Tradescant waited. Often these days, the earl was disinclined to talk and would walk in silence with his gardener through the slowly emerging shapes of the garden and park. His work was daily growing more arduous; the power of the favourites around the king was undiminished, the problems of the court profligacy greater than ever. The fashion for masques now dominated at court and every occasion was marked with a catastrophically expensive play: written, composed, designed and produced in one night, and completely forgotten the next. Every court favourite, the women as well as the men, had to have a costume blazing with jewels, every important role had to arrive in a chariot or depart with fireworks.

King James had inherited a fortune with the throne of England. The legendary meanness of the old queen had served the country extraordinarily well. Her father had left her a throne with two sources of revenue: the steady flow of money from the sale of places at court, favours, and civic jobs, and the rare bounties voted in taxes by an agreeable Parliament. The balance was a delicate one. Tax the wealth of the industries too sharply and the merchants, traders, and bankers would complain. Go cap in hand to Parliament too often and the country squires who sat there would buy control of royal policy. Only by scrimping on every expenditure, by borrowing, by insisting on constant gifts and by downright out-and-out corruption, had the Tudor King Henry and his daughter Elizabeth amassed a fortune for themselves, and a steady reliable prosperity for their kingdoms. The almighty theft of the Roman Catholic church possessions had started the process, but Tudor charm and Tudor guile had continued it.

King James was new to this process but he had Cecil and half a hundred others to advise him. The earl had thought that the new king, who had previously managed hand-to-mouth in cold castles in a poor kingdom, would show all of the family’s legendary parsimony and have no experience of their love of show.

But it was a habit quickly learned. James, new-come to one of the richest thrones in Europe, could see no reason why he should not have everything he desired. The money from the royal treasury poured out in fountains over the new favourites, over the new luxurious court, for every beautiful woman, for every pretty man. Not even Cecil’s constant struggle with the farming out of taxes, the sale of honours, the exploitation of orphans left in trust to the king, could keep the throne in profit; soon the king would have to call another parliament, and they would speak against him, and against the favourites at court, and the whole question of the king and the people would be thrown open, and who knew where such a debate might lead?