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.
His clear voice could be heard above the noise of the waves, the thunderous bellow of the cannon and the yells of ill-trained officers. “Come on!” he shouted. “Come on! For God and the king! For the king! For me! And let’s bugger the Catholics!”
They landed in a roar at his bawdiness, and the French, faced by an enemy suddenly renewed, powerful and even laughing, turned and fled. By the afternoon Buckingham stood on the beach of Rhé, his sword wet only with seawater, and knew himself to be triumphant.
John went inland with the scouts and saw the French cavalry driven back and back over brackish fields of rough grass where a hundred, a thousand, red poppies blew. “Like soldiers in red coats,” John said. He shivered as if it were an omen and bent to pluck a couple of the drying seed heads.
“Still gardening, Mr. Tradescant?” one of the scouts asked.
“They are a fine color,” he said. “A plentiful show.”
“Red as blood,” the scout said.
“Yes.”
The English luck held. Within days Buckingham held the whole of the little island of Rhé and the French army was holed up in one tiny half-finished castle on the landward side: St. Martin. John was sent to spy out the lie of the land.
“Tell me what their fort is like, John. Give me an idea of the size and how strong it is,” Buckingham commanded, as he strolled down the lines and came across Tradescant, digging a little nursery bed for any rare plants he might find during his stay. “Leave gardening, man, and tell me how their fort is placed.”
John put his trowel to one side at once, and slipped his satchel on his back, ready to set out.
“I’m no engineer,” he warned Buckingham.
“I know that,” his lord replied. “But you’re careful and you have a good eye, and you have been in a siege and under fire, which is more than can be said for any one of us. Go and have a look and when you come back, come to me privately and tell me what you think. I can’t trust a word these Frenchmen speak. All they want is victory at whatever price, and that price would include me and they would still pay it gladly.”
John nodded. He did not ask what, in that case, they were doing there, camped on a French beach on a small island off France. It was not his nature to complain of the obvious. He took up his blackthorn stick and set off, along the beach toward the other side of the island. Buckingham watched him go and noted the limp which favored John’s aching arthritic knee.
He was back late in the evening, with a brace of cuttings and a rough sketch.
“Good God, what have you in your hat?” Buckingham demanded. He was seated before his tent, at a table of exquisite marquetry, looking young and careless with his white linen shirt undone at the throat and his hair tumbling in black curls about his shoulders.