CHAPTER X
AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT
Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's Inn enters the circle of Beaumont's associates not only as the advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in Shakespeare's company of actors turn for counsel in an important suit at law, and as the encomiast of Shakespeare himself a year or two later:
He that from Helicon sends many a rill,
Whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men,[95]
but as one of the pastoralists of the Inns of Court. He was also a friend of Beaumont's older associates, Jonson, Drayton, and Davies of Hereford. From an unexpected quarter comes information of Brooke's intimacy with still others who at various points impinged upon Beaumont's career,—with Inigo Jones, for instance, who designed the machinery for Beaumont's Masque, and with Sir Henry Nevill, the father of the Sir Henry who, a few years later, supplied the publisher Walkley with the manuscript of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King. When we let ourselves in upon the elder Sir Henry carousing at the Mitre with Brooke and Jones, and others known to Beaumont as members of the Mermaid, in a famous symposium held some time between 1608 and September 1611, we begin to feel that it was not by mere accident that the manuscript of A King and No King fell into the hands of the Nevill family. Sir Henry the elder, of Billingbear, Berkshire, was a relative of Sir Francis Bacon, and a friend of Davies of Hereford, and of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to Nevill about 1611 one of his most graceful epigrams; probably, also, of Francis Beaumont's brother John, who wrote a graceful tribute to the memory of one of the gentlewomen of the family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill. This Sir Henry was an influential member of Parliament, a statesman, a courtier, and a diplomat, as well as a patron of poets. He came near being Secretary of the realm. It is his name that we find scribbled with those of Bacon and Shakespeare, about 1597, possibly by Davies of Hereford, the admirer of all three, over the cover of the Northumbrian Manuscript of "Mr. Ffrauncis Bacon's" essays and speeches. Sir Henry did not die till 1615, and it is more than likely that the play, A King and No King, which was acted about 1611, and of which his family held the manuscript, had his "approbation and patronage" as well as that of Sir Henry the younger "to the commendation of the authors"; and that both father and son knew Beaumont and Fletcher well.
The Mitre Inn, a common resort of hilarious Templars, still stands at the top of Mitre Court, a few yards back from the thoroughfare of Fleet Street.
FRANCIS BACON
From the portrait by Paul Van Somer in the National Portrait Gallery, London