Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory
‘That’s enough,’ John said roughly. ‘Go and take your horse to the stable. I won’t hear the duke traduced on his own land by his own servant.’
The man shrugged and twitched the reins over his horse’s head. ‘I’ve left his service. I am on my way to my own home.’
‘You have work to go to?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I’d rather beg from door to door than go with the duke to the Island of Rue. I’m not a fool. I know how it will be commanded, and how it will be paid, and what the risks will be.’
John nodded, his face betraying nothing. Then he turned away and walked from the avenue, across the grass lawn to the lake. He made his way down the pretty little path to the landing stage opposite the boat house where Buckingham used to row out on summer evenings, sometimes with his wife Kate in the stern, sometimes alone with a rod and line. John sat on the landing stage and looked across the water. The yellow flag irises were in flower as he had promised his master they would be, the fountain they had designed together played into the warm silent air of the afternoon. The water lilies he had planted bobbed gently as the wind breathed across the smooth surface of the lake, their buds just splitting to show cream and white petals. The ducks had had a second brood of ducklings and they came and quacked around him, hoping for corn. John held the letter in his hand, looking at the heavy seal on the fold of the thick cream notepaper. For a moment he did not break it, he did not shatter the impress of Buckingham’s ring, for a moment he sat in the sunshine and thought what he would be feeling if this was a letter from a master who loved him, from a man who loved as an equal. How it would be for him now, if Buckingham was his lover as well as his lord.
John thought that if they were lovers still his heart would leap at the sight of the sealed note, he would be happy at being ordered to his lord’s side, he would go glad-hearted, wherever he was ordered. If they were lovers he would go with his lord to the Isle of Rue, to that bleak island, to that certain death, with a sort of mad joy, that a love as encompassing and wild as theirs could only end in death and that there would be something erotic and powerful about it ending in a battle and the two of them side by side as comrades.
John rubbed his hand across his eyes. No point in dreaming like a lovesick maid and gazing out across the water. This would not be a love letter, these would be orders that must be obeyed whatever his private feelings. He tore the fold of the paper and opened the letter.
John,
I shall need my best travelling coach and some suits of clothes, my hats and the new diamonds. We will need a couple of cows and some hens – order everything as I would wish.
Bring it all to me and meet me at Portsmouth, we will sail at the beginning of July without fail.
You will sail with me and be at my side, as before. Villiers.
John read the letter once, and then read it again. It was his death warrant.
The evening was very warm. John watched the midges dancing over the still water, his legs dangling above the glassy surface of the lake like an idle boy’s. Even now he found it hard to believe that he must leave all this, and never see it again. The garden he had made, the trees he had planted, the vegetables and flowers he had introduced to New Hall – to England – all this would be taken from him, and he would die on an island half-rock and half-marsh for a cause he had never believed in, serving a master who was no good.
John’s long unthinking uncritical loyalty to his masters had been destroyed. And when John lost his faith in his master, he lost his faith in the world. If his master was not a better man, closer to the angels than his servant, then the king was not set higher again, even closer to heaven. And if the king was not divine, then he was not infallible, as John had always believed. And if the king was not infallible then all the questions that thinking men were posing, about the king’s new powers and the king’s mismanagement of affairs, were questions that John should have been asking. He should have been asking them years ago.
He felt like a fool who had neglected the chance of a great education. Cecil had been his first master and had taught him not to think of principle but of practice. If he had watched Cecil he would have seen a man who always acted in public as if the king were divine, but always plotted in private to protect him like any fallible mortal. Cecil had not been fooled by the masque of royalty, he was a man like Inigo Jones whose work was to illustrate and support it. Jones had built the staircase and a marble bathroom at New Hall, Tradescant had watched him at work. This was not a priest before the mysteries, this was a man doing a skilled job. He made a stair, he made an illusion of majesty, all the same work, all in the same day. But Tradescant, even with the example of Cecil as chief stage manager before him, had been taken in by the show and the costumes and the ingenious machinery, and had thought that he had seen gods when all that had been before him was a cunning old woman, Elizabeth; her nephew James, a lecher; and his son, Charles, a fool.
John did not feel vengeful; the habit of loving and loyalty towards his masters and beyond them to the king went too deep for that. He felt that he would have to endure the loss of faith as if it were his own fault. To lose faith in the king and his lord was very like to losing faith in God. It was gone but a man still went through the rituals of attendance, and hat-doffing and minding his tongue, so as not to spread doubt among others. John might doubt his lord and his king but no-one beyond his immediate family would ever know it. He might doubt that God had ordered him to obey the commandments or had recently included a commandment to obey the king, but he would not stand up in church and deny God when the preacher recited the new prayers for the king and queen which had been added as a collect for the day. John had been raised to be a man of loyalty and duty, he could not step out of his track just because his heart was broken and his faith gone.
For the duke his lover he thought he would never feel anything but a pain where his heart should be, and ice where his blood should be, and an ache where his belly should be. He did not blame his lord for turning away from his gardener to the court. The very suggestion was a foolish one. Of course Buckingham would cleave to the court, however well he was loved by his servants. It was Tradescant who blamed himself for forgetting that the man he loved was a great man, a man of the highest degree in the land, second only to the king. It was folly to think that he would need Tradescant in the days of his glory as he had needed him in the days of the voyage home when the ghosts of the men they had left behind cried every night in the rigging.
As John gave the orders in the stable and the big house to get the carriage ready, as he rode down to Manor Farm and requisitioned two cows in milk, he knew that Buckingham had forgotten him as a lover but trusted him completely as a servant, the most faithful servant of them all who would do everything, and overlook nothing.
Buckingham believed that John was his faithful servant; and Buckingham was right. As John ordered them to pack the duke’s best clothes, and put the diamonds in a purse to wear around his own neck, he knew that he was acting the part of a faithful servant, and that he would act that part until he died. He would take the travelling coach and the clothes, the hats and the new diamonds, some cows and some hens, all the long way down the road to Portsmouth, see them loaded with the pressganged soldiers on the Triumph and set sail with them to his death.
‘We will go to our deaths like herded cattle,’ John said quietly to himself as he watched them pull the great travelling coach from the stables and start to polish the gilded ornaments on the corners of the roof. ‘Like the milch cows which low as they are pushed on board. I am bound by my oath that I will be his until death, and I see now that this was what he meant. He will never have finished with me, nor with any in his company, until we are all dead.’
He turned away, his knee aching as he walked on the uneven cobbles of the stable yard, and went round to the pleasure gardens to find J, his son, who would now inherit all that he had, and would have to become head of the little family, for John was going to the war again and
The pleasure garden had been laid out with fountains and waterworks designed by the engineer Cornelius van Drebbel. J had ordered the drying and cleaning of an enormous round marble bowl at the foot of a cascade, and was splashing round inside the bowl checking that it was perfectly clean before he let the water flow back in. In the heat of the day it was a pleasant job, and J was a man young enough to take pleasure in playing about with a cascade of water and calling it work. At the side of the fountain, in the shade, was a hogshead tub squirming with carp waiting to be returned to the water. J looked up when he heard his father’s step on the white gravel and as soon as he saw his father’s face he climbed out of the marble bowl and came towards him, shaking his thick black hair like a spaniel coming out of a river.
‘Bad news, Father?’
John nodded. ‘I am to go to Rhé.’
J held out his hand for the letter and John hesitated only for a moment before passing it to him. J read it swiftly and thrust it back.
‘Carriage!’ he cried scathingly. ‘Best diamonds! He has learned nothing.’
‘It is his way,’ John said. ‘He has the grand manner and he rides out the storms.’
‘Can we say you are sick?’ J asked.
John shook his head.
‘I will go in your place, I mean it.’
‘Your place is here,’ John said. ‘You have a child on the way, perhaps an heir for us, someone to grow the chestnut trees on.’ The two men smiled at each other, and then John was grave again. ‘You’re well-provided for, there’s our own land, and the fee from the Whitehall granary. There’s our own cabinet of curiosities, I know they are nothing much yet but you could raise a few pounds on them if you’re ever in need, and with the training you have had under me at Lord Wootton’s garden and here, you could work anywhere in Europe.’
‘I won’t stay with the duke,’ J said. ‘I won’t stay here. I shall go to Virginia where there is neither a duke nor a king.’
‘Yes,’ Tradescant said. ‘But, of course, he may not come back from Rhé, either.’
‘He came home last time without a scratch on him and was greeted in triumph,’ J said resentfully.
‘Don’t make an enemy of him.’
‘He has taken my father away from me for years,’ J said. ‘And now he wants to take you to your death. How do you think I feel?’
John shook his head. ‘Feel as you like. But don’t make an enemy of him. If you go against him, you go against the king and that is treason and mortal danger.’
‘He is too great for me to challenge, I know that. He is too great altogether. There is not a man in England who does not hate and fear him, and now we are to go to war under him again when we know he does not know how to command, he cannot organise supplies, he cannot order an attack, he does not know how the business should be done. How should he know? He was a country squire’s son and got his place by his skill in dancing and talking … and sodomy.’
John flinched. ‘Enough, J. Enough.’
‘I wish to God we had never come here,’ the younger man said passionately.
John looked back down the years to the moment that he first saw Buckingham as green as a sapling in the dark allee at New Hall. ‘We wanted the best gardens in the country. We had to come here.’
The two men were silent.
‘Will you tell Mother?’ J asked eventually.
‘I’ll tell her now,’ John said. ‘She’ll be grieved. You will keep her to live with you and provide for her well when I am gone, J.’
‘Of course,’ J said.
Elizabeth packed John’s clothes in silence, including his winter boots and warm cloaks and blankets.
‘I probably won’t need those, we will be back before autumn,’ John said, trying to be cheerful.
She was folding his clothes and putting them into a big leather sack. ‘He will never sail on time,’ she said. ‘He never does. Nothing will be ready on time and you will be sailing out into the autumn storms, and setting siege as winter comes. You will need your warm cloak, and Jane’s father has sent me a bolt of oilskin to wrap your clothes in and try to keep them dry.’
‘Are you nearly ready? I have his wagons loaded and his coach is ready to go.’
‘All finished.’ She pulled the drawstring tight.
He held out his arms to her and she looked at him, her face very grave. ‘God bless you, my John,’ she said.
He wrapped his arms around her and felt the familiar warmth of the band of her cap and her smooth hair against his cheek. ‘I am sorry for the grief I have given you,’ he said, his voice choked. ‘Before God, Elizabeth, I have loved you dearly.’
She did not reprove his swearing, but tightened her grip around his waist.
‘Look after my grandchild,’ he said, and tried to make a joke: ‘And my chestnut trees!’
‘Don’t go!’ she cried suddenly. ‘Please, John, don’t go. You can get to London and on a ship to Virginia in a day and a night, before he even knows you have left him. Please!’
He put his hands behind his back and unfastened her fingers. ‘You know I cannot run away.’
He picked up his bag and went down the stairs, his tread uneven as the arthritis in his knee made him limp. She stayed where she was for a moment, and then ran after him.
Buckingham’s great carriage was drawn up outside their little cottage, but John could not ride in it without the lord’s express permission, and Buckingham had forgotten to tell John he could travel in comfort. John slung his bag in the back of the carter’s wagon and cast an experienced eye over the armed men who would ride before and after him, to guard the duke’s treasures against violent beggars, highwaymen, or a mob that might rise up against the sight of his crest in any of the towns on the way.
John pulled himself up beside the carter on the wagon’s driving seat and turned to wave to Elizabeth. J and Jane stood beside her at the cottage doorway, looking out as John gave the signal for the carriage and the wagons to move.
He meant to call out, ‘Goodbye! God bless!’, but he felt the words stick in his throat. He meant to smile and wave his hat so that the last sight they had of him was that of a cheery smile and a man going willingly. But Elizabeth’s white face pierced him like a knife and he could only pull his hat from his head as a mark of respect for her and let the wagon pull out, and away from her.
He turned in his seat and watched them grow smaller and smaller, obscured by the dust of the luggage train, until the wagon turned the corner into the great avenue and he could see them no more. He could not even hear the bees above the rumble of wheels, and he had never smelled the heady perfume of the limes.
Buckingham was not at Portsmouth, as he had said he would be. The fleet was ready, the sailors on board, every day that he did not come the murmurings grew worse and the officers resorted to harsher and longer whippings to keep the men in order. The army melted away daily, the officers scouring the towns and the roads to the north of the city to arrest ploughboys and shepherd boys and apprentices who were running for their lives away from the ships that waited, bobbing at the harbour wall, for the commander who did not come.
John saw the duke’s coach loaded aboard but kept the purse of diamonds on a string about his neck. The cows and the hens he penned up on Southsea Common and he took himself a lodging nearby. The landlord was surly and unhelpful, he had had soldiers billeted on him for months and his bills were never paid. John paid him directly from his own money, even though he knew that Buckingham would not remember to reimburse him, and then the man served him a little better.
On 19 July the king came riding down to inspect the fleet. The winds were blowing off shore, the ships were straining at their ropes as if they were willing to go, even if the men aboard had sulky faces. The king looked the ships over, but this time there was no handsome dinner on board the Triumph. All of them, even the king himself, waited for the Lord High Admiral.
He did not come.
&
The king left Southwick and went hunting in the New Forest. He had no objection to the fleet being delayed while Buckingham went about his business in London. Other men would have risked a charge of treason and imprisonment in the Tower as a punishment for keeping the king waiting for an hour, but it seemed that Buckingham could do nothing that would offend the king. His Majesty laughed and said that the duke was a laggard, and spent the night at Beaulieu and hunted deer. The sport was good and the weather stood fair. On board the ships the soldiers, cooped up in their quarters, sweated in the crowded heat, and many had to be carried out suffering from seasickness or worse. The crews and the soldiers ate up the provisions which had been laid aboard for the voyage, and the ships’ stewards had to go out into Hampshire and Sussex to buy more food to re-stock the ships. Prices went up in the local markets and the little villages could not afford bread at the rate the fleet could pay. Buckingham was cursed at a hundred hungry firesides. And still he did not come.
John wrote to his wife that perhaps the whole thing would blow over. The fleet would not sail without the Lord High Admiral, and the Lord High Admiral did not come for the whole of July. Perhaps, John thought, he was bluffing, and had never meant to sail. Perhaps he was wiser and more skilful than anyone had allowed, as cunning as Cecil. Perhaps all this preparation, all this fear, all this grief, had been to give substance to the most tremendous trick of all time – frightening the French into withdrawing from La Rochelle without a shot being fired, without the expedition even leaving port. John remembered the trickery and mischief in Buckingham’s smile, his cleverness and his wit, and thought that if any man could win a war without sending his fleet out, Buckingham was the man.