Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Yes,’ Johnnie said. ‘I’d like to plant them for the king.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Will he see them grow, d’you think?’

  January 1649

  John packed a bag. Hester, watching him from the doorway, knew that she was powerless to stop him.

  ‘I have to be there,’ he said. ‘I can’t sit at home while he is on trial for his life. I have to see him. I can’t stand not to know what is going on.’

  ‘Alexander could send you a message every day, tell you what has taken place,’ Hester suggested.

  ‘I have to be there,’ John repeated. ‘This was my father’s master, and my own. I was there at the start of this. I have to see the end.’

  ‘Who knows when the trial will be?’ she asked. ‘They should have started this month and yet the date is put back and put back. Perhaps they don’t mean to try him at all, but just to frighten him into agreeing.’

  ‘I have to be there,’ John insisted. ‘If there is to be no trial, then I have to see that there is no trial. I’ll wait until it happens – if it happens.’

  She nodded, resigned. ‘Send word to us then,’ she said. ‘Johnnie is sick with anxiety.’

  John swung his cloak over his shoulder and picked up his bag. ‘He’s young, he’ll mend.’

  ‘He still thinks they should have held out longer at Colchester, or fought their way out,’ she said. ‘When I think what this war has done to Johnnie, I wish the king was charged with treason. He has broken hearts up and down this country. He has turned against his people.’

  ‘Johnnie will recover,’ John said. ‘You don’t break your heart at fifteen.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But when he should have been at school or playing in the fields the country was at war and I had to keep him home. When you should have been home to teach and guide him you were away because you knew the king would keep you in his service, wherever that service might lead. Then, when he should have been apprenticed to you and making beautiful gardens or travelling and collecting plants, he was under siege in Colchester for a battle which could neither be won nor lost. Johnnie has never had a chance to be free of the king and the king’s wars.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll all be free of him at the end of this,’ John said grimly.

  John could not find a room in an inn near Westminster for love nor money. He could not find a bed. He could not find a share of a bed. They were renting out stables and hayracks as sleeping accommodation for the hundreds and thousands of people who were flocking to see the king on trial.

  If there had been half the sympathy that the king so confidently expected, there would have been a riot, or at the least intimidation of the commissioners. But there was no sense of outrage among the men and women who were packing into the City like herrings in a barrel. There was a sense of being spectators at the most remarkable event, of being safely in ringside seats to watch a cataclysm. They were birds above an earthquake, they were fish in a flood. The worst thing that could happen to a kingdom was happening now; and they were able to watch it.

  Once the crowd got a taste of history, there was no chance that they would resist it. They had come to see the most extraordinary event in an extraordinary decade, and they wanted to go home having seen it. A reversal in favour of the king that resulted in his agreement with Parliament and resting safe in his bed would have left the crowd, even the royalists among them, with a sense of having been cheated. They had come to see the king on trial. Most of them would even acknowledge that they had come to see the king beheaded. Anything less would have been a disappointment.

  John walked downriver to the Tower and knocked on Frances’s door, admiring the Christmas rose she had planted at one side.

  ‘One of mine?’ he asked her as she opened the door.

  She hugged him as she answered. ‘Of course. Did you not know you had been robbed?’

  ‘I’ve not been much in the garden,’ he said. It was a statement of his deep distress which she read at once.

  ‘The king?’

  ‘I’ve come to see his trial.’

  ‘You had much better not go,’ she said frankly, drawing him into the little hall and then into the parlour where a small fire of coal was burning.

  ‘I have to,’ John said shortly.

  ‘Will you stay here tonight?’

  He nodded. ‘If I may. There are no beds to be had in the City and I don’t want to go home.’

  ‘Alexander is going, but I didn’t want to see it. I remember when the king came to the Ark that day, and I saw him, and the queen. They were both so young then, and so rich. They were wrapped in silk and ermine.’

  John smiled, thinking of the little girl who had sat on the wall until her fingertips were blue with cold. ‘You wanted him to appoint you as the next Tradescant gardener.’

  She leaned forwards and stirred the coals so they flamed up. ‘It’s unbelievable that everything should be so changed. I don’t expect to be a gardener; but it is impossible to think that there may be no king.’

  ‘You could be a gardener now,’ John offered. ‘In these strange days anything is possible, I suppose. There are women preaching, aren’t there? And there were women fighting. There were hundreds of women who had their husbands’ and their fathers’ business in their charge while the men were off to war, and many still working because the men won’t be coming home again.’

  Frances nodded, her face grave. ‘I thank God that Alexander’s work was here, and that Johnnie was too young for all but the very end.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ John said softly.

  ‘Is Johnnie taking it hard?’

  ‘He’s bound to,’ John said. ‘I wouldn’t let him come to see the end of it. But I had to see it for myself.’

  ‘Well then,’ she said more cheerfully. ‘I shall send to the bake-house for a special dinner for you. And you will need to rise early tomorrow if you are to find a place inside the courtroom.’

  Saturday 20 January 1649

  Alexander and John went together to Westminster. The trial was to be held in Westminster Hall, open to the public, who were to be herded into pens in the body of the hall to prevent either an attack on the judges or a rescue of the king. Only the wealthy spectators were seated in the galleries running around the sides of the hall. John and Alexander chose to crowd on to the floor.

  ‘Like being in the pit at the theatre,’ Alexander complained as they were jostled and pushed.

  The galleries started to fill at midday, and then there was a furious scrum in the hall when latecomers tried to push to the front. Tradescant and Alexander battled to keep their places and the pushing was about to generate into an out-and-out fight when the doors opened and the judges entered.

  The sword and the mace were brought in first, then the Lord President Bradshaw took his place, a commissioner for advice on the law on either side of him. His big black hat was crammed over his ears. Alexander Norman nudged John.

  ‘He had it lined with iron plates,’ he whispered. ‘That hat. He is afraid that some royalist will shoot him where he sits.’

  John snorted with laughter and glanced across to where Cromwell entered, bare-headed, his face grim. ‘You have to admire the man,’ he said. ‘If anyone was going to be shot it would be him.’

  The charge was read, Bradshaw nodded for the prisoner to be brought before the court. John felt the heat and the press of the crowd.

  ‘Are you well?’ Alexander asked. ‘You’ve gone white.’

  John nodded, his eyes never leaving the south door.

  The soldiers came in and pushed back the crowd to make a passageway to the red velvet chair placed before the judges. Then the king came in. He was dressed all in the richest black – black waistcoat, breeches, and cloak, on his shoulder was the dazzling silver star of the Order of the Garter. He did not look at the crowd, he barely glanced at his judges. He walked through the crowd, his head high, dramatically regal, his jewelled heels tapping on the floorboards, his cane held in his hand. He took his seat in the red
velvet chair with his back to the audience and his hat firmly on his head, as if he were about to watch a play at Oatlands Palace.

  John breathed out and realised that his soft susuration was part of a sigh, almost a moan, from the crowd, as the king took his place, before the men who could condemn him to death.

  Bradshaw squashed his armoured hat firmly down on his head, took up the paper and read the charge naming the king as the accused. John Cook, the barrister leading the prosecution, rose to his feet to read the accusations.

  ‘Hold a little,’ the king said quietly.

  ‘My Lord, on behalf of the Commons of England and all the people thereof I do accuse Charles Stuart here present of high treason and high misdemeanours –’

  The king lifted his cane and tapped John Cook on his arm.

  John, hidden in the crowd, said softly: ‘Oh no.’

  Cook ignored the king completely and continued to read the charge, raising his voice as if to overcome the distraction of the tapping cane and his own sense of bewilderment that an accused man should behave in such a way.

  The king reached forward and struck the wing of Cook’s gown a vigorous thwack with his cane. There was a gasp from the crowd. Cook abruptly stopped reading. The silver head of the cane fell off and noisily rolled along the uncarpeted boards before coming to rest a few feet from the king’s chair. Charles looked around for a servant to pick it up for him. Not a man moved. It took him a long moment to realise that no-one was going to do it; then he shrugged, as if he was indifferent to the slight, and bent and picked it up himself.

  John felt his shoulders hunching as if he were ashamed.

  Bradshaw, the president of the court, took command of the situation. ‘Sir, the court commands the charge be read; if you have anything to say afterwards you may be heard.’

  John knew that the king would take any restriction on his speech as an insult. Once, it would have been treason. Surprisingly, the king was silent and Cook started to read the charges from the roll.

  After all the rumours and accusations it was odd to hear the charges put so simply. John found he was straining to listen to every word, one hand over his eyes, trying to concentrate. The king was accused of trying to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people by making himself a tyrant. They accused him of making war against his own people and listed the battles where he had been personally in command. Then they accused him of plotting against the kingdom with foreign powers. There was nothing of interest, it was all a matter of fact. The king had undoubtedly done all these things.

  The king turned in his chair, as if the long reading of his crimes was not of much interest to him, and looked up at the galleries at the many faces he knew, and out at the body of the court. John raised his head; the king’s gaze flicked over him with its usual indifference. John had to fight a desire to call out – and knew also that he had no words to call out.

  Cook’s accusation went on to what seemed, to most, the worst crime of all – the renewing of the war after the king’s defeat. There was a soft groan at that point, many men and women had thought the battles were finished and a peace in the making last year. None of them would forgive Charles for his final throw of the dice which had cost so many more lives and had taught the fighting men a new savagery.

  ‘My God,’ whispered Alexander. ‘They want to kill him. They are impeaching him for treason.’

  John nodded. As soon as he had seen the king dressed as a martyr in black with that dazzling burst of diamonds on his shoulder he had known that this was the greatest masque Charles had ever played. This was no light-hearted interlude, it was full tragedy, and both the king and the court would play it to the full.

  ‘For these reasons,’ Cook concluded, ‘on behalf of the people of England, I impeach the said Charles Stuart as a tyrant, traitor and murderer, and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England.’

  There was a dead silence in the court as the people absorbed the accusation and understood that Cromwell and his court were demanding the ultimate punishment: the beheading of the king. The silence was broken by a peal of completely convincing laughter. The king was shaking in his chair, laughing as if at some delightful, ridiculous jest. He threw back his head and shook his curls. The laughter went on, horribly on, prolonged beyond any real amusement, the hard noise of a man defying his own fear.

  ‘Sir,’ Bradshaw said steadily. ‘You have now heard your charge and the court expects your answer.’

  The whole body of people in the court leaned forwards. The fans of ladies in the galleries were frozen still. Everyone listened to hear what the king would say.

  ‘I would know by what power I am called hither?’ he asked. ‘I would know by what authority – I mean lawful?’

  The rest of his answer was drowned by an upsurge of voices. ‘He’s going to challenge them every step of the way,’ Alexander shouted over the noise to John.

  ‘God no! If he would just agree, if he would just ask for mercy …’

  The king was still speaking but he could not be heard above the shouting.

  Bradshaw hammered for order and replied to the king. John saw the king shake his head and speak again.

  Bradshaw made a gesture: the king should be taken from the court. As he rose to leave the soldiers in the court suddenly shouted ‘Justice! Justice!’ and John saw the king start back for a moment, and knew that he feared a brawl and death in a struggle more than anything else.

  ‘He wants the scaffold,’ John said, suddenly seeing it all. ‘So that he can hand the crown entire to Prince Charles. So he can die as a man who was martyred for his beliefs. He’s not staking for his own life now, but the condition of kingship itself.’

  Charles paused before the table of judges. ‘You have shown no lawful authority to satisfy any reasonable man,’ he said sternly to Bradshaw.

  ‘We are satisfied.’

  ‘I don’t fear that,’ the king said derisively.

  He turned and gave a little half-smile to the people in the courtroom, as a player will do when he has had the best of a scene.

  ‘God save the king!’ someone shouted, and then others took it up: ‘God save the king!’

  The king smiled as he heard the shout and went quietly with his armed escort through the door to the warren of corridors of Westminster. The crowd started to file out into the cold January day. John and Alexander paused outside, a few flakes of snow drifted from the roofs and from the grey sky.

  ‘I’ll go home,’ John decided. ‘There will be nothing until Monday now.’

  ‘I shall come again on Monday,’ Alexander agreed. ‘If I had not seen it I wouldn’t have believed it.’

  John shook his head. ‘I still don’t,’ he said.

  Hester and Johnnie fell on John the moment he was through the front door. ‘What’s the news?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ he said. ‘They opened the hearing but the king will not recognise the court and they did nothing more than read the charge to him.’

  ‘Will not recognise the court?’ Hester asked. ‘What can he be hoping to do?’

  John tossed his cloak on to the chest at the foot of the stairs. ‘God knows. I am frozen through, this is bitter weather to be doing such bitter business.’

  ‘I’ll get some hot ale,’ Hester said. ‘Come to the kitchen with me, I must have the news.’

  John followed his wife, Johnnie dogging his footsteps.

  ‘How did he look?’ Johnnie asked quietly, as John sat himself on the bench before the scrubbed table and Hester produced mulled ale and hot soup, and a trencher of bread and cheese.

  ‘He looked well,’ John said consideringly. ‘He had dressed for the part. He was in black but the George was ablaze on his shoulder. He carried his cane – and he tapped at the prosecutor with it –’

  ‘He struck him?’ Hester asked.

  ‘Not a hard blow; but it was an awkward moment,’ John confessed.

  Johnnie’s eyes were huge in his pale face. ‘Did no-one shout
for him?’

  ‘A woman cried from the gallery, and there were a few that shouted “God Save the king”, but the soldiers drowned them out with shouting for justice,’ John said.

  ‘I wish I could go,’ Johnnie said fervently. ‘I would shout for him.’

  ‘That’s why you won’t go,’ John said firmly. ‘And I keep my head down and my thoughts to myself. They were seeking witnesses to the raising of the royal standard.’

  ‘Did anyone recognise you?’ Hester demanded.

  John shook his head. ‘I am as quiet as a well-fed mouse,’ he said. ‘I have no wish to be summoned as a witness to either cause. I have no wish but to see the end of this.’

  ‘He’s the king!’ Johnnie burst out passionately.

  ‘Aye,’ John replied. ‘And if he would consent to be a little less then he still might get clear of this. He could withdraw and offer them his son in his place. Or he could offer to rule by their assent, not his own. But he will be the king. He would rather be a dead king than a live sensible man.’

  ‘Who were the commissioners?’ Hester asked. ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘A few familiar faces,’ John said. ‘But only half of them named and called have had the courage to sit in judgement on their king. There are a lot of men with pressing business elsewhere.’

  ‘John Lambert?’ she asked, deliberately casual.

  ‘With the army in the north,’ he replied. ‘But his name is down as a commissioner. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘I should hate to think him in it,’ she said.

  ‘He wouldn’t do it,’ Johnnie asserted. ‘He’d know that it is wrong.’

  John shook his head. ‘It’s the only way for everyone now,’ he said. ‘King and commoners. He’s left us no way out at all.’

  Monday 22 January 1649

  On Monday John and Alexander met on the steps of Westminster Hall and went in with the surging crowd as the doors were opened. The press of men and women swept John to the far side of the hall where he could see the king’s profile against the red velvet chair. Charles looked drawn and tired, he was finding it hard to sleep while constantly watched, and he knew now that the chances of a miraculous escape were every day diminishing.