Chapter Seven

Death of a Lord

As well as Hatfield House, John Tradescant also gardened at two other properties that Robert Cecil was busy extending and rebuilding: Salisbury House in London and Cranborne Manor in Dorset. To carry out his duties as Lord Treasurer, Cecil needed a fine London residence close to Whitehall and Westminster. At his father’s death, Burghley House on the north side of the Strand had passed to his elder brother Thomas and in any case Robert wanted to live on the more fashionable south side with direct access to the River Thames. After living for a time at Cecil House, next door to his brother, he eventually purchased a property from Henry, Lord Herbert, which would form the nucleus of Salisbury House. In the year before her death, Queen Elizabeth had dined with Cecil at his new house, ‘where they say there is great variety of entertainment prepared for her, and many rich jewels and presents’.1

One of those disturbed by Cecil’s Thames-side development was Sir Walter Raleigh, who had lived rent free for twenty years under the queen’s protection in property belonging to the Bishop of Durham. As soon as Elizabeth died, Cecil urged the bishop to eject Raleigh and he was ‘abruptly and discourteously thrown out into the street’.² Cecil further extended his property by applying to Parliament to shift Ivy Lane westwards, branding it as ‘verie narrow, foule and solitarie’.³ This would give him the extended river frontage he so desired, captured by Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar in his riverside view of the three grand houses of Durham, Salisbury and Worcester.

Work in the gardens at Salisbury House included a seat made by ‘Jenever the Joiner’ and a fountain by ‘Poole the Plumer’.4 It is tempting to think that the ‘John Gardener’ who was paid for keeping pheasants there in 1609⁵ might just possibly have been Tradescant, but there have doubtless been many ‘John Gardeners’ ever since ‘Mayster Jon Gardener’ wrote the earliest surviving treatise on English gardening in the fifteenth century.⁶ In November 1610, Cecil’s London garden was enlarged, the lane repaved with flint and a private walk made with carpenter’s work.⁷ By the following year, when Tradescant went plant-buying to the Low Countries, the property had two courtyards, a smaller gabled house and a garden loggia. As Hollar’s view from the river shows, the impression is one of elongated space, given added emphasis by the trees of the long terrace.

At least some of the trees in Hollar’s view may have come back with Tradescant from the Low Countries and France, as around £7 of the freight charges are debited to the Salisbury House accounts.⁸ His bills for January and February 1612 record many nights spent in London as he worked on Cecil’s garden, arranging the purchase and planting of a variety of hedging plants and materials (sweetbriar, long briar, short thorn and literally thousands of osiers) as well as cherries in tubs, lilacs, white and yellow jasmine, clematis and different coloured roses.⁹ Judging from his purchase pf 2,400 nails and 300 hazel poles, he was probably constructing a pergola or series of garden arbours.¹⁰ He also claimed back money for wages paid to the gardeners and labourers; all male, their names read like a roll-call of the English labouring classes: William Robarts, John Hedge, John Coats, Thomas Masse, William Miller, Thomas Byles, Hughe Tedder, John Hoge and Richard Terre (who was paid 2d for two brooms as well as his wages).

The other Cecil property where Tradescant worked, mostly before he went off to the Low Countries, was Cranborne Manor in Dorset, which Cecil had bought in 1599, although it was nine years or so before he began to develop the house and gardens into a delightfully eclectic country house. A Cecil descendant described its fortified medieval walls, tall lattice windows, Jacobean chimneys and sculptured Italian loggias as ‘Salisbury’s most exquisite architectural bequest to posterity’.¹¹ Masque-designer and Palladian architect Inigo Jones borrowed its three-arched porch and crenellated tower for the Palace of Fame in his masque, Britannia Triumphans.¹²

Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of Salisbury House and its two Thames-side neighbours (c. 1630).

Far from the noise and stresses of an increasingly crowded London, Cranborne fulfilled the busy courtier’s need for a country retreat. Here Cecil might send his family in the dangerous summer months to escape the outbreaks of plague and sweating sickness, which spared no one. His rebuilding plans were also spurred on by King James’s obsession with the chase and the magnificent hunting opportunities offered by his Dorset estate. As at Hatfield, once building began, the pace became frantic, causing one builder to complain that the gardens had been sown too early and were consequently ruined by the continual tramp of builders’ carriages.13

Once again, Mountain Jennings was despatched ‘to survey the garden plott’, while John Tradescant was sent down to plant trees in November 1610.14 Planned as a series of separate gardens,¹⁵ many of its elements remain today and it retains the quieter atmosphere of a family home rather than a showplace, like Hatfield.

While Tradescant was finishing off his garden tasks at Salisbury House in early 1612, Cecil’s health was beginning to fail, despite encouraging first reports of his recovery. ‘I will begin with the best newes first,’ wrote indefatigable correspondent and court observer John Chamberlain on 11 March 1612 to his friend Sir Dudley Carleton in Venice,

that the Lord Treasurer is so well recovered that he walkes dayly in his garden, and yt is thought will shortly remove to Kensington . . . The King and Prince were with him on Sonday, and the Quene every second day the last weeke. His disease proves nothing so daungerous as was suspected, beeing now discovered to be but the scorbut, or (as we terme yt) the scurvy, which is of easie and ordinarie cure yf yt be not too far overpast.16

Less than two weeks later, the prognosis was more confusing. ‘Within this fortnight,’ wrote Chamberlain, ‘my Lords disease hath varied (at leastwise in name or opinion) twise or thrise, for first yt was held the scorbut, then the dropsie, and now yt hath got another Greeke name that I have forgotten.’¹⁷

A cure at Bath was tried on Cecil’s insistence, in the company of Sir Walter Cope, Sir Michael Hicks and Cecil’s chaplain, ‘but as far as I can learne,’ wrote the faithful Chamberlain, ‘there is more cause of feare then hope . . . and only the vigor of his mind maintaines his weake body . . . Speaches go that he was very yll by the way yesterday and was almost gon once or twise.’¹⁸

Cecil died on Sunday, 24 May 1612, in the parsonage at Marlborough while travelling home, ‘his memorie perfect to the last gaspe’. According to Chamberlain, he ‘found so litle goode in the Bath that he made all the haste he could out of that suffocating sulphureous ayre as he called yt, though others thincke he hastened the faster homeward, to countermine his underminers, and (as he termed yt) to cast dust in theyre eyes.’ Even had he recovered his health, surmised Chamberlain, he would never have regained his power or credit. ‘I never knew so great a man so soone and so generally censured, for mens tongues walke very liberally and freely, but how truly I cannot judge.’¹⁹ One who stayed with him to the end was Sir Walter Cope, to whom Cecil entrusted his papers after he was gone.

His servants would have felt his death keenly and suffered from his rapid fall from grace that saw his reputation daily blackened, ‘whether yt be that practises and juglings come more and more to light, or that men love to follow the sway of the multitude’. Chamberlain refrained from giving his own opinion, merely recording that ‘they who may best maintain yt, have not forborn to say that he jugled with religion, with the King, Quene, theyre children, with nobilitie, Parlement, with frends, foes, and generally with all’.20 Cecil had grown ever lonelier in power and became increasingly melancholic after the deaths of his father and his wife. ‘The mature Robert Cecil, like the mature Burghley, was a sad man,’ commented his descendant, David Cecil. ‘Sadder perhaps, because his melancholy was more obsessive.’²¹

Cecil’s dying even makes a brief appearance in one of John Tradescant’s bills for his garden expenses. Among the vegetable seeds and other mundane items purchased, he added the exceptional item of 4s ‘for mowing of the Coorts and East gardyn against the funerall’.²²

By his own wish, Cecil was buried quietly and privately in Hatfield Church, commemorated by a High Renaissance tomb on which his white marble effigy, staff of office in hand, lies resplendent on a slab of black marble held aloft by matronly figures representing the cardinal virtues of Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude. Below him lies a macabre effigy of his skeleton awaiting judgment, which in the popular view was singularly cruel, whatever His Maker might have decided. Descendant David Cecil quotes one of the libellous rhymes shouted in London alleyways:

Here lies, thrown for the worms to eat

Little bossive Robin that was so great.

Not Robin Goodfellow or Robin Hood

But Robin th’encloser of Hatfield Wood,

Who seemed as sent from Ugly Fate

To Spoil the Prince and rot the State,

Owning a mind of dismal ends

As trap for foes and tricks for friends.

But now in Hatfield lies the Fox

Who stank while he lived and died of the Pox.²³

It was not fair but public opinion had raised venomous gossip to an art form, and Cecil was still blamed by many for the death of the popular (and handsome) 2nd Earl of Essex, executed for treason in 1601 after an abortive uprising.24 Tradescant himself had, of course, benefited from the enclosing of Hatfield Wood by renting land transformed into pasture.

John Tradescant stayed on at Hatfield for at least another two years but much of the satisfaction must have gone out of his employment. Cecil’s son and heir William had none of the father’s drive or ambition and he never achieved the rank or standing of his father or his grandfather, Lord Burghley. Soon after Robert Cecil’s death, the talented artists and craftsmen he had gathered about him began to disperse. His musicians moved on to other noble households or court appointments, and William Cecil’s own ‘delight in Musick’ proved short-lived.²⁵ The same was undoubtedly true of Hatfield’s gardeners. Mountain Jennings was by now working for King James at Theobalds, where he stayed until he died in 1628, planting trees, making walks and trees, tending the nursery;²⁶ and the story told by Tradescant’s estate bills is one of narrowing horizons and increasingly mundane purchases. Intriguingly, he was also receiving a reduced salary: £5 15s a quarter, half the previous amount.²⁷ Either he was less valued or – a more likely explanation – he was no longer required to fund garden expenditure out of his own pocket.

As well as the trees that he continued to buy in England (fruit trees for the East Garden; more plums, nectarines and cherries, including one ‘great Cherytree Caled the arche duks Rathe Ripe’ for the huge amount of £5),²⁸ he was also claiming for sundry seeds and supplies for the kitchen garden: glass cloches to cover the musk melons, a peck of ‘Rathe Ripe pease’, onion and radish seed, sixpenny nails to secure the pleached and espaliered trees in his Lordship’s London garden,²⁹ and a cheese presse.³⁰ One of his last actual claims was made halfway through 1614: ‘To John Tradescant that he paid for setting a pair of soles upon your Lordships “pompes”.’³¹ It was surely time to move on.