‘Indeed I have,’ John said, astounded. ‘There are some very precious things in the royal courts.’ He shook his head. ‘Every day there is something new but I would never have thought that they would raze Oatlands.’

John raised the matter of Oatlands’ gardens with a Parliament man who visited the Ark to see the rarities and in a few days he received a commission to supervise the selling of the specimen plants from the garden before the demolition of the house. He might take a tithe of the profit and any plants he chose as payment for his trouble, and he was ordered to sell the rest.

‘I’ll stay there for a week or so, until the work is done,’ he told Hester.

‘I shall miss our little house there,’ she said. ‘I liked knowing we had a place out of the city, a refuge.’

‘Such a waste,’ John said. ‘All that work in the gardens, all that beauty in the house. And the new orangery and the silkworm house! All for nothing.’

‘Shall you take Johnnie with you?’ Hester asked. ‘It might do him good to have a change of scene.’

‘Yes,’ John said. ‘I’ll take the cart too. I’ll bring back some of the chestnut trees if any have survived this winter. And there were some handsome climbers as well which I might be able to cut back from the walls and transplant.’

They harnessed Caesar, Johnnie’s war horse, to the cart and John thought that the handsome animal pulling a gardener’s cart to a palace which was to be demolished could have served as an illustration for a chapbook entitled: ‘How the mighty are fallen’. A war horse harnessed to pull a cart did not seem to him to be a symbol of peace and prosperity when his son sat beside him on the driving seat with his eyes deep-set and dark. Even the horse drooped its head at the unfamiliar weight dragging at its shoulders. It seemed as if both boy and horse should be released from drudgery, should be set free to ride off in some romance of their own devising. The times were too small and too mean for both of them. They were beautiful creatures, they should have been freed to go their own ways.

John thought that hard work might restore some of Johnnie’s spirits, and set him to cutting back and lifting the roses out of the rose garden. There was no time to be troubled with any but the most precious plants in the garden, and the trees in the orchards. The great richness of the nine acres and the terraced courts could not be uprooted and saved in the short February days.