Earthly Joys

1630

It was not stormy weather, but a sort of peace which caught the country by surprise. The MPs dispersed in obedience to the king’s order and though they took their complaints to their homes in every corner of the kingdom, there was no popular groundswell to sweep them back to confrontation in the city. The king set to work to rule without Parliament – as he had threatened to do – and that turned out to be almost no rule at all. The silence in the Houses of Parliament meant there was no forum for debate. The vacuum of power meant that things rubbed along as they had always done. The towns and cities were run, as they had always been, by a loose alliance of magistrates, gentry and vicars, and by the powerful weight of custom and practice.

In Lambeth, Frances’s promised brother did not come, though she outgrew her baby complaints, learned to walk, learned to talk and was even given a small corner of the garden and a dozen cuttings of pinks and twenty sweet pea seeds for her to try her hand at gardening. She was indulged – as the only baby in a house of four adults is bound to be indulged; but nothing spoiled her. As she grew older she still loved the echoey airiness of the rarities room, and would still go piggyback with her grandfather down to the end of the orchard. As she grew stronger and heavier John’s limp became more and more pronounced under the extra burden of her weight and he would roll in his walk like the old sailor he sometimes claimed to be.

He had a special voice for her, a meditative nonsense-telling voice which he used for no one else. Only his seedlings in the frame and Frances were treated to his “tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding.” Elizabeth would watch him and the little girl from the window as they went hand in hand down the garden and feel at last a sense of relief that she and John, J and Jane were settled at last.

“We’ve put down some roots,” John said to her one night as he saw her smile across the dinner table. The girl laid their dinner before them – they had a girl now, and a woman cook in the kitchen and a lad in the house, as well as three gardeners. “I think we should have a motto.”

“Not a motto,” J said under his breath. “Please, no.”

“A motto,” John said firmly. “To go under the crest. You shall write it, J. You have Latin.”

“I can’t think of anything that would fit a man who was born and bred a gardener and made up his own crest, and had some fool of a mason carve it in stone for anyone to see,” J said scathingly.

John smiled, unperturbed. “Why, the king himself is the grandson of a mere Mister,” he said. “These are times for men to rise.”

“And the Duke of Buckingham was called an upstart to the end of his days,” Jane observed.

John dropped his eyes to his plate so that no one could see his sharp pang of grief.

“Even so,” J said. “I can’t think of a motto which would suit.”

They were a family which did not fit the usual tags handed out by the College of Heralds. They were on the way to being gentry, with their own house and land, and rents coming in from the fields at Hatfield, and a couple of houses newly bought at a bargain price in the city. But John and J still worked with their hands deep in the dark earth of their fields and gardens, and could tell to the nearest farthing how much a seedling had cost them in terms of labor and the price of the seed.

Tradescant plants went all over the country, all over Europe. John Gerard the herbalist borrowed from their garden and gave new cuttings back to them. John Parkinson quoted them by name in his book on gardening and acknowledged his debt to them, even though he was the king’s own botanist. Every gardener at every great house in the land knew that for something strange and lovely the Tradescants at the Ark were the only men to ask. The Ark was the only place to buy rare tulips outside the Low Countries and their prices were as reasonable as they could be in a market which was still growing and growing every season.

The orders came in almost every day. Once the MPs were forced home to their estates there was little for the gentlemen to do but to look to their fields and their gardens.

“His Majesty did us a great favor,” John remarked to Elizabeth as she sat at the dining table and sorted seeds into packets for Jane to label and dispatch. “If the squires were still at Westminster they would not be planting their gardens.”

“We’re the only ones likely to be grateful for it then,” she said with something of her old sharpness. “Mrs. Hurte was telling me that in the city they are saying that we might as well never have had a parliament if the king is going to run the country like a tyrant and never hear the will of the people. There are new taxes every day. We had a demand for a salt tax only yesterday.”

“Peace,” John said quietly, and Elizabeth bent her head to her work.

They were both right. The country was enjoying a sort of peace bought at the price of never addressing the difficulties between Parliament and king. King Charles was ruling as he fondly imagined his great aunt Elizabeth had ruled, with little regard for Parliament, with little advice and on the smooth oil of his subjects’ love. He and the queen went from great house to great house, hunting, dancing, playing in masques, watching theater, assured everywhere that they went, in a dozen pageants of loyal verse, that the people loved them next only to their God.

Henrietta Maria had learned a little wisdom in her hard years as an apprentice queen. When she heard that Buckingham, her worst enemy, was dead, she did not allow one word of delight to escape her. She went straight to the king and when he emerged from his lonely vigil of mourning she was there, dressed in black and looking as grief-stricken as she could manage. In a moment he transferred to her the passionate need which he carried with him always, like a sickness in his blood: the sickness of the less favored son, the sickness of the plain son of a man who liked handsome men. Henrietta Maria staggered under the weight of his embrace but kept her footing. There was nothing in the world she wanted more than his adoration. It made her complete as a woman; it made her complete as a queen.

Nothing contradicted his newfound happiness; nothing was ever allowed to distress or trouble His Majesty. The plague in London meant merely that they moved early to Oatlands Palace near Weybridge, or Windsor, or Beaulieu in Hampshire. Poverty in Cornwall, Presbyterianism in Scotland, the papers from local lords or JPs warning the king that all was not completely well in his kingdom, pursued him from hunting lodge to palace, and waited for a rainy day for him to give them his fleeting attention. His early appetite for work had deserted him once he had found how little rewarded he was for duty. Parliament had never thanked him for the memoranda in his tiny handwriting, and in any case there was no Parliament now. The holders of the great offices of state, incompetent and corrupt, worked as well without supervision as they did under the king’s erratic gaze. It was easier, and pleasanter, for him to turn the business of kingship into a country-wide masque with people demonstrating their devotion in dances and songs, and the king play-acting at ruling with a crown of gold wire on his head.

The king’s first son and heir was born in May 1630, and three months later a messenger from the court, currently at Windsor, knocked peremptorily on the door of the Lambeth house and glanced upward, but did not comment, at the coat of arms fixed proudly on the wall.

“A message for John Tradescant,” he announced as Jane opened the door.

She stepped back to show him into the parlor and he went ahead of her as he would have preceded a Quaker serving woman. Jane, who knew that she should despise the vanity of worldly show, gestured rather grandly to the chair at the fireside. “You may be seated,” she said with the dignity of a duchess. “Mr. Tradescant, my father-in-law, will join you shortly.” She turned on her heel and stalked from the room, and then fled to the garden where John was transplanting seedlings.

“Get up! and get washed! There is a royal herald for you in the parlor!” she exclaimed.

John got slowly to his feet. “A royal herald?”

“Trouble?” J asked. “Not the coat of arms?”

“Surely not,” John said comfortably. “Give him a glass of wine, Jane, and tell him I am coming at once.”

“You will change your coat,” she reminded him. “He is in full livery and with a powdered wig.”

“It’s only a herald,” John said mildly. “Not Queen Henrietta Maria herself.”

Jane picked up her skirts and fled back to the house to order the kitchenmaid to pour a cool glass of wine and put it on the best silver tray.

She found the herald looking out from the window to the garden. “How many men does Mr. Tradescant employ here?” he asked, trying to engage her in conversation to make amends for his earlier mistake.

She glanced out. To her embarrassment it was not the garden lads but her husband and her father-in-law, strolling up from the orchard with a hoe and a bucket apiece. “Half a dozen in midsummer,” she said. “Fewer in winter.”

“And do you have many visitors?”

“Yes,” she said. “Both to the garden and to the cabinet of rarities. The garden is rich with both rare fruit and flowers; you are welcome to walk in it, if you wish.”

“Later perhaps,” the herald said loftily. “I must speak with Mr. Tradescant now.”

“He will come shortly,” Jane said. “I could show you some of the rarities in the cabinets while you wait.”

To her relief, the door behind her opened. “Here I am,” John said. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”

At least he had washed his hands, but he still wore his old gardening coat. The herald, whose face revealed nothing, realized that the workingman he had seen from the window was in fact the gentleman he had come to visit.

“Mr. Tradescant,” he began. “I am carrying a letter from the king, and I am to await your reply.”

He held out a scroll of paper with a thick red seal at the bottom. John took it and went to the window, where the August sunshine poured in.

Jane had to prevent herself from moving behind him and reading over his shoulder.

“Hmmm hmmm hmmm,” John said, skimming the customary compliments and addresses at the start of the letter. “Why! His Majesty is commanding me to be his gardener at Oatlands Palace! I am honored.”

“His Majesty has just given the palace to Her Majesty the Queen,” the herald informed them. “And she wants a garden like Hatfield or New Hall.”

John raised his head. “It’s a long time since I planted a garden for a palace. And I am sixty years old this year. There are other gardeners Their Majesties could employ, and I would have thought the queen would have preferred a garden in the French style.”

The herald raised his neat plucked eyebrows. “Perhaps. But I am not in a position to advise His Majesty or Her Majesty as to their course of action. I merely obey their royal decree.” The inference was clear.

“Oh,” John said, corrected. “I see.”

“His Majesty ordered me to take back a reply to him,” the herald continued loftily. “Is it your wish that I tell him you are sixty years of age and that it is your opinion that he didn’t want you in the first place?”

John grimaced. An invitation from the king was tantamount to a royal command. He was not able to refuse. “Tell His Majesty that I am honored for the invitation and that I accept, I gratefully accept, and that it will always be my pleasure to serve Their Majesties in any way I can.”

The herald unbent slightly. “I will deliver your message. His Majesty will expect you at Oatlands Palace within the week.”

John nodded. “I shall be delighted to attend.”

The herald bowed. “An honor to meet you, Mr. Tradescant.”

“The honor is all mine,” John said grandly.

The herald bowed himself from the room and left John and his daughter-in-law alone.

“Royal service,” she said grimly. “J won’t like it.”

John grimaced. “He will have to bear it. You can’t refuse the king. You heard him. My acceptance was just a matter of form; he knew what day I had to start work.”

“We said we would never work for another master,” Jane reminded him.

John nodded. “We never thought of this. But perhaps it won’t be so bad.” He turned and looked out of the window at his little farm. “I’ve heard they have a great orangery,” he said. “But they’ve never had much luck with getting the trees to flower. There’s a garden just for the king’s use and another for the queen. There’s a massive fountain in the great garden. The whole place is like a village set about with gardens, built all ramshackle with one court running into another, overlooking the Thames. The trick of it will be to make sure that every corner has a pretty plant, that the gardens pull the whole site together so that every corner has a view.”

Jane heard her father-in-law casting aside the principle of independence for the offer of a fine garden to make. She stalked to the door. “Shall I tell J or will you?” she asked coldly. “For he will not care for making pretty views for such a king.”

“I’ll tell him,” John said absently. “I wonder if we have enough chestnut saplings to use one at the center of each court?”

John told J the news at dinner but he knew from the moment his son entered the dining room that Jane had forewarned him, and that J was forearmed.

“I swore I’d never work for another master,” he said.

“This would be for me,” John corrected him, mildly. “Working for us all. For the good of us all.”

J glanced at his wife.

“It would be for the queen,” she said bluntly. “A woman of vanity and a heretic.”

“She may be both of those,” John agreed without hesitation. “But she’s only the paymaster. She will not supervise us at all. J need never speak to her.”

“There’s something about them, though, that sticks in my throat like dry bread,” J said thoughtfully. “There’s something about a man calling himself nearer to God than me. Something about a man thinking himself a better man than me – almost an angel. Even if I never saw him and never served him, there’s something about it which goes against the grain for me.”

“Because it’s heresy,” Jane said flatly.

J shook his head. “Not just because of that,” he said. “Because it denies me – it denies that I think, just as he thinks. That I have ideals, just as he has ideals. That I too want, think and pray for better days, for the coming of the Great Day, the Last Day. If he is as far above me as an angel then I need not think and hope and pray, for God would hardly listen to me when the king is on his knees. It’s as if his importance makes me more little.” He glanced around at their surprised faces. “I daresay I’m not making any sense,” he said defensively. “I’m not good at arguing these things. It’s just what I’ve been thinking.”

“But what you’re saying would deny any king,” John said. “This one or any other. A good one or a bad one.”

J nodded reluctantly. “I just can’t see that any man should set himself up to be above another. I can’t see that any man needs more than one house. I can’t see that any man needs dozens of houses and hundreds of servants. I can’t see that he can be closer to God with these things – I would have thought he would be farther and farther away.”

John shifted uncomfortably on his wooden seat. “This is Leveller talk, my son. Next thing you will be denying any king but King Jesus and taking off for the common and waste lands.”

“I don’t care what it’s called,” J said steadily. “I wouldn’t be frightened from speaking my mind because others think the same thoughts but express them wildly. I know that I must think that England would be better without a man at its head who claims to speak for us, and know us, and yet clearly knows nothing at all of what it is like to be a man such as me.”

“He has advisers.”

J shrugged. “He is surrounded by courtiers and flatterers. He hears what they tell him and they only tell him what he wants to hear. He can have no judgment, he can have no wisdom. He is trapped in his vanity and ignorance like a fish in a fishpond and since it knows nothing else it thinks it is something divinely special. If it could breathe air and see the sky it would know it is nothing more than a large fish.”

John snorted with laughter at the thought of the long mournful face of his monarch and the juxtaposition of the face of a carp.

“But who will you employ if J will not go?” Elizabeth asked practically.

“I’ll have to find someone,” John said. “There are dozens of men who would be glad of the place. But I would rather work with you, J. And it seems to me you are bound to work for me if I ask it.”

J shifted on his seat. “You would not drive me to rebellion,” he said. “You would respect my conscience, Father. I am a full-grown man.”

“You’re twenty-two,” John said bluntly. “Barely into your majority. You make your own choices; you are a man with a wife and child of your own. But I am still your father and it will be my work which will put the bread on your table, if you refuse to work.”

“I work here!” J exclaimed, stung. “I work hard enough!”

“In winter we earn almost no money,” John pointed out. “We live off our savings. There is no stock to sell, and the visitors tail off in the bad weather. Last year we were down to the bottom of our savings by the spring. The work at the palace would be money paid to us all the year round.”

“Papist gold,” Jane muttered to her plate.

“Honestly earned by us,” John countered. “I am an old man. I did not think to go out to work to keep you, J. I did not think your conscience would be more precious than your duty to me.”

J shot a furious look at his father. “It’s always the same!” he burst out. “You are always the one who is free to come and go. I am always the one who has to obey. And now that we have a home where I want to stay, and now you are free to stay yourself, you are still going away. And now I have to go too!”

“I am not free,” John said sternly. “The king commands me.”

“Defy the king!” J shouted. “For once in your life don’t go at some great man’s bidding. For once in your life speak for yourself! Think for yourself! Defy the king!”

There was a long shocked silence.

John rose from the table and walked to the window and looked out over the garden rinsed of color and lovely in the gray light of dusk. A star was shining over the chestnut tree and somewhere in the orchard a nightingale started to sing.

“I will never defy the king,” he said. “I will not even hear such talk in my house.”

The pause stretched till breaking point and then J spoke low and earnestly. “Father, this is not Queen Elizabeth and you are not still working for Robert Cecil. This is not a king as she was a queen. This is not a country as it was then. This is a country that has been run into debt and torn apart by heresy. It is ruled by a vain fool who is ruled in turn by a papist wife, in the pay of her brother, the King of France. I cannot bear to go and work for such a king nor for her. I cannot bear to be under their command. If you force me to this I would rather leave the country altogether.”

John nodded, taking in J’s words. The two women, Elizabeth and Jane, sat silent, hardly breathing, waiting to hear what John would reply.

“Do you mean this?”

J, breathing heavily, merely nodded.

John sighed. “Then you must follow your conscience and go,” he said simply. “For the king is my master before God, and he has ordered me. And I am your father and should command your duty and I have ordered you. If you choose to defy me then you should go, J. Just as Adam and Eve had to leave their garden. There are laws in heaven and earth. I cannot pretend to you that it is otherwise. I have tolerated loose thoughts and wild talk from you all your life, even in my lord’s garden. But if you will not serve the king then you should not garden in his garden. You should not garden in his country.”

J rose from the table. His hands were trembling and he swiftly snatched them out of sight, behind his back.

“Wait-” Elizabeth said softly. Neither man paid any attention to her.

“I shall go, then,” J said as if he were testing his father’s resolve. John turned his back on the room and looked out to his garden.

“If you do not accept your obedience to me, and to the king above me, and to God above him, then you are no longer my son,” John said simply. “I would to God that you do not take this path, J.”

J turned and walked jerkily to the door. Jane rose too, hesitant, looking from her husband to her father-in-law. J went out without another word.

“Go to him,” Elizabeth said swiftly to Jane. “Soothe him. He can’t mean it. Keep him here tonight at least – we’ll talk more in the morning.” A swift nod toward John at the window showed Jane that meanwhile Elizabeth would work on her husband.

Jane hesitated. “But I think he is right,” she whispered, too low for John to hear.

“What does it matter?” Elizabeth hissed. “What do the words matter? Nothing matters more than Frances and you and J living here now, and living here when we are gone. The gardens and the Tradescant name. Go quick and stop him packing at least.”

Jane prevented J from leaving home that night by presenting the folly of taking a sleeping baby out of her cradle into the night air, into a city filled with plague. The two men, father and son, met at breakfast and went out to the garden together in stiff silence.

“What can we do?” Jane asked her mother-in-law.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Pray that the two of them will see that the interests of this family are more important than whose gold pays the bills.”

“Father should not force J to work for the king against his conscience,” Jane said.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Ah, my dear, it was so different for us when we were your age. There was no other way to work but for a lord. There were no other gardens but those belonging to great lords. At J’s age his father would never have dreamed of owning a house, or fields. At J’s age he was an under-gardener in the Cecil household and living in hall; he didn’t even choose his own meat for breakfast – everything came from the lord’s kitchen. Things have changed so fast, you two must understand. The world is so different now. And J is still a very young man. Things could change again.”

“Things are changing,” Jane agreed. “But not in favor of lords and the court. Perhaps this family should not be linked with the king. Perhaps we would do better to be like my family, independent traders who do not fear the king’s favor. Who are not dependent on any master.”

“Yes, if we were mercers,” Elizabeth answered gently. “And could trade from a little shop, and every man and woman in the country would need our goods and could afford them. But we are gardeners and keepers of a rarities collection. Only the wealthy men will buy what we have to sell and show. And we cannot get our stock without owning land to grow it in. It is not a trade that can be done on a small scale. This is a business that puts us in the hands of the great men of the country. We sell to the great houses, we sell to the courtiers. Of course, sooner or later, we would come to the mind of the king.”

“And he wants us, as he wants everything that is beautiful and rare,” Jane said bitterly. “And he thinks he can buy us too.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Just so.”

The men came into dinner in silence. Jane and Elizabeth exchanged a few remarks about the weather and the progress of the work in the garden but gave up when neither man responded with more than a word or a nod.

As soon as they had eaten the men went back outside and Jane, looking from the window of the rarities room, saw J heading down for the orchard, as far away from the house as he could go, while John was weeding the seed beds in the cool shadow of the house. The day was hot. Even the wood pigeons that usually cooed in the Tradescant trees were silent. Jane took Frances to feed the ducks in the pond at the side of the orchard and saw her husband scything nettles in a distant corner. When he saw her he carefully sheathed the blade and came over.

“Wife.”

She looked into his unhappy face. “Oh, John!”

“You don’t want to leave here,” he said flatly.

“Of course not. Where could we go?”

“We could go to your father’s while we looked about and found some position.”

“You swore you would garden for no master.”

“The Devil himself would be better than the king.”

She shook her head. “You said no master.”

Frances leaned longingly toward the deeper water. Jane took the little hand in a firm grip. “Not too near,” she said.

“There are two places I would choose to live, if you would consent,” J said tentatively.

Jane waited.

“There is a community, of good men and women, who are trying to make a life of their own, to worship as they wish, to live as they wish.”

“Quakers?” Jane asked.

“Not Quakers. But they believe in freedom for men and even for women. They have a farm in Devon near the sea.”

“How have you heard of them?”

“A traveling preacher spoke of them, a few months ago.”

Jane thought for a moment. “So we don’t know them directly.”

“No.”

He saw her grip on Frances’s hand tighten. “I can’t go among strangers and so far from my family,” she said firmly. “What would become of us if one of us were ill? Or if they are no longer there? I can’t go so far from my mother. What if we have another baby? How would we manage without my mother or your mother?”

“Other women manage,” J said. “Leave home, manage among strangers. They will become your friends.”

“Why should we?” Jane asked simply. “We, who have two families who love us? We, who have a house to live in which is the most beautiful house in Lambeth and famed throughout the world for the rarities and the gardens?”

“Because it comes with too high a price!” J exclaimed. “Because I rent this beautiful house with my obedience, by putting my conscience in the keeping of my father who himself has never thought a thought which was not licensed by his lord. He is an obedient dutiful man, Jane, and I am not.”

She thought for a moment. Frances pulled at her hand. “Frances feed ducks,” she said. “Frances feed ducks.”

“Down there,” Jane said, hardly looking. “Where the bank is not so steep. Don’t get your feet wet.” She let the little girl go and watched her progress to the water’s edge. The ducks gathered hopefully around; Frances plunged her hands into the pockets of her little gown and came out with fistfuls of breadcrumbs.

“What is your other wish?” Jane asked.

J took a deep breath. “Virginia,” he said.

Jane looked into his face and then came into his arms as simply as she had done the day they were married. “Oh, my love,” she said. “I know you have such dreams. But we cannot go to Virginia; it would break my mother’s heart. And I could not bear to leave her. And besides – we don’t need to go. We are not adventurers, we are not desperate for a fortune or to run away from here. We have a place here, we have work here, we have a home here. I would not leave here for choice.”

J would not look at her. “You are my wife,” he said flatly. “You are duty-bound to go where I go. To obey me.”

She shook her head. “I am bound in duty to you as you are to your father, as he is to the king. If you break one link they all go, J. If you do not acknowledge him as your father then I need not acknowledge you as my husband.”

“Then what do we become?” he demanded in impatience. “All whirling, unconnected, unloving, atoms; like thistledown finding its own way on the wind?”

She said nothing. Behind them, Frances put one tentative foot in the water.

“If you are guided by your conscience and only by your conscience then that is what we must become,” she said thoughtfully. “All of us, guided by our own consciences, coming together only when it suits us.”

“A society cannot live like that,” J replied.

“A family cannot,” Jane said. “As soon as you love someone, as soon as you have a child, you acknowledge your duty to put another’s needs first.”

J hesitated.

“The other way is the king’s way,” Jane continued. “The very thing you despise. A man who puts his own desires and needs before everyone else. Who thinks his needs and desires are of superior merit.”

“But I am guided by my conscience!” J protested.

“He could say the same,” she said gently. “If you are Charles the king, then your wishes could very well seem to be conscience and there would be no one to tell you your duty.”

“So where is my course?” J asked. “If you are my adviser this day?”

“Somewhere between duty and your own wishes,” Jane said. “Surely we can find a way for you to keep your soul clear of heresy and yet still live here.”

J’s face was bleak. “You would put your comfort before my conscience,” he said flatly. “All it is with you, is living here.”

She did not turn away from him but tightened her grip around his waist. “Think,” she urged him. “Do you really want to walk away from the garden that is your inheritance? The chestnut tree which your father gave to your mother the year you were conceived? The black-heart cherry? His geraniums? The tulips that you saved from New Hall? The larches from Archangel?”

J turned his head away from her pleading face but Jane did not let go. “If we never have another child,” she said bravely. “We both come from small families, we might only ever have Frances. If God is not kind to us and we never have a son to carry your name, then all that will be left of the Tradescants is their name on their trees. These are your posterity, John – will you leave them to be named for another man, or grown by him? Or worse, neglected and felled by him?”

He looked down at her. “You are my conscience and my heart,” he said softly. “Are you telling me that we should garden for the king – even such a king as this – because if we do not then I lose my bond to my father and my rights to his name, and my claim to history?”

She nodded. “I wish it were an easier road to see,” she said. “But surely you can plant the king’s garden and take the king’s gold without compromising your soul or your conscience. You don’t need to be his man, as your father was wedded to Cecil and then to Buckingham. You can just take his wage and do his work. You can be an independent man working for pay.”

J hesitated for one more moment. “I wanted to be free of all this.”

“I know,” she said lovingly. “But we have to wait for the right time. Who knows, there may come a time when the whole country wants to be free of him? Then you will see your course. But until then, J, you have to live. We have to eat. We have to live with your father and mother and keep the Ark afloat.”

Finally he nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

J did not speak to his father till dinnertime the following day when the family was gathered together again, Frances beside her mother, John at one end of the big dark wood table and J at the other, Elizabeth seated between her husband and son.

“I have been considering. I will work with you at Oatlands Palace,” J announced abruptly.

John looked up, swiftly concealing his surprise. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said, keeping the joy from his voice. “I shall need your skills.”

Elizabeth and Jane exchanged one swift, relieved glance. “Who will run the business here while we are away?” J asked, matter-of-fact.

“We will,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “Jane and I.”

“Frances too,” Frances said firmly.

“And Frances, of course. Peter will show people round the rarities, he does it beautifully now, like a barker in a fairground; and you will be home often, one of you would be home for a day or two, surely?”

“When the court moves on from Oatlands we will be able to do as we please,” John said. “They will want beauty when they visit; we can do half of that with plants grown here in the seed beds and set in at the right time. When they are not at Oatlands we can go about our business here.”

“I will not hear heresy,” J warned.

“I myself shall guard your tender conscience,” his father assured him.

Reluctantly J chuckled. “Aye, you can laugh, but I mean this, Father. I will not hear heresy, and I will not bow down low to her.”

“You will have to uncover your head and bow,” John told him firmly. “That’s common politeness.”

“The Quakers don’t,” Jane volunteered.

John gave her a swift sideways look under his brows. “I thank you, Mistress Jane. I know the Quakers don’t. But J is not a Quaker-” he glared at his son as if to dare him to confess yet another step down the road to a more and more radical faith “ – and the Quakers do not work for me in the king’s garden.”

“They are still his subjects,” she said staunchly.

“And I honor their faith. Just as J is the king’s subject and has a right to his conscience, inside the law. But he will be obedient and he will be courteous.”

“And what shall we do if the law changes?” Elizabeth asked. “This is a king who is changing the shape of the church itself, whose father changed the Bible itself. What if he changes yet more and makes us outlaws in our own church?”

J glanced at his mother. “That’s the very question,” he said. “I can bend for the moment, but what if matters get worse?”

“Practice before principle,” John said with Cecil’s old remembered wisdom. “We’ll worry about that if it happens. In the meantime we have a road we can all take together. We can obey the king and dig his wife’s garden, and keep our consciences to ourselves.”

“I will not listen to heresy and I will not bow down low to the papist queen,” J stated. “But I can be courteous to her and I can work for my father. Two wages coming in is better than one. And besides-” He glanced up at his father with a silent appeal. “I want to do my duty by you, Father. I want there always to be a Tradescant at Lambeth. I want things working right in their right places. It’s because the king does not work right in his right place that everything is so disturbed. I want order – just as you do.”

John smiled his warm loving smile at his son. “I shall make a Cecil of you yet,” he said gently. “Let us put some order in the queen’s garden and keep the steady order of our own lives, and pray that the king does his duty as we do ours.”

The queen had commanded that John should have lodgings in the park at Oatlands and that everything should be done as he wished. His house adjoined the silkworm house and was warmed by the sun all day and by the charcoal burners which were set about the walls of the silkworm house all night. John at first found the thought of his neighbors the maggots, silently munching their way through mulberry leaves night and day, immensely distasteful; but the house itself was a miracle of prettiness, a little turreted play-castle of wood, south-facing with mullioned windows and furnished by the order of the queen with pretty light tables, chairs and a bed.

He was to eat in the great hall with the other members of the household. The king demanded that dinner be served in the great hall in full state whether he was there or not. The ritual demanded that a cover be set on the table before his chair, that dishes be put before the empty throne and that every man should bow to the throne before entering the hall and on leaving it.

“This is superstition,” John exclaimed unwarily when he saw the men bowing low to the empty chair.

“It is how the king orders it,” one of the grooms of the bedchamber replied. “To maintain the dignity of the throne. It’s how it was done in Queen Elizabeth’s time.”

John shook his head. “Well, I remember Elizabeth’s time, which is more than most do,” he said. “Men bowed to her chair when she was going to sit on it, and bowed to her dinner when she was going to eat it. She was too parsimonious to have dinner served in ten palaces when she was only going to eat in one.”

The man shook his head, warning John to be silent. “Well, this is how it’s done now,” he said. “The king himself ordered it.”

“And when does he come?”

“Next week,” the groom said. “And then you will see a change. The place is only half-alive when Their Majesties are not here.”

He was right. Oatlands Palace was like a village with the plague when the court was elsewhere, the passages between one building and another empty and silent, half the kitchens cold, their fires unlit. But early in September a trail of carts and wagons came down the road from Weybridge, and a hundred barges rowed upstream from London bringing the king’s goods as the court moved to Oatlands for the month.

The palace was under siege from an army of shouting, arguing, ordering, singing cooks, maids, horsemen, grooms, servers and minor gentry of the household. Everyone had an urgent task and an important responsibility, and everyone got in everyone else’s way. There were tapestries to hang and pictures to place and floors to sweep and carpets to lay. All the king’s most beautiful furniture traveled with him; and his bedroom and the queen’s bedroom had to be prepared and perfect. The chimneys had to be swept before fires could be lit, but fires had to be lit to air the damp linen at once. The whole village, spread over nine acres, was in a state of complete madness. Even the deerhounds in the kennels caught the excitement and bayed all night long under the yellow September moon.

Tradescant broke the rule of dining in the great hall and went to Weybridge village to buy bread, cheese and small ale, which he took home to his little house in the gardens. He and the silkworms munched their way through their dinners in their adjoining houses. “Goodnight, maggots,” Tradescant called cheerfully as he blew his candle out and the deep country darkness enveloped his bedroom.

John had given no thought to meeting the king. When he had last seen His Majesty, they had both been waiting for Buckingham to come to Portsmouth. The time before that had been at the sailing of the first expedition to Rhé. When John was led into the king’s state bedchamber he found, with the familiar pang of sorrow, that he was looking around for his master. He could not believe that his duke was not there.

At once, like a ghost summoned by desire, he saw him. It was a life-size portrait of Buckingham painted in dark rich oils. One hand was outstretched as if to show the length and grace of the fingers and the wealth of the single diamond ring, the other hand rested on the rich pommel of his sword. His beard was neatly trimmed, his clothes were bright and richly embroidered and encrusted, but it was his face that drew Tradescant’s look. It was his lord, it was his lost lord. The thick dark hair, the arrogant laughing half-raised brows set over dark eyes, the irresistible smile, the sparkle, and that hint of spirituality, of saintliness, which King James had seen even as he had loved the sensual beauty of the face.

John thought how he still touched his lord in his mind, almost every morning and every night, and how he had thought that perhaps the king too reached out over death to his friend. But now he saw that the king had a greater comfort, for every night and every morning he could glance at that assured smiling face and feel the warmth of those eyes, and if he wished he could touch the frame of the picture, or even brush a kiss upon the painted cheek.

The portrait was new in the chamber, along with the rich curtains and the thick Turkey rugs on the floor. The king’s most precious goods traveled with him everywhere he went. And the king’s most precious thing was the portrait which hung, wherever he slept, at his bedside where he could see it before closing his eyes at night and on waking in the morning.

Charles came silently into his bedchamber from his private adjoining room and hesitated when he saw John looking up at the portrait. Something in the tilt of the man’s head and the steadiness of his look reminded the king that John too had lost a man who had been at the very center of his world.

“Y… you are looking at my p… portrait of the… duke.”

John turned, saw the king and dropped to his knees, flinching a little as his bad knee hit the floor.

The king did not command him to rise. “Your l… late master.” His voice still held traces of the paralyzing stammer he had suffered from as a child. Only with his intimates could he speak without hesitation; only with two people, the duke and now his wife, had he ever been fluent.

“You m… must miss him,” the king went on. It sounded more like an order than an offer of sympathy.

John looked up and saw the king’s face. Grief had changed him; he looked older and more tired, and his brown hair was thinning.

His eyes were heavily lidded, as if he were weary of what he saw, as if he no longer expected to see what he wanted.

“I grieve for him still,” John said honestly. “Every day.”

“You l… loved him?”

“With all my heart,” John replied.

“And he l… loved you?”

John looked up at his king. There was passion behind the question. Even after his death Buckingham could still inspire jealousy. John, the older man, smiled wryly. “He loved me a little,” he said. “When I served him especially well. But one smile from him was worth a piece of gold from another.”

There was a silence. Charles nodded as if the statement was of little consequence and turned away to the window and looked out into the king’s court below.

“H… Her Majesty will tell you wh… what she wants done,” he said. “But I sh… should like one court planted with r… roses. Rose petals for throwing in masques.”

John nodded. A man who could turn from the death of his friend to the need of rose petals for masques would be a difficult master to love.

The king looked round, his eyebrow raised.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” John said from his place on the floor. He wondered what his master Sir Robert Cecil, who had scolded a greater monarch than this one, would have thought of a king who confided his grief in a gardener but left him kneeling on an arthritic leg.

There was a rustle of silk and high heels tapping.

“Ah! My gardener!” said the voice of the queen.

John, already low, tried to bow from a kneeling position and felt himself to be ridiculous. He glanced up. She was a short plump woman, beringed, curled, painted and patched with a low-cut gown which would have incurred Elizabeth’s censure, and a powerful scent of incense around her skirts which would have inspired outrage in the Ark at Lambeth. She gave him a bright dark-eyed smile and extended her small hand. John kissed it.

“Get up! Get up!” she commanded. “I want you to walk me all around the garden so that I can see what we must do!”

The flood of words came so quickly after her husband’s halting speech, and her accent was so strong, that John could not immediately understand what she said.

“Your Majesty?” He glanced toward the king for help. Charles made a brief dismissive gesture with his hand, which clearly indicated that John should go, so he bowed low once again, and backed from the room. To his surprise, the queen came with him. John pressed himself back against the wall as a footman flung open the door.

“This way! Come on!” the queen said, and ran prettily down the stairs and out into the summer sunshine of the king’s privy garden.

“I want this garden full of scented flowers,” she told him. “The king’s windows look out over it; I want the scents to blow up to him.”

John nodded, taking in the grand sweep of the walls around the court. The south-facing walls would provide extra warmth; the walls to the east would provide shelter. “I could grow almost anything here,” he said.

“It was the king’s mother’s garden,” the queen said. It was evident from the slight movement of her head that she did not think much of her predecessor’s taste for low-growing herbs and knot gardens made of colored gravel. “I want roses against the walls and lilies everywhere. Those are my flowers, in my crest. I want this garden filled with roses and lilies to remind the king of me whenever he looks from his window.”

John bowed slightly. “Any preference as to colors?” he asked. “I can get some very handsome red and white roses, Rosamund roses. I have them growing at my garden in Lambeth.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, falling over the words in her haste. Even after five years in the country she still spoke English as if it was a strange and ugly foreign language. “And in the center bed I want a knot with our initials entwined. C and H M. Can you do that?”

John nodded. “Of course…”

She suddenly stiffened. “Of course, Your Highness,” she corrected him abruptly.

“I beg your pardon,” John said smoothly. “I was so interested in what Your Highness was saying that I forgot my manners. Of course, Your Highness.”

At once she smiled at him and gave him her hand to kiss. John bowed low and pressed his lips gently to the little fingers. His sense that he had served steadier, more intelligent and more noble masters did not show on his face.

“It is to be a garden which expresses Love,” she said. “The highest love there can be below the heavens. The love that there is between a man and his wife, and higher than that: between a king and a queen.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” John said. “I could plant you some symbolic flowers around the roses. White violets for innocence, and periwinkle for constancy, and daisies.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “And one corner in blue as a tribute to Our Lady.” She turned her dark eyes on him. “Are you of the true faith, Tradescant?”

John thought briefly of Elizabeth in her gray Quaker-like gown, the staunch Baptist faith of his daughter-in-law and his promise to J that his conscience would not be offended by this work. He kept his face perfectly steady. “I attend the church of my fathers, Your Majesty,” he said. “I’m a simple gardener; I don’t think much of things other than plants and rarities.”

“You should think of your immortal soul,” she commanded. “And the church of your fathers is the church of Rome. I am always telling the king this!”

Tradescant bowed, thinking that she had just said enough to get both of them hanged if the king applied the laws of the land – which he manifestly only did when it suited him.

“And I shall want flowers for my chapel, for my private chapel,” she said. “Blue and white for Our Lady.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.”

“And for my private rooms, and strewing herbs, and the king wishes you to maintain and replant the physic garden and look at the herb garden.”

Tradescant bowed again.

“I want the house to be like a palace in a fairy tale,” she said, changing at once from the evangelical Roman Catholic into the flirtatious queen. “Like a bower for a fairy-tale Princess. I want people all over the country, all over Europe, to hear of it as a fairy-tale garden, a perfect garden. Have you heard of the Platonic ideal?”

John felt a sense of weariness he had never before known while talking about a garden. He had a sudden sympathy for the king, who had lost the easy male companionship of Buckingham and had no one to turn to but this vain woman.

The queen was laughing. “I suppose not!” she cried. “It does not matter, Gardener Tradescant. It is an idea which we make much of at court, in our masques and poetry and plays. I will just tell you that it is an idea that there is a perfect form of everything – of a woman, of a man, of a marriage, of a garden, of a rose, and the king and I want to attain that ideal.”

John glanced at her to see if she was speaking seriously. He thought of how the duke would have roared with laughter at the pedantry, at the pretentiousness. He would have slapped John on the back and called him Gardener Tradescant forever after.

“Think of it,” she said, her voice as sweet as syrup. “A perfect garden as a shell for a perfect palace for a perfect king and queen.”

“In a perfect country?” John asked incautiously.

She smiled. She had no sense that there might be anything behind his question but spellbound admiration. “Oh, yes,” she said. “How could it be otherwise when it is ruled by my husband, and by me?”