Virgin Earth

  They were glad of the rain in Colchester. It was their only drinking water. For meat they had to eat their horses, then dogs, cats, rats, anything they could catch. There was no flour for bread, there were no fruit or vegetables left in the town. Men started to sicken, everyone went hungry.

  Hester put a piece of sacking around her shoulders and splashed out into the garden to look at the rain-soaked lettuce, onions, peppers, beans, peas and herbs in their carefully tended beds. ‘He’s never gone hungry,’ she said softly to herself. ‘Brought up beside our garden he might have lacked meat once in a while, but he’s always had fruit and vegetables. He’s never wanted for anything before.’

  Hester was hoping that the Scots would march south quickly and relieve Colchester as their first objective. They swept over the border looking like a conquering force and reached Preston Moor, just a mile north of Preston, without anyone standing against them. But there they were met by the Parliament army commanded by Cromwell himself with John Lambert at his side, commanding the cavalry. When Hester heard that it was John Lambert against the only men who could rescue her son, she put her head in her hands at the kitchen table and stayed very still for a long while, as if she were asleep.

  When the news reached Colchester of the Scots’ defeat there was no hope left for them. The garrison surrendered to a harsh and unforgiving victor. The war was over, the king defeated once more; and the Tradescants had nothing to do but to wait and see if Johnnie would come home, or if he would be among the many hundreds who would never come home again.

  Hester left her place at the Venetian window and put a chair and a table at the front door, which overlooked the road from Lambeth. She put her sewing basket on the table and appeared, to any casual passer-by, as if she were sitting at her work and enjoying the September sunshine after the wet summer days. Only John and Frances knew that the shirt she held in her lap was no further forward by the end of September than it had been on the black day that Colchester surrendered.

  Autumn 1648

  A carter brought him home, a man who had visited the Ark in his boyhood and remembered it as a palace of treasures, and had a fondness for the Tradescant name. Johnnie, pale, jolted by the rough roads, terribly thin, and with a dark, ill-healing scar from his hipbone to his rib, lay in the back on a heap of sacks.

  Hester heard the rumble of the wheels and glanced up from her idle hands holding the unsewn shirt and then dropped her work, overturned her chair and flew out of the front door and into the road.

  ‘Johnnie!’ she exclaimed as she peered over the tailboard.

  He managed a little smile. ‘Mother.’

  ‘Drive around to the back,’ Hester ordered the driver, her months of passive silence quite forgotten. She jumped up on to the step of the cart, her eyes fixed on her stepson, and held on as they jolted over the little bridge, went past the terrace of the house and into the stable yard. John, picking apples, looked towards the house and saw the cart turning into the yard with his wife clinging like an urchin to the tailgate. He leaped down from the ladder and walked towards the house. He did not run. He feared too much what might greet him.

  The carter and Hester had Johnnie on his feet, walking slowly towards the kitchen door, an arm around each of them. Cook flung open the door and Hester guided them through to the parlour and seated Johnnie in his father’s chair at the fireside.

  He had gone very white, his lips pale in his pale face. Hester snapped over her shoulder, ‘Fetch the brandy,’ and Cook ran to obey her. John came in, treading mud on to the polished wooden parlour floor.

  ‘Son?’

  Johnnie looked up at his father and something in that glance, something vulnerable and unjustly hurt, reminded John so powerfully of Jane, his lost wife, that his pity for his son and his old grief for her hit him like a renewed blow. He dropped to his knees and took his son’s hands.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ he said. ‘Safe home. Are you hurt much?’

  ‘I got a pike in my side,’ Johnnie whispered. ‘It hurt a lot and bled a lot. But it’s healing now.’

  Hester held the glass of brandy to his lips and Johnnie sipped.

  ‘We’ll have you in bed in a moment,’ she promised him. ‘And a proper dinner for you.’ She smoothed his long fair hair from his forehead. ‘My boy,’ she said tenderly. ‘My poor boy.’

  Cook returned. ‘His bed is ready for him, sheets warmed.’

  The carter and Hester stepped forwards to help him but John put them back. ‘I can manage,’ he said huskily, and took his son in his arms.

  The boy weighed little more than he did when he was only ten years old. Tradescant scowled at the lightness of the body and went towards the stairs. Hester ran ahead and opened the bedroom door, turned down the sheets.

  ‘I’m lousy,’ Johnnie protested. ‘And covered with fleas.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Hester said, slipping off his boots and stripping down his breeches.

  He gave a little whimper of pain as she pulled up his shirt and she saw that the dirty linen had stuck to the raw wound.

  ‘We’ll soon have you well again,’ she said.

  Both her husband and her son heard the old determination in Hester’s voice. ‘We’ll soon have you well again.’

  King Charles blithely celebrated his forty-eighth birthday at Newport and entertained the Parliamentary negotiators who had been sent from London to make a new peace with a king who had broken every agreement they had made before. This time he was more accommodating than ever; but would not, swore that he could not, allow the sale of the bishops’ lands and palaces. The bishops could not be abolished, their position must be maintained. The most he would agree was to rule without them for three years, the promise he had already given to the Scots. But Parliament was firmer than the Scots. It would settle for nothing less than the complete abolition of all the bishops and the freeing of their wealth and lands.

  Alexander Norman and Frances, visiting the Ark in November, found Johnnie sitting at the fireside wrapped in a fine warm gown with his father and mother beside him, discussing the fate of the king.

  ‘Any news?’ John asked his son-in-law.

  ‘The Levellers are rising in strength in the army,’ Alexander replied. ‘And they demand that there be no king ever again and that Parliament be elected every three years by every man with a stake in the country.’

  ‘What does that mean for the king?’ John asked.

  Alexander shook his head. ‘If they gain control of Parliament then it must mean that he is sent abroad. There can be no place for him.’

  ‘Perhaps he will agree,’ Hester suggested, one eye on her son. ‘Perhaps the king and Parliament can agree at Newport.’

  ‘He must agree,’ Alexander replied. ‘He must see that he has to agree. He has fought two wars against his own people, and lost them both. He tried the greatest gamble he could play – he brought the Scots in against his own countrymen. And he has lost. He must now agree.’

  Johnnie flushed and moved uneasily in his chair. ‘How can he? How can he agree to become nothing? He’s the king in the sight of God. Does he call God a liar?’

  Frances crossed to him and took his hand. ‘Now you stop,’ she said with the firmness of an older sister. ‘You’ve done your fighting for him. You’ve done quite enough, and it did no good for anybody. The king must take his own decision, it’s nothing to do with you now, or any of us.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Hester said. ‘And none of us can do anything for or against the king. He has travelled his own road. He will have to decide what he should do now.’

  The king decided to take the high road of principle – or perhaps he decided he would gamble once again – or perhaps he decided he would make a gesture, a proud theatrical gesture, and see what came of it. He rejected Parliament’s proposals boldly, recklessly, outright. And then he waited to see what would happen next.

  What happened next rather surprised him. The men of Cromwell’s army, Lambert’s men, Fairfax’s men, fur
ious at the delays and missed opportunities, clear in their own minds that what should happen next was an unbreakable peace and a reform of the laws of the land in favour of hard-working common people, invaded the House of Commons, excluded those Members of Parliament known to be sympathetic to the king, and insisted that the king should be brought to trial for treason against his subjects.

  Hester brought the news to John as he was watering the tender plants in the orangery. The frost on the window pane was melting and the glass was dewy and opaque. The citrus trees, their boughs carrying the last glowing fruit of oranges and lemon, scented the room, the charcoal in the hearth shifted and crackled as it glowed. Hester paused on the threshold, reluctant to break the sense of peace. Then she set her lips and marched into the room.

  ‘They have taken the king from the Isle of Wight and are bringing him to London. They have called him for trial,’ she said flatly. ‘They have accused him of treason.’

  John froze where he stood, the watering bottle dribbling cold water on his boot. ‘Treason?’ he repeated. ‘How can a king be charged with treason?’

  ‘They say he tried to steal away the people’s liberty and to set up a tyranny,’ Hester said. ‘And to make war on his people is supposed to be treason.’

  The water made a little puddle around John’s feet but he did not notice it, and neither did Hester, her gaze fixed on his stunned face.

  ‘Where is he?’ John asked numbly.

  ‘On the road to London, that’s what they’re saying in Lambeth. I suppose they’ll put him in the Tower, or perhaps under arrest in one of the palaces.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They say that he is to be tried for treason. Before a court. A proper trial.’

  ‘But the punishment for treason …’

  ‘Is death,’ Hester finished.

  Just before Christmas there was a knock at the door. Johnnie, still nervous, started at the loud sound and Hester, hurrying to open it, whispered a blasphemy at whoever had disturbed her boy.

  As she opened the door she composed her face into stern serenity at the sight of the armed man.

  ‘Message for John Tradescant, as was gardener to the king,’ the man said.

  ‘Not here,’ Hester said with her habitual caution.

  ‘I’ll leave the message with you then,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘The king wants to see him. At Windsor.’

  ‘He is summoned to Windsor by the king?’ Hester asked, disbelievingly.

  ‘As he likes,’ the man said disrespectfully. ‘The king orders him there, he can go or no as he likes as far as I’m concerned. I take my orders from Colonel Harrison, who guards the king. And his orders were to tell Mr Tradescant that the king is asking for him. And now I’ve done that. And now I’m off.’

  He gave her a friendly nod and crossed the little bridge to the road before Hester could say another word. She watched him march up the road to the ferry at Lambeth before she closed the door and went to find John in the garden.

  He was pruning the roses with a sharp knife, his hands a mass of scratches from his work.

  ‘Why won’t you wear gloves?’ Hester remarked irritably.

  He grinned. ‘I always mean to, then I start work and I think I can do it without scratching myself, and then I can’t be troubled to stop and go and find them, and then I draw blood and think there’s no point in fetching them now.’

  ‘You’ll never guess who came to the door.’

  ‘All right. I never will.’

  ‘A messenger from the king,’ she said, watching for his reaction.

  He stiffened, like an old hunter when it hears the hunting horn. ‘The king sent for me?’

  She nodded. ‘To attend him at Windsor. The man was clear that you need not go unless you wish. The king has no power to order you to obey. But he brought the message.’

  John stepped carefully through the rose bushes, disentangling his coat when it was caught by a thorn, his mind already at Windsor.

  ‘What can he want of me?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not some harebrained scheme of escape?’

  He shook his head. ‘Surely not. But there’s nothing to interest him in the garden at this time of year.’

  ‘Will you go?’

  Already he was walking towards the house, his pruning knife slipped in his belt, his roses almost forgotten. ‘Of course I have to go,’ he said.

  They had no horse, there was not enough money to replace the mare who had carried Johnnie to Colchester and been slaughtered for meat during the siege. John walked to the ferry at Lambeth and took a boat upriver to Windsor.

  The castle looked much the same: a guard of soldiers at the door, the usual bustle and work which surrounded the royal court. But it was all strangely diminished: quieter, with less excitement, as if even the kitchen maids no longer believed that they were cooking the meat of God’s own anointed representative on earth, but instead working in a kitchen for a mere mortal.

  John paused before the crossed pikes of the men on guard.

  ‘John Tradescant,’ he said. ‘The king sent for me.’

  The pikes were lifted. ‘He’s at his dinner,’ one of the soldiers said.

  John went through the gateway, through the inner court, and into the great hall.

  There was an eerie sense of a life lived again. There was the royal canopy billowing a little in the draughts from the open windows. There was the king seated in state below it, the great chair before the great table, and the table crowded with dishes. There were the common people, crammed into the gallery, watching the king eat as they always did. There was the yeoman usher to declare the table ready for laying, the yeoman of ewry to spread the cloth, the yeoman of pantry to lay out the long knives, spoons, salt, and trenchers, the yeoman of cellar standing behind the chair with the decanter of wine. It was all as it had been, and yet it was completely different.

  There was no constant ripple of laughter and wit, there was no vying for the eye of the king. There was no plump, ringletted queen at his side, and none of the glorious portraits and tapestries which had always been hung in his sight.

  And Charles himself was changed. His face was scarred with disappointment, deep bags beneath his dark eyes, lines on his forehead, his hair thinner and streaked with grey, his moustache and beard still perfectly combed, but paler with white hairs where it had been glossy brown.

  He looked down the hall and saw John; but his habitual diffidence did not allow him to greet a friendly face. He merely nodded and with a tiny gesture indicated that John should wait.

  John, who had dropped to his knee as he came into the hall, rose up and took a seat at a table.

  ‘What you kneeling for?’ a man asked critically.

  John hesitated. ‘Habit, I suppose. Do you not kneel in his presence?’

  ‘Why should I? He’s no more than a man, as I am.’

  ‘Times are changing,’ John observed.

  ‘You eating?’ another man said.

  John looked around. These were not the elegant courtiers who used to dine in the hall. These were the soldiers of Cromwell’s army, unimpressed by the ritual. Hungry, honest, straightforward men at their dinner.

  John drew a trencher towards him and took a spoonful of meat from the common bowl.

  When the king had finished dining one yeoman came forward and offered him a bowl to wash his fingertips while another offered the fine linen cloth to dry his hands. Neither of them kneeled, John noticed, and wondered if the king would refuse their service.

  He did not even complain. The king took the service as it would have been offered to a mere lord of the manor. He did not even remark that they were not on their knees. John saw the mystery of kingship shrink before his eyes.

  John rose at his place, waiting for an order. The king crooked his finger and John approached the high table, paused and bowed.

  King Charles rose from his seat, stepped down from the dais and snapped his fingers for a pageboy, who sprang to follow him.

&nb
sp; ‘I d … dined on melons two nights ago,’ he remarked to John as if no time at all had passed since John and the queen and the king had planned the planting of Oatlands together. ‘And I th … th … thought that we always said we should have a m … melon bed at Wimbledon. I saved you the seeds for p … planting.’

  John bowed, his mind whirling. ‘Your Majesty?’

  The pageboy stepped forwards and handed John a little wooden box filled with seeds.

  ‘W … Will they grow at Wimbledon?’ the king asked as he walked past John to his inner chamber.

  ‘I should think so, Your Majesty,’ John said. He waited for more.

  ‘Good,’ said the king. ‘Her M … Majesty will like that, when she s … sees it. When she comes h … h … home again.’

  ‘And then he was gone,’ John said to an astounded Hester and Johnnie, sitting at the fireside after a long, cold boat trip back to Lambeth.

  ‘He summoned you all that way to give you melon seeds?’ Hester demanded.

  ‘I thought it might be some secret,’ John confessed. ‘I searched the box, and I waited all day in case he should send a secret message for me, once he knew I was in the castle. I weeded the flowerbed beneath the window of his privy apartments so that he would know I was there. But … nothing. It was truly just for the melon seeds.’

  ‘He is to stand trial for treason, and he is thinking about planting melons?’ Hester wondered.

  John nodded. ‘That is the king indeed,’ he said.

  ‘Where will you plant them?’ Johnnie asked.

  John looked at the taut face of his son, at the shadows under his eyes and the continual frown of pain.

  ‘Would you like to help me?’ he offered gently. ‘We could make a proper melon bed at Wimbledon. My father taught me the way, and he was taught by Lord Wootton at Canterbury. We were there when I was a boy. Would you like me to teach you how to do it, Johnnie? When the spring comes and you’re strong again?’