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 in A paradice, where I may freely taste Of 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 house Hanted 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 in To find it out? for sooner would I go To find a pearle cover'd with hills of snow; 'T were buried vertue, and thou mightst me move To reverence the tombe, but not to love,-- No more than dotingly to cast mine eye Upon the urne where Lucrece' ashes lye.
But thou art faire and sweet, and every good That ever yet durst mixe with flesh and blood: The Devill ne're saw in his fallen state An object whereupon to ground his hate So fit as thee; all living things but he Love thee; how happy, then, must that man be Whom from amongst all creatures thou dost take!
Is there a hope beyond it? can he make A 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 swear Madam, I think you are) endure to hear Their 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 pay My 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, viz{^t} 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.
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-falle In 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 have Is 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 blame Miscounted 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 dare Refuse 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 bones Sleep 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 seed That the earth did e're suck in Since 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 state Buried 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 care Of 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 delight He 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 looke Without 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 give By our most labour'd lines, can make thee live Like 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,"