In the commendatory poems, his friend, Thomas Nevill,[115] praises his goodness, his knowledge and his art. Sir Thomas Hawkins of Nash Court, Kent,—connected through Hugh Holland and Edmund Bolton with the circle of Sir John's acquaintances,—emphasizes the modesty, regularity, moral and religious devotion no less of his life than of his poetry. His sons rejoice that "His draughts no sensuall waters ever stain'd." His brother-in-law, George Fortescue of Leicestershire, and others swell the chorus of affection. He was, says the historian of Leicestershire who knew him well,—William Burton, the brother of that rector of Segrave, near by, who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy,—he was "a gentleman of great learning, gravity, and worthiness."
Sir John was succeeded at Grace-Dieu by John, his oldest son, who fought during the Civil War for King Charles, and fell at the siege of Gloucester, in 1644. Other sons were Gervase, who died in childhood, Francis, who became a Jesuit, and Thomas, who succeeded in 1644 to the family title and estates. The Manor of Grace-Dieu passed finally to the Philips family of Garendon Park, about four miles from Grace-Dieu and half a mile from old Judge Beaumont's property of Sheepshead. The founder of this family at Garendon in 1682 was Sir Ambrose Philips,[116] the father of the Ambrose who wrote the Pastorals and The Distrest Mother. From the Philipses the present owners of Garendon and Grace-Dieu, the Phillipps de Lisles, inherited. The old house is no longer standing. But below the new Manor may be seen the ruins of the Nunnery from which the Master of the Rolls almost four centuries ago evicted Catherine Ekesildena and her sister-nuns. It is interesting to note that the name de Lisle, or Lisle, is but a variant of that of Francis Beaumont's wife Isley (de Insula); and that the present family came from the Isle of Wight and Kent, Ursula Isley's native county. I have not, however, yet been able to establish any direct connection between the Sundridge Isleys and the Phillipps de Lisles who came into the Grace-Dieu estates in 1777.
The sister of the Beaumonts, Elizabeth, was about twenty-four years old at the time of Francis' marriage to Ursula Isley of Kent. The date of her wedding to Thomas Seyliard does not appear; but before 1619 she was settled in the same county, and within a few miles of Chevening, Sundridge, and Knole. Of the events of her subsequent life we know nothing. That she cultivated poetry and the poets, however, may be inferred, from various passages in Drayton's Muses Elizium. In the third, fourth, and eighth Nimphalls, written as late as 1630, the old poet introduces among his nymphs,—singing in the "Poets Paradice," which, I surmise, was terrestrially Knole Park,—the same "Mirtilla" who in his eighth Eglog of 1606 was "sister to those hopeful boys, ... Thyrsis and sweet Palmeo." Only a year before the appearance of these Nimphalls Drayton composed for the publication of her elder brother's poems, a lament "To the deare Remembrance of his Noble Friend, Sir John Beaumont, Baronet." Mirtilla had outlived both Thyrsis and Palmeo, but not the affection of their life-long admirer and boon companion.
The widow of the dramatist bore a child a few months after the father's death, and named her Frances. In 1619 Ursula administered her husband's estate;[117] and she probably continued to live with her children at the family seat in Sundridge. The elder daughter, Elizabeth, was married to "a Scotch colonel" and was living in Scotland as late as 1682. Frances was never married. She seems to have cherished her father's fame as her richest possession. It was, indeed, probably her only possession, save a packet of his poems in manuscript which, we are told, she carried with her to Ireland, but unfortunately "they were lost at sea"[118] on her return. In 1682 she was "resident in the family of the Duke of Ormonde," then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.[119] She appears to have attended the high-spirited and capable Duchess, or other ladies of the Butler family, at the Castle in Dublin, or the family seat in Kilkenny, as companion. Under the protection of that loyal cavalier and Christian statesman, James, Duke of Ormonde, whose prayer was ever "for the relieving and delivering the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed,"[120] she must have known happiness, for at any rate a few years. She was retired by the Duke, apparently after the death of the Duchess, in 1684, on a pension of one hundred pounds a year; and this competence we learn that she still enjoyed in 1700, when at the age of eighty-four she was living in Leicestershire,—let us hope in her father's old home of Grace-Dieu. She may have survived to see the accession of Queen Anne. We know merely that she died before 1711. Her life bridges the space from the day of her father, Shakespeare's younger contemporary, to that of her father's encomiast, Dryden, and further still to that of Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Addison; and we are thus helped to realize that in the arithmetic of generations Beaumont's times and thought are after all not so far removed from our own. Two more such spans of human existence would link his day with that of Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Works of B. and F., I, ii-iii.
[110] Hasted's History of Kent (1797), II, 433; III, 146, 154, 186.
[111] For Sundridge and the Isleys, see Hasted's Kent, II, 513-521; III, 128-132, 143-145; and Cal, S. P. (Dom.) Jan. 23, Feb. 24, 1554.
[112] Jonson's statement to Drummond "ere he was thirty years of age" is incorrect, or was misreported.
[113] Introduction to The Works of B. and F., ed. 1866, I, xviii.