Earthly Joys

November 1628

They crossed the river at Lambeth with a waterman rowing them: Jane bulky and eight months pregnant in the stern of the boat, John, Elizabeth and J seated amidships. Elizabeth had the keys to their new home in her lap, bought outright with Buckingham’s diamonds. When she turned the heavy key over and over the sun glinted on the cold metal.

On the south side of the river was the Swan Inn, where J had ordered a cart to meet them. He helped Jane up and then climbed up beside her. John smiled when he saw how his son held his wife as the cart lurched in the ruts of the South Lambeth road.

The journey was a short one and none of them spoke. They were waiting for John to break the silence but he said nothing. He had handed over the diamonds and the responsibility together. He sat in the wagon as if he were convalescent, weak from a long illness. His wife and his son could take the decisions for him.

“There it is,” J said at last, pointing ahead. “I hope to God he likes it,” he muttered in an undertone to Jane. “He let us buy it for him, but what if he refuses us now?”

Tradescant looked at his new home. It stood with its back to the road, an old half-timbered farmhouse with crisscross beams turning silvery gray from the weather of many seasons. The plaster between the beams had once been painted white but was mellowing to the color of pale mud. There was a little stream running between the road and the farm, crossed by a low bridge, broad enough for a cart. John got down and walked across it alone, the others waiting for him to speak.

The garden between the road and the house was a tiny patch, overgrown with briars and nettles. Tradescant walked around the house to the front. It faced southeast, placed to catch the morning and midday sun, and before it lay a good broad acre of meadow. Tradescant scuffed the heel of his boot in the soil and then bent down and inspected it. It was a dark soil, rich and easy to work. John took up a handful and rubbed it in his palm. He could grow things in this earth, he thought. Beyond the meadow was an orchard. He walked down to where the little wooden fence divided the meadow from the trees and measured it with his eyes. About two acres, he thought, and already stocked with apples, pears and plums; and along the south-facing wall a quince tree was growing in a ragged fan beside a pair of peach trees, roughly espaliered.

John had a momentary pang of homesickness for the kitchen garden he had left behind at New Hall with the tall heated wall built to his own innovative design, and the dozens of boys to carry dung and water for the trees. He shook his head. There was no point grieving. He had left beautiful gardens before now and started afresh. The worst had been leaving Theobalds Palace for the new house at Hatfield; and in the end Hatfield had been his great pride. He could make something of this garden, which would not be on the scale of Theobalds or Hatfield or New Hall, but would be his own. The fruit from these trees would be for his table. His grandson would sit in their shade. And no man could ever order him to leave them.

John turned back to look at the house, taking in for the first time the sloping roof of red clay tiles and the handsome tall clusters of chimney pots. Before the house there was a stone-flagged area overhung by the tiled roof and railed like the side of a ship, placed to overlook the meadow and the orchard. John walked back through the overgrown grass to the house and up the three creaking steps to the terrace. He turned, leaned on the rail and looked out over his property, the first good-sized garden he had ever owned.

He felt his face creasing in a smile of satisfaction. At last he had found a place where he could put down roots and see his son and his grandson secure in their future.

J, Elizabeth and Jane came around the corner of the house to see John leaning against the pillar of the terrace and surveying his acres.

“It’s like the deck of a ship,” Jane observed perceptively. “No wonder you look at home.”

“I shall call it the Ark,” John said. “Because we have come to it, two by two, to be safe from the deluge that is threatening the whole country, and because it will be an ark of rarities, which we will carry safe through the troubled times.”

They moved in at once. John drew up plans for the garden, and sent to Lambeth for a couple of lads to dig and weed in the orchard, and to a nearby farm for the loan of a horse and a plough to turn over the earth before the house. They planned a garden that would grow fruit and herbs for selling in London, where good-quality provender could command high prices. But also they knew that every gardener in the kingdom would long for a chestnut tree, for a double plum, for the Russian larches. It was the launching of a trade which was in its infancy. Every good gardener had spare stock of ordinary plants; the excessive bounty of God saw that where there was one plant there were a hundred seeds in the autumn. Every successful gardener exchanged stock or sold it at a profit to other gardeners. But what they longed for was the rare, the exotic, the strange. When John had worked for a lord it was part of his task to ensure that the gardens were full of rarities and he had guarded his seeds and saplings, and given them away to only his dearest of friends like the herbalist John Gerard or the gardener John Parkinson. Now he could sell them to men who had begged him for a cutting only a few years earlier. Now he could sell them to any gardener who might write to him, and already there were letters from all over England, even from Europe, asking Tradescant for seeds and saplings and yearling plants.

John had plans also for the house. He commissioned a builder to construct a new wing which would nearly double the size of the house.

J took him to one side while the men were unloading a wagon of furniture, and spoke to him urgently while Jane and Elizabeth went to and fro watching the stowing of trunks.

“I know this is to be our family home, but we don’t need to build it all at once,” he said. “The windows you have planned for the downstairs room will go from ceiling to floor. How will we ever afford the glass? And what if it breaks?”

“You will be bringing up a young family here,” John said to J. “It’s time you had some room to yourselves. And we need a good-sized room, a handsome room, for the rarities.”

“But Venetian windows…,” J expostulated.

John laid a finger to his nose. “This is to be my rarities room,” he said. “We’ll store them here in a beautiful room and show them to people who come to see them. We’ll charge them sixpence each to enter, and they can stay as long as they like and look around at the things.”

J was uncomprehending. “What things?”

“The two wagons of Buckingham’s rarities,” John explained precisely. “What did you think to do with them?”

“I thought we would sell them,” J confessed, a little shamefaced. “And keep the money.”

John shook his head. “We keep them,” he said. “They will be the making of us. Rare plants in the garden, rare and beautiful things in the house. It is our ark with rare and lovely things. And every day the ships come in with more things ordered by my lord duke. We shall buy them on our own account and set them in our room.”

“And we charge people for looking?”

“Why not?”

“It just seems so odd. I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”

“My lord duke kept his cabinet of curiosities for his friends to look at and enjoy. And the Earl Cecil before him.”

“He didn’t charge them sixpence a time!”

“No, but we will open our doors to ordinary people. To anyone who wishes to come and see. Not friends of ours, or even people with letters of introduction. Just anyone who is curious about wonderful and peculiar things. We let them come!”

“But how would they know of it?”

“We will speak of it everywhere. We’ll make a catalogue so people can read of all the things we have on show.”

“D’you think people would come?”

John nodded. “In Leiden and Paris the universities have great collections and they show them to the students, and to anyone who applies to see them. Why not here?”

“Because we are not a university!”

John shrugged. “We have a collection which is equal to my lord Cecil’s, and many men admired that. We make a beautiful room with the big things hanging from the ceiling and displayed on the walls and the small things bedded in little drawers in big cabinets. Seeds and shells, clothing and goods, toys and ingenious things. I’m sure we can do it, J. And it will mean that we are earning money in the autumn and winter when the garden work is less.”

J nodded but then remembered the cost of the panes of glass. “But Venetian windows are not necessary…”

“We need good light if we are to show rarities,” John said firmly. “This is not some little petty fusty cabinet. This is the first rarities show in the country; it will be one of the first things to see in London. A grand room with the things laid out handsomely. People will not come to see them at all if they are not housed in a proud and handsome manner. Venetian windows and waxed floors! And sixpence a head!”

J deferred to his father’s judgment, and only muttered about grand schemes and a duke’s tastes over his dinner that night, but the two men clashed again when J, trundling a sapling in a barrow around the wall of the new wing, glanced up and saw the stonemason fixing in place a handsome coat of arms.

“What are you doing?” he yelled upward.

The stonemason glanced down and pulled his cap to J. “Handsome, isn’t it?”

J dumped the sapling and ran to the orchard, where John was at the top of a fruit-picker’s ladder, pruning out the dead wood on an old pear tree. “D’you think this can be a Spanish pear?” John asked. “I brought one back for my Sir Robert from the Lowlands. Could they have gotten hold of one and planted it here?”

“Never mind that now,” J said. “The stonemason is putting up a coat of arms on our house!”

John hung his saw on a protruding branch and turned his attention to his son. J, looking up at his father comfortably leaning against the trunk, thought that they had reversed their roles and that John was like a feckless laughing boy scrumping fruit up a tree and he was like the worried older man.

“I know,” John said with a gleam. “Do us credit, I thought.”

“You knew?” J demanded. “You knew he had some ridiculous coat of arms drawn up for us?”

“I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” John said easily. “I drew them myself. I rather like it. Leaves as background, and then the shield laid across it with three fleurs-de-lys, and then a helmet on top with a little crown and fleur-de-lys on that.”

“But what will the College of Heralds say?”

John shrugged. “Who cares what they say?”

“We will care when they fine us, and make us take it down, and humiliate us before our new neighbors.”

John shook his head. “We’ll get away with it,” he said confidently.

“But we’re not gentry! We’re gardeners.”

John came stiffly down his ladder and took J by the shoulder, turning him to see the house.

“What’s that?”

“Our house.”

“A good-sized house, new wing, Venetian windows, right?”

“Yes.”

John turned his son southward again. “And what’s that?”

“The orchard.”

“How big?

“Only two acres.”

“But beyond it?”

“All right, another twenty acres… but Father…”

“We’re landowners,” John said. “We’re not gardeners any more. We’re landowners with duties and obligations and a large family business to run… and a crest of arms.”

“They’ll make us take it down,” J warned.

Tradescant waved a dismissive hand and climbed slowly back up his ladder. “Not they. Not when they see who’s coming to the Ark.”

J hesitated. “Why? Who is coming?”

“Everyone who is anyone,” John said grandly. “And all their country cousins. When your baby is born he will grow up to be knighted, I don’t doubt it. Sir John Tradescant… sounds very well, doesn’t it? Sir John.”

“I might call him Josiah, after his other grandfather, a respected city tradesman who knows his place and is proud of it,” J said mutinously, and had the pleasure of seeing a flicker of doubt cross his father’s face.

“Nonsense!” John said. “Sir John Tradescant of Lambeth.”