Summer 1649
With the coming of the summer the numbers of visitors increased at the Ark and the social life of London was restored. There was an explosion of debate as to how the new society should be built, what should be allowed and what should be forbidden. Pamphlets, sermons, diatribes and journals poured off the little presses which had sprung up everywhere during the war years, new plays were written, new poems commissioned. There was a sense of excitement, of being at the very heart of change, a new world which no one had ever experienced before. Kings had been killed before in England and elsewhere – but only on the battlefield, or in secret, and their thrones snatched by other claimants. Never before had the whole system of kingship been questioned and found so badly wanting that the people chose to destroy it and put no one in its place.
Oliver Cromwell was to be known as chairman of the Council of State, and there would never be another king of England. Even then the new state did not go far enough for many. There was no opening of the electorate: poor men still had no voice in the planning of the nation. There was no abolition of tithes, which many had fought for. There was no reform of the law, nor the ownership of land. The Houses of Parliament were still one House of Lords and a House of Commons packed with landed gentlemen, still serving their own needs before any other; so that the justice that John Lambert had hoped for so passionately was still far away.
But there was a sense of excitement and optimism as palpable as the warmer weather of May and June. There was a sense of changes coming, of hope, of a chance to make England into a country which could be prosperous for the many instead of the few. Families who had been estranged for years, siding with the opposing armies, were able to make friends again. Churches which had been emptied because of doctrinal arguments were now reestablished with a new, freer, informal style of preaching. Men wanted to be done with ceremony, with artifice. Men wanted to speak freely to their God, and to speak freely to each other.
An informal association of philosophers, botanists, mathematicians, physicians and astronomers met regularly to debate, Dr. Thomas Wharton among them, and John Tradescant too. John Lambert was in London from March and rarely missed a meeting, drawn by their discussion of science and botany. Many of them took to visiting the Ark that summer, to stroll around the garden, to sit by the little lake, to admire anything new and interesting in the rarities room and stay for dinner.
Hester, rather on her mettle as a housewife, took pride both in being able to provide dinner for a dozen men and beds for half of them at a moment’s notice, and that it was the Tradescant house and garden which was the center of attraction.
The conversation would go far into the night, and as the levels fell in the bottles of port the speculation about everything from the functions of parts of the body, to the existence of angels, the movement of the planets in their spheres and the rise and fall of sugar sap in John’s maple tree became wilder and more imaginative. Elias Ashmole, a learned lawyer, one evening swore that he could predict to an hour’s accuracy the time of a man’s death if only midwives would have the sense to record the exact time of birth to let an astronomy chart be rigorously drawn.
“But would you want to know?” John asked, slurring slightly.
“I want to know everything,” Elias replied. “That is what I mean by being a man of science. I, for instance, am born beneath the planet Mercury, and you can see that I am a completely mercurial man. I’m quick and versatile.”
“And looks like a silver slug, just like the metal!” someone interposed under his breath.
“But a man should separate the personal from the inquiring in his life,” a physician remarked rather confusedly. “I want to know how blood flows through the veins. But I’m not going to open up my own arm to have a look at it. I am not my own experiment.”
“Not at all!” another man interrupted passionately. “Unless you are prepared to penetrate, even into your own heart, then you are not inquiring at all. It is mere diversion.”
“Oh yes! If you want to die of the plague in an experiment to see that it is infectious!”
“Truly, one cannot study patients from a distance,” Dr. Wharton observed. “When the plague was in London I…”
“And what else have we done in the body politic but make a change and see what flows from it? Cut out the heart and see if the brain can still think?”
“That was not an experiment! It was a decision to which we were driven. I don’t see Cromwell as a great physician of the body politic! He was clinging on while the horse bolted!”
“But I don’t mean that,” John said, holding to his first thought with difficulty. “I mean, would you always want to know the future? How would you bear it?”
“Of course you can know it,” Elias replied. “I have drawn my own chart and I can tell you, for instance, that I shall be a man of considerable fame. I cast my own predictions and they told me clearly: ‘I shall labor for a fortune with a wife and get it.’”
“A rich widow?” someone asked from farther down the table.
“Lady Mary Manwaring,” someone muttered. “Old enough to be his mother. He’s been advising her. Guess what he advised?”
“I shall be remembered,” Ashmole insisted. “I shall have my place in the temple of history.”
“For what?” one of the mathematicians demanded and burped slightly. “Pardon me. What will earn you your place in the temple of history? Simpling in John’s herb garden? Picking his flowers for potions? I don’t expect to see you gleaming all over gold with the philosopher’s stone in your laboratory. Seems to me that of all of us it will be John’s name which will be remembered.”
John laughed. “I just collect,” he said modestly. “I don’t set myself up as a scientist. Of course, I’m bound to wonder how things grow the way they do. I can’t believe that it was all made by God in one week. I can see that man can make new plants, with proper skills. I can see that we can make the earth more yielding, that we can make plants grow better. I have some onions for instance…”
“Mr. Ashmole has an undeniable reputation in astronomy and astrology-” one of the physicians started.
“I’m just saying that Mr. Tradescant’s onions, or even his tulips, are likely to yield more lasting joy to the people of this country than all of Mr. Ashmole’s researches into the history of the masonic order!”
John shook his head. “It’ll be the trees if anything,” he said definitely. “The greatest joy a man can have in England is the sight of one of our horse chestnut trees in full bloom. And we have my father to thank for that.”
“Hush,” Ashmole said. “I never speak of the masonic order.”
“Mr. Ashmole’s work at Brasenose-”
“Is undeniable. And he is my guest.” John recalled his duties as host. “Pass the bottle, Stephen.”
Johnnie was present at the dinners, but generally kept silent. John, looking down the table, would see his son’s intent, dark gaze move from one man to another, taking in the argument, weighing it, and then smiling in agreement or shaking his head. He was as open as a child though he was now nearly sixteen; but he had the politeness and the discretion not to burst out with his own opinions.
He would observe and listen throughout an evening of speculation, but whenever the talk turned to politics he would rise up and leave the room. Most of John’s guests were men who thought, like John Milton, that the dead king had been an obstacle to the future of the country, that removing him was like cutting off a worm-eaten bud from a healthy stem. But Elias Ashmole, and some of the Oxford men of learning, continued to favor the king’s cause, though they spoke of it with caution. Ashmole’s own great work was researching the history of the Order of the Garter, which seemed to most of them at the table as a doomed piece of academia, given that there was now no king in England, and no Order of the Garter at all.