Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, came of the younger line of an ancient and distinguished family of Anglo-Norman descent in which there had been Barons de Beaumont from the beginning of the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. They lived, as did the dramatist later, in the forest of Charnwood in Leicestershire,-part of the old forest of Arden. And it is of a ride to their family seat that John Leland, the antiquary, speaks when in his itinerary, written between 1535 and 1543, he says: "From Leicester to Brodegate, by ground well wooded three miles....

From Brodegate to Loughborough about a five miles.... First, I came out of Brodegate Park into the forest of Charnwood, commonly called the Waste. This great forest is a twenty miles or more in compass, having plenty of wood.... In this forest is no good town nor scant a village; Ashby-de-la-Zouche, a market town and other villages on the very borders of it.... Riding a little further I left the park of Beau Manor, closed with stone walls and a pretty lodge in it, belonging of late to Beaumonts.... There is a fair quarry of alabaster stone about a four miles from Leicester, and not very far from Beau Manor.[1]... There was, since the Bellemonts [Beaumonts], earls of Warwick, a baron [at Beaumanoir] of great lands of that name; and the last of them in King Henry the Seventh's time was a man of simple wit. His wife was after married to the Earl of Oxford."[2] These barons "of great lands," living in Charnwood Forest,-where, as another old writer tells us, "a wren and a squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles; and in summer time a traveler could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun,"-these barons are the de Beaumonts, from the fourth of whom, John, Lord Beaumont, who died in 1396, our dramatist was descended.

The barony ran from father to son for six generations of alternating Henries and Johns, c. 1309 to 1460. John, fourth Baron; was grandson of Alianor, daughter of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, and so descended from Henry III and the first kings of the House of Plantagenet. The second Baron, husband of Alianor of Lancaster, was through his mother, Alice Comyn, descended from the Scotch Earls of Buchan, and thus connected with the Balliols and the royal House of Scotland; through his father, Henry, the first Baron de Beaumont, who died in 1343, he was great-grandson of John de Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem, 1210-1225.[3] In a quaint tetrastich in the church of Barton-upon-Humber, the memory of these alliances is thus preserved:

Rex Hierosolymus cum Bellomonte locatur,

Bellus mons etiam cum Baghan consociatur,

Bellus mons iterum Longicastro religatur,

Bellus mons ... Oxonie titulatur.[4]

The sixth Baron became, in 1440, the first Viscount of English creation; he married a granddaughter of the Lord Bardolph of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV; but with his son "of simple wit," who died in 1507, the viscounty died out. Beaumanoir to the east of Charnwood is seven miles north of Leicester and nine from Coleorton where, west of the Forest, an older branch of the Beaumont family of which we shall hear, later, continued to live and is living to-day; and the old barony was revived, in 1840, in a descendant of the female line, Miles Thomas Stapleton, as ninth Baron Beaumont.

The grandfather of the dramatist, John Beaumont, was in the third generation from Sir Thomas Beaumont, the younger son of the fourth Lord Beaumont. John evidently had to make his way before he could establish himself near the old home in Leicestershire; but he must have had some competence and position from the first, for he was admitted early, in the reign of Henry VIII, a member of the Inner Temple; in 1537 and 1543 he performed the learned and expensive functions of Reader, or exponent of the law in that society, and later was elected treasurer or presiding officer of the house. He started brilliantly in his profession. In 1529 he was counsellor for the corporation of Leicester; and, by 1539, he had means or influence sufficient to secure for himself the old Nunnery of Grace-Dieu in Charnwood Forest, which, as an ecclesiastical commissioner he had four years earlier helped to suppress. That he entered into possession, however, only with difficulty, is manifest from a letter which he wrote in 1538 to Lord Cromwell, enclosing ￡20 as a present and beseeching his lordship's intercession with the king that he may be confirmed in his ownership of the "demenez" as against the cupidity of George, first Earl of Huntingdon, who "doth labour to take the seyd abbey ffrom me; ... for I do ffeyre the seyd erle and hys sonnes do seeke my lyffe."[5] He occupied various important legal and administrative positions in the county, and, shortly before the death of Edward VI, was appointed to the high office of Master of the Rolls, or Judge of the Court of Appeal. A year or two later, however, early in 1553, he was removed from his seat on the bench, for defalcation and other flagrant breach of trust. He was imprisoned and fined in all his property, and died the next year. His vast estates were bestowed on Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, by Edward VI, but soon afterward, as a result of legal man?uvre and by the assistance of that Earl and his eldest son, the widow of the Master of the Rolls contrived to retain the manor of Grace-Dieu; and it long continued to be the country seat of the Beaumonts.[6] This prudent, strenuous, and high-born lady, Elizabeth Hastings, was the daughter of Sir William Hastings, a younger son of the incorruptible William, Lord Hastings, whom in 1483 Richard of Gloucester had decapitated. Her grandmother, Catherine Nevil, was daughter to the Earl of Salisbury, who died at Pomfret, and sister to Richard, Earl of Warwick, the King-maker. Elizabeth's aunt, Anne Hastings, was the wife of George Talbot, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, and her uncle, Edward, was the second Lord Hastings. Edward's children, our Elizabeth's first cousins, were Anne, Countess to Thomas Stanley, second Earl of Derby, and that George, first Earl of Huntingdon, whom, with certain of his five sons, the master of Grace-Dieu "ffeyred."[7] We may conjecture that the feud expired with the marriage of Elizabeth Hastings and John Beaumont, or with the death of the first Earl in 1544; and that the policy of his successors, Francis and Henry, in securing to the Huntingdon family the reversion of the forfeited estates of the Master of the Rolls and, later, releasing a portion of them to Elizabeth, was dictated by cousinly affection.

The great Francis, second Earl of Huntingdon, lived in the castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, about an hour's walk from Mistress Beaumont's, and had, in 1532, allied himself to royalty by marrying Katherine Pole, niece of the Cardinal, and great-granddaughter of that George, Duke of Clarence (brother to Edward IV), who was "pack'd with post-horse up to heaven" by the cacodemon of Gloucester. When Edward VI died, Francis declared for Lady Jane Grey and was for a time imprisoned. His daughter was the beautiful Lady Mary Hastings who, being of the blood royal, was wooed for the Czar, and might have been "Empress of Muscovy" had she pleased. From the Huntingdon family Elizabeth Hastings introduced at least one new Christian name into that of the Beaumonts. For the second Earl, she named her oldest son Francis. One of her daughters, Elizabeth, became the wife of William, third Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in the adjoining county of Northampton; and thus our dramatist, through his aunt, was connected with another of the proudest Norman families of England,-one of the most devoted to the Catholic faith and, as we shall see, active in Jesuit interests that during the dramatist's life in London assumed momentous political proportions. Aunt Elizabeth, Lady Vaux, died before our Frank Beaumont was born; and her son Henry died when Frank was but ten years of age,-but in an entry in the State Papers of 1595 concerning "the entail of Lord Vaux's estates on his children by his first wife [John] Beaumont's daughter,"[8] several "daughters" are mentioned. These, his cousins of Harrowden, Frank knew from his youth up. In 1605 all England was to be ringing with their names.

John and Elizabeth were succeeded at Grace-Dieu by their son, Francis. He was a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge; afterwards, at the Inner Temple, where like his father before him, he proceeded Reader and Bencher. In 1572 he sat in Parliament as member for Aldborough; in 1589 he was made sergeant-at-law; and in 1593 was appointed one of the Queen's Justices of the Court of Common Pleas. His method of trying a case, technical and merciless, may be studied in the minutes of the Lent assizes of 1595 at which the unfortunate Jesuit priest, Henry Walpole, was sentenced to death for returning to England.[9] His career on the bench was both successful and honourable; and he is described by a contemporary, William Burton, the author of the Description of Leicestershire, as a "grave, learned, and reverend judge." He married Anne, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire knight, Sir George Pierrepoint of Holme-Pierrepoint; and their children were Henry, born 1581; John, born about 1583; Francis, the subject of this study, born in 1584 or 1585; and Elizabeth, some four years younger than Francis.[10] That we know nothing of the life or personality of this mother of poets, is a source of regret. Her family, however, was of a notable stock possessed, immediately after the Conquest, of lands in Sussex under Earl Warren. Their estate of Holme-Pierrepoint in Nottinghamshire they had inherited from Michael de Manvers during the reign of Edward I. Anne's ancestors had been Knights Banneret, and of the Carpet and the Sword, for generations. Her brother, Sir Henry Pierrepoint, born 1546, married Frances, the eldest daughter of the Sir William Cavendish who began the building of Chatsworth, and his redoubtable Lady, Bess of Hardwick, who finished it. This aunt of the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu, Lady Pierrepoint, was sister to William Cavendish, first Earl of Devonshire in 1611 and forefather of the present Dukes,-to Henry Cavendish, the friend of Mary, Queen of Scots, and son-in-law of her kindly custodian, George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury,-to Sir Charles Cavendish, whose son, William, became Earl, and then Duke of Newcastle,-to Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess of Lennox, the wife of Henry Darnley's brother, Charles Stuart, and the mother of James I's hapless cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart,-and to Mary Cavendish, Countess of Shrewsbury, wife of Gilbert, seventh Earl. The son of Sir Henry and Lady Pierrepoint, Robert, born in the same year as his cousin, Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, married a daughter of the Talbots, became in due time Viscount Newark and Earl of Kingston, and was killed in 1643 during the Civil War. From him descended Marquises of Dorchester and Dukes of Kingston, and the Earls Manvers of the present time. Through their mother, Anne Pierrepoint, the Beaumont children of Grace-Dieu were, accordingly, connected with several of the most influential noble families of England and Scotland; and in their comradeship with the cousins of Holme-Pierrepoint they would, as of the common kin, be thrown into familiar acquaintance with the children of the various branches of these and other houses that I might mention.[11] Holme-Pierrepoint is seventeen miles northeast of Grace-Dieu, near the city of Nottingham, in the red sand-stone country along the River Trent. The Park is but a two or three hours' drive from Charnwood, and the old house to which Anne used to take her children to see their grandparents still stands, altered only in part from what it was in 1580. It belongs to the Earl Manvers of to-day. In the church is the tomb of the poet's uncle, Sir Henry Pierrepoint, who died the year before Francis.

Since no entry of Francis' baptism has been discovered it is uncertain whether he was born at Grace-Dieu. The probabilities are, however, in favour of that birth-place, since his father was not continuously occupied in London until a later date. As to the exact year of his birth, there is also uncertainty but I think that the records indicate 1584. The matriculation entry in the registers of Oxford University describes him as twelve years of age at the time of his admission, February 4, 1597 (new style), which would establish the date of his birth between February 1584 and February 1585. The funeral certificate issued at the time of his father's death, April 22, 1598, speaks of the other children, Henry, John, and Elizabeth as, respectively, seventeen, fourteen, and nine, years of age, "or thereaboutes"; but of Francis as "of thirteen yeares or more."

Justice Beaumont was a squire of considerable means. When, in 1581, he qualified himself to be Bencher by lecturing at the Inner Temple upon some statute or section of a statute for the space of three weeks and three days, his expenses for the entertainment at table or in revels, alone, must have run to about ￡1500, in the money of to-day. He held at the time of his death landed estates in some ten parishes of Leicestershire, between Sheepshead on the east and and Coleorton three miles away on the west, and scattered over some seven miles north and south between Belton and Normanton. In Derby, too, he had two or three fine manors. His will shows that he was able to make generous provision for many of his "ould and faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing specifically a handsome sum in money to his daughter Elizabeth. He was a considerate and careful man, too, for the morning of his death he added a codicil to his will: "I have left somewhat oute of my will which is this, I will that my daughter Elizabeth have all the jewells that were her mother's." His sons are not mentioned, for naturally the heir, Henry, would make provision for John and Francis.[12] His chief executor was Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, his kinsman,-worth mentioning here; for at Coleorton another cousin, Maria Beaumont, the mother of the great Duke of Buckingham, had till recently lived as a waiting gentlewoman in the household.

Grace-Dieu where the youth of these children was principally spent, was "beautifully situated in what was formerly one of the most recluse spots in the centre of Charnwood Forest," within a little distance of the turn-pike road that leads from Ashby-de-la-Zouch to Loughborough. It lies low in a valley, near the river Soar. In his Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs, 1639, Thomas Bancroft gives us a picture of the spot:

Grace-Dieu, that under Charnwood stand'st alone,

As a grand relicke of religion,

I reverence thine old, but fruitfull, worth,

That lately brought such noble Beaumonts forth,

Whose brave heroicke Muses might aspire

To match the anthems of the heavenly quire:

The mountaines crown'd with rockey fortresses,

And sheltering woods, secure thy happiness

That highly favour'd art (tho' lowly placed)

Of Heaven, and with free Nature's bounty graced.

And still another picture of it is painted, a hundred and seventy years later by Wordsworth, the friend of the Sir George Beaumont who in his day was possessed of the old family seat of Coleorton Hall, within half an hour's walk of Grace-Dieu:-

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,

Rugged and high, of Charnwood's forest ground

Stand yet, but, Stranger! hidden from thy view,

The ivied Ruins of forlorn Grace-Dieu,-

Erst a religious house, which day and night

With hymns resounded, and the chanted rite:

And when those rites had ceased, the Spot gave birth

To honourable Men of various worth:

There, on the margin of a streamlet wild,

Did Francis Beaumont sport, an eager child:

There, under shadow of the neighboring rocks,

Sang youthful tales of shepherds and their flocks;

Unconscious prelude to heroic themes,

Heart-breaking tears, and melancholy dreams

Of slighted love, and scorn, and jealous rage,

With which his genius shook the buskined stage.

Communities are lost, and Empires die,

And things of holy use unhallowed lie;

They perish;-but the Intellect can raise,

From airy words alone, a Pile that ne'er decays.[13]

So far as the "youthful tales of shepherds" go, Wordsworth is probably thinking of the verses of Francis' brother, Sir John, which open:

A shepherdess, who long had kept her flocks

On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks,-

written long after both brothers had left boyhood behind; indeed after Francis was dead; or he is attributing to our Beaumont a share in Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse. Francis, himself, has given us nothing of the pastoral vein, save sweet snatches in the dramas "with which his genius shook the buskined stage."

There is no doubt that from childhood up, the brothers and, as I shall later show, their sister Elizabeth breathed an atmosphere of literature and national life. At an early age John was sufficiently confessed a versifier to be assigned the Prelude to one of the nobly patronized Michael Drayton's Divine Poems, and there is fair reason for believing that the younger brother Francis was writing and publishing verses in 1602, when he was barely eighteen years of age. Their father was going to and fro among the great in London who made affairs. The country-side all about them was replete with historic memories and inspirations to poetry. In the Grey Friars' at Leicester, eleven miles south-east, Simon de Montfort allied by marriage to the first Anglo-Norman de Beaumonts, Earls of Leicester, lay buried. There, too, until his ashes were scattered on the waters of the Soar, King Richard the Third. In the Blue Boar Inn of that "toune,"-in our young Beaumont's day, all "builded of tymbre,"-this last of the Plantagenets had spent the night before the battle of Bosworth. The field itself on which the battle was fought lies but eight miles west of Leicester and about nine south of Grace-Dieu. No wonder that Francis Beaumont's brother John in after days chose Bosworth Field as the subject of an heroic poem:

The Winter's storme of Civill Warre I sing,

Whose end is crown'd with our eternall Spring;

Where Roses joyn'd, their colours mixe in one,

And armies fight no more for England's Throne.

The Beaumonts were living in the centre of the counties most engaged. Three of their predecessors had fallen fighting for the red rose, John Beaumont of Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at Northampton in 1460, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton in 1461. In his description of the battle, John introduces by way of simile a reference to what may have been a familiar scene about Grace-Dieu:

Here Stanley and brave Lovell trie their strength....

So meete two bulls upon adjoyning hills

Of rocky Charnwood, while their murmur fills

The hollow crags, when striving for their bounds,

They wash their piercing homes in mutuall wounds.

Lovell, himself, was a Beaumont on the mother's side. And the poet takes occasion to pay tribute, also, to his own most famous ancestor on the grandmother's side, the "noble Hastings," first baron, whose cruel execution in Richard III, Shakespeare had dramatized more than twenty years before John wrote.

Steel Engraving by W. Finden

THE RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU NUNNERY

Just south of Charnwood Forest stood, in the day of John and Francis, the Manor House in Bradgate Park where Lady Jane Grey was born, and where she lived from 1549 to 1552 while she was being educated by her ambitious father and mother, the Marquis and Marchioness of Dorset, "to occupy the towering position they felt assured she would sooner or later be called to fill"-that of Protestant queen of England. Here it was that Roger Ascham, as he tells us in his Schoolmaster, after inquiring for the Lady Jane of the Marquis and his lady who were out hunting in Charnwood Forest, came upon the twelve-year old princess in her closet "reading the Ph?don of Plato in Greek, with as much delight as gentlemen read the merry tales of Boccaccio." The grandmother of the young Beaumonts, who was still alive in 1578, may have lived long enough to take our Francis on her knee and tell him of the hopes her Protestant kinsmen of Ashby-de-la-Zouch had fixed upon the Lady Jane, and of how her cousin, the Earl, Francis of Huntingdon, had been one of those who in Royal Council in June 1553, abetted the Dukes of Northumberland and Suffolk in the scheme to secure the succession of Lady Jane to the throne, and how, with these dukes and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other lords and gentlemen (among them a certain Sir John Baker of Sissinghurst, Kent, whose family later appears in this narrative), he had signed the "devise" in accordance with which Jane was proclaimed Queen. And the old lady would with bated breath tell him of the cruel fate of that nine-days' queen. Of how Francis of Huntingdon was sent to the Tower with Queen Jane, she also would tell. But perhaps not much of how he shortly made his peace with Queen Mary, hunted down the dead Jane's father, and brought him to the scaffold. And either their grandmother or their father, the Judge, could tell them of the night in 1569 on which their cousin, Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon, had entertained in the castle "rising on the very borders" of the forest to the east, Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was on her way to her captivity in the house of another connection of theirs, Henry Cavendish, at Tutbury in the county of Stafford, just east of them.

In the history of culture not only John and Francis, but the Beaumonts in general are illustrious. In various branches and for generations the poetic, scholarly, and artistic vein has persisted. John Beaumont's son and heir, the second Sir John, edited his father's poems, and lived to write memorial verses on Ben Jonson, and on Edward King, Milton's "Lycidas"; and another son, Francis, wrote verses. A relative and namesake of the dramatist's father,-afterwards Master of Charterhouse,-wrote an Epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, 1598; and still another more distant relative, Dr. Joseph, Master of Peterhouse, and author of the epic allegory, Psyche, was one of the poetic imitators through whom Spenser's influence was conveyed to Milton. The Sir George Beaumont of Wordsworth's day to whom reference has already been made was celebrated by that poet both as artist and patron of art. And, according to Darley,[14] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was of the race and maiden name of our dramatist's mother, Anne Pierrepoint. From which coincidence one may, if he will, argue poetic blood on that side of the family, too; or from Grosart's derivation of Jonathan Edwards from that family, polemic blood, as well.

The three sons of Justice Beaumont of Grace-Dieu were entered on February 4, 1597, at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke, which at that time was one of the most flourishing and fashionable institutions in Oxford. These young gentlemen-commoners were evidently destined for the pursuit of the civil and common law, since, as Dyce informs us, their Hall was then the principal nursery for students of that discipline. But one cannot readily visualize young Frank, not yet thirteen, or his brother John, a year or so older, devoting laborious hours to the Corpus Juris in the library over the south aisle of St. Aldate's Church, or to their Euclid, Strabo, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian. We see them, more probably, slipping across St. Aldate's street to Wolsey's gateway of Christ Church, and through the, then unfinished, great quadrangle, past Wolsey's tower in the southeast corner, and, by what then served for the Broad Walk, to what now are called the Magdalen College School cricket grounds, and so to some well-moored boat on the flooded meadows by the Cherwell. And some days, they would have under arm or in pocket a tattered volume of Ovid, preferably in translation,-Turberville's Heroical Epistles, or Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses,-or Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or Fenton's Tragical Discourses out of Bandello, dedicated to the sister of Sir Philip Sidney-Sir Philip, whose daughter young Francis should, one day, revere and celebrate in noble lines. Or they would have Harington's Orlando Furioso to wonder upon; or some cheap copy of Amadis or Palmerin to waken laughter. And, other days, fresh quartos of Tamburlaine and Edward II and Dido, or Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Lyly's Gallathea, or Greene's Frier Bacon and James IV, or Shakespeare's Richard II, and Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost. These, with alternate shuddering and admiring, mirth or tears, to declaim and in imagination re-enact. And certainly there would be mellow afternoons when the Songs and Sonnettes known as Tottel's Miscellany and The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, with their poems of love and chivalry by Thomas, Lord Vaux,-of which they had often heard from their cousins of Harrowden,-and Chapman's completion of Hero and Leander or Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Drayton's fantastic but graceful Endimion and Phoebe would hold them till the shadows were well aslant, and the candles began to wink them back to the Cardinal's quadrangle and the old refectory, beyond, of Broadgates Hall. For the Char and the boats were there then, and all these El Dorados of the mind were to be had in quarto or other form, and some of them were appearing first in print in the year when Frank and his brothers entered Oxford.

View taken by Buck in 1730

RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU

Note: After Buck's time the ruins were "carried away to mend the roads" See John Throsby, Select Views of Leicestershire, Vol. II, 461

Taken by Buck

A PRIORY, ULVESTON, EXTANT IN 1730

We may be sure, that many a time these brothers and sworn friends in literature, and Henry, too, loyal young Elizabethans,-and with them, perhaps, their cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who was then at Oriel,-strolled northwest from the Cherwell toward Yarnton, and then Woodstock with its wooded slopes, to see the island where Queen Elizabeth, when but princess, had been imprisoned for a twelvemonth, and, hearing a milk-maid singing, had sighed, "She would she were a milkmaid as she was"; and that they took note of fair Rosamund's well and bower, too. They may have tramped or ridden onward north to Banbury, and got there at the same cakeshop in Parsons Street the same cakes we get now. Or, some happy Michaelmas, they would have walked toward the fertile Vale of Evesham, north, first, toward Warwickshire where at Compton Scorpion Sir Thomas Overbury, the ill-fated friend of their future master, Ben Jonson, was born, and on by the village of Quinton but six miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, toward Mickleton and the Malvern Hills; and then, turning toward the Cotswolds, to Winchcombe with its ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south of it Sudely Castle where Henry VIII's last wife, the divorced Catherine Parr, had lived and died,-where Giles, third Baron Chandos, had entertained Queen Bess, and where in their time abode the Lord William. With this family of Brydges, Barons Chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in 1597 at any rate after 1602, when the fifth Baron, Grey, succeeded to the title. For, writing Teares on the death of that hospitable "King of the Cotswolds," which occurred in 1621, John Beaumont describes him with the admiration begotten of long intimacy,-"the smoothnesse of his mind," "his wisdome and his happy parts," and "his sweet behaviour and discourse."

Or,-and how could any young Oxonian fail of it?-they started from Broadgates, down the High, crossed Magdalen Bridge, where the boats were lazily oaring below them, and set out for the climb to Rose Hill; then down by sleepy ways to Littlemore, and to Sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents to Nuneham,-where now, in the fine old manor house, hangs Frank's own portrait in oils,-one of the two contemporary likenesses of him that exist to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Leland's Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 18-19.

[2] Leland's Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. IV, 126.

[3] Collins, Peerage of England, IX, 460.

[4] J. Nichols, Collections toward the History of Leicestershire (Biblioth. Topogr. Brit., VII, 534). See, below, Appendix, A.

[5] Letters relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries, pp. 251-252, Camden Society, 1843. The editor, Thos. Wright, describes the petitioner as of Thringston, Co. Leicester.

[6] J. M. Rigg, Dict. Nat. Biog. art., John Beaumont; and Nichols's History of Leicestershire, III, ii, 651, et seq.

[7] Collins, Peerage, VI, 648, et seq.; H. N. Bell, The Huntingdon Peerage, 1821. See also, below, Appendix, Table B.

[8] Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), 1595, p. 154.

[9] Challoner, Missionary Priests, I, 347.

[10] For the preceding details, and some of those which follow, see the respective articles in the Dictionary of National Biography; Dyce's Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, Vol. I, Biographical Memoir; Grosart, Sir John Beaumont's Poems, and the sources as indicated. See also, below, Appendix, Table C.

[11] See Shaw's Knights of England; Collins, Peerage; and articles in D. N. B. under names.

[12] Dyce says that the Judge was knighted; so Rigg (D. N. B.) and others. The Inner Temple Records speak of him thirty times, but only once, Nov. 5, 1581, as "Sir," though others in memoranda running to 1601 which mention him are given the title. In the codicil to his will he is plain "Mr. Beaumont"; and he is not included in Shaw's Knights of England.

[13] For a Seat in the Groves of Coleorton.

[14] Works of B. and F., XVI.

* * *

The career of the Beaumonts at the University was shortened by the death of their father, some fourteen months after their admission. Henry had been entered of the Inner Temple, November 27, 1597, at his father's request. Some say with John, but I do not find the latter in the Records. Francis may have remained at Oxford until 1600. On November 3 of that year, he, also, was admitted a member of the Inner Temple, his two brothers acting as sponsors for him.

We notice from the admission-book that he was matriculated specialiter, gratis, comitive,-because his father had been a Bencher,-was excused from most of the ordinary duties and charges, and was permitted to take his meals and to lodge outside the Inn of Court itself. I gather that, like other young students at the time, he lodged and pursued his studies in one of the lesser Inns, called Inns of Chancery, attached to the Inner Temple and under its supervision: Clifford's Inn across Fleet Street; or, across the Strand, Lyon's Inn,-or, let us hope, by preference, Clement's Inn; where had lain Jack Falstaff in the days when he was "page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk," and was seen by lusty Shallow to "break Skogan's head at the court-gate when 'a was a crack not thus high;" where had boozed Shallow himself and his four friends-"not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns of Court again"; and where, no doubt, they were talking in Beaumont's day "of mad Shallow yet."

In 1600, the Inns of Chancery lodged about a hundred students each, and served as preparatory schools for the Inns of Court. At one of these lesser Inns[15] Beaumont would acquire some elementary knowledge of civil procedure by copying writs of the Clerks of Chancery, would listen to a reader sent over by the Inner Temple to lecture, and would be "bolted," or sifted, in the elements of law by the "inner" or junior barristers; and he would attend "moots" over which senior or "utter" barristers presided. At the end of about two years or earlier, if he proved a promising scholar, he would be transferred to the Inn of Court, itself. We may assume that about 1602, Beaumont would be sitting in Clerks' Commons in the Hall of the Inner Temple. Bread and beer for breakfast,-provided on only four days of the week. At 12 o'clock he would be summoned to dinner by the blowing of a horn,-"thou horne of hunger that cal'st the inns a court to their manger." For his mess of meat,-in Lent, fish,-on other occasions, loins of mutton, or beef,-he would make himself a trencher of bread. At 6 or 7 o'clock would come supper,-bread and beer again. After dinner, and again after supper, he would enjoy bolts and exercises conducted by the utter barristers, day in and day out through nearly the whole year. As he advanced in proficiency he would appear as a "moot-man" in the arguments presented before the Benchers, or governing fellows, seated as judges. And perhaps he resigned himself, meanwhile, to the proper wear within the Inn, which was cap and gown, "but the fashion was to wear hats, cloaks or coats, swords, rapiers, boots and spurs, large ruffs and long hair. Even Benchers were found to sit in Term Time with hats on."[16]

Whether Beaumont gave promise or not we are ignorant. The routine of the Inn was impeccable; but students and benchers were not. There were not infrequently other exercises than "moots" after supper: cards and stage-plays, revels and sometimes riots. This much we know, that before young Frank could have fulfilled his seven or more years as student and "moot-man," he was already in the rank of poets and dramatists. But, that by no means precludes his continuance for several years, perhaps till 1608, in the juridical university, or his intimate association with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of what would be his college,-the Inner Temple. And for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere was as poetic as juridical. The young man's fancy was fired by the poetry and the drama that for centuries had enlivened the graver pursuits of the Gothic halls that rose between Fleet Street and the Thames, Whitefriars and Paget Place,-"the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as Ben Jonson calls them in his dedication[17] to the Inns of Court of Every Man out of his Humour, first published in the year when Beaumont entered.

According to Aubrey, while the garden-wall of Lincoln's Inn, close by, was building, a Bencher of that society "walking thro' and hearing" a young bricklayer "repeat some Greek verses out of Homer, discoursed with him, and finding him to have a witt extraordinary gave him some exhibition to maintaine him at Trinity College, Cambridge." That young bricklayer was, later, Beaumont's friend and master, Ben Jonson. Lincoln's Inn had long been a nursing mother to dramatic effort. At the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was one of its members, Richard Edwardes, who, as Master of the Chapel Children, produced the "tragicall comedie" Damon and Pythias, and the tragedy of Palamon and Arcite, to the great edification of the Queen, and the permanent improvement of the Senecan style of drama by the fusion of the ideal and the commonplace, of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous in an appeal to popular interest. "He was highly valued," this Edwardes, "by those that knew him," says Anthony Wood, "especially his associates in Lincoln's Inn." And it was in the Middle Temple, just fourteen months after Beaumont joined the Inns of Court, that Manningham, one of the barristers, witnessed the performance for the Reader's Feast on Candlemas Day of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. If Beaumont of the Inner Temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more than the applause, he was not our Frank Beaumont. We may be sure that he had sauntered through the Temple Gardens many an afternoon, and knew the spot immortalized by Marlowe and that same Shakespeare, as the scene of the quarrel between Plantagenet and Somerset when the white and red roses were plucked, and that he would hear Shakespeare when he could.

But much as the Middle Temple and Lincoln's favoured the drama and costly entertainments on the major feast-days, they were outdone in Christmas revels and masques and plays by the closely affiliated societies of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple. Between these Houses, says Mr. Douthwaite, the historian of the former, "there appears anciently to have existed a kindly union, which is shown by the fact that on the great gate of the gardens of the Inner Temple may be seen to this day [1886] the 'griffin' of Gray's Inn, whilst over the great gateway in Gray's Inn Square is carved in bold relief the 'wingèd horse' of the Inner Temple." The two societies had long a custom of combining for the production of theatrical shows; and as we shall see, they combined some thirteen years after Beaumont entered the Inner Temple in the production at Court of one of the most glorious and expensive masques ever presented in London, Beaumont's own masque for the wedding of the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth. They were influential as patrons of the early drama, and as producers of amateur dramatists. For centuries Gray's Inn had permitted "revels" after six o'clock supper of bread and beer; and when Beaumont was of the Inner Temple close by, there was a Grand Week at Gray's in every term. "They had revels and masques some of which," as a member of that society has recently said, "have never been forgotten, and I think cannot be forgotten while English history lasts."[18] From a very early date, perhaps not long after the society was established in Edward the Third's reign in the old manor of Portpool, "they were addicted at the Christmas season to a great outburst of revelry of every kind. The revelings began at All Hallows; at Christmas a Prince of Portpoole was appointed; who was also Lord of Misrule, and he kept things gaily alive through Christmas and until toward the end of January." These and other disguises, masques, and mummeries, are lineal descendants of the mummings of the Ancient Order of the Coif, such as regaled King Richard II at Christmas 1389; and, amalgamated with St. George plays and other folk-shows and even with sword-dances, they influenced the course of rural drama throughout the realm. It may be a bow drawn at a venture but I cannot withhold the suspicion that the Lord of Pool of the Revesby Sword-Play and of other popular compositions derives from the historic Prince of Misrule of the Gray's Inn Christmas revels. It was George Gascoigne of Gray's Inn who by a translation from Ariosto introduced the Renaissance treatment of the Greek New Comedy and the Latin Comedy into England with his Supposes in 1566, and in the same year, with Francis Kinwelmersh, produced at Gray's Inn an English rendering of Ludovico Dolce's Giocasta, a tragedy descended from Euripides' Phoenissae by way of a Latin version. "Altogether," remarks Professor Cunliffe,[19] "the play must have provided a gorgeous and exciting spectacle, and have produced an impression not unworthy of Gray's Inn, 'an House', the Queen said on another occasion, 'she was much beholden unto, for that it did always study for some sports to present unto her.'" To this house and to Gascoigne, Shakespeare, too, was beholden, for from the Supposes proceeds more or less directly the minor plot of The Taming of the Shrew. In 1588, Gray's Inn figures prominently again in the career of the pre-Shakespearian drama, with the production by one of its gentlemen, Thomas Hughes, of a tragedy of English legend and Senecan type, The Misfortunes of Arthur, played by the society before the Queen at Greenwich. And, in 1594, Gray's Inn connects itself with the Shakespearian drama directly by witnessing in the great hall in the Christmas season a play called A Comedy of Errors, "like to Plautus his Menaechmus."

It is diverting to note that on the eve of just that season of 1594, a very pious woman, the second wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the mother of Anthony and Francis, is writing to the elder brother "I trust that they will not mum nor sinfully make revel at Gray's Inn." Anthony was not a very strict Puritan, Francis still less so; and Francis, who had been of Gray's Inn since 1575, was, till his fall from power, the keenest devotee and most ardent and reckless promoter of masquing that Gray's Inn or, for that matter, England, had ever known. According to Spedding,[20] the speeches of the six councillors for the famous court of the Prince of Purpoole in 1594 were written by him and him alone. He furnished the money and much of the device for gorgeous masques before Queen Elizabeth; and under her successor he was prime mover in many a masque, like that of the Flowers, presented by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, in 1614, which, alone, cost him about ￡10,000 as reckoned in the money of to-day. The masques by the four Inns, in honour of the Elector Palatine's marriage, the year before, are said to have cost ￡20,000,-five hundred thousand dollars in the money of to-day! And it would appear that much of this expense was assumed by Sir Francis Bacon, who in the years of his greatness as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General retained intimate relations with the life of Gray's Inn, and whom our Beaumont during the years of studentship before 1603, when the gallant Sir Walter Raleigh was consigned to the Tower, must many times have seen strolling with Sir Walter in the walks that Bacon himself had laid out for his fellow-benchers of the Inn.

If Beaumont's family had deliberately set about preparing him for his career of poet and dramatist, especially of dramatist who, with John Fletcher, should vividly reproduce the life, manners and conversation of young men of fashion about town, they could not have placed him in a community more favourable to these ends than that of the Inns of Court. As the name itself implies the members were gentlemen of the Court of the King. They must be "sons to persons of quality"; they must be trained to the possibility of appearance before the King at any time; they must be ready not merely as a privilege, but as a function, to entertain royalty upon summons. As Gray's Inn had its flavour of romance, its literary and dramatic history, its Sidney, its Bacon, its Gascoigne; so also the "anciently allied House" of the Inner Temple. There lingered the tradition, to say the least, of Chaucer's stirring poetry; there the spirit of Sir Francis Drake,-stirring romances of the Spanish main; there the memory of the Christmas revels of 1562 at which was first acted the Gorboduc of Thomas Sackville (afterwards Earl of Dorset, and connected by marriage with the Fletchers), and Thomas Norton,-whose "stately speeches and well sounding phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile," whose national quality, romantic illumination of classical form, impressive, and novel dramatic blank verse were to influence imperishably the course of Elizabethan tragedy. There, too, had been produced, by five poets of the House, in 1568, "the first English love-tragedy that has survived,"[21] Gismond of Salerne, a distant but unmistakable forerunner in tempestuous passion and pathos of plays in which young Beaumont was to compose the major part, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King.

Here, in the intervals between moots and bolts in the day time or during the long evenings about the central fire in Hall or in Chambers, a young man of poetic proclivities would find ample opportunity to indulge his genius. And, even after he ceased to be an inmate, the Inner Temple would still be for him a club, in which by the payment of a small annual fee he might retain membership for life. And membership in one 'college' of this pseudo-university implied an honorary 'freedom' of the others. Beaumont would know not only William Browne, the poet of the Inner Temple from 1611 on, and all Browne's poetic fellows in that House, but Browne's less poetic friend, Christopher Brooke, counsel for Shakespeare's company of King's Players, who earlier in the century had entered Lincoln's Inn; and, also, Brooke's chamber-fellow, John Donne, whose secret marriage with the daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower, in 1609, got the young scapegraces into jail. And at Gray's Inn Beaumont would be even more at home. It was the 'House' of his kinsman, Henry Hastings of Ashby,-in 1604 Earl of Huntingdon,-two years younger than Frank, and admitted as early as 1597; and of Robert Pierrepoint, who had come down with Frank from Oxford and was entered of the Inns at the same time; and, two years later, of Robert's cousin, William Cavendish, afterwards second Earl of Devonshire.

* * *

If we could be sure that a poem called The Metamorphosis of Tabacco, a mock-Ovidian poem of graceful style and more than ordinary wit, published in 1602, and ascribed by some one writing in a contemporary hand upon the title-page, to John Beaumont, was John's we might regard the half dozen verses in praise of "thy pleasing rime," signed F. B., and beginning,

My new-borne Muse assaies her tender wing,

And where she should crie, is inforst to sing,-

as young Francis' earliest effort in rhyme. The dedication of the Metamorphosis to "my loving friend, Master Michael Drayton," favours the conjectured composition by John, for he is writing other complimentary poems to Drayton in the years immediately following 1602. But, though F. B.'s lines prefatory to the Metamorphosis are not unworthy of a fanciful youngster, they are negligible; as is the evidence of their authorship. Certain flimsy love-poems included in a volume published forty years later, twenty-four years after Beaumont's death, as of his composition, have also been attributed to his boyhood at the University, or at the Inner Temple. Most of them have been definitely traced to other authors, and of the rest of this class still unassigned there is no reason to believe that he was the author. In the same volume, however, there appears as by Beaumont a metrical tale based upon Ovid, called Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, of which we cannot be certain that he was not the author. The poem was first published, without name of writer, in 1602,[22] and was not assigned to Francis Beaumont until 1639, when Lawrence Blaiklock included it among the Poems: By Francis Beaumont, Gent., entered on the Stationers' Registers, September 2, and published, 1640. Blaiklock evidently printed from John Hodgets's edition of 1602, carelessly omitting here and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical mistakes. Either because he had private information that Beaumont was the author, or because he wished to profit by Beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as to sign the initials, F. B., to the verse dedication, To Calliope, and to alter the signature, A. F., appended to an introductory sonnet, To the Author, so as to read I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher.) These licenses, in addition to the reckless inclusion in the 1640 volume of several poems by authors other than Beaumont, vitiate Blaiklock's evidence. On the other hand, the original publisher, Hodgets, was the publisher also, in 1607, of The Woman-Hater, a play now reasonably accepted as by Beaumont, originally alone; and, in Hodgets's edition of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, one of the introductory sonnets is signed J. B., and another W. B. The 'J. B.' sonnet is not unworthy of Beaumont's brother John. And if the W. B. of the other verses, In Laudem Authoris, is William Basse,-who in a sonnet, written after Beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare Beaumont,"-there is further justification for entertaining the possibility of Beaumont's authorship of the Salmacis. For Basse was one of the group of pastoralists to which Francis' friend Drayton, and Drayton's friend, William Browne, belonged,-a group with which Francis must have been acquainted. But of that we shall have more to say when we come to consider Beaumont's later connection with Drayton, and with the dramatic activities of the Inner Temple at a time when Browne and other pastoralists were members of it. For the present it is sufficient to say that Basse was himself issuing a pastoral romance in the year of Salmacis, 1602; and that he was by way of subscribing himself simply W. B.

The external evidence for Beaumont's authorship of this metrical tale is, at the best, but slight. As regards the internal, however, I cannot agree with Fleay and the author of the article entitled Salmacis and Hermaphroditus not by Beaumont.[23] Both diction and verse display characteristics not foreign to Beaumont's heroic couplets in epistle and elegy, nor to the blank verse of his dramas,-though they do not markedly distinguish them. The romantic-classical and idyllic grace may be the germ of that which flowers in the tragicomedies; and the joyous irony is not unlike that of The Woman-Hater and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The poem is a voluptuous and rambling expansion of the classical theme "which sweet-lipt Ovid long agoe did tell." The writer, like many a lad of 1602, has steeped himself in the amatory fable and fancy of Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare; and the passionate imaginings are such as characterize poetic lads of seventeen in any period. It is not impossible that here we have Francis Beaumont's earliest attempt at a poem of some proportions, and that he was stirred to it by exercises like The Endimion and Phoebe of Drayton, probably by that time the friend of the Grace-Dieu family. Francis, indeed, need not have been ashamed of such a performance, for in spite of the erotic fervour and the occasional far-fetched conceits, the poet has visualized clearly the scenes of his mythological idyl, and enlivened the narrative with ingenuous humour; he has caught the figured style and something of the winged movement of his masters; and every here and there he has produced lines of more than imitative beauty:

Looke how, when Autumne comes, a little space

Paleth the red blush of the Summer's face,

Searing the leaves, the Summer's covering,

Three months in weaving by the curious Spring,-

Making the grasse, his greene locks, go to wracke,

Tearing each ornament from off his backe;

So did she spoyle the garments she did weare,

Tearing whole ounces of her golden hayre.

The earliest definite indication that I have found of Beaumont's literary activity, and of his recognition by poets, connects him with his brother John, and is highly suggestive in still other respects. John had already written, in 1603 or 1604, verses prefatory to Drayton's poetic treatment of Moyses in a Map of his Miracles, published in June of the latter year; and also, in 1605, to Drayton's revision of the Barrons Wars. On April 19, 1606, Drayton issued a volume entitled Poems Lyrick and Pastoral, which included with other verses a revision, under the name of Eglogs, of his Idea, the Shepheard's Garland, first published in 1593. In the eighth eclogue of this new edition, Drayton, writing of the ladies of his time to whom "much the Muses owe," adds to his praise of Sidney's (Elphin's) sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, an encomium upon the two daughters of his early patron, Sir Henry Goodere, Frances and Anne (Lady Ramsford); then he celebrates a "dear Sylvia, one the best alive," and

Then that dear nymph that in the Muses joys,

That in wild Charnwood with her flocks doth go,

Mirtilla, sister to those hopeful boys,

My lovèd Thyrsis and sweet Palmeo;

That oft to Soar the southern shepherds bring,

Of whose clear waters they divinely sing.

So good she is, so good likewise they be,

As none to her might brother be but they,

Nor none a sister unto them, but she,-

To them for wit few like, I dare will say:

In them as Nature truly meant to show

How near the first, she in the last could go.

The "golden-mouthed Drayton musical" had spent his youth not many miles from "wild Charnwood," at Polesworth Hall, the home of the Gooderes, in Warwickshire. The dear nymph of Charnwood is Elizabeth Beaumont, in 1606 a lass of eighteen,-and the "hopeful boys" who bring the southern shepherds (Jonson, perhaps, and young John Fletcher, as well as Drayton) to their Grace-Dieu priory by the river Soar, are John, then about twenty-three, and the future dramatist, about twenty-two.[24] Under the pastoral pseudonym of Mirtilla, Elizabeth is again celebrated by Drayton twenty-four years later, in his Muses Elizium. Since these Pastorals are in confessed sequence with those of "the prime pastoralist of England," and the pastoral Thyrsis and young Palmeo have already sung divinely of the clear waters of their native stream, it would appear that they too are disciples at that time of Master Edmund Spenser in his Shepheards Calender. And since these brothers, so like in wit and feature, and in charming devotion to their sister, are all the brothers that she has, it is evident that this portion of the Eglog was written after July 10, 1605; for up to that date, the eldest of the family, Henry, was still living, and at the manor house of Grace-Dieu. This friendship between Drayton and the "hopeful boys" continued through life; for, as we shall later note and more at length, in 1627, the year of John's death, and many years after that of Francis, the older poet still celebrates the twain as "My dear companions whom I freely chose My bosome-friends."

When James I made his famous progress from Edinburgh to London, April 5 to May 3, 1603, "every nobleman and gentleman kept open house as he passed. He spent his time in festivities and amusements of various kinds. The gentry of the counties through which his journey lay thronged in to see him. Most of them returned home decorated with the honours of knighthood, a title which he dispensed with a profusion which astonished those who remembered the sober days of Elizabeth."[25] One of those thus decorated was the poet's brother Henry, who was dubbed knight bachelor at Worksop in Derbyshire, on the same day as his uncle, "Henry Perpoint of county Notts," and William Skipwith of Cotes in the Beaumont county-who appears later as a friend of Fletcher. Two days afterwards, Thomas Beaumont of Coleorton received the honour of knighthood at the Earl of Rutland's castle of Belvoir.[26]

Sir Henry of Grace-Dieu did not long enjoy his title. He died about the tenth of July 1605, and was buried on the thirteenth. By his will, witnessed by his brother Francis, and probated February 1606, Sir Henry left half of his private estate to his sister, Elizabeth "for her advancement in marriage," and the other half to be divided equally between John and Francis. He was succeeded as head of the family by John,[27] who later married a daughter of John Fortescue-also of a poetic race-and left by her a large family. The sister, Elizabeth (Mirtilla) probably continued to live at Grace-Dieu until her marriage to Thomas Seyliard of Kent. And that Francis occasionally came home on visits from London we have other proof than that afforded by Drayton. The provision of a competence made by Sir Henry's will leads us to conjecture that the subsequent dramatic activity of the younger brother was undertaken for sheer love of the art; and that, while his finances may have been occasionally at low ebb, the association in Bohemian ménage with John Fletcher, which followed the years of residence at the Inner Temple, was a matter of choice, not of poverty.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Inns of Court and Chancery (Lond., 1912), p. 45; W. R. Douthwaite, Gray's Inn, its History and Associations (Lond., 1886), pp. 36, 78, 253. For the Beaumonts, and what follows, see, also, Inderwick, Inner Temple Records (Lond. 1896), I, 421; II, 435; Introductions, and subjects as indexed.

[16] Inns of Court, etc., p. 163.

[17] The Dedication first appears in the folio of 1616.

[18] H. E. Duke, K. C., M. P., Gray's Inn in Six Lectures on the Inns of Court and of Chancery, 1912.

[19] Early English Classical Tragedies, Introduction, p. lxxxvi.

[20] Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, I, 342.

[21] Cunliffe, E. E. Class. Tragedies, p. lxxxvi.

[22] Reprinted by Dramaticus, Sh. Soc. Pap. III, 94 (1847).

[23] Dramaticus, (as above).

[24] On these identifications, see Fleay, Chron. Eng. Dr., I, 143-145; Elton, Michael Drayton, pp. 13, 58; Child, Michael Drayton (in Camb. Hist. Lit., IV, 197, et seq.).

[25] Gardiner, Hist. Engl. 1603-1607, p. 87.

[26] Shaw's Knights of Engl., Vol. II, under dates.

[27] Grosart (D. N. B. art. John Beaumont) says that John had been admitted to the Inner Temple with Henry. John does not appear in Inderwick.

* * *

Certain political events of the years 1603 to 1606 must have occasioned the young Beaumonts intimate and poignant concern. Their own family was, of course, Protestant, but it was closely connected by blood and matrimonial alliance with some of the most devoted and conspicuous Catholic families of England. Some of their Hastings kinsmen, sons of Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, were Catholics; and their first cousins, the Vauxes, whose home at Great Harrowden near by had been for over twenty years the harbourage of persecuted priests, were active Jesuits.

After the death of his first wife,-Beaumont's aunt Elizabeth, who left four children, Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne,-William, Lord Vaux, had married Mary, the sister of the noble-hearted and self-sacrificing Catholic, Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton in Northamptonshire; and this lady had brought up her own children, George and Ambrose, as well as the children of the first marriage, in strict adherence to the Roman faith and practice. Henry, the heir to the title, had been one of that zealous band of young Catholic gentlemen who received Fathers Campion and Persons on their arrival in England in 1580.[28] Before 1594, Henry, "that blessed gentleman and saint," as Father Persons calls him, had died, having resigned his inheritance of the Barony to his brother George some years earlier in order to spend his remaining days in celibacy, study, and prayer. In 1590, George, the elder son by the second marriage, had taken to wife, Elizabeth Roper, also an ardent Catholic, the daughter of the future Lord Teynham. She was left a widow in 1594 with an infant son, Edward, whom she educated to maintain the Catholicity of the family. In 1595, the old Baron, Beaumont's uncle, died-"the infortunatest peer of Parliament for poverty that ever was" by reason of the fines and forfeitures entailed upon him for his religious zeal. Meanwhile, in 1591, we find the daughters of the first marriage, Eleanor, whose husband was an Edward Brookesby, of Arundel House, Leicestershire, and Anne Vaux, concealing in a house in Warwickshire, the well-known Father Gerard and his Superior, Father Garnet, from priest-hunters, or pursuivants. These two cousins of Beaumont are described in Father Gerard's Narrative[29] as illustrious for goodness and holiness, "whom in my own mind I often compare to the two women who received our Lord." The younger, Anne, "was remarkable at all times for her virginal modesty and shamefacedness, but in the cause of God and the defence of His servants, the virgo became virago. She is almost always ill, but we have seen her, when so weakened as to be scarce able to utter three words without pain, on the arrival of the pursuivants become so strong as to spend three or four hours in contest with them. When she has no priest in the house she feels afraid; but the simple presence of a priest so animates her that then she makes sure that no devil has any power over her house." In the years that follow to 1605, the Vauxes are identified as recusants and as sympathizers with the untoward fortunes of Fathers Southwell, Walpole, Garnet, and others. In 1601, their kinsman and Frank Beaumont's, Henry Hastings, nephew to George, fourth Earl of Huntingdon, has joined the ranks and in 1602, we find him in a list of Jesuits "to be sought after" by the Earl of Salisbury,-"John Gerard with Mrs. Vaux and young Mr. Hastings." Father Gerard's headquarters in fact are from 1598 to 1605 with Mrs. Vaux and her son Edward, the young Baron, at Great Harrowden, and there others of the fifteen Jesuit fathers in England at that time, and prominent Catholics, such as Sir Oliver Manners, brother of Roger, Earl of Rutland, Sir Everard Digby, and Francis Tresham, a first cousin of Mrs. Vaux, were wont to foregather.

When James I came to the throne, the Catholics had hope of some alleviation of the penalties under which they laboured. Disappointed in this hope, the discontented, led by two priests, Watson and Clarke, embarked upon a wild scheme to kidnap the King and set as the price of his liberty the extension to Catholics of equal rights, religious, civil, and political, with the Protestants. The plot was betrayed, the priests executed, and the other leaders condemned to death,-then reprieved but attainted. Among those thus reprieved were Lord Grey de Wilton and "a confederate named Brookesby." This Brookesby was Bartholomew, the brother of Eleanor Vaux's husband. When new and more stringent measures were immediately adopted for the repression of priests and recusants, the indignation of the Catholics reached a climax. "They saw," says Gardiner, "no more than the intolerable wrong under which they suffered; and it would be strange if there were not some amongst them who would be driven to meet wrong with violence, and to count even the perpetration of a great crime as a meritorious deed."[30]

In 1603 Father Gerard took a new house in London in the fields behind St. Clement's Inn,-just across the Strand from the Inner Temple where Francis Beaumont was living at the time. "This new house," says Gerard, "was very suitable and convenient and had private entrances on both sides, and I had contrived in it some most excellent hiding-places; and there I should have long remained, free from all peril or even suspicion, if some friends of mine, while I was absent from London, had not availed themselves of the house rather rashly."[31] These friends were Robert Catesby, a cousin of the Vauxes of Harrowden; his cousin, Thomas Winter; Winter's relative, John Wright, and Thomas Percy, a kinsman of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland,-all gentlemen of distinguished county families. In May 1604, these men with one Guy Fawkes of York and Scotton, a soldier of fortune and "excellent good natural parts," and, like the rest, fanatic with brooding over the wrongs of the Catholic Church, met at Father Gerard's house behind St. Clement's Inn, swore to keep secret the purpose of their meeting, received in an adjoining room the Sacrament from Father Gerard, an unwitting accomplice, in confirmation of their oath; and then, retiring, learned from Catesby that the project intended was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder when the King and the royal family next came to the House of Lords. Within a few days "Thomas Percy hired a howse at Westminster," says Fawkes in his subsequent Confession, "neare adjoyning Parlt. howse, and there wee beganne to make a myne about the XI of December, 1604." The rest of the story is too well-known to call for repetition. How the gunpowder was smuggled into a cellar running under the Parliament House; how, when Parliament was prorogued to November 5th, 1605, the conspirators, running short of money to equip an insurrection, added to their number a few wealthy accomplices,-most significant to our narrative, that old friend of the Vauxes, Sir Edward Digby, and Francis Tresham, cousin of Catesby and the Winters, and as I have said of the Vauxes themselves.[32] How Tresham, recoiling from the destruction of innocent Catholic Lords with the detested Protestants, met Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes at White Webbs, "a house known as Dr. Hewick's house by Enfield Chace," and laboured with them for permission to warn their friends, especially his brothers-in-law, Lord Stourton and Monteagle; and how, when permission was refused, he wrote an anonymous letter to Monteagle, begging him "as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament; for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time." How Monteagle informed the Council and the King. How Guy Fawkes was discovered among his barrels of gunpowder, and on the fourth of November arrested as "John Johnson," the servant of Thomas Percy, one of the King's Gentlemen Pensioners. How "on the morning of the fifth, the news of the great deliverance ran like wildfire along the streets of London," and Catesby and Wright, Percy and the brothers Winter, were in full flight for Lady Catesby's house in Ashby St. Legers, Northamptonshire, not far from Harrowden.

With the rest of the world Francis Beaumont would gasp with amazement. But what must have been his concern when on the first examination of "John Johnson," November 5th, the identity of that conspirator was established not by any confession of his, but from the contents of a letter found upon him, written by-Beaumont's first cousin, Anne Vaux![33]

As intelligence oozed from the Lords of Council, Beaumont would next learn that Anne's sister-in-law, Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux of Harrowden had expected something was about to take place, and that Father Gerard and "Walley" [Garnet, the Father Superior of the English Jesuits] "made her house their chief resort"; and then that Fawkes had confessed that Catesby, the two Winters, and Francis Tresham-all of the Vaux family connection-and Sir Everard Digby of their close acquaintance, were implicated in the Plot; and that the conspiracy was not merely to blow up the older members of the royal family but to secure the Princess Elizabeth, place her upon the throne, and marry her to an English Catholic,[34]-therefore, an enterprise likely to implicate his Catholic cousins, indeed. His friend, Ben Jonson, is meanwhile blustering of private informations, and Francis would be likely to hear that Ben has written (November 8) to Lord Salisbury offering his services to unravel the web "if no better person can be found," and averring that the Catholics "are all so enweaved in it as it will make 500 gent. lesse of the religion within this weeke." Then he is apprised that John Wright, Catesby, Percy, etc., have been seen at "Lady" Vaux's on the eighth. The next day, that these three and Christopher Wright have been overtaken and slain; and then that, on the ninth, Fawkes has confessed that they have been using a house of Father Garnet's at White Webbs as a rendezvous. Perhaps White Webbs means nothing to Francis just yet, but it soon will. Three days later, Tresham under examination acknowledges interviews with his cousins, Catesby and Thomas Winter, and with Fathers Garnet and Gerard; but says he has not been at Mrs. Vaux's house at Harrowden for a year. Soon afterwards, December 5, the Inner Temple itself is shaken to the foundations by the intelligence that Jesuit literature has been discovered by Sir Edward Coke in Tresham's chamber,-a manuscript of Blackwell's famous treatise on Equivocation, destined to play a baleful r?le in the ensuing examination of certain of the suspects.

Meanwhile, Francis would observe with alarm that his Vaux cousins are from day to day objects of deeper suspicion. On November 13, Lord Vaux's house at Harrowden is searched; his mother gives up all her keys but no papers are found. She and the young lord strongly deny all knowledge of the treason; the house, however, is still guarded. On the eighteenth, Elizabeth, Mrs. Vaux, is examined and says that she does not know "Gerard, the priest"[!]; but among the visitors at her house she mentions Catesby, Digby, and "Greene" [Greenway] and "Darcy" [Garnet], priests. She acknowledges having written to Lady Wenman, the wife of Sir Richard, last Easter, saying that "Tottenham would turn French," but fails to explain her meaning. From other quarters, however, it is learned that she bade that lady "be of good comfort for there should soon be toleration for religion," adding: "Fast and pray that that may come to pass which we purpose, which yf it doe, wee shall see Totnam turned French." And Sir Richard, examined concerning the contents of Mrs. Vaux's letter to his wife, affirms that he "disliked their intercourse, because Mrs. Vaux tried to pervert his wife." On December 4, Catesby's servant, Bates, acknowledges that he revealed the whole Plot to Greenway, the priest, in confession, "who said it was a good cause, bade him be secret, and absolved him." From Henry Huddleston's examination, December 6, it appears that Mrs. Vaux has not been telling the whole truth about Harrowden, for not only were the two other priests most suspected, Garnet and Greenway, there sometimes, but also Gerard, whom Huddleston has met there. On January 19, Bates definitely connects Gerard and Garnet with the proceedings; and all three priests are proclaimed. Gerard cannot be found, but from his own Narrative it appears that he had been hiding at Harrowden before, that now he is concealed in London, and Elizabeth Vaux knows where.[35] When she is brought again before the Lords of Council and threatened with death if she tell not where the priest is, we may imagine the interest of the Beaumonts. Francis, though no sympathizer with the Plot, cannot have failed to admire the bearing of Elizabeth during the examination:

"As for my hostess, Mrs. Vaux," writes Father Gerard, "she was brought to London after that long search for me, and strictly examined about me by the Lords of the Council; but she answered to everything so discreetly as to escape all blame. At last they produced a letter of hers to a certain relative, asking for the release of Father Strange and another, of whom I spoke before. This relative of hers was the chief man in the county in which they had been taken, and she thought she could by her intercession with him prevail for their release. But the treacherous man, who had often enough, as far as words went, offered to serve her in any way, proved the truth of our Lord's prophecy, 'A man's enemies shall be those of his own household!' for he immediately sent up her letter to the Council. They showed her, therefore, her own letter, and said to her, 'You see now that you are entirely at the King's mercy for life or death; so if you consent to tell us where Father Gerard is, you shall have your life.'

"'I do not know where he is,' she answered, 'and if I did know, I would not tell you.'

"Then rose one of the lords, who had been a former friend of hers, to accompany her to the door, out of courtesy, and on the way said to her persuasively, 'Have pity on yourself and on your children, and say what is required of you, for otherwise you must certainly die.'

"To which she answered with a loud voice, 'Then, my lord, I will die.'

"This was said when the door had been opened, so that her servants who were waiting for her heard what she said, and all burst into weeping. But the Council only said this to terrify her, for they did not commit her to prison, but sent her to the house of a certain gentleman in the city, and after being held there in custody for a time she was released, but on condition of remaining in London. And one of the principal Lords of the Council acknowledged to a friend that he had nothing against her, except that she was a stout Papist, going ahead of others, and, as it were, a leader in evil."

What follows of Elizabeth's devotion to the cause, would not be likely to filter through; but the Beaumonts may have had their suspicions. According to Father Gerard:-

"Immediately she was released from custody, knowing that I was then in London, quite forgetful of herself, she set about taking care of me, and provided all the furniture and other things necessary for my new house. Moreover, she sent me letters daily, recounting everything that occurred; and when she knew that I wished to cross the sea for a time, she bid me not spare expense, so that I secured a safe passage, for that she would pay everything, though it should cost five thousand florins, and in fact she sent me at once a thousand florins for my journey. I left her in care of Father Percy, who had already as my companion lived a long time at her house. There he still remains, and does much good. I went straight to Rome, and being sent back thence to these parts, was fixed at Louvain."[36] So much at present of Elizabeth. We shall hear of her, as did Beaumont, during the succeeding years.

In the tribulations of Anne Vaux, his own first cousin, Francis must have been even more deeply interested. That she was in communication with Fawkes had been discovered, November 5. She was apprehended, committed to the care of Sir John Swynerton, but temporarily discharged. When Fawkes confessed, November 9, that the conspirators had been using a house of Father Garnet's at White Webbs, in Enfield Chace, the house called "Dr. Hewick's" was searched. "No papers nor munition found, but Popish books and relics,-and many trap-doors and secret passages." Garnet had escaped but, on examination of the servants, it developed that under the pseudonym of "Meaze" he had taken the house "for his sister, Mrs. Perkins,"-[and who should "Mrs. Perkins" turn out to be but Anne Vaux!] The books and relics are the property of "Mrs. Jennings,"-[and who should she be but Anne's sister, Eleanor Brookesby!] "Mrs. Perkins spent a month at White Webbs lately;" and "three gentlemen [Catesby, Winter, and another] came to White Webbs, the day the King left Royston" [October 31]. On November 27, Sir Everard Digby's servant deposes concerning Garnet that "Mrs. Ann Vaux doth usually goe with him whithersoever he goethe." On January 19, as we have seen, warrants are out for the arrest of Garnet. On January 30, he is taken with another Jesuit priest, Father Oldcorne, at Hindlip Hall, in Worcestershire, where for seven days and nights they have been buried in a closet, and nourished by broths conveyed to them by means of a quill which passed "through a little hole in a chimney that backed another chimney into a gentlewoman's chamber." True enough, the deposition, that whithersoever her beloved Father Superior "goethe, Mrs. Ann Vaux doth usually goe"; for she is the gentlewoman of the broths and quill,-she with Mrs. Abington, the sister of Monteagle. Garnet and Oldcorne are taken prisoners to the Tower; and three weeks later Anne is in town again, communicating with Garnet by means of letters, ostensibly brief and patent, but eked out with tidings written in an invisible ink of orange-juice. On March 6, Garnet confesses that Mrs. Anne Vaux, alias Perkins, he, and Brookesby bear the expenses of White Webbs. On March 11, Anne being examined says that she keeps the place at her own expense; that Catesby, Winter, and Tresham have been to her house, but that she knew nothing of the Plot; on the contrary, suspecting some mischief at one time, she had "begged Garnet to prevent it." Examined again on March 24, she says that "Francis Tresham, her cousin, often visited her and Garnet at White Webbs, Erith, Wandsworth, etc., when Garnet would counsel him to be patient and quiet; and that they also visited Tresham at his house in Warwickshire." Garnet's trial took place at Guildhall on March 28, Sir Edward Coke of the Inner Temple acting for the prosecution. Garnet acknowledged that the Plot had been conveyed to him by another priest [Greenway] in confession. He was convicted, however, not for failing to divulge that knowledge, but for failing to dissuade Catesby and the rest, both before and after he had gained knowledge from Greenway. He was executed on May 3. Of Anne's share in all that has preceded, Beaumont would by this date have known. One wonders whether he or his brother, John, ever learned the pathetic details of the final correspondence between Anne and the Father Superior. How, March 21, she wrote to him asking directions for the disposal of herself, and concluding that life without him was "not life but deathe." How, April 2, he replied with advice for her future; and as to Oldcorne and himself, added that the former had "dreamt there were two tabernacles prepared for them." How, the next day, she wrote again asking fuller directions and wishing Father Oldcorne had "dreamt there was a third seat" for her. And how, that same day, with loving thought for all details of her proceedings, and with sorrow for his own weakness under examination, the Father Superior sends his last word to her,-that he will "die not as a victorious martyr, but as a penitent thief,"-and bids her farewell.

All this of the Harrowden cousins and their connection with Catholicism and the Gunpowder Plot, I have included not only because it touches nearly upon the family interests and friendships of Beaumont's early years, but also because it throws light upon the circumstances and feelings which prompted the satire of his first play, The Woman-Hater (acted in 1607), where as we shall see he alludes with horror to the Plot itself, but holds up to ridicule the informers who swarmed the streets of London in the years succeeding, and trumped up charges of conspiracy and recusancy against unoffending persons, and so sought to deprive them, if not of life, of property. It is with some hesitancy, since the proof to me is not conclusive, that I suggest that the animus in this play against favourites and intelligencers has perhaps more of a personal flavour than has hitherto been suspected. An entry from the Docquet, calendared with the State Papers, Domestic, of November 14, 1607, may indicate that John Beaumont, the brother of Francis, though a Protestant, had in some way manifested sympathy with his Catholic relatives during the persecutions which followed the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot:-"Gift to Sir Jas. Sempill of the King's two parts of the site of the late dissolved monastery of Grace-Dieu, and other lands in Leicester, in the hands of the Crown by the recusancy of John Beaumont." At first reading the John Beaumont would appear to be Francis' grandfather, the Master of the Rolls. But the Master lost his lands not for recusancy (or refusal on religious grounds to take the Oath of Allegiance, or attend the State Church), but for malfeasance in office, and that in 1552-3, while the Protestant Edward VI was King. He had no lands to lose after Mary mounted the throne,-even if as a Protestant he were recusant under a Catholic Queen. The recusancy seems to be of a date contemporaneous with James's refusal, October 17, 1606, to take fines from recusants, the King, as the State Papers inform us, taking "two-thirds of their goods, lands, etc., instead." The "two-thirds" would appear to be the "two parts" of Grace-Dieu and other lands, specified in the Gift; and that the sufferer was Francis Beaumont's brother is rendered the more likely by the fact that the beneficiary, Sir James Sempill, had been distinguishing himself by hatred of Roman Catholics from November 16, 1605, on; and that on July 31, 1609, he is again receiving grants "out of lands and goods of recusants, to be convicted at his charges."

There is nothing, indeed, in the career of Beaumont's brother, John, as commonly recorded, or in the temper of his poetry to indicate a refusal on his part to disavow the supremacy of Rome in ecclesiastical affairs, or to attend regularly the services of the Protestant Church. His writings speak both loyalty and Protestant Christianity. But it is to be noted that not only many of his kinsmen but his wife, as well, belonged to families affiliated with Roman Catholicism, and that his eulogistic poems addressed to James are all of later years,-after his kinsman, Buckingham, had "drawn him from his silent cell," and "first inclined the anointed head to hear his rural songs, and read his lines"; also that it is only under James's successor that he is honoured by a baronetcy. It is, therefore, not at all impossible that, because of some careless or over-frank utterance of fellow-feeling for his Catholic connections, or of repugnance for the unusually savage measures adopted after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, he may have been accused of recusancy, deprived of part of his estate, and driven into the seclusion which he maintained at Grace-Dieu till 1616 or thereabout.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] John Morris, Life of Father John Gerard, p. 311, et seq.

[29] Morris, op. cit., p. 113. See below, Appendix, Table D.

[30] Gardiner, Hist. Engl. 1603-1642, I, 234.

[31] Morris, p. 360. See also, below, Appendix, Table D.

[32] Fletcher's connections, also, the Bakers, Lennards, and Sackvilles were interested in the fortunes of Francis Tresham; for he had married Anne Tufton of Hothfield, Kent, granddaughter of Mary Baker who was sister of Sir Richard of Sissinghurst and of Cicely, first Countess of Dorset.-Collins, III, 489; Hasted, VII, 518. See below, Appendix, Tables D, E.

[33] The facts as here presented are drawn from the Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), the Gunpowder Plot Book, and Father Gerard's Narrative (in Morris), in the order of dates as indicated.

[34] Nov. 5-8.

[35] Morris, Life of Father Gerard, p. 385.

[36] Morris, pp. 413-414.

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