Hardly less distinguished is the group of men who surrounded Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Her house at Twickenham Park, famous for its Holbeins and its garden, she loved to fill with men of genius. Ben Jonson, Chapman, Davies, Drayton, and Daniel were all proud to call themselves her friend, and almost every one of them dedicated to her some work of permanent value in English literature. Jonson addressed to her a poetical epistle and three characteristic epigrams. His language, though pompous, is probably sincere:
Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are
The Muses’ evening as their morning-star.[152]
The Countess was the recipient of more great verse than the entire group of bluestockings. Daniel, who celebrated her in the Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, has been called her poet laureate, and there would be no reason for rejecting the title if it did not more properly belong to John Donne. Not only did that poet write Twicknam Garden in her honour, and address her repeatedly in verse epistles which praise her beauty, virtue, and learning in terms of the most affectionate extravagance, but, says Mr. Gosse, owed to her the very revival of interest in his art.[153] Donne’s letters seem to show that he submitted poems to the judgment of the Countess; for she was herself a poet, and is thought to have written one of the elegies commonly attributed to Donne.[154] Certain it is that at her house he enjoyed the very type of society which, a century later, made the fame of salons. He always speaks of Lady Bedford with the same gratitude and awe which may be found in Castiglione’s praise of the Duchess of Urbino; he accepted the same sort of pecuniary assistance from her that Frenchmen received from Madame Geoffrin. Nay, more, he goes to her in her garden that he may, at eye and ear,
Receive such balmes as else cure everything.[155]
He writes to Sir Henry Goodyer:
For her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only all the verses I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s worthiness.
He is concerned not to be lightly esteemed ‘in that Tribe and that house’ where he has lived.[156]
In all respects, therefore, the Countess’s coterie would seem to stand just half-way between court and salon—if it is necessary to distinguish the two terms at all. If it is urged that we have no evidence of the stimulus wrought by conversation in the group, it may be answered that even this lack is apparent only and is due simply to the meagreness of contemporary records.
Similarly slender is our knowledge of other women whom we ought in all probability to associate with the two just discussed: Lady Rutland, Lady Wroth, and the Countess of Huntington, women who felt a keen interest in poets and in the welfare of poetry. As it is, the death of Lady Bedford in 1627 must be taken as marking the end of the Elizabethan system of feminine patronage.