once the mood of the scene shifted. The king took her hand and bowed over it, his silky hair falling to shield his face. ‘N … never say it,’ he said. ‘You are q … queen of this country, queen of all the h … hearts. This is a faithful country, they I … love you, I love you. Never even th … think of leaving me.’
There was renewed shouting at the door. John, forgetting that he should stay silent, could not bear to see them taken like a pair of runaway servants in the stable yard. ‘Your Majesty!’ he urged. ‘You must either prepare for a siege or get the coach out! The crowd will be upon you in a moment!’
The queen looked to him. ‘My faithful Gardener Tradescant!’ she exclaimed. ‘Stay with us.’
‘G … Get up at the back,’ the king ordered. ‘Y … You shall escort us t … to safety.’ John gaped at him. The only thing he had thought to do was to bring the two of them to a sense of urgency.
‘Your Majesty?’ he asked.
The king handed the queen into the coach where the two little princes, Charles and James, white-faced and silent, were waiting, their eyes like saucers with terror. Then the nursemaids and the babies bundled in and the king climbed in himself. John slammed the door on them. He wanted to tell them that he could not possibly go with them but he heard the rising volume of the crowd at the gates and he was afraid that they might argue with him, command his service, question his loyalty, delay again.
John stepped back from the coach, waiting for it to draw away; but it did not move. Nobody would do anything without a specific order and the king and queen were arguing again inside.
‘Oh! Damnation! Drive on!’ John shouted, taking command in the absence of any authority, and swung himself up beside the footmen clinging on the back. ‘Westward, to Hampton Court. And drive steadily. Don’t for God’s sake run anyone down. But don’t stop!’
Even then the footmen hesitated at the stable doors.
‘Open the doors!’ John shouted at them, his temper at breaking point.
They leaped to obey the first clear order they had heard all day and the great wooden doors swung open.
At once the men and women in the very front of the crowd fell back, as the doors opened up and the coach pulled out. John saw they were taken aback at the sudden movement of the doors, at the progress of the fine horses, and the wealth and richness of the gilding on the royal coach. The king’s ornate carriage with the plumes of feathers on each roof corner, and the huge high-stepping Arab horses harnessed with tack of red leather and gold studs, still had the mystique of power, divine power, even with a traitorous Papist queen inside. But those in the front could not get back very far; they were held steady by the weight of the crowd behind them, still pushing forward.
The crowd had pikes but they were using them as banners, not yet as weapons. On each one was tied a white flag scrawled with the word ‘Liberty!’ and they jogged them up and down at the windows of the coach. John prayed that the queen kept her face turned down and for once in her life kept quiet. The prestige of the king might get them safely through the mob if she did not antagonise them.
John heard a frightened child crying from inside the coach. ‘Drive on!’ he ordered the coachman above the noise of the crowd. ‘Go steady!’, and he shouted as loud as he could: ‘Make way for the king! For the rightful king!’
‘Liberty!’ someone yelled, jabbing a pike dangerously close to his face.
‘Liberty and the king!’ John replied, and heard another voice at once echo the new slogan. The footman beside him flinched as someone spat. ‘Stay still, you fool, or they will drag you down,’ John muttered.
At any moment the mood of the crowd could change from boisterous protest to murder. John looked over the roof of the carriage to where the streets narrowed for the way out of town.
‘Make way for the rightful king!’ John shouted.
The crowd grew denser at the crossroads. ‘Keep going!’ John yelled at the coachman. He had an absolute certainty that if they stopped, even for a moment, the doors would be pulled open and the royal family dragged from the coach and torn apart on the very street. Once the mob learned that they could stop the king in his carriage, then they would know they could do whatever they wished. All that was holding them back was the old superstitious belief in the king’s power, the divinity of kingship that King James had preached and that Charles so passionately believed. The crowd kept reaching towards the coach as it crawled slowly past them but their hands would drop back as if they feared a burning from the gold paintwork. If they touched and snatched just once, then they would all know that the king was not a god, a vengeful god. If they found the courage to touch just once, they would snatch at everything.
‘Keep back,’ John shouted. ‘Make way for the king!’
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
