Fletcher's closest friend, if we except Beaumont, seems to have been Charles Cotton of Beresford, Staffordshire, "a man of considerable fortune and high accomplishments," the son of Sir George Cotton of Hampshire. He owed his estates in Staffordshire, and in Derbyshire as well, to his marriage with the daughter of Sir John Stanhope. To him in 1639, as "the noble honourer of the dead author's works and memory," Richard Brome dedicates the quarto of Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas. "Yours," he says, "is the worthy opinion you have of the author and his poems; neither can it easily be determined, whether your affection to them hath made you, by observing, more able to judge of them, than your ability to judge of them hath made you to affect them deservedly, not partially.... Your noble self (has) built him a more honourable monument in that fair opinion you have of him than any inscription subject to the wearing of time can be." To this Charles Cotton, his cousin, Sir Aston Cockayne, writes a letter in verse after the appearance of the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, 1647, speaking of Fletcher as "your friend and old companion" and reproaching him for not having taken the pains to set the printers right about what in that folio was Fletcher's, what Beaumont's, what Massinger's,—"I wish as free you had told the printers this as you did me." And it is apparently to Cotton that Cockayne is alluding when, upbraiding the publishers for not giving each of the authors his due, he says, "But how came I (you ask) so much to know? Fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so." Elsewhere Cockayne describes Fletcher and Massinger as "great friends"; but the "bosome-friend" mentioned above cannot be Massinger, for Massinger is one of those concerning whose authorship "the bosome-friend" gives information.
Cotton was a friend of Ben Jonson, Donne, and Selden, also. To him it is, as a critic, and not to his son, who was a poet, that Robert Herrick, born seven years after Beaumont, writes:
For brave comportment, wit without offence,
Words fully flowing, yet of influence,
Thou art that man of men, the man alone,
Worthy the publique admiration:
Who with thine owne eyes read'st what we doe write,
And giv'st our numbers euphonie and weight;
Tell'st when a verse springs high, how understood
To be, or not, borne of the royall-blood.
What state above, what symmetrie below,
Lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show.—[106]
And it is likely that Cotton did the same for Fletcher and Beaumont.
Of Cotton, Fletcher's and, therefore, Beaumont's friend, Lord Clarendon gives us explicit information: "He had all those qualities which in youth raise men to the reputation of being fine gentlemen: such a pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness and gentleness of nature, and such a civility and delightfulness in conversation, that no man in the Court or out of it appeared a more accomplished person; all these extraordinary qualifications being supported by as extraordinary a clearness of courage, and fearlessness of spirit, of which he gave too often manifestation." In later life he was less happy in fortune and in disposition, "and gave his best friends cause to have wished that he had not lived so long." He passed through the Civil War and died at the end of Cromwell's protectorate, 1658.
And of Robert Herrick, we may say that he, too, was surely an acquaintance of our poets. He writes many poems to Ben Jonson. To their other friend, Selden, Fletcher's connection by the Baker alliance, and Beaumont's associate in the Inner Temple, he writes appreciatively:
Whose smile can make a poet, and your glance
Dash all bad poems out of countenance.[107]
And of our dramatists themselves, he writes about the same time that he is writing to Selden, in his verses To the Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium,—
Amongst which glories, crown'd with sacred bayes
And flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies—
Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all eares
Listen while they, like syrens in their spheres,
Sing their Evadne.[108]