‘We must destroy them,’ the queen said flatly. ‘Before they destroy us and destroy the country. We must gain and then keep control of the parliament, of the army and of the Church. There can be no agreement until they acknowledge that Church, army, and Parliament is all ours. And we will never compromise on that, will we, my love? You will never concede anything!’
He took her hand and kissed it as if she had given him the most sage and level-headed counsel. ‘You see how I am advised?’ he asked with a smile to Tradescant. ‘You see how w … wise and stern she is? This is a worthy successor to Queen Elizabeth, is sh … she not? A woman who could defeat the Sp … Spanish Armada again.’
‘But these are not the Spanish,’ John pointed out. He could almost hear Hester ordering him to be silent while he took the risk and spoke. ‘These are Englishmen, following their consciences. These are your own people – not a foreign enemy.’
‘They are traitors!’ the queen snapped. ‘And thus they are worse than the Spanish, who might be our enemies but at least are faithful to their king. A man who is a traitor is like a dog who is mad. He should be struck down and killed without a second’s thought.’
The king nodded. ‘And I am s … sorry, Gardener Tradescant, to hear you sympathise with them.’ There was a world of warning despite the slight stammer.
‘I just hope for peace and that all good men can find a way to peace,’ John muttered.
The queen stared at him, affronted by a sudden doubt. ‘You are my servant,’ she said flatly. ‘There can be no question which side you are on.’
John tried to smile. ‘I didn’t know we were taking sides.’
‘Oh yes,’ the king said bitterly. ‘We are certainly t … taking sides. And I have paid you a w … wage for years, and you have worked in my h … household, or in the household of my dear D … Duke since you were a boy – have you not? And your f … father worked all his life for my advisors and servants, and my f … father’s advisors and servants. You have eaten our b … bread since you were weaned. Which side are you on?’
John swallowed to ease the tightness in his throat. ‘I am for the good of the country, and for peace, and for you to enjoy what is your own, Your Majesty,’ he said.
‘What has always b … been mine own,’ the king prompted.
‘Of course,’ John agreed.
The queen suddenly smiled. ‘But this is my dear Gardener Tradescant!’ she said lightly. ‘Of course he is for us. You would be first into battle with your little hoe, wouldn’t you?’
John tried to smile and bowed rather than reply.
The queen put her hand on his arm. ‘And we never betray those who follow us,’ she said sweetly. ‘We are bound to you as you are bound to us and we would never betray a faithful servant.’ She nodded at the king as if inviting him to learn a lesson. ‘When a man is ready to promise himself to us he finds in us a loyal master.’
The king smiled at his wife and the gardener. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘From the highest servant to the 1 … lowest, I do not forget either loyalty or treachery. And I reward b … both.’
Summer 1641
John remembered that promise on the day that the Earl of Strafford was taken to the Tower of London and thrown into the traitors’ prison to be executed when the king signed the Act of Attainder – his death warrant.
The king had sworn to Strafford that he would never betray him. He had written him a note and gave him the word of a king that Strafford would never suffer ‘in life, honour or fortune’ for his service – those were his exact words. The most cautious and wily members of the Privy Council fled the country when they recognised that Parliament was attacking the Privy Council rather than attacking the king. Most of them were quick to realise too that whatever the king might promise, he would not raise one hand to save a trusted servant from dying for his cause. But the Bishop of Ely and Archbishop William Laud were too slow, or too trusting. They too were imprisoned for plotting against the safety of the kingdom, alongside their ally Strafford in the Tower.
For all of the long spring months, Parliament had met on Strafford’s case and heard that he had recommended bringing in an army of Irish Papist troops to reduce ‘this kingdom’. If the king had interrupted the trial to insist that Strafford was referring to the kingdom of Scotland he might have saved him then from the executioner. But he did not. The king stayed silent in the little ante-room where he sat and listened to the trial. He did not insist. He offered, rather feebly, to never take Strafford’s advice again as long as the old man lived if they would but spare his life. The Houses of Parliament said they could not spare his life. The king struggled with his conscience for a short, painful time, and then signed the warrant for Strafford’s execution.
‘He sent little Prince Charles to ask them for mercy,’ Hester said in blank astonishment to John as she came back from Lambeth in May with a wagon full of shopping and a head full of news. ‘That poor little boy, only ten years old, and the king sent him down to Westminster to go before the whole Parliament and plead for the Earl’s life. And then they refused him! What a thing to do to a child! He’s going to think all his life that it was his fault that the Earl went to his death!’
‘Whereas it is the king’s,’ John said simply. ‘He could have denied that Strafford had ever advised him. He could have borne witness for him. He could have taken the decision on his own shoulders. But he let Strafford take the blame for him. And now he will let Strafford die for him.’
‘He’s to be executed on Tuesday,’ Hester said. ‘The market women are closing their stalls for the day and going up to Tower Hill to see his head taken off. And the apprentices are taking a free day, an extra May Day.’
John shook his head. ‘So much for the king’s loyalty. These are bad days for his servants. What’s the word on Archbishop Laud?’
‘Still in the Tower,’ Hester said. She rose to her feet and took hold of the side of the wagon to clamber down but John reached out his arms and lifted her down. She hesitated for a moment at the strangeness of his touch. It was nearly an embrace, his hands on her waist, their heads close together. Then he released her and moved to the back of the wagon.
‘You’ve bought enough for a siege!’ he exclaimed, and then, as his own words sunk in, he turned to her. ‘Why have you bought so much?’
‘I don’t want to go into market for a week or so,’ she said. ‘And I won’t send the maids either.’
‘Why not?’
She made a little helpless gesture. He thought he had never before seen her anything other than certain and definite in her movements. ‘It’s strange in town,’ she began. ‘I can’t describe it. Uneasy. Like a sky before a storm. People talk on corners and break off when I walk by. Everyone looks at everyone else as if they would read their hearts. No-one knows who is a friend and who is not. The king and Parliament are splitting this country down the middle like a popped pod of peas and all of us peas are spilling out and rolling around and not knowing what to do.’
John looked at his wife, trying to understand, for the first time in their married life, what she might be feeling. Then he suddenly realised what it was. ‘You look afraid.’
She turned away to the edge of the wagon as if it were something to be ashamed of. ‘Someone threw a stone at me,’ she said, her voice very low.
‘What?’
‘Someone threw a stone as I was leaving the market. It hit me in the back.’
John was dumbfounded. ‘You were stoned? In Lambeth?’
She shook her head. ‘A glancing blow. It was not thrown to hurt me. I think it was an insult, a warning.’
‘But why should anyone at Lambeth market insult you? Or warn you?’
She shrugged. ‘You’re well-known as the king’s gardener, the king’s man, and your father before you. And these people don’t inquire where your heart lies, what you think in private. They think of us as the king’s servants, and the king is not well-regarded in Lambeth and the City.’
John
’s mind was whirling. ‘Did it hurt you? Are you hurt?’
She started to say ‘No’, but she stumbled over the word and John, without thinking, caught her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder as the torrent of words spilled out.
She was afraid, very afraid, and she had been afraid every market day since Parliament had been recalled and the king had come home defeated from the war with the Scots. The women would not always serve her, they overcharged her and leaned on the scales when they were weighing out flour. And the apprentice boys ran after her and called out names, and when the stone had struck her back she had thought it would be the first of a hail of stones which would hit her and knock her from the box of the wagon and beat her down in the street.
‘Hester! Hester!’ John held her as the storm of crying swept over her. ‘My dear, my dear, my little wife!’
She broke off from crying at once. ‘What did you call me?’
He had not been aware of it himself.
‘You called me little wife, and your dear –’ she said. She rubbed her eyes, but kept her other hand firmly on his collar. ‘You called me dear, you’ve never called me that before.’
The old closed look came down on his face. ‘I was upset for you,’ he said, as if it was a sin to call his own wife an endearment. ‘For a moment I forgot.’
‘You forgot that you had been married before. You treated me like a wife you are … fond of,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘I am glad,’ she said softly. ‘I should like you to be fond of me.’
He disengaged himself very gently. ‘I should not forget I was married before,’ he said firmly, and went into the house. Hester stood beside the cart, watching the kitchen door closing behind him, and found she had no more tears left to cry but only loneliness and disappointment and dry eyes.
Summer 1641
Hester did not go to market again all summer. And she had been right to fear the mood of the village of Lambeth. The apprentice boys all ran wild one night and the fever was caught by the market women and by the serious chapel goers, who made a determined mixed mob and marched through the streets shouting, ‘No popery! No bishops!’ Some of the loudest and most daring shouted, ‘No king!’ They threw a few burning brands over the high walls of the empty archbishop’s palace, and made a half-hearted attempt at the gates, and then they broke the windows down Lambeth High Street at every house that did not show a light at the window for Parliament. They did not march down the road as far as the Ark and John thanked God for the luck of the Tradescants, which had once again placed them on the very edge of great events and danger and yet spared them by a hair’s breadth.
After that, John sent the gardener’s lad and the stable lad together to market and though they often muddled the order and stopped for an ale at the taverns, at least it meant that any muttering about the king’s gardener was not directed at Hester.
John had to go to Oatlands and before he went he ordered wooden shutters to be made for all the windows of the house, especially the great windows of Venetian glass in the rarities room. He hired an extra lad to wake at nights and watch out down the South Lambeth road in case the mob came that way, and he and Hester went out one night in the darkness with shaded lanterns to clear out the old ice house, and put a heavy bolt on the thick wooden doors to make a hiding place for the most valuable of the rarities.
‘If they come against us you will have to take the children and leave the house,’ he ordered.
She shook her head and he found himself admiring her cool nerve. ‘We have a couple of muskets,’ she said. ‘I won’t have my house overrun by a band of idle apprentice lads.’
‘You must not take risks,’ he warned her.
She gave him a tight, determined smile. ‘Everything is a risk in these days,’ she said. ‘I will see that we come safe through it all.’
‘I have to leave you,’ John said anxiously. ‘I am summoned to Oatlands. Their Majesties will visit next week and I have to see the gardens are at their best.’
She nodded. ‘I know you have to go. I shall keep everything safe here.’
John was at Oatlands ready for the full court, but the queen came alone. The king and half the court were missing, and the rumour was that he had gone north to negotiate with the Scots himself.
‘He is in Edinburgh and all will be mended,’ the queen said with her complacent smile when she came upon John dead-heading the roses. She was concealing her boredom as best as she could. She was accompanied only by a few ladies, the old flirtatious, artistic, idle entourage was broken up. The more adventurous and more ambitious men were riding with the king. There was the smell of opportunity and advancement in the court of a king at war, and the young men had been sick of peace and a court devoted to marital love for so long. ‘It will all be resolved,’ the queen promised. ‘Once they meet him again he will charm them into seeing that they were wrong to march against him.’
John nodded. ‘I hope so, Your Majesty.’
She came close to him and lowered her voice. ‘We will not go to London again until it is all agreed,’ she confided. ‘Not even to my little manor at Wimbledon. We shall go nowhere near to Westminster. After the death of my Lord Strafford –’ She broke off. ‘They said they would try me after the Earl! Try me for treasonous advice!’
John had to resist the temptation to take one of her little white hands. She looked genuinely afraid.
‘He should have stood against them,’ she whispered. ‘My husband should not have let them take Strafford, nor Laud. If he lets them pick us off one after another we will all be lost. And then he will be left all alone and they will have tasted blood. He should have stood against them for William Laud, he should have stood against them for Strafford. How can I be sure he will stand for me?’
‘Your Majesty, matters cannot go so far,’ John said soothingly. ‘As you say yourself, the king will come home and it will all be resolved.’
She brightened at once. ‘He can scatter a few baronies around the Houses of Parliament, and places at court,’ she said. ‘These are all lowly men, commoners up from the provinces. They have neither learning nor breeding. They will forget their folly if the price is high enough.’
John felt the familiar rise of irritation. ‘Majesty, I think they are men of principle. They did not behead Lord Strafford on a whim. I think they believe in what they are doing.’
She shook her head. ‘Of course not! They are scheming with the Scots, or with the Dutch, or with someone for their own ends. The House of Lords is not with them, the court is not with them. These are little men come up from the country, crowing like little cocks on their own dunghills. We just have to wring their necks like little cocks.’
‘I pray that the king can find a way to agree with them,’ John said steadily.
She flashed him her charming smile. ‘Why, so do I! He shall make all sorts of promises to them, and then they can vote us the taxes we need and the army we need to crush the Scots and they can go back to their dunghills and we can rule without them again.’
Autumn 1641
It might have gone either way for the king, and the queen, but for their fourth kingdom of Ireland. The news that Strafford was dead ran through Ireland like a heath fire. Strafford had held Ireland down with a mixture of legal rigour and terrible abuse of power. He had ruled them like a cynical old soldier and the only law in the land was that of superior military power. Once he was dead the Papist Irish rose up in a defiant storm of rage against their Protestant masters. Strafford had kept them brutally down, but now Strafford was gone. The rumours and counter-rumours had flown around the kingdom of Ireland until every man who called himself a man took up a pitchfork or a hoe and flung himself against the newly arrived Protestant settlers, and the greedy land-grabbing Protestant lords, and spared neither them nor their women nor children.
The news of what had taken place, horrifically embellished by the terrified imagination of a minority in a country they did not own, reache
d London in October and fuelled the hatred against Papists a thousand times over. Even Hester, normally so level-headed, departed from discretion that night and prayed aloud in family prayers that God might strike down the dreadful savage Irish and preserve His chosen people, settled in that most barbaric land; and the Tradescant children, Frances and Johnnie, round-eyed with horror at what they heard in the kitchen and in the stable, whispered a frightened, ‘Amen’.
The Papist rebels were spitting Protestant children on their pikes and roasting them over the fires, eating them before the anguished gaze of their parents. The Papist rebels were firing cottages and castles with the Protestant owners locked inside. Everyone knew a story of fresh and unbelievable horror. No-one questioned any report. It was all true, it was all the worst of the worst nightmares. It was all worse than reports told.
John was reminded, for a brief moment, of the bitter woman who kept the lodging house in Virginia, and how she had called the Indians pagans and beasts, and how she too had stories of skinning and flaying and eating alive. For a moment he stepped back from the terror which had caught up the whole of England, for a moment he wondered if the stories were as true as everyone swore. But only for a moment. The circumstances were too persuasive, the stories were too potent. Everyone said it; it had to be true.
And there was worse. In the streets of Lambeth and in London they did not call it the Irish rebellion, they called it the queen’s rebellion, in the absolute certainty that all the nightmare tales from Ireland were gospel truth, and that the rebellion was fomented by Henrietta Maria herself in support of the devilish Papists. What the queen wanted was a free Roman Catholic Ireland and then, as soon as she dared, the queen would ship her fellow Papists from Ireland to England so they could butcher and eat English babes as well.