He got up and went over to her. His knees ached, and he was careful to walk steadily without a limp. He put his arm around her waist. He could feel the warmth and softness of her body beneath her gray gown. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have to go. Give me your blessing. You will never make me sail without your blessing.”

She turned her troubled face toward him. “I can bless you and I can pray for the Lord to watch over you,” she said. “But I fear that you are sailing with bad company into a senseless fight. You will be badly commanded, badly ruled and poorly paid.”

Tradescant flinched back from her. “This is not a blessing, this is ill-wishing!”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It is the truth, John, and everyone in the country but you knows it. Everyone but you thinks that your duke is leading this country into war to spite Richelieu and to tease the King of France whom he cuckolded already. Everyone but you thinks he is showing off before the king. Everyone but you thinks he is a wicked and dangerous man.”

John was white. “I see you have been listening to the preachers and the gossips again,” he said. “This poison is not of your cooking!”

“The preachers speak nothing but the truth,” she said, confronting him at last. “They say that a new world is coming where men can share in the wealth of the country and that every man should have his share. They say that the king will see reason and give the country to his people when his adviser is thrown down. And they say that if the king will not turn against papist practices in his home, and ritual in his church, and poverty in his streets, then we should all go to make a new world of our own.”

“Virginia!” John mocked scathingly. “That was an investment of mine in a promising business. It was not a dream of a new world.”

“There is certainly no dreaming in this old world,” she flashed back. “Innocent men in the Tower, poor men taxed into paupers. Plague in the streets every summer, starvation in the country, and the richest king in the world riding around in silk with his Favorite riding beside him on a horse from Arabia.”

John put his hand under her chin and turned her face so that she was forced to meet his eyes. “This is treason,” he said firmly. “And I will not have it spoken in my house. I have struck J for less. Mark me well, Elizabeth, I will put you aside if you speak against my lord. I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

For a moment she looked as if he had indeed struck her. “Say that again,” she whispered.

He hesitated; he did not know if she was daring him to repeat it, or if she simply could not believe her ears. But either way he could not back down before a woman. The chain of command from God to man was clear; a wife’s feelings could not disrupt the loyalty from man to lord to king to God. “I will put you aside if you speak against my lord,” John said to his wife, as solemnly as he had spoken the marriage oath in church that long-ago day in Meopham. “I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

He turned on his heel and went out of the room. Elizabeth heard his heavy step going up the stairs to their bedroom and then the noise of the wooden chest opening as he took his traveling suit from where it was laid in lavender and rue. She put out her hand to the chimney breast to steady herself as her knees grew suddenly weak beneath her, and she sank down to the little three-legged stool at the fireside.

“I want to go with him,” J suddenly said from his seat at the table.

Elizabeth did not look around. She had forgotten her son was there. “You’re too young,” she said absently.

“I’m nearly nineteen, I am a man grown. I could keep him safe.”

She looked up at his bright hopeful face and his dark eyes, as dark as his father’s. “I cannot bear to let you go,” she said. “You stay home with me. This voyage is going to break hearts enough in this household and in others all over the country. I can’t risk you as well.” She saw the refusal in his face. “Ah, John, don’t waste your time reproaching me or trying to convince me,” she suddenly cried out bitterly. “He won’t take you. He won’t allow you to go. He will want to be with the duke alone.”

“It is always the duke,” J said resentfully.

She turned her face from her son to look into the fire. “I know,” she said. “If I had been able to hide from that knowledge before, I would certainly know it now. Now that he has told me to my face and repeated it – that he is their man and not mine.”


Elizabeth did not come to see the fleet sail from Stokes Bay near Portsmouth. It was too far from Essex, and besides she did not want to see her husband walking up the narrow gangplank to his master’s ship, the Triumph, supervising the loading of his master’s goods. On this warlike expedition Buckingham was taking a full-sized harp with a harpist, a couple of milk cows, a dozen laying hens, a massive box of books for reading in his leisure hours and an enormous coach with livery for his servants for his triumphant progress through La Rochelle.

Watching this fanciful equipment lumbering up the gangplank, John was rather relieved that Elizabeth was not with him. Six thousand foot soldiers slouched unwillingly aboard the fleet, a hundred cavalry. The king himself rode down to Portsmouth for a farewell dinner with his Lord High Admiral, and bade him farewell with a dozen kisses, wishing him Godspeed on his mission.

The mission itself remained uncertain. Firstly they were to harry French shipping as they sailed to La Rochelle, but, as it happened, though the July seas were calm and pleasant they saw no French shipping and could not complete their orders. Buckingham’s court played cards for desperately high stakes and held a poetry competition as they sailed southward. There was a good deal of hard drinking and laughter.

The next part of the orders bade them to go to La Rochelle for the grateful welcome of the besieged townspeople. Even this apparently simple command could not be fulfilled. When the fleet hove to before the town and spread the pennants so that the town could see that the great duke himself had come to relieve the siege, the townspeople were neither grateful nor particularly welcoming. They were deep in complicated and subtle negotiations with Richelieu’s agents for their rights to practice their religion, and to live freely among other Frenchmen. The arrival of Buckingham’s fleet threw their diplomatic agreements into jeopardy.

“So we can go home with honor,” John suggested. He was standing at the back of Buckingham’s richly decorated cabin. Seated around the table were his advisers, French Protestant leaders among them.

“Never! We must show that we are serious,” Soubise the Frenchman said. “We should take the Ile de Rhé at the harbor mouth and then they will see we are in earnest. It would give them the courage to declare against Richelieu, break off these negotiations and defy him.”

“But our orders were to wait for them to declare,” John said levelly. “Not stir up trouble. The townspeople must invite our help. And if they do not declare against Richelieu, we were ordered to sail to Bordeaux and escort the English wine fleet home. We need not fight for La Rochelle, if the townspeople do not invite us.”

The Frenchman tried to catch Buckingham’s eye. “My lord duke did not come all this way to fetch a wine fleet home,” he laughed.

“Nor to find himself embroiled in a quarrel which no one wants,” John said stoutly.

Buckingham lifted his head from admiring a large new diamond on his finger. “Are you homesick, John?” he asked coldly.

Tradescant flushed. “I am your man,” he said steadily. “Nothing else. And I don’t want to see you drawn into a battle for a small island opposite a small town on a small river in France.”

“This is La Rochelle!” Soubise exclaimed. “Hardly a small town!”

“If they are not willing to fight for themselves,” John persisted doggedly, “then why should we fight for them?”

“For glory?” Buckingham suggested, smiling across the room at John.

“You are glorious enough,” John smiled back, indicating the new diamond, and a shining stone in Buckingham’s thick plumed hat on the table before him.

The Frenchman swore softly underneath his breath. “Are we to go home as if we were defeated then?” he demanded. “Without firing a shot? That will please the king, that will silence Parliament! They will say that we were suborned, that we are the queen’s men, papist men! They will say that this mission was a masque, a piece of theater. They will say we were players, not soldiers.”

Buckingham rose from his seat and stretched, his dark curls brushing the gilded roof of his cabin. “Not them,” he said softly. John watched warily. He knew the signs.

“They will mock us in the streets,” Soubise lamented.

“Not them,” Buckingham repeated.

“They will say it was a gesture to seduce the Queen of France,” Soubise said, going as far as he dared. “That you were throwing down a glove to her husband and that you did not fulfil your challenge.”

For a moment John thought that the man had gone too far. Buckingham stiffened at the mention of the queen’s name. But then his smile returned. “Not them,” he said. “And I will tell you why they will not mock. Because we will lay siege to the island, we will take the island, then we will take La Rochelle, and we will go home as conquering heroes.”

The Frenchman gasped and then beamed as the cabin of men burst into applause. Buckingham gleamed at the praise. “Set to!” he shouted above the laughter and applause. “We will land tomorrow!”


It was a shambles but it did the job. Inexperienced sailors, press-ganged from ale houses up and down the south coast of England, fought to keep the landing boats steady in the currents that swirled around the boggy and uninviting beaches. Inexperienced soldiers press-ganged from the poorhouses and ale houses of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland cringed from the waves and from the French soldiers, forewarned and splendidly armed, drawn up to greet them. All would have been lost but for the duke, conspicuous beneath his standard, dressed in glorious gold and crimson, who rowed up and down between the boats and urged the men on shore. Reckless of danger, laughing when the cannon from his ships roared over his head, he was a leader from a fable. He was indeed a champion fit to bed the most beautiful queen in Europe. When they saw him, still sporting his diamonds, with his golden sword on his hip, their spirits lifted. It was impossible that such a man, such a glamorous golden laughing man, could ever be defeated.