Earthly Joys

Spring 1611

John stayed for little more than three weeks at Meopham, long enough to get under Elizabeth’s feet in the little cottage and to make his peace with his son, before hiring another cart and driver and traveling down the mud-filled, almost impassable roads to Dorset, seeking more trees for sale: apple trees for the orchard, cherry, pear, quince, plum. Trees for the park: oak, rowan, birch, beech.

“Wherever will you get them all from?” Elizabeth wondered, bringing him his well-darned traveling cloak and packing a basket of food under the seat of the wagon.

“I shall buy them from the orchards,” John said determinedly. “They sell apples by the dozen, why not trees?”

“And the wild trees for the earl’s park?”

“I shall take them,” John said recklessly. “From every forest I pass on my way. I shall be going through the New Forest; every sapling I see I shall stop and dig up.”

“You will be hanged for certain!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “You will be hauled before the verderers’ courts and hanged for damaging the royal chase.”

“How else am I to find my lord’s trees?” John demanded. “How else am I to do it?”

John traveled around England and brought back his swaying whispering carts filled with the bushy heads of trees. They came to know him on the West Road, and when children saw him coming into a town with his carts rumbling behind him they would run to the well to fetch a bucket to water Mr. Tradescant’s trees.

The great house was nearly finished and the gardens were slowly shaping according to the master plan. There had only been one long delay when the workmen had run short of money, and even the great Cecil coffers had run dry. John had feared for his lord then, feared that the cost of the house and the cost of the garden had overstretched him, as everyone had warned that it would. John sensed, but did not know, that there were enemies on every side at court who might bow to and flatter the Secretary of State now, but at the least sign of weakness would pull him down like a pack of hounds upon an old stag. Just as the rumors got out that Cecil had overreached himself and would fail, there was more money delivered to the builders, and more money at the goldsmiths’ in the little provincial towns for John to draw on to buy his trees.

“How did you manage it?” John asked Cecil. “Have you sold your soul, my lord?”

Cecil’s smile was grim. “All but,” he said. “I sold every other property I owned, and borrowed on the rest. But I had to have my house, John. And we had to have our garden.”

John first labored on the acres which faced the house, especially the huge knot garden below the terrace where the earl had his private rooms. Each path leading from the house was precisely aligned to the windows of the private rooms so that Cecil, looking out, would always see a vista of straight lines, running outward to the distant horizon. Tradescant, breaking with tradition, planted different edging plants at each junction of the outward path so the color of the hedges melted and grew paler as the eye was drawn farther and farther from the house. At each crossroads was a little statue, an aid to meditation on the fleeting nature of life and the vanity of wishes.

“I might as well have put up a moneylender’s sign,” Cecil said dourly to John when they walked the new paths, and John grinned.

“You were warned, my lord,” he said lovingly. “But you would have your own way.”

“And are you telling me I was wrong?” Cecil asked with a dark upward gleam at the taller man.

Tradescant shook his head. “Not I! It was a great venture. And grandly carried out. And still much to do.”

“You have given me a great gift,” the earl said thoughtfully. They climbed the steps to the stone terrace, Cecil heaving his lame leg, refusing to take help, John beside him, his hands pushed deep into his pockets to prevent him reaching out and holding his master’s arm. They gained the top of the terrace and Cecil gave John a quick glance which thanked him for his forbearance.

“Walk with me,” he said.

The two men strolled side by side on the new paving stone, and looked down on the patterns of the twisting beds of the knot garden. “You have given me a great gift because every year it will grow more lovely. Most gifts are consumed in the first weeks, like young love. But you have given me a gift which will be here long after we are both gone.”

John nodded. The sky above them was soft and gray; only in the west was there a line of rosy cloud where the sun had gone. An owl called in the wood and then they saw its pale shape drift across the new orchard in the distance where the land fell away down to the valley.

The earl smiled. “Sometimes I think the greatest thing that I ever did for England was to set you to work, my John. Nothing in my life gives me more joy.”

Tradescant waited. Often these days, the earl was disinclined to talk and would walk in silence with his gardener through the slowly emerging shapes of the garden and park. His work was daily growing more arduous; the power of the favorites around the king was undiminished, the problems of the court profligacy greater than ever. The fashion for masques now dominated at court and every occasion was marked with a catastrophically expensive play: written, composed, designed and produced in one night, and completely forgotten the next. Every court favorite, the women as well as the men, had to have a costume blazing with jewels; every important role had to arrive in a chariot or depart with fireworks.

King James had inherited a fortune with the throne of England. The legendary meanness of the old queen had served the country extraordinarily well. Her father had left her a throne with two sources of revenue: the steady flow of money from the sale of places at court, favors and civic jobs, and the rare bounties voted in taxes by an agreeable Parliament. The balance was a delicate one. Tax the wealth of the industries too sharply and the merchants, traders and bankers would complain. Go cap in hand to Parliament too often and the country squires who sat there would buy control of royal policy. Only by scrimping on every expenditure, by borrowing, by insisting on constant gifts and by downright out-and-out corruption, had the Tudor King Henry and his daughter Elizabeth amassed a fortune for themselves, and a steady reliable prosperity for their kingdoms. The almighty theft of the Roman Catholic church possessions had started the process, but Tudor charm and Tudor guile had continued it.

King James was new to this process but he had Cecil and half a hundred others to advise him. The earl had thought that the new king, who had previously managed hand-to-mouth in cold castles in a poor kingdom, would show all of the family’s legendary parsimony and have no experience of their love of show.

But it was a habit quickly learned. James, new-come to one of the richest thrones in Europe, could see no reason why he should not have everything he desired. The money from the royal treasury poured out in fountains over the new favorites, over the new luxurious court, for every beautiful woman, for every pretty man. Not even Cecil’s constant struggle with the farming out of taxes, the sale of honors, the exploitation of orphans left in trust to the king, could keep the throne in profit; soon the king would have to call another parliament, and they would speak against him, and against the favorites at court, and the whole question of the king and the people would be thrown open, and who knew where such a debate might lead?

The earl limped forward. His arthritic hip pained him to walk, and it had grown worse in the last few months. John, without offering sympathy, moved a little closer and his master leaned on his shoulder.

“All I have ever done is juggle with the forces which drive us,” the earl said. “All I ever have to do is to fend off consequences. He’s running through the old queen’s fortune as if there were no bottom to the well. And nothing to show for it. No roads, no Navy, no protection for shipping, no new colonies to mention… and not even a bit of show for the people.”

It was growing darker; the cool early summer twilight hid the bare places of the garden, masked the awkward corners. The earl’s favorite pinks, which John had planted in great ornamental urns on the terrace, scented the air as their cloaks brushed by. John bent to pick a spray and handed it to him.

“You brought the new king to his throne, and to his country,” John observed. “You’ve served him well. And he came to his country without trouble. You’ve kept the country at peace.”

The earl nodded. “I don’t forget it. But that little chestnut tree of yours, John, that little tree in the pot, may bring more joy to more Englishmen than any of my schemes, in the long run.”

“Most men’s tastes are not political,” John said apologetically. “I prefer the tree, myself.”

The earl laughed. “I have something to show you. I think you may be surprised.”

He turned and John followed him back toward the house. The wide double door stood open, two serving men at either side. The earl walked past them as if they were invisible; John nodded pleasantly to them.

The earl led John into the shady hall. The wood floor and paneling smelled sweet and new, there was sawdust still in the corners and the linenfold shapes on the paneling were sharp-cut and bright. The wood had not even had its first polish yet; it was still light and shining. Even in the twilight it gleamed as if it were bathed in sunshine.

At the foot of the stairs there was a great newel post, left swathed in a cloth by the woodcarver when he went home for the night. The earl took hold of the sheet and pulled it to one side.

“What d’you see?”

John stepped forward to look. The post was square and grand, a fitting size and solidity for the big hall, the ornaments carved on top with acanthus leaves and swags and ribbons. One face of the square pillar was ornate with half-finished carvings but the other was already complete. It showed a man, in the act of stepping down from the plinth, stepping out of the frame of the carving as if he would take his place in the outside world, as if he would take his work to the farthest corners of the world.

In one hand the figure had a long-handled rake, and in the other a grand fanciful flower springing from a huge pot, which was spilling over with fruit and seeds: a cornucopia of goodness. He was wearing comfortable baggy breeches and a stout overcoat, and on his head, at a rakish joyful angle, was his hat. With an awestruck gasp John recognized himself, carved in wood on the earl’s newel post.

“Good God! Is it me?” John asked in a whisper.

Robert Cecil’s hand was gentle on his shoulder. “It’s you,” he said. “And a very good likeness, I think.”

“Why have you put me on your stair post, my lord?” John asked. “Of all the things that you could have had carved?”

The earl smiled. “Of all my great choices: the Three Graces, or Zeus, or Apollo, or something from the Bible or the king himself? Yet I chose to have my gardener carved in the center post of my house.”

John looked at the jaunty confidence of the set of the hat and the brandished rake. “I don’t know what to say,” he said simply. “It’s too much for me. You have taken my breath away.”

“Fame comes in many guises, Tradescant,” Robert Cecil remarked. “But I think people will remember you when they sit beneath their chestnut trees and when your plants bloom in their gardens. And here you are, and here you will be, as long as my house stands, recorded forever, striding out with a plant in one hand, and your rake in the other.”