Buckingham glanced at his table where a flagon of red wine gleamed beside a plate of biscuits. ‘Are we short of food?’ he asked, surprised.

‘We’re not starving; but rations have been cut,’ John replied. ‘The Protestants are sending us all they can from La Rochelle – but it is not justice for us to eat their supplies. We came here to relieve them, not to devour their stores. And they themselves are surrounded by the Papist French troops, they cannot go on supplying us forever.’

‘I will speak with the French commander,’ Buckingham said thoughtfully. ‘He is a gentleman. Perhaps we can make some sort of terms.’

‘We should starve them to death and drive them into the sea,’ Soubise said hastily. ‘We have raised the siege, we should smash them into nothing!’

‘Next year,’ Tradescant said hastily. ‘When we come back with another fleet.’

A package of letters for the English troops had got safely through. The king had written, Buckingham’s wife Kate had written, and his mother, the cunning old countess. None of them had sent money to buy food or pay the troops, and there was no news of the fleet being equipped and setting sail. The duke kept the bad news to himself but no-one seeing the way he thrust the letter from the king inside his embroidered waistcoat could doubt that Charles had sent fond words but no news of an English fleet ploughing its way through stormy seas from Portsmouth to relieve his beloved friend.

The letter from the old countess was even more ominous. She urged her son to come home and reclaim his place at court. No man could risk being too far from one of the Stuarts, they had notoriously short memories. Buckingham himself had replaced Rochester, the previous Favourite, in the affections of King James, and now King Charles was coming under the sway of new advisers. William Laud, a new bishop, a common red-faced little man, was advising him at every turn. Buckingham must hurry home before he was forgotten.

Charles wrote to his dearest friend that he had no money but that he was raising funds by every means possible. He wrote that he was thinking of nothing but ways to get money to send a fleet. The old countess wrote to Buckingham in their private code that Charles had just bought the Duke of Mantua’s entire collection of pictures for fifteen thousand pounds – enough to equip and send two fleets. He had been unable to resist them at such a bargain price, and now he was penniless again. The money for the fleet had been squandered twice over – Buckingham need not hope for support.

Buckingham tore up her letter and scattered the tiny pieces over the stern of the Triumph. ‘Oh, Charles,’ he sighed. ‘How can you love me as you do and yet betray me like this?’