“Could that happen?” J was horrified.

John nodded. “It is not gardening, it is speculation,” he said with distaste. “There are people dealing in tulips who have never so much as pulled a weed. And making fortunes from their work.”

J extended a respectful finger and stroked the dry firm surface of the nearest bulb. “The skin is solid, and the shape is good. They are even lovely in the bulb, aren’t they?” He bent and sniffed the firm warm skin.

“Is it clean?” John asked anxiously. “No hint of taint?”

J shook his head. “None. What sort is it?”

“This is the Duck tulip – yellow with crimson blush at the base of the petals.” John pointed to the next bulb. “This is a Lack tulip, white and thin-petaled with thin red stripes through white, and this is a French bizarre tulip, very strong-stemmed and scarlet petals with a white border. Pray God they grow for us; I have spent nearly a thousand pounds on the six of them.”

J’s hand holding the trowel trembled. “A thousand pounds? A thousand? But Father – what if they rot?” he asked, his voice a whisper. “What if they grow blind and fail to flower at all?”

John smiled grimly. “Then we seek another line of work. But what if they grow and split into new bulbs, J? Then our master has doubled his wealth in one season.”

“But we stay on the same wages,” J observed.

John nodded and put the six pots in a cool cupboard in the corner of the room. “That is how it works,” he said simply. “But there could be no objection to us taking a bulb for every two we grow for him. My master Cecil taught me that himself.”


John was popular in the great dining room of New Hall on his return. He was able to tell a rapt audience of the prettiness of the little French princess: only fifteen and tiny, dark-haired and dark-eyed. He told them of her dancing and her singing, of her complete refusal to learn English. He told them that the news in London was that when the young King Charles met her at Dover Castle, he had covered her little face with kisses, laughed at her prepared speech, and spent the night in her bed.

The ladies wanted to know what she was wearing and John struggled through a description of her clothes. He assured them that the king and queen entered London by the river in a grand barge, both dressed in green, with the guns of the Tower roaring out a salute, and that was a vivid enough picture to be told and retold by a dozen hearthsides. He did not tell them that there had been a nasty quarrel between the king and his bride of only a day when she had wanted her French companions in the carriage from Dover to London, and the king had insisted that she travel with Buckingham’s wife and his mother.

The king had said that the French attendant was not of high enough station to ride with the Queen of England; and the young queen incautiously retorted that she knew well enough that the Buckinghams had been nobodies just ten years ago. She did not yet know enough to mind her sharp tongue; she had not yet learned of the extent of the duke’s influence. As it was, she rode in her carriage with the duke’s wife and the duke’s mother for the long journey into her capital and it might be safely assumed that no promises of friendship were made on the drive.

“So did she look happy?” asked Mrs. Giddings, who worked in the New Hall laundry but had her own little farm and would kill another sheep for the Tradescants if John’s story was good enough.

John thought of the fifteen-year-old girl and her un-English formality, her court which spoke only French, and her brace of confessors who spoke Latin grace over her dinner, and warned her not to eat meat even though her new husband had just carved her a slice, since she must observe a fast day.

“As happy as a maid can be,” he said. “Laughing and chattering and singing.”

“And the duke, does he like her?”

Only Elizabeth saw the swift shadow cross her husband’s face. There had been a scandal in France, several scandals. Buckingham had told him the worst of it as they paced the deck of a little fishing boat, sailing from Rotterdam to Tilbury. The Queen of France had encouraged Buckingham further than a married woman, and one so carefully watched, should have done. He had climbed the wall into her private garden to meet her there. What took place Buckingham would not say, but everyone else in Europe was talking about it. The pair had been caught by her personal guard. Swords had been drawn and threats made. Some said that the queen had been assaulted by Buckingham; some said the queen had been seduced, and caught half-naked in his arms. The queen’s ladies said that she had been elegantly flirting or – no such thing – somewhere else all the time. There had been a whirlwind of rumor and innuendo and through it all Buckingham had sailed smiling, the handsomest man at court, the wickedest look, the most roguish smile, the irresistible charm. John had frowned when Buckingham had confessed to losing his heart to the Queen of France and thought that he should have stayed by his master and kept him from secret assignations with the most carefully guarded woman in Europe.

“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.”