‘I worship on Sundays in the Church of England,’ John said. ‘Where the king himself prays. If it is good enough for the king it is good enough for me.’

There was a discreet pause. ‘I think we might differ as to the king’s judgement,’ Mr Hurte volunteered. His wife, sitting lacemaking at the fireside, gave him a sharp look and clattered the bobbins together on the pillow.

‘But enough of that,’ he said swiftly. ‘You’re the duke’s man and I’ve nothing to say against that. It is my daughter’s happiness we must consider. Does J earn enough to keep a wife?’

‘He draws a full wage,’ John said. ‘And they would live with us.

I will see that she does not want for anything. Will she bring a dowry?’

‘Fifty pounds now, and a third share of my shop at my death,’ Josiah answered. ‘They can have the wedding here and I will treat them.’

‘Shall I tell J he can propose, then?’ John asked.

Josiah smiled. ‘If I know my daughter, he has already done so,’ he said as they shook hands.

Spring 1628

Jane Hurte and young John Tradescant were married in the city church of St Gregory by St Paul. The officiating priest neither wore a surplice nor did he turn his back on the congregation to prepare communion as Archbishop Laud had ordered. The communion table was placed where tradition said it should be: at the head of the aisle, close to the communicants. And the vicar stood behind it, facing them like a yeoman of the ewry laying the lord’s table, doing his work in full sight of the congregation, and not like some secret Papist priest hidden behind a screen, muttering over bread and wine and incense and water, with his back turned to the people he should be serving and his hands busy doing nobody knew what.

It was a good Baptist wedding and John, watching the priest about his business, serving his God and his congregation in the sight of them both, remembered the church at Meopham and his own wedding, which had been conducted the same way, and wished that Archbishop Laud had left things as they were, and not put honest men like him and Josiah Hurte on either side of a new divide.

Josiah Hurte gave them a good wedding dinner as he had promised and both sets of parents, the apprentice boys, and half a dozen friends saw the young couple into their wedding chamber and put them to bed.

John, in the bed chamber overlooking the street with Elizabeth sitting in the four-poster bed behind him, was reminded of his own wedding night. ‘D’you remember, Lizzie?’ he asked Elizabeth. ‘What a misery it was?’

She nodded. ‘I’m glad it has been quieter for our John. And I don’t think anyone would dare make a game of Jane, she is a strong-minded young woman.’