It took all Buckingham’s charm to talk the king into a more reasonable frame of mind, and all his patience to tolerate the moist kisses on his face and his mouth. It took all his ready humour and his genuine joy of life to seek to make the elderly king happy again, and the court happy with him. A sick man, newly up from his bed, Buckingham danced with Kate before the king, and sat at his side and listened to his rambling complaints about the Spanish alliance and the Spanish threat, and never showed so much as a flicker of weariness or sickness.

Buckingham waited until the royal carriage was out of sight before he put his hat back on his head and turned away towards the stone steps to the knot garden. Already it was as Tradescant had promised it would be. Each delicately shaped bed was filled with plants of a single uniform colour, edged with dark green box and entwined in an unending pattern with another. Buckingham walked around them, feeling his anxiety melt away at the sight of the twisting patterns, at the perfection of the planting.

It was a joy he had not known before Tradescant had made this place for him. He had seen gardens as part of the furniture of a great house, something a great man must have. But Tradescant had made him see things with a plantsman’s eye. Now he walked around and around the little twisting paths of the knot garden with a sense of renewed pleasure and a feeling of liberty. The little hedges destroyed the sense of perspective; when he looked across them from one end of the knot garden to the other they seemed as if they enclosed acres of land, one field after another. They were a little parable of wealth. They looked like great fields, great acres, and yet they were encompassed within a few hundred yards.

‘A thing of beauty,’ Buckingham murmured softly to himself. ‘I should thank him for it. Thank him for making it for me, and then for training my eye to see it.’

He walked down from the formal garden towards the lake. There were the lilies that Tradescant had promised him, and waving in the slight breeze were the golden buttercups and flag irises. A little pier jutted out into the water and the still reflection of the lake showed another pier reflected darkly beneath it. At the very end of it, looking down into the water, was John Tradescant himself, watching a boy drop baskets of osier roots into the deep mud.

When he heard Buckingham approach he pulled off his hat and nudged the boy with his foot. The boy dropped to his knees. Buckingham waved him away.

‘Will you row me?’ he asked Tradescant.