan in hand, Walsingham controlled exactly what misleading information was leaked to da Vega, and through him to Mendoza. I am not sure how he approached Ruy or let it be known that he knew about da Vega. Certainly he cannot have mentioned my name, for Ruy never gave any indication that I had passed on the information to Sir Francis.

That flood of gossip, instructions, secret briefings and military plans which found their way to Mendoza must have had him scratching his head in confusion. Though, given his known arrogance, he may merely have assumed that it was all the result of his own cleverness. I felt no pity for him. While he was the Spanish ambassador in London he was dyed to the elbows in various plots to invade England, assassinate the Queen, and put the Scottish woman on the throne, all of which had been followed closely from Phelippes’s office. Mendoza had been expelled from England, but his skin remained intact, unlike those gallant if ill-judging boys like Babington. I hoped his Spanish master would eventually roast him alive for his false intelligence.

Amid these flying rumours, on the twelfth day of April, Drake’s flagship, the aptly named Elizabeth Bonaventura, followed by his fleet, slipped away from Plymouth.

‘Sir Francis has had da Vega arrested,’ Phelippes told me, as we worked on a batch of papers sent to da Vega from Mendoza, intercepted at Dover. Ever since the increased concern about a Spanish invasion, I had been summoned to assist him for more hours in the day, despite my attempts to plead my hospital work.

‘What will happen to him?’ I asked. ‘To da Vega?’

‘Oh, nothing will happen to him. He was arrested before Drake sailed. And then he was questioned cunningly, as if we were not quite sure whether he was an honest follower of Dom Antonio or not. Sir Francis released him when he calculated that it was too late for da Vega to inform King Philip that Drake had sailed not for the New World but for Spain.’

‘But won’t he be a danger to us?’

‘Oh, no. The spy you know is not a danger. It is the hidden spy you must fear. Sir Francis wants da Vega to think he has fooled us. That way he can be used in future to channel false information to the Spanish king.’

I nodded. The longer I worked in Walsingham’s service, the better I understood how these affairs were conducted.

Sir Francis’s sense of timing was accurate, but a close-run thing, for some weeks later, Dr Nuñez told me that his agent in Cadiz had sent word that the Spanish king had received da Vega’s letter warning of Drake’s intention to attack Spain on the last day of April, that is, on the very day when Drake began burning the ships in the confined quarters of Cadiz harbour.

‘Before he set sail for home,’ Dr Nuñez said, ‘Drake destroyed half the Spanish fleet. He has bought us a precious year longer to prepare for invasion. Although,’ he added, with a wry smile, ‘he burnt my ship along with the rest.’

Chapter Three

Drake sailed home to a hero’s triumphant welcome. Drake the hero. Drake the pirate. Drake the Dragon, El Draque, as the Spanish called him. He hated the Spanish as much as I did, though for different reasons. And he had the means to avenge himself on them, which I had not. Soon the story of his attack on Cadiz was being told on every street in London, growing in extravagance with every retelling. The truth itself was astonishing, and I suppose what we knew at Seething Lane was as near as anyone would ever come to an honest account of one of Drake’s expeditions.

Just before sailing from Plymouth, Drake had written to Sir Francis, mentioning his fears that nervous counsellors might yet persuade the Queen to forbid the expedition – men who would ‘keep their finger out of the fire’, though he believed God was with him. His letter, scribbled on board ship, ended:

‘The wind commands me away, our ships are under sail. God grant we may so live in His fear that the enemy may have cause to say that God fights for Her Majesty as well abroad as at home. Haste.’

Drake was right to fear the Queen’s notorious ability to change her mind. A messenger was despatched post haste to Plymouth with orders to rein back the attack to a minor privateering expedition, forbidding a direct attack on the Spanish mainland, for she still clung – so Walsingham said – to a forlorn hope of peace with Spain. Burghley too was cautious, but Walsingham was convinced that the only thing that could withstand Spain was military action. The Queen’s messenger arrived too late in Plymouth. Drake’s fleet had already sailed. The Queen’s order was sent on by fast pinnace, but it was driven back by bad weather and returned to England.

‘Drake may well believe that God is with him,’ Phelippes said, with a grim smile. ‘For the storms of Heaven meant he never received the Queen’s message. Just how hard the various bearers tried to catch him we will never know, but most Englishmen are with him, heart and soul.’

Soon Drake was being praised for singeing the King of Spain’s beard, a vivid picture particularly pleasing to every true-blooded Englishman. On the way home he seized a treasure ship packed with spices, silks and ivory, so the Queen herself profited from the expedition in money as well as strategy. No doubt she forgave him for not obeying her last minute order. She could always claim that she had been against it, if ever it came to peace negotiations with Spain. The attack on Cadiz had destroyed not only a large number of the ships in the harbour but most of the provisions and armaments stored in the warehouses of the port. The town itself had suffered, and not only through Drake’s activities.