Virgin Earth (33 page)

“What could have prevented it?” Buckingham sighed, but with a glint in his eye which always meant mischief. “It’s love, John. I shall run away with her and take her from her dreary husband to live with her in Virginia.”

John had shaken his head at his master. “What does her husband think?” he asked.

“Oh, he hates me,” Buckingham said joyfully.

“And the Princess Henrietta Maria?”

“My sworn enemy now.”

“She’s your queen,” John reminded him.

“She is only the wife of my dearest friend,” Buckingham had replied. “And she’d better remember who he loves.”

“So what does she think of him?” the questioner repeated. “What does the new queen think of our duke?”

“He is her greatest friend at court,” John answered carefully. “The duke admires and respects her.”

“Will he come home soon?” someone asked from the back of the crowd, packed into John’s kitchen.

“Not for a while,” John answered. “There are parties and masquings and balls at court to greet the new queen, and then there will be the coronation. We’ll not see him here for a few weeks.”

There was a general murmur of disappointment at that. New Hall was merrier when the duke was at home, and there was always the chance of a glimpse of the king.

“But you’ll go to him,” Elizabeth said, rightly reading her husband’s contented serenity.

“I am to meet him in London. And then I have to go down to the New Forest, looking for trees. He wants a maze,” Tradescant said with ill-hidden delight. “Where I am to get enough yew from I don’t know.”

John only ever told half the story to the curious, and he always emphasized the things that they should hear. He was ready to tell that the young King Charles had already dismissed dozens of his father’s idle wastrel favorites, that the court now ran to a strict rhythm of prayer, work and exercise. The king seldom drank wine, and never to excess. He read all the papers set before him and signed each one personally with his own name. Sometimes his advisers would find small-handed notes written in the margin, and he would ask them later to ensure they were obeyed. He wanted to be a king with an eye to detail, to the meticulous observance both of ceremony and the minutiae of government.

John did not tell them that he had no eye to the grander picture; he was incapable of visualizing consequences on a long-term or big scale. He was faultlessly loyal to those he dearly loved, but quite incapable of keeping his word to those he did not. Everything to the new king was personal; and when a man or a nation displeased him, he could not bear to see them or think of them.

His sister Elizabeth of Bohemia, still in exile, still waiting for support from her brother, remained uppermost in his mind, and he ransacked his advisers for ideas, and his treasure chests for money to pay for an army to help her. John never mentioned to anyone, not even his wife, the long hours in the darkened rooms of the Dutch moneylenders, and the humiliation of finally seeing that no man in Europe had any faith in the partnership of the untried king and the extravagant duke.

It was not only the moneylenders who found the duke wanting. An itinerant preacher, his clothes ragged but his face shining with conviction, came to Chelmsford and set up to preach under the market cross.

“You surely won’t go and hear him,” John grumbled to Elizabeth as she laid his supper on the table and threw a shawl around her shoulders.

“I should like to go,” she said.

“He’s bound to preach heresy,” John said. “You’d much better stay home.”

“Come too,” she invited him. “And if he speaks nonsense we can stop at the Bush on the way home and taste their ale.”

“I’ve no time for hedgerow preachers,” John said. “And every year there are more of them. I hear two sermons on a Sunday. I don’t need to seek one on Tuesday as well.”

She nodded, and slipped out of the door without arguing. She walked briskly down the street; a small crowd was at the center of the village, gathered around the preacher.

He was warning them of hellfire, and of the sins of the great. Elizabeth stepped back a little way into a doorway to listen. John was right; this was probably heresy, and it might well turn into treason too. But there was something powerful in how he moved his arguments slowly forward.

“Step by step we are going down the road to ruination,” he said, so softly that his listeners craned forward and had the sense of being drawn into a conspiracy. “Today the plague walks the streets of London as freely as a favored guest. Not a home is safe against it, not a person can be sure he will escape. Not a family in the city but loses one or two. And it is not only London — every village across the land must be wary of strangers, and fearful of sickly people. It is coming, it is coming to all of us — and there is only one escape: repentance and turning to Our Lord.”

There was a soft murmur of assent.

“Why is it come to us?” the preacher asked. “Why should it strike us down? Let us look at where it starts. It comes from London: the center of wealth, the center of the court. It comes in the time of a new king, when things should be new-made, not struggling against the old sickness of plague. It comes because the king is not new-made; he has his father’s Favorite forever at his shoulder, he has his father’s adviser forever ordering his ways. He is not a new king; he is the old king while he is ruled by the same man.”

There was a movement of the crowd away from the preacher. He saw it at once. “Oh, yes,” he continued swiftly. “He pays your wages, I know; you live in his cottages, you grow your vegetables on his ground, but look up from your dungheaps and your crooked chimneys and see what this man does in the greater world. He it was who took the prince into mortal danger in Spain. He it was who brought home a papist French queen. Every office in the land is his, or in his gift. Every great office has a Villiers sitting on the top of it, raking in wealth. When our king goes begging to the towns and to the corporations, why has he no money? Where has the wealth gone? Does the duke know — as he walks in his great house in his silk and diamonds — does the duke know where the money has gone?

“And if that were all it would be enough; but it is not all. There are more questions we should answer. Why can we win no battle neither by land nor by sea against the Spanish? Why do our soldiers come home and tell us they had nothing to eat? And no powder to fire their guns? Who is in charge of the army but the duke? When our sailors tell us that the ships are not fit to put to sea and the provisions are moldering before they are eaten — who is the High Admiral? The duke again!

“And when our brothers and sisters in faith at La Rochelle in France, Protestants like us, ask us for help against a papist army of France, do we send them our aid? Our own brothers, praying as we do, escaped as we have escaped from the curse of popery? Do we send them help? No! This great duke sends English ships and English sailors to help the forces of darkness, the army of Rome, the Navy of Richelieu! He sends good Protestant Englishmen for hire to the Devil, to the painted whore of Rome.”

The man was sweating; he swayed back against the stonework and wiped his face. “Worst of all,” he said very low, “there are those who wonder that in his last hours our King James, our good King James, was watched over only by Villiers and his mother. That the king seemed to be better, but they sent away his physicians and his surgeons and under their nursing he grew worse and died!”

There was an awestruck whisper at this scandal, which came so close to naming the greatest crime in the world: regicide. The preacher pulled back. “No wonder that the plague comes among us!” he exclaimed. “No wonder. For why should the Lord of Hosts smile down on us who are betrayed and betrayed and let the betrayal go on!”

Someone shouted from the back of the crowd and those around him laughed. The preacher replied at once to the challenge.

“You’re right, I cannot speak like this to the duke himself! But others will speak for me. We have a parliament of men, good men, who know how the country feels. They will speak to the king and warn him that this duke is a false friend. They will advise him to turn from Villiers and to listen to the needs of the nation. And he will turn! He will turn! He will give justice to the people and food to the children, and land to the landless. For it is very clear in the Bible that every man shall have his own land to dig and grow, and every woman shall have her own place. This king will turn from his evil advisers and give us that. An acre for every man and a cottage for every woman, and freedom from want for every child.”

There was a silence — this was an agricultural audience, and the thought of free land struck to the very heart of their deepest desire.

“Will the king do this for us?” a man asked.

“Once he is rid of false advisers he will certainly do it for us,” the preacher answered.

“What, and break down his own park gates?”

“There is enough land. The commons and wastes of England are vast. There is more than enough land for us all, aye, and for all the city men too, and if we need more then we have only to look around. Why! The very gardens of New Hall would feed fifty families if they were brought under the spade! There is wealth in this country! There is enough for us all, if we can take the surfeit from the wicked men and give it to the children in need.”

Elizabeth felt a gentle hand on her elbow. “Come away,” John said softly in her ear. “This is not preaching, this is ranting: a sermon with more treason than writ.”

Silently, she let him draw her away from the crowd and back up the lane to their home. “Did you hear it all?” she asked as they entered the house.

“I heard enough,” John replied shortly.

J looked up at their entrance and then dropped his head and went on with his supper.

“He blamed the duke for everything,” Elizabeth said.

John nodded. “Some do.”

“He said that without his bad advice the king would give land away, and make no more wars.”

John shook his head. “The king would live as a king whether or not my lord was at his shoulder,” he said. “And no king gives away his land.”

“But if he did…” Elizabeth persisted.

John pulled out his stool and sat beside J at the table. “It is a dream,” he said. “Not reality. A dream to whisper to children. Think of a country where every man might have his own garden, where every man might grow enough for his own pot, and then grow fruits and flowers as well. This is not England, it is Eden. There would be no hunger and no want, and a man might draw his garden in the ground and plant it as he wished, and watch it grow.”

There was a silence in the little room. John, who had been meaning to deride the preacher’s vision, found himself tempted at the thought of a nation of gardens, of every park an orchard, every common a wheatfield, and no hunger or want.

“In Virginia they cut their land from the forest, however much land they want,” J said. “It need not be a dream.”

“There is no shortage of land here either,” John said. “If it were shared equally among every man and woman. There are the commons and the wastelands and the forests…there is enough land for everyone.”

“So the preacher was right,” Elizabeth said. “It is the surfeit of the few which brings poverty to the rest. The rich men enclose the land and use it for parks and for wilderness. That is why there is not enough for poor people.”

John’s face closed at once. “That is treason,” he said simply. “It is all the king’s. He must do with it as he wishes. No one else can come along and ask for land as if it were free. It all belongs to the king.”

“Except for the acres which belong to the duke,” J remarked slyly.

“He holds it for the king, and the king holds it for God,” Tradescant said, repeating the simple truth.

“Then we must pray that God wants to give land to the poor,” J said, getting up from the table and pushing his bowl irritably to one side. “For they cannot survive another summer of plague and failed harvest without help, and neither the king nor the duke is likely to ease their pains.”

Summer 1626

Tradescant had thought that complaints about the duke were in the mouths of ignorant men, boys like J, women like Elizabeth, and wayside preachers, whose opinions might disturb a man’s peace but would not challenge him. But then the king called Parliament to Oxford, sitting outside London to escape the plague which made the streets of the city a charnel house. The king’s debts forced him to deal with Parliament, though he suspected their loyalty and hated their self-importance.

Once they were in place they were not obliging. They refused to settle the massive bills of the court and instead the simple country squires confronted him with a long list of complaints against the duke and demanded that he be brought before a committee to be examined for his faults.

“I can’t settle to anything, not knowing what is happening,” John said to Elizabeth. He was working in their own garden at the little house at New Hall, planting peas in straight orderly rows. She saw that his fingers trembled slightly as he pressed each one into the earth. “They say they want him impeached! They say they want him tried for treason!”

“Do you want to go to him?” she asked, keeping her voice colorless.

John shook his head. “How can I? Without orders?”

“Won’t he send for you?”

“If I can serve him, he will send for me. But there’s no reason for him to think that I might serve him. He won’t need a gardener at Oxford!”

“But he uses you for all sorts of work,” Elizabeth said. “Dirty work,” she thought to herself. “Private work,” she said out loud.

John nodded. “If he sends for me I will go,” he repeated. “But I may not go until he orders me.”

She thought his head drooped a little at the thought of the duke in trouble or danger, and not thinking to get help from Tradescant. “I have to wait,” John said.

One of the duke’s servants brought the news from Oxford to New Hall. The steward saw John in the stable yard and sent down a message for him to come into the house, to the central household office.

“I knew you would want to know that the duke will not face his accusers!” William Ward beamed. “I knew you would have been worried.”