He tied a sack stuffed with hay into the low branch of a tree and practiced charging it and stabbing at it with his lance. The first few practices he followed his horse back to the stable after a couple of hard tumbles; but then he learned the knack of thrusting and withdrawing the lance in one smooth motion so the horse and he could go on together.
He bought a traveling cape and a bag that he could strap on the back of the saddle and he kept them packed with everything he might need so that he was ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He was alive and vital with excitement and determination, and the whole house rang with the noise of him singing, whistling, running up and down the wooden stairs in his riding boots, shedding mud and creating confusion out of sheer energy.
John had made him promise that he would not tell anyone of the agreement they had made, and Johnnie, who remembered well enough the danger of living as suspected royalists when the king’s army was on the march, was careful to make no direct reference as to which side he would be joining as soon as his father said he might go. He was as excited as a child, but he was no fool. Never again did he let slip to visitors or guests that he was only waiting for news from Yorkshire to saddle up his war horse and ride north to join the new, uncrowned king.
The family depended on Alexander Norman to tell them how the war was going. Living in the center of the city and near the Tower he always had the first of the rumors anyway; but filling Cromwell’s orders for supplies of munitions he always knew the latest position of the Model Army, though it might be impossible to tell how they were faring.
“But that’s not the point,” Johnnie reminded his father anxiously, finding him in the rarities room, with a tray of recently purchased foreign coins.
“We’re running out of space,” John said. “We have to buy new items, and people like to see different things when they visit. But we cannot show everything we have now properly. We should think about building another room, perhaps.”
“The point was not whether the Scots are winning or losing, it was how far they are advanced,” Johnnie persisted. “That was our agreement, wasn’t it? Because Mother is saying that if they have advanced to York but been defeated then I shouldn’t go. But we didn’t say that, did we?”
John looked at his son’s eager face. “The letter of our agreement was certainly that you might go if they reached York,” he said. “But surely, Johnnie, you wouldn’t want to join a defeated army. You wouldn’t want to volunteer for a lost cause?”
The young man did not hesitate for a moment. “Of course I would,” he said simply. “This is not about calculating which side might win and joining that. This is not about trying to end up on the winning side like half the men now in Parliament. This is about serving the king, whether he is winning or losing. His father did not recant when he saw the scaffold. Neither will I.”
John pushed the tray of coins roughly into his son’s hands. “Find a little corner for these, and write out new labels for them,” he said. “They need to be dusted and polished too. And don’t talk to me about scaffolds.”
“But if they get to York, even if they are in retreat-”
“Yes, yes,” John said. “I remember what we agreed.”
Autumn 1650
For all of Alexander Norman’s confidence in the New Model Army, it was a desperate gamble that John was taking with his son’s safety. Sometimes he thought of Charles Stuart and himself, at opposite ends of the country, both taking their desperate gambles – one for the crown of England, one for the life of his son. It did not trouble John that he was gambling on Charles Stuart’s failure. John’s loyalty to the kings, never a strong flame, had flickered fitfully all through the first king’s war, and been blown out altogether when the war had been renewed not once, but twice, after defeat. His vigil at the courtroom and scaffold had been a farewell to a man he had served, not the act of a loyal royalist. John’s sympathies had always been independent, now, a citizen of a republic, he could call himself a republican.
More than anything else he wanted peace, a society in which he could garden, in which he could watch his children grow to adulthood, make marriages and have children of their own. He would have been hard-pressed to forgive any man for breaking the peace of the new state. And Charles Stuart did not sound like an exceptional man. Cromwell himself complained that the prince was so debauched that he would undo the whole country. All the news of the prince’s court over the water had been of popery, folly, and vice.
But it was a close thing. The Scots army first met the English just south of Edinburgh for the battle on Scottish soil that Alexander had predicted. The Scots were in fine form, and filled with confidence at the presence of the young king. The English army were tired from the long march north, and were losing men all the way as individual soldiers changed their minds and turned south for home. The commander-in-chief, Cromwell, was in one of his dark moods when he doubted his men’s abilities and, worse than that, doubted his own. The voice of God which guided him so clearly had suddenly gone silent and Cromwell was spiraling down into one of his disabling fits of despair. It was only John Lambert’s unshakable optimism that kept the army marching north.
Then they nearly lost Lambert at the battle of Musselburgh, just south of Edinburgh, when his horse was shot dead under him and Lambert, falling, was lanced in the thigh. The Scots infantry spotted him, and a band of them were dragging him away from the battlefield when his own regiment, Yorkshiremen most of them, let out a yell of horror that made even the Highlanders check, and charged through the crowd to get to him.
The Scots pressed on southward for London; the English army chased after them until the Scots chose the ground and turned to face the pursuers outside Dunbar. The English were hopelessly outnumbered; injury, illness, and desertion had taken a dramatic toll. Cromwell was uncertain whether to go forward against the Scots or fall back. Only Lambert gritted his teeth and said they must fight then and there.
While Cromwell dropped the flap of his tent so that he might weep and pray in privacy, John Lambert mustered the army and told them simply and clearly that the Scots outnumbered them by two to one and thus they must fight with double bravery, double persistence and double faith. There were about twenty-two thousand Scotsmen drawn up for battle, and only eleven thousand of them. With the smile that Hester Tradescant secretly loved, Lambert pulled off his plumed hat and beamed at his troops. “I don’t think this is a difficulty,” he shouted. “Come on, Ironsides!”
Early in September, Alexander sent a one line note to John.
Scots defeated at Dunbar.
“Thank God,” Hester said piously when John held out the letter for her to read in the stable yard. She put her hand in her pocket and gave Alexander’s boy a coin.
“I already paid him,” John remarked.
Hester smiled. “I could give ten shillings for this news,” she said.
“Shall you tell Johnnie, or will I?”
She hesitated. “Where is he?”
“On the other side of the road, picking nuts from the horse chestnut trees.”
“You go,” she said. “It was your agreement with him that has kept him safe.”
“Praise God,” John said. “I have had some sleepless nights.”
He strolled around the house, savoring the warmth of the sun reflected from the walls, glancing up in passing at the flamboyant crest which his father had illegally composed and claimed. It didn’t matter now, John thought with satisfaction. There were so many newly created titles and such confusion about how titles had come into being, that they could claim to be baronets and no one would query it. Indeed, Johnnie might one day very well be Sir John Tradescant as his grandfather had always wanted. Who knew what this new world would bring? As long as the family could keep its place, could keep the business, could keep the plants; as long as the horse chestnut trees flowered each year and scattered down the precious nuts like a prodigal rain of wealth, as long as there was always a Tradescant heir to pick them up and set them deep in moist pots.