Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“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 colored 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, toward 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 traveling 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 center 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 Robert smiled, as modest as he could be, and bowed slightly; but not even his courtier skills were able to conceal his pride of ownership.

“And this wall!” the king exclaimed.

It was the wall which showed the Cecil family connections. Other older members of court, other greater families might sneer at the Cecils, who had come from a farm in Herefordshire only a few generations ago; but this wall was Sir Robert’s answer. It was emblazoned with his family shield showing the motto “Prudens Qui Patiens” – a good choice for a family who had made their fortune in two generations by advising the monarch – and linked by swags and ropes of laurel and bay leaves to the coats of arms and branches of the family. The garlands showed the extent of the Cecil power and influence. This was a man who had a cousin or a niece in every noble bed in the land and, conversely, every noble family in the land had, at one time or another, sought the seal of Cecil approval. The rich swooping loops of carved and polished foliage which connected one shield to another were like a map of England ’s power from the fountainhead of the Cecil family, closest to the throne, to the most distant tributaries of petty northern lordships and baronetcies.

On the opposite wall was Cecil’s great planetary clock, which showed the time of day in hours and minutes as it shone on Cecil’s house. A great solid gold orb represented the sun, and then at one side was a moon hammered from pure silver, and the planets in their courses, all moving in their spheres. Each planet was made from silver or gold and encrusted with jewels, each kept perfect time, each demonstrated in its symmetry and beauty the natural order of the universe that put England at the center of the universe and mirrored the arrangement of the opposite wall that put Cecil at the center of England.

It was an extraordinary display even for a house of extraordinary displays.

The king looked from one wall to another, stunned by the richness. “I’ve seen nothing like this in my life before,” he said.

“It was my father’s great pride,” Sir Robert said. At once he could have bitten off his tongue rather than mention his father to this man. William Cecil had been the queen’s adviser when she had hesitated over the death of her cousin, Queen Mary of Scotland. It was Cecil’s father who had put the death warrant on the table and told the queen that, kin or no, monarch or no, innocent or no, the lady must die, that he could not guarantee Queen Elizabeth’s safety with her dangerously attractive rival alive. It was William Cecil who had responsibility for Mary’s death and now his son welcomed the dead queen’s son into his house.

“I must show you the royal apartments.” Robert Cecil recovered rapidly. “And if there is anything you lack you must tell me, Your Majesty.” He turned and waved to a man holding a heavy box. The man, whose cue should have come later, started forward and presented the jewel box on one knee.

The gleam from the diamonds completely obscured Cecil’s small blunder. James beamed with desire. “I shall lack nothing,” he declared. “Show me the royal rooms.”

It seemed odd to Cecil, taking this stocky, none-too-clean man into the rooms which had belonged exclusively to the queen, and were always left empty when she was not there, filled only with the aura of royalty. When she was in residence, on her long and expensive visits, the place was scented with rosewater and orange blossom and the richest strewing herbs and pomanders. Even when she was absent there was a ghost of her perfume in the room which made any man coming into it pause in awe on the threshold. There was a tradition that her chair was placed in the center of the room like a throne, and like a throne it was vested with her authority. Everyone, from serving maid to Cecil, bowed to it on entering the room and on leaving, such was the power of England ’s queen even in her absence.