Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
Sundridge Place lies, as we know, just south of Chevening and west of
Sevenoaks. The old manor house in which, we may presume, Beaumont and
Ursula lived, and where his children were born, has long since
disappeared. But the old church, just north of the Place, with its Early
English and Perpendicular architecture still stands much as in their
day. The old brass tablets to the Isleys of two centuries are there, and
the altar-tomb of the John Isley and his wife who died a century before
Beaumont was born. Near this memorial we may imagine that Beaumont and
Ursula sat of a Sunday; and through this same picturesque graveyard,
breathing peace, they would pass home again. Some days they would take
the half-hour stroll across the forks of the Darenth, by Combebank in
the chalk hills and through the woods, to Chevening House, and drink a
cup with old Sampson Lennard and his son, Sir Henry, and Fletcher's
stepsister Chrysogona (Grisogone), now Lord and Lady Dacre, and make
merry with their seven youngsters; and, coming back by the Pilgrim's
road that makes for the shrine of the "holy blissful martir," Beaumont
would quote, from Speght's edition of Chaucer which had appeared but
thirteen years before, something merry of the
Well nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
Or sometimes they would tramp across to Squerries and fish in the
Darenth for the bream of which Spenser had written; perhaps, visit their
sister Seyliard that same evening.