Virgin Earth

Autumn 1647

“He’s gone,” Alexander said flatly the moment he entered the kitchen door and surprised the Tradescants at breakfast. His horse stood sweating in the stable yard outside. “I came at once to tell you. I rode over. I couldn’t bear to wait. I couldn’t believe it myself.”

“The king?” John leaped to his feet and strode to the door, checked and turned back.

Alexander nodded. “Escaped from Hampton Court.”

“Hurrah!” Johnnie shouted.

“My God, no,” John said. “Not to the French? Not when they were so near agreement? The French haven’t rescued him? Kidnapped him?”

Alexander shook his head and dropped into John’s vacated seat. Frances put a mug of small ale beside him and he caught her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist in thanks. “I heard the news this morning and came straight here with it. I couldn’t bear even to write it. What days we live in! When will we ever see an end to these alarms!”

“When will we ever see peace?” Hester murmured, one eye on her husband who was standing at the window gazing out into the yard as if ready to run himself.

“Who’s got him?” John demanded. “Not the Irish?”

“He just slipped away on his own, by the looks of it. There’s not word of him being broken out by soldiers. Just away with his gentlemen.”

“Sir John Berkeley,” John guessed.

Alexander shrugged. “Maybe.”

“And where has he gone? France? To be with the queen and Prince Charles?”

“If he has any sense,” Alexander said. “But why break away now? When things were going so well? When they were so close to agreeing to what he wanted? When he had an agreement with the army that he could sign? All he had to do was wait. The City is for him, Parliament is for him, the army has nothing but fair demands, Cromwell has destroyed the opposition. He has nearly won.”

“Because he always thinks he can do better,” John exclaimed despairingly. “He always thinks he can do a little more by a grand gesture, a great chance. My father saw him ride out to Spain with the Duke of Buckingham when he was a young prince, and wild and reckless. He never learned the line between taking a risk and ripe folly. No one ever taught him to take care. He likes the masque – the style and the action. He’s never seen that it is all pretend. That real life isn’t like that.”

Hester sank back in her chair and glanced down the table at her stepson. Johnnie was looking mutinous. She put out a hand to warn him to hold his silence, but the boy burst out:

“It’s the greatest of things! Don’t you see? He’ll be safe in France by now, and they can beg his pardon from there! The queen will have an army ready for him to command, Prince Rupert will take the cavalry again. They said that he was defeated but he was not!”

John turned a dark look on his son. “You’re right about only one thing,” he said somberly. “He’s never defeated.”

“That’s the wonderful thing about him!”

John shook his head. “It’s the worst.”

Alexander stayed for breakfast and then agreed to stay on for the rest of the week. John was restless all day and at mid-afternoon he went to find Hester.

She was in the rarities room, bringing the planting records up to date in the big garden book.

“I can’t stay here, not knowing what’s going on,” John said briskly. “I’ll go into Whitehall, see if I can hear some news.”

She put down her pen and smiled at him. “I knew you’d have to go,” she said. “Make sure you come home, don’t be caught up in whatever is going on there.”

He paused in the doorway. “Thank you,” he said.

“Oh! For what?”

“For letting me go without badgering me with a dozen questions, without warning me a dozen times.”

She smiled but it did not reach her eyes. “Since you would go whether I give you leave or no, I might as well give you leave,” she said.

“That’s true enough!” John said lightly and went from the room.

Whitehall was in a frenzy of gossip and speculation. John went into a tavern where he might find an acquaintance, bought a mug of ale and looked around for a face he knew. At a nearby table were a group of Africa merchants.

“Mr. Hobhouse! Any news? I have come up from Lambeth especially and all I can get is what I know already.”

“You know that he’s gone to the Isle of Wight?”

John recoiled. “What?”

“Carisbrooke Castle. He’s set himself up in Carisbrooke Castle.”

“But why? Why would he?”

The merchant shrugged. “It’s not a bad plan. No one can trust the navy, and if they declare for him how is Cromwell’s army going to lay hold of him? He could be snug enough at Carisbrooke, create his court, build his army, and when he is ready sail straight into Portsmouth. He must have had some secret arrangement with the governor Robert Hammond, though everyone thought that Hammond was a Parliament man through and through. The king must have had a deep plan. He’ll be waiting for the queen’s army from France and then we’ll be at war again, if anyone has the stomach for it.”

John briefly closed his eyes. “This is a nightmare.”

The merchant shook his head. “I cannot tell you how much money I am losing every day this goes on,” he said. “I can’t induce men to serve, my ships are harassed by pirates in the very mouth of the Thames, and I never know when a ship comes in what price I can command on the quayside or what taxes I shall have to pay. These are times for a madman. And we have a mad king to rule over us.”

“Not another war,” John said.

“He must have laid his plans very deep,” the merchant said. “He was promising to agree with Cromwell and Ireton only the day before, he gave his word as a king. He was about to sign. What a man! What a false man! Y’know, in business we’d never deal with him. How would I manage if I gave my word and then skipped away?”

“Deep-laid plans?” John asked, seizing on the one unlikely feature.

“So they say.”

One of the other merchants glanced up. “D’you know better, Mr. Tradescant? You were at Oatlands with him, weren’t you?”

John sensed the sudden intensity of interest. “I was planting the garden. He hardly spoke to me. I saw him walk by, nothing more.”

“Well, God save him and keep him from his enemies,” one of the men said stoutly and John noticed that while only a few months before the man would have been booed into silence or even thrown out of the tavern there were now a few men who muttered “Amen” into the bottom of their mugs, and no one who denied the wish.

“So what happens now?” John asked.

“We wait on his whim,” one of the merchants said sourly. “As we have been doing for this past year and a half. He was defeated fair and square but he still dances around the country and we still have to wait till he tells us what he will agree to. It makes no sense to me.”

“He won’t lie down till he’s dead,” one of the men said frankly. “Would to God that he might fall sick and die and then we could deal with his son, any of the sons. Anyone rather than this man.”

“I’ll not ill wish him,” another man said stoutly.

“Then why will he not come to the City and make an agreement?” someone demanded. “God knows all we want is to have things at peace.”

John looked from one angry, worried face to another and drained his ale. “I must go back to my garden,” he said. He had a sense of relief at the thought of the rarities room restored and the garden in its autumn order. “Whether the king has his own again or no, I have my work to do.”

“You won’t go and garden for him at Carisbrooke?” one of the men asked mischievously.

John did not rise to the bait. “I bid you good day,” he said gently, took his hat in his hand and went out.

They learned the rest of the news in dribs and drabs over the week. The king had no deep-laid plans, just as John had suspected. King Charles had taken an impulsive leap into freedom at the very moment when he was about to sign the agreement with Cromwell which would have brought peace between king and Parliament and stability to the kingdom riven by civil war.

Cromwell had faced down his own army, the men who had fought for him in the long and bitter war. The men had told their commander and told Parliament that they expected more from the peace than a king restored to his own, they wanted changes. They wanted justice for the common people, and a living wage. They wanted Parliaments which would represent all the working men of the country and not just the gentry. Cromwell had taken the hard line against them, defending the king against his own men. He had shot the leaders for mutiny, he had made the men drop down their pamphlets into the mud, and then he had returned to Hampton Court with the blood of his own soldiers on his hands, to meet with Charles and conclude the other side of the bargain which would bring the king home. Cromwell had defeated the men who would have shouted against a restoration of the king, and then returned to the king for his signature on the document, as they had agreed it.

But Charles had gone. He had given his word, his word of honor as a king, and then slipped away in the night. He rode with two gentlemen to the New Forest where he had hunted so often with Buckingham in the old days, and taken a boat across to the Isle of Wight, putting his faith in the belief that the governor, Robert Hammond, would take his part on the slight evidence that Hammond had once said he disliked the Levelers in the army, because he was a nephew of one of the king’s chaplains, and cousin, many times removed, to the Marquess of Winchester.

“He trusted a man because he knows his uncle?” John asked Hester in despair as they sat by the fireside before going to bed.

She shook her head. “Oh, John. What else could he do but dodge and dive and scrape about?”

“He could come to an agreement!” John exclaimed. “And have his throne again!”

She picked up the sewing from her lap. “He is the king,” she said. “He would not feel that he has to agree. He has always thought that others should agree with him.”

Hester was right. When the king arrived at Carisbrooke Castle and found that Governor Hammond imprisoned him, rather than hailing him as a hero, he gave his parole and immediately set to scheming. He sent secret messages to the Scots and told them that he was ready now to agree to the very things he had sworn he would never accept when he had been their prisoner. The Scots, tempted by the thought of a king who would accept their parliament and their church, secretly betrayed their allies, the English Parliament, and made a secret solemn engagement to restore Charles to his throne. In return he swore that for a trial period of three years he would abolish the position of bishops and run the English church on the Scottish model. He promised that all the senior posts in the land (and their fat fees) would be given to Scotsmen.

But Charles was no better at keeping his secrets than keeping his word. News of the agreement soon leaked out, especially when a proposal from the English Parliament was insultingly rejected by the king who was visibly, excessively, puffed up with confidence. Soon everyone knew that the king was dealing a false hand again.

“He would make an alliance with the Scots Covenanters?” Johnnie asked his father in bewilderment. “But he refused to agree with them for all those months at Newark.”

“He has changed his mind,” John said quietly. “He wants to make a new agreement. He wants to beat Parliament and Cromwell’s army at any price. He hated the covenanting Scots and could not agree with them, but they are now the only allies he can get. He is agreeing to things he denied completely only a few months ago. He refused them when he was their prisoner but now he has been seized by the English army he is looking kindly on the Scots again.”

Johnnie scowled. “So what does he believe in?” he demanded in exasperation. “I thought that he would never give up the English church and the bishops. You told me he thought that was sacred. You told me he would never give up his rights as a king.”

“I think now he is looking to survive,” John said grimly. “And if he can get back on the throne then who can force him to keep to agreements he made when he was in prison?”

“He would play false?”

John softened at the sight of his son’s distress. “A king must be on his throne,” he said gently. “You can understand that he might think it was worth anything to get back to his place.”

“And will he do it?” Johnnie asked. “Will he come back to London? Will I see him on his throne?”

John shook his head. “They’ll never let him off the Isle of Wight again,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if I were General Cromwell.”