John felt the familiar rise of irritation. ‘Majesty, I think they are men of principle. They did not behead Lord Strafford on a whim. I think they believe in what they are doing.’
She shook her head. ‘Of course not! They are scheming with the Scots, or with the Dutch, or with someone for their own ends. The House of Lords is not with them, the court is not with them. These are little men come up from the country, crowing like little cocks on their own dunghills. We just have to wring their necks like little cocks.’
‘I pray that the king can find a way to agree with them,’ John said steadily.
She flashed him her charming smile. ‘Why, so do I! He shall make all sorts of promises to them, and then they can vote us the taxes we need and the army we need to crush the Scots and they can go back to their dunghills and we can rule without them again.’
It might have gone either way for the king, and the queen, but for their fourth kingdom of Ireland. The news that Strafford was dead ran through Ireland like a heath fire. Strafford had held Ireland down with a mixture of legal rigour and terrible abuse of power. He had ruled them like a cynical old soldier and the only law in the land was that of superior military power. Once he was dead the Papist Irish rose up in a defiant storm of rage against their Protestant masters. Strafford had kept them brutally down, but now Strafford was gone. The rumours and counter-rumours had flown around the kingdom of Ireland until every man who called himself a man took up a pitchfork or a hoe and flung himself against the newly arrived Protestant settlers, and the greedy land-grabbing Protestant lords, and spared neither them nor their women nor children.
The news of what had taken place, horrifically embellished by the terrified imagination of a minority in a country they did not own, reached London in October and fuelled the hatred against Papists a thousand times over. Even Hester, normally so level-headed, departed from discretion that night and prayed aloud in family prayers that God might strike down the dreadful savage Irish and preserve His chosen people, settled in that most barbaric land; and the Tradescant children, Frances and Johnnie, round-eyed with horror at what they heard in the kitchen and in the stable, whispered a frightened, ‘Amen’.
The Papist rebels were spitting Protestant children on their pikes and roasting them over the fires, eating them before the anguished gaze of their parents. The Papist rebels were firing cottages and castles with the Protestant owners locked inside. Everyone knew a story of fresh and unbelievable horror. No-one questioned any report. It was all true, it was all the worst of the worst nightmares. It was all worse than reports told.
John was reminded, for a brief moment, of the bitter woman who kept the lodging house in Virginia, and how she had called the Indians pagans and beasts, and how she too had stories of skinning and flaying and eating alive. For a moment he stepped back from the terror which had caught up the whole of England, for a moment he wondered if the stories were as true as everyone swore. But only for a moment. The circumstances were too persuasive, the stories were too potent. Everyone said it; it had to be true.
And there was worse. In the streets of Lambeth and in London they did not call it the Irish rebellion, they called it the queen’s rebellion, in the absolute certainty that all the nightmare tales from Ireland were gospel truth, and that the rebellion was fomented by Henrietta Maria herself in support of the devilish Papists. What the queen wanted was a free Roman Catholic Ireland and then, as soon as she dared, the queen would ship her fellow Papists from Ireland to England so they could butcher and eat English babes as well.
Parliament, still in session, drew ever closer to accusing the queen. It was a steady, terrifying approach, which would not waver nor hesitate. They impeached twelve bishops for treason, one after another, until a round dozen had appeared before the bar of the House, with their lives on the line. And then the word was that the queen was next on the list.
‘What shall you do?’ Hester asked John. They were in the warmth of the rarities room where a large fire kept the collection warm and dry though there was a storm of wintry sleet dashing against the grand windows. Hester was polishing the shells and precious stones to make them gleam on their beds of black velvet, and John was labelling a new collection of carved ivories which had just arrived from India.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go to Oatlands to see to the planning for the gardens next season. I will learn more there.’
‘Planning gardens for a queen who will be beheaded?’ Hester asked quietly.
John met her gaze, his mouth twisted with anxiety. ‘I am following your creed, wife. I’m trying to survive these times. I don’t know what’s best to do other than to behave as if nothing has changed.’
‘But John –’ Hester started, but was interrupted by a knock at the front door, and they both froze. John saw Hester’s colour drain from her cheeks, and the hand that held the duster trembled as if she had an ague. They stood in complete silence and then they heard the maid answer and the reassuring chink of a coin as a visitor paid for entrance to the collection. Hester whisked her cloth out of sight into the pocket of her apron and threw open the handsome double doors to him. He was a well-dressed man, a country man, by the look of his brown suit and his weather-beaten face. He paused in the doorway and looked around at the grand, imposing room and the warm fire.
‘Well, this is a treat,’ he said in the round tones of the west country.
Hester moved forward. ‘You are welcome,’ she said pleasantly. ‘This is John Tradescant, and I am his wife.’
The man dipped his head. ‘I am Benjamin George,’ he said. ‘From Yeovil.’
‘A visitor to London?’
‘Here on business. I am a Parliament man representing the borough of Yeovil.’
John stepped forward. ‘My wife will show you the rarities,’ he said. ‘But first can you tell me what news there is?’
The man looked cautious. ‘I can’t say whether it is good or bad,’ he said. ‘I am on my way home and Parliament is dissolved, I know that much.’
John and Hester exchanged a quick look. ‘Parliament dissolved?’
The man nodded. ‘The king himself came marching in to arrest five of our members. You would not have thought that he was allowed to come into Parliament with his own soldiers like that. Whether he was going to arrest our members for treason or cut them down where they stood, I don’t know which!’
‘My God!’ John exclaimed, aghast. ‘He drew a sword in the House of Commons?’
‘What happened?’ Hester demanded.
‘He came in very civil though he had his guards all about him, and he asked for a seat and sat in the Speaker’s chair. But they were gone – the men he wanted. They slipped out the back half an hour before he came in the front. We were warned, of course. And so he looked about for them, and made a comment, and then went away again.’
John was struggling to hide his irritation with the slowness of the man’s speech. ‘But what did he come for, if he left it too late to arrest them?’
The man shrugged. ‘I think myself it was some grand gesture, but he bodged it.’
Hester looked quickly at John. He made an impatient exclamation. ‘Are you saying he marched his guard into the House to arrest five members and failed?’