Earthly Joys

May 1625

John met his master in Paris as he had been ordered. He waited for him in the black-and-white marble hall of the great house until the double doors swung open and the duke was framed in the bright Paris sunlight. He was wearing diamonds in his hat, on his finely embroidered doublet. His cape was hemmed with brilliants which John hoped very much were glass but feared were also diamonds. He sparkled in the spring sunshine like the new leaves on a silver birch tree.

“My John!” he exclaimed with delight. “And have you brought all my clothes? I am reduced to rags!”

John found he was beaming with delight at the sight of his master. “So I see, my lord. I was afraid that I would find you looking very poor and mean. I have brought everything and your coach and six horses is coming behind me.”

Buckingham grasped him by the shoulder. “I knew you would do it for me,” he said. “I would trust no other. How are things at New Hall?”

“Everything is well,” John told him. “The garden is looking well, your water terrace is working and looks lovely. Your wife and mother are at New Hall and are both well.”

“Oh yes, gardens,” the duke said. “You must meet the gardeners to the French court; you will be impressed with what they do here. The queen will give me a note for you to introduce yourself to them.” He bent toward John and spoke softly in his ear. “The queen would give me a good deal more too, if I asked for it, I think!”

John found he was smiling at the shameless vanity of the man. “I know the Robinses, but I shall be pleased to see them again. And you have been amusing yourself.”

Buckingham kissed his fingertips like a Frenchman acknowledging beauty. “I have been in paradise,” he said. “And you shall come with me and we shall see the palace gardens together. Come, John, I shall change my clothes and I shall take you around the city. It’s very fair and very joyful, and the women are as easy as mares in heat. It’s a perfect town for me!”

John chuckled unwillingly. “My wife would be most distressed. I will go and see the gardens but I cannot go visiting women.”

Buckingham put his arm around Tradescant’s shoulders and hugged him tight. “You shall be my conscience then,” he said. “And keep me on the straight and narrow way.”

It could not be done. The Archangel Gabriel with a flaming sword could not have kept the Duke of Buckingham on the straight and narrow way in Paris in 1625. The French court was besotted with the English, a new prince on the throne, a French princess as his chosen bride and the handsomest man in Europe at court to fetch her to her new home. Crowds of women gathered outside Buckingham’s hôtel just to see him come and go, and to admire the astounding sight of his carriage and six, and the jewels and his clothes and his hat, the “bonnet d’anglais” which was copied by a hundred hatters as soon as they glimpsed it.

The queen herself blushed when he came near her, and watched him from behind her fan if he so much as spoke to another woman, and little Princess Henrietta Maria stammered when he was in the room and forgot what little English she knew. The whole of France was in love with him, the whole of Paris adored him. And Buckingham, smiling, laughing, fêted everywhere he went, passed through adoring crowds as if he were the king himself and not a mere ambassador: the bridegroom himself and not a proxy.

John was weary of Buckingham’s ceaseless round of parties within days.

“Keep up, John,” Buckingham threw over his shoulder. “We are going to a masked ball tonight.”

“As you wish,” John said.

Buckingham turned and laughed at John’s stoical expression. “Have you no assignations? No dances promised?”

“I’m a married man,” John said. “As you are, my lord.” He paused for Buckingham’s crack of laughter. “But I will attend you there and wait for you as long as you wish, my lord.”

Buckingham rested his hand on Tradescant’s shoulder. “No, I have a dozen men who can wait on me, and only one who loves me like a brother. I shan’t waste your love and loyalty on watching me dancing. What would you like to do most?”

Tradescant thought. “I’ve seen some plants which would look very well at New Hall,” he said cautiously. “If you could spare me, I shall visit the Robins’s garden to order the plants and see them packed, and then they could come home with us when we leave.”

Buckingham thought, his head on one side. “I think we can do better than that.” He reached into the deep pocket of his coat and pulled out a purse. “D’you know what this is?”

“Money?”

“Better than that. A bribe. An enormous bribe, from Richelieu or his agents.”

John looked at the purse as if it were a venomous snake. “Do you want me to return it?”

Buckingham threw back his head and laughed. “John! My John! No! I want you to spend it!”

“French money? What do they want for it?”

“My friendship, my advice to the king, my support of the little princess. Take it!”

Still John hesitated. “But what if you need to warn the king against them? What if things change?”

“Who’s our worst enemy? Worst enemy of the faith? Greatest danger to the freedom of our Protestant brothers in Europe?”

“The Spanish,” John said slowly.

“So we befriend the French to make an alliance against the Spanish,” Buckingham said simply. “And if they want to give me a fortune for doing what I would be doing anyway – then they may!”

“But what if it all changes?” John asked. “What if the Spanish make an alliance with the French? Or the French turn against us?”

Buckingham tossed the purse in the air and caught it again. It fell as if it were indeed very heavy. “Then the money is spent and I have done my country the service of draining the coffers of our enemy. Here! Catch!” He threw the purse to John, and John caught it as a reflex action before he could stop himself.

“Take it to Amsterdam,” Buckingham said, as skillfully tempting as a serpent in Eden. “Take it to Amsterdam, and buy tulips, my John.”

He could have said nothing which would have worked more powerfully on Tradescant. Unaware of the action, John hefted the purse in his hand, guessing at the weight. “They are going at a terrible price,” he said. “The market has gone mad for tulips. Everyone is buying, everyone is speculating in them. Men who have never left their money counters are buying the names of tulips on scraps of paper; they never even see the flower. I can’t be sure how many bulbs I could get, even with this money.”

“Go,” Buckingham commanded. He flung himself into a chair and swung his long legs over the arm. He looked at Tradescant with his teasing smile. “You know you are longing for them, my John. Go and look at the tulip fields and buy as many as you want. There’s that purse, and another to follow. Bring me a couple of bulbs back and we will put them in a pot, set ourselves up as burghers and grow rich.”

“The Semper Augusta is scarlet and white,” John said. “I’ve seen a painting of it. The color is most beautifully broken, and it has a most wonderful shape, the true tulip cup shape but with tiny points on each petal, so each petal stands a little proud from the others. And long curvy leaves…”

“In faith! This is love!” Buckingham mocked. “This is true love, John. I’ve never seen you so moved.”

Tradescant smiled. “There’s never been a more perfect flower. It’s the best there is. There’s nothing better. And there’s never been one which cost more.”

Buckingham pointed to the French bribe in Tradescant’s hand. “Go and buy it,” he said simply.

Tradescant packed that night and was ready to leave at dawn. He left a note for his master, promising that the gold would be safe in his keeping and that he would buy as many bulbs as could be gotten but, to his surprise, when he was about to mount his horse in the street outside the Buckingham hôtel, the duke himself came lounging out, pulling on a robe against the cold morning air, dressed only in his shirt and boots and breeches.

“My lord!” Tradescant dropped the reins of his horse and went toward him. “I had thought you would sleep till noon!”

“I woke and thought of you setting off on your own adventure and I chose to come down to bid you farewell,” Buckingham said casually.

“I would have waited if I had known. I could have left later and you could have had your sleep.”

Buckingham slapped John on the shoulder. “I know. It doesn’t matter. I knew you were setting off early, and I woke and looked from my window and took a fancy to see you ride away.”

John said nothing; there were no words to say to the greatest man in England who rose at dawn after a night’s dancing to bid a servant farewell.

“Enjoy yourself,” Buckingham urged. “Stay as long as you like, draw on my banker, buy anything which takes your fancy and bring it home to New Hall. I want tulips next season, my John. I want thousands of beautiful tulips.”

“You shall have them,” Tradescant said fervently. “I shall give you gardens of great beauty, my lord. Great beauty.” He paused for a moment and cleared his throat. “And when am I to be home, my lord?”

Buckingham put his arm around John’s shoulders and hugged him tightly. “When you are ready, my John. Go and spend some money, and enjoy yourself. I have never been happier; you be happy too. Go and joyfully spend some of my easily earned money and we will meet again at New Hall when you come home.”

“I shall not fail you,” John promised, thinking that if he were not an honest man he could disappear into Europe with the heavy purses of gold and never be seen again.

“I know. You never fail me,” Buckingham said affectionately. “And that is why I want you to go and pleasure yourself with tulips. It is a reward for fidelity. If I cannot tempt you with easy French women and drink, then let me give you what is your greatest joy. Go and run riot in the bulbfields, my John. Lust after petals and slake your lust!”

He waved and turned inside the house. Tradescant waited, his hat in his hand, until the great double doors had closed behind his master, and then he mounted his horse, clicked encouragingly and turned its head eastward, out of Paris to the Low Countries and the tulip fields.

John found Amsterdam buzzing with infectious, continual excitement. All the taverns he had known where the tulip growers had met and sold tulips to one another were now expanded into double and treble the size and they opened for business in the morning in an atmosphere of teeth-gritting excitement. He looked in vain for the men he had known, the quiet steady gardeners who had told him how to cut the bulbs and plant them. They had been replaced by men with soft white hands who carried not bulbs but great books in which there were illustrations of tulips drawn with the beauty and care of fine portraits. The bidding for the bulbs was done on promisory notes; no money changed hands. John with his purses of French gold was an exception; he felt like a fool trying to pay men with money when everyone else was trading in credit.

And he felt even more of a fool when he tried to buy tulip bulbs to take away with him, when he wanted to exchange a sackful of gold – real money – for a sackful of bulbs – real bulbs. Everyone else was trading without ever holding a bulb in their hand. They bought and sold the promise of the tulip crop when it was lifted, or they bought and sold the name of a tulip. Some flowers were so rare that there were only ten or a dozen in the whole country. Such bulbs would never come to market, John was assured. He would have to buy the slip of paper with the name of the tulip written on the top of it, and have it attested at the Bourse. If he had any sense he would sell the slip of paper the very next day as the price jumped and leapfrogged. He should make his profit in the rising market and not hang around the dealers and ask them for real tulips to take home with him. The market was not for a bulb in a pot, it was for an idea of a tulip, the promise of a tulip. The market had gone light, the market had gone airy. It was the windhandel market.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“A wind market,” a man translated for him. “You are no longer buying the goods, you are buying the promise of the goods. And you are paying with a promise to pay. You don’t actually have to give your gold and receive your tulip until – oh – next year. But if you have any sense by then you will have sold it at a profit and you will have made a fortune merely by letting the wind blow through your fingers.”

“But I want tulips!” John exclaimed in frustration. “I don’t want a piece of paper with a tulip name written on it to sell to someone else. I want a bulb that I can take home and grow.”

The man shrugged, losing interest at once. “It’s not how we do business,” he said. “But if you go down the canal toward Rotterdam you will find men and women who will sell you bulbs that you can take away. They will call you a fool for paying money on the nail.”

“I’ve been called a fool before,” John said grimly. “I can bear it.”

He was dining in a tavern at the end of this expedition, drinking deep of the thick ale which the Dutch loved and eating well of their rich food, when the door darkened and a well-loved voice shouted into the gloom. “Is my John in here?”

John choked on his ale and leaped to his feet, overturning his stool. “Your Grace?”

It was Buckingham, modestly dressed in a suit of smooth brown wool, chuckling like a madman at the sight of John’s astounded face.

“Caught you,” he said easily. “Drinking away my fortune.”

“My lord! I never-”

He laughed again. “How have you done, my John? Are you rich in tulip notes?”

John shook his head. “I am rich in tulips, in real bulbs, my lord. The men in this town seem to have forgotten what they are buying and selling; they want only a piece of paper with a name written on it and the Bourse seal at the bottom. I had to go far inland to find growers who would sell me the real thing.”

Buckingham came into the ale house and sat at John’s table. “Finish your dinner; I have dined already,” he remarked. “So where are they? These tulips?”

“They are packed away and ready to sail tonight,” John said, reluctantly picking up a crust of bread smeared with creamy Dutch butter. “I was on my way home to New Hall with them.”

“Can they sail alone?”

John thought quickly. “I’d send a man I could trust to go with them. It’s too precious a cargo to leave to the captain. And I’d like someone to see them all the way to New Hall.”

“Do it,” the duke said idly.

John swallowed his question with his bread, rose from the table, bowed swiftly to the duke and went out of the tavern. He ran like a deer for his inn, engaged the landlord’s son to go to England and to see the barrels of tulips safely delivered to New Hall, pressed money and a note of introduction to J into the young man’s hand, and then ran back to the tavern as the duke was downing his second pint of ale.

“All done, Your Grace,” he reported breathlessly.

“I thank you,” the duke said.

There was a tantalizing silence. John stood before his master.

“Oh, you can sit down,” the duke said. “And have an ale. You must be thirsty.”

John slid into the seat opposite his master and watched him as the girl brought his drink. The duke was pale, a little tired from the festivities of the French court, but his dark eyes were sparkling. John felt a stir of his venturing spirit.

“Are you not attended, Your Grace?”

The duke shook his head. “I am traveling unknown.”

John waited but his master volunteered nothing.

“Anywhere to stay?”

“I thought I’d bed with you.”

“What if you had not found me?” John grimaced at the thought of the greatest man in England wandering around the Low Countries in search of his gardener.

“I knew I only had to wait somewhere near the tulip exchange and you would turn up,” Buckingham said easily. “And besides, I do not crumple without a dozen servants to support me, you know, John. I can fend for myself.”

“Of course,” John agreed quickly. “I just wondered what you are doing here?”

“Oh, that,” Buckingham said as if recalled to his mission. “Why, I have a job to do for my master and I thought you might help me.”

“Of course,” John said instantly.

“We’ll drink a little more and then roister a little, and then in the morning we shall do some business,” Buckingham suggested engagingly.

“Are we to go far?” John asked, thinking wildly of the ships which left for the Dutch Indies and for the spreading Dutch empire. “It may be that I should prepare while you make merry.”

The duke shook his head. “My business is in town, with the gold and diamond merchants. But I want you with me. My amulet. I shall need all my luck tomorrow.”

They slept in the same bed. When John woke in the morning the younger man had thrown an arm out in his sleep and John woke to a touch on his face like a caress. He lay still for a little while, under that casual blessing, and then slid out of bed and looked out of the little window down at the street below.

The cobbled quayside was crowded with sellers of bread and cheese and milk, up from the country by barge at dawn and spreading their stalls for all to see. Among them, and starting to lay out their wares, were the cobblers and sellers of household goods: brushes and soaps, kindling and brassware. Artists were setting up easels and offering to sketch portraits. Sailors up from the deep-water docks were moving among the crowd and offering rarities and foreign goods – silk shawls, flasks of rare drink, little toys. The low barges plied constantly up and down the canal; and ducks, in continual flurry away from the prows, quacked and complained. The sunlight glinted on the water of the canal and threw back the reflection of the market stalls and the dark shadows of the crisscrossing bridges.

Tradescant heard Buckingham stir in the bed behind him and turned at once.

“Good morning, my lord, is there anything I can get you?”

“You can get me a hundred thousand pounds in gold or I am a ruined man,” Buckingham said, his face buried in the pillow. “That’s what we’re doing today, my John. We’re going to pawn the Crown Jewels.”

Cecil’s long training stood John in good stead through that day. Buckingham was trying to raise the money to equip a mighty Protestant army to attack Spain and to free Charles’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and her husband and restore them to their rightful throne. There was no money in the royal treasury. The English Parliament would vote no more to a king who had done so little to bring in the reforms they had demanded. It was left to Buckingham to raise the funds. And he had nothing to offer as security but the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland and any related valuables that the moneylenders might require.

John stood with his back to the door, watching his master charming the powerful money men of Amsterdam. The scene looked like one of the new oil paintings that King Charles kept buying. The room was in half-darkness, windows shrouded with thick embroidered curtains. The table was lit only by a couple of candles behind an engraved shade which threw strange cabalistic patterns on the walls. There were three men on one side of the table and Buckingham on the other. One man was a solid burgher, a father of the city and a cautious man. To him Buckingham deferred with a charming youthful respect, and as the meeting went on John watched the big man slowly unbend, like a horse on the towpath bending its neck to be patted. Next to him was a Jewish financier, his eyes as dark as Buckingham’s own, his hair as black and lustrous as the duke’s. He wore a little cap on the back of his head and a long dark suit in plain material. The Low Countries was a place that prided itself on its tolerance; John thought that Buckingham would not have sat on equal terms with a Jew at any other table in Europe.

The duke was uneasy with the financier. He could not find the right tone to tempt him. The man was guarded, his long face giving away nothing. He spoke little and when he did, it was in French with an accent which John could not identify. He treated Buckingham with deference, but it seemed as if there was a secret inner judgment that he was keeping hidden. John was as superstitious and fearful of the Jews as any Englishman. He feared this man in particular.

The third man was from some strand of nobility who would have access to a vast fortune if these other two approved. He was slim and young and richly dressed, and he had no aptitude for the carefully written calculations of profit and interest on the small pieces of paper which the other two men were exchanging. He leaned back in his chair and gazed idly around him. Every now and then he and Buckingham would exchange a smile as if to agree that they two were men of the world and these vulgar details were beneath them.

“We have to consider the issue of the security of the jewels,” the burgher said. “They will be lodged here.”

Buckingham shook his head. “They cannot be taken from London,” he said. “But you shall have your own man in London to guard them, if you wish. And a sealed letter from King Charles himself to acknowledge your right.”

The burgher looked uneasy. “But if we should need to collect them?”

“If His Majesty cannot repay the loan?” Buckingham smiled. “Ah, forgive me, the king will repay. He will not fail. When Prince Frederick and Princess Elizabeth are back on their thrones then the wealth of Bohemia will repay all the debts incurred in the campaign to restore them.”

“And if the campaign fails?” the Jew asked quietly.

Buckingham checked for a moment. “It will not,” he replied.

There was a brief silence. The Jew waited for his answer.

“If it should fail then his Majesty will repay according to the schedule of repayments as you propose,” Buckingham said smoothly. “We are speaking of the King of England, my lords. He is hardly likely to run off to the Americas.”

The nobleman laughed at the joke and Buckingham shot him a swift smile. The Jew did not laugh.

“But how should we collect if, by some error, His Majesty were to default?” the burgher asked politely.

Buckingham shrugged as if such a thing were beyond the stretch of any imagination. “Oh. I can hardly think – well – we will follow the line of fairy tales. If the campaign fails and the Prince and Princess of Bohemia do not repay you themselves, and then if the King of England does not repay you then I, the Duke of Buckingham, will myself deliver to you the Crown Jewels of England. Will that satisfy you, gentlemen?”

John looked from one face to another. It satisfied the nobleman, who could not imagine that Buckingham could say one thing and do another. He was no obstacle. The burgher was wavering, half-convinced, half-fearful. The Jew was inscrutable. His dark serious face could not be read. He might be inwardly approving; he might have damned this project from the first moment. John could not tell.

“And you would put that in writing?”

“Signed in blood if you wish,” Buckingham said carelessly, the glancing reference to the popular play a half-insult to all Jewish moneylenders. “I have promised my master the King of England that he shall have the funds to raise an army to restore his sister to her throne. It is a task which we should all do as good Protestants and good Christians. It is a task which most becomes me as His Majesty’s most faithful servant.”

The three men nodded.

“Shall I leave you to consult for a while?” Buckingham offered. “I must warn you, out of courtesy, that my time is a little limited. There are other gentlemen who would extend this loan to the king and think it an honor to so do. But I promised you I would see you first.”

“Of course,” the burgher said awkwardly. “And we thank you. Perhaps you would like a glass of wine?”

He drew back one of the thick hangings and showed a small door beyond. It opened into a walled courtyard. In a giant pot against the wall grew an apricot tree, at its feet the folded leaves of some tulips now past their prime. John saw at once that they had been Lack tulips, beautifully white and veined with scarlet. There were a couple of chairs and a table in the shade of the tree, and a flagon of wine with a small plate of biscuits.

“Please,” the burgher said. “Enjoy this. And ring for anything further you need. We will delay you only a moment.”

He bowed and went back into the room. Buckingham threw himself into the chair and watched John pour the wine and hand him a glass.

“What d’you think?” he asked quietly.

“It’s possible,” John said in the same undertone. “Do you have other men to borrow from?”

“No,” Buckingham said. “D’you think they know that?”

“No,” John said. “There is so much wealth flying around this city that they cannot be sure of it. The nobleman is in your pocket but I doubt the other two.”

Buckingham nodded and sipped his wine. “That’s good,” he said with approval. “Alicante.”

“What do we do if they say no?”

Buckingham tipped his beautiful face up to the sun and closed his eyes as if he did not have a care in the world. “Go home with the whole of the king’s foreign policy in ruins,” he said. “Tell the king that his sister is thrown out of her kingdom and insulted and that he can do nothing. Tell the king that unless he agrees with Parliament he will be a pauper on his own throne, and that his chief minister was a better Master of Horse than he is a diplomat.”

“You got him the French princess,” John observed.

Buckingham half-opened his eyes and John saw the glint of his look under the thick eyelashes. “Let’s hope to God she pleases him. I don’t guarantee it.”

The door behind John opened and he whirled around. It was the Jew in the doorway, his head held low. “I am sorry, masters,” he said quietly. “We cannot oblige you. The capital is more than we can afford without holding the security ourselves.”

Buckingham jumped to his feet in one of his sudden rages, about to shout at the man. John threw himself forward and got both hands on his master’s shoulders as if he were rearranging his cape.

“Steady,” he whispered.

He felt the shoulders straighten under his grip. Buckingham lifted his head. “I am sorry you could not oblige me,” he said. “I will tell the king of your reluctance and my disappointment.”

The Jew’s head bowed lower.

Buckingham turned on his heel and John dived before him to open the door so his smooth disdainful stride from the courtyard was not checked. They arrived out in the street by a side door and hesitated.

“What now?” Tradescant asked.

“We try another,” Buckingham said. “And then another. And then we go and buy some bulbs, for I think that is all we’re going to get out of this damned damned city.”

Buckingham was right. John was back at New Hall by the end of May, preceded by wagonloads of plants, sacks of tulip bulbs and with six of the most precious bulbs – each costing a purse of gold – hidden deep inside his waistcoat.

His first act was to go to the rarities room of New Hall and to summon J to meet him there with six large porcelain pots and a basket of soil.

J came into the room and found the six bulbs laid out on a table. His father was, with infinite care, cutting slightly into the base of each bulb in the hope that it would encourage them to divide, and make new bulbs.

“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-petaled with thin red stripes through white, and this is a French bizarre tulip, 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 rumor 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 emphasized 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 favorites, 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 visualizing consequences on a long-term or big scale. He was faultlessly 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 center 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 favored 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 center of wealth, the center 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 Favorite 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 moldering 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 awestruck 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 fruits 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.”