Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
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
Just south of Charnwood Forest stood, in the day of John and Francis,
the Manor House in Bradgate Park where Lady Jane Grey was born, and
where she lived from 1549 to 1552 while she was being educated by her
ambitious father and mother, the Marquis and Marchioness of Dorset, "to
occupy the towering position they felt assured she would sooner or later
be called to fill"--that of Protestant queen of England. Here it was
that Roger Ascham, as he tells us in his _Schoolmaster_, after inquiring
for the Lady Jane of the Marquis and his lady who were out hunting in
Charnwood Forest, came upon the twelve-year old princess in her closet
"reading the _Phaedon_ of Plato in Greek, with as much delight as
gentlemen read the merry tales of Boccaccio." The grandmother of the
young Beaumonts, who was still alive in 1578, may have lived long enough
to take our Francis on her knee and tell him of the hopes her Protestant
kinsmen of Ashby-de-la-Zouch had fixed upon the Lady Jane, and of how
her cousin, the Earl, Francis of Huntingdon, had been one of those who
in Royal Council in June 1553, abetted the Dukes of Northumberland and
Suffolk in the scheme to secure the succession of Lady Jane to the
throne, and how, with these dukes and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
other lords and gentlemen (among them a certain Sir John Baker of
Sissinghurst, Kent, whose family later appears in this narrative), he
had signed the "devise" in accordance with which Jane was proclaimed
Queen. And the old lady would with bated breath tell him of the cruel
fate of that nine-days' queen. Of how Francis of Huntingdon was sent to
the Tower with Queen Jane, she also would tell. But perhaps not much of
how he shortly made his peace with Queen Mary, hunted down the dead
Jane's father, and brought him to the scaffold. And either their
grandmother or their father, the Judge, could tell them of the night in
1569 on which their cousin, Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon, had
entertained in the castle "rising on the very borders" of the forest to
the east, Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was on her way to her captivity
in the house of another connection of theirs, Henry Cavendish, at
Tutbury in the county of Stafford, just east of them.