Earthly Joys

Summer 1627

Buckingham, at New Hall for the summer, frightened back to Essex by the enmity of the parliament, found John in the fruit garden, tying back peach trees against the red brick wall. John turned when he heard the duke’s quick step on the brick-chip path and Buckingham, seeing the leap of joy in Tradescant’s face, put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I was a hero to all the world as I am to you, John,” he said.

“Is there trouble?”

Buckingham threw back his head and laughed his reckless gambler’s laugh. John smiled in reply but felt a chill sense of unease. He had learned to be wary when his lord was in joyful mood. “There is always trouble,” Buckingham said. “I snap my fingers at it. And what of you, John? What are you doing here?”

“I am trying a little experiment; I don’t know if it will work. It is a fancy of mine to see if I can give the peach trees a little extra heat, where they grow, here in the garden.”

“Will you set fire to their trunks?”

“I shall burn charcoal,” Tradescant said seriously. “Here.” He showed the duke the high wall and three small fireplaces placed one above the other. “The flues from the fireplaces run along the length of the wall and the hot smoke travels behind the bricks where the trees are tied. I am hoping it will keep the frost off them so that you can have early peaches and apricots. Weeks, perhaps even months, early. I think it must be something in the nature of the tree which makes it bear fruit; but then I am sure it is the heat of the sunshine which makes it ripen. The first year I scorched them and last year I was too cautious and the frost got them. But this year I think I may have done it right and you shall have sweet ripe fruit in June.”

“I shall be eating no English peaches in June this year, and nor will you,” the duke remarked.

Alerted, John turned away from his heated wall. “Not this year?”

“Unless you wish to eat peaches while I go to war!”

“You, my lord!”

Buckingham threw back his head and laughed once more. John thought for a moment that he might have crowed like a cock on the farmyard wall. “Listen to this, my John. We are to take on the French! Won’t that be a game? While they trouble us in the Lowlands and threaten the fair Queen Elizabeth, driven off her rightful throne in Bohemia, we will sail around and attack their soft underbelly.”

“In the Mediterranean?”

“ La Rochelle,” Buckingham said triumphantly. “We will sail in to a hero’s welcome from the Protestants. They have been besieged by their own countrymen, martyrs for their faith, for long enough. Our arrival will turn the tables. I doubt we will need to fire a shot! And what a snap of fingers in the face of Richelieu!”

“But only last year you sent a fleet to fight for Richelieu, you were his ally against them-”

“Policy! Policy!” Buckingham dismissed the idea. “We should have supported our brothers in religion as soon as the siege was raised. The country was wild to go to war against the Catholics; I was wild for it. But with a French queen new-come to the English throne and the Spanish such a threat – what could I do? It’s different now. It will be better now.”

“The people may have longer memories,” John warned. “They may remember that you hired our Navy out to Richelieu and English guns were trained on the Protestants at La Rochelle.”

Buckingham shook his head and laughed. “What is wrong with you today, Tradescant? Don’t you want to come with me?”

“You are never sailing yourself?”

Buckingham smiled his heart-stopping smile. “I? But of course! Who else is Lord High Admiral?”

“I didn’t think…” John broke off. “Are you not needed at home, by the king? And your enemies in the country, will they not mass against you if you are gone on an expedition for months at a time? The gossip is loud against you, I’ve heard even here that they are making accusations – my lord, surely you cannot risk being away?”

“How better to silence them than with a victory? When I come home with a victory against France, a triumph against the papists and a new English port on the west coast of France, don’t you think my enemies will disappear in a moment? They will be my dearest friends again. Sir John and Sir Dudley will love me like brothers again, come rushing out of the Tower to kiss my hand. Don’t you see? It will turn everything around for me.”

John put his hand on the richly slashed sleeve of his master’s fine doublet. “But, my lord, if you fail?”

Buckingham did not throw him off, as he could have done; did not laugh, as John half-expected. Instead he put his white fingers on John’s hand, and held his touch closer. “I must not fail,” he said softly. “To tell you truth, John, I dare not fail.”

John looked into his master’s dark eyes. “Are you in so much jeopardy?”

“The worst. They will execute me for treason if they can.”

The two men stood still for a moment, hands clasped, their heads close.

“Come with me?” Buckingham asked.

“Of course,” John replied.

“You are going where?” Elizabeth demanded, icily furious.

“To France with the fleet,” John said, keeping his head low over his dinner. J, at the other end of the table, watched his parents in silence.

“You are nearly sixty.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled with rage. “It is time you stayed home. The duke pays you as his gardener and the keeper of his rarities. Why can he not leave you to garden?”

John shook his head and cut himself a slice of ham. “This is sweet meat,” he remarked. “One of our own?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Why does the duke want you?”

“He has asked me to go,” John said in his most reasonable tone. “I can hardly ask him if he is sure, or what his reasons are. He has ordered me to go.”

“You are at an age when men sit by their fireside and tell their grandchildren of their travels,” she said. “Not going as a common soldier off to war.”

He was stung. “I’m not a common soldier. I travel as a gentleman in his train. As his companion and adviser.”

She slapped the table with her hand. “What can you advise him? You are a gardener.”

He met her challenging eyes squarely. “I may be a gardener but I have traveled farther and faced worse danger than any other in his train,” he said. “I was at the battle of Algiers, and the long voyage to Russia. I have traveled all over Europe. He needs all the wise heads he can muster. He has asked for me and I will go.”

“You could refuse,” she challenged him. “You could leave his service. There are many other places where you could work. We could go back to Canterbury; Lord Wootton would have you back. He says that no one can grow melons like you. We could go back to Hatfield and work for the Cecils again.”

“I will not be forsworn. I will not leave his lordship.”

“You took no oath,” she pressed him. “You think of yourself as his man and he treats you like a vassal right enough, but these are new times, John. The way you served Lord Cecil with such love and devotion is the old way. Other men work for Villiers for nothing more than their wages and they move on as it suits them. You could serve him like that. You could tell him that it does not suit you to go to war with him, and seek another place.”

He was genuinely shocked. “I tell him that it does not suit me to go to war when he is going? Tell him that it suits me to stay at home when he is fighting for my country in a foreign land? I to be a turncoat, having eaten his bread and lived in his house for five years? After he has paid me and trusted me, and employed my own son so he served his apprenticeship in one of the finest households in the land? I wait till now, till the worst moment of his life, to tell him that I was only here until it suited me to be elsewhere? This is not a matter of a wage, Elizabeth, it is a matter of faith. It is a matter of honor. It is a matter between my lord and me.”

J made a little impatient gesture, and then sat still. John did not even glance at him.

“Then serve him where you are placed,” Elizabeth said urgently. “Cleave to your master and do the work he employs you to do. Keep his cabinet of rarities, keep his gardens.”

“I am placed at his side,” John said simply. “Wherever he is, there I should be. Wherever that is.”

She swallowed her pride as it rose up, a wife’s pride, a jealous pride, stung by the devotion in his voice. She kept her temper with an effort. “I don’t want you running into danger,” she said quietly. “We have a good place here; I acknowledge our debt to the duke. You have a fine life here. Why d’you have to go away? And this time to make war against the French! You told me yourself what a court they have and what an army! What chance does the fleet have against them?” – “Especially commanded by the duke,” she thought but did not say it.

“He thinks that we will sail into a heroes’ welcome and sail home again,” John said. “The Protestants of La Rochelle have been under siege by the French government troops for months. When we relieve the siege we will free the Huguenots and slap Richelieu’s face.”

“And why should you slap Richelieu’s face?” she demanded. “He was an ally only months ago.”

“Policy,” John answered, concealing his ignorance.

She drew a breath as if she would draw in patience again. “And if it is not so easy? If the duke cannot slap Richelieu’s face, just like that?”

“Then the duke will need me,” John said simply. “If they have to build siege machines, or bridges, he will need me there.”

“You are a gardener!” she exclaimed.

“Yes!” he cried, goaded at last. “But the rest of them are poets and musicians! The officers are young men from the court who have never ridden out for anything more arduous than a day’s hunting, and the sergeants are drunkards and criminals. He needs at least one man in his train who can work with his hands and measure a length with his eye! Who in my lord’s train will guard him? Who can he trust?”

She got up from her stool and snatched up the platters from the table. John saw her blink away angry tears and he softened at once. “Lizzie…” he said gently.

“Are we never to be at peace together?” she demanded. “You are a young man no longer, John; will you never stay home? We have our son, we have our home, you have your great garden and your rarities. Is this not enough for you that you have to go chasing off halfway round the world to fight the French, who were our allies and friends only last year?”

He got up and went over to her. His knees ached, and he was careful to walk steadily without a limp. He put his arm around her waist. He could feel the warmth and softness of her body beneath her gray gown. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have to go. Give me your blessing. You will never make me sail without your blessing.”

She turned her troubled face toward him. “I can bless you and I can pray for the Lord to watch over you,” she said. “But I fear that you are sailing with bad company into a senseless fight. You will be badly commanded, badly ruled and poorly paid.”

Tradescant flinched back from her. “This is not a blessing, this is ill-wishing!”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It is the truth, John, and everyone in the country but you knows it. Everyone but you thinks that your duke is leading this country into war to spite Richelieu and to tease the King of France whom he cuckolded already. Everyone but you thinks he is showing off before the king. Everyone but you thinks he is a wicked and dangerous man.”

John was white. “I see you have been listening to the preachers and the gossips again,” he said. “This poison is not of your cooking!”

“The preachers speak nothing but the truth,” she said, confronting him at last. “They say that a new world is coming where men can share in the wealth of the country and that every man should have his share. They say that the king will see reason and give the country to his people when his adviser is thrown down. And they say that if the king will not turn against papist practices in his home, and ritual in his church, and poverty in his streets, then we should all go to make a new world of our own.”

“Virginia!” John mocked scathingly. “That was an investment of mine in a promising business. It was not a dream of a new world.”

“There is certainly no dreaming in this old world,” she flashed back. “Innocent men in the Tower, poor men taxed into paupers. Plague in the streets every summer, starvation in the country, and the richest king in the world riding around in silk with his Favorite riding beside him on a horse from Arabia.”

John put his hand under her chin and turned her face so that she was forced to meet his eyes. “This is treason,” he said firmly. “And I will not have it spoken in my house. I have struck J for less. Mark me well, Elizabeth, I will put you aside if you speak against my lord. I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

For a moment she looked as if he had indeed struck her. “Say that again,” she whispered.

He hesitated; he did not know if she was daring him to repeat it, or if she simply could not believe her ears. But either way he could not back down before a woman. The chain of command from God to man was clear; a wife’s feelings could not disrupt the loyalty from man to lord to king to God. “I will put you aside if you speak against my lord,” John said to his wife, as solemnly as he had spoken the marriage oath in church that long-ago day in Meopham. “I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

He turned on his heel and went out of the room. Elizabeth heard his heavy step going up the stairs to their bedroom and then the noise of the wooden chest opening as he took his traveling suit from where it was laid in lavender and rue. She put out her hand to the chimney breast to steady herself as her knees grew suddenly weak beneath her, and she sank down to the little three-legged stool at the fireside.

“I want to go with him,” J suddenly said from his seat at the table.

Elizabeth did not look around. She had forgotten her son was there. “You’re too young,” she said absently.

“I’m nearly nineteen, I am a man grown. I could keep him safe.”

She looked up at his bright hopeful face and his dark eyes, as dark as his father’s. “I cannot bear to let you go,” she said. “You stay home with me. This voyage is going to break hearts enough in this household and in others all over the country. I can’t risk you as well.” She saw the refusal in his face. “Ah, John, don’t waste your time reproaching me or trying to convince me,” she suddenly cried out bitterly. “He won’t take you. He won’t allow you to go. He will want to be with the duke alone.”

“It is always the duke,” J said resentfully.

She turned her face from her son to look into the fire. “I know,” she said. “If I had been able to hide from that knowledge before, I would certainly know it now. Now that he has told me to my face and repeated it – that he is their man and not mine.”

Elizabeth did not come to see the fleet sail from Stokes Bay near Portsmouth. It was too far from Essex, and besides she did not want to see her husband walking up the narrow gangplank to his master’s ship, the Triumph, supervising the loading of his master’s goods. On this warlike expedition Buckingham was taking a full-sized harp with a harpist, a couple of milk cows, a dozen laying hens, a massive box of books for reading in his leisure hours and an enormous coach with livery for his servants for his triumphant progress through La Rochelle.

Watching this fanciful equipment lumbering up the gangplank, John was rather relieved that Elizabeth was not with him. Six thousand foot soldiers slouched unwillingly aboard the fleet, a hundred cavalry. The king himself rode down to Portsmouth for a farewell dinner with his Lord High Admiral, and bade him farewell with a dozen kisses, wishing him Godspeed on his mission.

The mission itself remained uncertain. Firstly they were to harry French shipping as they sailed to La Rochelle, but, as it happened, though the July seas were calm and pleasant they saw no French shipping and could not complete their orders. Buckingham’s court played cards for desperately high stakes and held a poetry competition as they sailed southward. There was a good deal of hard drinking and laughter.

The next part of the orders bade them to go to La Rochelle for the grateful welcome of the besieged townspeople. Even this apparently simple command could not be fulfilled. When the fleet hove to before the town and spread the pennants so that the town could see that the great duke himself had come to relieve the siege, the townspeople were neither grateful nor particularly welcoming. They were deep in complicated and subtle negotiations with Richelieu’s agents for their rights to practice their religion, and to live freely among other Frenchmen. The arrival of Buckingham’s fleet threw their diplomatic agreements into jeopardy.

“So we can go home with honor,” John suggested. He was standing at the back of Buckingham’s richly decorated cabin. Seated around the table were his advisers, French Protestant leaders among them.

“Never! We must show that we are serious,” Soubise the Frenchman said. “We should take the Ile de Rhé at the harbor mouth and then they will see we are in earnest. It would give them the courage to declare against Richelieu, break off these negotiations and defy him.”

“But our orders were to wait for them to declare,” John said levelly. “Not stir up trouble. The townspeople must invite our help. And if they do not declare against Richelieu, we were ordered to sail to Bordeaux and escort the English wine fleet home. We need not fight for La Rochelle, if the townspeople do not invite us.”

The Frenchman tried to catch Buckingham’s eye. “My lord duke did not come all this way to fetch a wine fleet home,” he laughed.

“Nor to find himself embroiled in a quarrel which no one wants,” John said stoutly.

Buckingham lifted his head from admiring a large new diamond on his finger. “Are you homesick, John?” he asked coldly.

Tradescant flushed. “I am your man,” he said steadily. “Nothing else. And I don’t want to see you drawn into a battle for a small island opposite a small town on a small river in France.”

“This is La Rochelle!” Soubise exclaimed. “Hardly a small town!”

“If they are not willing to fight for themselves,” John persisted doggedly, “then why should we fight for them?”

“For glory?” Buckingham suggested, smiling across the room at John.

“You are glorious enough,” John smiled back, indicating the new diamond, and a shining stone in Buckingham’s thick plumed hat on the table before him.

The Frenchman swore softly underneath his breath. “Are we to go home as if we were defeated then?” he demanded. “Without firing a shot? That will please the king, that will silence Parliament! They will say that we were suborned, that we are the queen’s men, papist men! They will say that this mission was a masque, a piece of theater. They will say we were players, not soldiers.”

Buckingham rose from his seat and stretched, his dark curls brushing the gilded roof of his cabin. “Not them,” he said softly. John watched warily. He knew the signs.

“They will mock us in the streets,” Soubise lamented.

“Not them,” Buckingham repeated.

“They will say it was a gesture to seduce the Queen of France,” Soubise said, going as far as he dared. “That you were throwing down a glove to her husband and that you did not fulfil your challenge.”

For a moment John thought that the man had gone too far. Buckingham stiffened at the mention of the queen’s name. But then his smile returned. “Not them,” he said. “And I will tell you why they will not mock. Because we will lay siege to the island, we will take the island, then we will take La Rochelle, and we will go home as conquering heroes.”

The Frenchman gasped and then beamed as the cabin of men burst into applause. Buckingham gleamed at the praise. “Set to!” he shouted above the laughter and applause. “We will land tomorrow!”

It was a shambles but it did the job. Inexperienced sailors, press-ganged from ale houses up and down the south coast of England, fought to keep the landing boats steady in the currents that swirled around the boggy and uninviting beaches. Inexperienced soldiers press-ganged from the poorhouses and ale houses of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland cringed from the waves and from the French soldiers, forewarned and splendidly armed, drawn up to greet them. All would have been lost but for the duke, conspicuous beneath his standard, dressed in glorious gold and crimson, who rowed up and down between the boats and urged the men on shore. Reckless of danger, laughing when the cannon from his ships roared over his head, he was a leader from a fable. He was indeed a champion fit to bed the most beautiful queen in Europe. When they saw him, still sporting his diamonds, with his golden sword on his hip, their spirits lifted. It was impossible that such a man, such a glamorous golden laughing man, could ever be defeated.

His clear voice could be heard above the noise of the waves, the thunderous bellow of the cannon and the yells of ill-trained officers. “Come on!” he shouted. “Come on! For God and the king! For the king! For me! And let’s bugger the Catholics!”

They landed in a roar at his bawdiness, and the French, faced by an enemy suddenly renewed, powerful and even laughing, turned and fled. By the afternoon Buckingham stood on the beach of Rhé, his sword wet only with seawater, and knew himself to be triumphant.

John went inland with the scouts and saw the French cavalry driven back and back over brackish fields of rough grass where a hundred, a thousand, red poppies blew. “Like soldiers in red coats,” John said. He shivered as if it were an omen and bent to pluck a couple of the drying seed heads.

“Still gardening, Mr. Tradescant?” one of the scouts asked.

“They are a fine color,” he said. “A plentiful show.”

“Red as blood,” the scout said.

“Yes.”

The English luck held. Within days Buckingham held the whole of the little island of Rhé and the French army was holed up in one tiny half-finished castle on the landward side: St. Martin. John was sent to spy out the lie of the land.

“Tell me what their fort is like, John. Give me an idea of the size and how strong it is,” Buckingham commanded, as he strolled down the lines and came across Tradescant, digging a little nursery bed for any rare plants he might find during his stay. “Leave gardening, man, and tell me how their fort is placed.”

John put his trowel to one side at once, and slipped his satchel on his back, ready to set out.

“I’m no engineer,” he warned Buckingham.

“I know that,” his lord replied. “But you’re careful and you have a good eye, and you have been in a siege and under fire, which is more than can be said for any one of us. Go and have a look and when you come back, come to me privately and tell me what you think. I can’t trust a word these Frenchmen speak. All they want is victory at whatever price, and that price would include me and they would still pay it gladly.”

John nodded. He did not ask what, in that case, they were doing there, camped on a French beach on a small island off France. It was not his nature to complain of the obvious. He took up his blackthorn stick and set off, along the beach toward the other side of the island. Buckingham watched him go and noted the limp which favored John’s aching arthritic knee.

He was back late in the evening, with a brace of cuttings and a rough sketch.

“Good God, what have you in your hat?” Buckingham demanded. He was seated before his tent, at a table of exquisite marquetry, looking young and careless with his white linen shirt undone at the throat and his hair tumbling in black curls about his shoulders.

John carefully took one of the plants by the leaf and held it up. “It’s a new sort of gillyflower,” he said. “I’ve never seen such leaves before.” He held out the plant. “Do the leaves have a scent?”

Buckingham sniffed. “Nothing I can smell, John. And – forgive me – but you were sent out as a scout to bring us news of the French fortification, not to go plant-gathering.”

“I sat among the plants while I drew a sketch of the fort,” John said, with simple dignity. “A man can do two things at once.”

Buckingham grinned at him. “A man such as you can do a dozen,” he said sweetly. “Show me your plan, John.”

John unfolded the paper and spread it on the little table before his master. “The fort is built like a star,” he said. “And only half-finished on one side. Our trouble will be that the north side, on the strand, is facing La Rochelle over the sea and can be easily relieved by the French troops who are camped around the besieged city on the mainland. We hold the island, right enough; they will get no help from here. And the town of La Rochelle is holding out against the papist French army. But there are sally ports all along the base of the St. Martin’s fort wall and they have boats moored ready. We will have to cut them off from the mainland before they can be reduced.”

Buckingham looked at John’s sketch. “What about a direct attack? Never mind starving them. An attack against the walls?”

John’s mouth turned down. “I don’t advise it,” he said briefly. “The walls are new-built and high. The windows look very deep. You can’t hammer your way in, and you will lose half your men trying to scale it.”

“They have to be starved out?”

John nodded.

“So if we put our army all around them on the landward side, can you build me a barrier to span the seaward side to prevent them getting ships in and out?”

John thought for a moment. “I can try, my lord,” he said. “But these are high seas. It’s not like building a raft across the Isis, it’s like building a raft across Portsmouth harbor. The waves come very high, and if there is a storm, anything we built would be smashed.”

“Surely if we have enough wood, and chains…”

“If the summer weather remains calm it might hold,” John said doubtfully. “But one night of high winds would smash it.”

Buckingham got up swiftly and strode forward, looking down on the fort. “I tell you, John, I cannot stay here seated before a little fort, looking at it forever,” he said, his voice so low that no one but Tradescant could hear him. “I am laying siege to them, and they are trapped inside the fort, right enough; but all I have to feed my men is what I brought in my ships. I need support as much as the fort. Their army and their suppliers are over a small channel of water, while my army and suppliers are many miles away. And their king is commanded by Richelieu, while my king…” He broke off, and then saw John’s uneasy face.

“He will not forget me,” he said firmly. “Even now he will be preparing a fleet to come after us and revictual and supply us. But you see that I am in a hurry. I cannot wait. The French in the citadel of St. Martin must starve and surrender at once. Otherwise we will beat them to it. We will starve and surrender even though we are supposed to be laying siege to them.”

“I’ll plan something,” John promised.

There were no tents for the men nor for the poorer officers; no one in England had thought that the expedition would need tents. John laid his soldier’s pack on the ground beside the other men, heeled in his new gillyflower in his little nursery bed, and then set about planning his blockade of St. Martin.

Within an hour or two he had his drawing of ships’ timbers and a couple of spare masts chained together. The senior shipwright and John supervised the throwing of the wood in the water and watched the sailors leaning out from little boats and struggling to chain them together.

“Those were our spare masts and timbers to repair the ships,” the shipwright observed dourly. “Better pray we don’t lose a mast on the way home.”

“We can’t go home until the citadel falls,” John reasoned. “First things first.”

“And have you heard when they will come to relieve us?” the shipwright asked. “The lads were saying that a great fleet is coming behind us, now that the king knows that the duke has been successful, now they know that we are at war.”

“It will come soon,” John said, with more confidence than he felt. “My lord told me that the king had promised it.”

John was right about the fragility of the timber barrier. The high wind blowing over their camp in the next week warned him of the storm that was coming. He crawled out of his makeshift shelter and looked out to sea. In the darkness he could see nothing. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Buckingham, sleepless too.

“Will your blockade hold?”

“Not if this wind keeps up,” Tradescant replied. “I am sorry, my lord.”

He could feel the warmth of Buckingham’s breath as he leaned forward to be heard above the storm.

“Don’t ask for pardon, John,” he said. “You warned me of the danger and I told you of the need. But at first light tomorrow get out there and build me another barrier. I must have St. Martin cut off.”

John’s next attempt was to use the landing-craft ships, lashed together prow to stern across the channel before the St. Martin citadel. Two small camps of soldiers were set up at either side, to guard the barrier and to take the occasional pot shot at those citizens of St. Martin who were bold enough to peep over the half-finished walls. The building work on the fort had almost ceased, although the need to finish the citadel had never been greater.

“They’re weary and hungry,” Buckingham said with satisfaction. “We will outlast them.”

Within a week of the new barrier being in place there were more high winds, and the stormy waters, pushing the landing craft in opposite directions, broke through. Some of the officers were openly contemptuous of Tradescant at the council of war.

“I am sorry,” John said dourly. “But you are asking me to build a barrier in what is almost open sea. I can rebuild it. I shall bring the ships closer in to shore and run hawsers one from another. The men on board ship can keep watch, and if a hawser breaks we can replace it. But the weather is getting worse; I can think of nothing which will withstand the autumn storms.”

Buckingham’s face was grave. “The king’s fleet will arrive this month,” he said. “It will come without fail. His Majesty loves me and I have his solemn promise of a fleet in September. I have asked him to send more hawsers and timber as well as munitions, money and food. And three thousand more fighting men. As soon as it arrives we will take the castle and move on to La Rochelle itself. Once we’re on the mainland all our troubles will be over.”

There was a brief dispirited silence. Only John dared voice what they were all thinking. “If he is delayed…,” he began cautiously. “If the king cannot raise the money for the fleet…”

Buckingham’s sharp gaze warned John to be silent; but he doggedly continued.

“I beg your pardon, my lord, but if His Majesty is delayed in sending succor then we will have to withdraw for this year,” he said stoutly.

“You are afraid,” one of the Frenchmen declared. He whispered something behind his hand about gardens and easy lives.

“I know that we are running short of food and munitions,” John said steadily. “And the men are on half-pay. If there was anywhere for them to go they would have deserted already. We cannot make them fight if they are hungry. They cannot shoot their muskets if they have no powder.” He looked at Buckingham, past the gentlemen who were openly laughing at him. “Forgive me, my lord. But I am much with the common soldiers and I know what they are thinking, and I know that they are going hungry.”

Buckingham glanced at his table where a flagon of red wine gleamed beside a plate of biscuits. “Are we short of food?” he asked, surprised.

“We’re not starving; but rations have been cut,” John replied. “The Protestants are sending us all they can from La Rochelle – but it is not justice for us to eat their supplies. We came here to relieve them, not to devour their stores. And they themselves are surrounded by the papist French troops; they cannot go on supplying us forever.”

“I will speak with the French commander,” Buckingham said thoughtfully. “He is a gentleman. Perhaps we can make some sort of terms.”

“We should starve them to death and drive them into the sea,” Soubise said hastily. “We have raised the siege; we should smash them into nothing!”

“Next year,” Tradescant said hastily. “When we come back with another fleet.”

A package of letters for the English troops had gotten safely through. The king had written, Buckingham’s wife Kate had written and his mother, the cunning old countess. None of them had sent money to buy food or pay the troops, and there was no news of the fleet being equipped and setting sail. The duke kept the bad news to himself but no one seeing the way he thrust the letter from the king inside his embroidered waistcoat could doubt that Charles had sent fond words but no news of an English fleet ploughing its way through stormy seas from Portsmouth to relieve his beloved friend.

The letter from the old countess was even more ominous. She urged her son to come home and reclaim his place at court. No man could risk being too far from one of the Stuarts; they had notoriously short memories. Buckingham himself had replaced Rochester, the previous Favorite, in the affections of King James, and now King Charles was coming under the sway of new advisers. William Laud, a new bishop, a common red-faced little man, was advising him at every turn. Buckingham must hurry home before he was forgotten.

Charles wrote to his dearest friend that he had no money but that he was raising funds by every means possible. He wrote that he was thinking of nothing but ways to get money to send a fleet. The old countess wrote to Buckingham in their private code that Charles had just bought the Duke of Mantua’s entire collection of pictures for fifteen thousand pounds – enough to equip and send two fleets. He had been unable to resist them at such a bargain price, and now he was penniless again. The money for the fleet had been squandered twice over – Buckingham need not hope for support.

Buckingham tore up her letter and scattered the tiny pieces over the stern of the Triumph. “Oh, Charles,” he sighed. “How can you love me as you do and yet betray me like this?”

The pieces blew in an eddy of wind, like flecks of snow. Superstitiously, Buckingham looked up at the September sky. There were thick clouds on the horizon; the fair weather was due to break. “He is a sweet man,” he said to himself. “The sweetest man that ever lived, but the most faithless friend and king that could ever be.”

He wrapped his cape around him a little closer. He knew that any time his name was mentioned at court, Charles would think of him with love. He knew that he would return to an openhearted welcome. But he knew also that a collection of pictures like the Duke of Mantua’s would be irresistible to a man who from boyhood had been able to have what he wanted at the instant he had wanted it. Charles would think that Buckingham, that the English fleet, that the full-scale war with France could wait while he amassed yet more money from the hard-pressed taxpayers of England. He would never understand that it was he who had to do without. He had no practice in self-denial. For all his sympathy and charm and sweetness, there was a core of pure selfishness in Charles that nothing could penetrate.

“I will have to win and return home or I will be left here to die,” Buckingham said. The last pieces of his mother’s letter blew, sank into water, and then slipped away. Buckingham watched them go down into the heaving greenness and realized that he was facing his own defeat and death, and that he had never thought before that his life and his charmed career could end in despair.

He looked up at the horizon at the dark layers of cloud. The wind was blowing the rain toward the Triumph and toward the string of English ships moored as a thin barrier between St. Martin and the sea of La Rochelle.

“I will win and return home,” Buckingham vowed. “I was not born and raised so high to die in a cold sea off France. I was born for great things, for greater than this. I will see St. Martin razed to the ground and then I will go home and I shall have that fifteen thousand pounds poured into my hands for my pains; and I will forget I was ever here, in fear and in want.”

He turned back to the waist of the ship and saw John Tradescant, standing a yard away, watching him.

“Confound you, John! You startled me. What the Devil are you doing?”

“Just watching you, my lord.”

Buckingham laughed. “Did you fear an assassin’s knife on my own ship?”

John shook his head. “I feared disappointment and despair,” he said. “And sometimes a companion can guard you against them too.”

Buckingham slid his hand around John’s shoulders and pressed his face against the older man’s thick-muscled neck. John smelled comfortingly of home, of homespun cloth, clean linen and earth. “Yes,” Buckingham said shortly. “Stay by me, John.”