‘When you have a lord or a king,’ John went on, choosing his words with caution, ‘you have to be sure that he knows what he’s doing. Because he’s going to be the one who decides what you do.’ He stopped, bent and whisked out the little yellow head of a groundsel plant. ‘Once you’re his man, you’re stuck with him,’ he said frankly. ‘He has to be a man of judgement, because if he gets it wrong then he is ruined; and you with him.’

Cecil waited in case there was more but John looked shyly down into his face. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to suggest that the king did not know what he has to do. I was thinking of us subjects.’

Sir Robert waved away the apology with one gesture of his long-fingered hand. They strolled together up the great avenue through the large formal knot garden towards the front terrace of the palace. It was done in the old style, and John had changed nothing here since his arrival as gardener. It had been laid out by Sir Robert’s father in the bleak elegance of the period. Sharply defined geometric patterns of box hedging enclosed different coloured gravels and stones. The beauty of the garden was best seen if you looked down on it, from the house. Then you could see that it was as complex and lovely as a series of neat diagrams of cropped hedging and stone. John had a private ambition to change the garden after the new fashion – to break up the regular square and rectangular beds and make all the separate beds one long whole, like an embroidered hem or scarf – a twisting pattern that went on and on, serpentined in and about itself. When his master was less absorbed with statecraft John was going to suggest melding the beds one into another.

Once he had persuaded Sir Robert to follow the new fashion for the knot garden he had an ambition to go yet further. He longed to take out the gravel from the enclosed shapes and plant the patterns with herbs, flowers and shrubs. He wanted to see the whole disciplined shape softened and changing every day with foliage and flowers which would bloom and wilt, grow freshly green, and then pale. He had a belief, as yet unexpressed, almost unformed, that there was something dead and hard about a garden of stone paths edged with box enclosing beds of gravel. Tradescant had a picture in his mind’s eye of plants spilling over the hedges, of the thick green of the box containing wildness, fertility, even colour. It was an image that drew on the hedgerow and roadside of the wild country of England and brought that richness into the garden and imposed order upon it.

‘I miss her,’ Sir Robert admitted.