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
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]