The two men looked out across the palace gardens spread below them like a tapestry map. ‘Those woods!’ the earl mourned. ‘The trees we have planted.’
‘The bluebells underneath them in springtime,’ John reminded him.
‘The orchards, my peach-tree wall!’
‘And the courts!’ Tradescant nodded at the smooth grass laid out in every courtyard of the rambling palace. ‘There isn’t grass like that anywhere else in the kingdom. Not a weed in it, and the mowing team trained to go to half an inch.’
‘I don’t see any mud in the knot garden,’ Robert Cecil remarked, looking at the garden as it was meant to be viewed – from on high.
‘There isn’t any now,’ John said with rare impatience. ‘Because I’ve been washing the stones in freezing water all morning.’
‘I shall be sorry to lose the hunting,’ the earl said.
‘I shan’t miss the deer eating my young shoots in spring.’
The earl shook his head. ‘You know they say that this is the fairest garden in England? And the greatest palace? That there never was and never will be a palace and garden to match it?’
John nodded. ‘I know.’
‘I couldn’t keep it,’ the earl said. ‘It’s his revenge on my father for the execution of his mother, you know. He wanted to take my own father’s house, his pride and his joy. What could I say? I hedged and twisted and turned and showed him other men’s houses. It’s my own fault. We built it too grand and too beautiful, my father and I. It was bound to draw out envy.’
John shrugged. ‘It is all the king’s,’ he said simply. ‘The whole country. And each of us is nothing more than his steward. If he wants anything, we have to give it.’
The earl threw him a curious sideways glance. ‘You really believe that, don’t you?’
John nodded, his face open and guileless. ‘He is the king under God. I would no more refuse him than I would skip my prayers.’
‘Please God he always has subjects as loyal as you.’
‘Amen.’
‘Leave washing the stones now and start preparing the plants for moving, and dig up those damned bulbs.’ The earl got to his feet with a grunt of discomfort. ‘My bones ache in this cold weather.’
‘I’ll leave the bulbs,’ John replied.
The earl raised an eyebrow.
‘You’ve given him the house and the grounds,’ John said. ‘I can be generous too. Let the king have these tulips in spring and I shall go myself to the Lowlands to buy you a fine crop for Hatfield, as we planned. We can make a new garden at Hatfield, we don’t have to scrump from here.’
‘A lordly gesture from a gardener?’ Cecil asked, smiling.
‘I have my grander moments,’ John said.
Hatfield House in Hertfordshire had been the home and the prison of the young Elizabeth during the dangerous years of her half-sister’s rule, when she had been a studious girl with a deep fear of the executioner’s axe. It had been Robert Cecil’s father who had come to her in the garden to tell her that she was now queen.
‘I’ll keep the tree she was sitting under,’ Robert Cecil said to Tradescant as they surveyed the quagmire the workmen had made in the building of the huge new house. ‘But I’m damned if I’ll do anything with that poky little hall. It can’t have been impressive even when it was new-built. I’m not surprised the queen was in the garden. Nowhere else to sit.’
‘If you cut away all around it so that it stood on a hill instead of so low, you could make it into a banqueting hall for summer, or a masquing theatre …’
The earl shook his head. ‘Leave it. An extra hall with its own kitchen and stables is always useful if someone important comes with a big entourage. Come and see the new house!’
He led the way up the garden, John following him slowly, looking everywhere with his quick perceptive glance. ‘Fine trees,’ he remarked.
‘They can stay,’ the earl said. ‘Mountain Jennings does the park and a Frenchman has designed the garden. But you plant it.’
John suppressed an instant, unworthy pang of envy. ‘I’d rather plant a garden than design it anyway.’
‘You know it comes to the same thing after the first summer,’ Cecil said. ‘The Frenchman goes back to Paris, and you have a free hand then. Anything you don’t like, you can tell me it has died – I’m not likely to know.’
John chuckled. ‘I can’t see me lasting long in your employ if I kill off your plantings, my lord,’ he said.
The earl smiled. ‘Never mind the plants, what about the new house?’
It was a large stately house, not as big as Theobalds, which was built as a palace and had sprawled to become a village, but it was a grand beautiful house in the new style, fit to display the staggering wealth of the Cecils, fit to welcome the prodigal luxury of the Jacobean court, fit to take its place as a great display house of Europe.
‘Surrounded by great courts on every side,’ the earl pointed. ‘A hundred rooms, separate kitchen and bake house altogether. I tell you, John, it has cost me nigh on thirty thousand pounds for the house alone, and I expect to spend as much again on the park and gardens.’
John gulped. ‘You’ll be ruined!’ he said bluntly.
The earl shook his head. ‘The king is a generous master to those who serve him well,’ he said. ‘And even to those who serve him ill,’ he added.
‘But sixty thousand pounds!’
The earl chuckled. ‘My money,’ he said grimly. ‘My show house, and in the end my grand funeral. What else should I do with it but spend it on what I love? And what a garden we will make, won’t we, John? Do you want me to scrimp on the plantings?’
John felt his excitement rising. ‘Have you the plans?’
‘Over here.’ The earl led the way to a little outhouse, his boots squelching in the mud. ‘As soon as the workmen have finished you can sow grass here, get the place clean.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ John said automatically, looking at the plans spread out on the table inside.
‘There!’ Cecil exclaimed.
John leaned over. The parkland was so immense that the grand house, drawn to scale, showed as nothing more than a little box in the centre. He ran his eye over the gardens. All the courts were to be planted with different flowers, each with their own ornate knot garden in different patterns. There was to be a great walk of espaliered fruit trees, and a grand water feature of a river running along a terrace edged with seats and planted with tender fruit trees in tubs. The water for the terrace was to be fed from a gigantic fountain splashing from a copper statue standing on a great rock. Further away from the house were to be wooded walks and orchards, a bowling green, and a mountain large enough to ride a horse up a winding path to the top.
‘Will this ease your homesickness for Theobalds?’ Cecil asked jokingly.
‘It will ease mine,’ John replied, looking at the magnitude of the plan and thinking, his imagination whirling, of how he would ever get the thousands of fruit trees, where he would buy the millions of plants. ‘Will it ease yours, my lord?’
The earl shrugged. ‘The service of a king is never easy, John. Don’t forget that. No true servant of a king ever sleeps well at night. I shall miss my old house.’ He turned back to the plan. ‘But this will keep us busy into our old age, don’t you think?’
‘This will keep us busy forever!’ John exclaimed. ‘Where am I to get a thousand golden carp from for your water parterre?’
‘Oh!’ Cecil said negligently. ‘Ask around, John. You can find a hundred pairs, surely! And they will breed if they are well kept, I don’t fear it!’
John chuckled reluctantly. ‘I know you don’t fear it, my lord. That is to be my job.’
Cecil beamed at him. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘And they are reroofing a fine cottage for you here, and I shall pay you an increase. How much did I promise you?’
‘Forty pounds a year, sir,’ John replied.
‘Call it fifty then,’ the earl said genially. ‘Why not? I’m hardly g
oing to notice it with the rest of these bills to pay.’
Summer 1610
John decided that Elizabeth and Baby J should remain at Meopham while he was travelling in Europe to buy the earl’s trees. Elizabeth protested that she wanted to live in the new cottage in Hertfordshire, but John was firm.
‘If Baby J should be ill, or you yourself sick, then there is no-one there who would care for you,’ he said in the last days of August, while he planned and packed his clothes for the journey.
‘There’s no-one here in Meopham who would care for me,’ she said inaccurately.
‘Your whole family is here, cousins, sisters, aunts, and your mother.’
‘I can’t see Gertrude wasting much time on my comfort!’
John nodded. ‘Maybe not. But she would do her duty by you. She would make sure that you had a fire and water and food. Whereas at Hatfield I know no-one but the workmen. Not even the house staff are fully at work yet. The place is still half-built.’
‘They must be finished soon!’
John was incapable of explaining the scale of the project. ‘It looks as if they could build for a dozen years and never be done!’ he said. ‘They have the roof on now, at least, and the walls complete. But all the inside fittings, the floors, the windows, there is all that to do. And the panelling is yet to come, there are hundreds of carpenters and woodcarvers on site! I tell you, Elizabeth, he is building a little town there, in the middle of a hundred meadows. And I must plant the meadows and turn them into a great garden!’
‘Don’t sound so overawed!’ Elizabeth said affectionately. ‘You know you are as excited as a child!’
John smiled, acknowledging the truth. ‘But I fear for him,’ he confided. ‘It is a great task he has taken on. I can’t see how he can bear the cost of it. And he is buying property in London too, and then selling it on. I fear he will overstretch himself and if he gets into debt –’ He broke off. Not even to Elizabeth would he trust the details of Cecil’s business arrangements, the bribes routinely taken, the Treasury money diverted, the men bankrupted by the king one day on charges of treason or offences against the Crown whose estates were bought up by his first minister at knockdown prices the next.
‘They say he is an engrosser,’ Elizabeth remarked. ‘Not a wood or a common is safe from his fences. He takes it all to himself.’
‘It is his own,’ John said stoutly. ‘He takes what is his by right. Only the king is above him, and God above him.’
Elizabeth gave him a sceptical look but kept her thoughts to herself. She was too much like her father – a clergyman of stoutly independent Protestantism – to accept John’s spiritual hierarchy which led from God in heaven down to the poorest pauper with each man in his place, and the king and the earl a small step down from the angels.
‘I fear for myself too,’ John said. ‘He has given me a purse of gold and ordered me to buy and buy. I am afraid of being cheated, and I am afraid of shipping these plants so far. He wants a garden all at once, so I should buy plants as large and fruitful as I can get. But I am sure that little sturdy ones might travel better!’
‘There’s no-one in the kingdom better able than you,’ Elizabeth said encouragingly. ‘And he knows it. I just wish I might come with you. Are you not afraid to go alone?’
John shook his head. ‘I’ve longed to travel ever since I was a boy,’ he said. ‘And my work for my lord has tempted me every time I go down to the docks and speak to the men who have sailed far overseas. The things they have seen! And they can bring back only the tiniest part of it. If I might go to India with them or even Turkey, just think what rarities I might bring home.’
She watched him, frowning slightly. ‘You would not want to go so far, surely?’
John put his arm around her waist to reassure her, but could not bring himself to lie. ‘We are a nation of travellers,’ he said. ‘The finest of the lords, my lord’s friends, are all men who seek their fortunes over the seas, who see the seas as their highway. My lord himself invests in every other voyage out of London. We are too great a nation with too many people to be kept to the one island.’
Elizabeth was a woman from a village that counted the men who were lost to the sea, and tried to keep them on the land. ‘You don’t think of leaving England?’
‘Oh, no,’ John said. ‘But I don’t fear to travel.’
‘I don’t know how you can bear to leave us for so long!’ she complained. ‘And Baby J will be so changed by the time you come back.’
John nodded. ‘You must note down every new thing he says so that you can remember to tell me when I return,’ he said. ‘And let him plant those cuttings I brought for him. They are his lordship’s favourite pinks, and they smell very sweet. They should grow well here. Let him dig the hole himself and set them in, I showed him how to do it this afternoon.’
‘I know.’ Elizabeth had watched from the window as her husband and her quick dark-eyed dark-haired son had kneeled side by side by the little plot of earth and dug together, John straining to understand the rapid babble of babytalk, Baby J looking up into his father’s face and repeating the sound until between guesswork and faith they could understand each other.
‘Dig!’ Baby J insisted, thrusting a little trowel into the earth.
‘Dig,’ his father agreed. ‘And now we put these little fellows into their beds.’
‘Dig!’ Baby J insisted again.
‘Not here!’ John said warningly. ‘They need to rest quiet here so that they can grow and make pretty flowers for Mama!’
‘Dig! J want dig!’
‘Not dig!’ John replied, descending rapidly to equal stubbornness.
‘Dig!’
‘No!’
‘Dig!’
‘No! Elizabeth! Come and take your son out of this! He is going to destroy these before they even know they’ve been transplanted!’
She had come from the house and swept Baby J up, and taken him down to the end of the garden to pet Daddy’s horse.
‘I don’t know that he will make a gardener,’ she warned. ‘You should not count on it.’
‘He understands the importance of deep digging,’ John said firmly. ‘Everything else will follow.’
Autumn 1610
John set sail in September, and experienced a rough and frightening crossing after waiting for four dull days off Gravesend for a southerly wind. He landed in Flushing and hired a large flat-bottomed canal boat so that he could stop at every farm and enquire what they had to sell, all the way down the canal to Delft. To his relief the canal boatman spoke English even though his accent was as strong as any Cornishman. The boat was drawn by an amiable sleepy horse which wandered along the tow path and grazed on the lush banks during John’s frequent halts. He found farmers of flowers whose whole trade consisted of nothing but the famous tulips, and whose whole fortune rested on being able to produce and then reproduce the new colours of blooms. They were farms like John had never seen before. Row upon row of floppy-leaved stalks were tended by women wearing huge wooden clogs against the rich sandy soil, and big white hats against the sun, working their way down the rows with an implement like a wooden spoon, gently lifting the smooth round bulbs from the ground and laying them softly down, and the cart coming along behind to gather them all up.
John watched them. Each set of leaves which had grown from one bulb now had a cluster of three, perhaps even four, bulbs at the end of their white stems. Most of them even carried fat buds at the head where the petals had been and when the women spotted them, and they never missed one however long he watched, they cut them off and popped them in their apron pockets. Where one valuable bulb had been set in the ground and flowered there were now four, and maybe three dozen seeds as well. A man could quadruple his investment in one year for no more labour than keeping the field free of weeds and digging up his capital in the autumn.
‘Profitable business,’ John remarked enviously under his breath, thinking of the price he paid for tulips in England.
At every canalside market town he had the boatman tie up and wait for him on board, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, as he wandered around the market gardens and picked out a well-shaped tree, a sack of common bulbs, a purse full of seeds. Wherever he could, he bought in bulk, haunted by the thought of the rich green commonland and meadows around Hatfield waiting for forests and plantations and mazes and orchards. Wherever he could find someone who could speak English and had the appearance of an honourable man, he made a contract with him to send on more plants to England as they matured.
‘A great planting scheme,’ one of the Dutch farmers commented.
John smiled but his forehead was creased with worry. ‘The greatest,’ he said.
Despite his rooted belief that Englishmen were the best of the world, and England undeniably the best country, John could not help but be impressed with the labour these people had put into their land. Each canal bank was maintained as smartly as each town doorstep. They took a pleasure and a pride in things being just so. And their rewards were towns which exuded wealth and a land which was interlaced with an efficient transport system that put the potholed roads of England to shame.
The dykes that held back the shifting sands and the high waves of the North Sea were a wonder to John, who had seen the feckless neglect of the marshes and waterlogged estuaries of the Fens and East Anglia. He had not thought it was possible to do anything with land soured by salt, but he saw the Dutch farmers had learned the way of it and were making use of land that an Englishman would call waste ground and abandon it as hopeless. John thought of the harbours and inlets and boggy places all around the coast, even in land-hungry Kent and Essex, and how in England they were left to lie fallow, steeped in salt, whereas in Holland they were banked off from the sea and growing green.
Earthly Joys Page 9