“Then be ignorant!” she said with sudden passion. “Get into your garden, John, and set seeds for the gardens at Wimbledon and Oatlands. Do the trade you were born to. Stay home where you are safe.”
He shook his head and took both her hands. “I won’t be long,” he promised her. “I shall go over the river to Whitehall and find out the news and then come back home. Don’t fret so, Hester. I must learn what is happening and then I’ll come home. It is better for us if I know which way the wind is blowing. It is safer for us.”
She left her hands in his, enjoying the warmth of his calloused palms. “You say that, but you are like a boy setting out on an adventure,” she said shrewdly. “You want to be in the heart of things, my husband. Don’t deny it.”
John gave her a roguish grin and then kissed her quickly on both cheeks. “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s true. Let me go with your blessing?”
She was breathless with the sudden casual embrace and felt herself flushing. “With my blessing,” she repeated. “Of course you have my blessing. Always.”
He swung himself into the saddle and let the horse walk out of the yard. Hester put her hand to her cheek where his lips had briefly touched, and watched him go.
He had to wait for a place on the horse ferry at Lambeth, and then the traffic on the City side of the river was busier than he had ever seen it. There were hundreds of people milling around in the narrow streets, asking for news and stopping ballad sellers and peddlers of news-sheets to demand what they knew. There were armed groups of men marching down the road, pushing people aside and demanding that they shout “Hurrah! for the king!” But then down another road would come another group shouting, “Hurrah! for Pym! No bishops! No Papist queen!”
John drew his horse back into a side street, fearful of being caught up in a fight when he saw two of these groups heading toward each other. But the royalists wheeled off quickly to one side, as if they were on an urgent errand that took them away; and the others took care not to see them, and not to give chase. He watched them go and saw that they, like himself, were not ready for a fight yet. They didn’t even want a brawl, let alone a war. He thought the country must be filled with men like himself, like the honest Member of Parliament for Yeovil, who knew that they were in the grip of great times, and wanted to take their part in the great times, who wanted to do the right thing; but were very, very far from knowing what the right thing might be.
John’s father would have known. He would have been for the king. John’s father had had a straightforward faith that his son had never learned. John made a wry face at the thought of the certainties of the man and of his own confused layering of doubts, which left him now still mourning one woman, half in love with another, and married to a third; in the service of a king while his heart was with the opposition; always torn both ways, always on the fringe of everything.
The crowds grew thicker around the palace of Whitehall and there were armed guards looking grim and frightened with their pikes crossed at the doorways. John rode his horse ’round to an inn and left her in the stable, and then walked back to the palace, jostled all the way. The crowd was the same strange mix of people. There were beggars and paupers and ill-doers in rags and shabby old livery who were there to shout and perhaps collect a few coppers for their hired loyalty. There were workingmen and women, young apprentices, artisans and market people. There were the serious black-coated preachers of the independent churches and sectaries, and there were the well-to-do merchants and City men who would not fight themselves, but whose hearts were in the fight. There were sailors from the ships in port, shouting for Parliament since they blamed the king and his French wife for the dangers of the Dunkirk pirates, and there were members of the London trained bands, some of them trying to impose order and find their men, and others running wild and shouting that they would die to defend the rights of Parliament. This motley crowd had a motley chant which ranged from the catcalls and boos of those who did not know what they cared for, to the regular call of those who knew their cause: “No bishops! No queen!” and the new call which had come about since the king had taken a sword into the House of Commons: “Privilege! Privilege!”
John fought his way to the front of the mob at the gates to the palace of Whitehall and shouted, over the noise, to the guard.
“John Tradescant! The king’s gardener.”
The man shifted slightly, and John ducked under the pike and went in.
The old palace of Whitehall was the most disorganized of all the royal palaces, a jumble of buildings and courts and gardens, dotted with statuary and fountains and alive with birdsong. John, hoping to find a face he knew, made his way toward the royal apartments and then was brought short as he rounded a corner and nearly collided with the queen herself.
She was running, her cape flying behind her, her jewel box in her hands. Behind her came the king, carrying his own traveling desk of papers and a dozen maidservants and manservants, each burdened with whatever they had been able to snatch up. Behind them came two royal nursemaids, running with the two royal babies in their arms, the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth trotting to keep up, and the two young princes, James and Charles, lagging in the rear.
John dropped to his knee as she saw him but she rushed toward him and he jumped to his feet as she pushed her jewel box at him.
“Gardener Tradescant!” she cried. “Take this!” She turned to the king. “We must wait!” she insisted. “We must face the rabble! We must face them down!”
The king shook his head and motioned for her to go on. Unwillingly, she went before him. “I t-tell you they have run mad!” he said. “We must get out of the C-City! There’s not a loyal heart here. They have all run m-mad. We must go to Hampton Court and c-c-consider what to do! We must summon soldiers and take advice.”
“We are running like fools from our own shadows!” she shrieked at him. “We must face them and face them down or we will spend the rest of our life on the run.”
“We are l-lost!” he shouted. “L-lost! D’you think I want to see you dragged before the b-bar and impeached for treason? D’you think I want to see your h-h-head on a pike? D’you think I want to see the rabble take y-you, and the children, t-take you now?”
John joined the train of servants running behind them and followed them to the stables. All the way the quarrel between the king and queen grew more inarticulate as her French accent deepened with her temper and his stammer grew worse with his fear. When they reached the stable yard she was beside herself.
“You are a coward!” she spat at him. “You will lose this city forever if you leave it now. It is easier to run away than to retake. You must show them that you are not afraid.”
“Ha-Hi-I fear nothing!” He drew himself up. “N-Nothing! But I must have you safe and the children safe before I can m-make m-my m-move. It is your safety, Madam, that I am securing now. For myself I care nothing! N-ha-N-Nothing!”
John pressed forward and put the jewel box on the coach floor. He was reminded of the king’s odd mixture of shyness and boastfulness. Even now, with a mob hammering on the doors of the palace, the two of them were playing out their parts in a masque. Even now they did not seem to be completely real. John looked around, the servants were like an audience at a great play. No one urged a course of action, no one spoke. The king and queen were the only actors; and their script was a great romance of danger and heroism and lost causes and sudden flights. John felt his heart pounding at the noise of the crowd outside and knew the deep visceral fear of a mob. He had a sudden vision of them breaking down the gates and tumbling into the stable yard. If they found the queen beside her traveling coach with her jewel box beside her, anything could happen. The whole power of the royal family which the old Queen Elizabeth had so powerfully cultivated depended on the creation and maintenance of distance and magic and glamour. Let the people once see the queen swearing at their king like a French lace-seller, and the game would be up.