1630

It was not stormy weather, but a sort of peace which caught the country by surprise. The MPs dispersed in obedience to the king’s order and though they took their complaints to their homes in every corner of the kingdom, there was no popular groundswell to sweep them back to confrontation in the city. The king set to work to rule without Parliament – as he had threatened to do – and that turned out to be almost no rule at all. The silence in the Houses of Parliament meant there was no forum for debate. The vacuum of power meant that things rubbed along as they had always done. The towns and cities were run, as they had always been, by a loose alliance of magistrates, gentry and vicars, and by the powerful weight of custom and practice.

In Lambeth, Frances’s promised brother did not come, though she outgrew her baby complaints, learned to walk, learned to talk and was even given a small corner of the garden and a dozen cuttings of pinks and twenty sweet pea seeds for her to try her hand at gardening. She was indulged – as the only baby in a house of four adults is bound to be indulged; but nothing spoiled her. As she grew older she still loved the echoey airiness of the rarities room, and would still go piggyback with her grandfather down to the end of the orchard. As she grew stronger and heavier John’s limp became more and more pronounced under the extra burden of her weight and he would roll in his walk like the old sailor he sometimes claimed to be.

He had a special voice for her, a meditative nonsense-telling voice which he used for no-one else. Only his seedlings in the frame and Frances were treated to his ‘tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding’. Elizabeth would watch him and the little girl from the window as they went hand in hand down the garden and feel at last a sense of relief that she and John, J and Jane were settled at last.

‘We’ve put down some roots,’ John said to her one night as he saw her smile across the dinner table. The girl laid their dinner before them – they had a girl now, and a woman cook in the kitchen and a lad in the house, as well as three gardeners. ‘I think we should have a motto.’

‘Not a motto,’ J said under his breath. ‘Please, no.’

‘A motto,’ John said firmly. ‘To go under the crest. You shall write it, J. You have Latin.’

‘I can’t think of anything that would fit a man who was born and bred a gardener and made up his own crest, and had some fool of a mason carve it in stone for anyone to see,’ J said scathingly.