‘God be with you, wife,’ John said lovingly from the foot of the stairs. ‘And give Jane my blessing. Has she named the child?’
‘She wants to call her Frances.’
John went out of the front door to the veranda. The cold night air was crisp and sharp, and the stars were like pin-heads against a deep blue silk sky. The moon was down and it was too dark to see more than the weathered boards of the veranda and the spiky stalks of the fruit trees. John had planted his chestnut sapling and its first rooted cutting as a pair before the house and, two by two, a dozen cuttings from them to make a little avenue of chestnut running the length of the orchard. Their bare branches were as thin as whips against the arching cold sky.
John exhaled and his breath was a brandy-tinged cloud before his face. He thought briefly of other nights when he had watched and waited. Nights on board ship when the only sound had been the creaking and shifting of the timbers, nights when he had been on watch for icebergs in the perilous cold seas around Russia or when he had swung dizzily to and fro in the crow’s nest and looked for pirate ships in the darkness of the Mediterranean waters. He thought of keeping watch in the cold wet fogs of the Ile de Rhé, and of the one, two, three nights, when he had laid naked beside his lord and watched over his precious sleep.
‘Sleep well now, my lord,’ he said into the silent darkness.
He thought he would carry with him always this inner life which was like grief, but which was not quite grief, which was like love, but which was not quite love, which was like homesickness, but which was not a longing for home. Now that Buckingham was dead and his goods had bought the Tradescants their ark, John felt as if all the struggle of his love for his lord was resolved. He could love him without sin, he could love him without shame. The death of his lord had been the only way out, for John, for Buckingham himself. He might grieve for it but he did not blame himself for failing to give that one word of warning. And Elizabeth was true to her promise and the duke’s name was in her prayers every Sunday.
John sometimes wondered if the other man who had loved Buckingham, the King of England, felt like this; and if for him too, in the round of his court and daily pleasure and other loves and interests – birth like tonight, deaths and marriages – there was always a gap in the procession, always a face missing, that beautiful wilful angel face. And if he felt also that the world was a safer place, a calmer place, but a greyer place, without George Villiers.
John touched that face in his mind, as the king might lay his finger on the lips of a portrait as he passed it; and then he went round to the stable and rattled the door till the stable lad came tumbling down the stairs, and sent him to the Hurtes’ house in London.
Frances set the house by the ears, as a new baby always does. She cried and would not settle at night, and J saw dawn after dawn from the big Venetian windows as he walked her round and round the big room which housed the rarities. Held in his arms, rocked by his continual steady pacing, was the only way she would settle, and the great rarities room was the only place in the house where Jane was not wakened by the distant sound of her cries.
‘Sleep,’ J would say to his wife as the wail from the crib warned them of another restless night. ‘I will walk her,’ and he would wrap the tiny thing in a warm blanket, throw his father’s soldiering cape over his nightshirt and take her downstairs to walk and walk her around the echoing moonlit room, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for three, until she quieted and slept and he could creep back into his bedroom and lay her, as tender as a seedling, back in her little crib.
Jane did not have enough milk and Elizabeth said there was nothing for it but for her to stay in bed, eat as much as she could bear, and rest, rest, rest. ‘You must think and worry no more than a milch cow,’ she insisted when her daughter-in-law protested. ‘Or else it will be a wet nurse for Frances.’
In the face of such a threat Jane fell back against the pillows and closed her eyes. ‘I shall bring you some chicken broth at noon,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Sleep now.’
‘Where is Frances?’ Jane asked. ‘With J?’
‘J is sleeping like a dead man in the parlour,’ Elizabeth said with a smile. ‘He sat down at the table to bring the planting records up to date, and his head fell into the inkpot and he was gone. I’ve wrapped him with a rug and left him. Frances is with John.’
‘Does John know how to care for her? Will you watch him?’
‘John has his own methods,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But I will watch him.’
She glanced from the bedroom window and saw John and his granddaughter, but did not think she would point them out to Jane. John had strapped the baby to his back in an outlandish savage fashion that he must have seen on one of his voyages. She was wrapped in a fold of blanket against his back with two ends of the blanket knotted around his chest and two around his belly. With the baby held warm and snug against his homespun coat John was walking through the garden and down towards the orchard to see that his chestnut saplings were all surviving the frost.
Elizabeth watched for a moment, and curbed her desire to hurry out and take the child from him. The baby was not crying, John’s rolling limp was soothing to her, and as he walked he was singing a low muttered song: ‘Tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding …’, a nonsense song. Frances, soothed by the gentle pressure of his warm back, lulled by the weak winter sunlight, and enjoying the irregular motion of his walk, slept and woke and slept again as John went down to the end of his orchard to check his fruit trees, and came back again.
They could not yet afford a heated wall as he had built at New Hall. But John had curtained his trees with sacking and stuffed straw gently inside the bags, hoping to keep the frost from them and to warm them a little. He used the same technique on tender new saplings, especially those that came from the Mediterranean or from Africa and probably had never felt a frost. New plants from the Americas he thought might be a little more hardy, but anything small he planted in a new row of special beds near the house where the raised timber borders kept the soil a little warmer, and where he had great domes of glass, usually used for ripening melons, to keep the cold winds off them and to retain the weak heat of the winter sun.
Despite the duke’s death the plants and the rarities still came in on the ships and most days a sailor would make his way down the Lambeth Road to tap on John Tradescant’s back door and offer him some little curiosity or treasure. The duke might be collecting no more, but now the ships’ captains sent goods home addressed to John Tradescant, The Ark, Lambeth, certain that when they got home Mr Tradescant or his son would offer them a fair price for whatever they had found, and that they might enjoy the pleasure of boasting that their find was the centre of the Tradescants’ increasingly famous exhibition. Sometimes the goods were enormous: the skeleton jaw of a whale, or a monstrous unnamed bone. Sometimes they were tiny: a carving of a house inside a walnut. They could be stone or hide, wood or ivory, fashioned by a craftsman or thrown up by nature; the Tradescant collection was gloriously eclectic. Who cared how a thing was made or what it was? If it was rare and exotic it was of interest, it had a place somewhere in the cabinets in the great room with the great windows.
John paused in his walk and looked back at his house with pleasure. He had thought he might attempt to glaze the terrace and keep his most delicate plants there during the winter, but his pleasure in the look of his house, and his joy at sitting out on the terrace and looking out over his orchard on sunny days was too great. ‘It’s a fine house,’ he said over his shoulder to the sleeping baby. ‘A fine home for a growing family, and when you have a brace of brothers and a sister, you shall all play on the grass court before the house and I shall buy a new field for you to keep a donkey.’
Spring 1629
John’s view of the house at Lambeth as an ark which would keep the family afloat during troubled times was proved before Frances was more than two months old. The king’s steady resentment against the House of Commons which had traduced Buckingham and tried
to impeach him, flared up again to dangerous heights at their open delight at the duke’s death. The king blamed Sir John Eliot, radical leader in the House, for the assassination of Buckingham and ordered the assassin, Felton, to be tortured till he revealed the conspiracy. Only the lawyers, standing against an angry king, preserved Felton from agony and he went to the gallows swearing that he had acted only for the love of his country, and alone.
Eliot, sensing that the mood of the country was with him, pressed his advantage in the newly called House of Commons in January, refusing to pay the king one penny of his dues until the House had debated the incendiary motion that the king on earth must give way to the king of heaven – a clear call for Puritans to withstand the earthly power of the increasingly Papist Charles and his High Church bishops.
While the city seethed with rumours of the debate, there was a loud knocking at the back door of the Tradescant house and then the cook ran into the rarities room where Jane was writing labels and rocking Frances’s cradle with her foot. J was before the hearth, stretching a rare skin on a frame for hanging.
‘A message for the master, from Whitehall!’ the cook exclaimed.
Jane rose to her feet and went to the window. ‘He’s by the seedling beds,’ she said, knocking on the glass and beckoning. ‘Here he comes.’
John arrived, rubbing his hands on his leather breeches. ‘What’s to do?’
‘A message,’ the cook said. ‘And no reply waited for. From Whitehall.’
John put out his hand and looked at the seal. ‘William Ward,’ he said briefly. ‘My lord’s steward.’ He turned the page, broke the seal, and read. J saw his father pale under the wind-worn tan of his skin.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the king. He has arrested Sir John Eliot and sent him to the tower. He has closed down Parliament. He calls the members a nest of vipers and says he will rule forever without them.’ He read swiftly. ‘They locked the doors of the House against the king and voted tonnage and poundage illegal, and voted the king’s theology illegal.’ He read a little, and then swore.
‘What?’ Jane asked impatiently.
‘They held the Speaker down in his chair so that the resolutions could be passed before the king’s guards burst in and arrested them.’
Jane looked at once to the cradle and the sleeping baby. ‘What will he do?’ she asked.
John shook his head. ‘God knows.’
J waited. ‘What does it mean for us?’
John shook his head again. ‘For us and the country? Stormy weather.’
1630
It was not stormy weather, but a sort of peace which caught the country by surprise. The MPs dispersed in obedience to the king’s order and though they took their complaints to their homes in every corner of the kingdom, there was no popular groundswell to sweep them back to confrontation in the city. The king set to work to rule without Parliament – as he had threatened to do – and that turned out to be almost no rule at all. The silence in the Houses of Parliament meant there was no forum for debate. The vacuum of power meant that things rubbed along as they had always done. The towns and cities were run, as they had always been, by a loose alliance of magistrates, gentry and vicars, and by the powerful weight of custom and practice.
In Lambeth, Frances’s promised brother did not come, though she outgrew her baby complaints, learned to walk, learned to talk and was even given a small corner of the garden and a dozen cuttings of pinks and twenty sweet pea seeds for her to try her hand at gardening. She was indulged – as the only baby in a house of four adults is bound to be indulged; but nothing spoiled her. As she grew older she still loved the echoey airiness of the rarities room, and would still go piggyback with her grandfather down to the end of the orchard. As she grew stronger and heavier John’s limp became more and more pronounced under the extra burden of her weight and he would roll in his walk like the old sailor he sometimes claimed to be.
He had a special voice for her, a meditative nonsense-telling voice which he used for no-one else. Only his seedlings in the frame and Frances were treated to his ‘tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding’. Elizabeth would watch him and the little girl from the window as they went hand in hand down the garden and feel at last a sense of relief that she and John, J and Jane were settled at last.
‘We’ve put down some roots,’ John said to her one night as he saw her smile across the dinner table. The girl laid their dinner before them – they had a girl now, and a woman cook in the kitchen and a lad in the house, as well as three gardeners. ‘I think we should have a motto.’
‘Not a motto,’ J said under his breath. ‘Please, no.’
‘A motto,’ John said firmly. ‘To go under the crest. You shall write it, J. You have Latin.’
‘I can’t think of anything that would fit a man who was born and bred a gardener and made up his own crest, and had some fool of a mason carve it in stone for anyone to see,’ J said scathingly.
John smiled, unperturbed. ‘Why, the king himself is the grandson of a mere Mister,’ he said. ‘These are times for men to rise.’
‘And the Duke of Buckingham was called an upstart to the end of his days,’ Jane observed.
John dropped his eyes to his plate so that no-one could see his sharp pang of grief.
‘Even so,’ J said. ‘I can’t think of a motto which would suit.’
They were a family which did not fit the usual tags handed out by the College of Heralds. They were on the way to being gentry, with their own house and land, and rents coming in from the fields at Hatfield, and a couple of houses newly bought at a bargain price in the city. But John and J still worked with their hands deep in the dark earth of their fields and gardens, and could tell to the nearest farthing how much a seedling had cost them in terms of labour and the price of the seed.
Tradescant plants went all over the country, all over Europe. John Gerard the herbalist borrowed from their garden and gave new cuttings back to them. John Parkinson quoted them by name in his book on gardening and acknowledged his debt to them, even though he was the king’s own botanist. Every gardener at every great house in the land knew that for something strange and lovely the Tradescants at the Ark were the only men to ask. The Ark was the only place to buy rare tulips outside the Low Countries and their prices were as reasonable as they could be in a market which was still growing and growing every season.
The orders came in almost every day. Once the MPs were forced home to their estates there was little for the gentlemen to do but to look to their fields and their gardens.
‘His Majesty did us a great favour,’ John remarked to Elizabeth as she sat at the dining table and sorted seeds into packets for Jane to label and dispatch. ‘If the squires were still at Westminster they would not be planting their gardens.’
‘We’re the only ones likely to be grateful for it then,’ she said with something of her old sharpness. ‘Mrs Hurte was telling me that in the city they are saying that we might as well never have had a parliament if the king is going to run the country like a tyrant and never hear the will of the people. There are new taxes every day. We had a demand for a salt tax only yesterday.’
‘Peace,’ John said quietly, and Elizabeth bent her head to her work.
They were both right. The country was enjoying a sort of peace bought at the price of never addressing the difficulties between Parliament and king. King Charles was ruling as he fondly imagined his great aunt Elizabeth had ruled, with little regard for Parliament, with little advice, and on the smooth oil of his subjects’ love. He and the queen went from great house to great house, hunting, dancing, playing in masques, watching theatre, assured everywhere that they went, in a dozen pageants of loyal verse, that the people loved them next only to their God.
Henrietta Maria had learned a little wisdom in her hard years as an apprentice queen. When she heard that Buckingham, her worst enemy, was dead, she did not allow one word of delight to escape her. She went straight to the king and when he emerg
ed from his lonely vigil of mourning she was there, dressed in black and looking as grief-stricken as she could manage. In a moment he transferred to her the passionate need which he carried with him always, like a sickness in his blood: the sickness of the less favoured son, the sickness of the plain son of a man who liked handsome men. Henrietta Maria staggered under the weight of his embrace but kept her footing. There was nothing in the world she wanted more than his adoration. It made her complete as a woman, it made her complete as a queen.
Nothing contradicted his new-found happiness, nothing was ever allowed to distress or trouble His Majesty. The plague in London meant merely that they moved early to Oatlands Palace near Weybridge, or Windsor, or Beaulieu in Hampshire. Poverty in Cornwall, Presbyterianism in Scotland, the papers from local lords or JPs warning the king that all was not completely well in his kingdom, pursued him from hunting lodge to palace, and waited for a rainy day for him to give them his fleeting attention. His early appetite for work had deserted him once he had found how little rewarded he was for duty. Parliament had never thanked him for the memoranda in his tiny handwriting, and in any case there was no Parliament now. The holders of the great offices of state, incompetent and corrupt, worked as well without supervision as they did under the king’s erratic gaze. It was easier, and pleasanter, for him to turn the business of kingship into a country-wide masque with people demonstrating their devotion in dances and songs, and the king play-acting at ruling with a crown of gold wire on his head.
The king’s first son and heir was born in May 1630, and three months later a messenger from the court, currently at Windsor, knocked peremptorily on the door of the Lambeth house and glanced upwards, but did not comment, at the coat of arms fixed proudly on the wall.
‘A message for John Tradescant,’ he announced as Jane opened the door.
She stepped back to show him into the parlour and he went ahead of her as he would have preceded a Baptist serving woman. Jane, who knew that she should despise the vanity of worldly show, gestured rather grandly to the chair at the fireside. ‘You may be seated,’ she said with the dignity of a duchess. ‘Mr Tradescant, my father-in-law, will join you shortly.’ She turned on her heel and stalked from the room, and then fled to the garden where John was transplanting seedlings.
Earthly Joys Page 41