Virgin Earth

Spring 1651

In the cold, dark days of February John was glad to go to London and stay with Frances, or with Philip Harding, or Paul Quigley, and join the men in their discussions. Sometimes one of the physicians would conduct an experiment and summon the gentlemen to watch so that they might comment on his findings. John attended an evening in which one of the alchemists attempted to fire a new glaze for porcelain.

“John should be the judge,” one of the gentlemen said. “You have some porcelain in your collection, haven’t you, John?”

“I have some china dishes,” John said. “They range in size from as big as a trencher to so small that a mouse could dine off it.”

“Very fine?” the man asked. “You can see light through them, can’t you?”

“Yes,” John said. “But strong. I’ve never seen the like in this country. I think we don’t have china clay which is fine enough.”

“It’s the glaze,” said another man.

“The heat of the furnace,” suggested another.

“Wait,” said the alchemist. “Wait until the furnace is cooled enough and you shall see it.”

“A drink while we wait?” someone suggested and the maidservant brought a bottle of Canary wine and glasses, and they drew up high stools to sit companionably around the alchemist’s working bench.

“Have you heard that Oatlands Palace is to be taken down?” one of the men asked John. “You planted the gardens there, didn’t you?”

John checked in the act of drinking. “Taken down?” he repeated.

Another man nodded. “They can’t sell it. It’s too big for a private residence, and it needs too much work done. It’s to be destroyed.”

“But – the gardens?” John stammered.

“You should petition Parliament,” one of the mathematicians recommended. “Ask them if you may uproot your plants before they start to knock the whole thing down. You have some rarities there, don’t you?”

“Indeed I have,” John said, astounded. “There are some very precious things in the royal courts.” He shook his head. “Every day there is something new but I would never have thought that they would raze Oatlands.”

John raised the matter of Oatlands’ gardens with a Parliament man who visited the Ark to see the rarities and in a few days he received a commission to supervise the selling of the specimen plants from the garden before the demolition of the house. He might take a tithe of the profit and any plants he chose as payment for his trouble, and he was ordered to sell the rest.

“I’ll stay there for a week or so, until the work is done,” he told Hester.

“I shall miss our little house there,” she said. “I liked knowing we had a place out of the city, a refuge.”

“Such a waste,” John said. “All that work in the gardens, all that beauty in the house. And the new orangery and the silkworm house! All for nothing.”

“Shall you take Johnnie with you?” Hester asked. “It might do him good to have a change of scene.”

“Yes,” John said. “I’ll take the cart too. I’ll bring back some of the chestnut trees if any have survived this winter. And there were some handsome climbers as well which I might be able to cut back from the walls and transplant.”

They harnessed Caesar, Johnnie’s warhorse, to the cart and John thought that the handsome animal pulling a gardener’s cart to a palace which was to be demolished could have served as an illustration for a chapbook entitled: “How the mighty are fallen.” A warhorse harnessed to pull a cart did not seem to him to be a symbol of peace and prosperity when his son sat beside him on the driving seat with his eyes deep-set and dark. Even the horse drooped its head at the unfamiliar weight dragging at its shoulders. It seemed as if both boy and horse should be released from drudgery, should be set free to ride off in some romance of their own devising. The times were too small and too mean for both of them. They were beautiful creatures, they should have been freed to go their own ways.

John thought that hard work might restore some of Johnnie’s spirits, and set him to cutting back and lifting the roses out of the rose garden. There was no time to be troubled with any but the most precious plants in the garden, and the trees in the orchards. The great richness of the nine acres and the terraced courts could not be uprooted and saved in the short February days.

John worked from memory, powerful, evocative memories of planting for the king and queen, remembering what plant was in his hand when she stopped by him on the path, what precious bulbs were stored in the nets hung up high in the roofs of the sheds.

In the evenings they planned the work for the next day and Johnnie would ask over and over again whether the queen had chosen this plant, or that; whether the king had eaten fruit from this very tree. Despite himself, John found that he was remembering with affection the beauty of the garden and the rich frivolity of the court. Despite his own skepticism he drew a picture of a golden time, gardening in summer for a king and a queen who spent money like rain and who walked lovingly arm-in-arm along well-tended paths from one exquisite court and terrace to another.

John and his son spent a week lifting the rarest and most precious plants and potting them up and loading them into the cart. Every other day they drove the cart down to the river and transferred the pots on to a ferry to send to the Ark at Lambeth.

“Hester won’t be best pleased,” John remarked as yet another boatload of plants set off downstream. “She and Joseph will be doing nothing but unloading and watering pots this week.”

“We have to do it,” Johnnie said passionately. “We’re his gardeners. We have to save as much of his garden as we can.”

Something in the desperate note in his voice warned John. He put his hand on his son’s arm. “We’re doing this for the plants, not for the king,” he said. “Some of these are of the best quality, some of these are rare and precious. I couldn’t let them go to waste. This work is for the plants and for the Ark.”

Johnnie looked at his father. “These are the king’s plants,” he said with suppressed emotion. “We’re gardening for him now as we always have done. Once it was our duty to put the plants in and safeguard them. Now it’s our duty to save them for him. When he comes to his own again he can sit underneath his own father’s cherry tree, he can pick roses for his mother from her favorite tree. They’ve crowned him king in Scotland, haven’t they? They’ve declared him to be their king though they once called his father a prisoner and handed him over to his death. But Charles is an anointed king once more, in a kingdom which acknowledges him?”

“At such a price,” John muttered. “He agreed to every demand the Scots put to him, and betrayed men who had fought for him in the Highlands for years. Your old hero, Montrose, was captured and executed, and the king dining with the Kirk, his old enemies, looked out of the window and saw Montrose’s hand nailed to the door. He said nothing. He went on with his dinner.”

“He does what he has to do,” Johnnie said staunchly.

Once they had rescued the pick of the specimens, and rummaged in the cold soil of the courts for forgotten bulbs, they declared a general sale of plants in Weybridge. The town crier called out the news and it spread from one manor garden to another, from one cottage to another, until everyone in Surrey wanted a flower from the king’s garden.

On Saturday John set up a stall on the very front door of the palace and let people come with their own spades to choose, and then dig up their choice. He and Johnnie inspected the booty and set an instant knockdown price on the trees which marched past them, on the little pots of pansies and herbs, on the trailing creepers, torn from the walls, on the endless scarlet-budding roses.

It was a melancholy business to see the garden walking away down the drive, as if even the plants had gone into exile, and John was sorry that he had exposed his son to the sight. He had thought that the work would have given them a project to complete together, that Johnnie would see that the garden was finished, that the palace was destroyed, that the king and kingship were gone forever. But instead there was a powerful sense of loss invoked by the sale. More than one man or woman stopped at John’s table, gestured to their purchase and asked reverently: “He did love these, didn’t he? Can you remember if he ever picked a flower from it? Did he touch it?”

John realized that only half of the people were buying plants cheaply; the other half were buying relics, honoring the memory of a dead king, planting a little bit of his martyrdom in their own gardens.

All the cold gray day Johnnie priced, took money, answered questions with endless easy patience. But John, watching him, saw how his head drooped as the light faded from the sky.

“You’re tired,” he said gruffly at five o’clock as the winter twilight closed around them. “And chilled too. I know I am. Let’s go down to the ale house and get ourselves a good dinner. I’d like to leave the money in the goldsmith’s keeping anyway. I don’t want to keep it here.”

Johnnie’s face was pale. “Yes.”

“Are you sick?” John asked.

Johnnie shook his head. “Weary,” he said. “I wasn’t born to be a huckster. I hate it. How they do go on, don’t they? And the smaller the plant the more ado they make about the price.”

John laughed eagerly. “Yes. It’s been a long business. But tomorrow we’ll go.”

“And then they’ll pull it down and it will be as if it was never here,” Johnnie said dreamily.

John tied the string of the purse and slipped it into his deep pocket. “Come on,” he said cheerfully. “Before we are completely benighted.”

He marched briskly down the avenue with Johnnie keeping step beside him. They were warm by the time they saw the yellow light of the ale house and smelled the mixture of woodsmoke and frying bacon.

“You go on,” John said. “I’ll take this purse and put it in the goldsmith’s vault.”

Johnnie nodded and went ahead of his father. John stood back and watched his son walk away. “Johnnie!” he suddenly called.

The young man hesitated and turned, his face a pale blur in the twilight.

“It’s being rid of the old to prepare for the new,” John said. “A baptism. Not a funeral, you know.”

It was a melancholy business the next morning, for all of John’s forced brightness. They loaded the cart with leftover tools and the pots which they had filled with the rescued plants during their stay, and then they went round the garden and orchard and orangery in one final tour to see what had been overlooked.

The rose garden was a desert of pitted holes, like the face of a beloved woman pocked with scars. The very shape of the garden had gone, the trees which had given it a structure had been uprooted, the trellised arbors which had been pulled down as people cut off the climbing roses were left as smashed wood in the mud. The lavender borders were ragged, some plants missing, some trodden down. A few snowdrops which had struggled up at the base of the wall in the queen’s court had been crushed by someone in their haste to cut down a creeper. A pot had been dropped and smashed and the shards left where they lay, cluttering up the path. The whole palace, once so rosy in pink brick and so immaculately gardened, with smooth lawns and sculpted arbors, was now a tangle of overgrown hedging and churned mud. Even the bowling green, which had been John’s great pride, was pocked with weeds and the richer green of winter moss shone in moist patches among the paler green of weak winter grass.

It had started to rain, an icy, penetrating drizzle, and the clouds sat heavily on the roof of the palace. The glass had been stolen long ago from the windows, or smashed by the successive troops quartered in the palace, and the smell of damp plaster and decay seeped into the courts from the derelict building.

“Let’s go,” John said. “Everything is finished here.”

Johnnie nodded in silence and followed his father to the cart. He climbed onto the box and took the reins of the horse which should have been his war horse, to drive away from the palace which should have been the king’s. The avenue was long gone, felled for timber. They drove between pale stumps where grand trees had once shaded the road.

“That was a miserable task,” John said heartily, hoping that Johnnie would agree and that they might share the sadness and then put it behind them.

“It was burying him and his hopes all over again,” Johnnie said somberly; and then said nothing more.