Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory
Everything depended on the coach maintaining the painfully slow walking pace, and never checking, and never stopping, all the way westwards where the sun shone on the water in the open sewers, like a pointer to safety.
Someone pulled at his coat, nearly hauling him off balance. John grabbed tighter at the footman’s strap and looked down. It was a woman, her face contorted with rage. ‘Liberty!’ she cried. ‘Death to the Papists! Death to the Papist queen!’
‘Liberty and the king!’ John shouted back. He tried to smile at her and felt his lips stick on his dry teeth. As long as the queen kept her face hidden! ‘Liberty and the king.’
The carriage lurched over the cobbles. The crowd was thicker but the road further ahead was clear. Someone threw a handful of mud at the coach door but the crowd was too dense for them to start stoning, and though the pikes still jogged to the cry of ‘Liberty!’ they were not yet aimed towards the glass of the windows.
As the road went on, out of town, the crowd thinned, as John had hoped it would. Most of these people had homes or market stalls or even businesses in the City, there was nothing to be gained by following the coach out along the West Way. Besides, they were out of breath and tiring of the sport.
‘Let’s open the doors!’ someone exclaimed. ‘Open the doors and see this queen, this Papist queen. Let’s hear her prayers, that they’re so keen that we should learn!’
‘Look!’ John yelled as loud as he could. ‘An Irishman!’ He pointed back the way they had come. ‘Going into the palace! An Irish priest!’
With a howl the mob turned back and ran, slipping and sliding over the cobbles back towards the palace, chasing their own nightmares.
‘Now drive on!’ John yelled at the driver. ‘Let them go!’
The carriage gave a great lurch as the driver whipped the horses and they leaped forward, bumping on the cobbles. John clung like a barnacle on the back of the great coach, swaying on the leather straps, and ducked his head down as the wind blowing down the street whisked his hat away.
When they reached the outskirts of London the streets were quiet, the people either boarded inside their houses and praying for peace, or roaming in the city. John felt the slackening of tension around his throat and he loosened his grip on the footman’s strap and rocked with the sway of the coach all the way to Hampton Court.
The king was not expected at Hampton Court. There was nothing ready for the royal family. The royal beds and furniture, rugs and pictures were all left at Whitehall. The family stepped down before the solidly closed great doors of the palace and there was not even a servant to open up for them.
John had a sense that the whole world was collapsing around him. He hesitated and looked towards his monarch. The king leaned back against the dirty wheel of the coach, as if he were exhausted.
‘I did not expect this sort of welcome!’ Charles said mournfully. ‘The doors of my own palace closed to me!’
The queen looked pleadingly at Tradescant. ‘What shall we do?’
John felt an irritable sense of responsibility. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll find someone.’
He left the royal coach before the imposing grand front doors and went around to the back. The kitchens were in their usual careless state; the whole household always took a holiday during the king’s absence.
‘Wake up,’ John said, putting his head around the door. ‘The king, queen and royal family are outside waiting to be let in.’
It was as if he had set off a fire-ship among the cockle boats at Whitby. There was a stunned silence and then instantaneous uproar.
‘For God’s sake get the front door open and let him in,’ John said, and went back to the courtyard.
The king was leaning back against the coach surveying the high, imposing roofs of the palace as if he had never seen them before. The queen was still seated in the carriage. Neither of them had moved since John had left them, although the children were whimpering inside the coach and one of the nursemaids was praying.
John pinned a smile on his face and stepped forward and bowed. ‘I am sorry for the poor welcome,’ he said. As he spoke the great doors creaked open and a frightened-looking footman peeped out. ‘There’s a couple of cooks here, and a household of servants,’ John said reassuringly. ‘They’ll make Your Majesties comfortable enough.’
At the sight of a servant the queen brightened. She rose to her feet and waited for the footman to hand her down from the carriage. The children followed her.
The king turned to John. ‘I thank you for the service you have given us this day. We were glad of your escort.’
John bowed. ‘I am glad to see Your Majesty safe arrived,’ he said. At least he could say that with a clear conscience, he thought. He was indeed glad to get them safe out of London. He could not have stood by and seen the queen and the royal princes pulled out of their carriage by a mob, any more than he could have watched Hester and the children abused.
‘Go and see that there are r … rooms made ready for us,’ the king commanded.
John hesitated. ‘I should return home,’ he said. ‘I will give orders that everything shall be done as you wish, and then go to my home.’
The king made that little gesture with his hand which signified ‘No.’
John hesitated.
‘S … stay until we have some order here,’ the king said coolly. ‘Tell them to prepare our p … privy chambers and a dinner.’
John could do nothing but bow and walk carefully backwards from the king’s presence and go to do his bidding.
There was only so much that could be done. There was only one decent bed in the house fit for them; and so the king, queen, and the two royal princes were forced to bed down together in one bed, in the only aired linen in the whole palace. There was a dinner which was ample, but hardly royal; and no golden plate and cups for the service. The trappings of monarchy – the tapestries, carpets, gold plate and jewels, even the richly embroidered bed linen that always travelled with the king in his great progresses around the country – were still at Whitehall. All that was ever left in the empty palaces was second-rate goods, and Hampton Court was no exception. The queen ate off pewter with an air of shocked disdain.
Dinner was served by the kitchen staff and the lowly gentlemen of the household who maintained the palace in the king’s absence. They served it as it should be done, on bended knee, but all the ceremony in the world could not conceal that it was plain bread and meat on pewter plates on a plain board table.
‘You will escort the queen and I to Windsor tomorrow,’ the king said, when he had finished eating. ‘And from thence to Dover.’
Tradescant, who was seated at a lower table down the hall, got up from his bench and dropped to his knee on the stale rushes on the floor. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ He kept his head down so that he showed no surprise.
‘See that the horses are ready at dawn,’ the king ordered.
The royal family rose from their places at the top table and left the great hall by the door at the back of the dais. Their withdrawing room would be cold and smoky with a chimney which did not properly draw.
‘Are they running for it?’ one of the ushers asked John as he rose from his knees. ‘All of them?’
John looked appalled. ‘They cannot do so!’
‘Did they need to run from London? Like cowards?’
‘How can you tell? The mood of the rabble around Whitehall was angry enough. There were moments when I feared for their lives.’
‘The rabble!’ the man jeered. ‘They could have thrown them a purse of gold and turned