Virgin Earth

Summer 1649

With the coming of the summer the numbers of visitors increased at the Ark and the social life of London was restored. There was an explosion of debate as to how the new society should be built, what should be allowed and what should be forbidden. Pamphlets, sermons, diatribes and journals poured off the little presses which had sprung up everywhere during the war years, new plays were written, new poems commissioned. There was a sense of excitement, of being at the very heart of change, a new world which no one had ever experienced before. Kings had been killed before in England and elsewhere – but only on the battlefield, or in secret, and their thrones snatched by other claimants. Never before had the whole system of kingship been questioned and found so badly wanting that the people chose to destroy it and put no one in its place.

Oliver Cromwell was to be known as chairman of the Council of State, and there would never be another king of England. Even then the new state did not go far enough for many. There was no opening of the electorate: poor men still had no voice in the planning of the nation. There was no abolition of tithes, which many had fought for. There was no reform of the law, nor the ownership of land. The Houses of Parliament were still one House of Lords and a House of Commons packed with landed gentlemen, still serving their own needs before any other; so that the justice that John Lambert had hoped for so passionately was still far away.

But there was a sense of excitement and optimism as palpable as the warmer weather of May and June. There was a sense of changes coming, of hope, of a chance to make England into a country which could be prosperous for the many instead of the few. Families who had been estranged for years, siding with the opposing armies, were able to make friends again. Churches which had been emptied because of doctrinal arguments were now reestablished with a new, freer, informal style of preaching. Men wanted to be done with ceremony, with artifice. Men wanted to speak freely to their God, and to speak freely to each other.

An informal association of philosophers, botanists, mathematicians, physicians and astronomers met regularly to debate, Dr. Thomas Wharton among them, and John Tradescant too. John Lambert was in London from March and rarely missed a meeting, drawn by their discussion of science and botany. Many of them took to visiting the Ark that summer, to stroll around the garden, to sit by the little lake, to admire anything new and interesting in the rarities room and stay for dinner.

Hester, rather on her mettle as a housewife, took pride both in being able to provide dinner for a dozen men and beds for half of them at a moment’s notice, and that it was the Tradescant house and garden which was the center of attraction.

The conversation would go far into the night, and as the levels fell in the bottles of port the speculation about everything from the functions of parts of the body, to the existence of angels, the movement of the planets in their spheres and the rise and fall of sugar sap in John’s maple tree became wilder and more imaginative. Elias Ashmole, a learned lawyer, one evening swore that he could predict to an hour’s accuracy the time of a man’s death if only midwives would have the sense to record the exact time of birth to let an astronomy chart be rigorously drawn.

“But would you want to know?” John asked, slurring slightly.

“I want to know everything,” Elias replied. “That is what I mean by being a man of science. I, for instance, am born beneath the planet Mercury, and you can see that I am a completely mercurial man. I’m quick and versatile.”

“And looks like a silver slug, just like the metal!” someone interposed under his breath.

“But a man should separate the personal from the inquiring in his life,” a physician remarked rather confusedly. “I want to know how blood flows through the veins. But I’m not going to open up my own arm to have a look at it. I am not my own experiment.”

“Not at all!” another man interrupted passionately. “Unless you are prepared to penetrate, even into your own heart, then you are not inquiring at all. It is mere diversion.”

“Oh yes! If you want to die of the plague in an experiment to see that it is infectious!”

“Truly, one cannot study patients from a distance,” Dr. Wharton observed. “When the plague was in London I…”

“And what else have we done in the body politic but make a change and see what flows from it? Cut out the heart and see if the brain can still think?”

“That was not an experiment! It was a decision to which we were driven. I don’t see Cromwell as a great physician of the body politic! He was clinging on while the horse bolted!”

“But I don’t mean that,” John said, holding to his first thought with difficulty. “I mean, would you always want to know the future? How would you bear it?”

“Of course you can know it,” Elias replied. “I have drawn my own chart and I can tell you, for instance, that I shall be a man of considerable fame. I cast my own predictions and they told me clearly: ‘I shall labor for a fortune with a wife and get it.’”

“A rich widow?” someone asked from farther down the table.

“Lady Mary Manwaring,” someone muttered. “Old enough to be his mother. He’s been advising her. Guess what he advised?”

“I shall be remembered,” Ashmole insisted. “I shall have my place in the temple of history.”

“For what?” one of the mathematicians demanded and burped slightly. “Pardon me. What will earn you your place in the temple of history? Simpling in John’s herb garden? Picking his flowers for potions? I don’t expect to see you gleaming all over gold with the philosopher’s stone in your laboratory. Seems to me that of all of us it will be John’s name which will be remembered.”

John laughed. “I just collect,” he said modestly. “I don’t set myself up as a scientist. Of course, I’m bound to wonder how things grow the way they do. I can’t believe that it was all made by God in one week. I can see that man can make new plants, with proper skills. I can see that we can make the earth more yielding, that we can make plants grow better. I have some onions for instance…”

“Mr. Ashmole has an undeniable reputation in astronomy and astrology-” one of the physicians started.

“I’m just saying that Mr. Tradescant’s onions, or even his tulips, are likely to yield more lasting joy to the people of this country than all of Mr. Ashmole’s researches into the history of the masonic order!”

John shook his head. “It’ll be the trees if anything,” he said definitely. “The greatest joy a man can have in England is the sight of one of our horse chestnut trees in full bloom. And we have my father to thank for that.”

“Hush,” Ashmole said. “I never speak of the masonic order.”

“Mr. Ashmole’s work at Brasenose-”

“Is undeniable. And he is my guest.” John recalled his duties as host. “Pass the bottle, Stephen.”

Johnnie was present at the dinners, but generally kept silent. John, looking down the table, would see his son’s intent, dark gaze move from one man to another, taking in the argument, weighing it, and then smiling in agreement or shaking his head. He was as open as a child though he was now nearly sixteen; but he had the politeness and the discretion not to burst out with his own opinions.

He would observe and listen throughout an evening of speculation, but whenever the talk turned to politics he would rise up and leave the room. Most of John’s guests were men who thought, like John Milton, that the dead king had been an obstacle to the future of the country, that removing him was like cutting off a worm-eaten bud from a healthy stem. But Elias Ashmole, and some of the Oxford men of learning, continued to favor the king’s cause, though they spoke of it with caution. Ashmole’s own great work was researching the history of the Order of the Garter, which seemed to most of them at the table as a doomed piece of academia, given that there was now no king in England, and no Order of the Garter at all.

Ashmole would explain that whether the king was present or not, there was still a notion of kingship which could not be so easily dismissed. At moments like that, Johnnie’s face would flush and he would lean forward to listen. But when the other men cried down the notion and said that the king was dead and kingship was finished forever, then Johnnie would silently slip away.

He still could not hear the king named without flinching. It was as if some picture of the king had taken possession of his heart, and the truth about the dead man, his fallibility, his unreliability, and at the end the arrogance of his downright dishonesty, was not enough to shift it.

“This determined loyalty!” John exclaimed to Hester as they sat on the terrace one evening and watched the sun set away to their right in strips of yellow- and peach-colored clouds. “It’s such a curse to him, he cannot leave the past behind him and move on.”

She was sewing a collar for Frances and she looked up from her work and smiled. “He’s so like your father.”

“Yes.” John was struck. “Of course. I hadn’t thought of it. My father loved Robert Cecil in the old way – a man and his lord – and then the Duke of Buckingham too. When everyone in the country was shouting for the Duke’s head my father would still have done his bidding. He was ready to sail with him to France just as the Duke was struck down. Then he was grieving while everyone else in the country was blessing the assassin.”

“Frances has it too,” Hester said. “That ability to love without doubts. For her it’s Alexander, she’s not interested in following a master. But that talent to love a man and his cause is a gift, I really admire it. The more so, I suppose, because it’s not one that I share. I’m ashamed to say that I am a complete turncoat. I spent much of my early life at court and most of my family and friends were of the king’s party; but all I care for now is peace so that we can sell plants and show the rarities.”

“It’s a gift that comes with a price to pay,” John observed. “Johnnie can’t accept that the king is dead and that it is all over. I had hoped that General Lambert would have turned him into a Parliamentary man if not a Leveler. I would rather have had him in love with liberty than with a dead king.”

“He’ll grow out of it,” Hester said comfortably. “They were hard years for him. For all of his boyhood he was sure that Prince Rupert would win the war for the king. He thought that King Charles would triumph up to the very last moment. I think even after Colchester he still thought the king might win. But he knows it is all over now.”

In June Johnnie took the king’s melon seedlings in their final largest pots on the cart to the river and loaded them onto a little wherry to take them upriver to Wimbledon. He went alone, he did not even tell his father that he was going, anticipating correctly that John had hoped that the seedlings had been forgotten and might be raised among the others in the melon beds at the Ark.

Johnnie took with him some planks of wood to build the frame, his dinner of bread and cheese in his pocket, a saw and a hammer, and a handful of nails in his belt.

“Building a house and planting a garden?” the ferryman asked with a grin.

Johnnie did not smile in reply. “I am on an errand,” he said solemnly. “An errand for my master.”

At the manor house he found the garden running to seed and the kitchen garden overgrown. But there was a warm south-facing wall and Johnnie spent the morning setting in his timber framework and banking up earth for the melon bed. Finally he planted the precious seedlings with a good space between each one, and then painstakingly ferried water from the kitchen-yard pump in the empty clay pots with his finger stopping the hole at the bottom.

Johnnie was his father’s son; it was hard for him to leave the rest of the garden alone, and only weed the melon bed. He could see the hallmarks of a typical Tradescant garden becoming gradually obliterated. The south face of the house had a large paved terrace before it and an impressive sweep of paired steps coming down in a semicircle. Johnnie saw the stone pots on the terrace and guessed correctly that his father would have filled them with citrus trees pruned into glossy green balls. At the foot of the steps would have been flower beds, he could still see the floppy dead leaves of the tulips that had pushed up through the weeds and presented their bright cups to the blind windows above them. There were fountains and watercourses which were once planted with irises and kingcups and were now choked with waterweed. There was an ornamental lake which was now evilly bright green but it still had the white and rose plates of water lilies on the scummy surface. There was an old-fashioned knot garden but the pattern of the bay hedges was blurred with weeds and the white stones were dirty. Johnnie looked around at the desolation of the summer garden that had been carefully planted to be the queen’s special refuge and knew that the royal cause was lost indeed.

There was nothing he could do for the garden, he decided. But later in the summer, when the melons were in flower, he would visit again and take a soft rabbit’s tail from one to another to pollinate them. Then, when they were setting fruit, he would bring his father’s expensive glass melon domes to set over each one to make them ripen. He had not thought what he would then do with the fruit. The king had clearly ordered it, so only the king or his son should eat it. Perhaps it would be Johnnie’s duty to take the fruit to France, find the king’s son, and give him this eccentric piece of his inheritance.

Johnnie shrugged, the fruit was a question for the future. His task was to keep faith with the last order of the king. King Charles had ordered a Tradescant to make him a melon bed in his manor house at Wimbledon; and it was done.

When Johnnie got home he found that his father was irritated with the wasted day’s work, and reluctant to promise the loan of the glass melon domes later in the year; but his stepmother defended him.

“Let him be,” she counseled John, as she plaited her hair ready for bed that night. “He is doing nothing more than putting flowers on the grave. Let him do this one thing for the king and perhaps he will feel that he has done everything that should be done. Then he will feel that his defenses of the king is over, and he can be happy and enjoy the peace.”