Despite their safety behind the thick walls, the French sentries on duty were alert. As the little makeshift English tents were struck and the soldiers quietly formed into ranks, the French sentries watched and raised the alarm. As the ragged English army lined up in companies the gates of St Martin opened and the French, well-fed, well-clothed, well-commanded, marched out. Buckingham’s troops, nearly seven thousand of them, fell slowly back before the French force. They went in a textbook retreat, staying outside musket range, refusing to engage with the sporadic fire that the French troops offered.

‘How does the tide?’ Buckingham asked John quickly as he tried to keep the men maintaining a steady pace towards the causeway. The ground underfoot was marshy and wet and the men could not keep to a quick march. They floundered about and had to be ordered into single file on the narrow path. The sniping from the rear increased as the French soldiers gained on them.

‘The tide’s turning,’ John warned. ‘Let them run to the ships, my lord, or we’ll not get them off the island before the tide rises.’

‘Run!’ Buckingham shouted. ‘As fast as you can!’ He sent his standard bearer ahead to show the men the way. One man stepped carelessly off the causeway and immediately sank to his waist in thick mud. He shouted to his friends for help and they, glancing anxiously towards the rear of the army where the French were coming closer, laid their pikes on the ground towards him and pulled him out.

‘Go on! Go on!’ John urged them. ‘Hurry!’

It was a race against three forces. One, the English, breaking ranks and running for their ships; two, the French coming behind them, as confident as poachers in a field of rabbits, pausing to fire and reload and then marching briskly on; three, the tide swirling in either side of the island, threatening to cut the narrow causeway in two, pushed on by the rising winds.

The men who had been ordered to lay timbers down over the mud flats to make a causeway to the ships had made the road too narrow, and there were no handholds. As the men pushed and shoved their way along the track, those at the very edge fell off and struggled in the marshy water which grew deeper with every pulse of the tide. John stopped to haul a man back on the causeway. The man struggled, gripping tight to John’s reaching hands until John felt his own feet slipping under him.

‘Swim with your legs!’ John shouted.

‘Pull me!’ the man begged.