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I listened to him with pleasure. He had an unusually soft musical voice for a sailor. I could not imagine his shouting to sailors on the deck. There could not have been a man less like my father. It was amazing how I compared them all with him.
“If we had entirely neglected trading,” Fe
“Traders!” cried my father. “Nothing to do with it. We beat the Dons because we were better seamen and we were determined not to let them set foot on our land.”
“Yes, yes, Captain Pe
“Now, young man, don’t you make the mistake of thinking this victory was due to luck. Good fortune, you say. Good seamanship, say I.”
“It was that, but we did have the ships,” insisted Fe
My father was listening now. Any method of worsting the Spaniards appealed to him.
I found it fascinating to listen to Fe
I sat listening to his voice and it was as though he created before my eyes the fulfilment of a dream. He was going to make our country great—not through war which to my father had always seemed the way to do this, but through trade. To ply peacefully throughout the world practising legitimate trading would prove more profitable, Fe
“The time has come,” he cried. “The troubles between the Low Countries and the Spaniards have crippled them both. What fools men are to kill when they might trade peaceably! At one time Antwerp was a centre of great wealth—one of the greatest in the world. The closing of the Schelde three years ago finished that. We have still to contend with Amsterdam. They’ll be our rivals for a while. That is good. Rivalry is necessary. It is the spur.”
He leaned his elbows on the table and contemplated my father earnestly.
“I prophesy that in the next decade we in this country will build a merchant fleet which will be the envy of the world. We have come through a great ordeal victorious. It is not for us now to gloat over our enemies but to go on to greatness. Our derision ca
I clapped my hands together and then I flushed because everyone was looking at me.
“Congratulations, Captain Landor,” I stammered. “I … was quite carried away.”
He smiled at me then and it seemed a very long moment that we looked at each other.
“The trading ships would have to be equipped with guns,” my father said.
“There is no doubt of that,” replied Fe
“England has always had need of ships,” said Carlos.
“But rarely as urgently as now. We have this breathing space. I doubt the Spaniards will ever recover from the trouncing they’ve had. Our rivals will be the Dutch. We must be prepared to meet the challenge.”
“And this,” said my father, “is what you wish to speak to me about.”
“Captain Pe
“God bless her,” said my father. He lifted his glass and we all drank to Queen Elizabeth.
“May this be the begi
“Amen,” said my mother.
My father looked at her and I saw the faint smile which passed between them; I knew then that she would persuade him to consider Fe
After that the conversation became more general.
Jacko had two of the new medals which had been struck to commemorate the victory. We all laughed over the one on which was engraved “Venit, vidit, fugit,” a play on Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered.” With the Spaniards they had come, seen and fled.
My father kept gazing at it and chuckling over it.
My mother said: “The Captain has suffered a great bereavement. He has lost his Spaniards. What shall you do, Jake, with no one to curse, no throats to cut, none to run through with your sword?”
“I doubt not,” he said, his eyes flashing fire at her, “that there are some lurking in that poxy land who will yet feel the steel of my sword.”
Edwina commented that she had heard that Robert Dudley’s death had caused the Queen great sorrow. “She truly loved him,” she said. “What a pity she could not have married him. I believe she would have been happy to do so.”
“She was too wise for that,” said Fe
“I like the medal,” said my mother, “which stresses the fact that she is a woman and that a woman was at the heart of our victory. ‘Dux femina facti.’ It is a heartening thought … for us women.”
“She is an unusual woman, don’t forget, and she wears a crown,” said Jake. “’Twould be a sorry state of affairs if all women thought they could govern men.”
“’Twould be worth a try,” retorted my mother. “You have all been saying—and my husband in particular—that we have just had the most resounding victory ever known. And a woman was at the heart of it. I like that medal.”
“There were men who served her well,” pointed out Fe
Edwina said that in her opinion men and women should work together. There should be no rivalry between them. They should be complementary one to the other.
“If men would remember that, there would be complete understanding, between the sexes,” said my mother.
Pe
There was a brief silence at the table. It was not usually wise to discuss such matters freely, but over the last weeks we had all grown a little less careful.
Court affairs were always of the utmost interest to us, none the less so because, being so far from London, we usually heard of them some time after they had taken place. This distance may well have made us perhaps more reckless than we would have dared be had we lived closer to the Court.