If we could take Lisbon.

I looked around. Like me, the soldiers had simply sunk to the ground. Their faces were pinched and grey with hunger and thirst and suffering and disease. Gone was the bravado which had had them looting the provisions in Plymouth and running wild in Coruña. They looked like a company of ghosts, like the flitting wraiths that Aeneas encountered in the Underworld. They did not even raise their eyes to our goal. They lay upon the ground and slept.

 

Chapter Sixteen

The siege of Lisbon was doomed from the outset. It had been no part of the plan, in those days of hectic excitement in London during the early spring, that Lisbon should be besieged. Dom Antonio had even been forced to concede to the Queen that the volunteer army should be allowed to loot his capital city for the first ten days. There was no other means of paying them. I never understood how this appalling concession was to be reconciled with a longed-for monarch returning to his jubilant people. I only learned of this arrangement to permit the looting of Lisbon the day we reached the city, when Dr Nuñez told me sorrowfully what had been agreed with the Queen. It seemed that the plan, so carefully devised in London, was that the authorised looting was to occur after the gates of the city were voluntarily opened to Dom Antonio by those same adoring subjects. It was assumed that there might be a little skirmishing in the streets with the occupying Spaniards, but they would soon be rounded up and despatched.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Dr Nuñez, when he told me this. I knew already that Portugal was to become some sort of dependency of England, encumbered by debt, shackled by trade concessions to English merchants, with Dom Antonio no more than a puppet king, but I did not see how the plundering of the country’s capital could be reconciled with a peaceful transition of power from Spain to an Anglo-Portuguese alliance.

Perhaps I was ignorant about how warfare and the affairs of kings should be conducted, but I could not comprehend how Dom Antonio – King Antonio – could hope to sit securely upon his throne by popular acclamation if he had first agreed to allow his capital city to be looted for ten days – ten days! – by an invading foreign Protestant army, and above all after the inhabitants had welcomed that army joyfully. There is no way to control an army set loose on an alien city with permission to loot. There would be not merely theft. There would be widespread destruction, rape, and murder. I did not want to be here when this happened. On the other hand, it would never happen unless the city surrendered. There was no intention on the part of our leaders to sit down to a siege.

Dr Nuñez shrugged. ‘I was not party to this agreement, Kit. It was drawn up between Her Majesty, the Privy Council and Dom Antonio. If Lisbon were to fall as the result of a siege, then of course there would be looting.’

‘But surely if a city is voluntarily handed over–’ I said. ‘And of course we are not proposing to besiege Lisbon. The city is supposed to open its doors to us.’

As a result of the original plan, we had brought with us no siege cannon, as we had been reminded again and again. We had no heavy artillery, no cannon save those that were the armaments of the fleet, and the fleet was twenty miles away at Cascais, busy about Drake’s affairs. Some small-bore artillery had originally been carried on the soldiers’ backs from Peniche. One by one, as the men died on the march, the weaponry they carried was left behind, for none of those poor shambling creatures could have carried two men’s loads. And even those who had managed to stumble as far as Lisbon had been shedding their own burdens, piece by piece, at the side of the road. There were men with half a suit of body armour, but no weapons for attack, and men with perhaps a musket and a dagger, but no breastplate to protect them from enemy fire. Our route across the countryside of Portugal was marked by a trail of dead men and scattered arms and armour and personal possessions, a smear, a slug track, across the map which spoke all too loudly of the true outcome of this Portuguese affair.

‘If the city does not surrender, then we can only take it by siege,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘And we can only take it by siege if Drake sails up the river, bringing his naval cannon.’

‘Those are the only alternatives.’

‘And we cannot sit down and starve them out.’ I remembered what the soldier had said to me, the night of the attack. The city would be well provisioned, while we were starving. ‘So the only possible outcomes are the willing surrender of the city or the arrival of Drake.’

‘Norreys has sent a messenger to Drake,’ he said, ‘urging him to move upriver at once.’

‘I, for one,’ I said, ‘will not be counting on it.’

In fact, at first we thought the city might surrender through sheer terror. Around midnight of that first night I was summoned to Dom Antonio’s tent, where I found all the English Portuguese party gathered, together with Sir John Norreys, several of his captains, and – to my astonishment – seated on a gilded stool which must have been carried here by one of those sumpter mules, the Earl of Essex himself.

I slipped behind Dr Nuñez and Dr Lopez, wondering what could be so urgent that I had been summoned like this in the middle of the night. Facing Dom Antonio and the Earl was a thin, dark-haired young man, who looked both frightened and queerly elated. He was standing before the two nobles, twisting his hands together. There were beads of sweat gathering on his temples and running down his cheeks, although the night was relatively cool after the heat of the day.

‘A deserter from Lisbon,’ Dr Nuñez whispered in my ear, ‘or a patriot, depending on your point of view. He managed to creep out through a postern gate to bring us news of what is happening inside the city walls.’

The sweating, then, was from fear or excitement.

‘Senhores,’ the man said, making a bow vaguely intended to include us all. ‘The garrison in the city has been reinforced by six thousand troops sent by King Philip from Madrid as soon as he heard of the attack on Coruña.’ He wiped his face on his sleeve. ‘You have heard of the executions? Of those believed to be supporters of the Dom?’

‘We have heard.’ It was Essex who spoke. He seemed to think he ranked first here and could take command of the discussion, although Dom Antonio, already proclaimed king in Peniche, far outranked him, while Sir John Norreys was indisputably in command of the army, whatever Essex might assume.

‘The killings have frightened many who would have been prepared to come over to Your Majesty.’ The man directed his words to Dom Antonio, and I saw Essex give an irritable jerk of his head.

‘Then, after the English fleet was sighted off Cascais, a rumour has spread that El Dracque is roaming the country with a thousand man-eating Irish wolfhounds, trained to cut down and kill anyone of Iberian blood.’

He looked around nervously, as if he expected to see a slavering beast at his heels. Someone gave a snort of laughter, quickly suppressed.

‘It is no laughing matter.’ Dr Nuñez had the courage to speak up, in the face of Essex and Dom Antonio. ‘Such a rumour, if indeed it is believed, might keep our Spanish enemies cowering behind the walls, unwilling to give battle. However, it also means that our Portuguese friends, if we have any, will be too terrified to leave the city to join us.’