Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ type="note">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 manœuvre 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.СКАЧАТЬ