Book
A Queen’s Privateer
by Sam Burnell
Book 10 in the Richard Fitzwarren Tudor Historical series.
Buy the book from:
Early in Elizabeth I’s reign, the London sailor and former thief Jack Stannard is pressed into a covert Atlantic voyage aboard the privateer Lucianna. Richard Fitzwarren travels as the queen’s envoy, accompanied by Emilio, an exiled knight from Malta. Their task is to gather intelligence about Spanish routes and coastal possessions while preserving enough deniability to prevent an unofficial mission from becoming open war.
Storms, Spanish guns and competing ships threaten the voyage, but betrayal aboard the Lucianna may be more dangerous than any declared enemy. The crew moves from London’s waterfront towards the Spanish-controlled New World, where mapping, trade and raiding overlap. The novel places its fictional expedition within the growth of Elizabethan privateering and the undeclared maritime rivalry that preceded the Anglo-Spanish War.