‘What are they?’ J asked reverently, holding a wicker basket of sieved warm weed-free earth, watching his father’s meticulous care. ‘Are they the Semper Augustus?’
His father shook his head. ‘I had a king’s ransom to spend and yet I could not afford it,’ he said. ‘No-one bought the Semper. I was at the Bourse every day and the price was so high that no-one would buy, and the merchant kept his nerve and would not drop the price. Next season he will offer them again at double the price, and all the year he will be praying that no-one has grown a new tulip which supplants the Semper and leaves him with a pair of fine flowers which are out of fashion.’
‘Could that happen?’ J was horrified.
John nodded. ‘It is not gardening, it is speculation,’ he said with distaste. ‘There are people dealing in tulips who have never so much as pulled a weed. And making fortunes from their work.’
J extended a respectful finger and stroked the dry firm surface of the nearest bulb. ‘The skin is solid, and the shape is good. They are even lovely in the bulb, aren’t they?’ He bent and sniffed the firm warm skin.
‘Is it clean?’ John asked anxiously. ‘No hint of taint?’
J shook his head. ‘None. What sort is it?’
‘This is the Duck tulip – yellow with crimson blush at the base of the petals.’ John pointed to the next bulb. ‘This is a Lack tulip, white and thin-petalled with thin red stripes through white, and this is a Tulipa australis, very strong-stemmed and scarlet petals with a white border. Pray God they grow for us, I have spent nearly a thousand pounds on the six of them.’
J’s hand holding the trowel trembled. ‘A thousand pounds? A thousand? But father – what if they rot?’ he asked, his voice a whisper. ‘What if they grow blind and fail to flower at all?’
John smiled grimly. ‘Then we seek another line of work. But what if they grow and split into new bulbs, J? Then our master has doubled his wealth in one season.’
‘But we stay on the same wages,’ J observed.
John nodded and put the six pots in a cool cupboard in the corner of the room. ‘That is how it works,’ he said simply. ‘But there could be no objection to us taking a bulb for every two we grow for him. My master Cecil taught me that himself.’
John was popular in the great dining room of New Hall on his return. He was able to tell a rapt audience of the prettiness of the little French princess: only fifteen and tiny, dark-haired and dark-eyed. He told them of her dancing and her singing, of her complete refusal to learn English. He told them that the news in London was that when the young King Charles met her at Dover Castle, he had covered her little face with kisses, laughed at her prepared speech, and spent the night in her bed.
The ladies wanted to know what she was wearing and John struggled through a description of her clothes. He assured them that the king and queen entered London by the river in a grand barge, both dressed in green, with the guns of the Tower roaring out a salute, and that was a vivid enough picture to be told and retold by a dozen hearthsides. He did not tell them that there had been a nasty quarrel between the king and his bride of only a day when she had wanted her French companions in the carriage from Dover to London, and the king had insisted that she travel with Buckingham’s wife and his mother.
The king had said that the French attendant was not of high enough station to ride with the Queen of England; and the young queen incautiously retorted that she knew well enough that the Buckinghams had been nobodies just ten years ago. She did not yet know enough to mind her sharp tongue, she had not yet learned of the extent of the duke’s influence. As it was, she rode in her carriage with the duke’s wife and the duke’s mother for the long journey into her capital and it might be safely assumed that no promises of friendship were made on the drive.
‘So did she look happy?’ asked Mrs Giddings, who worked in the New Hall laundry but had her own little farm and would kill another sheep for the Tradescants if John’s story was good enough.
John thought of the fifteen-year-old girl and her un-English formality, her court which spoke only French, and her brace of confessors who spoke Latin grace over her dinner, and warned her not to eat meat even though her new husband had just carved her a slice, since she must observe a fast day.
‘As happy as a maid can be,’ he said. ‘Laughing and chattering and singing.’
‘And the duke, does he like her?’
Only Elizabeth saw the swift shadow cross her husband’s face. There had been a scandal in France, several scandals. Buckingham had told him the worst of it as they paced the deck of a little fishing boat, sailing from Rotterdam to Tilbury. The Queen of France had encouraged Buckingham further than a married woman, and one so carefully watched, should have done. He had climbed the wall into her private garden to meet her there. What took place Buckingham would not say, but everyone else in Europe was talking about it. The pair had been caught by her personal guard. Swords had been drawn and threats made. Some said that the queen had been assaulted by Buckingham, some said the queen had been seduced, and caught half-naked in his arms. The queen’s ladies said that she had been elegantly flirting or – no such thing – somewhere else all the time. There had been a whirlwind of rumour and innuendo and through it all Buckingham had sailed smiling, the handsomest man at court, the wickedest look, the most roguish smile, the irresistible charm. John had frowned when Buckingham had confessed to losing his heart to the Queen of France and thought that he should have stayed by his master and kept him from secret assignations with the most carefully guarded woman in Europe.
‘What could have prevented it?’ Buckingham sighed, but with a glint in his eye which always meant mischief. ‘It’s love, John. I shall run away with her and take her from her dreary husband to live with her in Virginia.’
John had shaken his head at his master. ‘What does her husband think?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he hates me,’ Buckingham said joyfully.
‘And the Princess Henrietta Maria?’
‘My sworn enemy now.’
‘She’s your queen,’ John reminded him.
‘She is only the wife of my dearest friend,’ Buckingham had replied. ‘And she’d better remember who he loves.’
‘So what does she think of him?’ the questioner repeated. ‘What does the new queen think of our duke?’
‘He is her greatest friend at court,’ John answered carefully. ‘The duke admires and respects her.’
‘Will he come home soon?’ someone asked from the back of the crowd, packed into John’s kitchen.
‘Not for a while,’ John answered. ‘There are parties and masquings and balls at court to greet the new queen, and then there will be the coronation. We’ll not see him here for a few weeks.’
There was a general murmur of disappointment at that. New Hall was merrier when the duke was at home, and there was always the chance of a glimpse of the king.
‘But you’ll go to him,’ Elizabeth said, rightly reading her husband’s contented serenity.
‘I am to meet him in London. And then I have to go down to the New Forest, looking for trees. He wants a maze,’ Tradescant said with ill-hidden delight. ‘Where I am to get enough yew from I don’t know.’
John only ever told half the story to the curious, and he always emphasised the things that they should hear. He was ready to tell that the young King Charles had already dismissed dozens of his father’s idle wastrel favourites, that the court now ran to a strict rhythm of prayer, work, and exercise. The king seldom drank wine, and never to excess. He read all the papers set before him and signed each one personally with his own name. Sometimes his advisers would find small-handed notes written in the margin, and he would ask them later to ensure they were obeyed. He wanted to be a king with an eye to detail, to the meticulous observance both of ceremony and the minutiae of government.
John did not tell them that he had no eye to the grander picture, he was incapable of visualising consequences on a long-term or big scale. He was faultl
essly loyal to those he dearly loved, but quite incapable of keeping his word to those he did not. Everything to the new king was personal; and when a man or a nation displeased him, he could not bear to see them or think of them.
His sister Elizabeth of Bohemia, still in exile, still waiting for support from her brother, remained uppermost in his mind, and he ransacked his advisers for ideas, and his treasure chests for money to pay for an army to help her. John never mentioned to anyone, not even his wife, the long hours in the darkened rooms of the Dutch moneylenders, and the humiliation of finally seeing that no man in Europe had any faith in the partnership of the untried king and the extravagant duke.
It was not only the moneylenders who found the duke wanting. An itinerant preacher, his clothes ragged but his face shining with conviction, came to Chelmsford and set up to preach under the market cross.
‘You surely won’t go and hear him,’ John grumbled to Elizabeth as she laid his supper on the table and threw a shawl around her shoulders.
‘I should like to go,’ she said.
‘He’s bound to preach heresy,’ John said. ‘You’d much better stay home.’
‘Come too,’ she invited him. ‘And if he speaks nonsense we can stop at the Bush on the way home and taste their ale.’
‘I’ve no time for hedgerow preachers,’ John said. ‘And every year there are more of them. I hear two sermons on a Sunday. I don’t need to seek one on Tuesday as well.’
She nodded, and slipped out of the door without arguing. She walked briskly down the street; a small crowd was at the centre of the village, gathered around the preacher.
He was warning them of hellfire, and of the sins of the great. Elizabeth stepped back a little way into a doorway to listen. John was right, this was probably heresy, and it might well turn into treason too. But there was something powerful in how he moved his arguments slowly forward.
‘Step by step we are going down the road to ruination,’ he said, so softly that his listeners craned forward and had the sense of being drawn into a conspiracy. ‘Today the plague walks the streets of London as freely as a favoured guest. Not a home is safe against it, not a person can be sure he will escape. Not a family in the city but loses one or two. And it is not only London – every village across the land must be wary of strangers, and fearful of sickly people. It is coming, it is coming to all of us – and there is only one escape: repentance and turning to Our Lord.’
There was a soft murmur of assent.
‘Why is it come to us?’ the preacher asked. ‘Why should it strike us down? Let us look at where it starts. It comes from London: the centre of wealth, the centre of the court. It comes in the time of a new king, when things should be new-made, not struggling against the old sickness of plague. It comes because the king is not new-made, he has his father’s Favourite forever at his shoulder, he has his father’s adviser forever ordering his ways. He is not a new king; he is the old king while he is ruled by the same man.’
There was a movement of the crowd away from the preacher. He saw it at once. ‘Oh, yes,’ he continued swiftly. ‘He pays your wages, I know, you live in his cottages, you grow your vegetables on his ground, but look up from your dungheaps and your crooked chimneys and see what this man does in the greater world. He it was who took the prince into mortal danger in Spain. He it was who brought home a Papist French queen. Every office in the land is his, or in his gift. Every great office has a Villiers sitting on the top of it, raking in wealth. When our king goes begging to the towns and to the corporations, why has he no money? Where has the wealth gone? Does the duke know – as he walks in his great house in his silk and diamonds – does the duke know where the money has gone?
‘And if that were all it would be enough; but it is not all. There are more questions we should answer. Why can we win no battle neither by land nor by sea against the Spanish? Why do our soldiers come home and tell us they had nothing to eat? And no powder to fire their guns? Who is in charge of the army but the duke? When our sailors tell us that the ships are not fit to put to sea and the provisions are mouldering before they are eaten – who is the High Admiral? The duke again!
‘And when our brothers and sisters in faith at La Rochelle in France, Protestants like us, ask us for help against a Papist army of France, do we send them our aid? Our own brothers, praying as we do, escaped as we have escaped from the curse of Popery? Do we send them help? No! This great duke sends English ships and English sailors to help the forces of darkness, the army of Rome, the Navy of Richelieu! He sends good Protestant Englishmen for hire to the Devil, to the painted whore of Rome.’
The man was sweating, he swayed back against the stonework and wiped his face. ‘Worst of all,’ he said very low, ‘there are those who wonder that in his last hours our King James, our good King James, was watched over only by Villiers and his mother. That the king seemed to be better, but they sent away his physicians and his surgeons and under their nursing he grew worse and died!’
There was an awe-struck whisper at this scandal, which came so close to naming the greatest crime in the world: regicide. The preacher pulled back. ‘No wonder that the plague comes among us!’ he exclaimed. ‘No wonder. For why should the Lord of Hosts smile down on us who are betrayed and betrayed and let the betrayal go on!’
Someone shouted from the back of the crowd and those around him laughed. The preacher replied at once to the challenge.
‘You’re right, I cannot speak like this to the duke himself! But others will speak for me. We have a parliament of men, good men, who know how the country feels. They will speak to the king and warn him that this duke is a false friend. They will advise him to turn from Villiers and to listen to the needs of the nation. And he will turn! He will turn! He will give justice to the people and food to the children, and land to the landless. For it is very clear in the Bible that every man shall have his own land to dig and grow, and every woman shall have her own place. This king will turn from his evil advisers and give us that. An acre for every man and a cottage for every woman, and freedom from want for every child.’
There was a silence – this was an agricultural audience, and the thought of free land struck to the very heart of their deepest desire.
‘Will the king do this for us?’ a man asked.
‘Once he is rid of false advisers he will certainly do it for us,’ the preacher answered.
‘What, and break down his own park gates?’
‘There is enough land. The commons and wastes of England are vast. There is more than enough land for us all, aye, and for all the city men too, and if we need more then we have only to look around. Why! The very gardens of New Hall would feed fifty families if they were brought under the spade! There is wealth in this country! There is enough for us all, if we can take the surfeit from the wicked men and give it to the children in need.’
Elizabeth felt a gentle hand on her elbow. ‘Come away,’ John said softly in her ear. ‘This is not preaching, this is ranting: a sermon with more treason than writ.’
Silently, she let him draw her away from the crowd and back up the lane to their home. ‘Did you hear it all?’ she asked as they entered the house.
‘I heard enough,’ John replied shortly.
J looked up at their entrance and then dropped his head and went on with his supper.
‘He blamed the duke for everything,’ Elizabeth said.
John nodded. ‘Some do.’
‘He said that without his bad advice the king would give land away, and make no more wars.’
John shook his head. ‘The king would live as a king whether or not my lord was at his shoulder,’ he said. ‘And no king gives away his land.’
‘But if he did …’ Elizabeth persisted.
John pulled out his stool and sat beside J at the table. ‘It is a dream,’ he said. ‘Not reality. A dream to whisper to children. Think of a country where every man might have his own garden, where every man might grow enough for his own pot, and then grow f
ruits and flowers as well. This is not England, it is Eden. There would be no hunger and no want, and a man might draw his garden in the ground and plant it as he wished, and watch it grow.’
There was a silence in the little room. John, who had been meaning to deride the preacher’s vision, found himself tempted at the thought of a nation of gardens, of every park an orchard, every common a wheatfield, and no hunger or want.
‘In Virginia they cut their land from the forest, however much land they want,’ J said. ‘It need not be a dream.’
‘There is no shortage of land here either,’ John said. ‘If it were shared equally among every man and woman. There are the commons and the wastelands and the forests … there is enough land for everyone.’
‘So the preacher was right,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It is the surfeit of the few which brings poverty to the rest. The rich men enclose the land and use it for parks and for wilderness. That is why there is not enough for poor people.’
John’s face closed at once. ‘That is treason,’ he said simply. ‘It is all the king’s. He must do with it as he wishes. No-one else can come along and ask for land as if it were free. It all belongs to the king.’
‘Except for the acres which belong to the duke,’ J remarked slyly.
‘He holds it for the king, and the king holds it for God,’ Tradescant said, repeating the simple truth.
‘Then we must pray that God wants to give land to the poor,’ J said, getting up from the table and pushing his bowl irritably to one side. ‘For they cannot survive another summer of plague and failed harvest without help, and neither the king nor the duke is likely to ease their pains.’
Summer 1626
Tradescant had thought that complaints about the duke were in the mouths of ignorant men, boys like J, women like Elizabeth, and wayside preachers, whose opinions might disturb a man’s peace but would not challenge him. But then the king called Parliament to Oxford, sitting outside London to escape the plague which made the streets of the city a charnel house. The king’s debts forced him to deal with Parliament, though he suspected their loyalty and hated their self-importance.