Prev Next

CHAPTER XI

BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER; RELATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE

Glimpses of the more personal relations of Beaumont with the world of rank and fashion, and to some extent of his character, are vouchsafed us in the few non-dramatic verses that may with certainty be ascribed to him. Unfortunately for our purpose, most of those included in the _Poems_, "by Francis Beaumont, Gent.," issued by Blaiklock in 1640 and printed again in 1653, and among _The Golden Remains_ "of those so much admired Dramatick Poets, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gents.," in 1660, are, as I have already said, by other hands than his: some of them by his brother, Sir John, and by Donne, Jonson, Randolph, Shirley, and Waller. Of the juvenile amatory lyrics, addresses, and so-called sonnets in these collections, it is not likely that a single one is by him; for in an epistle to Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland, written when he was evidently of mature years and reputation,--let us suppose, about 1611, Beaumont says:

I would avoid the common beaten ways To women used, which are love or praise.

As for the first, the 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.

Let others, "well resolved to end their days With a loud laughter blown beyond the seas,"--let such

Write love to you: I would not willingly Be pointed at in every company, As was that little tailor, who till death Was hot in love with Queen Elizabeth.

And for the last, in all my idle days I never yet did living woman praise In prose or verse.

A sufficient disavowal, this, of the foolish love songs attributed to him by an uncritical posterity.

As for this "strange letter," as he denominates it, from which I have quoted, the sincere, as well as brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaintance with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess lived but twenty-five miles north-west of Charnwood, and in the same country of Leicestershire. One can see the towers from the heights above Grace-Dieu. The Beaumonts undoubtedly had been at Belvoir, time and again. "If I should sing your praises in my rhyme," says he to her of the "white soul" and "beautiful face,"

I lose my ink, my paper and my time And nothing add to your o'erflowing store, And tell you nought, but what you knew before.

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; for, if I thought You took a pride to have your virtues known, (Pardon me, madam) I should think them none.

Many a writer of the day agreed with Beaumont concerning Elizabeth Sidney,--"every word you speak is sweet and mild." She, said Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden, "was nothing inferior to her father in poesie"; she encouraged it in others. But her husband, Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, though a lover of plays himself, does not appear to have favoured his Countess's patronage of literary men. He burst in upon her, one day when Ben Jonson was dining with her, and "accused her that she kept table to poets." Of her excellence Jonson bears witness in four poems. Most pleasantly in that Epistle included in his _The Forrest_, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he says:

With you, I know my off'ring will find grace: For what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit, Were it to think, that you should not inherit His love unto the Muses, when his skill Almost you have, or may have, when you will?

Wherein wise Nature you a dowrie gave, Worth an estate treble to that you have.

Beauty, I know is good, and blood is more; Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what store The world hath scene, which all these had in trust, And now lye lost in their forgotten dust.

And in an Epigram[97] _To the Honour'd ---- Countesse of ----_, evidently sent to her during the absence of her husband on the continent, he compliments her conduct,--

Not only shunning by your act, to doe Ought that is ill, but the suspition too,--

at a time when others are following vices and false pleasures. But "you," he says,

admit no company but good, And when you want those friends, or neare in blood, Or your allies, you make your bookes your friends, And studie them unto the noblest ends, Searching for knowledge, and to keepe your mind The same it was inspired, rich, and refin'd.

Among other admirers of the Countess of Rutland was Sir Thomas Overbury, who, according to Ben Jonson, was "in love with her." Beaumont would have known the brilliant and ill-starred Overbury, of Compton Scorpion, who was not only an intimate of Jonson's, but a devoted admirer of their mutual friend, Sir Henry Nevill of Billingbear.

And if Beaumont was on terms of affectionate familiarity with Sidney's daughter, he could not but have known Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, as well, the idol of William Browne's epitaph, and of his old friend Drayton's eulogy, on the "Fair Shepherdess,"

To whom all shepherds dedicate their lays, And on her altars offer up their bays.

"In her time Wilton house," says Aubrey, "was like a College; there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. She was the greatest patronesse of witt and learning of any lady in her time." And if Beaumont knew the mother, then, also, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the son, to whom his master, Jonson, dedicates in 1611, the tragedy of _Catiline_, prefaced, as we have already observed, by verses of Beaumont himself.

Whatever Rutland's objection may have been to his Countess's patronage of poets, we may be sure that that lady's attitude toward Beaumont and his literary friends was seconded by her husband's old friend the Earl of Southampton, with whom in earlier days Rutland used to pass away the time "in London merely in going to plaies every day." Southampton had remained a patron of Burbadge, Shakespeare, and the like. And when he died in 1624, we find not only Beaumont's acquaintance, Chapman, but Beaumont's brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his memory. "I keep that glory last which is the best," writes Sir John,

The love of learning which he oft express'd In conversation, and respect to those Who had a name in arts, in verse, in prose.

Since Southampton was "a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves"[98] we may figure not only the two Beaumonts but their beloved Countess participating in such discussion of noble themes,--if not in London, then at Belvoir Castle or Titchfield House or Grace-Dieu Priory. If at Belvoir, Leland, the traveler, helps us to the scene. The castle, he says "standyth on the very knape of an highe hille, stepe up eche way, partely by nature, partely by working of mennes handes, as it may evidently be perceived. Of the late dayes [1540], the Erle of Rutland hath made it fairer than ever it was. It is straunge sighte to se be how many steppes of stone the way goith up from the village to the castel. In the castel be 2 faire gates, And its dungeon is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a place to walk yn, to se at the countery aboute, and raylid about the round [waull, and] a garden [plot] in the middle."[99] One sees Francis toiling up the "many steps," received by his Countess and the rest, and rejoicing with them in the view of the twenty odd family estates from the garden on the high tower.

Returning to Francis Beaumont's epistle to the Countess of Rutland, we observe that it concludes with a promise:

But, if your brave thoughts, which I must respect Above your glorious titles, shall accept These harsh disorder'd lines, I shall ere long Dress up your virtues new, in a new song; Yet far from all base praise and flattery, Although I know what'er my verses be, They will like the most servile flattery shew, If I write truth, and make the subject you.

The opportunity for "the new song" came in a manner unexpected, and, alas, too soon. In August 1612, but a brief month or so after she had been freed by her husband's death from the misery of an unhappy marriage, she was herself suddenly carried off by some mysterious malady. According to a letter of Chamberlain to Sir R. Winwood, "Sir Walter Raleigh is slandered to have given her certaine Pills that despatch'd her." That, Sir Walter, even with the best intent in the world, could not have done in person, for he was in the Tower at the time. Perhaps the medicine referred to was one of those "excellent receipts" for which Raleigh and his half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, were famous. The chemist Gilbert was living in those days with the Countess of Rutland's aunt, at Wilton.

Three days after the death of the lady whom he so revered, Beaumont poured out his grief in verses justly praised as

A Monument that will then lasting be When all her Marble is more dust than she.

That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of the _Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland_. And so far as the elegy proper is concerned,--that is to say, the first half of the poem, ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians who helped the Countess to her grave,--I fully agree with Earle. Here is poetry of the heart, pregnant with pathos, not only of the untimely event--she was but twenty-seven years old,--but of the unmerited misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy,--

Ere thou knewest the use of tears Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;

sorrow in her wedded life,--

As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief, There were enough to meet thee; and the chief Blessing of women, marriage, was to thee Nought but a sacrament of misery.

And then,

Why didst thou die so soon? Oh, pardon me!

I know it was the longest life to thee, That e'er with modesty was call'd a span, Since the Almighty left to strive with man.

In this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence, we have our most definite revelation of Beaumont's personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage (Jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome husband); his admiration of the chivalric great--as of the hero whose life was ventured and generously lost at Zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the decree of "the wise God of Nature"; his acceptance of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning mercy:

I will not hurt the peace which she should have By looking longer in her quiet grave,--

the consummation that all his heroines of tortured chastity, the Bellarios, Arethusas, Aspasias, Pantheas, Uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. And as a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence as exists outside of Beaumont's dramatic productions. It displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his preference in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,--

Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse;

and "Thou art gone,"--

Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and we May 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 took Thee, a more faultless issue than his book, Which, now the only living thing we have From him, we'll see, shall never find a grave As thou hast done. Alas, would it might be That 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 admired 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.

Report error

If you found broken links, wrong episode or any other problems in a anime/cartoon, please tell us. We will try to solve them the first time.

Email:

SubmitCancel

Share