Virgin Earth

Summer 1647

John was digging in the new vegetable bed and setting in lettuce seeds to see which would grow the fastest when Hester came out of the house, shading her eyes against the bright sunshine, and then hurried down the path toward him.

“The king’s been taken,” she said baldly.

He looked up with as much anxiety as if she had said one of the children was ill. “Taken?”

“Some whippersnapper Cornet marched up to Holdenby House and arrested His Majesty,” Hester said, nearly spitting with rage.

“How did you hear this?” John asked, wiping his muddy hands on his leather gardening apron.

“The ferry boatman. Frances has come for a visit, I went down to the river to meet her. London is buzzing with the news.”

“Who has him?”

“A man of no importance,” Hester said. “A nobody. One of the new men of the New Model Army, rode to Holdenby House and captured the king as if he was a piece of baggage in the baggage train. It is these people who will bring us down. People who have no respect. Men who have spent four years learning that nothing matters, not pictures in church, not music, not gardens, not kings.”

“And where has he taken His Majesty?” John asked.

“To Maidenhead,” she said. “And they say Oliver Cromwell himself is going out to meet him.”

“Cromwell?”

She nodded. “D’you think that means peace?”

John shook his head. “I suppose it means that the game has changed again,” he said, baffled. “When the king was held by the Scots he was in the power of Parliament. But now the army has him, I don’t know what will become of him, or us for that matter.”

“We may be in danger,” Hester said. “The ferry boatman said that the soldiers of the New Model Army may march on Parliament. They’re determined to have their pay. And they recognize no loyalty to anyone but their commanders and their leveling ideas. They are saying that Parliament and the City may hold out against the army. But if the army comes to the City from the south then they will march right through here. We may have to pack up the rarities again. They are marching for their pay, they are hungry and desperate men. And they have sworn that all the land and all the property shall be held in common.”

John shook his head. “It’s like living in the middle of a thunderstorm,” he complained. “It has all changed again. If the army fights against the Parliament which brought it into being, then what becomes of the country?”

In July the news was that the king was to be taken, under guard, to Oatlands.

Hester looked at her husband across the kitchen table. Cook, Joseph, the new gardening boy, Frances and Johnnie all turned to the head of the table and waited for John to speak.

“Now, I have to go,” he said simply. “He cannot be at Oatlands and not see me working in the garden. That was my work, that was my place.”

Hester hesitated for only a moment. “I’ll pack your bag,” she said, and went out of the room.

Johnnie turned to his father, his face suddenly flushed. “May I come too?” he asked. “And see him?”

When his father hesitated he went on in a rapid torrent of speech. “I’ve never seen him, and my father and my grandfather were in his service. And I’ve never even seen him. Frances saw him and the queen. Can I come? Please?”

John gave a short laugh. “I cannot be sure that I will see him,” he said. “And if he sees me, he may not speak to me. I just feel the royal court under his window should be tidy, I don’t know what state it’s in.”

“I can tidy it,” Johnnie said desperately. “I can weed. I worked there while you were away. I can do it. I am a Tradescant, I am gardener to the king. I should be there.”

Hester came back into the kitchen and John turned to her with relief. “It depends on what your mother says.”

“Can I go with Father to Oatlands?” Johnnie scrambled over his stool to get to his stepmother. “And work for him? He’d have such a lot of work to do, I could help.”

“I don’t know if it’s safe,” Hester said hesitantly.

“It’s probably safe,” John said shortly. “Safer than it’s ever been with him under guard and forced to make peace at last.”

She nodded. “He can go if you wish it,” she said to John.

Johnnie turned his bright hazel eyes on his father.

“Oh, very well,” John said. “But not a word do you speak unless spoken to – and then you just answer “Yes, Your Majesty,” or “No, Your Majesty.” Not a word about me being in Virginia. Not a word about the cavalier who came here. Not a word about John Lambert buying our tulips. Not a word about anything.”

Johnnie was dancing on the spot with excitement. “Yes! Yes!” he shouted. “Yes! Of course. And I shall be absolutely silent. Absolutely. I shall be absolutely discreet.”

John met his wife’s eyes across the boy’s bobbing head. “I don’t know about you; but I feel very confident,” he said wryly.

They went by the river, rowed in a wherry, Johnnie seated beside his father and looking all around him. When they were past the village of Staines, John said quietly, “There it is,” and pointed to the little rose-pink palace, sitting on the terraces with the unkempt lawns running down to the river. “D’you know, I never thought I’d see it again,” John said softly. “I never thought I’d be here, working in these gardens again.”

Johnnie glanced quickly at his father’s darkened expression. “But you’re glad of it?” he asked. “Glad you came home and that the king is back in his palace, and soon everything will be as it was?”

John dropped his hand on his son’s thin shoulder. “I don’t think everything will be quite as it was,” he said. “There’s a lot of men dead and a lot of tears shed, and the king is in his palace but not on his throne. We’ll have to mind our tongues here, and beware even of our thoughts.”

The boatman shipped the oars and the wherry nudged against the landing stage. John stepped quickly ashore and caught the mooring rope, dug in his pocket for a coin and dropped it down into the boat as Johnnie tossed up their bags and then handed up, one at a time, a dozen pots with nodding blooms.

John shouldered his bag. “We’ll come back for the pots,” he said, and led the way up the slope to the palace.

Prince Rupert had allowed his cavalrymen’s horses to graze on the lawns and they were pocked with hoofprints and lumpy with droppings, but at least the animals had kept the grass down. As John approached the palace he saw that the creepers and the wall climbers which he had trained so carefully to take blossoms and scent up to the windows were doing well – overspread, sometimes pulling away from their ties, but thriving on neglect.

The beds at the feet of the rose-brick walls were overrun with weeds but some flowers were still struggling through. Pansies and gillyflowers, irises and peonies had thrust their heads above the encroaching green. “Soon hoe that out,” John remarked, nodding to his son.

The yew tree allée was overgrown but looked thick and bushy, throwing a welcome green shade against the brightness of the afternoon sunshine. The orangery that John’s father had rebuilt was dilapidated – the white paint was peeling and some of the ornamental woodwork had been wrenched off for the troopers’ campfires – but the silkworm house and the neighboring gardener’s house were as Hester had left them, swept clean and bare and empty.

John left his son collecting firewood for the empty grate and unrolling their traveling cloaks for beds as he prowled around the deserted palace.

The strangest thing was the quiet. Instead of a bustling royal court filled with folly and flirtation, shouted orders, voices calling and musicians playing, there was nothing but the occasional rattle of a shutter banging in the breeze and the insistent coo of the wood pigeons nesting in the trees. The stable yard, which had housed more than a hundred horses, was empty, straws blowing in the yard, the stalls heaped with dung, stale water in the troughs.

The great front door was shut and bolted. John tried the massive brass handle and then stepped back. The king was due in a few days, surely there should be servants inside setting the palace to rights. Not a face showed at the windows, there was not a movement in the courts.

John went around to the kitchen quarters and to the bake-house. The fires were out, the place was silent. A heap of ash and a few scattered utensils showed that the cavalrymen had dined before they left, but all the food had been eaten by rats or mice and their droppings were heaped even on the kitchen tables.

John shook his head in wonder at the desolation of the place, at its transformation from the pinnacle of the social life of the kingdom, with the queen singing about the platonic ideal and the king going hunting on his high-bred Arab horses, to this shell. He turned and trudged back across the bowling green to the silkworm house.

Johnnie had brought up the pots from the riverside.

“Good lad,” John said with pleasure, glad of the chance to set about his work and restore normality at least to the flower beds. “Let’s take these up to the royal court. At least that can be looking right in a couple of days.”

They worked hard, side by side, and John enjoyed his son’s company. The boy had inherited the Tradescant gift with plants, he handled them as if he loved the touch of the silky white roots, the caress of damp earth. When he hefted a pot in his hand he could tell from the weight whether it needed watering. When he tipped a plant out into his palm he never knocked the blooms. When he set it into a hole and pressed down the earth there was something about his touch which was both precisely judged, and quite unknowing.

“You may be the greatest gardener of us all,” John said at the end of the second day as they walked homeward with their tools over their shoulders. “I don’t believe I had your way with plants when I was your age.”

Johnnie gleamed. “I love the plants. Not so much the rarities,” he said.

“Not the rarities?” John asked, amazed.

His son shook his head. “What I’d rather do, more than anything else, would be to collect new plants, to go with you to the Americas, the West Indies, travel, find things, bring them home and grow them. The rarities – well, they just sit there, don’t they? Once they’re in place there is nothing more to do with them except keep them dusted. But plants grow and blossom and fruit and seed and then there’s next year to plant them again. I like how they change.”

John nodded. “I see.”

He was about to remark that the rarities played their part in the Tradescant family fortune when he heard hoofbeats on the drive. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Could it be the king?”

“Could be.”

John turned and ran toward the silkworm house, cast down his tools, grabbed his coat and turned to run back to the palace. Johnnie danced on the spot. “Can I come? Can I come?”

“Yes. But remember what I said about keeping silent.”

Johnnie fell into line behind his father, mirrored his father’s long stride, composed his face to a scowl of what he hoped was dignified discretion, and spoiled the effect only slightly by a great bounce at every fourth step as his excitement proved too much for him.

They ran round to the stable yard and there, in the dirty stall, was the king’s Arab, and a dozen other horses of his escort.

“The king here?” John asked a trooper.

“Just arrived,” the man said, easing the girth of his horse. “We had to stop at every village for him to touch people.”

“Touch people?”

“They turned out in dozens,” the man said abruptly. “With all sorts of illnesses and sores and God knows what. And again and again he stopped and touched them, so that they would be cured. And they all went off, back to their hovels, back to their porridge of nothing and water, thinking that he had done them a great favor and that we were some kind of beast to imprison him.”

John nodded.

“Who are you?” the man asked. “If you want a favor of him, he’ll do it. He’s the most charming, generous, agreeable man to ever take a country into disaster and death and four years of war.”

“I’m the gardener,” John replied.

“Then you’ll see him,” the man said. “He went out to sit in the garden with his companions, while someone cooks his dinner, and sweeps his chamber, and makes everything ready for him so that he can dine in comfort and sleep in comfort. While I and my men do without.”

John turned on his heel and went round to the royal court.

The king was seated on a bench, his back against the warm brick wall, looking around him at the newly weeded, newly planted garden. Standing behind him were a couple of gentlemen that John did not know, another stranger strolled on the newly raked paths. When the king heard John’s footsteps he glanced up.

“Ah…” For a moment he could not remember the name. “Gardener Tradescant.”

John dropped to his knee and heard Johnnie behind him do the same.

“Your w-w-work?” the king asked with his slight stammer, gesturing to the dug-over beds.

John bowed. “When I heard you were coming to Oatlands I came to do what I could, Your Majesty. With my son: John Tradescant.”

The king nodded, his dark eyes half-lidded. “I thank you,” he said languidly. “When I am returned to my proper place I shall see that you are returned to yours.”

John bowed again and waited. When there was silence he glanced up. The king made a small gesture of dismissal with his hand. John rose to his feet, bowed and walked backward, Johnnie skipping nervously out of the way as his father suddenly reversed, and then quickly copying him. John bowed again at the gateway to the garden and then stepped backward till he was out of sight.

He turned and met Johnnie’s astounded face. “And that’s it?” Johnnie demanded. “After we came here without being asked, and worked without pay for all this time to make it lovely for him?”

John gave a little snort of amusement and started to walk back to the silkworm house. “What did you expect? A knighthood?”

“I thought-” Johnnie started and then broke off. “I suppose I thought he might have some task for us, or he might be glad of us, he might see that we were loyal and thank us-”

John snorted again and opened the little white wooden door. “This is not a king who has plans or gives thanks,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons he’s where he is.”

“But doesn’t he realize that you needn’t have come at all?”

John paused for a moment and looked down at the stricken face of his boy. “Oh Johnnie,” he said softly. “This is not the king of the broadsheet ballads and the church sermons. This is a foolish man who ran into the war because he would not take advice, and when he took advice at all, always chose the wrong people to guide him.

“I came today as much for my father as for the king. I came because my father would have wanted to know that when the king came to his palace, the gardens were weeded. It would have been a matter of duty for him. It was a matter of pride for me. If I had freely chosen my way I would have been for the rights of workingmen and against the king. But I could not choose freely. I was in his service, and there have been some days – most days – when even seeing him as a fool I pity him from the bottom of my heart. Because he is a fool who cannot help himself. He does not know how to be wise. And his folly has cost him everything he owned.”

“I thought he was a great man, like a hero,” Johnnie remarked.

“Just an ordinary man in an extraordinary place,” John said. “And too much of a fool to know that. He was taught from birth that he was half divine. And now he believes it. Poor foolish king.”

John and Johnnie stayed the month working at Oatlands. The cook that Parliament had sent with the king needed fresh vegetables and fruits from the kitchen garden and by picking and choosing from the overgrown beds the two Tradescants were able to send fresh food up to the house each day. The king was surrounded by a small court and his imprisonment seemed more like a guard of honor. He hunted, he shot at archery, he ordered John to roll the bowling green smooth so that they could play at bowls.

John was considering paying for some boys to help with the weeding and planting in winter greens, when the news came that the king was to be moved to Hampton Court. Within a few hours the horses were saddled and the retinue was ready to move on.

The king was in the garden, waiting to be told that his escort was ready. John found he could not keep away from the excitement of great events, and took his pruning hook to the climbers on the far wall of the royal court.

The king, strolling around with two of his courtiers, came upon John and paused to watch him work as the two men stood aside.

“I shall see you repaid for this,” he said simply. He smiled a sly little smile. “Sooner perhaps than you think.”

“John jumped from his ladder and dropped to one knee. “Your Majesty.”

“They may have defeated my army, but now they tear themselves apart,” the king said. “All I must do is wait, p-patiently wait, until they beg me to come to the throne and set all to rights.”

John risked an upward glance. “Really, Your Majesty?”

The king’s smile transformed him. “Y-Yes. Indeed. The army will destroy P-Parliament, and then t-tear themselves apart. Already the army tells P-Parliament what it should do. When they have no enemy they have no c-common cause. All they could do was to destroy, it needs a k-king to rebuild. I know th-them. There is L-Lambert. He heads the f-faction against Parliament. He will lead the army against P-Parliament and then I will have w-won.”

John paused before he could find the words to reply. “So Your Majesty will greet them kindly when they come? And make an agreement with them?”

The king laughed shortly. “I shall w-win the argument, though I lost the b-battle,” he said.

A trooper came to the garden gate. “We are ready to leave, Your Majesty,” he called.

King Charles, who had never before this year ever done another man’s bidding, turned and went from Tradescant’s garden.

John and his son went down to the gatehouse to see them leave. John was half expecting a summons to Hampton Court, but the king went by with only a flicker of recognition that his gardener was on his knees at the roadside.

“And that’s it?” Johnnie demanded again.

“That’s it,” John replied shortly. “Royal service. We’ll set things in order tomorrow and we’ll go home the next day. Our work here is done.”

They discovered why the king had been moved when they got home. The City was in uproar with the apprentices rioting in favor of the king’s return and the army had thought it safer to have him at Hampton Court with a larger garrison around him. Alexander Norman had sent Frances to the Ark for safety and forbidden her to return to the City until the riots were over – whether they were ended by the return of the king to his throne, the seizing of control by Parliament, or the arrival of Cromwell’s army. There were now three players in the game for England. The king, playing one side against the other and hoping; Parliament, increasingly directionless and fearful of its future; and the army, which seemed to be the only force with a vision of the future and the discipline and determination to make it happen.

The soldiers under Cromwell had forged their faith in themselves, in their cause and in their God during the long, hard years of fighting; they were not men who would now welcome a compromise. They wanted their pay; but they also wanted the country new-made. They had worked out their beliefs and philosophy in between battles, on forced marches, on dark nights when the rain doused their campfires. They had given up four years of peaceful life at home to fight for the causes of religious and political freedom. They wanted to see a new world in return for their sacrifice. They were under the command of Thomas Fairfax and John Lambert, two great generals who understood them and shared their beliefs, and marched them on the faithless, fearful city of London to ensure that Parliament did not bow to pressure and make a peace with a king who should be deep in despair and not radiant with hope.

Frances took her husband’s note to her father, who was hoeing the new vegetable bed. He looked at it briefly, and handed it back to her.

“You’ll stay here,” he said.

“If I may.”

He tipped his hat over his eyes and grinned at his daughter. “I imagine we can endure your company. Will you keep an eye on Johnnie for me? I don’t want him marching up to Parliament with a pruning hook over his shoulder, thinking he is bringing the king home to his own.”

“Mother is more afraid that it’ll be you running off to enlist.”

John shook his head. “I’ll not take up arms ever again,” he said. “It’s not a trade I do well. And the king is not a captivating master.”

Alexander wrote almost daily, reporting the fluctuations in the mood of the city. But it was all resolved in August when the army, under the command of General John Lambert, marched into London and declared that they could and would make peace with the king. With the House of Lords they drew up proposals to which any king could agree. Cromwell himself took the proposals to King Charles at Hampton Court.

“He will agree to them and be restored,” Alexander Norman said over a comfortable bottle of wine on the terrace. Frances sat on a stool at her husband’s feet and he rested his hand on her golden-brown head. Hester sat opposite John, who was in his father’s chair – facing out over the garden, watching the fruit in the orchard gilded with the last rays of sunshine. Johnnie sat at the top of the terrace steps. At Alexander’s words he gave a radiant smile.

“The king will be returned to his palaces,” he said wonderingly.

“Please God,” said John. “Please God that the king sees where his interests lie. He told me that he would set the army against Parliament and conquer them both.”

“Not with John Lambert in command,” Hester remarked. “That man is not a fool.”

“Can it all be as it was?” Frances asked. “The queen come home, and the court restored?”

“There’ll be some missing faces,” Alexander pointed out. “Archbishop Laud for one, Earl Strafford.”

“So what was it all for?” Hester asked. “All these years of hardship?”

John shook his head. “In the end, perhaps it was to bring the king and Parliament to realize that they have to deal together, they cannot be enemies.”

“A high price to pay,” Frances said, thinking of the years when she and Hester had struggled on their own at the Ark, “to get some sense into that thick royal head.”