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Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher
By Philip J. Finkelpearl PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06825-1
CHAPTER 1
THE COUNTRY, THE PLAYHOUSE, AND THE MERMAID: THE THREE WORLDS OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
How Angels (Cloyster'd in our humane Cells) Maintaine their parley, Beaumont-Fletcher tels; Whose strange unimitable Intercourse Transcends all Rules, and flyes beyond the force Of the most forward soules; all must submit Untill they reach these Mysteries of Wit.
— John Pettus (1647)
The astonishing consistency of texture of the plays of "Beaumont-Fletcher" has led many to assume a virtual interchangeability of the identities of these writers, as expressed in the couplet, "For still your fancies are so wov'n and knit, / 'Twas FRANCIS FLETCHER, or JOHN BEAUMONT writ." In a famous phrase John Aubrey spoke of a "wonderful consimility of fancy," for which an admirer suggested a biographical explanation: "Mitre and Coyfe here into One Piece spun, / BEAUMONT a Judge's, This a Prelat's sonne." The Castor and Pollux of the English stage, as Thomas Fuller designated them, in fact had backgrounds so different that friendship, much less harmonious collaboration, might well have been impossible. Theirs is a story of parallels that eventually converged.
Beaumont's Family History
Thirty years after Francis Beaumont's death, the publisher Humphrey Moseley attempted to obtain the playwright's picture for the 1647 folio edition of the collaborators' plays. He tried two sources: "those Noble Families whence he was descended" and "those Gentlemen that were his acquaintance when he was of the Inner Temple." There was a third group he might have tried: surviving colleagues from his days at the Bankside where he lived and worked. But by the time Moseley began his project, this base resource might have been forgotten because in the interval the "nobility" of Beaumont's family had come to be stressed. This development happened to coincide with the ascendancy at court of the handsome George Villiers, eventually duke of Buckingham, whose mother Maria Beaumont Villiers was a poor relation of the branch of the Leicestershire Beaumonts who lived at Coleorton. Moseley's impression of Beaumont's noble descent would seem to be corroborated by the pedigree that Charles Mills Gayley constructed in 1914. There one may discover the most august aristocratic families in England: Cavendish, Talbot, Nevil, Hastings, even Plantagenet. But a close examination will confirm the well-known fact that if one searches far enough, one can discover relationships among almost all the gentry families in Elizabethan England.
Within the Beaumonts' own family — certainly among the leaders in Leicestershire — the branch living at Coleorton seems to have been the most important. It was not until the appearance of Francis's grandfather John (fl. 1529–54) that his immediate family became prominent, or to be exact, notorious. This John Beaumont had a meteoric career as a lawyer and judge that reached its height with his appointment as Master of the Rolls in 1550. In the best Tudor manner he amassed much property from the Reformation, including the eventual family seat, a recently dissolved priory at Grace Dieu, Leicestershire. His second wife, Elizabeth Hastings, was collaterally related to the greatest family in the county, the earls of Huntingdon. Before this marriage (ca. 1540) Beaumont had been involved in a serious feud with George, first earl of Huntingdon. In 1538 John Beaumont wrote to Lord Cromwell, complaining that the earl "doth labour to take the seyd abbey [Grace Dieu] ffrom me; ... for I do ffeyre the erle and hys sonnes do seeke my lyffe." After his marriage to the earl's relative, the relationship became more amicable. Judge Beaumont's public career ended in shame and scandal when it was discovered that he had abused his position by engaging in forgery and peculation on a vast scale. As receiver general of the Court of Wards he managed to cheat the Crown of no less than twelve thousand pounds. Joel Hurstfield concludes that Beaumont was "a man of ability, an experienced lawyer and judge, who might have risen higher but for his failure to recognise that there was a limit to peculation, even in the Tudor age." John Beaumont's punishment involved imprisonment and the forfeiture of all his estates to Francis, second earl of Huntingdon (his enemy, the first earl, having died). Probably this arrangement was a legal maneuver or a prearranged stratagem (perhaps inspired by the family connection), since John's wife Elizabeth was allowed to regain possession of the bulk of his land and fortune after his death.
The relative lenity of the punishment is confirmed by the fact that the dramatist's father, also named Francis, does not seem to have suffered from his father's misdeeds. He too became a lawyer and eventually a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Unlike his father, he was described after his death as a "grave, learned, and reverend judge." Clearly, he was quite affluent by the time he made his will, which lists estates in ten parishes in Leicestershire and others elsewhere and provides many generous bequests. His marriage to Anne Pierrepoint of nearby Holme-Pierrepoint, Nottinghamshire, is also a measure of the Grace Dieu Beaumonts' status since the notoriously ambitious Bess of Hardwick was willing to permit one of her daughters, Francis Cavendish, to marry Anne Pierrepoint's brother Henry.
The Beaumonts' Recusancy
If John Beaumont's peculations did not cause his descendants to live under a cloud, other activities of the family certainly did. It was known as long ago as 1914 with the publication of Gayley's book that Anne Beaumont Vaux, the daughter of Judge Francis Beaumont's sister Elizabeth, was intimately involved in the Gunpowder Plot, as were her relatives the Treshams. We now know that the playwright's grandmother (Elizabeth Hastings Beaumont), two of his uncles (the aforementioned Henry and his brother Gervase Pierrepoint), his mother, and even his father before he became a judge were also active recusants. As Mark Eccles describes the situation,
[Beaumont's] mother Anne ... denied in 1581 that she had harbored Edmund Campion [the Jesuit priest and martyr], but the [Privy] Council sent for the books and writings found at Gracedieu and ordered the "Massing stuffe" to be defaced. ... While her brother Gervase Pierrepoint was in prison for having concealed Campion, the government seized letters that Francis [Sr.] and Anne had sent him with two fallow deer pies. Anne Beaumont was again examined at the time of the Throckmorton plot [1583], when the commissioners also described "old Mrs. Beaumont" [the dramatist's mother] ... as "a recusant and great favourer of papists." ... Even [the dramatist's father] Francis Beaumont was charged in 1591 with having been hitherto a large contributor to seminary priests, but when he became a justice of the assize he executed the laws and sentenced Walpole and other priests to death for treason.
For punishment, in 1581 Anne Beaumont was put under house arrest, and two prominent neighbors, Adrian Stokes and Sir Francis Hastings, were charged to keep watch over her. The degree of involvement of the Pierrepoints in recusant activities was even greater than Eccles reported. Gervase Pierrepoint was one of Edmund Campion's most trustworthy guides on his hazardous priestly mission through the countryside. Henry Pierrepoint eventually agreed to conform, but Gervase remained an implacable recusant. As late as 1601 he was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower for his activities.
Judge Beaumont and Anne Pierrepoint had four children: Henry, born ca. 1581; John, born ca. 1583–84; Francis, born ca. 1585; and Elizabeth, born ca. 1588. There is no baptismal record for any of them in the parish register of Belton, a fact that leads to the suspicion of secret baptism by a Catholic priest. After Judge Beaumont's death in 1598, the oldest of the three brothers, Henry (later Sir Henry),17 succeeded to the estate; upon his death in 1605 John, also a poet, became the master of Grace Dieu. As Lawrence Stone observed, it was the worst possible moment for a recusant, as John proved to be, to acquire an estate: "Elizabethan parliaments had enacted strict laws against Catholic recusants and in 1605 James saw an easy way of gratifying his followers by granting the right to enforce these laws and to take the profits. ... The most active period of the grants was between 1605 and 1611, the commonest form being the gift to a courtier of the fine and forfeiture of eight or ten recusants."
Thus began the period of persecution for the Beaumonts of Grace Dieu. As Eccles's account describes,
John Beaumont succeeded to Gracedieu on the death of his brother Sir Henry in July 1605. ... By October the profits of his recusancy had been allotted to Sir James Sempill, a companion of King James since boyhood. ... Two-thirds of his lands and all his goods ... were thereby forfeited to the King and were formally granted in 1607 to Sempill, who .was still profiting from them in 1615. ... [John] Beaumont was now required to live at Gracedieu, ... "beynge a Recusant Convicted And remayninge confyned to hys house."
Francis Beaumont himself seems not to have maintained the family faith. I draw this conclusion from the Leicestershire clergyman Thomas Pestell's praise of Beaumont's adeptness at confuting Jesuits, many of whom passed through Grace Dieu:
The Jesuits that trace witt and subtiltye,
And are mere cryticks in Divinitie;
Who to the soadring a crackt cause allow
Sett fees for every new distinction; thou [Beaumont]
By a clean strength of witt and judgment wert
Well able to confound, if not convert.
But in assessing the attitude toward princes and courts in Beaumont's plays, it is useful to recall that during the entire period in which he was a writer, most of the income from his family's estate was being siphoned off by the Crown to a Scottish crony of the king while Beaumont's brother John was virtually imprisoned on his own land.
Beaumont's Connection with the Inner Temple
By now it should be clear that it begs many questions merely to label Beaumont as an affluent member of the gentry with noble relations. There is a further complication if one considers another group to which the publisher Moseley connects Beaumont, the "Gentlemen ... of the Inner Temple." Of course, many of the gentry passed through the Inns of Court for a brief time, but the Beaumonts' connection was different: they were a veritable Inner Temple dynasty. Francis's infamous grandfather John twice served as reader (a tribute to his legal scholarship but also to his wealth); he also was the society's leading officer, known as treasurer, for many years. The playwright's father, Francis, Sr., and uncle Henry also rose to eminence at the Temple. Both were readers; Francis, Sr., was also a member of the governing body known as benchers. All three of his sons spent some time at the Inner Temple. About the social position of lawyers in early seventeenth-century English society Wallace Notestein wrote, "by virtue of their manner of education and discipline, they had become almost a class in society, a class with which the Government had to reckon as with the nobility and the gentry." If one considers that every male in the Grace Dieu branch of the Beaumont family for three generations was a member of the Inner Temple and that in the first two generations they were successful, important lawyers, judges, and officers of their Inn, it may be argued that the "class" into which Francis Beaumont was born was this special subclass of lawyers.
Many of the important participants in the battles between James and Parliament resided at the Inns of Court; naturally (as one knows from diaries and memoirs) their attitudes and points of view provoked discussion in the halls and studies of the Inns. The most prominent member of the Inner Temple at that time, Sir Edward Coke, was surely James's most outspoken opponent; and among the young Francis Beaumont's coevals at the Inner Temple was the great scholar and defender of the common law, John Selden, who was almost the same age as Beaumont and admitted to the Temple in 1603.
An even more direct conduit to the politics of the day would have been the Leicestershire cousins Sir Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, an executor of Francis, Sr.'s, will, and this Henry's brother, Sir Thomas Beaumont of Staunton Grange. Both were members of Parliament, and in his study The House of Commons (1604–1610), Notestein singled out these two Beaumonts as "early English liberals, who stood for the individual." Sir Henry only lived until 1605, but throughout the period when Francis was writing plays, Sir Thomas was a constant, outspoken critic of the king. In a conference between James and thirty members of the Commons in 1610, Thomas made a classic statement on the function of the law. As paraphrased by a reporter, he said, "The walls between the King and his people were the laws. If ministers of state leaped over them and broke them down, what security was there for the subject? Contempt for the law was as dangerous to the Commonwealth as a tormented spirit to the body." Notestein concludes, "Beaumont's words suggest a desperation that may have been affecting many members of the House."
Descended from a family of lawyers, judges, and M.P.s — some prominent opponents of the court, some suffering court-inspired persecution for their religious beliefs — Francis Beaumont was brought up in an atmosphere that could hardly have favored the new Stuart dynasty.
Fletcher's Background And Life
Few facts are known about John Fletcher's own life, but a great deal of enlightening information exists about his ancestry, background, and social connections. As with Beaumont the story begins with his paternal grandfather. Far from having any Plantagenets (however distant) in his pedigree, Richard Fletcher, Sr., came from humble stock — "honestis parentibus natus," according to the plaque erected in his memory by his sons. He was ordained by the soon-to-be-martyred Bishop Ridley in 1550, made vicar of Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, in 1551, but was deprived of this position under Queen Mary. It is recorded by Foxe in the Book of Martyrs that in this dark period Richard Fletcher and his son Richard, Jr., John Fletcher's father, witnessed in 1555 the burning of the Protestant martyr Christopher Wade. Later in Mary's reign the elder Fletcher was imprisoned for his religious beliefs.
After the accession of Elizabeth, Richard Fletcher, Sr., served as vicar of Cranbrooke, Kent. He produced two distinguished sons. The younger one, Giles (ca. 1548–1611), was a diplomat, member of Parliament, government official, and author of the sonnet sequence Licia (1595). His comprehensive account, Of the Russe Commonwealth, published after his return from a mission to Russia, is a remarkably perceptive study still cited by historians. Two of Giles's sons were the well-known "Spenserian" poets, Giles, Jr., and Phineas.
John's father, Richard Fletcher (d. 1596), had a brilliant career, at least until its disastrous last chapter. He was educated at Bene't (now Corpus Christi) College at Cambridge and was briefly its chief officer in 1573. During his ministry at Rye, which began in 1574, his handsome appearance, elegant manner, and ability as a preacher brought him to the attention of Queen Elizabeth. He became chaplain to the queen in 1581 and dean of Peterborough in 1583; he also held other rich livings. As chaplain at the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, he took a prominent part in the proceedings. Possibly his notoriously stern "Amen" at the moment of execution in response to the ritualistic intonement of "So perish all the Queen's enemies" was inspired by his memory of the Protestant martyrdoms he observed in his childhood. His rivals claimed it was a bid for the queen's favor, which certainly followed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher by Philip J. Finkelpearl. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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