The pieces blew in an eddy of wind, like flecks of snow. Superstitiously, Buckingham looked up at the September sky. There were thick clouds on the horizon, the fair weather was due to break. ‘He is a sweet man,’ he said to himself. ‘The sweetest man that ever lived, but the most faithless friend and king that could ever be.’

He wrapped his cape around him a little closer. He knew that any time his name was mentioned at court, Charles would think of him with love. He knew that he would return to an open-hearted welcome. But he knew also that a collection of pictures like the Duke of Mantua’s would be irresistible to a man who from boyhood had been able to have what he wanted at the instant he had wanted it. Charles would think that Buckingham, that the English fleet, that the full-scale war with France could wait while he amassed yet more money from the hard-pressed taxpayers of England. He would never understand that it was he who had to do without. He had no practice in self-denial. For all his sympathy and charm and sweetness, there was a core of pure selfishness in Charles that nothing could penetrate.

‘I will have to win and return home or I will be left here to die,’ Buckingham said. The last pieces of his mother’s letter blew, sank into water, and then slipped away. Buckingham watched them go down into the heaving greenness, and realised that he was facing his own defeat and death, and that he had never thought before that his life and his charmed career could end in despair.

He looked up at the horizon at the dark layers of cloud. The wind was blowing the rain towards the Triumph and towards the string of English ships moored as a thin barrier between St Martin and the sea of La Rochelle.

‘I will win and return home,’ Buckingham vowed. ‘I was not born and raised so high to die in a cold sea off France. I was born for great things, for greater than this. I will see St Martin razed to the ground and then I will go home and I shall have that fifteen thousand pounds poured into my hands for my pains; and I will forget I was ever here, in fear and in want.’

He turned back to the waist of the ship and saw John Tradescant, standing a yard away, watching him.

‘Confound you, John! You startled me. What the Devil are you doing?’

‘Just watching you, my lord.’

Buckingham laughed. ‘Did you fear an assassin’s knife on my own ship?’

John shook his head. ‘I feared disappointment and despair,’ he said. ‘And sometimes a companion can guard you against them too.’