Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ type="note">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.

      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 Phædon 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 СКАЧАТЬ