The Portuguese Affair (25 page)

He was a truly magnificent sight, like some Arthurian knight from an illuminated book of romances, if, that is, one could have banished from one’s mind – as I could not – the image of this gallant warrior emerging from the surf at Pe
niche, his head wreathed in seaweed and water streaming from every joint of his armour, while around and behind him, unheeded, men drowned. Accompanied by a bodyguard of his followers, and watched, dull-eyed, by the rest of us, Essex rode up to the nearest gate of the city and banged on it defiantly with the butt of his spear.

‘Ho, within there! I challenge you to come forth and surrender the town or else be prepared to meet your end on the bloody field of battle.’

No one responded.

Unsuccessful in provoking the garrison of
Lisbon, Essex nevertheless rode back to the rest of the army with a complacent smirk displayed within his open visor. Had he no understanding that this was a real war,
not
some heroic and fanciful tale drawn from the pages of a book of romances, written for courtiers and ladies?

I slid from my horse and found my legs would not hold me. Sinking down on a tussock of dried and dusty grass, I put my head between my knees. I had been in the saddle for two weeks, first to seek Isabel and then on the terrible journey to come here, to look upon our capital city. My mind was almost numb. My only clear thought was that if we could take
Lisbon and drive out the Spaniards, I might still be able to return and rescue my sister.

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

T
he 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.’

He turned to the man. ‘Is it believed?’

He nodded. ‘By enough people to affect how they will behave. There are others who perhaps do not quite believe, but will find it more expedient to pretend they believe, so they need do nothing.’ He swallowed. ‘Is it true?’

‘Nay
, my friend.’ Dr Nuñez smiled at him gently. ‘It is not true. Drake has a pet Irish wolfhound at home. I have seen it myself and it is as gentle as a babe. There are no wolfhounds, trained or otherwise, with us on the expedition. You may return and scotch the rumour.’

The young man’s eyes widened, showing the white, like those of a frightened horse. ‘I am not going back.’ His voice rose to a squeak. ‘I should be caught and killed at once. As it is, I have risked my life to come to you.’

‘Of course we welcome your good service.’ Clearly the Dom felt it was time he took charge of the meeting. ‘You will be rewarded for your courage, and amply too.’

I wondered at such self-deception. Dom Antonio had no money to reward anyone, nor overlordship of lands to be given away. I doubted whether, at this moment in
Portugal, he owned much more than the clothes he stood up in.

‘Either way,’ said Dr Nuñez, ‘whether such a wild rumour is believed or not, Spanish and Portuguese alike will soon see that Drake is nowhere near Lisbon, but twenty miles away with his fleet as Cascais. Whether that will help or hinder us is any man’s guess.’

What had Drake been doing, all the time we had been labouring overland? I suspected that he might have been indulging in a little privateering to fill in the time. There was certainly no sign of him sailing up river to join us, despite Norreys demand.

The man from
Lisbon also brought word that public executions were continuing to take place all day long.

‘Any who are suspected of supporting Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘are killed without trial. Men are being dragged to the gallows or garrotted in the street, merely on some anonymous informer’s whisper.’

The meeting in the royal tent went on for some while longer, but the man could tell us little more, save the number of the troops and the vast quantities of arms, gunpowder and food which had been stockpiled in the city while we lingered at Coruña, then made our slow way to Peniche and overland to Lisbon. It was nearing dawn by the time the meeting broke up.

‘I have heard,’ I said to Dr Nuñez the following day, ‘that the Dom has persuaded the local priests to slip into the houses round about and tell the people that he is God’s chosen ruler of Portugal, that they must come to his aid, and they will be richly rewarded, in this world and hereafter.’

We were sitting on the ground, leaning against our saddles, while our horses grazed nearby and we tore lumps out of a loaf of bread his servant had somehow managed to find for him. The bread was coarse, and I felt my teeth grate on fragments of grit, but it was fresh and I was too hungry to care.

‘Well enough,’ said Dr Nuñez, ‘but I have never heard that priests made good recruiting officers, except in the days of the Crusades, and then they were of a more fiery disposition than those we have seen here.’

I was aware all at once how tired and old he looked. When we had first set out from London, he had been so buoyed up, with hope and joy at returning to his native Portugal, that he seemed to have shed his age. Now it weighed down on him, the whole burden of his seventy years.

‘I also heard there was one priest,’ I said, in the hope of cheering him, ‘who has promised to find a way into the city and open the gates to us.’

‘Aye, I heard it too. But can one man alone accomplish such a thing? I doubt it, Kit, I doubt it.’

Later that day I met the priest, Father Hernandez. I was checking the wounds of the men who had been injured during the night attack by the Spanish. There was a risk, even with the lesser injuries, that they might still fester, for the men were so weakened and the conditions in which we had lived since Peniche so poor that there was a risk of serious inflammation or even gangrene. To my relief, there was no sign of gangrene, though all the wounds were slow in healing. There being no better place to treat them, my patients came one by one to lie on the ground under a single sheet of canvas, providing a makeshift shelter. When at last I was done, I sat back on my heels and wiped my face with a wet cloth. At least here we had water from the river.

‘You are over young to be serving as an army physician, my son.’

It was a priest, not more than thirty, who sat down cross-legged beside me on the ground. He had addressed me in English, but I replied in Portuguese.

‘No younger than many of the soldiers,’ I said. ‘Or not much. Though I think many of us have aged during the march here from Peniche.’

‘You are Portuguese? This march overland does not seem a wise course to have taken. Why were you not brought by ship?’

I shrugged. ‘It was the decision of those in charge of the expedition. I believe they chose that course because they believed that the local people would flock to King Antonio’s banner.’

‘But they did not.’

‘Nay.’

He held
out his hand to me. ‘I am Dinis Hernandez.’

‘Christoval Alvarez.’ I shook his hand, where we sat, side by side on the ground, the last of my patients having left. In this ramshackle camp, there was no formality, except perhaps in
Essex’s tents.

‘Are you not the priest who–’ I broke off.

‘Aye,’ he said quietly. ‘I have volunteered to make my way into the city and recruit good friends of King Antonio’s to help me open the city gates to his army.’

‘It is a very dangerous thing to attempt.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘Such times require desperate measures. I have little love for the Spanish. They killed my parents when they first invaded Portugal nearly ten years ago. My brother and my brother-in-law were amongst those executed without trial within the last two weeks. My sister and her children were in Lisbon, but there has been no word of them. They disappeared about the same time as my brother-in-law was killed. I want the Spanish driven out of Portugal.’

‘Do you think you will be allowed into the city?’

‘I am a priest. Why should they refuse me?’

‘If indeed you succeed in entering the city,’ I said slowly, ‘I know that there is an Englishman held prisoner there. His name is Hunter. I have no other name for him. Before I left
London, I was asked to make sure that he was brought safely out of Lisbon, once we took the city. I do not know whether that will happen, or whether I shall be able to enter the city, but if you–’ I was uncertain how to continue. It seemed best not to mention Walsingham, or what manner of man Hunter was.