Elizabeth did not look around. She had forgotten her son was there. ‘You’re too young,’ she said absently.

‘I’m nearly nineteen, I am a man grown. I could keep him safe.’

She looked up at his bright hopeful face and his dark eyes, as dark as his father’s. ‘I cannot bear to let you go,’ she said. ‘You stay home with me. This voyage is going to break hearts enough in this household and in others all over the country. I can’t risk you as well.’ She saw the refusal in his face. ‘Ah, John, don’t waste your time reproaching me or trying to convince me,’ she suddenly cried out bitterly. ‘He won’t take you. He won’t allow you to go. He will want to be with the duke alone.’

‘It is always the duke,’ J said resentfully.

She turned her face from her son to look into the fire. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘If I had been able to hide from that knowledge before, I would certainly know it now. Now that he has told me to my face and repeated it – that he is their man and not mine.’

Elizabeth did not come to see the fleet sail from Stokes Bay near Portsmouth. It was too far from Essex, and besides she did not want to see her husband walking up the narrow gangplank to his master’s ship, the Triumph, supervising the loading of his master’s goods. On this warlike expedition Buckingham was taking a full-sized harp with a harpist, a couple of milk cows, a dozen laying hens, a massive box of books for reading in his leisure hours, and an enormous coach with livery for his servants for his triumphant progress through La Rochelle.

Watching this fanciful equipment lumbering up the gangplank, John was rather relieved that Elizabeth was not with him. Six thousand foot soldiers slouched unwillingly aboard the fleet, a hundred cavalry. The king himself rode down to Portsmouth for a farewell dinner with his Lord High Admiral, and bade him farewell with a dozen kisses, wishing him God speed on his mission.

The mission itself remained uncertain. Firstly they were to harry French shipping as they sailed to La Rochelle, but, as it happened, though the July seas were calm and pleasant they saw no French shipping and could not complete their orders. Buckingham’s court played cards for desperately high stakes and held a poetry competition as they sailed southwards. There was a good deal of hard drinking and laughter.