Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      CHAPTER IV

      THE VAUX COUSINS AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT

      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 Narrative29 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 СКАЧАТЬ