Virgin Earth

January 1649

John packed a bag. Hester, watching him from the doorway, knew that she was powerless to stop him.

“I have to be there,” he said. “I can’t sit at home while he is on trial for his life. I have to see him. I can’t stand not to know what is going on.”

“Alexander could send you a message every day, tell you what has taken place,” Hester suggested.

“I have to be there,” John repeated. “This was my father’s master, and my own. I was there at the start of this. I have to see the end.”

“Who knows when the trial will be?” she asked. “They should have started this month and yet the date is put back and put back. Perhaps they don’t mean to try him at all, but just to frighten him into agreeing.”

“I have to be there,” John insisted. “If there is to be no trial, then I have to see that there is no trial. I’ll wait until it happens – if it happens.”

She nodded, resigned. “Send word to us then,” she said. “Johnnie is sick with anxiety.”

John swung his cloak over his shoulder and picked up his bag. “He’s young, he’ll mend.”

“He still thinks they should have held out longer at Colchester, or fought their way out,” she said. “When I think what this war has done to Johnnie, I wish the king was charged with treason. He has broken hearts up and down this country. He has turned against his people.”

“Johnnie will recover,” John said. “You don’t break your heart at fifteen.”

“No,” she said. “But when he should have been at school or playing in the fields the country was at war and I had to keep him home. When you should have been home to teach and guide him you were away because you knew the king would keep you in his service, wherever that service might lead. Then, when he should have been apprenticed to you and making beautiful gardens or traveling and collecting plants, he was under siege in Colchester for a battle which could neither be won nor lost. Johnnie has never had a chance to be free of the king and the king’s wars.”

“Maybe we’ll all be free of him at the end of this,” John said grimly.

John could not find a room in an inn near Westminster for love or money. He could not find a bed. He could not find a share of a bed. They were renting out stables and hayracks as sleeping accommodation for the hundreds and thousands of people who were flocking to see the king on trial.

If there had been half the sympathy that the king so confidently expected, there would have been a riot, or at the least intimidation of the commissioners. But there was no sense of outrage among the men and women who were packing into the City like herrings in a barrel. There was a sense of being spectators at the most remarkable event, of being safely in ringside seats to watch a cataclysm. They were birds above an earthquake, they were fish in a flood. The worst thing that could happen to a kingdom was happening now; and they were able to watch it.

Once the crowd got a taste of history, there was no chance that they would resist it. They had come to see the most extraordinary event in an extraordinary decade, and they wanted to go home having seen it. A reversal in favor of the king that resulted in his agreement with Parliament and resting safe in his bed would have left the crowd, even the royalists among them, with a sense of having been cheated. They had come to see the king on trial. Most of them would even acknowledge that they had come to see the king beheaded. Anything less would have been a disappointment.

John walked downriver to the Tower and knocked on Frances’s door, admiring the Christmas rose she had planted at one side.

“One of mine?” he asked her as she opened the door.

She hugged him as she answered. “Of course. Did you not know you had been robbed?”

“I’ve not been much in the garden,” he said. It was a statement of his deep distress, which she read at once.

“The king?”

“I’ve come to see his trial.”

“You had much better not go,” she said frankly, drawing him into the little hall and then into the parlor where a small fire of coal was burning.

“I have to,” John said shortly.

“Will you stay here tonight?”

He nodded. “If I may. There are no beds to be had in the City and I don’t want to go home.”

“Alexander is going, but I didn’t want to see it. I remember when the king came to the Ark that day, and I saw him, and the queen. They were both so young then, and so rich. They were wrapped in silk and ermine.”

John smiled, thinking of the little girl who had sat on the wall until her fingertips were blue with cold. “You wanted him to appoint you as the next Tradescant gardener.”

She leaned forward and stirred the coals so they flamed up. “It’s unbelievable that everything should be so changed. I don’t expect to be a gardener; but it is impossible to think that there may be no king.”

“You could be a gardener now,” John offered. “In these strange days anything is possible, I suppose. There are women preaching, aren’t there? And there were women fighting. There were hundreds of women who had their husbands’ and their fathers’ business in their charge while the men were off to war, and many still working because the men won’t be coming home again.”

Frances nodded, her face grave. “I thank God that Alexander’s work was here, and that Johnnie was too young for all but the very end.”

“Amen to that,” John said softly.

“Is Johnnie taking it hard?”

“He’s bound to,” John said. “I wouldn’t let him come to see the end of it. But I had to see it for myself.”

“Well then,” she said more cheerfully. “I shall send to the bake-house for a special dinner for you. And you will need to rise early tomorrow if you are to find a place inside the courtroom.”