John noted, with no sign of disapproval showing in his face, that seated on one side of the queen was her confessor, and beside the king was the French ambassador. Grace was said in a quiet mutter in Latin by the queen’s confessor and it was undoubtedly a Roman Catholic grace. There was no sign at all that this was a Protestant court in a Protestant country.

There was no sign either of the royal family. Their portrait was there, right enough, all five children as lovely as angels under the painter’s tactful depiction. But the real children were never at their parents’ dinner table. The queen prided herself on the passion of her maternal feelings, but tended to exercise them on her real children only occasionally, and mainly when she was being watched in public.

A young woman in her mid-twenties, dressed simply but elegantly in subdued colours, walked briskly into the hall, bowed low to the top table and dropped a slight curtsey to her uncle.

‘This is my niece, Hester Pooks,’ John de Critz said. ‘John Tradescant, the king’s gardener.’

She did not bob a curtsey to John but looked him straight in the face with a smile and held out her hand for a brief firm handshake. ‘I am glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘I have been walking round and round the gardens and I think I have never seen anything more lovely.’

It was the quickest route to John’s heart. He pulled out a chair for her and helped her to a piece of bread from the platter, and meat from the serving bowl which was before them. He told her about the making and improving of the Oatlands gardens, about the new breeds of tulips just blushing into colours, about the deep digging in the kitchen garden and the enormous asparagus bed.

‘I made some sketches of the fruit trees in bud and those little daffodils beneath them,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen an orchard so pretty.’

‘I should like to see your sketches,’ John said.

‘The grass is like a tapestry or a painting,’ she remarked. ‘The true flowery mead. You can hardly see the green for flowers.’

‘Now that’s just what I intended,’ John said, his enthusiasm growing. ‘It has to be balanced all the time, and mown at the right time so that you don’t cut the flowers before they are seeded, and you have to pull the plants which are running away and drowning the rest … but I am so glad you saw it. It is supposed to look artless, and that is the hardest thing to get right!’

‘So now I have a drawing based on a garden, which is based on a tapestry, which will have been based on a drawing.’

‘And perhaps at the very back of it all, there was a garden.’