Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

John shook his head. “He must surrender and accept the terms Parliament imposes. Parliament and the army have defeated him. He has to give up.”

John was wrong. The king did not give up. He attempted to escape, an ill-planned, unlikely attempt which was as successful as it deserved to be. The guard around him was doubled, he was warned that he should know that he was a prisoner of the English Parliament, and taken to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire.

Hester found John at the bottom of the orchard, scowling at the cherry tree. “I think I killed it,” he said. “And I watched my father moving trees twice the size of this when I was a boy and never learned the knack of it.”

“It looks no worse than the others,” Hester said, looking around the orchard where the whippy bare boughs of the trees flailed against a white sky.

“I’ve killed it,” John said. “For all the care I took. I don’t have my father’s talent. I worked at his side all my life and still I’m not half the gardener he was. He knew where he belonged, he knew who he served, and he knew his trade and I-” He broke off and put his hand on the bough of the tree as if for support.

“What’s the news?” Hester asked, guessing at once the source of John’s discomfort.

John gave her a quick look from under his lowered brows. “Just some lads at the back door, begging for bread on their way home,” he said. “Discharged from the army and heading homeward.”

Hester waited. John put his hand out and held the trunk of the dead cherry tree. “They said that the army would rule Parliament and they would have their revenge on the king,” he said. “They said they would make him pay because a new day is coming when all men will have land and all men will have a vote to choose their rulers and all men will be equal with one another.”

“These are young men’s thoughts,” Hester said quickly. “You were a young man wild for change yourself once, John.”

He nodded. “But these were not young men, they were men of my age. And they said that many think as they do. They are Levelers and they say the best men of the army are with them. They want to finish what Parliament started. They want to exile the king and turn the country into a new land of freedom and equality.”

Hester looked around the security of the walled orchard. “Parliament would not give away land?” she asked.

John shook his head. “I don’t think they’ll wait for Parliament,” he said. “These are men of action and determination. They’ve been fighting to make a better country for workingmen. They have little patience for the gentlemen in Parliament. They want to see the land given to workingmen. They want the royal estates, the church estates, the commons, and the wastes.”

“And every man would have his own little piece of land and grow things?”

“So they say.” John smiled grimly. “It’s what I always wanted. It’s how I always thought things should be. And now it looks as if the army might destroy Parliament and do it.”

“Turn on their masters?”

“Why not? Didn’t Parliament turn on the king?”

“Would they take from landowners like us? Tax us?”

John shrugged. “How would I know what they might do? They might think that these walls should be pulled down as any other.”

Hester nodded and turned back toward the house. He could tell by her slow stride that she was thinking. Halfway to the house she turned and came back to him.

“I think we should be growing vegetables,” she said. “That’s what they’ll be wanting now.”

The whole family helped in the restoration of the rarities to the room with the high Venetian windows and the smooth, polished floor. They wanted to return it to its previous state, they wanted it restored, without loss of beauty, without loss of richness, without loss of the glamour that hung around it: the scent of the skins, the delight of the multiplicity of things, the joy of the ordered jumble; the big things hanging from the ceiling, the tiny things in their cabinets, the exotic next to the mundane, the historic next to the inventions.

There were some terrible gaps in the collection. The coins had fared the worst and the items made of precious metals. Hester had made inroads into anything which had held its value during the war years and she could not conceal from John that there were trays of Roman and medieval coins which would never be stocked again.

Some things had suffered from damp. A triptych altar screen had been leaned against the ice-house wall and its bright colors had been leached away by the moisture of the brick. Many rare skins had rotted and decayed, and some of the woolen clothes were pitted with mothholes. Vellum pages of illuminated manuscripts had been eaten by ants and the foul dirt of rats and mice was all over the cases which held the flowers dried in sugar.

“I am sorry, I am sorry,” Hester cried as one parcel after another was brought out into the light. “If I had only known that we would be safe I would never have hidden the things away.”

“You didn’t know,” John said generously. “And if the soldiers had suddenly swept through we could have lost everything in one night.”

Frances, her hair tied in a kerchief, and Johnnie in his gardening clothes gently beat the dust and the moths from the clothes, rugs and skins outside and then carried them in for Hester and John to rearrange and hang.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, drawer by drawer, object after object, the rarities room was reassembled, and when they stepped back and looked around after a full fortnight of work they saw an impressive collection of wealth and novelty. Only someone who had grown up in the room, as the Tradescant children had done, rocked in the light of those great windows, would have known that anything was missing. The visitors, who would surely come again now that peace was here, could not fail to be amazed.

John was digging in the new vegetable bed and setting in lettuce seeds to see which would grow the fastest when Hester came out of the house, shading her eyes against the bright sunshine, and then hurried down the path toward him.

“The king’s been taken,” she said baldly.

He looked up with as much anxiety as if she had said one of the children was ill. “Taken?”

“Some whippersnapper Cornet marched up to Holdenby House and arrested His Majesty,” Hester said, nearly spitting with rage.

“How did you hear this?” John asked, wiping his muddy hands on his leather gardening apron.

“The ferry boatman. Frances has come for a visit, I went down to the river to meet her. London is buzzing with the news.”

“Who has him?”

“A man of no importance,” Hester said. “A nobody. One of the new men of the New Model Army, rode to Holdenby House and captured the king as if he was a piece of baggage in the baggage train. It is these people who will bring us down. People who have no respect. Men who have spent four years learning that nothing matters, not pictures in church, not music, not gardens, not kings.”

“And where has he taken His Majesty?” John asked.

“To Maidenhead,” she said. “And they say Oliver Cromwell himself is going out to meet him.”

“Cromwell?”

She nodded. “D’you think that means peace?”

John shook his head. “I suppose it means that the game has changed again,” he said, baffled. “When the king was held by the Scots he was in the power of Parliament. But now the army has him, I don’t know what will become of him, or us for that matter.”

“We may be in danger,” Hester said. “The ferry boatman said that the soldiers of the New Model Army may march on Parliament. They’re determined to have their pay. And they recognize no loyalty to anyone but their commanders and their leveling ideas. They are saying that Parliament and the City may hold out against the army. But if the army comes to the City from the south then they will march right through here. We may have to pack up the rarities again. They are marching for their pay, they are hungry and desperate men. And they have sworn that all the land and all the property shall be held in common.”

John shook his head. “It’s like living in the middle of a thunderstorm,” he complained. “It has all changed again. If the army fights against the Parliament which brought it into being, then what becomes of the country?”

In July the news was that the king was to be taken, under guard, to Oatlands.

Hester looked at her husband across the kitchen table. Cook, Joseph, the new gardening boy, Frances and Johnnie all turned to the head of the table and waited for John to speak.

“Now, I have to go,” he said simply. “He cannot be at Oatlands and not see me working in the garden. That was my work, that was my place.”

Hester hesitated for only a moment. “I’ll pack your bag,” she said, and went out of the room.

Johnnie turned to his father, his face suddenly flushed. “May I come too?” he asked. “And see him?”

When his father hesitated he went on in a rapid torrent of speech. “I’ve never seen him, and my father and my grandfather were in his service. And I’ve never even seen him. Frances saw him and the queen. Can I come? Please?”

John gave a short laugh. “I cannot be sure that I will see him,” he said. “And if he sees me, he may not speak to me. I just feel the royal court under his window should be tidy, I don’t know what state it’s in.”

“I can tidy it,” Johnnie said desperately. “I can weed. I worked there while you were away. I can do it. I am a Tradescant, I am gardener to the king. I should be there.”

Hester came back into the kitchen and John turned to her with relief. “It depends on what your mother says.”

“Can I go with Father to Oatlands?” Johnnie scrambled over his stool to get to his stepmother. “And work for him? He’d have such a lot of work to do, I could help.”

“I don’t know if it’s safe,” Hester said hesitantly.

“It’s probably safe,” John said shortly. “Safer than it’s ever been with him under guard and forced to make peace at last.”

She nodded. “He can go if you wish it,” she said to John.

Johnnie turned his bright hazel eyes on his father.

“Oh, very well,” John said. “But not a word do you speak unless spoken to – and then you just answer “Yes, Your Majesty,” or “No, Your Majesty.” Not a word about me being in Virginia. Not a word about the cavalier who came here. Not a word about John Lambert buying our tulips. Not a word about anything.”

Johnnie was dancing on the spot with excitement. “Yes! Yes!” he shouted. “Yes! Of course. And I shall be absolutely silent. Absolutely. I shall be absolutely discreet.”

John met his wife’s eyes across the boy’s bobbing head. “I don’t know about you; but I feel very confident,” he said wryly.

They went by the river, rowed in a wherry, Johnnie seated beside his father and looking all around him. When they were past the village of Staines, John said quietly, “There it is,” and pointed to the little rose-pink palace, sitting on the terraces with the unkempt lawns running down to the river. “D’you know, I never thought I’d see it again,” John said softly. “I never thought I’d be here, working in these gardens again.”

Johnnie glanced quickly at his father’s darkened expression. “But you’re glad of it?” he asked. “Glad you came home and that the king is back in his palace, and soon everything will be as it was?”

John dropped his hand on his son’s thin shoulder. “I don’t think everything will be quite as it was,” he said. “There’s a lot of men dead and a lot of tears shed, and the king is in his palace but not on his throne. We’ll have to mind our tongues here, and beware even of our thoughts.”

The boatman shipped the oars and the wherry nudged against the landing stage. John stepped quickly ashore and caught the mooring rope, dug in his pocket for a coin and dropped it down into the boat as Johnnie tossed up their bags and then handed up, one at a time, a dozen pots with nodding blooms.

John shouldered his bag. “We’ll come back for the pots,” he said, and led the way up the slope to the palace.

Prince Rupert had allowed his cavalrymen’s horses to graze on the lawns and they were pocked with hoofprints and lumpy with droppings, but at least the animals had kept the grass down. As John approached the palace he saw that the creepers and the wall climbers which he had trained so carefully to take blossoms and scent up to the windows were doing well – overspread, sometimes pulling away from their ties, but thriving on neglect.

The beds at the feet of the rose-brick walls were overrun with weeds but some flowers were still struggling through. Pansies and gillyflowers, irises and peonies had thrust their heads above the encroaching green. “Soon hoe that out,” John remarked, nodding to his son.