Virgin Earth Read online

  ‘Prince James,’ the king said. ‘Ten minutes too l … late.’

  The king’s party waited while the horsemen rode nearer and nearer and then pulled up.

  ‘Where the devil were you, sir?’ the king demanded of his nephew, the Elector Palatine, who had led the party.

  ‘I am sorry, Your Majesty,’ the young man replied stolidly. ‘We were at our dinner and did not know you were outside the gates until Sir John came to us just now and said you had ridden away.’

  ‘You were supposed to open the g … gates to me! Not idle with your no … noses in the trough!’

  ‘We were not sure you were coming. You were due before dinner. You said you would come in the afternoon. We gave up waiting for you. I thought the governor would have opened the gates to you himself.’

  ‘But he refused! And there was no-one to force him, b … b … because you were at your dinner, as usual!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Uncle,’ the young man replied.

  ‘You will be sorrier yet!’ the king said. ‘For now I have been refused admittance to one of my t … t … towns as well as being banned from my City! You have done evil, evil work this day!’ He turned on his son. ‘And you, J … James! Did you not know that your father was outside the gates?’

  The prince was only eight years old. ‘No, sire,’ he said. His little voice was scarcely more than a thread in the cold evening air.

  ‘You have disappointed your f … father very much this day,’ Charles said gloomily. ‘Pray to G … God that we have not taught disloyal and wicked men the lesson that they can defy me and travel in their w … wicked ways and fear nothing.’

  The prince’s lower lip trembled slightly. ‘I didn’t know. I am sorry, sir. I didn’t understand.’

  ‘It was a harebrained plan from first to last,’ the Elector said dourly. ‘Whose was it? Any fool could see that it would not work.’

  ‘It was m … my plan,’ the king said. ‘But it required speed and decisiveness and c … courage, and so it failed. How am I to succeed with such servants?’ He surveyed them as if they were all equally to blame, then he turned his horse’s head towards York and led them back to the city through the darkening twilight.

  April 1642

  When they got back to York John found a letter waiting for him from Hester. It had taken nearly a month to reach him instead of the usual few days. John, looking at the dirt-stained paper, realised that, along with loyalty and peace, everything else was breaking down too: the passage of letters, the enforcement of laws, the safety of the roads. He went to his pallet bed in the hayloft and sat where a crack in the shingles of the roof let in the cold spring light and he could see to read.

  Dear Husband,

  I am sorry that you have gone away with the court and I understand that it was not possible for you to come and say farewell before you rode away. I have hidden the finest of the rarities where we agreed, and sent others into store at the Hurtes’ warehouse where they have armed guards.

  The city is much disturbed. Every day there is drilling and marching and preparations for war. All the apprentice boys in Lambeth have given up their rioting around the streets and are now formed into trained bands and drilled every evening.

  Great ditches are dug outside London against the coming of a French or Spanish army and all of our gardeners have to go and take their turn with the digging whether they will or no.

  Food is scarce because the markets are closed as country people will not travel from their homes, and carters are afraid of meeting armies on the roads. I am feeding vagrants at the door with what we can afford but we are all doing very poorly. All the dried and bottled fruit is finished and I cannot get hold of hams to salt down for love nor money.

  These are strange and difficult times and I wish you could be with us. I am keeping up my courage and I am caring for your children as if they were mine own, and your rarities and gardens also are safe.

  I trust you will come home as soon as you are released from service.

  God be with you,

  Your wife,

  Hester Tradescant.

  John turned Hester’s letter over in his hands. He had an odd, foolish thought that if she were not his wife already, he would admire and like this woman more than any other he knew. She cared for the things that mattered most to him as if they were her own. It was a great comfort to him to know that she was in his house, in his father’s house, and that his children and his rarities and his garden were under her protection. He felt an unexpected tenderness towards the woman who could write of the difficulty of the times and yet assure him that she was keeping up her courage. He knew he would never love her as he had loved Jane. He thought he would never love another woman again. But he could not help but like and admire a woman who could take control of a household as she had done, and confront the times that they lived in as she did.

  John rose to his feet, picked hay off his doublet, and went to his dinner in the great hall of York castle.

  The king and his noble friends, splendidly dressed, were already in their place at the top table as John slipped into the hall. They were dining off gold plate but there were only a dozen dishes. The county was finding it hard to feed the appetite of the court, the provincial cooks could not devise the dishes that Charles expected, and the farms and markets were drained by the hunger of the enlarging, idle, greedy court.

  ‘What news?’ John asked, seating himself beside a captain of the guard and helping himself from the shared dish placed in the middle of the table.

  The man looked at him sourly. ‘None,’ he said. ‘His Majesty writes letters to all who should be here, but the men who are loyal are already here, and the traitors merely gain the time to make themselves ready. We should march on London now! Why give them more time to prepare? We should put them to the sword and cut out this canker from the country.’

  John nodded, saying nothing, and bent over his meat and bread. It was venison in a rich, dark sauce, very good. But the bread was coarse and brown with gritty seeds. The rich wheat stores of Yorkshire were slowly emptying.

  ‘While he is waiting I might go to my home,’ John said thoughtfully.

  ‘Lambeth?’ the captain asked.

  John nodded.

  ‘You’d be seen as a traitor,’ the man said. ‘London is solid against the king, you’d be seen as a turncoat. You’d never plant another bulb for him.’

  John grimaced. ‘I’m doing next to nothing here.’

  The man spat a piece of gristle on the rushes of the floor and one of the dogs squirmed forwards on its belly to lick it up. ‘We’re all doing next to nothing here,’ he said. ‘Nothing but waiting. It is war. All that is undecided is when and where.’

  July 1642

  All that spring and summer the country was waiting, like the captain, to see when and where. Every gentleman who could command men to follow him armed them, drilled them, and trained them, and then wrestled with his conscience night and day as to which side he should join. Brothers from the same great house might take opposite sides and divide the tenants and servants amongst them. The men of one village might come out as passionate royalists, the men of the village next door might side with Parliament. Local loyalties set their own traditions: villagers in the shadow of a great courtier’s house that had felt the benefits of royal visits might sharpen their pikes and put a feather in their hat for the king. But villagers along roads from London where the news was easily spread, knew of the king’s evasions and lies before the demands of Parliament. Those who prized their freedom of conscience, or those who were prosperous, free-thinking men, said that they would leave their work and their homes and take up the sword and fight against papacy, superstition and a king who was driven to sin by his bad advisors. Those whose habits of loyalty had gone deep with Elizabeth and deeper with James, and were far from the news of London, would turn out for the king.

  In early July, as the court at York started to complain of the smell of drains and to fear the plague in th
e overcrowded town, the king announced that they were to march to Hull once again. This time the plan was better laid. The royalist George Digby was inside the garrison and he had forged a plan with Hotham the governor that the town would open its gates to a besieging force from the king, as long as the force was sufficiently impressive to justify a surrender.

  Charles himself, dressed in green as for a picnic, rode out at the head of a handsome army on a warm summer day in early July. Tradescant rode at the tail end of the courtiers, and felt that he was the only man in the chattering, singing, light-hearted band who wished that he was elsewhere, and who doubted what they were about to do.

  The city’s defenders were bolstered by soldiers sent by the Scots. ‘It makes no difference, we have an agreement,’ Charles said contentedly.

  The foot soldiers laid aside their pikes and got out spades. The royal army started to dig a ring of trenches around the city. ‘They will surrender before we are more than a foot deep,’ Charles assured his commanders. ‘No need to dig the lines t … too straight or too well. If they do not surrender t … tonight, we will attack at dawn tomorrow. As long as we make a sh … show.’

  As the soldiers dug their trenches, and as Charles broke his fast with some red wine and bread and cheese, a simple meal, as if he were out on a hunting trip, the great gates of Hull slowly opened.

  ‘Already?’ Charles laughed. ‘Well, this is gracious!’ He shaded his eyes with his hand, and then shook his head and stared harder. The bread fell from his hand, unregarded. Slowly, his laughter died.

  A regular well-drilled army marched steadily out from the gates of the town towards them. The front flank kneeled down and the musketmen, steadying their weapons on the shoulders of the front rank, took aim and fired straight at the royalist army.

  ‘Good G … God! What are they doing?’ Charles cried.

  ‘To horse!’ one of the quicker courtiers shouted. ‘Get the men saddled up! We’ve been betrayed!’

  ‘It can’t b … be …’

  ‘Save the king!’ Tradescant shouted. The royal guard, recalled to their duties, dropped their dinner in the dust and threw themselves on their horses.

  ‘Mount! Your Highness!’

  There was a dreadful scream as another volley of shots pocked the dry ground around them, and some of the musket balls found a target.

  ‘Retreat! Retreat!’ someone yelled.

  All the orders of command were broken, as the men scattered, running like panicked sheep across the stubbly hayfields, pushing through hedges and trampling down the ripening corn. Still the defenders of Hull came forward, the first rank dropping to their knees and reloading as the second rank fired over their shoulders and then marched on. Then they too dropped down and reloaded as the men behind them fired.

  It was an unstoppable progress, John thought. The king’s soldiers did not even have fire lit ready for their muskets. They had no cannon ready, they did not even have their pikes. All they had were their trenching spades, and the men who had been digging had been the first to fall, toppling down into their shallow ditches, and screaming and crawling in the dirt.

  At last someone found a trumpeter and ordered him to sound the retreat, but the foot soldiers were already up and running, running from the well-disciplined lethal ranks that were pouring, like little toy soldiers, out of the gates of Hull, firing and reloading, firing and reloading, like a monstrous toy which could not be stopped or escaped.

  The king’s guards surrounded his horse and galloped him away from the battle. Tradescant, his own horse snorting and pulling, looked wildly around him and then followed the king. His last view of the battlefield was a horse, its stomach blown open by a cannon shot from the walls of the city, and a lad, not much more than fourteen, trying to shelter behind the body.

  ‘This is the end,’ John found he was saying as his horse wearily found the road to York and followed in the train of the ragged retreat. ‘This is the end. This is the end. This is the end.’

  August 1642

  For the king it was the beginning. The second humiliation outside the walls of Hull had decided him. The queen’s continual demands that he confront and defeat his parliament drove him on. He issued a proclamation that every able-bodied man in the country should rally to his army, and on Eastcroft Common outside Nottingham he paraded three cavalry troops and a battalion of infantry while the herald read the proclamation of war. John, standing behind his master in the pouring rain, thought that never in the history of warfare did any campaign look less promising.

  The rain dripped in a steady stream from his hat. No-one had thought to bring a spade and they could not get the royal standard to stand properly in the stony ground. John thought of his father and his last service to the Duke of Buckingham when he had followed him to Portsmouth and waited to take ship to the He de Rhé, knowing that the battle would be lost and that it was, in any case, a cause not worth fighting for. John thought of his father’s face when he had met him, riding home on the Duke’s cart, of the half-hidden look of relief in his eyes. And he understood at last what it was to follow a master unwillingly, when that master will lead you to death from pure folly.

  John looked at the king, the feather in his hat drooping in the pouring rain, as he listened, nodding approval, to the herald shouting the proclamation into the wind which whipped his words away. John thought that his family had served the kings and their favourites for long enough, and that any debt owed, had surely by now been paid – by his father’s heartbreak in the Ile de Rhé, and now, a generation later, by his own fear and despair before the walls of Hull.

  In the rain outside Nottingham John found his determination to leave the king, whatever might be the outcome of his desertion. When they turned away from Eastcroft Common and went back to their billets in Nottingham, John turned southwards and rode alone to London without asking permission, without giving notice.

  The royal standard blew down that night.

  Hester, roused from sleep by the sound of a tap on the back door, ran downstairs, pulling on her nightgown, her heart pounding with fear. She peered out of the kitchen window into the pale greyness of the summer dawn and saw the familiar outline of John’s head.

  She threw open the door. ‘John!’

  He opened his arms to her, as if they were husband and wife in their hearts as well as by name, and Hester ran towards him and felt his arms come around her and hold her close.

  He smelled of sweat and fatigue and the warm erotic male smell which lingered around his clothes when she brushed them. Hester felt herself long for his touch, and she tightened her grip around his back and held him close. He did not move away from her, he did not unclasp her hands. He held her as if he wanted her as she wanted him, and made no move to put her aside.

  They stumbled together over the threshold, not releasing each other until they were at the fireside and the embers of the fire cast a warm glow. Then she leaned back, her arms still tightly around him, so that she could see his face.

  She was shocked. The eight months of his absence had put grey into his hair at the temples and bags beneath his eyes. His beard was still a true dark brown, but matted and dirty, his face was smudged with dirt, his forehead carried new lines. He looked desperately weary. He looked like a man on the run.

  ‘Was there a battle?’ she asked, trying to understand what this mute look of suffering might mean.

  He shook his head, released her, and dropped into the chair by the fireside. ‘Not one that is worth mentioning,’ he said bitterly. ‘When they come to write the history of these days it will not have more than a line. We rode out like fools, thinking that we would win without having to fight. We went out like the chorus in one of his masques – all show and pretence. For all the good we were, we might as well have had swords of wood and helmets of painted paper.’

  Hester was silent, shocked by his vehemence, and by the bitterness in his tone. ‘Were you hurt?’

  He shook his head. ‘No – only in my pride.’ He
paused. ‘Yes. Deep in my pride,’ he corrected himself.

  She did not know how to question him. She turned and threw some kindling on the fire and then some small twigs and broken branches of applewood. Coal was short in London, the Tradescants were living off their land.

  He leaned forward to the blaze as if he were chilled to the heart. ‘All along it has been like a masque,’ he said, as if he was gripping some truth about the king at last. ‘As if it were some pretty play with a script which everyone was to follow. The threat of Parliament, the flight from London, his parting with the queen when he rode along the cliffs waving to her ship and wept, the ride north to victory. It has all been a masque – beautifully costumed. But when the time came for the king to defeat his enemies –’ He broke off.

  ‘What happened?’ Hester kneeled at the fire and kept her eyes on the flames, afraid to interrupt him.

  ‘The chorus didn’t arrive,’ John said sourly. ‘The engines which should show Jove descending or Neptune rising up from the sea failed to work. Instead of the gates of Hull opening and the governor coming out with the golden key on a velvet cushion and some poetry from Ben Jonson, it all went wrong. The gates opened and the soldiers came out and just went fire … reload … fire … reload … like dancers – but they weren’t doing our dance. They were following another script. And … and …’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know what the end of this play will be.’

  ‘The king?’ she asked in a little whisper.

  ‘The king is sticking to his masque,’ John said savagely. ‘Act two was raising the royal standard. But the weather was all wrong. It should have been balmy skies or perhaps a bright comet overhead. Instead it poured with rain on him and we looked like sodden fools. But he will not realise that the scenes are going wrong. He thinks it is a rehearsal, he thinks it will be the greater on the night if it all goes wrong now.’