Virgin Earth

‘You’ve bought enough for a siege!’ he exclaimed, and then, as his own words sunk in, he turned to her. ‘Why have you bought so much?’

‘I don’t want to go into market for a week or so,’ she said. ‘And I won’t send the maids either.’

‘Why not?’

She made a little helpless gesture. He thought he had never before seen her anything other than certain and definite in her movements. ‘It’s strange in town,’ she began. ‘I can’t describe it. Uneasy. Like a sky before a storm. People talk on corners and break off when I walk by. Everyone looks at everyone else as if they would read their hearts. No-one knows who is a friend and who is not. The king and Parliament are splitting this country down the middle like a popped pod of peas and all of us peas are spilling out and rolling around and not knowing what to do.’

John looked at his wife, trying to understand, for the first time in their married life, what she might be feeling. Then he suddenly realised what it was. ‘You look afraid.’

She turned away to the edge of the wagon as if it were something to be ashamed of. ‘Someone threw a stone at me,’ she said, her voice very low.

‘What?’

‘Someone threw a stone as I was leaving the market. It hit me in the back.’

John was dumbfounded. ‘You were stoned? In Lambeth?’

She shook her head. ‘A glancing blow. It was not thrown to hurt me. I think it was an insult, a warning.’

‘But why should anyone at Lambeth market insult you? Or warn you?’

She shrugged. ‘You’re well-known as the king’s gardener, the king’s man, and your father before you. And these people don’t inquire where your heart lies, what you think in private. They think of us as the king’s servants, and the king is not well-regarded in Lambeth and the City.’

John’s mind was whirling. ‘Did it hurt you? Are you hurt?’

She started to say ‘No’, but she stumbled over the word and John, without thinking, caught her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder as the torrent of words spilled out.

She was afraid, very afraid, and she had been afraid every market day since Parliament had been recalled and the king had come home defeated from the war with the Scots. The women would not always serve her, they overcharged her and leaned on the scales when they were weighing out flour. And the apprentice boys ran after her and called out names, and when the stone had struck her back she had thought it would be the first of a hail of stones which would hit her and knock her from the box of the wagon and beat her down in the street.

‘Hester! Hester!’ John held her as the storm of crying swept over her. ‘My dear, my dear, my little wife!’

She broke off from crying at once. ‘What did you call me?’

He had not been aware of it himself.

‘You called me little wife, and your dear –’ she said. She rubbed her eyes, but kept her other hand firmly on his collar. ‘You called me dear, you’ve never called me that before.’

The old closed look came down on his face. ‘I was upset for you,’ he said, as if it was a sin to call his own wife an endearment. ‘For a moment I forgot.’

‘You forgot that you had been married before. You treated me like a wife you are … fond of,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I am glad,’ she said softly. ‘I should like you to be fond of me.’

He disengaged himself very gently. ‘I should not forget I was married before,’ he said firmly, and went into the house. Hester stood beside the cart, watching the kitchen door closing behind him, and found she had no more tears left to cry but only loneliness and disappointment and dry eyes.

Summer 1641

Hester did not go to market again all summer. And she had been right to fear the mood of the village of Lambeth. The apprentice boys all ran wild one night and the fever was caught by the market women and by the serious chapel goers, who made a determined mixed mob and marched through the streets shouting, ‘No popery! No bishops!’ Some of the loudest and most daring shouted, ‘No king!’ They threw a few burning brands over the high walls of the empty archbishop’s palace, and made a half-hearted attempt at the gates, and then they broke the windows down Lambeth High Street at every house that did not show a light at the window for Parliament. They did not march down the road as far as the Ark and John thanked God for the luck of the Tradescants, which had once again placed them on the very edge of great events and danger and yet spared them by a hair’s breadth.

After that, John sent the gardener’s lad and the stable lad together to market and though they often muddled the order and stopped for an ale at the taverns, at least it meant that any muttering about the king’s gardener was not directed at Hester.

John had to go to Oatlands and before he went he ordered wooden shutters to be made for all the windows of the house, especially the great windows of Venetian glass in the rarities room. He hired an extra lad to wake at nights and watch out down the South Lambeth road in case the mob came that way, and he and Hester went out one night in the darkness with shaded lanterns to clear out the old ice house, and put a heavy bolt on the thick wooden doors to make a hiding place for the most valuable of the rarities.

‘If they come against us you will have to take the children and leave the house,’ he ordered.

She shook her head and he found himself admiring her cool nerve. ‘We have a couple of muskets,’ she said. ‘I won’t have my house overrun by a band of idle apprentice lads.’

‘You must not take risks,’ he warned her.

She gave him a tight, determined smile. ‘Everything is a risk in these days,’ she said. ‘I will see that we come safe through it all.’

‘I have to leave you,’ John said anxiously. ‘I am summoned to Oatlands. Their Majesties will visit next week and I have to see the gardens are at their best.’

She nodded. ‘I know you have to go. I shall keep everything safe here.’

John was at Oatlands ready for the full court, but the queen came alone. The king and half the court were missing, and the rumour was that he had gone north to negotiate with the Scots himself.

‘He is in Edinburgh and all will be mended,’ the queen said with her complacent smile when she came upon John dead-heading the roses. She was concealing her boredom as best as she could. She was accompanied only by a few ladies, the old flirtatious, artistic, idle entourage was broken up. The more adventurous and more ambitious men were riding with the king. There was the smell of opportunity and advancement in the court of a king at war, and the young men had been sick of peace and a court devoted to marital love for so long. ‘It will all be resolved,’ the queen promised. ‘Once they meet him again he will charm them into seeing that they were wrong to march against him.’

John nodded. ‘I hope so, Your Majesty.’

She came close to him and lowered her voice. ‘We will not go to London again until it is all agreed,’ she confided. ‘Not even to my little manor at Wimbledon. We shall go nowhere near to Westminster. After the death of my Lord Strafford –’ She broke off. ‘They said they would try me after the Earl! Try me for treasonous advice!’

John had to resist the temptation to take one of her little white hands. She looked genuinely afraid.

‘He should have stood against them,’ she whispered. ‘My husband should not have let them take Strafford, nor Laud. If he lets them pick us off one after another we will all be lost. And then he will be left all alone and they will have tasted blood. He should have stood against them for William Laud, he should have stood against them for Strafford. How can I be sure he will stand for me?’

‘Your Majesty, matters cannot go so far,’ John said soothingly. ‘As you say yourself, the king will come home and it will all be resolved.’

She brightened at once. ‘He can scatter a few baronies around the Houses of Parliament, and places at court,’ she said. ‘These are all lowly men, commoners up from the provinces. They have neither learning nor breeding. They will forget their folly if the price is high enough.’

John felt the familiar rise of irritation. ‘Majesty, I think they are men of principle. They did not behead Lord Strafford on a whim. I think they believe in what they are doing.’

She shook her head. ‘Of course not! They are scheming with the Scots, or with the Dutch, or with someone for their own ends. The House of Lords is not with them, the court is not with them. These are little men come up from the country, crowing like little cocks on their own dunghills. We just have to wring their necks like little cocks.’

‘I pray that the king can find a way to agree with them,’ John said steadily.

She flashed him her charming smile. ‘Why, so do I! He shall make all sorts of promises to them, and then they can vote us the taxes we need and the army we need to crush the Scots and they can go back to their dunghills and we can rule without them again.’

Autumn 1641

It might have gone either way for the king, and the queen, but for their fourth kingdom of Ireland. The news that Strafford was dead ran through Ireland like a heath fire. Strafford had held Ireland down with a mixture of legal rigour and terrible abuse of power. He had ruled them like a cynical old soldier and the only law in the land was that of superior military power. Once he was dead the Papist Irish rose up in a defiant storm of rage against their Protestant masters. Strafford had kept them brutally down, but now Strafford was gone. The rumours and counter-rumours had flown around the kingdom of Ireland until every man who called himself a man took up a pitchfork or a hoe and flung himself against the newly arrived Protestant settlers, and the greedy land-grabbing Protestant lords, and spared neither them nor their women nor children.

The news of what had taken place, horrifically embellished by the terrified imagination of a minority in a country they did not own, reached London in October and fuelled the hatred against Papists a thousand times over. Even Hester, normally so level-headed, departed from discretion that night and prayed aloud in family prayers that God might strike down the dreadful savage Irish and preserve His chosen people, settled in that most barbaric land; and the Tradescant children, Frances and Johnnie, round-eyed with horror at what they heard in the kitchen and in the stable, whispered a frightened, ‘Amen’.

The Papist rebels were spitting Protestant children on their pikes and roasting them over the fires, eating them before the anguished gaze of their parents. The Papist rebels were firing cottages and castles with the Protestant owners locked inside. Everyone knew a story of fresh and unbelievable horror. No-one questioned any report. It was all true, it was all the worst of the worst nightmares. It was all worse than reports told.

John was reminded, for a brief moment, of the bitter woman who kept the lodging house in Virginia, and how she had called the Indians pagans and beasts, and how she too had stories of skinning and flaying and eating alive. For a moment he stepped back from the terror which had caught up the whole of England, for a moment he wondered if the stories were as true as everyone swore. But only for a moment. The circumstances were too persuasive, the stories were too potent. Everyone said it; it had to be true.

And there was worse. In the streets of Lambeth and in London they did not call it the Irish rebellion, they called it the queen’s rebellion, in the absolute certainty that all the nightmare tales from Ireland were gospel truth, and that the rebellion was fomented by Henrietta Maria herself in support of the devilish Papists. What the queen wanted was a free Roman Catholic Ireland and then, as soon as she dared, the queen would ship her fellow Papists from Ireland to England so they could butcher and eat English babes as well.

Spring 1642

Parliament, still in session, drew ever closer to accusing the queen. It was a steady, terrifying approach, which would not waver nor hesitate. They impeached twelve bishops for treason, one after another, until a round dozen had appeared before the bar of the House, with their lives on the line. And then the word was that the queen was next on the list.

‘What shall you do?’ Hester asked John. They were in the warmth of the rarities room where a large fire kept the collection warm and dry though there was a storm of wintry sleet dashing against the grand windows. Hester was polishing the shells and precious stones to make them gleam on their beds of black velvet, and John was labelling a new collection of carved ivories which had just arrived from India.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go to Oatlands to see to the planning for the gardens next season. I will learn more there.’

‘Planning gardens for a queen who will be beheaded?’ Hester asked quietly.

John met her gaze, his mouth twisted with anxiety. ‘I am following your creed, wife. I’m trying to survive these times. I don’t know what’s best to do other than to behave as if nothing has changed.’

‘But John –’ Hester started, but was interrupted by a knock at the front door, and they both froze. John saw Hester’s colour drain from her cheeks, and the hand that held the duster trembled as if she had an ague. They stood in complete silence and then they heard the maid answer and the reassuring chink of a coin as a visitor paid for entrance to the collection. Hester whisked her cloth out of sight into the pocket of her apron and threw open the handsome double doors to him. He was a well-dressed man, a country man, by the look of his brown suit and his weather-beaten face. He paused in the doorway and looked around at the grand, imposing room and the warm fire.

‘Well, this is a treat,’ he said in the round tones of the west country.

Hester moved forward. ‘You are welcome,’ she said pleasantly. ‘This is John Tradescant, and I am his wife.’

The man dipped his head. ‘I am Benjamin George,’ he said. ‘From Yeovil.’

‘A visitor to London?’

‘Here on business. I am a Parliament man representing the borough of Yeovil.’

John stepped forward. ‘My wife will show you the rarities,’ he said. ‘But first can you tell me what news there is?’

The man looked cautious. ‘I can’t say whether it is good or bad,’ he said. ‘I am on my way home and Parliament is dissolved, I know that much.’

John and Hester exchanged a quick look. ‘Parliament dissolved?’

The man nodded. ‘The king himself came marching in to arrest five of our members. You would not have thought that he was allowed to come into Parliament with his own soldiers like that. Whether he was going to arrest our members for treason or cut them down where they stood, I don’t know which!’

‘My God!’ John exclaimed, aghast. ‘He drew a sword in the House of Commons?’

‘What happened?’ Hester demanded.

‘He came in very civil though he had his guards all about him, and he asked for a seat and sat in the Speaker’s chair. But they were gone – the men he wanted. They slipped out the back half an hour before he came in the front. We were warned, of course. And so he looked about for them, and made a comment, and then went away again.’

John was struggling to hide his irritation with the slowness of the man’s speech. ‘But what did he come for, if he left it too late to arrest them?’

The man shrugged. ‘I think myself it was some grand gesture, but he bodged it.’

Hester looked quickly at John. He made an impatient exclamation. ‘Are you saying he marched his guard into the House to arrest five members and failed?’

The man nodded. ‘He looked powerfully put out,’ he observed.

‘I should think he was. What will he do?’

‘As to that … I couldn’t say.’

‘But then what will Parliament do?’

The man slowly shook his head. Hester, seeing her husband on the edge of an outburst and the man still thinking his answer through, had to bite her lip to keep silent herself.

‘As to that … I couldn’t say either.’

John took a swift step to the door and then turned back. ‘So what is happening in the City? Is everything quiet?’

The country squire shook his head at the mystifying speed of change. ‘Well, the Lord Mayor’s trained bands are to be called out to keep the peace, the king’s men have all gone into hiding, the City is boarded up and ready for a riot or … something worse.’

‘What could be worse?’ Hester asked. ‘What could be worse than a riot in the City?’

‘War, I think,’ he said slowly. ‘A war would be worse than a riot.’

‘Between who?’ John asked tightly. ‘A war between who? What are you saying?’

The man looked into his face, struggling with the enormity of what he had to say. ‘War between the king and Parliament, I’m afraid.’

There was a brief shocked silence.

‘It has come to this?’ John asked.

‘So I am come to see the greatest sight of London which I promised myself I would see before I left, and then I am going home.’ George looked around. ‘There is even more than I thought.’

‘I will show it all to you,’ Hester promised him. ‘You must forgive our hunger for news. What will you do when you get home?’

He bowed courteously to her. ‘I shall gather the men of my household and train them and arm them so that they can fight to save their country from the enemy.’

‘But will you fight for the king or for Parliament?’

He bowed again. ‘Madam, I shall fight for my country. I shall fight for Right. The only thing is: I wish I knew who was in the right.’

Hester showed him the main features of the collection and then, as soon as she could, left him to open the drawers and look at the smaller things on his own. She could not find John in the house, nor in the orangery. As she feared, he was in the stable yard, dressed in his travelling cloak, waiting for his mare to be saddled.

‘You’re never going to court!’ she exclaimed.

‘I have to,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear having to wait for scraps of news like this.’

‘You are a gardener,’ she said. ‘Not a courtier, not a Member of Parliament. What is it to you whether the king is quarrelling with Parliament or not?’

‘I am on the edge of it all,’ John said. ‘I know too much to sit quietly at home and nurse up my ignorance. If I knew less of them then I would care less. If I knew more then I could decide better what to do. I am halfway between knowledge and ignorance and I have to settle on one side or the other.’

‘Then be ignorant!’ she said with sudden passion. ‘Get into your garden, John, and set seeds for the gardens at Wimbledon and Oatlands. Do the trade you were born to. Stay home where you are safe.’

He shook his head and took both her hands. ‘I won’t be long,’ he promised her. ‘I shall go over the river to Whitehall and find out the news and then come back home. Don’t fret so, Hester. I must learn what is happening and then I’ll come home. It is better for us if I know which way the wind is blowing. It is safer for us.’

She left her hands in his, enjoying the warmth of his callused palms. ‘You say that, but you are like a boy setting out on an adventure,’ she said shrewdly. ‘You want to be in the heart of things, my husband. Don’t deny it.’

John gave her a roguish grin and then kissed her quickly on both cheeks. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s true. Let me go with your blessing?’

She was breathless with the sudden casual embrace and felt herself flushing. ‘With my blessing,’ she repeated. ‘Of course you have my blessing. Always.’

He swung himself into the saddle and let the horse walk out of the yard. Hester put her hand to her cheek where his lips had briefly touched, and watched him go.

He had to wait for a place on the horse ferry at Lambeth, and then the traffic on the City side of the river was busier than he had ever seen it. There were hundreds of people milling around in the narrow streets, asking for news and stopping ballad sellers and pedlars of news-sheets to demand what they knew. There were armed groups of men marching down the road, pushing people aside and demanding that they shout, ‘Hurrah! for the king!’ But then down another road would come another group shouting, ‘Hurrah! for Pym! No bishops! No Papist queen!’

John drew his horse back into a sidestreet, fearful of being caught up in a fight, when he saw two of these groups heading towards each other. But the royalists wheeled off quickly to one side, as if they were on an urgent errand that took them away; and the others took care not to see them, and not to give chase. He watched them go and saw that they, like himself, were not ready for a fight yet. They didn’t even want a brawl, let alone a war. He thought the country must be filled with men like himself, like the honest Member of Parliament for Yeovil, who knew that they were in the grip of great times, and wanted to take their part in the great times, who wanted to do the right thing; but were very, very far from knowing what the right thing might be.

John’s father would have known. He would have been for the king. John’s father had had a straightforward faith that his son had never learned. John made a wry face at the thought of the certainties of the man and of his own confused layering of doubts, which left him now still mourning one woman, half in love with another, and married to a third; in the service of a king while his heart was with the opposition; always torn both ways, always on the fringe of everything.

The crowds grew thicker around the palace of Whitehall and there were armed guards looking grim and frightened with their pikes crossed at the doorways. John rode his horse round to an inn and left her in the stable, and then walked back to the palace, jostled all the way. The crowd was the same strange mix of people. There were beggars and paupers and ill-doers in rags and shabby old livery who were there to shout and perhaps collect a few coppers for their hired loyalty. There were working men and women, young apprentices, artisans and market people. There were the serious black-coated preachers of the independent churches and sectaries, and there were the well-to-do merchants and City men who would not fight themselves, but whose hearts were in the fight. There were sailors from the ships in port, shouting for Parliament since they blamed the king and his French wife for the dangers of the Dunkirk pirates, and there were members of the London trained bands, some of them trying to impose order and find their men, and others running wild and shouting that they would die to defend the rights of Parliament. This motley crowd had a motley chant which ranged from the catcalls and boos of those who did not know what they cared for, to the regular call of those who knew their cause: ‘No bishops! No queen!’, and the new call which had come about since the king had taken a sword into the House of Commons: ‘Privilege! Privilege!’

John fought his way to the front of the mob at the gates to the palace of Whitehall and shouted, over the noise, to the guard.

‘John Tradescant! The king’s gardener.’

The man shifted slightly, and John ducked under the pike and went in.

The old palace of Whitehall was the most disorganised of all the royal palaces, a jumble of buildings and courts and gardens, dotted with statuary and fountains and alive with birdsong. John, hoping to find a face he knew, made his way towards the royal apartments and then was brought short as he rounded a corner and nearly collided with the queen herself.

She was running, her cape flying behind her, her jewel box in her hands. Behind her came the king, carrying his own travelling desk of papers and a dozen maidservants and manservants, each burdened with whatever they had been able to snatch up. Behind them came two royal nursemaids, running with the two royal babies in their arms, the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth trotting to keep up, and the two young princes, James and Charles, lagging in the rear.