Читать книгу Francis Beaumont: Dramatist - Gayley Charles Mills - Страница 5

Certain political events of the years 1603 to 1606 must have occasioned the young Beaumonts intimate and poignant concern. Their own family was, of course, Protestant, but it was closely connected by blood and matrimonial alliance with some of the most devoted and conspicuous Catholic families of England. Some of their Hastings kinsmen, sons of Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, were Catholics; and their first cousins, the Vauxes, whose home at Great Harrowden near by had been for over twenty years the harbourage of persecuted priests, were active Jesuits. After the death of his first wife, – Beaumont's aunt Elizabeth, who left four children, Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne, – William, Lord Vaux, had married Mary, the sister of the noble-hearted and self-sacrificing Catholic, Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton in Northamptonshire; and this lady had brought up her own children, George and Ambrose, as well as the children of the first marriage, in strict adherence to the Roman faith and practice. Henry, the heir to the title, had been one of that zealous band of young Catholic gentlemen who received Fathers Campion and Persons on their arrival in England in 1580.28 Before 1594, Henry, "that blessed gentleman and saint," as Father Persons calls him, had died, having resigned his inheritance of the Barony to his brother George some years earlier in order to spend his remaining days in celibacy, study, and prayer. In 1590, George, the elder son by the second marriage, had taken to wife, Elizabeth Roper, also an ardent Catholic, the daughter of the future Lord Teynham. She was left a widow in 1594 with an infant son, Edward, whom she educated to maintain the Catholicity of the family. In 1595, the old Baron, Beaumont's uncle, died – "the infortunatest peer of Parliament for poverty that ever was" by reason of the fines and forfeitures entailed upon him for his religious zeal. Meanwhile, in 1591, we find the daughters of the first marriage, Eleanor, whose husband was an Edward Brookesby, of Arundel House, Leicestershire, and Anne Vaux, concealing in a house in Warwickshire, the well-known Father Gerard and his Superior, Father Garnet, from priest-hunters, or pursuivants. These two cousins of Beaumont are described in Father Gerard's Narrative29 as illustrious for goodness and holiness, "whom in my own mind I often compare to the two women who received our Lord." The younger, Anne, "was remarkable at all times for her virginal modesty and shamefacedness, but in the cause of God and the defence of His servants, the virgo became virago. She is almost always ill, but we have seen her, when so weakened as to be scarce able to utter three words without pain, on the arrival of the pursuivants become so strong as to spend three or four hours in contest with them. When she has no priest in the house she feels afraid; but the simple presence of a priest so animates her that then she makes sure that no devil has any power over her house." In the years that follow to 1605, the Vauxes are identified as recusants and as sympathizers with the untoward fortunes of Fathers Southwell, Walpole, Garnet, and others. In 1601, their kinsman and Frank Beaumont's, Henry Hastings, nephew to George, fourth Earl of Huntingdon, has joined the ranks and in 1602, we find him in a list of Jesuits "to be sought after" by the Earl of Salisbury, – "John Gerard with Mrs. Vaux and young Mr. Hastings." Father Gerard's headquarters in fact are from 1598 to 1605 with Mrs. Vaux and her son Edward, the young Baron, at Great Harrowden, and there others of the fifteen Jesuit fathers in England at that time, and prominent Catholics, such as Sir Oliver Manners, brother of Roger, Earl of Rutland, Sir Everard Digby, and Francis Tresham, a first cousin of Mrs. Vaux, were wont to foregather.

When James I came to the throne, the Catholics had hope of some alleviation of the penalties under which they laboured. Disappointed in this hope, the discontented, led by two priests, Watson and Clarke, embarked upon a wild scheme to kidnap the King and set as the price of his liberty the extension to Catholics of equal rights, religious, civil, and political, with the Protestants. The plot was betrayed, the priests executed, and the other leaders condemned to death, – then reprieved but attainted. Among those thus reprieved were Lord Grey de Wilton and "a confederate named Brookesby." This Brookesby was Bartholomew, the brother of Eleanor Vaux's husband. When new and more stringent measures were immediately adopted for the repression of priests and recusants, the indignation of the Catholics reached a climax. "They saw," says Gardiner, "no more than the intolerable wrong under which they suffered; and it would be strange if there were not some amongst them who would be driven to meet wrong with violence, and to count even the perpetration of a great crime as a meritorious deed."30

In 1603 Father Gerard took a new house in London in the fields behind St. Clement's Inn, – just across the Strand from the Inner Temple where Francis Beaumont was living at the time. "This new house," says Gerard, "was very suitable and convenient and had private entrances on both sides, and I had contrived in it some most excellent hiding-places; and there I should have long remained, free from all peril or even suspicion, if some friends of mine, while I was absent from London, had not availed themselves of the house rather rashly."31 These friends were Robert Catesby, a cousin of the Vauxes of Harrowden; his cousin, Thomas Winter; Winter's relative, John Wright, and Thomas Percy, a kinsman of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland, – all gentlemen of distinguished county families. In May 1604, these men with one Guy Fawkes of York and Scotton, a soldier of fortune and "excellent good natural parts," and, like the rest, fanatic with brooding over the wrongs of the Catholic Church, met at Father Gerard's house behind St. Clement's Inn, swore to keep secret the purpose of their meeting, received in an adjoining room the Sacrament from Father Gerard, an unwitting accomplice, in confirmation of their oath; and then, retiring, learned from Catesby that the project intended was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder when the King and the royal family next came to the House of Lords. Within a few days "Thomas Percy hired a howse at Westminster," says Fawkes in his subsequent Confession, "neare adjoyning Parlt. howse, and there wee beganne to make a myne about the XI of December, 1604." The rest of the story is too well-known to call for repetition. How the gunpowder was smuggled into a cellar running under the Parliament House; how, when Parliament was prorogued to November 5th, 1605, the conspirators, running short of money to equip an insurrection, added to their number a few wealthy accomplices, – most significant to our narrative, that old friend of the Vauxes, Sir Edward Digby, and Francis Tresham, cousin of Catesby and the Winters, and as I have said of the Vauxes themselves.32 How Tresham, recoiling from the destruction of innocent Catholic Lords with the detested Protestants, met Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes at White Webbs, "a house known as Dr. Hewick's house by Enfield Chace," and laboured with them for permission to warn their friends, especially his brothers-in-law, Lord Stourton and Monteagle; and how, when permission was refused, he wrote an anonymous letter to Monteagle, begging him "as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament; for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time." How Monteagle informed the Council and the King. How Guy Fawkes was discovered among his barrels of gunpowder, and on the fourth of November arrested as "John Johnson," the servant of Thomas Percy, one of the King's Gentlemen Pensioners. How "on the morning of the fifth, the news of the great deliverance ran like wildfire along the streets of London," and Catesby and Wright, Percy and the brothers Winter, were in full flight for Lady Catesby's house in Ashby St. Legers, Northamptonshire, not far from Harrowden.

With the rest of the world Francis Beaumont would gasp with amazement. But what must have been his concern when on the first examination of "John Johnson," November 5th, the identity of that conspirator was established not by any confession of his, but from the contents of a letter found upon him, written by – Beaumont's first cousin, Anne Vaux!33

As intelligence oozed from the Lords of Council, Beaumont would next learn that Anne's sister-in-law, Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux of Harrowden had expected something was about to take place, and that Father Gerard and "Walley" [Garnet, the Father Superior of the English Jesuits] "made her house their chief resort"; and then that Fawkes had confessed that Catesby, the two Winters, and Francis Tresham – all of the Vaux family connection – and Sir Everard Digby of their close acquaintance, were implicated in the Plot; and that the conspiracy was not merely to blow up the older members of the royal family but to secure the Princess Elizabeth, place her upon the throne, and marry her to an English Catholic,34– therefore, an enterprise likely to implicate his Catholic cousins, indeed. His friend, Ben Jonson, is meanwhile blustering of private informations, and Francis would be likely to hear that Ben has written (November 8) to Lord Salisbury offering his services to unravel the web "if no better person can be found," and averring that the Catholics "are all so enweaved in it as it will make 500 gent. lesse of the religion within this weeke." Then he is apprised that John Wright, Catesby, Percy, etc., have been seen at "Lady" Vaux's on the eighth. The next day, that these three and Christopher Wright have been overtaken and slain; and then that, on the ninth, Fawkes has confessed that they have been using a house of Father Garnet's at White Webbs as a rendezvous. Perhaps White Webbs means nothing to Francis just yet, but it soon will. Three days later, Tresham under examination acknowledges interviews with his cousins, Catesby and Thomas Winter, and with Fathers Garnet and Gerard; but says he has not been at Mrs. Vaux's house at Harrowden for a year. Soon afterwards, December 5, the Inner Temple itself is shaken to the foundations by the intelligence that Jesuit literature has been discovered by Sir Edward Coke in Tresham's chamber, – a manuscript of Blackwell's famous treatise on Equivocation, destined to play a baleful rôle in the ensuing examination of certain of the suspects.

Meanwhile, Francis would observe with alarm that his Vaux cousins are from day to day objects of deeper suspicion. On November 13, Lord Vaux's house at Harrowden is searched; his mother gives up all her keys but no papers are found. She and the young lord strongly deny all knowledge of the treason; the house, however, is still guarded. On the eighteenth, Elizabeth, Mrs. Vaux, is examined and says that she does not know "Gerard, the priest"[!]; but among the visitors at her house she mentions Catesby, Digby, and "Greene" [Greenway] and "Darcy" [Garnet], priests. She acknowledges having written to Lady Wenman, the wife of Sir Richard, last Easter, saying that "Tottenham would turn French," but fails to explain her meaning. From other quarters, however, it is learned that she bade that lady "be of good comfort for there should soon be toleration for religion," adding: "Fast and pray that that may come to pass which we purpose, which yf it doe, wee shall see Totnam turned French." And Sir Richard, examined concerning the contents of Mrs. Vaux's letter to his wife, affirms that he "disliked their intercourse, because Mrs. Vaux tried to pervert his wife." On December 4, Catesby's servant, Bates, acknowledges that he revealed the whole Plot to Greenway, the priest, in confession, "who said it was a good cause, bade him be secret, and absolved him." From Henry Huddleston's examination, December 6, it appears that Mrs. Vaux has not been telling the whole truth about Harrowden, for not only were the two other priests most suspected, Garnet and Greenway, there sometimes, but also Gerard, whom Huddleston has met there. On January 19, Bates definitely connects Gerard and Garnet with the proceedings; and all three priests are proclaimed. Gerard cannot be found, but from his own Narrative it appears that he had been hiding at Harrowden before, that now he is concealed in London, and Elizabeth Vaux knows where.35 When she is brought again before the Lords of Council and threatened with death if she tell not where the priest is, we may imagine the interest of the Beaumonts. Francis, though no sympathizer with the Plot, cannot have failed to admire the bearing of Elizabeth during the examination:

"As for my hostess, Mrs. Vaux," writes Father Gerard, "she was brought to London after that long search for me, and strictly examined about me by the Lords of the Council; but she answered to everything so discreetly as to escape all blame. At last they produced a letter of hers to a certain relative, asking for the release of Father Strange and another, of whom I spoke before. This relative of hers was the chief man in the county in which they had been taken, and she thought she could by her intercession with him prevail for their release. But the treacherous man, who had often enough, as far as words went, offered to serve her in any way, proved the truth of our Lord's prophecy, 'A man's enemies shall be those of his own household!' for he immediately sent up her letter to the Council. They showed her, therefore, her own letter, and said to her, 'You see now that you are entirely at the King's mercy for life or death; so if you consent to tell us where Father Gerard is, you shall have your life.'

"'I do not know where he is,' she answered, 'and if I did know, I would not tell you.'

"Then rose one of the lords, who had been a former friend of hers, to accompany her to the door, out of courtesy, and on the way said to her persuasively, 'Have pity on yourself and on your children, and say what is required of you, for otherwise you must certainly die.'

"To which she answered with a loud voice, 'Then, my lord, I will die.'

"This was said when the door had been opened, so that her servants who were waiting for her heard what she said, and all burst into weeping. But the Council only said this to terrify her, for they did not commit her to prison, but sent her to the house of a certain gentleman in the city, and after being held there in custody for a time she was released, but on condition of remaining in London. And one of the principal Lords of the Council acknowledged to a friend that he had nothing against her, except that she was a stout Papist, going ahead of others, and, as it were, a leader in evil."

What follows of Elizabeth's devotion to the cause, would not be likely to filter through; but the Beaumonts may have had their suspicions. According to Father Gerard: —

"Immediately she was released from custody, knowing that I was then in London, quite forgetful of herself, she set about taking care of me, and provided all the furniture and other things necessary for my new house. Moreover, she sent me letters daily, recounting everything that occurred; and when she knew that I wished to cross the sea for a time, she bid me not spare expense, so that I secured a safe passage, for that she would pay everything, though it should cost five thousand florins, and in fact she sent me at once a thousand florins for my journey. I left her in care of Father Percy, who had already as my companion lived a long time at her house. There he still remains, and does much good. I went straight to Rome, and being sent back thence to these parts, was fixed at Louvain."36 So much at present of Elizabeth. We shall hear of her, as did Beaumont, during the succeeding years.

In the tribulations of Anne Vaux, his own first cousin, Francis must have been even more deeply interested. That she was in communication with Fawkes had been discovered, November 5. She was apprehended, committed to the care of Sir John Swynerton, but temporarily discharged. When Fawkes confessed, November 9, that the conspirators had been using a house of Father Garnet's at White Webbs, in Enfield Chace, the house called "Dr. Hewick's" was searched. "No papers nor munition found, but Popish books and relics, – and many trap-doors and secret passages." Garnet had escaped but, on examination of the servants, it developed that under the pseudonym of "Meaze" he had taken the house "for his sister, Mrs. Perkins," – [and who should "Mrs. Perkins" turn out to be but Anne Vaux!] The books and relics are the property of "Mrs. Jennings," – [and who should she be but Anne's sister, Eleanor Brookesby!] "Mrs. Perkins spent a month at White Webbs lately;" and "three gentlemen [Catesby, Winter, and another] came to White Webbs, the day the King left Royston" [October 31]. On November 27, Sir Everard Digby's servant deposes concerning Garnet that "Mrs. Ann Vaux doth usually goe with him whithersoever he goethe." On January 19, as we have seen, warrants are out for the arrest of Garnet. On January 30, he is taken with another Jesuit priest, Father Oldcorne, at Hindlip Hall, in Worcestershire, where for seven days and nights they have been buried in a closet, and nourished by broths conveyed to them by means of a quill which passed "through a little hole in a chimney that backed another chimney into a gentlewoman's chamber." True enough, the deposition, that whithersoever her beloved Father Superior "goethe, Mrs. Ann Vaux doth usually goe"; for she is the gentlewoman of the broths and quill, – she with Mrs. Abington, the sister of Monteagle. Garnet and Oldcorne are taken prisoners to the Tower; and three weeks later Anne is in town again, communicating with Garnet by means of letters, ostensibly brief and patent, but eked out with tidings written in an invisible ink of orange-juice. On March 6, Garnet confesses that Mrs. Anne Vaux, alias Perkins, he, and Brookesby bear the expenses of White Webbs. On March 11, Anne being examined says that she keeps the place at her own expense; that Catesby, Winter, and Tresham have been to her house, but that she knew nothing of the Plot; on the contrary, suspecting some mischief at one time, she had "begged Garnet to prevent it." Examined again on March 24, she says that "Francis Tresham, her cousin, often visited her and Garnet at White Webbs, Erith, Wandsworth, etc., when Garnet would counsel him to be patient and quiet; and that they also visited Tresham at his house in Warwickshire." Garnet's trial took place at Guildhall on March 28, Sir Edward Coke of the Inner Temple acting for the prosecution. Garnet acknowledged that the Plot had been conveyed to him by another priest [Greenway] in confession. He was convicted, however, not for failing to divulge that knowledge, but for failing to dissuade Catesby and the rest, both before and after he had gained knowledge from Greenway. He was executed on May 3. Of Anne's share in all that has preceded, Beaumont would by this date have known. One wonders whether he or his brother, John, ever learned the pathetic details of the final correspondence between Anne and the Father Superior. How, March 21, she wrote to him asking directions for the disposal of herself, and concluding that life without him was "not life but deathe." How, April 2, he replied with advice for her future; and as to Oldcorne and himself, added that the former had "dreamt there were two tabernacles prepared for them." How, the next day, she wrote again asking fuller directions and wishing Father Oldcorne had "dreamt there was a third seat" for her. And how, that same day, with loving thought for all details of her proceedings, and with sorrow for his own weakness under examination, the Father Superior sends his last word to her, – that he will "die not as a victorious martyr, but as a penitent thief," – and bids her farewell.

All this of the Harrowden cousins and their connection with Catholicism and the Gunpowder Plot, I have included not only because it touches nearly upon the family interests and friendships of Beaumont's early years, but also because it throws light upon the circumstances and feelings which prompted the satire of his first play, The Woman-Hater (acted in 1607), where as we shall see he alludes with horror to the Plot itself, but holds up to ridicule the informers who swarmed the streets of London in the years succeeding, and trumped up charges of conspiracy and recusancy against unoffending persons, and so sought to deprive them, if not of life, of property. It is with some hesitancy, since the proof to me is not conclusive, that I suggest that the animus in this play against favourites and intelligencers has perhaps more of a personal flavour than has hitherto been suspected. An entry from the Docquet, calendared with the State Papers, Domestic, of November 14, 1607, may indicate that John Beaumont, the brother of Francis, though a Protestant, had in some way manifested sympathy with his Catholic relatives during the persecutions which followed the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot: – "Gift to Sir Jas. Sempill of the King's two parts of the site of the late dissolved monastery of Grace-Dieu, and other lands in Leicester, in the hands of the Crown by the recusancy of John Beaumont." At first reading the John Beaumont would appear to be Francis' grandfather, the Master of the Rolls. But the Master lost his lands not for recusancy (or refusal on religious grounds to take the Oath of Allegiance, or attend the State Church), but for malfeasance in office, and that in 1552-3, while the Protestant Edward VI was King. He had no lands to lose after Mary mounted the throne, – even if as a Protestant he were recusant under a Catholic Queen. The recusancy seems to be of a date contemporaneous with James's refusal, October 17, 1606, to take fines from recusants, the King, as the State Papers inform us, taking "two-thirds of their goods, lands, etc., instead." The "two-thirds" would appear to be the "two parts" of Grace-Dieu and other lands, specified in the Gift; and that the sufferer was Francis Beaumont's brother is rendered the more likely by the fact that the beneficiary, Sir James Sempill, had been distinguishing himself by hatred of Roman Catholics from November 16, 1605, on; and that on July 31, 1609, he is again receiving grants "out of lands and goods of recusants, to be convicted at his charges."

There is nothing, indeed, in the career of Beaumont's brother, John, as commonly recorded, or in the temper of his poetry to indicate a refusal on his part to disavow the supremacy of Rome in ecclesiastical affairs, or to attend regularly the services of the Protestant Church. His writings speak both loyalty and Protestant Christianity. But it is to be noted that not only many of his kinsmen but his wife, as well, belonged to families affiliated with Roman Catholicism, and that his eulogistic poems addressed to James are all of later years, – after his kinsman, Buckingham, had "drawn him from his silent cell," and "first inclined the anointed head to hear his rural songs, and read his lines"; also that it is only under James's successor that he is honoured by a baronetcy. It is, therefore, not at all impossible that, because of some careless or over-frank utterance of fellow-feeling for his Catholic connections, or of repugnance for the unusually savage measures adopted after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, he may have been accused of recusancy, deprived of part of his estate, and driven into the seclusion which he maintained at Grace-Dieu till 1616 or thereabout.