It’s time for the cover reveal of my debut novel, which I expect to publish in mid November.

I first met Sir Anthony Standen in George Malcolm Thomson’s biography of Sir Francis Drake. “The time had come when Walsingham was no longer satisfied with news that came to him at second-hand, whether from Santa Cruz’s kitchen or from the Governor of Guernsey’s reports of the gossip on Breton ships or in Rouen taverns. He needed an accurate and detailed stream of information about the number of Philip’s ships, their tonnage, the sailors who would man them and the soldiers they would carry. Thanks above all to Standen, he got what he wanted.”

Standen is a family name, so I became intrigued by this potential ancestor, an Elizabethan spy. I read his ODNB entry and was captivated, but I kept asking myself why did he do that, and how did he do that?

I visited the British Library to read accounts by Venetian diplomats concerning Standen. I read Daphne Du Maurier’s Golden Lads, in which Standen is a minor character. I read documents from the archives of the Duke of Tuscany, for whom Standen worked for a time, and then I started to write. My book, The Spy who Sank the Armada, answers my two questions, but is not a biography. It is true to everything we know about Standen and the history of the period, but the why and the how are my creation.