'I wouldn't have, Thomas. I am loyal.' He looked Gorges in the eye. 'I hope you know that, Thomas. Don't you?'

Gorges stared straight back. 'Yes,' he said slowly. 'I know.'

From dawn until ten that morning, in a near calm, out on the horizon behind the Isle of Wight the English ships pounded the Armada. By afternoon both fleets were on their way again up the English Channel and for two days they continued, until the Duke of Medina Sidonia anchored off Calais and sent urgent messages to the Duke of Parma asking that general to come at once and cross to England.

Parma said: 'No.' With irritation he explained that a crossing in his flat-bottomed boats was quite impossible if enemy ships were anywhere in sight. Unless the Armada could come and fetch him - which, in the shallow waters off the Netherlands, they couldn't - he wasn't coming. All this, it turned out, he had been telling the King of Spain for weeks - a fact which the king, preferring to trust in providence, had not seen fit to tell the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

So the Spanish Armada lay off Calais, sending ever more baffled messages to Parma, and Parma stayed in the Netherlands, a day's journey away, despatching even crosser messages back. And the English waited by the Thames, expecting an invasion at any moment because the one thing that had never occurred to them was that the King of Spain had sent his Armada without any co-ordinated battle plan at all.

The Armada spent two fruitless days like this. Then, in the dead of night, the English sent in eight fire ships, coated with tar, blazing as brightly as a thousand beacons and the Spanish captains, in panic, cut their cables and scattered. The next day the English fell upon them. The Spanish were driven towards the shore, some wrecked, some taken; but the majority were still intact.

Then, on the following day came God's wind.

The Protestant wind, they called it. Nobody, on either side could ever deny that, whatever their valour or their piety, it was the weather that truly destroyed the mighty Armada. Day after day, week after week it blew, turning the seas to heaving froth. Ships lost sight of each other; galleons were scattered all over the northern waters, some were driven on to the rocks in northern Scotland or even Ireland. Less than half reached home. And whether it was to reward the Protestants for their faith or punish the Catholics for their shortcomings, both Queen Elizabeth of England and King Philip of Spain could agree that such winds could only come from God.