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Bernardino de Mendoza; he had been expelled from England three years earlier for his endless conspiracies, and even as he left under armed guard, he turned to one of the Council and taunted him that he would return as a conqueror. As for Berden, Shakespeare knew of him as one of Walsingham’s top intelligencers in the field. There would be no reason to doubt the authenticity of this intercept.
    I assume you have had it deciphered?
    It is a subject close to your own heart, John. Phelippes has broken the code and finds this message: ‘The dragon slayer has been dispatched to England.’ It goes on to ask for funds of seventy thousand ducats to be made available in the event of a successful outcome. This note is a warrant for murder, John. It tells us an assassin has been sent to England to kill Drake. We have no way of knowing when he was sent, how long he has been here, or how far his plans are advanced. But there is no question as to the import of the message and the seriousness of the position.
    Shakespeare nodded assent. He knew that Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s cipher expert, would not have made an error in discovering the meaning of such a paper. It was his breaking of the Queen of Scots’s intricate code that had convicted her of treason. And now, if this encoded message was to be believed, a killer had been contracted to murder Sir Francis Drake. All Spaniards feared Drake and called him El Draque, meaning Dragon. His title was Vice Admiral of England and yet his repute far exceeded mere titles. In a country of superb mariners—Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher, Thomas Cavendish, Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Grenville, John Hawkins, and Howard of Effingham—Drake was peerless. And he was driven by hatred of the Spanish. It was a loathing born of the cruelties meted out to his friends and comrades-at-arms long ago, in 1568, when they were taken by the Inquisition at the debacle of San Juan d’Ulua in the New World. The names of those men still gnawed at Drake’s soul, and he thought of them often: fellow Devonian Robert Barrett, burned to death in the auto-dafé at Seville; William Orlando, dead in the same town while festering in a dungeon; Michael Morgan, tortured, whipped almost to death, then put to the oars as a galley slave; George Ribley of Gravesend, garroted and his body burned at the stake. This was what infused Drake with feral courage and kept hot his bitter enmity for the Spaniard. It was a hatred that was fueled by every Spanish outrage that occurred: the 1572 massacre of men, women, and children in the Dutch town of Naarden; the slaughter, rape, and sacking of Antwerp. These events seared themselves into Drake’s memory and kept his rage burning like molten iron. His enmity was returned in kind by King Philip II, who had long since decided Drake must die.
    All in England knew that no single man was more important than Drake to the survival of the realm. If anything could prevent an invasion by the rumored armada, it was the fighting skills and strategic brilliance of the Vice Admiral. During twenty years at sea, he had proved his courage and seacraft time and again, capturing scores of Spanish galleons and storming ports with irresistible ferocity.
    No one was in any doubt that Spain’s invasion fleet must be beaten at sea—for if it disgorged its battle-hardened troops on English soil, all would be lost.
    England’s land forces were woefully ill-prepared. They would be swept aside and slaughtered within days. And then the terror would begin: the dread Inquisition.
    Soon, villages, towns, and cities would be ablaze with the burning bodies of tens of thousands of Protestant heretics. No one would be safe from torture and execution.
    Shakespeare shuddered at the prospect. He knew what was at stake from his own experience.
    As a junior intelligencer in Walsingham’s service five years earlier, he had helped break another Spanish plot against Drake. The money on offer to kill him then was twenty