[Illustration: GEORGE VILLIERS, FIRST DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, AND FAMILY From the painting by Honthorst in the National Portrait Gallery]
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 manoeuvred 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 Henry[103] 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 combine The 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 brest True wisdom hath with bounty equal place, As modesty with beauty in her face: She found me singing Flora's native dowres And 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 dwell In 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 inclines To 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 time Till 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 understood To 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 glance Dash 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 bayes And flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies-- Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all eares Listen while they, like syrens in their spheres, Sing their Evadne.[108]
[Illustration: JOHN SELDEN From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London]
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_.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] _Underwoods_, XLVIII.
[98] Thomas Nashe, _Dedication of The Life of Jack Wilton_.
[99] _Itinerary_, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 97.
[100] See Greg's _Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Drama_, and my former pupil, H. W. Hill's, _Sidney's Arcadia and the Elizabethan Drama_.
[101] _Itinerary_, Vol. I, 21. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.
[102] _Cal. State Papers, Domestic_, Chamberlain to Carleton, Jan. 4, 1617. The Villiers descent is given in Collins, _Peerage_, III, 762.
[103] Sir Henry had petitioned ineffectually for the revival of the viscounty at an earlier date. _Cal. St. Pa., Dom._, Nov. 23, 1606; see, also, reference in 1614. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.
[104] _Calendar of State Papers_ (Domestic), 1611-1617, under dates.
[105] Elton, _Drayton_, p. 28.
[106] _Hesperides_, Aldine edition of _Herrick_, II, 136.
[107] _Hesperides_, Aldine edition, _Herrick_, I, 301.
[108] _Op. cit._, I, 329.
CHAPTER XII