BEAUMONT, CHRISTOPHE DE (1703-1781), French ecclesiastic and archbishop of Paris, was a cadet of the Les Adrets and Saint-Quentin branch of the illustrious Dauphiné family of Beaumont. He became bishop of Bayonne in 1741, then archbishop of Vienne in 1743, and in 1746, at the age of forty-three, archbishop of Paris. Beaumont is noted for his struggle with the Jansenists. To force them to accept the bull Unigenitus which condemned their doctrines, he ordered the priests of his diocese to refuse absolution to those who would not recognize the bull, and to deny funeral rites to those who had confessed to a Jansenist priest. While other bishops sent Beaumont their adhesion to his crusade, the parlement of Paris threatened to confiscate his temporalities. The king forbade the parlement to interfere in these spiritual questions, and upon its proving obdurate it was exiled (September 18, 1753). The “royal chamber,” which was substituted, having failed to carry on the administration of justice properly, the king was obliged to recall the parlement, and the archbishop was sent into honourable exile (August 1754). An effort was made to induce him to resign the active duties of his see to a coadjutor, but in spite of the most tempting offers—including a cardinal’s hat—he refused. On the contrary, to his polemic against the Jansenists he added an attack on the philosophes, and issued a formal mandatory letter condemning Rousseau’s Émile. Rousseau replied in his masterly Lettre à M. de Beaumont (1762), in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force.
De Beaumont’s Mandements, lettres et instructions pastorales were published in two volumes in 1780, the year before his death.
BEAUMONT, SIR JOHN (1583-1627), English poet, second son of the judge, Sir Francis Beaumont, was born at Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire in 1583. The deaths of his father (in 1598) and of his elder brother, Sir Henry Beaumont (in 1605), made the poet early the head of this brilliant family; the dramatist, Francis Beaumont, being a younger brother. John went to Oxford in February 1597, and entered as a gentleman commoner in Broadgates Hall, the present Pembroke College. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1600, but on the death of Henry he no doubt went down to Grace-Dieu to manage the family estates. He began to write verse early, and in 1602, at the age of nineteen, he published anonymously his Metamorphosis of Tabacco, written in very smooth couplets, in which he addressed Drayton as his “loving friend.” He lived in Leicestershire for many years as a bachelor, being one “who never felt Love’s dreadful arrow.” But in process of time he became a tardy victim, and married a lady of the Fortescue family, who bore him four stout sons, the eldest of whom, another John, was accounted one of the most athletic men of his time. “He could leap 16 ft. at one leap, and would commonly, at a stand-leap, jump over a high long table in the hall, light on a settle beyond the table, and raise himself straight up.” This magnificent young man was not without literary taste; he edited his father’s posthumous poems, and wrote an enthusiastic elegy on him; he was killed in 1644 at the siege of Gloucester. Another of Sir John Beaumont’s sons, Gervaise, died in childhood, and the incidents of his death are recorded in one of his father’s most touching poems. Sir John Beaumont concentrated his powers on a poem in eight books, entitled The Crown of Thorns, which was greatly admired in MS. by the earl of Southampton and others, but which is lost. After long retirement, Beaumont was persuaded by the duke of Buckingham to move in larger circles; he attended court and in 1626 was made a baronet. This honour he did not long survive, for he died on the 19th of April 1627, and was buried in Westminster Abbey ten days later. The new Sir John, the strong man, published in 1629 a volume entitled Bosworth Field; with a taste of the variety of other Poems left by Sir John Beaumont. No more “tastes” were ever vouchsafed, so that it is by this volume and by the juvenile Metamorphosis of Tobacco that Beaumont’s reputation has to stand. Of late years, the peculiarities of John Beaumont’s prosody have drawn attention to his work. He wrote the heroic couplet, which was his favourite measure, with almost unprecedented evenness. Bosworth Field, the scene of the battle of which Beaumont’s principal poem gives a vaguely epical narrative, lay close to the poet’s house of Grace-Dieu. He writes on all occasions with a smoothness which was very remarkable in the first quarter of the 17th century, and which marks him, with Edmund Waller and George Sandys, as one of the pioneers of the classic reformation of English verse.
The poems of Sir John Beaumont were included in A. Chalmers’s English Poets, vol. vi. (1810). An edition, with “memorial introduction” and notes, was included (1869) in Dr A.B. Grosart’s Fuller Worthies’ Library; and the Metamorphosis of Tobacco was included in J.P. Collier’s Illustrations of Early English Popular Literature, vol. i. (1863).
(E. G.)
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, English dramatists[1] The names of Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) are inseparably connected in the history of the English drama. John Fletcher was born in December 1579 at Rye in Sussex, and baptized on the 20th of the same month. Richard Fletcher, his father, afterwards queen’s chaplain, dean of Peterborough, and bishop successively of Bristol, Worcester and London, was then minister of the parish in which the son was born who was to make their name immortal. That son was just turned of seven when the dean distinguished and disgraced himself as the spiritual tormentor of the last moments on earth of Mary Stuart. When not quite twelve he was admitted pensioner of Bene’t College, Cambridge, and two years later was made one of the Bible-clerks: of this college Bishop Fletcher had been president twenty years earlier, and six months before his son’s admission had received from its authorities a first letter of thanks for various benefactions, to be followed next year by a second. Four years later than this, when John Fletcher wanted five or six months of his seventeenth year, the bishop died suddenly of over much tobacco and the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at his second marriage—this time, it appears, with a lady of such character as figures something too frequently on the stage of his illustrious son. He left eight children by his first marriage in such distress that their uncle, Dr Giles Fletcher, author of a treatise on the Russian commonwealth which is still held in some repute, was obliged to draw up a petition to the queen on their behalf, which was supported by the intercession of Essex, but with what result is uncertain.
From this date we know nothing of the fortunes of John Fletcher, till the needy orphan boy of seventeen reappears as the brilliant and triumphant poet whose name is linked for all time with the yet more glorious name of Francis Beaumont, third and youngest son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, one of the justices of the common pleas—born, according to general report, in 1586, but, according to more than one apparently irrefragable document, actually born two years earlier. The first record of his existence is the entry of his name, together with those of his elder brothers Henry and John, as a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates Hall, Oxford, now supplanted by Pembroke College. But most lovers of his fame will care rather to remember the admirable lines of Wordsworth on the “eager child” who played among the rocks and woodlands of Grace-Dieu; though it may be doubted whether even the boy’s first verses were of the peaceful and pastoral character attributed to them by the great laureate of the lakes. That passionate and fiery genius which was so soon and for so short a time to “shake the buskined stage” with heroic and tragic notes of passion and of sorrow, of scorn and rage, and slighted love and jealousy, must surely have sought vent from the first in fancies of a more ardent and ambitious kind; and it would be a likelier conjecture that when Frank Beaumont (as we know on more authorities than one that he was always called by his contemporaries, even in the full flush of his adult fame—“never more than Frank,” says Heywood) went to college at the ripe age of twelve, he had already committed a tragedy or two in emulation of Tamburlaine, Andronicus or Jeronymo. The date of his admission was the 4th of February 1597; on the 22nd of April of the following year his father died; and on the 3rd of November 1600, having left Oxford without taking his degree, the boy of fifteen was entered a member of the Inner Temple, his two brothers standing sponsors on the grave occasion. But the son of Judge Beaumont was no fitter for success at the bar than the son of Bishop Fletcher for distinction in the church: it is equally difficult to imagine either poet invested with either gown. Two years later appeared the poem of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, generally attributed to Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion of the Ovidian legend, not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits. At twenty-three Beaumont prefixed to the magnificent masterpiece of Ben Jonson some noticeable verses in honour of his “dear friend” the author; and in the same year (1607) appeared the anonymous comedy of The Woman-Hater, usually assigned to Fletcher alone; but being as it is in the main a crude and puerile imitation of Jonson’s manner, and certainly more like a man’s work at twenty-two than at twenty-eight, internal evidence would seem to justify, or at least to excuse those critics who in the teeth of high authority and tradition would transfer from Fletcher to Beaumont the principal responsibility for this first play that can be traced to the hand of either. As Fletcher also prefixed to the first edition of Volpone a copy of commendatory verses, we may presume that their common admiration for a common friend was among the earliest and strongest influences which drew together the two great poets whose names were thenceforward to be for ever indivisible. During the dim eleven years between the death of his father and the dawn of his fame, we cannot but imagine that the career of Fletcher had been unprosperous as well as obscure. From seventeen to twenty-eight his youth may presumably have been spent in such painful struggles for success, if not for sustenance, as were never known to his younger colleague, who, as we have seen, was entered at Oxford a few months after Fletcher must in all likelihood have left Cambridge to try his luck in London: a venture most probably resolved on as soon as the youth had found his family reduced by the father’s death to such ruinous straits that any smoother course can hardly have been open to him. Entering college at the same age as Fletcher had entered six years earlier, Beaumont had before him a brighter and briefer line of life than his elder. But whatever may have been their respective situations when, either by happy chance or, as Dyce suggests, by the good offices of Jonson, they were first brought together, their intimacy soon became so much closer than that of ordinary brothers that the household which they shared as bachelors was conducted on such thoroughly communistic principles as might have satisfied the most trenchant theorist who ever proclaimed as the cardinal point of his doctrine, a complete and absolute community of bed and board, with all goods thereto appertaining. But in the year following that in which the two younger poets had united in homage to Jonson, they had entered into a partnership of more importance than this in “the same clothes and cloak, &c.,” with other necessaries of life specified by Aubrey.
In 1608, if we may trust the reckoning which seems trust-worthiest, the twin stars of our stage rose visibly together for the first time. The loveliest, though not the loftiest, of tragic plays that we owe to the comrades or the successors of Shakespeare, Philaster, has generally been regarded as the first-born issue of their common genius. The noble tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret has sometimes been dated earlier and assigned to Fletcher alone; but we can be sure neither of the early date nor the single authorship. The main body of the play, comprising both the great scenes which throw out into full and final relief the character of either heroine for perfect good or evil, bears throughout the unmistakable image and superscription of Fletcher; yet there are parts which for gravity and steady strength of style, for reserve and temperance of effect, would seem to suggest the collaboration of a calmer and more patient hand; and these more equable and less passionate parts of the poem recall rather the touch of Massinger than of Beaumont. In the second act, for example, the regular structure of the verse, the even scheme of the action, the exaggerated braggardism which makes of the hero a mere puppet or mouthpiece of his own self-will, are all qualities which, for better or for worse, remind us of the strength or the weakness of a poet with whom we know that Fletcher, before or after his alliance with Beaumont, did now and then work in common. Even the Arbaces of Beaumont, though somewhat too highly coloured, does not “write himself down an ass,” like Thierry on his first entrance, after the too frequent fashion of Massinger’s braggarts and tyrants; does not proclaim at starting or display with mere wantonness of exposure his more unlovely qualities in the naked nature of their deformity. Compare also the second with the first scene of the fourth act. In style and metre this second scene is as good an example of Massinger as the first is of Fletcher at his best. Observe especially in the elaborate narrative of the pretended self-immolation of Ordella these distinctive notes of the peculiar style of Massinger; the excess of parenthetic sentences, no less than five in a space of twenty lines; the classical common-place of allusion to Athens, Rome and Sparta in one superfluous breath; the pure and vigorous but somewhat level and prosaic order of language, with the use of certain cheap and easy phrases familiar to Massinger as catchwords; the flat and feeble terminations by means of which the final syllable of one verse runs on into the next without more pause or rhythm than in a passage of prose; the general dignity and gravity of sustained and measured expression. These are the very points in which the style of Massinger differs from that of Fletcher; whose lightest and loosest verses do not overlap each other without sensible distinction between the end of one line and the beginning of the next; who is often too fluent and facile to be choice or forcible in his diction, but seldom if ever prosaic or conventional in phrase or allusion, and by no means habitually given to weave thoughts within thoughts, knit sentence into sentence, and hang whole paragraphs together by the help of loops and brackets. From these indications we might infer that this poem belongs altogether to a period later than the death of Beaumont; though even during his friend’s life it appears that Fletcher was once at least allied with Massinger and two lesser dramatists in the composition of a play, probably the Honest Man’s Fortune, of which the accounts are to be found in Henslowe’s papers.