John said nothing, there were no words to say to the greatest man in England who rose at dawn after a night’s dancing to bid a servant farewell.

‘Enjoy yourself,’ Buckingham urged. ‘Stay as long as you like, draw on my banker, buy anything which takes your fancy and bring it home to New Hall. I want tulips next season, my John. I want thousands of beautiful tulips.’

‘You shall have them,’ Tradescant said fervently. ‘I shall give you gardens of great beauty, my lord. Great beauty.’ He paused for a moment and cleared his throat. ‘And when am I to be home, my lord?’

Buckingham put his arm around John’s shoulders and hugged him tightly. ‘When you are ready, my John. Go and spend some money, and enjoy yourself. I have never been happier, you be happy too. Go and joyfully spend some of my easily earned money and we will meet again at New Hall when you come home.’

‘I shall not fail you,’ John promised, thinking that if he were not an honest man he could disappear into Europe with the heavy purses of gold and never be seen again.

‘I know. You never fail me,’ Buckingham said affectionately. ‘And that is why I want you to go and pleasure yourself with tulips. It is a reward for fidelity. If I cannot tempt you with easy French women and drink, then let me give you what is your greatest joy. Go and run riot in the bulbfields, my John. Lust after petals and slake your lust!’

He waved and turned inside the house. Tradescant waited, his hat in his hand, until the great double doors had closed behind his master, and then he mounted his horse, clicked encouragingly and turned its head eastwards, out of Paris to the Low Countries and the tulip fields.

John found Amsterdam buzzing with infectious, continual excitement. All the taverns he had known where the tulip growers had met and sold tulips to each other were now expanded into double and treble the size and they opened for business in the morning in an atmosphere of teeth-gritting excitement. He looked in vain for the men he had known, the quiet steady gardeners who had told him how to cut the bulbs and plant them. They had been replaced by men with soft white hands who carried not bulbs but great books in which there were illustrations of tulips drawn with the beauty and care of fine portraits. The bidding for the bulbs was done on promissory notes; no money changed hands. John with his purses of French gold was an exception, he felt like a fool trying to pay men with money when everyone else was trading in credit.