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the docks for some rarity promised by an East India trader but which had proved to be nothing.
    When all the clocks in London struck eight, John went down to the great hall and found his master, as if by magic, also resident in London, calmly seated to break his fast at the big chair at the head of the big table at the top of the hall. Robert Cecil raised an eyebrow at him, John returned the smallest nod, and master and man, at either end of the hall, fell on their bread and cheese and small ale and ate with relish.
    Cecil summoned him with a crook of his long finger. “I have a small task for you today and then you can go back to Theobalds,” he said.
    John waited.
    “There is a little room in Whitehall where some kindling is stored. I should like it damped down to prevent the danger of a fire.”
    John frowned, his eyes on his master’s impish face. “My lord?”
    “I’ve got a lad who will show you where to go,” Cecil continued smoothly. “Take a couple of buckets and make sure the whole thing is soaked through. And come away without being observed, my John.”
    “If there is a danger of fire I should clear it all out,” John offered. He had the sense of swimming in deep and dangerous water and knew that this was his master’s preferred element.
    “I’ll clear it out when I know who laid the fire in the first place,” Cecil said, very low. “Just damp it down for me now.”
    “Then I’ll get back to my garden,” Tradescant said.
    Cecil grinned at the firmness of the statement. “Then your job is finished here; go and plant something. My work is coming into its flowering time.”

    It was only after November fifth that John learned that the whole Gunpowder Plot had been discovered by Lord Monteagle, who had received a letter warning him not to go near Parliament. He had, quite rightly, taken the letter to Secretary Robert Cecil, who, unable to understand its meaning, had laid the whole thing before the king. The king, quicker-witted than them all — how they praised him for the speed of his understanding! — had ordered the Houses of Parliament to be searched and found Guido Fawkes crouched amid kindling, and nearby, barrels of gunpowder. On the wave of anti-Catholic sentiment Cecil enforced laws to control papists, and mopped up the remaining opposition to the English Protestant succession. The handful of desperate, dangerous families were identified as one confession led to another, and as the young men who had staked everything on a barrel of wet gunpowder were captured, tortured and executed. The one bungled plot forced everyone from the king to the poorest beggar to turn against the Catholics in a great wave of revulsion. The one dreadful threat — to the king, to his wife, to the two little princes — was such that no monarch in Europe, Catholic or Protestant, would ever plot again with English Catholics. The Spanish and French kings were monarchs before they were Catholics. And as monarchs they would never tolerate regicide.
    Even more importantly for Cecil, the horror at the thought of what might have happened if Monteagle had not proved faithful, if the king had not proved astute, persuaded Parliament to grant the king some extraordinary revenue for the year and pushed back for another twelve months the impending financial crisis.
    “Thank you, John,” Cecil said when he returned to Theobalds in early December. “I won’t forget.”
    “I still don’t understand,” John said.
    Cecil grinned at him, his schoolboyish conspiratorial grin. “Much better not to,” he replied engagingly.

May 1607

    After the king’s first successful visit to Theobalds it was as if he could not keep away. Every summer brought the court hungry as locusts out of London and into the country, to stay at Theobalds and then to move on in a constant circle of all the wealthy houses. The courtiers braced themselves for the unimaginable expense of entertaining the king, and sighed with relief when he moved on. He