Virgin Earth (52 page)

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 center 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 rumors 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 labor 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 favor,” 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 theater, 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 emerged 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 favored 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 newfound 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 upward, 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 parlor and he went ahead of her as he would have preceded a Quaker 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.

“Get up! and get washed! There is a royal herald for you in the parlor!” she exclaimed.

John got slowly to his feet. “A royal herald?”

“Trouble?” J asked. “Not the coat of arms?”

“Surely not,” John said comfortably. “Give him a glass of wine, Jane, and tell him I am coming at once.”

“You will change your coat,” she reminded him. “He is in full livery and with a powdered wig.”

“It’s only a herald,” John said mildly. “Not Queen Henrietta Maria herself.”

Jane picked up her skirts and fled back to the house to order the kitchenmaid to pour a cool glass of wine and put it on the best silver tray.

She found the herald looking out from the window to the garden. “How many men does Mr. Tradescant employ here?” he asked, trying to engage her in conversation to make amends for his earlier mistake.

She glanced out. To her embarrassment it was not the garden lads but her husband and her father-in-law, strolling up from the orchard with a hoe and a bucket apiece. “Half a dozen in midsummer,” she said. “Fewer in winter.”

“And do you have many visitors?”

“Yes,” she said. “Both to the garden and to the cabinet of rarities. The garden is rich with both rare fruit and flowers; you are welcome to walk in it, if you wish.”

“Later perhaps,” the herald said loftily. “I must speak with Mr. Tradescant now.”

“He will come shortly,” Jane said. “I could show you some of the rarities in the cabinets while you wait.”

To her relief, the door behind her opened. “Here I am,” John said. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”

At least he had washed his hands, but he still wore his old gardening coat. The herald, whose face revealed nothing, realized that the workingman he had seen from the window was in fact the gentleman he had come to visit.