Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

It will be remembered that Beaumont's sister Elizabeth became the wife of a Thomas Seyliard of Kent. The Seyliards were one of the oldest families in the vicinity of Sundridge; and Thomas would be of Brasted, which adjoins Sundridge westward, a quarter of a mile from Sundridge Place and near the river Darenth; or of Delaware at the south of the parish; or of Gabriels about a mile from there and seven miles south of Sundridge; or of Chidingstone close by; or Boxley.110 If Elizabeth was married before 1613, it is easy to surmise that during some visit to her, Beaumont was brought acquainted with Ursula Isley of Sundridge Place. If not, we may refer the acquaintance to sojournings with his friend, Fletcher, at Cranbrook or at the Kentish homes of Fletcher's stepsisters, or with their cousins, the Sackvilles.

We have no proof that Francis Beaumont wrote more than one drama after the Whitehall festivities of February 1613. Two plays in which he is supposed by some to have had a hand with Fletcher, The Captaine and The Honest Man's Fortune, were acted during that year; but I find no trace of Francis in the latter and but slight possibility of it in the former. We must conclude that from 1613 he lived as a country gentleman. He would be much more likely to take up his abode at Sundridge, which, as we have seen, belonged to his wife and her sister, than at Grace-Dieu Manor; for that was occupied by John Beaumont who had four sons to provide for. It is, of course, barely possible that one of his father's properties in Leicestershire or Derby may have fallen to him, – Cottons, for instance, in the latter county, or that "Manner House of Normanton, and a close ther called the Parke" mentioned in the Judge's will and in which house-room was given by him to a "servaunte … for the tearme of eleaven yeares" beginning 1598. But the probabilities all point to the manor house in Kent as the scene of Beaumont's closing years.111

Sundridge Place lies, as we know, just south of Chevening and west of Sevenoaks. The old manor house in which, we may presume, Beaumont and Ursula lived, and where his children were born, has long since disappeared. But the old church, just north of the Place, with its Early English and Perpendicular architecture still stands much as in their day. The old brass tablets to the Isleys of two centuries are there, and the altar-tomb of the John Isley and his wife who died a century before Beaumont was born. Near this memorial we may imagine that Beaumont and Ursula sat of a Sunday; and through this same picturesque graveyard, breathing peace, they would pass home again. Some days they would take the half-hour stroll across the forks of the Darenth, by Combebank in the chalk hills and through the woods, to Chevening House, and drink a cup with old Sampson Lennard and his son, Sir Henry, and Fletcher's stepsister Chrysogona (Grisogone), now Lord and Lady Dacre, and make merry with their seven youngsters; and, coming back by the Pilgrim's road that makes for the shrine of the "holy blissful martir," Beaumont would quote, from Speght's edition of Chaucer which had appeared but thirteen years before, something merry of the

Well nyne and twenty in a companye,Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falleIn felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

Or sometimes they would tramp across to Squerries and fish in the Darenth for the bream of which Spenser had written; perhaps, visit their sister Seyliard that same evening.

Another summer day, Francis would ride the ten miles north toward Chislehurst (ashes of Napoleon le petit!), and turn aside to pay his compliments to the proprietor of Camden Place, Ben Jonson's friend the antiquary. But we may suppose that more gladly and frequently than to any other spot, this dramatist-turned-squire, and settled down for health and leisure, would head his horse for Knole; and, galloping the hills through Chipstead and Sevenoaks up to the old church that crowns the height, would steady to a trot along the stately avenue of the Park amid its beeches and sycamores, – resting his eye on broad sweeps of pasture-land and distant groves, and thinking poetry, – to be greeted within one short half-hour from the time he left the Place, by that most hospitable nobleman of the day, the noblest patron of poetry and art, Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. They would pace – these two lovers of Ben Jonson, and worshippers of the first dramatist-earl – the Great Hall, together, talking of plays, of the burning of the Globe while Henry VIII was on the boards, or of the opening of the new Blackfriars, or of Overbury's poisoning, and the scandalous marriage of Rochester and Lady Essex, or of Sir Henry Nevill's chances in the matter of the Secretaryship, or of Winwood's appointment, or of Raleigh's grievances, or of the new favourite, young Villiers of Brooksby, or of the long existing grievance of Beaumont's Catholic cousins, in and after 1614 all the more acute because of the hopes and fears thronging that other subject of discussion which doubtless would occupy a place in any conversation, the negotiations of Don Diego Sarmiento for a Spanish Marriage. Perhaps they would stretch their legs out to the fire before the old andirons that had once been Henry VIII's, and talk of the tragic romance of young William Seymour and Lady Arabella Stuart, the cousin alike of Robert Pierrepoint and his majesty, James I; or of the indictment and fall of Somerset. Or they would stroll to the chapel, and decipher the carvings of the Crucifixion which Mary, Queen of Scots, had given to the Earl's brother, now dead. Or the Earl would point out some new portrait of that wonderful collection, then forming, of literary men in the dining-room, and Beaumont would pass judgment upon the presentment of some of his own contemporaries.

Then down the drive by which the sheep are browsing and the deer, like Agag delicately picking their way, and back to Sundridge of the Isleys, and to Ursula; maybe to an afternoon of lazy writing on scenes that Fletcher has called for – perhaps the posset-night of Sir Roger and Abigail for the beginning of The Scornful Ladie.

In 1614 or 1615, the poet's first child, a daughter, was born and was appropriately named after the two Elizabeths who had touched most closely upon his life. But the days of wedded happiness – "This is my blisse, Let it run on now!" – were brief. On March 6, 1616, he died, – only thirty-one years of age.112

The lines written to Lady Rutland, some five years before,

What little wit I haveIs not yet grown so near unto the grave,But that I can, by that dim fading light,Perceive of what, or unto whom I write,

may have been conceived merely in humorous self-depreciation. But when we couple them with the epitaph written by John of Grace-Dieu "upon my deare brother, Francis Beaumont," —

On Death, thy murd'rer, this revenge I take:I slight his terrour, and just question make,Which of us two the best precedence have —Mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave.Thou shouldst have followed me, but Death to blameMiscounted yeeres, and measur'd age by fame:So dearely hast thou bought thy precious lines;Their praise grew swiftly, so thy life declines.Thy Muse, the hearer's queene, the reader's love,All eares, all hearts (but Death's), could please and move; —

when we couple the dramatist's own words of his "wit not yet grown so near unto the grave" with these of his brother which I have italicized, and reflect that for the last three years Francis seems to have written almost nothing, we are moved to conjecture that his early death was not unconnected with an excessive devotion to his art, and that his health had been for some time failing. As Darley long ago pointed out,113 the lines of Bishop Corbet "on Mr. Francis Beaumont (then newly dead)" may intend more than a poetical conceit; and they would confirm the probability suggested above.

He that hath such acuteness and such wit,As would ask ten good heads to husband it;He that can write so well, that no man dareRefuse it for the best, let him beware:Beaumont is dead; by whose sole death appears,Wit's a disease consumes men in few years. —

And this conjecture is borne out by the portrait of the weary Beaumont that now hangs in Nuneham.

Three days after his death the dramatist was buried in that part of Westminster Abbey which, since Spenser was laid there to the left of Chaucer's empty grave, had come to be regarded as the Poets' Corner. Beaumont lies to the right of Chaucer's gray marble on the east side of the South Transept in front of St. Benedict's chapel. In what honour he was held we gather from the consideration that, of poets, only Chaucer and Spenser had preceded him to a resting place in the Abbey; and that of his contemporaries, only four writers of verse followed him: his brother, Sir John, who died some eleven years later, and lies beside him; his old friend, Michael Drayton, in 1631; Hugh Holland, in 1633; and that friend of all four, Ben Jonson, in 1637. On the "learned" or "historical" side of the transept, across the way from the poets, lie also only three of Beaumont's generation: Casaubon the philologist, Hakluyt the voyager, and Ben Jonson's master and benefactor – "most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in acts, all that I know," – Camden the antiquary. "In the poetical quarter," writes Addison, a hundred years later, "I found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets." Of the former category is Beaumont; of the latter, the alabaster bust of Drayton whose body lies under the north wall of the nave, and the monument to Jonson, who, having no one rich enough to "lay out funeral charges upon him," stands, in accordance with his own desire, on his "eighteen inches of square ground" under a paving-stone in the north aisle of the nave, – and the figure of their associate, Shakespeare, who, though there was much talk of transporting his body from Stratford in the year of his death and Beaumont's, did not, even in "preposterous" effigy, join his compeers of the Poets' Corner till more than a century had elapsed. Upon Beaumont's grave Dryden's lofty pile encroaches. Above the grave rises the bust of Longfellow; and not far from Beaumont, Tennyson and Browning were lately laid to rest.

The verses, On the Tombs in Westminster, attributed to our poet-dramatist, are of doubtful authorship, but in diction and turn of thought they are paralleled by more than one of the poems which we have found to be his: —

Mortality, behold, and feare,What a change of flesh is here!Thinke how many royall bonesSleep within these heap of stones:Here they lye, had realmes and lands,Who now want strength to stir their hands;Where from their pulpits, seal'd with dust,They preach "In greatnesse is not trust."Here's an acre sown, indeed,With the richest, royall'st seedThat the earth did e're suck inSince the first man dy'd for sin:Here the bones of birth have cry'd,"Though gods they were, as men they dy'd";Here are sands, ignoble things,Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.Here's a world of pomp and stateBuried in dust, once dead by fate.

If the lines are not by Francis, they still preach the calm, deterministic spirit of his poems and his tragedies; and they are worthy of him.

Beaumont's surviving brother of Grace-Dieu continued for many years to write epistolary, panegyric, and religious poems, which won increasing favour among scholars and at Court. They were collected and published by his son, in 1629. Of his Battle of Bosworth Field, which contains some genuinely poetic passages, I have already spoken. In his lines to James I Concerning the True Forme of English Poetry, composed probably the year of Francis' death, or the year after, he desiderates regularity of rhyme,

Pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober careOf metaphors, descriptions cleare, yet rare,Similitudes contracted, smooth and round,Not vex't by learning, but with nature crown'd, —

strong and unaffected language, and noble subject. They made an impression upon his contemporaries in verse; and, though he was but a minor poet, he has come to be recognized as one of the "first refiners" of the rhyming couplet, – a forerunner, in the limpid style, of Waller, Denham, and Cowley. His translations from Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Prudentius are done with spirit. His later poems set him before us an eminently pious soul, kindly, courtly, and cultivated. His greatest work, the Crowne of Thornes, in eight books, is lost. It was evidently dedicated to Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton, for in his elegy on the Earl, 1624, he says:

Shall ever I forget with what delightHe on my simple lines would cast his sight?His onely mem'ry my poore worke adornes,He is a father to my crowne of thornes:Now since his death how can I ever lookeWithout some tears, upon that orphan booke?

That this poem was printed we gather also from the elegy of Thomas Hawkins upon Sir John.

I have already said that John was raised by Charles I, undoubtedly through the influence of the Duke of Buckingham, to the baronetcy in 1626. He died only a year or two later,114 and was lamented in verse by his sons, and by poets and scholars of the day. On the appearance of his poetical remains, Jonson wrote "This booke will live; it hath a genius," and "I confesse a Beaumont's booke to be The bound and frontire of our poetrie." And Drayton —

There is no splendour, which our pens can giveBy our most labour'd lines, can make thee liveLike to thine owne.

In the commendatory poems, his friend, Thomas Nevill,115 praises his goodness, his knowledge and his art. Sir Thomas Hawkins of Nash Court, Kent, – connected through Hugh Holland and Edmund Bolton with the circle of Sir John's acquaintances, – emphasizes the modesty, regularity, moral and religious devotion no less of his life than of his poetry. His sons rejoice that "His draughts no sensuall waters ever stain'd." His brother-in-law, George Fortescue of Leicestershire, and others swell the chorus of affection. He was, says the historian of Leicestershire who knew him well, – William Burton, the brother of that rector of Segrave, near by, who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy, – he was "a gentleman of great learning, gravity, and worthiness."

Sir John was succeeded at Grace-Dieu by John, his oldest son, who fought during the Civil War for King Charles, and fell at the siege of Gloucester, in 1644. Other sons were Gervase, who died in childhood, Francis, who became a Jesuit, and Thomas, who succeeded in 1644 to the family title and estates. The Manor of Grace-Dieu passed finally to the Philips family of Garendon Park, about four miles from Grace-Dieu and half a mile from old Judge Beaumont's property of Sheepshead. The founder of this family at Garendon in 1682 was Sir Ambrose Philips,116 the father of the Ambrose who wrote the Pastorals and The Distrest Mother. From the Philipses the present owners of Garendon and Grace-Dieu, the Phillipps de Lisles, inherited. The old house is no longer standing. But below the new Manor may be seen the ruins of the Nunnery from which the Master of the Rolls almost four centuries ago evicted Catherine Ekesildena and her sister-nuns. It is interesting to note that the name de Lisle, or Lisle, is but a variant of that of Francis Beaumont's wife Isley (de Insula); and that the present family came from the Isle of Wight and Kent, Ursula Isley's native county. I have not, however, yet been able to establish any direct connection between the Sundridge Isleys and the Phillipps de Lisles who came into the Grace-Dieu estates in 1777.

The sister of the Beaumonts, Elizabeth, was about twenty-four years old at the time of Francis' marriage to Ursula Isley of Kent. The date of her wedding to Thomas Seyliard does not appear; but before 1619 she was settled in the same county, and within a few miles of Chevening, Sundridge, and Knole. Of the events of her subsequent life we know nothing. That she cultivated poetry and the poets, however, may be inferred, from various passages in Drayton's Muses Elizium. In the third, fourth, and eighth Nimphalls, written as late as 1630, the old poet introduces among his nymphs, – singing in the "Poets Paradice," which, I surmise, was terrestrially Knole Park, – the same "Mirtilla" who in his eighth Eglog of 1606 was "sister to those hopeful boys, … Thyrsis and sweet Palmeo." Only a year before the appearance of these Nimphalls Drayton composed for the publication of her elder brother's poems, a lament "To the deare Remembrance of his Noble Friend, Sir John Beaumont, Baronet." Mirtilla had outlived both Thyrsis and Palmeo, but not the affection of their life-long admirer and boon companion.

The widow of the dramatist bore a child a few months after the father's death, and named her Frances. In 1619 Ursula administered her husband's estate;117 and she probably continued to live with her children at the family seat in Sundridge. The elder daughter, Elizabeth, was married to "a Scotch colonel" and was living in Scotland as late as 1682. Frances was never married. She seems to have cherished her father's fame as her richest possession. It was, indeed, probably her only possession, save a packet of his poems in manuscript which, we are told, she carried with her to Ireland, but unfortunately "they were lost at sea"118 on her return. In 1682 she was "resident in the family of the Duke of Ormonde," then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.119 She appears to have attended the high-spirited and capable Duchess, or other ladies of the Butler family, at the Castle in Dublin, or the family seat in Kilkenny, as companion. Under the protection of that loyal cavalier and Christian statesman, James, Duke of Ormonde, whose prayer was ever "for the relieving and delivering the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed,"120 she must have known happiness, for at any rate a few years. She was retired by the Duke, apparently after the death of the Duchess, in 1684, on a pension of one hundred pounds a year; and this competence we learn that she still enjoyed in 1700, when at the age of eighty-four she was living in Leicestershire, – let us hope in her father's old home of Grace-Dieu. She may have survived to see the accession of Queen Anne. We know merely that she died before 1711. Her life bridges the space from the day of her father, Shakespeare's younger contemporary, to that of her father's encomiast, Dryden, and further still to that of Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Addison; and we are thus helped to realize that in the arithmetic of generations Beaumont's times and thought are after all not so far removed from our own. Two more such spans of human existence would link his day with that of Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION OF BEAUMONT

Our poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of my scholarly friends, Professor Herford, judging apparently from the crude engraving of 1711,121 or from that of 1812, sees him, "of heavy and uninteresting features," but as Swinburne saw him, probably in Robinson's engraving of 1840, "handsome and significant in feature and expression alike … with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely-curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and the imperial head, with its 'fair large front' and clustering hair, set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation";122 as we see him to-day in the soft and speaking photogravure123 recently made from the portrait at Knole Park or in the reproduction of 1911124 of the portrait which belongs to the Rt. Hon. Lewis Harcourt at Nuneham, – a courtly gentleman of noble mien, of countenance dignified, beautiful, and mobile, and of dreamy eyes somewhat saddened as by physical suffering, or by sympathetic pondering on the mystery of life. The original at Knole was already there, in the time of Lionel, seventh Earl of Dorset, 1711, and in default of information to the contrary we may conclude that it has always been in the possession of the Sackville family, and was painted for Beaumont's contemporary, and I have ventured to surmise friend as well as neighbour, Richard, third Earl of Dorset, – who had succeeded to the earldom in 1609 – about the year of Philaster. I have already shown that the Sackvilles were connected with the Fletchers by marriage. They were also patrons of Beaumont's friends, Jonson and Drayton. While the third Earl was still living, poor old Ben writes to son, Edward Sackville, a grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. And to the same Edward, as fourth Earl,125 Drayton dedicated, 1630, the Nimphalls of his Muses Elizium, and to his Countess, Mary, the Divine Poems, published therewith. If, as others have conjectured, the Earl is himself the Dorilus of the Nimphalls, the exquisite Description of Elizium which precedes, may be, after the fashion of the poets and painters of the Renaissance, an idealized picture of Knole Park, where Drayton probably had been received:

A Paradice on earth is found,Though farre from vulgar sight,Which, with those pleasures doth abound,That it Elizium hight, —

of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon the "cleeves," its ripening fruits:

The Poets Paradice this is,To which but few can come;The Muses onely bower of blisse,Their Deare Elizium.

It was the widow of the third Earl, Anne (Clifford), Countess of Dorset and, afterwards, of Pembroke and Montgomery,126 who erected the monument to Drayton in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore, in every way more than probable; and there is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family still retains, in the house which Beaumont probably often visited, this noble presentment of the dramatist.

The portrait at Nuneham, which I have mentioned above, is not so life-like as that at Knole: it lacks the shading. But it is for us most expressive: it is that of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow, higher cheek-bones, and face falling away toward the chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent of illness. It is the likeness of Beaumont approaching the portals of death.

Of the personality of Beaumont we have already had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed him chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tolerant of the "standing family-jests" of country gentlemen, tired of "water mixed with claret-lees," "with one draught" of which "man's invention fades," and yearning for the Mermaid wine of poetic converse, "nimble, and full of subtle flame." Other verses to Jonson and to Fletcher express his scorn of "the wild applause of common people," his confidence in sympathetic genius and Time as the only arbiters of literary worth. In still other poems, lyric, epistolary, and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour, – unsophisticated, somewhat ammoniac; and from them have caught his habit of emotional utterance, frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or indignation. We have grown acquainted with his reverence for womanly purity; with his religion of suffering, his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave. An amusing side-light is thrown upon his character by Jonson who told Drummond of Hawthornden, that "Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses." We are glad to know that a man of Jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in Beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic superiority; that even this "great lover and praiser of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for whom Spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his matter, and "Shakespeare wanted art," – that even this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in literature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even he could not bully out of him. But we must not be harsh in our judgment of Drummond's Ben Jonson, for though he "was given rather to lose a friend than a jest and was jealous of every word and action of those about him," this is not the Ben who some seven years earlier had written "How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse"; this is Ben as Drummond saw him in 1619 – Ben talking "especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth." That Beaumont's affection and geniality of intercourse were reciprocated not only by Jonson, but by others, we learn from lines written to, or of, him by men of worth.