“That’s enough,” John warned him. “More than enough.”
“Go to sleep,” the duke said gently. “I am going to bed myself in a minute.”
John shucked off his breeches and shoes, lay down in his shirt and was asleep in moments.
There was a hammering on the bedroom door in the early hours of the morning. John started out of sleep, leaped from his bed and ran, not to the door, but to the duke’s bed, to stand between him and whoever might be outside battering the door down. In that first moment, as he pulled back the bed curtains, he saw that the younger man was not asleep but was lying open-eyed, as if he were silently waiting, as if he had been wide awake and waiting all night.
“All’s safe, Tradescant,” he said. “You can open the door.”
“My lord duke!” the shout came. “You must come at once!”
Buckingham rose from his bed and threw a cape around him. “What’s to do?” he called.
“It’s the king! It’s the king!”
He nodded and swiftly went from the room. John, pulling on breeches and his waistcoat, ran behind him.
Buckingham went swiftly through the door to the antechamber but the guards barred John’s way.
“I’m with my lord,” John said.
“No one goes in but the prince and the Villiers: mother and son,” the guard replied. “His orders.”
John fell back and waited.
The door opened and Buckingham looked out. His face was pale and grave. “Oh, John. Good. Send someone you can trust to fetch His Grace the Bishop of Winchester. The king needs him.”
John bowed and turned on his heel.
“And come back here,” Buckingham ordered. “I have need of you.”
“Of course,” John said.
The court was subdued all day. The king was worse; there could be no doubt of it. But the countess was said to be confident. She was applying another plaster, the king was feverish; she was certain her cure would draw the heat from him.
In the evening a message came that the Bishop of Winchester was too ill to travel. “Get me another bishop,” Buckingham said to John. “Any bloody bishop will do. Get me the nearest, get me the quickest. But get me a bishop!”
John ran down to the stables and sent three menservants riding out to different palaces, with three urgent summonses, and then went back to the gallery outside the king’s rooms to wait for the duke.
He heard the long low groan of a man in much pain. The door opened and Lady Villiers came out. “What are you doing here?” she demanded sharply. “What are you listening for?”
“I am waiting for my lord,” John said quietly. “As he bid me.”
“Well, keep others off,” she ordered. “The king is in pain; he does not want eavesdroppers.”
“Is he getting better?” John asked. “Has his fever broken?”
She gave him an odd, sideways smile. “He is doing well,” she said.
The fever did not break. The king lay sweating and calling for help for two more days. Buckingham said that John could go back to New Hall but he could not bear to go until he had seen the end. The court went everywhere on tiptoe; the flirting and gambling had ceased. Around the somber young prince was an aura of silence – everywhere he went people fell quiet and bowed their heads. The courtiers longed to recommend themselves to him; some of them had sided with his father against him, some of them had laughed at him when he had been a tongue-tied weakly younger son. Now he was the king-to-be, and only Buckingham had completely accomplished the great balancing act of being the greatest friend of the father and the greatest friend of the son.
Buckingham was everywhere. In the sickroom, watching at the king’s bedside, walking with Prince Charles in the garden, moving among the men at court giving a word of reassurance here, a carefully judged snub there.
The Bishop of Lincoln arrived from his palace and was shown in to the king. The whisper came out of the sick chamber that the king, too ill to speak, had assented to the prayers by raising his eyes to heaven. He would die a true son of the English church.
That night John lay in Buckingham’s chamber listening to the quiet breathing, and knew his master was affecting sleep but was wide awake. At midnight the duke got up from his bed, pulled on his clothes in the darkness and went softly out of the bedchamber. John lost all desire for sleep, sat up in his bed and waited.
He heard the sound of a woman’s light footstep down the corridor and then her knock on the door. “Mr. Tradescant! The duke wants you!”
John got up, pulled on his breeches and hurried to the king’s chamber. Buckingham was standing at the window embrasure, looking out over Tradescant’s garden. When he turned from the night to face the room his face was alight with excitement.
“It is now!” he said shortly. “At last. Wake the bishop, and bring him quietly. And then wake the prince.”
John went through the maze of wood-lined corridors, tapped on the bishop’s door and forced his sleepy servant to wake His Grace. When the bishop came out of the room, robed in his vestments and holding King James’s own Bible, John led him through the servants’ hall, past sleeping men and dogs which growled softly as they went by. Only firelight illuminated their way and the moving silver moon which tracked their path through the great high windows.
The bishop went into the chamber. John turned and ran along the broad wood-paneled corridor to the prince’s apartments.
He knocked on the door and whispered through the keyhole. “Your Highness! Wake up! The duke told me to fetch you.”
The door was flung open and Charles came quickly out, wearing only his nightshirt. Without saying a word he ran down the corridor to the king’s chamber and went in.
The palace was completely quiet. John waited outside the royal chamber, straining his ears to hear. There was the low dismal mutter of the last rites, and the prayers. Then there was a silence.
Slowly the door opened and the duke came out. He looked at Tradescant and nodded as if a difficult task had been well done.
“The king is dead,” he said. “Long live His Majesty King Charles.”
Charles was at his shoulder, looking stunned. His dark eyes fell unseeing upon Tradescant. “I did not know…” he said at once. “I did not know what they were doing. Before God, I had no idea that your mother…”
Buckingham dropped to one knee and John followed his example.
“God bless Your Majesty!” Buckingham said swiftly.
“Amen,” Tradescant said.
Charles was silenced; whatever he might have said would never be spoken.
Spring 1625
Three hours later Prince Charles was proclaimed king at the gate of Theobalds Palace, and stepped into the royal coach to ride in state to London. Buckingham, the Master of Horse, did not follow tradition by taking the place of honor, heading the train that rode behind the royal coach. Buckingham walked into the royal coach a mere half-pace behind His Majesty and rode like a prince himself at the new king’s side. Tradescant followed in the long train of the household, closing his ears to the general gasp of horror at his master’s presumption.
They drew up at St. James’s Palace in the afternoon and John waited for his orders. At first he could not find Buckingham’s chamber and waited in the hall. The palace was in complete confusion. King James had been expected to stay hunting at Theobalds for many days, and go afterward to Hampton Court. In his absence his palace had closed down for cleaning and refurbishing. There was no food in the kitchens and no fire in the chambers. The few housekeeping staff who did not travel with the king had been spring cleaning and had swept up the strewing herbs from the floor, and taken down the curtains from the windows and the tapestries off the walls. Serving men and maids ran everywhere, trying to prepare the palace for the new king and his train and do in moments what usually took days to accomplish, delayed all the time by the storm of gossip that was running around the royal courts, explaining how the king had fallen sick, how the Villiers mother and son had nursed him and excluded all others and how the king had died under their care.