Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Yes indeed. I couldn’t resist.’ He stepped into the hall and bent over her hand.

  ‘Is it still Major?’ she asked, looking at the rich feather in his hat and the shining leather of his boots.

  ‘Ah no!’ he said with a flourish. ‘I am a general now, Mrs Tradescant. And before I have done I shall sit in Parliament and bestow a baronetcy on you for your services to gardeners. Or a dukedom. Whatever you would wish.’

  Hester giggled. ‘Come and see the tulips then,’ she urged. ‘They are lovely this year. My husband came back last spring and he has many new species which you will want to see, some beautiful plants from Virginia. You will never resist our tulip tree.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Hester laughed. ‘I promise. A most beautiful tree which bears white flowers shaped exactly like a tulip. I’ve not seen them yet because we have only two saplings but we have taken cuttings and my husband swears they will thrive.’

  John Lambert followed her through the house and paused on the terrace to look out over the garden. It was the first time he had seen it properly weeded and pruned and looking its best.

  ‘This is a little piece of paradise,’ he said, his eyes going over the nodding blossoms of the fruit trees and the flowerbeds and nursery beds before the house. ‘It was well-named when you called it the Ark. It has been like a flood of terror outside these walls and yet here it always seems to be like peace.’

  Hester stood very still and absorbed the compliment like a blessing. ‘I have spent my whole life trying to make it so,’ she said. ‘I am glad you can see it.’

  He glanced at her as if they understood each other very well. ‘If we can make the country as peaceful and fertile as this garden, Mrs Tradescant, then it will all have been worth while. If I can make every cottage garden a safe place like this, and every hardworking man in the country with a legal right to his cottage and his garden, then I will have done my duty as well as you have done yours.’

  She looked curiously at him. ‘Aren’t those Leveller sentiments?’ she asked. ‘I thought the Leveller cause was stamped out?’

  He smiled but he did not disagree. ‘Not out of the hearts and minds. I think that any man who has seen how the poor suffer in this country, and has seen the way that poor men fought for their rights, would want to see the great wastes and parks opened up so that homeless people could build themselves houses, and hungry people could grow food. I’m a landholder myself, Mrs Tradescant. I don’t want my garden walls pulled down. But I don’t want huge parks enclosed to feed and shelter deer while men and women outside go hungry.’

  Hester nodded and led the way down the garden path towards the blaze of colour that was the tulip beds. She glanced back with a half-smile at John Lambert’s transfixed expression.

  ‘They’re good, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are superb,’ he breathed. ‘I must, I must have some of those.’

  ‘I’ll fetch a pen and paper for your order,’ Hester said with satisfaction. ‘And you must come again next month and see the roses. They are going to be wonderful this year. I like our roses even better than our tulips.’

  He shook his head, and something in that gesture alerted her that he was not as carefree as he had suggested. ‘I’m afraid I will be busy elsewhere in June,’ he said.

  Hester understood what John Lambert had meant when the day after his visit the news came of royalist bands mustered in every town and village in every county. Men who had put away their pikes thinking the battle was over were running and riding up and down the country lanes again, calling men to fight for the king, who needed only one battle to be won against a demoralised and divided Parliament and army to come to his own. The navy suddenly declared for the king and sailed into harbours all along the south coast, and declared every port as royalist. All over the country the retired royalist officers were out again, calling men to arms. Each county, each town, each village had its own royalist headquarters and royalist troop. The nation was at war once more, spontaneously, naturally, and the prize was to release the king and restore him to his throne in a great heave of nostalgia for the days of peace before the war.

  Men who had stood by and watched Cromwell’s army take the victory in the first king’s war were now seized with such an impatience for peace that they turned out for Charles, certain that only by restoring him to the throne could the kingdom find peace. Men who had been indifferent soldiers under Cromwell turned their coats and hoped for pay and a victory under the command of the royalists. And those who had fought for the king over the long four years of the king’s war and suffered and feared in the two years since, prayed that this one last chance might restore them to their former fortunes.

  They were not summoned by a message. They responded almost individually, spontaneously, in an uprising which was as much an irritated demand for a return to more peaceful days, as a struggle of principle about the existence of bishops.

  It was incredible to Hester that the king could be the centre of a second catastrophe, even while he was in his prison. Without even being at liberty his mere presence could be the focus of unrest, and the country which had been at peace for nearly two years was suddenly at war again. It was a full-scale war fought in a hundred different pitched battles all over the kingdom, and then news came to Lambeth that Lord Norwich was besieging the City of London itself and was likely to take it for the king. If London fell then Parliament itself would be taken, and then the war must be over and the king would be the victor.

  Hester caught Johnnie sneaking a saddle on to the horse in the stable yard, a pack at his side. Her steady temper suddenly broke. ‘And where the devil d’you think you’re going?’

  He turned to her. ‘You can’t stop me. I’m going to fight for the king.’

  ‘You’re a child.’

  ‘I’m nearly fifteen, old enough to fight.’

  It was that spark that fired the charge. Hester sprung on him and seized him by his shirt collar and marched him, like a schoolboy, down the garden path, past the glorious rose beds where waves of perfume billowed in their wake, to the orchard where John was up a ladder disbudding apple trees.

  ‘The king needs fools!’ Hester exclaimed. ‘A fools’ army for a fool of a king.’

  ‘I will go!’ Johnnie proclaimed, struggling out from her grip. ‘I will not be under your command. I’m a man, I shall play a man’s part.’

  Hester thrust him at his father. ‘He’s fourteen,’ she announced baldly. ‘Says he’s a man. I can’t rule him any more. You will have to decide. Is he to go to serve the king or not?’

  John stepped slowly off the lower rungs of the ladder and looked at his son. ‘What’s this?’

  Johnnie did not look away but faced his father like a young stag facing the leader of the herd. ‘I want to do my duty,’ he said. ‘I want to serve the king.’

  ‘The king is not served by riots and uproar and Englishmen killing each other in the streets of Maidstone and Canterbury,’ John said slowly.

  ‘If that is what it takes –’

  John shook his head. ‘Making peace in a kingdom is done by ceaseless work, ceaseless working towards agreement,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you lived your childhood through a war and seen that at the end there is nothing agreed, nothing is any further forward?’

  ‘I want to do my duty!’

  John put his hand on the bough of the apple tree as if he would draw strength from it. ‘Your duty is to your God and to your father and mother,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t even believe in God,’ Johnnie shot back. ‘You don’t believe in anything. You have not done your duty by me as a father – you left us for years. You’re the king’s man but you don’t fight for him, you’re in the pay of Parliament and you joke about being a Parliament gardener. You’re a Virginia planter but you stay at home in Lambeth. I won’t be told my duty by you!’

  Hester started forwards to protect her stepson against the blow that must come, and then forced herself to pause, and h
old back. John did not strike Johnnie but froze, his hand tightened on the bough of the apple tree until the knuckles went pale.

  ‘I am sorry you think so low of me,’ John said quietly. ‘And what you say is true. I lost my faith in God when your mother died and I could not even hold her for fear of spreading the infection to you. I have tried to show my respect to others’ faith. But the heart went out of me. I did leave you and Frances and your stepmother at a time when I should have stayed and protected you – but I thought the king would draw me into fighting and never let me go. And I was right to fear that – he has drawn the whole four kingdoms of men into fighting and he has never let them go. I have my headright in Virginia but I could not keep it without killing people that I have every reason to love and respect. It was a war between countrymen there too.’

  Johnnie was about to speak, Hester knowing him so well, knew that he was fighting not to break down in tears and pitch into his father’s arms. He held himself very still, rigid as a soldier under fire.

  ‘But I do have a right to speak,’ John said. ‘Because I know things that you don’t. Because I have thought of things in all this time. I have struggled with one loyalty against another, with one love against another. You might think that I am weak – but this is how my life has come to me. It is not a simple life of simple loyalties. I am not like my father. He found master after master that he could love and follow with a loyal heart. He loved Sir Robert Cecil, and then the Duke of Buckingham, and then the king. He never questioned that they were the master and he the man. But it’s not been like that for me. And it won’t be like that for you. The world has changed, Johnnie. It’s not enough to cite duty any more and go marching off to the rattle of a recruiting drum. You have to think for yourself, you have to pick your own path.’

  There was a long silence in the orchard. Somewhere in the high leaves of one of the trees a blackbird started to sing.

  ‘I beg your pardon for speaking as I did,’ Johnnie said stiffly. ‘And I ask your permission as your dutiful son. I want to go and serve the king. That’s my path. I have considered it for myself. I want to fight for my king.’

  John shot a look at Hester as if to ask if she could see a way out. One look was enough. Hester’s face was tragic, both hands gripped under the shield of her apron.

  ‘God bless you and keep you then,’ John said slowly. ‘And come back home the minute you have a doubt, Johnnie. You are the only Tradescant heir, and very dear to us.’

  Slowly Johnnie dropped to one knee on the grass for his father’s blessing. Over his bent fair head John looked at Hester and saw that he had said the right thing – they had to let their son go to war.

  Dearest Mother and Father,

  I write this to you on the road to Colchester. I am riding with Lord Norwich and half a dozen gentlemen and a fine troop of more than a thousand strong. We were rebuffed at London – I got there as they were leaving, unluckily for me – but at least I am in a troop of horse gathering recruits as we go.

  The mare is keeping up well and I am sure to feed her every night. We have to forage for our own feed which is hard to do in some of these farms that were poor enough before we arrived and are left worse. Some of the gentlemen use the farmers and labourers very hard, and this does not increase our welcome further down the road.

  The ships will supply us when we are in Colchester and an army is coming to our aid from out of East Anglia. There is no doubt that we will win.

  My love to Frances and her husband. You can ask Alexander to delay his supply of barrels of gunpowder as a favour to me. I hope you are all well. Your loving and dutiful son – John.

  ‘He signs himself John, not Johnnie,’ Hester observed.

  ‘He sounds well,’ John answered.

  They stood, cheek to cheek in the hall, both of them reading the short letter, and then reading it again.

  ‘She’s a good horse, she’ll keep him safe,’ John said.

  ‘He doesn’t sound very happy with the troop.’

  John relinquished the letter into her hands and turned towards the garden. ‘How could he be? A boy who has seen so little of the world, suddenly ridden off to war?’

  ‘Should you fetch him home?’ Hester asked.

  John paused, hearing the longing in her voice. ‘I cannot,’ he said.

  She would have argued but he raised his hand to check her. ‘Don’t reproach me, Hester, it means as much to me as it does to you to see my son enmeshed in this war. I have prayed just as hard as you that we would be at peace before he reached his manhood. I thought it was over. I was sure it was over. But I can’t fetch him home like a naughty schoolboy. He has to walk his own path.’

  He looked at her and saw the blank agony on her face.

  ‘He is my son!’ she said passionately. ‘Joking about gunpowder.’

  John paused, bleak with worry, nodded, and went out to his garden.

  July 1648

  Frances was at the Ark for the plague months of the summer and Hester found that her stepdaughter’s company was the only one she could bear, as they waited for news of Johnnie. The war was favouring the king and she could hope that Johnnie would march into London as part of a triumphant royal army. In July the Scots confirmed in the most dramatic way that they had changed sides and were now for the king, when they crossed the border with an army of nine thousand men to fling against the battle-weary, underpaid, disillusioned forces of Parliament.

  It was an appallingly wet summer. The roses in the garden filled with rain and rotted in their blooms. The strawberries and raspberries were washed into sodden pulp on their stems. Hester spent the days watching the rain pour down the great panes of Venetian glass in the rarities room, looking out at the flooded garden, at her husband splashing around ankle-deep in mud, digging ditches to drain the sodden land into the stream outside the house which was already bubbling over the little bridge and still rising.

  Uncharacteristically, Hester did not throw a piece of sacking over her cap and go out to help him. She sat at the desk without books before her, without sewing in her hands. She did not even talk to the few visitors who came to see the rarities, though with the river in flood and the country at war again, they might as well have shut the Ark for all the money they took. Hester sat in silence, watching the rain, Frances in silence at her side.

  The news came that the English royalist troops had come under attack on the road to Colchester and had had to rush into the town for shelter. There was a brief and terrible battle as the royalists were driven back into the town, before they got the town gates shut and the Parliamentary soldiers locked out. Hundreds of men were killed in close fighting which was bloodier and more bitter than any known in England before. The names of the hundreds of individual soldiers killed in that spiteful skirmish were lost. Hester sat watching the rain, not knowing if her stepson was alive, or face down in the mud outside the gates of Colchester.

  It was not a siege, it was a massacre-in-waiting. General Fairfax with John Lambert was commanding the Parliament army and he had ringed the city with a rampart and ditch with ten forts studding the perimeter. No-one would be able to get out alive. The whole city was not just besieged, it was completely entrapped.

  ‘John Lambert is there?’ Hester asked when Frances brought a news-sheet and read the report of the siege.

  ‘Yes,’ Frances said, and looked at her mother.

  ‘What times these are: that John Lambert should be in one army and my boy in another,’ Hester said very softly.

  There was another royalist army raised at Kingston upon Thames, commanded by Lord Holland, supported by the Duke of Buckingham, the son of the Tradescants’ old master. John had scowled at the mention of his name and stamped out to lay sandbags at the front door of the Ark. The road to Lambeth was completely under water and the little stream before the house had burst its banks and was spreading over the road and into the Tradescants’ orchard. John was fearful that the River Thames itself would flood and bring salt water to co
ntaminate his land on the north side of the road but there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  The new royalist army mustered only a few men. Little more than five hundred turned out in the wet and marched first to London and then to Reigate Castle, and then turned in a retreat which quickly became a rout through the villages north of London to defeat at Surbiton. The Earl of Holland was captured by the Parliamentary army and sent to London. Parliament decreed that he would be beheaded for treason to his country. The Duke of Buckingham slipped away to safety in Holland.

  ‘He would,’ Tradescant said sourly.

  Suddenly, royal fever seemed to have passed as abruptly as it had raged. There was no further uprising in England. It would all depend on the Scots: whether they could get to Colchester in time to relieve the town, whether they would march all the way south and into the very city of London itself.

  The royalists besieged in Colchester, their rations running low and any hope for relief now gone, asked for safe passage for women and children, opened the sally port door and sent them out to the Parliamentary army. To their horror the women were stripped and beaten, and sent back to the fort. England had never seen such savagery in fighting. The rules of warfare had been suspended. Men who would have been chivalrous to a defeated enemy six years ago were now in a killing frenzy of rage that war should have broken out again. There were rumours that when the besieged came out of Colchester, as soon they must, they would be cut down where they stood. There would be no quarter, there would be no prisoners. There would not even be trials for treason. When the men lay down their arms the Parliament cavalry would ride over them.

  Hester said nothing when John told her this news, she did not weep, she did not whisper Johnnie’s name. She looked out of the window and said only: ‘When is it ever going to stop raining?’

  John went out into the garden and left her watching the drops run down the panes.