‘Though it is true that it is better not to flaunt your wealth,’ Tradescant remarked to the sky outside the bay window.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’m thinking that my old lord loved Theobalds Palace before anything else in the country and the king, this king, in very truth, saw it through his eyes, acknowledged its value, and claimed it for himself. And here we’ve only just got the avenue planted.’

Buckingham cracked a laugh. ‘John! My John! If he wants it, he’ll have to have it! Avenue and all. Anything so long as I am back in his favour.’

John nodded. ‘You think he will forgive you?’

The younger man lay back on the rich cushions heaped in the window-seat and turned his face to look out at the view. John noted, with affection, the perfect profile, white against red velvet.

‘What d’you think, John? If I am very pale and very quiet and very submissive, and look – so – would you forgive me?’

John tried to stare at his master unmoved, but he found he was smiling as if his master was a tender wilful maid in the first years of her beauty, at the time when a girl can do anything and be forgiven by everyone. ‘I suppose so,’ he admitted ungraciously. ‘If I were a besotted old fool.’

Buckingham grinned. ‘I suppose so too.’

The duke waved farewell to the royal coach and the hundreds of courtiers and outriders, and watched them move slowly down the newly planted avenue. John Tradescant had done his best but the limes in the double-planted avenue were still only saplings. The duke watched the coach with the crown and the nodding feathers rumble from one thin leafy shade to another. When they grew, the trees would be a powerful symbol of the greatness of the house. And by then the prince would be on the throne, with Buckingham as his adviser, and the king, the jealous difficult bad-tempered old king, would be dead.

The king had wept and asked for forgiveness after a long bitter quarrel. He had tolerated Buckingham’s marriage, indeed he loved Kate, and he was even amused by Buckingham’s notorious affairs with every pretty woman at court, but he could not bear to feel that his son the prince had supplanted him in Buckingham’s affections. Tearfully he accused them of conspiring against him and that Prince Charles – never the favoured son – had stolen from his father his love, his only love.

He publicly called Prince Charles a changeling and wished that his brother, the handsome and godly Prince Henry, had never died. He publicly called Buckingham a heartbreaker and a false son to him. He called him a traitor and wept the easy tears of an old man, and swore that no-one loved him.