Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse;

and "Thou art gone," —

Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and weMay call that back again as soon as thee.

In still another way the lines on the death of Sidney's daughter are instructive. Its noble tribute to Sidney's Arcadia is payment of a debt manifest in more than one of the dramas to which Beaumont had contributed. Of Sir Philip, Beaumont here writes:

He left two children, who for virtue, wit,Beauty, were lov'd of all, – thee and his writ:Two was too few; yet death hath from us tookThee, a more faultless issue than his book,Which, now the only living thing we haveFrom him, we'll see, shall never find a graveAs thou hast done. Alas, would it might beThat books their sexes had, as well as we,That we might see this married to the worth,And many poems like itself bring forth.

The Arcadia had already brought forth offspring: in prose, Greene's Menaphon and Pandosto, and Lodge's Rosalynde; in verse, Day's Ile of Guls. It had fathered, immediately, the subplot of Shakespeare's King Lear, – and, indirectly, portions of the Winter's Tale, and As You Like It, and of other Elizabethan plays.100 Within the twelve months immediately preceding August 1612, it had inspired also, as we have already observed, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, the finest scenes in which are Beaumont's dramatic adaptation of romantic characters and motives furnished by Sir Philip. And from that same "faultless issue," the Arcadia, virtue, art, and beauty, loved of all, had earlier still been drawn by Beaumont, certainly for The Maides Tragedy, and, perhaps, for Philaster as well.

The acquaintance with the Rutland family was continued after the death of Francis by his brother John, and his sister Elizabeth. The Nymph "of beauty most divine … whose admirèd vertues draw All harts to love her" in John's poem, The Shepherdess, is Lady Katharine Manners, daughter of Francis, sixth Earl of Rutland, and now the wife of George Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham; and the Shepherdess herself "who long had kept her flocks On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks," the country dame "For singing crowned, whence grew a world of fame Among the sheep cotes," is Elizabeth Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, back on a visit from her Seyliard home in Kent. She had wandered into the summer place of the Rutlands and Buckinghams near the Grace-Dieu priory – "watered with our silver brookes," and had been welcomed and had sung for them. And now John repays the courtesy with indirect and graceful compliment.

With the Villiers family, as I have earlier intimated, the Beaumonts were connected not only by acquaintance as county gentry but by ties of blood. Sir George Villiers, a Leicestershire squire, had married for his second wife, about 1589, Maria Beaumont, a relative of theirs, who had been brought up by their kinsmen of Coleorton Hall to the west of them on the other side of the ridge. It will be remembered that one of those Coleorton Beaumonts, Henry, was an executor of Judge Beaumont's will in 1598. The father of the Maria, or Mary, Beaumont whom Henry Beaumont nurtured as a waiting gentlewoman in his household, was his second cousin, Anthony Beaumont of Glenfield in Leicestershire. While Maria was living at the Hall, the old Knight, Sir George Villiers of Brooksby, recently widowed, visited his kinswoman, Eleanor Lewis, Henry's wife, at Coleorton, "found there," writes a contemporary, Arthur Wilson, "this young gentlewoman, allied, and yet a servant of the family," was fascinated by her graces and made her Lady Villiers. This Sir George Villiers was of an old and distinguished family. Leland mentions it first among the ten families of Leicestershire, "that be there most of reputation."101 And he says "The chiefest house of the Villars at this time is at Brokesby in Leicestershire, lower by four miles than Melton, on the higher ripe [bank] of Wreke river. There lie buried in the church divers of the Villars. This Villars [of 1540] is lord of Hoby hard-by, and of Coneham in Lincolnshire… He is a man of but two hundred marks of land by the year." This "Villars" was the father of the Sir George who married Maria Beaumont. Brooksby, near Melton Mowbray, is only two or three hours' drive from Coleorton.

The children of this marriage, John, George, and Christopher, were but a few years younger than the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu; and there would naturally be some coming and going between the Villiers children of Brooksby and their Beaumont kin of Coleorton and Grace-Dieu. George, the second son, born in 1592, through whom the fortunes of the family were achieved, was introduced to King James in August 1614. This youth of twenty-two had all the graces of the Beaumont as well as the Villiers blood. "He was of singularly prepossessing appearance," says Gardiner, "and was endowed not only with personal vigour, but with that readiness of speech which James delighted in." It was his mother, Maria, now the widowed Lady Villiers, who manœuvred the meeting. Her husband's estates had gone to the children of the first marriage: George was her favourite son and she staked everything upon his success. James took to him from the first; the same year he made him cup-bearer; the next, Gentleman of the Bed-chamber, and knighted him and gave him a pension. We may imagine that Francis Beaumont and his brother John watched the promotion of their kinsman with keen interest. But his phenomenal career was only then beginning. In 1616, a few months after Francis had died, Sir George Villiers was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Villiers. By 1617 this devoted "Steenie" of his "dear Dad and Gossop," King James, is Earl of Buckingham, and now, – that Somerset has fallen, – the most potent force in the kingdom; in 1618 he is Marquis, and in 1623, Duke, – and for some years past he has been enjoying an income of £15,000 a year from the lands and perquisites bestowed upon him. Meanwhile his brother, John, has, in 1617, married a great heiress, the daughter of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, and in 1619 has become Viscount Purbeck; his mother, the intriguing Maria, has been created Countess of Buckingham, in her own right; in due time his younger brother, the stupid Christopher, is made Earl of Anglesey. And Buckingham takes thought not for his immediate family alone: In 1617 "Villiers' kinsman [Hen] Beaumont was to have the Bishopric of Worcester, but failed";102 in 1622 his cousin, Sir Thomas Beaumont of Coleorton, the son of the Sir Henry103 who cared for Villiers' mother in her indigence, is created Viscount Beaumont of Swords; and in 1626, John Beaumont of Grace-Dieu is dubbed knight-baronet.

In 1620, the Marquis of Buckingham had married Katharine Manners, the daughter and sole heiress of Francis, Earl of Rutland. It was a love match; and John Beaumont celebrated it with a glowing epithalamium, praying for the speedy birth of a son

Who may be worthy of his father's stile,May answere to our hopes, and strictly may combineThe happy height of Villiers race with noble Rutland's line.

Soon afterwards and before 1623, John Beaumont's Shepherdesse, spoken of above, was written. Beside the Nymph, the Marchioness of Buckingham, those whom the poem describes as living in "our dales," – and welcoming Elizabeth Beaumont, – are the father of the Marchioness, the Earl of Rutland, "his lady," Cicely (Tufton), the stepmother of Katharine Manners, – and

Another lady, in whose brestTrue wisdom hath with bounty equal place,As modesty with beauty in her face:She found me singing Flora's native dowresAnd made me sing before the heavenly pow'rs,For which great favour, till my voice be done,I sing of her, and her thrice noble son.

This other lady, so wise, and bounteous to John Beaumont, is the Countess of Buckingham, who when John and our Francis were boys, was poor cousin Maria of the Coleorton Beaumonts. To the Marquis of Buckingham, "her thrice-noble sonne," John writes many poetic addresses in later years: of the birth of a daughter, Mall, "this sweete armefull"; of the birth and death of his first son; of how in his "greatnesse," George Villiers did not forget him:

You, onely you, have pow'r to make me dwellIn sight of men, drawne from my silent cell;

and of how Villiers had won him the recognition of the King:

Your favour first th' anointed head inclinesTo heare my rurall songs, and read my lines.

George Villiers, is "his patron and his friend." In writing to the great Marquis and Duke, John Beaumont never recalls the kinship; but in writing to the less distinguished brother, the Viscount Purbeck, he delicately alludes to it.

In the fortunes of the Vauxes of Harrowden, the Beaumonts would naturally have continued their interest. Anne, imprisoned after the Gunpowder Plot, was released at the end of six months. The family persisted in its adherence to the Catholic faith and politics. As late as Feb. 26, 1612, "Mrs. Vaux, Lord (Edward) Vaux's mother, is condemned to perpetual imprisonment, for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance"; and we observe that on March 21, of the same year, "Lord Vaux is committed to the Fleet" for a like refusal.104 Young Lord Vaux got out of the Fleet, in time married, and lived till 1661.

Others of kin or family connection, – and of his own age, – with whom Francis would be on terms of social intercourse or even intimacy during his prime, were his cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who by 1601 was in Parliament as member for Nottingham, and in 1615 was High Sheriff of the shire; Henry Hastings, born in 1586, who since 1604 had been fifth Earl of Huntingdon, and in May 1616 was to be of those appointed for the trial of the Earl and Countess of Somerset; Huntingdon's sister, Catherine (who was wife of Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield), and his brother, Edward, a captain in the navy, who the year after Beaumont's death made the voyage to Guiana under Sir Walter Raleigh; Huntingdon's cousin, and also Beaumont's kinsman, Sir Henry Hastings, of whom we have already heard as one of Father Gerard's converts (a first cousin of Mrs. Elizabeth Vaux, and husband of an Elizabeth Beaumont of Coleorton); Sir William Cavendish, of the Pierrepoint connection, a pupil of Hobbes, an intimate friend of James I, and a leader in the society of Court, who was knighted in 1609, and in 1612 strengthened his position greatly by marrying Christiana, daughter of Lord Bruce of Kinloss; and that other young Cavendish, Sir William of Welbeck, county Notts., who in 1611 was on his travels on the continent under the care of Sir Henry Wotton. With at least three of these scions of families allied to the Beaumonts, Francis had been associated, as I have already pointed out, by contemporaneity at the Inns of Court.

Neither the epistle to Elizabeth Sidney nor the elegy on her death was included by Blaiklock in his foolish book of so-called Beaumont poems. From the elegy on Lady Markham's death, in 1609, there included, we learn little of the poet's self – he had never seen the lady's face, and is merely rhetoricizing. From the elegy, also included by Blaiklock, "On the Death of the Lady Penelope Clifton," on October 26, 1613, almost as artificial, we learn no more of Beaumont's personality, – but we are led to conjecture some social acquaintance with the distinguished family of her father, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, and of her husband, Sir Gervase Clifton, who had been specially admitted to the Inner Temple in 1607; and the conjecture is confirmed by the perusal of lines "to the immortal memory of this fairest and most vertuous lady" included in the works of Sir John Beaumont. He writes as knowing Lady Penelope intimately, – the sound of her voice, the fairness of her face, her high perfections, – and as regretting that he had neglected to utter his affection in verse "while she had lived":

We let our friends pass idly like our timeTill they be gone, and then we see our crime.

These poems on Lady Penelope Clifton forge still another link between the Beaumonts and the Sidneys, for Penelope's mother, the Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of Walter, first Earl of Essex, was Sidney's innamorata, the Stella to his Astrophel.

One may with safety extend the list of Beaumont's acquaintances among the gentry and nobility by crediting him with some of Fletcher's during the years in which the poets were living in close association; not only with Fletcher's family connections, the Bakers, Lennards, and Sackvilles of Kent, but with those to whom Fletcher dedicates, about 1609, the first quarto of his Faithfull Shepheardesse: Sir William Skipwith, for instance, Sir Walter Aston, and Sir Robert Townshend. Of these the first, esteemed for his "witty conceits," his "epigrams and poesies," was admired and loved not only by Fletcher but by Beaumont's brother as well – to whom we owe an encomium evidently sincere:

… A comely body, and a beauteous mind;A heart to love, a hand to give inclin'd;A house as free and open as the ayre;A tongue which joyes in language sweet and faire, …

and more of the kind. Sir William was a not distant neighbour of the Beaumonts, and was knighted, as we have seen, at the same time and place as Henry of Grace-Dieu; one may reasonably infer that his "house as free and open as the ayre" at Cotes in Leicestershire harboured Fletcher and the two Beaumonts on more than one occasion. Sir Walter Aston of Tixall in Staffordshire, the diplomat, of the Inner Temple since 1600, had been, since 1603,105 the patron also of Francis Beaumont's life-long friend, Drayton. And that poet keeps up the intimacy for many years. Writing, after 1627 when Sir Walter, now Baron Aston of Forfar, was sent on embassy to Spain, he says of Lady Aston that "till here again I may her see, It will be winter all the year with me". In 1609 Sir Walter is a "true lover of learning," in whom "as in a centre" Fletcher "takes rest," and whose "goodness to the Muses" is "able to make a work heroical." Of Sir Robert Townshend's relation to our dramatists we know nothing save that Fletcher says: "You love above my means to thank ye." He came of a family that is still illustrious, and for a quarter of a century he sat in Parliament.

Fletcher's closest friend, if we except Beaumont, seems to have been Charles Cotton of Beresford, Staffordshire, "a man of considerable fortune and high accomplishments," the son of Sir George Cotton of Hampshire. He owed his estates in Staffordshire, and in Derbyshire as well, to his marriage with the daughter of Sir John Stanhope. To him in 1639, as "the noble honourer of the dead author's works and memory," Richard Brome dedicates the quarto of Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas. "Yours," he says, "is the worthy opinion you have of the author and his poems; neither can it easily be determined, whether your affection to them hath made you, by observing, more able to judge of them, than your ability to judge of them hath made you to affect them deservedly, not partially… Your noble self (has) built him a more honourable monument in that fair opinion you have of him than any inscription subject to the wearing of time can be." To this Charles Cotton, his cousin, Sir Aston Cockayne, writes a letter in verse after the appearance of the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, 1647, speaking of Fletcher as "your friend and old companion" and reproaching him for not having taken the pains to set the printers right about what in that folio was Fletcher's, what Beaumont's, what Massinger's, – "I wish as free you had told the printers this as you did me." And it is apparently to Cotton that Cockayne is alluding when, upbraiding the publishers for not giving each of the authors his due, he says, "But how came I (you ask) so much to know? Fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so." Elsewhere Cockayne describes Fletcher and Massinger as "great friends"; but the "bosome-friend" mentioned above cannot be Massinger, for Massinger is one of those concerning whose authorship "the bosome-friend" gives information.

Cotton was a friend of Ben Jonson, Donne, and Selden, also. To him it is, as a critic, and not to his son, who was a poet, that Robert Herrick, born seven years after Beaumont, writes:

For brave comportment, wit without offence,Words fully flowing, yet of influence,Thou art that man of men, the man alone,Worthy the publique admiration:Who with thine owne eyes read'st what we doe write,And giv'st our numbers euphonie and weight;Tell'st when a verse springs high, how understoodTo be, or not, borne of the royall-blood.What state above, what symmetrie below,Lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show. —106

And it is likely that Cotton did the same for Fletcher and Beaumont.

Of Cotton, Fletcher's and, therefore, Beaumont's friend, Lord Clarendon gives us explicit information: "He had all those qualities which in youth raise men to the reputation of being fine gentlemen: such a pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness and gentleness of nature, and such a civility and delightfulness in conversation, that no man in the Court or out of it appeared a more accomplished person; all these extraordinary qualifications being supported by as extraordinary a clearness of courage, and fearlessness of spirit, of which he gave too often manifestation." In later life he was less happy in fortune and in disposition, "and gave his best friends cause to have wished that he had not lived so long." He passed through the Civil War and died at the end of Cromwell's protectorate, 1658.

And of Robert Herrick, we may say that he, too, was surely an acquaintance of our poets. He writes many poems to Ben Jonson. To their other friend, Selden, Fletcher's connection by the Baker alliance, and Beaumont's associate in the Inner Temple, he writes appreciatively:

Whose smile can make a poet, and your glanceDash all bad poems out of countenance.107

And of our dramatists themselves, he writes about the same time that he is writing to Selden, in his verses To the Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium, —

Amongst which glories, crown'd with sacred bayesAnd flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies —Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all earesListen while they, like syrens in their spheres,Sing their Evadne.108

The Bohemian life on the Bankside, such as it was, must have been brought to an end by Beaumont's marriage, about 1613. By that time Beaumont had written The Woman-Hater, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Maske, and several poems; Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse and three or four plays more; the two in partnership, at least five plays; and Fletcher had meanwhile collaborated with other dramatists in from eight to eleven plays which do not now concern us. As to the remaining dramas assigned to this period and attributed by various critics to Beaumont and Fletcher in joint-authorship, we shall later inquire. Suffice it for the present to say that I do not believe that the former had a hand in any of them, except The Scornful Ladie.

CHAPTER XII

BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING FAMILY

In the 1653 edition of the "Poems; By Francis Beaumont, Gent." there is one, ordinarily regarded as of doubtful authorship, which, in default of information to the contrary, I am tempted to accept as his and to attach to it importance, as of biographical interest. It purports to bear his signature "Fran. Beaumont"; it bears for me the impress of his literary style. Writing before August 1612, to the Countess of Rutland, Beaumont had, as we have remarked, disclaimed ever having praised "living woman in prose or verse." In The Examination of his Mistris' Perfections, the poem of which I speak, the writer praises with all sincerity the woman of his love:

Stand still, my happinesse; and, swelling heart, —No more! till I consider what thou art.

Like our first parents in Paradise who "thought it nothing if not understood," so the poet of his happiness —

Though by thy bountious favour I be inA paradice, where I may freely tasteOf all the vertuous pleasures which thou hast[I] wanting that knowledge, must, in all my blisse,Erre with my parents, and aske what it is.My faith saith 'tis not Heaven; and I dare swear,If it be Hell, no pain of sence, is there;Sure, 't is some pleasant place, where I may stay,As I to Heaven go in the middle way.Wert thou but faire, and no whit vertuous,Thou wert no more to me but a faire houseHanted with spirits, from which men do them blesse,And no man will halfe furnishe to possesse:Or, hadst thou worth wrapt in a rivell'd skin,'T were inaccessible. Who durst go inTo find it out? for sooner would I goTo find a pearle cover'd with hills of snow;'T were buried vertue, and thou mightst me moveTo reverence the tombe, but not to love, —No more than dotingly to cast mine eyeUpon the urne where Lucrece' ashes lye.But thou art faire and sweet, and every goodThat ever yet durst mixe with flesh and blood:The Devill ne're saw in his fallen stateAn object whereupon to ground his hateSo fit as thee; all living things but heLove thee; how happy, then, must that man beWhom from amongst all creatures thou dost take!Is there a hope beyond it? can he makeA wish to change thee for? This is my blisse,Let it run on now; I know what it is.

The poet of this tribute is not wooing, but worshiping the woman won; reverently striving to comprehend an ineffable joy. The poem is not of praises such as Beaumont in his epistle Ad Comitissam Rutlundiae contemns, praises "bestow'd at most need on a thirsty soul." The writer, here, purports to examine into his Mistress's perfections, but, like the author of the epistle to the Countess, he examines not at all, – he observes the reticence for which Beaumont there had given the reason, —

Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swearMadam, I think you are) endure to hearTheir own perfections into question brought,But stop their ears at them.

When the lines of the Examination are set beside the undoubted poems of Beaumont, they appear, in rhetoric, metaphor, and sentiment, to be of a type with the two tributes to Lady Rutland; in vocabulary, rhyme, and run-on lines, also, to be of one font with them, and with the letter to Ben Jonson and the elegy to Lady Clifton. When the lines are set beside those of Beaumont's own phrasing in the dramas, one finds that in their brief compass they echo the metaphor of his Amintor, "my soul grows weary of her house," – the hyperbole of his Philaster, "I will sooner trust the wind With feathers, or the troubled sea with pearl," – the passionate ecstasy of his Arbaces, "Here I acknowledge thee, my hope … a happinesse as high as I could thinke … Paradice is there!" The tribute is a variant of those closing lines in A King and No King,

I have a thousand joyes to tell you of,Which yet I dare not utter, till I payMy thankes to Heaven for um.

I date this poem, then 1612 or 1613, a year or two after the play just mentioned and the epistle to Lady Rutland; and I imagine with some confidence that it was written by Beaumont for Ursula Isley, whom he married about this time.

Ursula's father, Henry Isley, belonged to a family of landed gentry which had been seated since the reign of Edward II in the parish of Sundridge, Kent. The manor came to them from the de Freminghams in 1412. In 1554 Sir Harry Isley and his son, William, who were prominent upholders of the reformed religion, had joined hands with the gallant young Sir Thomas Wyatt of Allington Castle – about seventeen miles from Sundridge – in the rebellion which he raised in protest against the proposed marriage of Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. At Blacksole Field, near Wrotham, half-way between Sundridge and Allington, the Isley contingent was met and routed by Sir Robert Southwell and Lord Abergavenny; and the vast Isley estates were confiscated. A considerable part was restored to William within a year or two. But he falling into debt had to sell the larger portion; and for the manor of Sundridge itself, he appears to have paid fee farm rent to the Crown.

By will, probably September 3, 1599, William's son, Henry, left all his "manners, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, in the countie of Kent or else where within the realme of England, unto Jane my lovinge wief in fee simple, vizt to her and her heires for ever, to the end and purpose that she maye doe sell or otherwise dispose at her discretion the same, or such parte or soe much thereof as to her shall seeme fitt, for the payement of all my just and true debts … and also for the bringing up and preferment in marriage of Ursula and Una, the two daughters or children of her the said Jane, my lovinge wief." That the children were not, however, stepdaughters of Henry, is pointed out by Dyce, who quotes the manuscript of Vincent's Leicester, 1619: "Ursula, the daughter and coheir [evidently with Una] of Henry Isley."109 In fact, Henry had named Ursula after his mother, the daughter of Nicholas Clifford.