Buckingham gleamed. ‘And one of those toys which sprinkle people when they approach!’ he exclaimed. ‘And I should like a little mount as well, perhaps in the middle of the lake!’
‘A grand mount,’ John suggested. ‘Planted thickly with a winding allee to the summit. Perhaps cherry trees, espaliered into a hedge to make them thick and shady. I have some wonderful new cherry trees. Or even apple trees and pears. They take time to establish but you have a pretty effect with blossom in spring, and at the end of summer it is very rich to walk under boughs heavy with fruit. We could thread them through with roses and eglantine, which would climb and hang their blooms down through the leaves. You could row out to your island and wander among roses and fruit.’
‘And where would you put the knot gardens?’ Buckingham demanded. ‘Beyond the lake?’
John shook his head. ‘Near to the house,’ he said firmly. ‘But you could show me your favourite window-seat and I could plant a garden which leads the eyes outwards, into the garden, a little maze for your eye to follow, in stone and with small pale-leafed plants, and herbs to aid your meditations.’
‘And an orchard with a covered walk all around it, and turf benches in every corner. I must have an orchard! Great fruiting trees which bow low to the ground. Where can we get quick-growing fruit trees?’
‘We can buy saplings. But it will take time,’ John warned him.
‘But I want it now,’ Buckingham insisted. ‘There must surely be trees which will grow swiftly, or trees we can buy full-grown? I want it at once!’
John shook his head. ‘You may command every man in England,’ he said gently. ‘But you cannot make a garden grow at once, my lord. You will have to learn patience.’
A shadow crossed Buckingham’s face, a dark flicker of frustration. ‘For God’s sake!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is as bad as the Spanish! Is everything I desire to go so slow that by the time it comes to me I am sick of waiting? Am I to grow old and tired before my desires can be met? Do I have to die before my plans come to fruit?’
John said nothing, only stood still, like a little oak tree, while the storm of Buckingham’s temper blew itself out. Buckingham paused as he took the measure of John Tradescant, and he threw back his curly dark head and laughed.
‘You will be my conscience, John!’ he exclaimed. ‘You will be the keeper of my soul. You gardened for Cecil, didn’t you? And they all say that when you wanted Cecil, you had to go out into the garden and find him; and half the time he would be sitting on a bench in his knot garden and talking to his man.’
John nodded gravely.
‘They say he was the greatest Secretary of State that the country has ever had, and that your gardens were his greatest solace and his joy.’
Tradescant bowed and looked away, so that his new mercurial master should not see that he was moved.
‘When I am tempted to overreach myself in my garden or in the great wild forests which are the courts of Europe, you can remind me that I cannot always have my own way. I cannot command a garden to grow,’ Buckingham said humbly. ‘You can remind me that even the great Cecil had to wait for what he wanted, whether it was a plant or policy.’
John shook his head in quiet dissent. ‘I can only plant your garden, my lord,’ he said softly. ‘That’s all I did for the earl. I can’t do more than that.’
For a moment he thought that Buckingham would argue, demand that there must be more. But then the young man smiled at him and dropped an arm around his shoulders and set them both walking back to the house. ‘Do that for me now, and when you trust me more, and know me better, you shall be my friend and adviser as you were Cecil’s,’ he said. ‘You will make it grow for me, won’t you, John? You will do your best for me, even if I am impatient and ignorant?’
Tradescant found that he was smiling back. ‘I can undertake to do that. And it will grow as fast as it is able. And it will be all that you want.’
John started work that afternoon, walking to Chelmsford to find labourers to start the work of fencing the cows out, digging the lake and building the walls for the kitchen garden. He took a horse from the stables and rode a wide circle around the great estate to neighbouring farms to see what trees they had in their orchards and what wooded copses he could buy and transplant at once.
Buckingham was careless about cost. ‘Just order it, John,’ he said. ‘And if they are tenants of mine just tell them to give you whatever you wish and they can take it off their rent at quarter day.’
John bowed but made a point of visiting the steward of the household, at his desk in an imposing room at the very centre of the grand house.
‘His Grace has ordered me to buy trees and plants from his tenants, and command them to take the cost from their rent,’ Tradescant began.
The steward looked up from the household books, which were spread before him. ‘What?’
‘He has ordered me to buy from the tenants,’ John began again.
‘I heard you,’ the man said angrily. ‘But how am I to know what is bought or sold? And how am I to run this house if the rents are discounted before they are collected?’
John hesitated. ‘I was coming to you only to ask you how it should be done, if you have a list of tenants –’
‘I have a list of tenants, I have a list of rents, I have a list of expenditure. What no-one will tell me is how to make the one agree with the other.’
John paused for a moment to take stock of the man. ‘I am new in this post,’ he said cautiously. ‘I don’t seek to make your task any harder. I do need to buy his lordship trees and plants to stock his gardens and he ordered me to buy from his tenants and see that they deduct the cost from their rents.’
The steward took in Tradescant’s steadiness. ‘Aye,’ he said more quietly. ‘But the rents are already spent, signed away, or promised. They are not free for deductions.’
There was a brief silence. ‘What am I to do then?’ John asked pleasantly. ‘Shall I return to his lordship and tell him it cannot be done?’
‘Would you do that?’ the man enquired.
John smiled. ‘Surely. What else could I do?’
‘You don’t fear taking bad news to a new master, the greatest master in the land?’
‘I have worked for a great man before,’ John said. ‘And, good news or bad, I found the best way was to tell him simply what was amiss. If a man is fool enough to punish his messengers he’ll never get his messages.’
The steward cracked a laugh and held out his hand. ‘I am William Ward. And I am glad to meet you, Mr Tradescant.’
John took the handshake. ‘Have you been in his lordship’s service for long?’ he asked.
The steward nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And are his affairs in a bad way?’
‘He is the wealthiest man in the land,’ William Ward stated. ‘Newly married to an heiress and with the king’s own fortune at his disposal.’
‘Then –?’
‘And the most spendthrift. And the wildest. D’you know how he did his courting?’
John glanced at the closed door behind them and shook his head.
‘He caught the lady’s fancy – not surprising –’
John thought of that smile and the way the man threw back his head when he laughed. ‘Not surprising,’ he agreed.
‘But when he went to her father, the man declined. Again, not surprising.’
John thought of the rumours that Buckingham was the king’s man in ways that a sensible man did not question. ‘I don’t know,’ he said stoutly.
‘Not surprising to those of us who have seen the king on his visits here,’ the steward said bluntly. ‘So what does my lord do?’
Tradescant shook his head. ‘I have been away, and in Canterbury, we don’t hear gossip. I rarely listen to it, anyway.’
The steward laughed shortly. ‘Well, hear this. Buckingham invites Lady Kate to his mother’s house for dinner and when the dinner is ended they don’t let her call for her carriage. They don’t let
her go home! Buckingham’s mother herself keeps the girl overnight. So her reputation is ruined and her father is glad to get her wed at any price, takes the duke’s offer and has to pay handsomely for the privilege of having his daughter dishonoured into the bargain.’
Tradescant’s jaw dropped open. ‘He did this?’
William Ward nodded.
‘To a lady?’
‘Aye. Now you get some idea of what he can do and what he is allowed. And now you get some idea of his rashness.’
Tradescant took a couple of swift steps and looked out of the window. Almost at once his sense of anxiety at this new post, at this madly impulsive young master, deserted him. He could see the site of what would be his kitchen garden, and he had it in mind to build a hollow wall, the first of its kind in England, and to heat the inside of it like a chimney. It might warm the fruit trees growing against the wall and make them come early into bud. He shook his head at the promising site and returned to the problem of his new master’s wildness.
‘And is his new wife unhappy?’ he asked.
William Ward looked at him for one incredulous moment and then burst into laughter. ‘You’ve seen my lord. D’you think a new wife would be unhappy?’
John shrugged. ‘Who knows what a woman wants?’
‘She wants rough wooing and passionate bedding and she has had both from our lord. She wants to know that he loves her above everything else and there is no other woman in the land who can say that her husband risked everything to have her.’
‘And the king?’ Tradescant asked, going to the key of all things.
Ward smiled. ‘The king keeps the two of them as lesser men keep lovebirds in a cage, for the pleasure of seeing their happiness. And in any case, when he wants Buckingham all to himself he has only to crook his finger and our lord goes. His wife knows that he must go, and she smiles and bids him farewell.’
The steward fell silent. John looked out again at the parkland that stretched to the horizon. This was flat country, he thought the winds in winter would be cruel. ‘So,’ he said slowly. ‘I have a new lord who is a spendthrift, and wild, a breaker of hearts and no respecter of persons.’
The steward nodded. ‘And any one of us would lay down our lives for him.’
Surprised, John looked up. The steward was smiling.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a man on the estate who wouldn’t go hungry to keep him in his silks and satin. You’ll see. Now go and buy your trees. Every time you agree a price, make sure that you note down the tenant’s name and the price of his trees. And tell them that I – I and not they – will calculate the difference in the rents and discount the rents next quarter day. Bring me the list when you have done.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Unless I have given you a disliking for your lord and you want to go back to Canterbury?’ he asked. ‘He is as wild as I say, he is as spendthrift as I say, and he is as wealthy as I say. He has more power at his fingertips than any man in the land, and that is probably including the king.’
John had a strong sense of returning to his place at the very centre of things, serving a lord who served his country, a man whose doings were the talk of every ale house in the land. ‘I’ll keep my place here,’ he said. ‘There is much for me to do.’
1623
John and J worked hard all the winter, planning the gardens and pegging out lines for the knot garden, for the terraces, and for the turf benches in the lord’s new orchards. Much of the work had to wait until the spring when the ground was soft enough for digging, but John had a small forest of trees waiting for the earth to warm so that they could be planted, each one labelled with its place, each with a plot reserved for it. For the workers who could neither read nor write, J had instituted a scheme of coloured dots. They had to match the label on the tree marked with three red dots with the plot in the ground marked with three red dots. Or green or yellow. ‘This is code,’ John said admiringly to J.
‘It’s madness,’ J said bluntly. ‘Everyone should be taught to read at dame school. How else can they understand their Bible? How else do their work?’
‘We’re not all scholars like you,’ John said mildly.
J flushed in one of his sudden attacks of bashfulness. ‘I’m no scholar,’ he said gruffly. ‘I don’t pretend to be one. I’m no better than any man. But I do think that all men should be taught to read and write so that they can read their Bible and think for themselves.’
Work on the heated wall had already started to John’s design. The plot was marked out and the foundations for the perimeter wall were already dug. The whole garden was to be walled with a double skin of deep red brick, and there were to be built three equally-spaced fireplaces, one above the other, where the charcoal burners could be lit and the smoke drift sideways through the wall till every brick was warm to the touch. The beds of the garden were not to be edged with box in the usual way. John wanted to raise them after a fashion never seen before. He wanted little brick walls to edge them, and the beds were to be filled with sifted earth and rotted manure. He even instituted a pile of manure from the stables, which was to be left to moulder and then turned over every month. ‘I don’t want it all fresh and carrying the roots of weeds into my garden,’ he explained to J and to the other vegetable gardeners. ‘I want the earth in these beds to be free of weeds and free of stones. I want this garden to have soil so rich and so soft that I could lay a strawberry plant on it and leave it to set its own roots. D’you understand?’
They grumbled behind his back but to his face they nodded and pulled their caps. John’s reputation as one of the greatest gardeners of the day had preceded him and it was an honour to work under him – raised beds, and stirred manure, hollow walls, or no.
The house was quiet after the festivities of Christmas; the duke had returned from the court in January and set up residence with Kate, his wife. His mother was to come later in the year. So Tradescant, rounding the stable yard in search of an errant weeding lad, was surprised to see an exceptionally fine horse, an Arab, being led from its stall into the yard, and the duke’s hunter prancing around on the cobbles, all tacked up and ready to go.
‘Whose horse is that?’ John asked a groom and received nothing more than a wink for a reply.
‘Dolt,’ John said shortly, picked up his hoe and went to pace out the orchard.
That afternoon, John was measuring the length of the new avenue which he planned to plant with lime trees leading from the Chelmsford road to the house when he heard hoofbeats on the drive and there were the two horses with two strange men on their backs.
John stepped forward to challenge them. ‘Who are you? And what’s your business here? That’s my lord’s horse.’
‘Let me pass, my John,’ said one of the men in a familiar voice. The stranger leaned down from the duke’s horse and swept off his hat. Buckingham’s dark eyes looked down at John, and John heard his irrepressible chuckle.
‘Fooled you,’ Buckingham cried triumphantly. ‘Fooled you completely.’
John stared at the face of his lord, absurdly concealed by a false beard and a muffler. ‘Your Grace –’ He glanced across at the other horseman and recognised, with a sense of shock, the young prince he had last seen snivelling at the heels of his older brother. But now the young prince was the heir, Prince Charles. ‘Good God! Your Highness!’
‘Will we pass, d’you think?’ Buckingham demanded joyously. ‘I am John Smith and this is my brother Thomas. Will we pass, d’you think?’
‘Oh, yes,’ John said. ‘But what are you about, my lord? Wenching?’
Buckingham laughed aloud at that. ‘The finest wench in the world,’ he whispered. ‘We’re going to Spain, John, we’re going to marry His Highness here to the Infanta of Spain! What d’you think of that?’
For a moment John was too stunned to speak, then he grabbed the hunter’s bridle above the bit. ‘Stay!’ he cried. ‘You can’t.’
‘You order me?’ Buckingham enquired politely. ‘You had
much better take your hand off my horse, Tradescant.’
John flinched but did not let go. ‘Please, your Grace,’ he said. ‘Wait. Think on this. Why are you going disguised?’
‘For the adventure!’ Buckingham said merrily.
‘Come on, Thomas!’ the prince said. ‘Or are you John? Am I Thomas?’
‘I beg of you,’ John said urgently. ‘You cannot go like this, my lord. You cannot take the prince like this.’
The prince’s horse pawed the ground. ‘Come on!’ the prince said.
‘Forgive me!’ Tradescant looked over at him. ‘Your Highness has perhaps not considered. You cannot ride into France as if it were East Anglia, Your Highness. What if they hold you? What if Spain refuses to let you leave?’
‘Nonsense,’ Prince Charles said briefly. ‘Come on, Villiers.’
Buckingham’s horse moved forward and John was dragged along, not releasing his grip on the bridle. ‘Your Grace.’ He tried again. ‘Does the king know of this? What if he turns against you?’
Buckingham leaned low over the horse’s neck so he could whisper to Tradescant. ‘Leave me go, my John. I am at work here. If I marry the prince to the infanta then I have done something which no man has ever done – make Spain our ally, make the greatest alliance in Europe and myself the greatest marriage broker who ever lived. But even if I fail, then the prince and I have ridden out like brothers and we will be brothers for the rest of our lives. Either way, my place is assured. Now let my bridle go. I have to leave.’
‘Have you food and money, a change of clothes?’
Buckingham laughed. ‘John, my John, next time you shall pack for me. But I must go now!’
His spur touched the hunter’s side and it threw up its head and bounded forward. Prince Charles’s horse leaped after, and there was a swirl of dust in John’s face and the two of them were gone.
‘Please God keep him safe, keep them safe,’ Tradescant said, looking after them. His new master and the prince he had known as a lonely incompetent little boy. ‘Please God, stop them at Dover.’