Earthly Joys

Spring 1625

Three hours later Prince Charles was proclaimed king at the gate of Theobalds Palace, and stepped into the royal coach to ride in state to London. Buckingham, the Master of Horse, did not follow tradition by taking the place of honor, heading the train that rode behind the royal coach. Buckingham walked into the royal coach a mere half-pace behind His Majesty and rode like a prince himself at the new king’s side. Tradescant followed in the long train of the household, closing his ears to the general gasp of horror at his master’s presumption.

They drew up at St. James’s Palace in the afternoon and John waited for his orders. At first he could not find Buckingham’s chamber and waited in the hall. The palace was in complete confusion. King James had been expected to stay hunting at Theobalds for many days, and go afterward to Hampton Court. In his absence his palace had closed down for cleaning and refurbishing. There was no food in the kitchens and no fire in the chambers. The few housekeeping staff who did not travel with the king had been spring cleaning and had swept up the strewing herbs from the floor, and taken down the curtains from the windows and the tapestries off the walls. Serving men and maids ran everywhere, trying to prepare the palace for the new king and his train and do in moments what usually took days to accomplish, delayed all the time by the storm of gossip that was running around the royal courts, explaining how the king had fallen sick, how the Villiers mother and son had nursed him and excluded all others and how the king had died under their care.

A feast had to be prepared and the comptroller of the royal household had to use all his cash and all of the new king’s credit to buy in food, and set everyone in the kitchen – from the scullions laboring over the bellows to get the kitchen fires alight to the great master cooks – preparing and cooking food so that a king newcome to his kingdom might sit down to his dinner.

A great press of people invaded the palace to see the new king and the first man in the land: the Duke of Buckingham. The poorer people came just to see him, they liked to watch their betters eat, even when their own bellies were empty; and hundreds of others had complaints about taxes, about land ownership, about injustices, which they were eager to place before the new king. When King Charles and his duke came pushing through the hall Tradescant was forced to the back behind dozens of shouting demanding people. But even there, as he was fighting for a space in the crowd, his master looked over the bobbing heads and called to him.

“John! You still here? What did you stay for?”

“For your orders.”

Men craned around to see who had taken the duke’s attention and Tradescant fought his way forward.

“Oh – forgive me, John. I have been so busy. You can go to New Hall now. Call at the docks on the way and get my India goods. Then go home.”

“Your Grace, you have no chamber prepared for you here,” John said. “I asked, and there is none. Where shall you sleep? Shall I go to your London house and bid the lady, your mother, make ready for you? Or shall I wait and we will go to New Hall together?”

The duke looked across to where the young king was moving slowly through the crowd, his hand extended for people to kiss, acknowledging their bows with a small gesture of his head. When he saw Buckingham watching him he gave him a private, conspiratorial smile.

“Tonight I sleep in His Majesty’s chamber,” the duke remarked silkily. “He needs me at his side.”

“But there is only one bed-” John started, then he bit back the words. Of course a truckle bed could be found. Or the two men could sleep in comfort in the big expanse of the royal bed. King James had never slept alone; why should his son do so if he wanted company?

“Of course, my lord,” John said, careful to ensure that none of his thoughts appeared in his face. “I shall leave you, if you’re well served.”

Buckingham gave John his sweet satisfied smile. “Never better.”

John bowed, and pushed his way to the back of the hall and out into the dusk. He wrapped his borrowed cloak around his shoulders and went outside to the stables. The horses were tired after the day’s journey but he had no intention of riding hard. He chose a steady-looking beast and mounted.

“When are you back with us, Mr. Tradescant?” a groom asked.

John shook his head. “I’m going to my garden,” he said.

“You look sick,” the man remarked. “Not taken the king’s ague, have you?”

John thought for a moment of the old king’s long heartsickness for Buckingham, and the net of half-truths and deceptions which were the very heart of court life. “Maybe I have a touch of it,” he said.

He turned the horse’s head eastward, and rode down to the docks. There was only one cartload of goods waiting to be unloaded. He saw it packed on a wagon and ordered it to follow him down the lanes to New Hall, irritated all the way at the noise and the lumbering slowness of the cart in the muddy lanes. His hat pulled low over his eyes, his coat collar turned up against the light cold spring rain, John sat heavily in the saddle, and kept his thoughts on the seasonal tasks of planting and weeding. He did not want to think about the new king, about his great friend the duke, or the old king who had died, a healthy man aged only fifty-nine years, from a slight fever, under their nursing, after his doctors had been sent away. If evil had been done there were men whose duty it was to make accusations. It was not John’s duty to accuse his master or his king, not even privately in his anxious conscience.

Besides, John was not a man who could live with a divided loyalty in his heart. If evil had been done Tradescant had to be blind to it, and deaf to it. He could not love and follow a master and set himself up as judge of that master. He had to give his love and his trust and follow blindly – as he had followed Cecil, as it had been possible to follow Cecil – a master who might bend all the rules but whom you could trust to act only for his country’s gain.

John reached his home in the cool light of the early evening and found Elizabeth in the kitchen, preparing supper for J. “Forgive me,” John said shortly, coming into the house and taking and kissing her hand. “I was called away in haste and I had no time to send you word. Afterward there were great deeds going on, and I was rushed.”

She looked curiously at him but the usual warmth was missing. “J was told that you had gone with the duke to Theobalds at a moment’s notice,” she said. “So I knew you were on another errand for him.”

Tradescant noted the slight emphasis she placed on “him” and found himself longing for a quarrel. “He’s my master,” he said abruptly. “Where else should I be?”

She shrugged slightly and turned back to the fire. The pot hanging over the flames was simmering with pieces of meat bobbing in a rich gravy. Elizabeth held it steady with one hand shielded by a cloth and stirred with a long spoon.

“I have said I am sorry for not sending you word,” Tradescant insisted. “What more could I have done?”

“Nothing more,” she said steadily. “Since you chose to ride with him and you went far away in the night.”

“I did not choose…”

“You did not refuse-”

“He is my master…”

“I am sure I am aware of it!”

“You are jealous of him!” Tradescant exclaimed. “You think I am too devoted! You think that he treats me like a servant and takes me and uses me when he needs me and then sends me back to the garden when he has had his fill of my service!”

Elizabeth straightened up and one cheek was flushed on the side near the fire, but the other was pale and cold. “I did not say any of that,” she pointed out. “Nor, as it happens, do I think it.”

“You think he involves me in his plotting and his darker deeds,” Tradescant persisted. “I know you suspect him.”

She took up the hook and drew the hanging chain away from the flames of the fire, unhooked the pot and placed it carefully on the stone of the hearth. She worked with an absorbed quietness as if she would not let him disturb her tranquillity.

“You do!” Tradescant insisted. “You suspect him and you suspect me with him!”

Still in silence she fetched three bowls and one trencher. She sliced her home-baked loaf into three equal pieces, bowing her head for a moment over the breaking of the bread. Then she took the long-handled spoon and served broth and meat into each bowl and carried them to the table.

“I have seen things these days which he would trust to no other,” John said urgently. “Things which I would tell no one, not even you. I have seen things which, if he were a lesser man, would give me grave pause. I have seen things which he trusts only to me. He trusts me. He trusts no one but me. And if – when he needs me no more – he sends me back to his garden, why, that is part of our understanding. I am at his side when he needs a man he can trust like no other. When he is in safe harbor, any man can serve him.”

Elizabeth put out three knives and three spoons on the table, and pulled up her little stool and bowed her head. Then she waited for him to sit.

John threw himself on to the stool, unwashed and without saying his grace, and moodily stirred his broth.

“You are thinking that he is guilty,” he said suddenly.

The face that she raised to him was completely serene and clear. “Husband, I am thinking nothing. I begged you once that we should leave this place, and when you would not, I took my sorrow to my God, in prayer. I have left it to Him. I am thinking nothing.”

But John was burning to quarrel, or to confess. “That’s a lie. You are thinking that I was present, that I was witness to acts which might ruin him, acts which are a dreadful crime, the worst crime in the world, and that he leads me on to love him so that I am ensnared in love, and then I am incriminated myself!”

She shook her head and spooned her broth.

Tradescant pushed his bowl away, unable to eat for the anger and the darkness on his conscience. “You are thinking that I have been an assistant to a murder!” he hissed. “To assassination. And that it is plaguing my conscience and making me sick with worry! You are thinking that I come home with guilt in my face! You are thinking I come home to you with a stain on my soul! And that even after all I have done for him, in closing my ears and my eyes to what I can see and hear, that even then he will not keep me by his side but vaults on my shoulders to go upward and upward and tonight he sleeps beside the new king and dismisses me with no more than a word!”

Elizabeth put her hands over her eyes, shielding her face from his anguish, incapable of disentangling the mortal sins at which her husband was hinting: murder, treason and forbidden desire.

“Stop it! Stop it!”

“How can I stop?” John yelled in terror for his mortal soul. “How can I go forward? How can I go back? How can I stop?”

There was a shocked silence. Elizabeth took her hands from her face and looked up at her husband.

“Leave him,” she whispered.

“I cannot.”

She rose from the table and went toward the fireplace. John watched her go, as if she might have the key for them to escape from this knot of sin. But when she turned back to him her face was stony.

“What are you thinking?” he whispered.

“All that I think is that I have given you the wrong spoon,” she said with sudden clarity. She took off her apron, hung it on the hook and went out of the room.

“What d’you mean?” John shouted at her back as she went through the doorway.

“You need that one.”

He recoiled as her meaning struck him.

She was pointing to the spoon she used for cooking, the long spoon.

The news that King James was dead and his son was to be crowned the first King Charles arrived at Chorley the next day. Elizabeth was told in the marketplace at her small stall selling herbs. She nodded and said nothing. Her neighbor asked her if her husband was home and if he had brought any news of the doings from London.

“He was very tired last night,” Elizabeth said with her usual mixture of discretion and honesty. “He said hardly a word that made sense. I left him to sleep this morning. I expect he will tell me all the news from London when he wakes, and it will be old news by then.”

“It’s time for a change!” her neighbor said decisively. “I’m all for a new king. God bless King Charles, I say, and keep us safe from those damned Spaniards! And God bless the duke too! He knows what should be done, you can count on it!”

“God bless them both,” Elizabeth said. “And guide them in better ways.”

“And the king is to be married to a French bride!” the neighbor went on. “Why can he not marry a good English girl, brought up in our religion? Why does it have to be one of these papist princesses?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “The ways of the world are strange indeed. You would think that with the whole of the country at their feet they would be content…” She paused for a moment and her neighbor waited, hoping against all likelihood for a juicy piece of gossip. “Vanity,” Elizabeth concluded, unsatisfactorily. “It is all vanity.”

She looked around the quiet market. “I shall go home,” she said. “Perhaps John is awake now.”

She packed her little pots of herbs into her basket, nodded to her neighbor and made her way through the muddy street to her own cottage.

John was seated at the table in the kitchen, a mug of small ale and a piece of bread untasted before him. When Elizabeth came in and hung her cape on the hook on the back of the door, he started up.

“I am sorry, Elizabeth,” he said quickly. “I was tired and angry yesterday.”

“I know,” she said.

“I was troubled by what I had seen and heard.”

She waited in case he would say more.

“The court life is a tempting one,” he said awkwardly. “You think you are at the very center of the world, and it takes you further and further away from the things which really matter. What I love more than anything else is gardening, and you, and J – the last thing I should be doing is dawdling like a serving wench in the halls of great men.”

She nodded.

“And then I think I am in the center of great events, and an actor on a great stage,” he went on. “I think it will all go wrong if I am not there. I think I am indispensable.” He broke off with a little laugh. “I am a fool, I know it. For look! He has come to the highest point of his power yet, and his first act was to send me home.”

“Shall you go to the house?” Elizabeth asked. “Will you go to work today?”

John turned to the door. “No. I’ll walk until I can live with myself. I feel…” He made a strange distressed gesture. “I feel all… racked… I can’t say more. I feel as if I have pulled myself out of shape and I need to restore myself somehow.”

Elizabeth took a small piece of linen and wrapped a piece of bread and cheese. “You walk,” she advised. “Here is your dinner, and when you come home tonight I will have a good supper prepared for you. You look like a man who has been poisoned.”

John recoiled as if she had slapped him. “Poisoned? What are you saying?”

Elizabeth’s face was graver than ever. “I meant that you looked as if the court had not agreed with you, John. What else should I mean?”

He passed his hand quickly over his face as if he were wiping away a cold sweat. “It does not,” he said. “It does not agree with me. For here I am as nervous as a deer when I should be quietly at peace and setting my seeds.”

He took the bread and cheese from her. “I’ll be home by dusk,” he promised.

She drew him to her, took his worried face in her hands and drew his head down to her. She put a kiss on his brow, as if she were his mother blessing and absolving him. “You say a little prayer as you walk,” she said. “And I shall pray for you while I set the house to rights.”

John reached for his hat and opened the door. “What shall you pray for me, Lizzie?” he asked.

Elizabeth’s look was calm and steady. “That you shall avoid temptation, husband. For I think you have chosen a way which is much among the snares of the world.”

John worked through the spring with a dogged sullenness on the gardens of New Hall. The cherries which had always been his special pleasure blossomed well, and he watched the pink and white buds swell and then bloom, denying his own feeling that since their master did not see them their sweetness was wasted.

Buckingham did not come. The rumor was that London was dreadfully infested by plague, the dead lying in the streets of the poorer quarters and the plague cart coming by two and three times a day, healthy citizens shrinking back into doorways and locking themselves into their houses, every man who could afford it moving out to the country and then finding that villages on the road from the capital barred their doors to London trade. No one knew how the plague spread; perhaps it was by touch, perhaps it was in the air. People spoke of a plague wind as the season grew warmer and said that the soft warm breezes of spring blew the plague into your skin and set the buboes like eggs in your armpit and groin.

John longed to see Buckingham and to know that he was well. He could hardly believe that the court would linger in London while the hot weather came. The young king must be mad to expose himself to such danger, to expose his friends. But no one at New Hall could say when the court would move, no one could tell John if the court would come on a visit, or even if the duke might come home alone, tired of the squabbles and rivalry of the court and longing to be quietly in his own house, in his garden, among those who loved him.

John unpacked the India rarities and laid them out, as his fancy took him, in a small room. They looked well all together, he thought. There were some handsome skins and some silks, and he ordered the maids to sew them to strips of stout canvas which he could fix to the walls to make into hangings. He had a cabinet made to hold the jewels, fastened with an intricate gold lock with only one key, which he held for the duke. Still, the duke never came.

Then John had news. The king’s delayed marriage to the French princess was to go ahead; the duke had already left for France.

“He’s out of the country?” John asked the steward, in the safe privacy of the household office.

William Ward nodded.

“Who has he taken from his household?” John demanded.

“You know his way,” Ward said. “He was up and gone within the day. He forgot half his great wardrobe. The moment the king said he was to go, he was gone. He took hardly a dozen servants for his own use.”

“He did not ask for me?”

He shook his head. “Out of sight, out of mind, when you serve His Grace,” he said.

John nodded and went back outside.

The plan for the fish had worked. The terrace was a delightful place in the April sunshine. The goldfish swam in their own pool on the top terrace and the banks around them were gleaming with kingcups and celandine, as gold as they. The stream overflowed and babbled down to the next level, where silver fish swam under the overhanging pale green stems of what would bloom into white carnations. The glass fence was quite invisible; the water rippled down just as John had planned. He sat in one of the arbors and watched the water play, knowing that it was only his own folly which made the sound mournful and made him feel that great events were taking place out of reach and out of sight.

There was much to do in the garden. The ships of the Navy still obeyed Buckingham’s command that John should have the pick of rarities and new plants every time they returned from a voyage. Often a traveler would make his way to the garden at New Hall with something to sell: a plant, a seed, a nut, or some rare and curious gift. John bought many things and added them to the collection, keeping a careful account and submitting it to William Ward, who repaid him. The things accumulated in the cabinet, the India skins grew dirty and John ordered a woman to come into the rarities room to dust and clean. Still the duke did not come home.

Finally, in May a message came for Tradescant, scrawled in the duke’s own hand and brought all the way from Paris. It read:

My best suit and shirts forgotten in the hurry. Do bring all the things I may need, and anything precious and rare which might amuse the little princess.

“He sends for you?” the steward asked.

John read and reread the note and then laughed aloud, like a man who has been told that he shall be rescued. It was a laugh of relief. “He needs me. At last he needs me. I am to take his best suit and some curious playthings for the princess herself!” He stuffed the note in his pocket and headed for the rarities room, his step lighter, his whole being straighter, more determined, as if he were a young man commanded to set out on a quest, a chivalric quest.

“William, help me. Send for the housekeeper and get his things packed for me at once. He must have everything he might need. His best suit, but shirts as well, and I had better take a pair of his horses. Remember his riding clothes, and his hats. Everything he might want, I must take it all. His jewel box and his best diamonds. Nothing must be forgotten!”

The steward laughed at Tradescant’s urgency. “And when is all this to be ready?”

“At once!” John exclaimed. “At once! He has sent for me, and he trusts me to forget nothing. I must leave tonight.”

John scattered orders like plentiful seed up the stairs and down the stairs, in the stable and in the kitchen, until everyone in the household was running to pack whatever the duke might require in France.

Tradescant himself ran like a man half his age across the park to his cottage. Elizabeth was spinning, her wheel pushed alongside the window so that the sunshine fell on her hands. John hardly saw the beauty of the moving strands of wool in the sunshine and the quiet peace of his wife, humming a psalm as she worked.

“I’m off!” he cried. “He has sent for me at last!”

She rose to her feet, her face shocked, knowing at once who he meant. “The duke?”

“God be praised!”

She did not say, “Amen.”

“I am to follow him to France, with his baggage,” John said. “He wrote to me himself. He knows that no one else could get it done. No one else would take the care. He wrote to me by name.”

She turned her face away for a moment, and then quietly put her spindle down. “You will need your traveling cape, and your riding breeches,” she said and went to climb the little stair to their bedchamber.

“He wants me!” Tradescant repeated exultantly. “He sent for me! All the way from France!”

Elizabeth turned back to look at him and for a moment he could not understand her expression. She was looking at him with regret, with a strange inexplicable pity.

“This is what I have been waiting for!” he said. But at once the words sounded lame. “At last!”

“I know you have been waiting for him to whistle and for you to run,” she said gently. “And I will pray that he does not lead you down dark pathways.”

“He is leading me to the court of France!” John exclaimed. “To the heart of Paris itself to bring home the new Queen of England!”

“To a papist court and a papist queen,” Elizabeth said steadily. “I will pray for your deliverance night and day, husband. Last time you went to court you came home sickened to your soul.”

John swore under his breath and flung himself out of the cottage to wait on the road for his wife to pack his bag. So when they said farewell he did not take her in his arms but merely nodded his head to her. “I bid you farewell,” he said. “I cannot say when I shall return.”

“When he has finished with you,” she said simply.

John flinched at the words. “I am his servant, as he is the king’s,” he said. “Duty to him is an honor as well as my task.”

“Indeed, I hope his service always is an honor,” she said. “And that he never asks anything of you that you should not perform.”

John took her hand and kissed her lightly, coldly, on the forehead. “Of course not,” he said irritably. The cart, packed with the duke’s goods and drawn by two good horses, with his lordship’s two best hunters tossing their heads at being tied on behind, clattered down the lane. John hailed it and swung up on the seat beside the driver. When he looked down on her he thought his wife seemed very small, but as indomitable as she had been the day of their engagement twenty-four years ago.

“God bless you,” he said gruffly. “I shall come home as soon as I have done my duty.”

She nodded, still grave. “J and I will be waiting for you,” she said. The cart rolled forward; she turned and watched it go. “As we always are.”

When J came in for his supper she sent him back out to the pump to wash his hands again. He came in wiping his palms on his smock, leaving muddy stains.

“Look at you!” Elizabeth exclaimed without heat.

“It’s clean earth,” he defended himself. “And I’ve never seen my father’s hands without grimy calluses.”

Elizabeth brought bread and meat broth to the table.

“Chicken broth again?” J asked without resentment.

“Mutton,” she said. “Mrs. Giddings killed a sheep and sold me the lights and a leg. We’ll have a roast tomorrow.”

“Where’s Father?”

She let him break bread and take a spoonful of soup before she answered. “Gone to France after my lord Buckingham.”

He dropped his spoon back in his bowl. “Gone where?” he asked incredulously.

“I’d have thought you’d have heard.”

He shook his head. “I was over at the far side of the estate all day, with the game birds. I heard nothing.”

“The duke sent for him, wanted him to take some clothes, and some playthings for the French princess.”

“And he went?”

She met his angry glare. “Of course, J my boy. Of course he went.”

“He runs after the duke as if he were a dog!” J burst out.

Elizabeth shot a fierce look at him. “You remember your duty!” she hissed.

J dropped his gaze to the table, and fought for control. “I miss him,” he said quietly. “When he is not there then people look to me to tell them what to do. Because I am his son they assume that I know things, and I don’t know them. And the lads in the stable tease me when he is not there. They mock me behind my back and call me names. They say things about him and the duke which are not fit to be repeated.”

“He won’t be long,” Elizabeth said without conviction.

“You cannot know that.”

“I know he will come as soon as he can.”

“You know he will come when the duke has finished with him, and not a moment sooner. Besides, he loves traveling; if he gets the chance he will be off around Europe again. Did he leave you with an address where we can reach him?”

“No.”

“Or money?”

“No.”

J sighed heavily and spooned broth. When his bowl was empty he took the last piece of bread and wiped it carefully around, mopping up the gravy. “So at the end of the month I shall have to go to the almoner for his wages and he will swear they will be paid to him in Paris, and we will have to make do on my money until he returns.”

“We can manage,” Elizabeth said. “I have some put by, and he will make it up when he gets back.”

J knew how to bait his mother. “And he will be drinking and dining and living at a papist court. I doubt that there will be any church where he can say his prayers. He will come home crossing himself and needing a priest to pray for him.”

She went white at that. “He will not,” she said faintly.

“They say Buckingham himself is inclining that way,” J went on. “His mother is turned papist, or witch, or something.”

Elizabeth dropped her head and was silent for a moment. “Our Lord will keep him safe,” she said. “And he is a godly man. He will come home safe, to his home, to his faith.”

J tired of the sport of teasing his mother’s piety. “When I am a man I shall call no man master,” he asserted.

She smiled at him. “Then you will have to earn more money than your father has ever done! Every man has his better, every dog a master.”

“I shall never follow a man as my father follows the duke,” J said boldly. “Not the King of England himself. I shall work for my own good, I shall go on my own travels. I shall not be ordered to one place and then summoned away.”

Elizabeth put out her hand in a rare gesture of tenderness and touched his cheek. “I hope you will live in a country where great men do not exercise their power in such a way,” she said. It was the closest he had ever heard her come to any sort of radical thought. “I hope you will live in a country where great men remember their duty to the poor, and to their servants. But we do not live in such a world yet, my J. You have to choose a master and become his man and do his bidding. There is no one who does not serve another, whether you’re the lowest ploughboy or the greatest squire. There is always another above you.”

Instinctively he lowered his voice. “England will have to change,” he said softly. “The lowest ploughboy is questioning if his master has a God-given right to rule over him. The lowest ploughboy has a soul which is as welcome in heaven as the greatest squire’s. The Bible says that the first shall become last. That’s not the promise that nothing can ever change.”

“Hush,” Elizabeth said. “Time enough to speak like that when things have changed, if they ever do.”

“Things are changing now,” J insisted. “This king will have to deal with the people of the country. He will have to listen to Parliament. He cannot cheat on honest, good men, as his father did. We are tired of paying for a court which shows us nothing but luxury and sin. We will not be allied to papists; we will not be brothers to heretics!”

She shook her head, but she did not stop him.

“At New Hall there is a man who knows another man who says that there should be a petition against the king that should tell him his duties. That he cannot levy taxes without calling a parliament. That he must listen to his advisers in Parliament. That the duke should not rule over everything and scrape all the wealth into his own pocket. That orphans and widows should have the protection of the Crown, so that a man can die in peace and know that his estate will be well managed and not farmed by the duke for his own good.”

“Are there many that think this?” Her whisper was a thread of sound.

“He says so.”

Her eyes were wide. “Does any say so in your father’s hearing?”

J shook his head. “Father is known as the duke’s man through and through. But there are many, even in the duke’s own service, who know that the mood of the country is turning against the duke. They blame him for everything that goes wrong, from this hot weather to the plague.”

“What will become of us if the duke should fall?” she asked.

J’s young face was determined. “We would survive,” he said. “Even if the country never wanted another duke, it would always need gardeners. I should always find work and there will always be a home for you with me. But what would become of my father? He’s not just the duke’s gardener – he is his vassal. If the duke falls then I think Father’s heart will break.”