Earthly Joys. Philippa Gregory
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nothing here since his arrival as gardener. It had been laid out by Sir Robert’s father in the bleak elegance of the period. Sharply defined geometric patterns of box hedging enclosed different coloured gravels and stones. The beauty of the garden was best seen if you looked down on it, from the house. Then you could see that it was as complex and lovely as a series of neat diagrams of cropped hedging and stone. John had a private ambition to change the garden after the new fashion – to break up the regular square and rectangular beds and make all the separate beds one long whole, like an embroidered hem or scarf – a twisting pattern that went on and on, serpentined in and about itself. When his master was less absorbed with statecraft John was going to suggest melding the beds one into another.
Once he had persuaded Sir Robert to follow the new fashion for the knot garden he had an ambition to go yet further. He longed to take out the gravel from the enclosed shapes and plant the patterns with herbs, flowers and shrubs. He wanted to see the whole disciplined shape softened and changing every day with foliage and flowers which would bloom and wilt, grow freshly green, and then pale. He had a belief, as yet unexpressed, almost unformed, that there was something dead and hard about a garden of stone paths edged with box enclosing beds of gravel. Tradescant had a picture in his mind’s eye of plants spilling over the hedges, of the thick green of the box containing wildness, fertility, even colour. It was an image that drew on the hedgerow and roadside of the wild country of England and brought that richness into the garden and imposed order upon it.
‘I miss her,’ Sir Robert admitted.
John was recalled to his real duty – to be his master’s man heart and soul, to love what he loved, to think what he thought, to follow him to death without question if need be. The image of the creamy tossing heads of gypsy lace and moon daisies encased by hawthorn hedging in its first haze of spring green vanished at once.
‘She was a great queen,’ John volunteered.
Sir Robert’s face lightened. ‘She was,’ he said. ‘Everything I learned about statecraft, I learned from her. There never was a more cunning player. And she named him at the very end. So she did her duty, in her own way.’
‘You named him,’ John said dryly. ‘I heard that it was you that read the proclamation which named him as king while the others were still hopping between him and the other heirs like fleas between sleeping dogs.’
Cecil shot John his swift sly smile. ‘I have some small influence,’ he agreed. The two men reached the steps which led to the first terrace. Sir Robert leaned on John’s sturdy shoulder and John braced himself to take the slight weight.
‘He’ll not go wrong while I have the guiding of him,’ Sir Robert said thoughtfully. ‘And neither I, nor you, will be the losers. It takes a good deal of skill to survive from one reign to the next, Tradescant.’
John smiled. ‘Please God this king will see me out,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a queen, the greatest queen that ever was; and now a new king. I don’t expect to see more.’
They reached the terrace and Sir Robert dropped his hand from John’s shoulder and shrugged. ‘Oh! You’re a young man still! You’ll see King James and then his son Prince Henry on the throne! I don’t doubt it!’
‘Amen to their safe succession,’ John Tradescant replied loyally. ‘Whether I see it or not.’
‘You’re a faithful man,’ Sir Robert remarked. ‘D’you never have any doubts, Tradescant?’
John looked quickly at his master to see if he was jesting; but Sir Robert was serious.
‘I made my choice of master when I came to you,’ John said baldly. ‘I promised then that you would have no more faithful servant than me. And I promise my loyalty to the queen, and now to her heir, twice every Sunday in church before God. I’m not a man who questions these things. I take my oath and that’s the end of it for me.’
Sir Robert nodded, reassured as always by Tradescant’s faith, as straight as an arrow to the target. ‘It’s the old way,’ he said, half to himself. ‘A chain of master and man leading to the very head of the kingdom. A chain from the lowest beggar to the highest lord and the king above him and God above him. Keeps the country tied up tight.’
‘I like men in their places,’ Tradescant agreed. ‘It’s like a garden. Things ordered in their right places, pruned into shape.’
‘No wild disorder? No tumbling vines?’ Sir Robert asked with a smile.
‘That’s not a garden, that’s outside,’ John said firmly. He looked down at the knot garden, the straight lines of the low clipped hedges, and behind them the sharply defined coloured stones, each part of the pattern in its right place, each shape building up the design which could not even be seen clearly by the workers on the ground who weeded the gravel. To understand the symmetry of the garden you had to be gentry – looking down from the windows of the house.
‘My job is to make order for the master’s pleasure,’ Tradescant said.
Sir Robert touched his shoulder. ‘Mine too.’
They walked together along the terrace to the next great flight of steps. ‘All ready for His Majesty?’ Sir Robert asked, knowing what the answer would be.
‘All prepared.’
Tradescant waited to see if his master would speak more and then he bowed, and fell back, and watched Sir Robert limp onward, towards the grand house, to supervise the preparation for the visit of the Lord’s Anointed, England’s new, glorious king.
They had news of the arrival long before the first outriders clattered in through the great gates. Half the country had turned out to see what sort of man the new king might be. The whole royal court moved with the king – the baggage trains behind his carriages carried everything from silver and gold cutlery to pictures for his walls. One hundred and fifty English noblemen had attached themselves at once to the new king, their hats banded with red and gold to demonstrate their loyalty. But travelling with him also was his own Scots court, drawn south by the promise of easy pickings from the fat English manors. Behind them came all the retainers – twenty for each lord – and behind them came their baggage and horses. It was a massive battalion of idlers on the move. In the centre of the whole train came the king, riding his big black hunter, and scarcely able to see the country he had come to claim as his own for the lords and gentry who milled about him.
Half of the commoners who had joined the progress as it moved along the dusty roads were turned back at the great palace gates by Sir Robert’s retainers – a private army of his own – and the king rode down the great sweep of the tree-lined avenue to the house. When they reached the base court the followers broke away, looking for their own apartments and shouting for grooms to stable their horses. The king was greeted by Sir Robert’s chief servant, the master of the house, who had a paper to read to welcome the king on coming to his kingdom, and then Sir Robert himself stepped forward, and knelt before him.
‘You can get up,’ the new king said gruffly, his accent extraordinary to those subjects who had only ever heard a monarch speak in the queen’s ringing rounded tones.
Sir Robert rose, awkward on his lame leg, and led his king into the great hall of Theobalds. King James, prepared for English wealth and English style, nonetheless checked at the doorway and gasped. The walls and the ceilings were so massively carved with branches and flowers and leaves that the walls themselves looked like the boughs of a wood, and on the warm spring day even the wild birds were misled and came flying in and out of the huge open windows with their vast panes of expensive Venetian glass. It was a flight of fancy in stone, wood, and precious metals and jewels, an excess of folly and grandeur in one splendid hall as big as a couple of barns.
‘This is magnificent. What jewels in those planets! What workmanship in the wood!’
Sir