Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

ourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. They lived, as did the dramatist later, in the forest of Charnwood in Leicestershire,-part of the old forest of Arden. And it is of a ride

with stone walls and a pretty lodge in it, belonging of late to Beaumonts.... There is a fair quarry of alabaster stone about a four miles from Leicester, and not very far from Beau Manor.[1]... There was, since the Bellemonts [Beaumonts], earls of Warwick, a baron [at Beaumanoir] of great lands of that name; and the last of them in King Henry the Seventh's time was a man of simple wit. His wife was after married to the Ea

e House of Plantagenet. The second Baron, husband of Alianor of Lancaster, was through his mother, Alice Comyn, descended from the Scotch Earls of Buchan, and thus connected with the Balliols and the royal House of Scotland; through his father,

mus cum Bello

tiam cum Bagh

terum Longica

... Oxonie t

n 1507, the viscounty died out. Beaumanoir to the east of Charnwood is seven miles north of Leicester and nine from Coleorton where, west of the Forest, an older branch of the Beaumont family of

hip's intercession with the king that he may be confirmed in his ownership of the "demenez" as against the cupidity of George, first Earl of Huntingdon, who "doth labour to take the seyd abbey ffrom me; ... for I do ffeyre the seyd erle and hys sonnes do seeke my lyffe."[5] He occupied various important legal and administrative positions in the county, and, shortly before the death of Edward VI, was appointed to the high office of Master of the Rolls, or Judge of the Court of Appeal. A year or two later, however, early in 1553, he was removed from his seat on the bench, for defalcation and other flagrant breach of trust. He was imprisoned and fined in all his property, and died the next year. His vast estates were bestowed on Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, by Edward VI, but soon afterward, as a result of legal man?uvre and by the assistance of that Earl and his eldest son, the widow of the Master of the Rolls contrived to retain the manor of Grace-Dieu; and it long continued to be the country seat of the Beaumonts.[6] This prudent, strenuous, and high-born lady, Elizabe

was wooed for the Czar, and might have been "Empress of Muscovy" had she pleased. From the Huntingdon family Elizabeth Hastings introduced at least one new Christian name into that of the Beaumonts. For the second Earl, she named her oldest son Francis. One of her daughters, Elizabeth, became the wife of William, third Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in the adjoining county of Northampton; and thus our dramatist, through his aunt, was connected with another of the proudest Norman families of England,-one of the most devoted to the Catholic faith and, as we s

s of a notable stock possessed, immediately after the Conquest, of lands in Sussex under Earl Warren. Their estate of Holme-Pierrepoint in Nottinghamshire they had inherited from Michael de Manvers during the reign of Edward I. Anne's ancestors had been Knights Banneret, and of the Carpet and the Sword, for generations. Her brother, Sir Henry Pierrepoint, born 1546, married Frances, the eldest daughter of the Sir William Cavendish who began the building of Chatsworth, and his redoubtable Lady, Bess of Hardwick, who finished it. This aunt of the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu, Lady Pierrepoint, was sister to William Cavendish, first Earl of Devonshire in 1611 and forefather of the present Dukes,-to Henry Cavendish, the friend of Mary, Queen of Scots, and son-in-law of her kindly custodian, George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury,-to Sir Charles Cavendish, whose son, William, became Earl, and then Duke of Newcastle,-to Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess of Lennox, the wife of Henry Darnley's brother, Charles Stuart, and the mother of James I's hapless cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart,-and to Mary Cavendish, Countess of Shrewsbury, wife of Gilbert, seventh Earl. The son of Sir Henry and Lady Pierrepoint, Robert,

is also uncertainty but I think that the records indicate 1584. The matriculation entry in the registers of Oxford University describes him as twelve years of age at the time of his admission, February 4, 1597 (new style), which would establish the date of his birth between February 158

rton three miles away on the west, and scattered over some seven miles north and south between Belton and Normanton. In Derby, too, he had two or three fine manors. His will shows that he was able to make generous provision for many of his "ould and faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing specifically a handsome sum in money to his daughter Elizabeth. He was a considerate and careful man, too, for the morning of his death he added a codicil to his will: "I have left

ots in the centre of Charnwood Forest," within a little distance of the turn-pike road that leads from Ashby-de-la-Zouch to Loughborough. It

under Charnwood

relicke o

ine old, but f

ught such noble

eroicke Muses

nthems of the

crown'd with ro

woods, secure

vour'd art (th

ith free Nature'

Wordsworth, the friend of the Sir George Beaumont who in his day was possessed of

stern ridge, t

, of Charnwood'

Stranger! hidd

ns of forlorn

us house, whic

ounded, and th

tes had ceased, t

le Men of v

margin of a

aumont sport,

adow of the nei

les of shepherds

prelude to h

tears, and me

e, and scorn, a

genius shook th

are lost, an

f holy use u

but the Intel

lone, a Pile that

o, Wordsworth is probably thinking of the ver

who long had

wood's dry and

ting to our Beaumont a share in Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse. Francis, himself, has given us nothin

barely eighteen years of age. Their father was going to and fro among the great in London who made affairs. The country-side all about them was replete with historic memories and inspirations to poetry. In the Grey Friars' at Leicester, eleven miles south-east, Simon de Montfort allied by marriage to the first Anglo-Norman de Beaumonts, Earls of Leicester, lay buried. There, too, until his ashes were scattered on the waters of the So

torme of Civil

own'd with our

n'd, their colo

t no more for E

rose, John Beaumont of Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at Northampton in 1460, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton in 1461. In h

brave Lovell trie

bulls upon ad

wood, while th

, when striving

piercing homes i

o, to his own most famous ancestor on the grandmother's side, the "noble Hastings," first baron, whos

raving by

OF GRACE-D

o." The grandmother of the young Beaumonts, who was still alive in 1578, may have lived long enough to take our Francis on her knee and tell him of the hopes her Protestant kinsmen of Ashby-de-la-Zouch had fixed upon the Lady Jane, and of how her cousin, the Earl, Francis of Huntingdon, had been one of those who in Royal Council in June 1553, abetted the Dukes of Northumberland and Suffolk in the scheme to secure the succession of Lady Jane to the throne, and how, with these dukes and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other lords and gentlemen (among them a certain Sir John Baker of Sissinghurst, Kent, whose family later appears in this narrative), he had signed the "devise" in accordance with which Jane was proclaimed Queen. An

relative and namesake of the dramatist's father,-afterwards Master of Charterhouse,-wrote an Epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, 1598; and still another more distant relative, Dr. Joseph, Master of Peterhouse, and author of the epic allegory, Psyche, was one of the poetic imitators through whom Spenser's influence was conveyed to Milton. The Sir George Beaumont of Wordsworth's day to whom reference

oad Walk, to what now are called the Magdalen College School cricket grounds, and so to some well-moored boat on the flooded meadows by the Cherwell. And some days, they would have under arm or in pocket a tattered volume of Ovid, preferably in translation,-Turberville's Heroical Epistles, or Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses,-or Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or Fenton's Tragical Discourses out of Bandello, dedicated to the sister of Sir Philip Sidney-Sir Philip, whose daughter young Francis should, one day, revere and celebrate in noble lines. Or they would have Harington's Orlando Furioso to wonder upon; or some cheap copy of Amadis or Palmerin to waken laughter. And, other days, fresh quartos of Tamburlaine and Edward II and Dido, or Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Lyly's Gallathea, or Greene's Frier Bacon and James IV, or Shakespeare's Richard II, and Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, and Love's

en by Bu

OF GRA

ied away to mend the roads" See John Throsby

n by

LVESTON, EX

anbury, and got there at the same cakeshop in Parsons Street the same cakes we get now. Or, some happy Michaelmas, they would have walked toward the fertile Vale of Evesham, north, first, toward Warwickshire where at Compton Scorpion Sir Thomas Overbury, the ill-fated friend of their future master, Ben Jonson, was born, and on by the village of Quinton but six miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, toward Mickleton and the Malvern Hills; and then, turning toward the Cotswolds, to Winchcombe with its ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south of it Sudely Castle where Henry VIII's last wife,

ing below them, and set out for the climb to Rose Hill; then down by sleepy ways to Littlemore, and to Sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents t

TNO

rary, Ed. L. T. Sm

rary, Ed. L. T. Sm

Peerage of En

tory of Leicestershire (Biblioth. Topogr.

pp. 251-252, Camden Society, 1843. The editor, Thos. Wrigh

John Beaumont; and Nichols's History

H. N. Bell, The Huntingdon Peerage, 18

ate Papers (Domest

Missionary Pr

ictionary of National Biography; Dyce's Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, Vol. I, Biographical Memoir;

land; Collins, Peerage; and ar

y times, but only once, Nov. 5, 1581, as "Sir," though others in memoranda running to 1601 which mention him are given

t in the Grove

s of B. a