Virgin Earth (58 page)

“And a woman’s love is not the same,” the king remarked. “To please a woman you have to try and keep trying, and women are changeable: first one thing pleases them, then another. But a man’s love is easier, s… steadier. When George and I were young men we spent whole days thinking of nothing but hunting and play. The king used to call us his dear l… l… lads.”

John nodded. The king paused and abruptly turned to him. “Did you ever see my brother Henry?”

“Yes,” John said. “I was gardener at Theobalds, and then for my lord Cecil at Hatfield. I saw Prince Henry and King James often; I remember you too, Your Majesty.”

“Do you think he was like the D… Duke of Buckingham? My brother? In his ways?”

John thought. They had the same arrogance, the same easy smile. They had the same sense that the world was half in love with them and that all they had to do was to accept homage.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “The prince was like the duke in many ways. But the duke had…” He broke off.

“What?”

“The duke had that shining beauty,” John said. “The prince was a handsome boy, as handsome as any. But the duke was as beautiful as an angel.”

Charles suddenly smiled, his grave face warming. “He was, wasn’t he?” he said. “It’s so easy to f… forget. All the portraits I have of him show his beauty, but all p… portraits are beautiful even when the sitters are plain. It’s good to know that you keep a picture of him in your heart, Tradescant.”

“I do,” John said simply. “I see him night and day. And sometimes I dream of him.”

“As if he w… w… were alive?”

John nodded. “I can never remember in my dreams that he is dead,” he confessed. “And sometimes I wake and think he is calling for me, and I jump from my bed as if I were a young man and in a hurry to go to him.”

“The queen didn’t l… like him,” the king said thoughtfully.

Tradescant tactfully said nothing.

“She was jealous.”

Tradescant gave a little nod. The king glanced at him. “Was your wife jealous of your love for your lord?”

Tradescant thought of Elizabeth and her long enmity for the duke and all he stood for: luxury, popery, waste and carnal sin.

“Oh, yes,” he said with a smile. “But women were always besotted with him or his worst enemy, or both.”

The king laughed shortly. “It’s true. He was a l… lamentable man with women.”

The gardener and the king smiled at one another, the king looking into Tradescant’s face for the first time.

“D’you have any of his things at your Ark?” the king asked.

“Some plants from the garden at New Hall, and a couple of rarities from the Ile de Rhé,” Tradescant replied carefully, conscious of the danger of this conversation. “He gave me some things from his own collection of rarities. Anything he did not need, anything he already had. I was collecting for him for many years.”

“I’ll come and see it,” the king said. “I’ll bring the queen. I have some things you might l… like, some gloves and things.”

Tradescant bowed low. “I should be honored.”

When he rose up the king was looking at him as if they shared a secret. “He was a very very great man, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Tradescant agreed, looking at the king’s melancholy face and sparing him the truth, as everyone always did. “He was the greatest lord in England and the most fit for his high office.”

The king nodded and turned away without another word. Tradescant, unseen, knelt again as the king strolled off. When the king had gone he got awkwardly to his feet; his bad knee was painful in the cold weather.

While John was at Oatlands, J stayed at Lambeth. Jane was now complete mistress of the house and the place was run with godly care. The day started with prayers for the household which J read aloud and then any one of them, from the youngest kitchen maid to the senior gardener, would pray extempore, saying what that person wished to the congregation and to his or her own personal God. The household went about their work all day and then came together again in the evening, before bedtime, for another brief session of praying together. Imperceptibly, the dress of the household altered, the servants naturally copying Jane’s modest muted style.

J rather thought that his father would complain when he finally returned home, but there was no explosion of disapproval.

“You must run the house as you wish,” he said equably to Jane. “You are the mistress here now. You must order what you wish.”

“I think it is what everyone wishes,” Jane said eagerly.

John gave her a little knowing smile. “But what if it were not?” he asked. “What if the cook and the kitchen maid, Peter and the two gardeners and their lad all agreed that they would rather have some dancing and some singing and a cup of ale instead? That they wanted to wear green and scarlet and ribbons in their hair? Would you provide it?”

“I would reason with them,” Jane said stiffly. “And wrestle with their souls.”

“So people are free to do as they wish as long as they choose right?”

“Yes,” she said; and then, “No, not exactly.”

John smiled at her. “When you have power over people, it is very easy to forget that they are doing as you order because you order it,” he said. “You can mistake obedience for consent. I say that my household shall be obedient to you. I don’t think that they prefer it that way. But they will be obedient to you because I order it. However, I shall come to prayers only now and then — when I really want to.”

“I am sure you would find it a comfort…” Jane began.

John patted her cheek. “I think you are wrestling with my soul,” he said. “I want my soul left in peace.”

Jane smiled at him. “All right,” she conceded. “D’you want to see Baby John?”

“Yes,” John said.

Frances brought the baby and placed him carefully in his grandfather’s lap. Baby John put his fists against his grandfather’s chest, reared back and inspected his face.

“He still doesn’t eat properly,” Frances said disapprovingly.

“Why not?” John asked.

“He still sucks,” Frances said. “He’s like a little goat.”

John smiled. “Don’t you love your little brother?” he asked.

Frances drew closer to him. “He’s all right,” she said. “But I don’t like how everyone makes such a fuss of him. I’m still your favorite, aren’t I, Granddad?”

John kept one hand firmly on Baby John, and with the other drew his granddaughter to him and kissed her smooth warm head, just before the plain white cap which Jane insisted that she wear.

“It’s not always the best thing to be, the Favorite,” he said, thinking of his lord and the parliament that impeached him, and the king who mourned for him.

“Yes it is,” she said instantly. “I was always your favorite and I still am.”

He settled her into the crook of his arm. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You are my precious girl.”

“And when I am grown I shall be gardener to the king,” she said firmly. “And run the Ark.”

“Girls cannot be gardeners,” John said gently.

“Cook says that girls can be gardeners because women are equal to men at the Day of Judgment,” Frances volunteered. “And that prophesying and preaching comes natural to women who es… es… eschew carnival knowledge.”

“I think you mean carnal knowledge,” John said unsteadily.

“Carnival,” Frances corrected him. “It means you can’t go maypole dancing or buy fairings, or play in the churchyard on feast days.”

“I suppose it does,” John said. He was very near to laughter but he managed to turn it into a gruff cough.

“And I am going to eschew carnival knowledge and be free of sin,” Frances went on. “And then I can be the king’s gardener.”

“We’ll see,” John said pacifically.

“Is Baby John going to be the king’s gardener?” she demanded.

John nestled the baby back into his arm and took up the plump dimpled hand. “I think he’s too small to work yet,” he said tactfully. “Whereas you’re a great big girl. By the time he’s ready for work you’ll have been prophesying and gardening for years.”

It was exactly the right answer. Frances beamed at him and went to the door. “I have to go now,” she said seriously. “I’ve got some seedlings that want watering.”

John nodded. “You see? You’re a gardener already and all Baby John can do is sit inside with his grandfather.”

Frances nodded and slipped through the door. John looked out of the window and saw her heaving the heavy watering bottle down toward the seed beds set against the warm south wall. Her little thumb was too small to fit the hole at the top of the bottle and she was sprinkling a shiny trail of water behind her like a determined snail.

January 1635

The letter that arrived for the Tradescants at Lambeth bore the royal stamp on the bottom. It was a demand for a tax, a new tax, another new tax. John opened it in the rarities room, standing beside the Venetian windows to catch the light, J beside him.

“It’s a tax to support the Navy,” he said. “Ship money.”

“We don’t pay that,” J said at once. “That’s only for the ports and the seaside towns who need the protection of the Navy against pirates and smugglers.”

“Looks like we
do
pay it,” John said grimly. “I imagine that everyone is going to have to pay it.”

J swore and took a brief step down the room and back again. “How much?”

“Enough,” John said. “Do we have savings?”

“We have my last quarter’s wages untouched, but that was to buy cuttings and seeds this spring.”

“We’ll have to dip into that,” John told him.

“Can we refuse to pay?”

John shook his head.

“We should refuse,” J declared passionately. “The king has no right to levy taxes. Parliament levies the taxes and passes the money raised on to the king. He has no right to demand on his own account. It is Parliament that should consent to the tax, and any complaint the people have is heard in Parliament. The king cannot just charge what he pleases. Where is it to end?”

John shook his head again. “The king has closed down Parliament, and I doubt he’ll invite them back. The world has changed, J, and the king is uppermost. If he sets a tax then we have to pay. We have no choice.”

J glared at his father. “You always say we have no choice!” he exclaimed.

John looked wearily at his son. “And you always bellow like a Ranter. I know you think me an old fool, J. So tell me your way. You refuse to pay the tax; the king’s men or the parish officers come and arrest you for treason. You are thrown into prison. Your wife and children go hungry. The business collapses; the Tradescants are ruined. This is a master plan, J. I applaud you.”

J looked as if he were about to burst out but then he laughed a short bitter laugh. “Aye,” he said. “Very well. You’re in the right. But it sticks in my throat.”

“It’ll stick in many throats,” John predicted. “But they’ll pay.”

“There will come a time when they will refuse,” J warned his father. “You cannot choke a country year after year and not have to face the people at the end of it. There will come a time when good men will refuse in such numbers that the king has to listen.”

“Maybe,” John said thoughtfully. “But who can say when?”

“If the king knew that his subjects object, that they don’t like being ordered to church and the prayers ordered for them, that they don’t like being ordered to play like children in the churchyard after the service, that there are men in the country who want to use the Lord’s Day for thought and reflection and who don’t want to practice archery and sports — if the king knew all that—”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know that,” John pointed out. “He dismissed the men who might have told him, and those left at court would never bring him bad news.”

“You could tell him,” J observed.

“I’m no better than the rest of them,” John replied. “I’ve learned to be a courtier. Maybe it’s late in life, but I’ve learned it now. I told the truth as I saw it to all the lords I ever served and I never flattered one of them with lies. But this king is a man who doesn’t invite the truth. I tell you, J, I
cannot
speak the truth to him. He is surrounded by fancy. I would not dare to be the one to tell him that he and the queen are not adored everywhere they go; I couldn’t tell him that the men he has thrown into prison are not wild men, madmen, hotheads, but men more sane and careful and honorable than the rest of us. I cannot be the one to tell him that he is in the wrong and the country is slowly coming to know it. He has made sure that the world appears as best pleases him. It would take more than me to turn it upside down.”

The king kept his promise to visit the Ark, though Tradescant had thought it was a royal promise — one thrown off in the moment with no thought other than to please by the graciousness of the intention. But early in January a Gentleman Usher of the court came to the Ark and was shown into the rarities room.

He looked around, concealing his surprise. “It’s an imposing room,” he remarked to J, who had shown him in. “I had not thought you had built such a grand room.”

J inwardly congratulated his father for overweening ambition. “We need a lot of accommodation,” he said modestly. “Every day we get something new for the collection, and the things need to be shown in the best light.”

The usher nodded. “The king and queen will visit you tomorrow at noon,” he said. “They want to see this famous collection.”

J bowed. “We will be honored.”

“They will not dine here, but you may offer them biscuits and wine and fruit,” the usher said. “I assume you will have no difficulty with that?”

J nodded. “Of course.”

“And there is no need for any loyal address, or anything of that sort,” the usher said. “No poem of greeting or anything like that. This is just an informal visit.”

J thought that the king and queen were very unlikely to get a poem of greeting from his staunchly independent wife but he merely nodded his assent. “I understand.”

“And if there are any in your household who suffer from strong and misguided views—” the usher paused to make sure that J was following him “ — it is your responsibility to make sure that they do not appear before Their Majesties. The king and queen do not want to see long Puritanical faces on their visit; they do not want anyone reflecting on them. Make sure that only your well-dressed and joyful neighbors are on the road.”