Virgin Earth

July 1648

Frances was at the Ark for the plague months of the summer and Hester found that her stepdaughter’s company was the only one she could bear, as they waited for news of Johnnie. The war was favoring the king and she could hope that Johnnie would march into London as part of a triumphant royal army. In July the Scots confirmed in the most dramatic way that they had changed sides and were now for the king, when they crossed the border with an army of nine thousand men to fling against the battle-weary, underpaid, disillusioned forces of Parliament.

It was an appallingly wet summer. The roses in the garden filled with rain and rotted in their blooms. The strawberries and raspberries were washed into sodden pulp on their stems. Hester spent the days watching the rain pour down the great panes of Venetian glass in the rarities room, looking out at the flooded garden, at her husband splashing around ankle-deep in mud, digging ditches to drain the sodden land into the stream outside the house which was already bubbling over the little bridge and still rising.

Uncharacteristically, Hester did not throw a piece of sacking over her cap and go out to help him. She sat at the desk without books before her, without sewing in her hands. She did not even talk to the few visitors who came to see the rarities, though with the river in flood and the country at war again, they might as well have shut the Ark for all the money they took. Hester sat in silence, watching the rain, Frances in silence at her side.

The news came that the English royalist troops had come under attack on the road to Colchester and had had to rush into the town for shelter. There was a brief and terrible battle as the royalists were driven back into the town, before they got the town gates shut and the Parliamentary soldiers locked out. Hundreds of men were killed in close fighting which was bloodier and more bitter than any known in England before. The names of the hundreds of individual soldiers killed in that spiteful skirmish were lost. Hester sat watching the rain, not knowing if her stepson was alive, or facedown in the mud outside the gates of Colchester.

It was not a siege, it was a massacre-in-waiting. General Fairfax with John Lambert was commanding the Parliament army and he had ringed the city with a rampart and ditch with ten forts studding the perimeter. No one would be able to get out alive. The whole city was not just besieged, it was completely entrapped.

“John Lambert is there?” Hester asked when Frances brought a news-sheet and read the report of the siege.

“Yes,” Frances said, and looked at her mother.

“What times these are: that John Lambert should be in one army and my boy in another,” Hester said very softly.

There was another royalist army raised at Kingston upon Thames, commanded by Lord Holland, supported by the Duke of Buckingham, the son of the Tradescants’ old master. John had scowled at the mention of his name and stamped out to lay sandbags at the front door of the Ark. The road to Lambeth was completely under water and the little stream before the house had burst its banks and was spreading over the road and into the Tradescants’ orchard. John was fearful that the River Thames itself would flood and bring saltwater to contaminate his land on the north side of the road, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

The new royalist army mustered only a few men. Little more than five hundred turned out in the wet and marched first to London and then to Reigate Castle, and then turned in a retreat which quickly became a rout through the villages north of London to defeat at Surbiton. The Earl of Holland was captured by the Parliamentary army and sent to London. Parliament decreed that he would be beheaded for treason to his country. The Duke of Buckingham slipped away to safety in Holland.

“He would,” Tradescant said sourly.

Suddenly, royal fever seemed to have passed as abruptly as it had raged. There was no further uprising in England. It would all depend on the Scots: whether they could get to Colchester in time to relieve the town, whether they would march all the way south and into the very city of London itself.

The royalists besieged in Colchester, their rations running low and any hope for relief now gone, asked for safe passage for women and children, opened the sally port door and sent them out to the Parliamentary army. To their horror the women were stripped and beaten, and sent back to the fort. England had never seen such savagery in fighting. The rules of warfare had been suspended. Men who would have been chivalrous to a defeated enemy six years ago were now in a killing frenzy of rage that war should have broken out again. There were rumors that when the besieged came out of Colchester, as soon they must, they would be cut down where they stood. There would be no quarter, there would be no prisoners. There would not even be trials for treason. When the men lay down their arms the Parliament cavalry would ride over them.

Hester said nothing when John told her this news, she did not weep, she did not whisper Johnnie’s name. She looked out of the window and said only: “When is it ever going to stop raining?”

John went out into the garden and left her watching the drops run down the panes.

They were glad of the rain in Colchester. It was their only drinking water. For meat they had to eat their horses, then dogs, cats, rats, anything they could catch. There was no flour for bread, there were no fruit or vegetables left in the town. Men started to sicken, everyone went hungry.

Hester put a piece of sacking around her shoulders and splashed out into the garden to look at the rain-soaked lettuce, onions, peppers, beans, peas and herbs in their carefully tended beds. “He’s never gone hungry,” she said softly to herself. “Brought up beside our garden he might have lacked meat once in a while, but he’s always had fruit and vegetables. He’s never wanted for anything before.”

Hester was hoping that the Scots would march south quickly and relieve Colchester as their first objective. They swept over the border looking like a conquering force and reached Preston Moor, just a mile north of Preston, without anyone standing against them. But there they were met by the Parliament army commanded by Cromwell himself with John Lambert at his side, commanding the cavalry. When Hester heard that it was John Lambert against the only men who could rescue her son, she put her head in her hands at the kitchen table and stayed very still for a long while, as if she were asleep.

When the news reached Colchester of the Scots’ defeat there was no hope left for them. The garrison surrendered to a harsh and unforgiving victor. The war was over, the king defeated once more; and the Tradescants had nothing to do but to wait and see if Johnnie would come home, or if he would be among the many hundreds who would never come home again.

Hester left her place at the Venetian window and put a chair and a table at the front door, which overlooked the road from Lambeth. She put her sewing basket on the table and appeared, to any casual passerby, as if she were sitting at her work and enjoying the September sunshine after the wet summer days. Only John and Frances knew that the shirt she held in her lap was no further forward by the end of September than it had been on the black day that Colchester surrendered.