The earl shook his head. ‘You know they say that this is the fairest garden in England? And the greatest palace? That there never was and never will be a palace and garden to match it?’

John nodded. ‘I know.’

‘I couldn’t keep it,’ the earl said. ‘It’s his revenge on my father for the execution of his mother, you know. He wanted to take my own father’s house, his pride and his joy. What could I say? I hedged and twisted and turned and showed him other men’s houses. It’s my own fault. We built it too grand and too beautiful, my father and I. It was bound to draw out envy.’

John shrugged. ‘It is all the king’s,’ he said simply. ‘The whole country. And each of us is nothing more than his steward. If he wants anything, we have to give it.’

The earl threw him a curious sideways glance. ‘You really believe that, don’t you?’

John nodded, his face open and guileless. ‘He is the king under God. I would no more refuse him than I would skip my prayers.’

‘Please God he always has subjects as loyal as you.’

‘Amen.’

‘Leave washing the stones now and start preparing the plants for moving, and dig up those damned bulbs.’ The earl got to his feet with a grunt of discomfort. ‘My bones ache in this cold weather.’

‘I’ll leave the bulbs,’ John replied.

The earl raised an eyebrow.

‘You’ve given him the house and the grounds,’ John said. ‘I can be generous too. Let the king have these tulips in spring and I shall go myself to the Lowlands to buy you a fine crop for Hatfield, as we planned. We can make a new garden at Hatfield, we don’t have to scrump from here.’

‘A lordly gesture from a gardener?’ Cecil asked, smiling.

‘I have my grander moments,’ John said.

Hatfield House in Hertfordshire had been the home and the prison of the young Elizabeth during the dangerous years of her half-sister’s rule, when she had been a studious girl with a deep fear of the executioner’s axe. It had been Robert Cecil’s father who had come to her in the garden to tell her that she was now queen.

‘I’ll keep the tree she was sitting under,’ Robert Cecil said to Tradescant as they surveyed the quagmire the workmen had made in the building of the huge new house. ‘But I’m damned if I’ll do anything with that poky little hall. It can’t have been impressive even when it was new-built. I’m not surprised the queen was in the garden. Nowhere else to sit.’

‘If you cut away all around it so that it stood on a hill instead of so low, you could make it into a banqueting hall for summer, or a masquing theatre …’