‘And Rochester was as nothing to my lord.’ The man lowered his voice still further. ‘Rochester is the old favourite, but my lord is the new. Rochester may have had the king’s ear, but my lord has all his parts. D’you understand me? He has all his parts!’

John kept his face very still, he did not smile at the bawdy humour.

‘My master is supreme under the king,’ the man declared. ‘There is no-one in England more beloved than my master, George Villiers. And he has decided that you are to serve him.’ The man looked down at John’s plain dinner. ‘Chosen you from every other man in the kingdom!’

‘I am honoured. But I do not think I can be released from my work here.’

The man flapped a letter in John’s face. ‘Villiers’s orders,’ he said. ‘And the king’s seal. You’re to do as you are told.’

John resigned himself to the inevitable, and rolled up his half-eaten dinner in his napkin.

‘And remember this,’ the man continued in the same boastful tone. ‘That what the duke thinks today, the king thinks tomorrow, and the prince thinks the next. When the king goes, the duke and the prince succeed. When you hitch your cart to the star of my master you have a long brilliant future.’

John smiled. ‘I have worked for a great man before,’ he said gently. ‘And in great gardens.’

‘You have never worked for one like this,’ the servant declared. ‘You have never even seen a man such as this.’

John thought that Elizabeth would dislike the move to His Grace’s house at New Hall, Chelmsford, and he was right. She was passionately opposed to leaving Lord Wootton’s service and going near to the hazardous glamour of the royal court. But the little family had no choice. J took his mother’s worries to his father and gained no satisfaction. ‘Mother does not want to move house, and she doesn’t want you to work for a great lord again,’ he said in his halting shy way. ‘Mother wants us to live quietly, she likes it here.’

‘Won’t she speak to me herself?’

‘She didn’t ask me to tell you,’ J said, embarrassed. ‘I thought perhaps you didn’t know. I was trying to help.’

John dropped a gentle hand on his son’s narrow shoulder. ‘I know what she fears, but I am no more free to choose where to live than your mother is free,’ he explained. ‘She is bound by God to follow me, and I am bound by God to go where I am commanded by my lord and by the king above him. And lord and king and therefore God say we must go to the Duke of Buckingham in Essex.’ He shrugged. ‘So we go.’

‘I don’t believe that God wants us to go near to vanity and idleness,’ J protested.