Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      CHAPTER V

      FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH

      The friendship between Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher may have commenced at any time after Francis became a member of the Inner Temple, in 1600, – probably not later than 1605, when Beaumont was about twenty-one and Fletcher twenty-six. The latter was the son of "a comely and courtly prelate," Richard, Bishop, successively of Bristol, Worcester, and London. Richard's father, also, had been a clergyman; and Richard, himself, in his earlier years had been pensioner and scholar of Trinity, Cambridge (1563), then Fellow of Bene't College (Corpus Christi), then President of the College. In 1573 he married Elizabeth Holland at Cranbrook in Kent, perhaps of the family of Hugh Holland, descended from the Earls of Kent, who later appears in the circle of Beaumont's acquaintance; became, next, minister of the church of Rye, Sussex, about fifteen miles south of Cranbrook; then, Chaplain to the Queen; then, Dean of Peterborough. While he was officiating at Rye, in December 1579, John the fourth of nine children, was born. This John, the dramatist, is probably the "John Fletcher of London," who was admitted pensioner of Bene't College, Cambridge, in 1591, and, as if destined for holy orders, became two years later a Bible-clerk, reading the lessons in the services of the college chapel. At the time of his entering college, his father had risen to the bishopric of Bristol; and, later in 1591, had been made Lord High Almoner to the Queen; he had a house at Chelsea, and was near the court "where his presence was accustomed much to be." By 1593 the Bishop had been advanced to the diocese of Worcester; and we find him active in the House of Lords with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the proposal of severe measures against the Barrowists and Brownists.37 The next year he was elected Bishop of London, – succeeding John Aylmer, who had been tutor to Lady Jane Grey, – and was confirmed by royal assent in January 1595. From Sir John Harington's unfavourable account38 it would appear that the Bishop owed his rapid promotion to the combination of great mind and small means which made him a fitting tool for "zealous courtiers whose devotion did serve them more to prey on the Church than pray in the Church." But his will, drawn in 1593, shows him mindful of the poor, solicitous concerning the "Chrystian and godlie education" of his children and confident in the principles and promises of the Christian faith, – "this hope hath the God of all comforte laide upp in my breste."

      We have no record of John's proceeding to a degree. It is not unlikely that he left Cambridge for the city when his father attained the metropolitan see. From early years the boy had enjoyed every opportunity of observing the ways of monarchs and courtiers, scholars and poets, as well as of princes of the Church. Since 1576, his father had "lived in her highnes," the Queen's, "gratious aspect and favour." Præsul splendidus, says Camden. Eloquent, accomplished, courtly, lavish in hospitality and munificence, no wonder that he counted among his friends, Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, and Burghley's oldest son, Sir Thomas Cecil, Anthony Bacon, the brother of Sir Francis, and that princely second Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, who had married the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, and with whom the lame but clever Anthony Bacon lived. Sir Francis Drake also was one of his friends and gave him a "ringe of golde" which he willed to one of his executors. Another of his "loveinge freindes," and an assistant-executor of his will, was the learned and vigorous Dr. Richard Bancroft, his successor as Bishop of London and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. As for immediate literary connections, suffice it here to say that the Bishop's brother, Dr. Giles Fletcher, was a cultivated diplomat and writer upon government, and that the sons of Dr. Giles were the clerical Spenserians, Phineas, but three years younger than his cousin the dramatist, – whose fisher-play Sicelides was acting at King's College, Cambridge, in the year of John's Chances in London, and whose Brittain's Ida is as light in its youthful eroticism as his Purple Island is ponderous in pedantic allegory, – and Giles, nine years younger than John, who was printing verses before John wrote his earliest play, and whose poem of Christ's Victorie was published, in 1610, a year or so later than John's pastoral of The Faithfull Shepheardesse. Bishop Fletcher could tell his sons stories of royalty, not only in affluence, but in distress; for when John was but eight years old the father as Dean of Peterborough was chaplain to Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringay, adding to her distress "by the zeal with which he urged her to renounce the faith of Rome." It was he who when Mary's head was held up after the execution cried, "So perish all the Queen's enemies!"39 He could, also, tell them much about the great founder of the Dorset family, for at Fotheringay at the same time was Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards first Earl of Dorset, who had come to announce to Mary, Queen of Scots, the sentence of death.

      From 1591 on, the Bishop was experiencing the alternate "smiles and frowns of royalty" in London; about the time that John left college more particularly the frowns. For, John's mother having died about the end of 1592, the Bishop had, in 1595, most unwisely married Maria (daughter of John Giffard of Weston-under-Edge in Gloucestershire), the relict of a few months' standing of Sir Richard Baker of Sissinghurst in Kent. The Bishop's acquaintance with this second wife, as well as with the first, probably derived from his father's incumbency as Vicar of the church in Cranbrook, Kent, which began in 1555 and was still existing as late as 1574. The young Richard would often have shuddered as a child before Bloody Baker's Prison with its iron-barred windows glowering from the parish church, for Sir John hated the primitive and pious Anabaptists who had taken up their abode about Cranbrook, and he hunted them down;40 and Richard would, as a lad, have walked the two miles across the clayey fields and through the low-lying woods with his father to the stately manor house, built by old Sir John Baker himself in the time of Edward VI, and have seen that distinguished personage who had been Attorney-General and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry VIII, – and who as may be recalled was one of that Council of State, in 1553, which ratified and signed Edward VI's 'devise for the succession' making Lady Jane Grey inheritress of the crown. And when young Richard returned from his presidency of Bene't College, in 1573, to Cranbrook to marry Elizabeth Holland, he would have renewed acquaintance with Sir Richard, who had succeeded the "bloody" Sir John as master of Sissinghurst, sixteen years before. He may for all we know have been present at the entertainment which that same year Sir Richard made for Queen Elizabeth. Maria Giffard was twenty-four years old, then. Whether she was yet Lady Baker we do not know – but it is probable; and we may be sure that on his various visits to Cranbrook, the rising dean and bishop had frequent opportunity to meet her at Sissinghurst before his own wife's death, or the death of Sir Richard in 1594. Since the sister of Sir Richard Baker, Cicely, was already the wife of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, when, in 1586-7, Buckhurst and Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, were thrown together at Fotheringay, it is not unlikely that the closer association between the Fletchers and Lady Buckhurst's sister-in-law of Sissinghurst grew out of this alliance of the Sackvilles with the Bakers.

      Lady Baker was in 1595 in conspicuous disfavour with Queen СКАЧАТЬ