CHAPTER VI.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER--THEIR ORIGIN--THEIR JOINT PRODUCTIONS--CHARACTER OF BISHOP FLETCHER--ANECDOTES ABOUT THE USE OF TOBACCO--FORD, THE DRAMATIST--HOWELL--SIR HENRY WOTTON--THE CHARACTER OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM CONSIDERED.

CHAPTER VI.

Among the young Templars who devoted themselves to the drama during the times of George Villiers, was Francis Beaumont. Born in the same county as that in which Buckingham’s family were settled, and bearing the same name as the Duke’s mother, there is every probability of there being some tie of consanguinity between the poet and the peer.

Beaumont, like his colleague Fletcher, was one of ancient and honourable family; and, as such, entitled to be called to the Bar. It might be satisfactory to some of the lovers of literature to find that its pursuit, in the days of the Stuart Kings, was most frequently the choice of men of high connections, and by them considered as equal in position to the calling of the Bar, and far superior to that of the Church, or of medicine. The personal tastes of James, the passionate loveof the drama evinced by Charles, by Henrietta Maria, and by Villiers, encouraged aspiring men to a display of genius which might have long been hidden in a lawyer’s wig, or extinguished for ever beneath the coif. Men were less shackled then by conventionalities than in the present day.

The father of Francis Beaumont was one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas during the reign of Elizabeth, and the family seat was Grace-Dieu, in Leicestershire. Two gifted sons emerged from this ancient Manor-house to the universities--John Beaumont,[230]who became a Gentleman Commoner at Broad-gate Hall, Oxford; and Francis, who was educated at Cambridge. Both were entered at the Inns of Court: Francis at the Inner Temple, the popular resort of Cambridge men; John, however, retired to Grace-Dieu, married into the family of Fortescue, and devoted his peaceful days to translations of the classics, and to religious poems, which even Ben Jonson eulogized. Amongst them is the “Crown of Thorns,” a poem in eight books. Whether from Buckingham’s influence, or from his own merit, or from both conjoined, is not known, but he was knighted by Charles in 1626. He survived that honour only two years, dying in the same year in which Buckingham was killed.

His brother, Francis Beaumont, born in 1586, had a less peaceful career. Endowed with no ordinary abilities, he became acquainted with those whose example was not calculated to promote the due attention to legal studies. Ben Jonson and John Fletcher were then in favour with the public. Jonson in the decline of life, Fletcher almost in the dawn of his celebrity.

The Fletchers, like the Beaumonts, were a family of talent; and the famous friendship, or partnership, which produced so much, and to which we owe some of the most beautiful passages of poetry, linked to the most unreadable, was the result of that community of tastes and studies which is promoted by the education at an English university.

Fletcher, as well as Beaumont, had been at Cambridge; and his father, Dr. Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London, having been a benefactor to Benet College, that society was chosen for his matriculation. He came to London, and meeting, at some one or other of the clubs, with Francis Beaumont, they wrote plays in concert. Fletcher, who was ten years younger than his partner, had the most wit, the greatest luxuriance of fancy, the most extended conception, and lavish prodigality of improprieties. Beaumont had the soundest judgment, and employed it in cutting down young Fletcher’s daring flights of fancy. Both assistedin forming the plots; since Beaumont happened to be the elder of the two, his name appears first in the literary firm, but it ought, in strict propriety, to be Fletcher and Beaumont, instead of Beaumont and Fletcher.

They worked out the plots together; and one night, as they sat in a tavern, concocting a play, Fletcher undertook “To kill the King.” He was overheard by a waiter, who gave information of their traitorous designs; instantly the two young men were apprehended, and all the terrors of the law were before them--until they succeeded in justifying themselves, when the affair ended in mirth.

Beaumont, meantime, was gaining the confidence even of the formidable Ben Jonson, who submitted some of his works to his criticism before publication. The young lawyer had that skill in forming plots which seems like a natural gift, and which even good writers are unable to acquire; and he is said to have concocted some of those on which Jonson’s plays are founded.

Meantime, he wrote a little drama called “A Mask of Gray’s Inn Gentleman,” and a poem entitled “The Inner Temple.” Jonson, grateful for his aid, and admiring his talents, poured forth his delight in these lines:--

“How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy muse,That unto me do’st such religion useHow I do fear myself that am not worthThe least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth;At once thou mak’st me happy, and unmak’st;And giving largely to me more than tak’st.What fate is mine that so itself bereaves?What fate is thine, that so thy friend deceives?When, even there when most thou praisest me,For writing better I must envy thee.”

“How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy muse,

That unto me do’st such religion use

How I do fear myself that am not worth

The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth;

At once thou mak’st me happy, and unmak’st;

And giving largely to me more than tak’st.

What fate is mine that so itself bereaves?

What fate is thine, that so thy friend deceives?

When, even there when most thou praisest me,

For writing better I must envy thee.”

But, unhappily, Beaumont’s career was ended before he had attained the age of thirty. He was buried in St. Benedict’s within St. Peter’s, Westminster. No inscription on his tomb recalls the merits so soon closed in death; but Bishop Corbet, the author of the “Grave Poem,” and Sir John Beaumont, commemorated them in epitaphs which are to be found in their works. Frances Beaumont, the poet’s only daughter, survived him many years; but lost some of her father’s manuscript poems as she went to Ireland by sea. Beaumont died in 1615, just at the crisis of Villiers’ early career, when he became first the subject of King James’s notice. Notwithstanding his premature death, his plays attained an almost unrivalled popularity. Dryden tells us that they were the most popular entertainments of the time--two of them being acted through the year for one of Shakspeare’s or Jonson’s; there being, he adds, a certain gaiety in the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, and a pathos in their serious plays, which accorded with the tasteor humour of all men. Posterity, however, does not admit of the comparison; but it is impossible to say whether, if the lives of these two dramatists had been spared, their powers might not have enabled them far to exceed even the fanciful and poetical works which they found time to accomplish.

Fletcher died of the plague, in 1625, at the age of forty-five, and his remains were carried to the church of St. Mary Overie, where those of Massinger were deposited--and it has been said that they were both interred in the same tomb; but of this there is no certainty.

It is, perhaps, the greatest compliment we can pay to the present state of society to say that the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher can never be listened to by an English audience, as long as Englishwomen have one principle of delicacy, or Englishmen any respect for virtue, remaining. Those, however, who desire to judge of the poetical power of Fletcher will delight in his poem of the “Faithful Shepherdess,” which Milton thought worthy of imitation in his mask of “Comus.” Little is known of John Fletcher personally; but he lived in times when every nerve was touched by stirring events, and when many of the old memories which clung to men’s minds were dramatic and tragical. His father, when Dean of Peterborough, had attended Mary,Queen of Scots, to her execution. The good man, looking, perhaps, for that preferment which followed, and forgetting the peril, the misery of sudden conversions, had urged the heroic Queen to change her religion, even at that solemn hour when the heart clings the most closely to the impressions of youth. He repeated his arguments; then she begged him three or four times to desist. “I was born,” she said, “in this religion--I have lived in this religion--and am resolved to die in this religion.”

In spite of his vehement Protestantism, the Bishop had some small and great failings; he was an inveterate taker of tobacco, which was then not only imported, but reared in Ireland and England. The Bishop probably considered tobacco to be, as Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” describes it, “a vertuous herbe, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medecinally used;” but he did not follow the advice of that admirable writer in the moderation with which the snuff-box and the pipe should be indulged in. The prelate fell into an excess in the use of tobacco, to which Camden, in his History of England, imputed his death. The narcotic weed was indeed one of those luxuries of the age, which was most abused in the time of Buckingham. Burton anathematizes it--“as it is commonly used bymost men, who take it as tinkers do ale; ’tis a plague, a mischiefe, a violent purger of goods, lands, healthe, hellish, devilish, damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of bodye and soule.”[231]

But no considerations of this nature could either restrain Bishop Fletcher, or convince the gallants of the day that they were ruining either body or soul in their love of tobacco. It was very generally employed in the form of snuff by both sexes in the seventeenth century, and was allowed even in the royal presence.[232]“Before the meat came smoking to the board,” says Dekker, “our gallant must draw out his tobacco-box, and the ladle for the cold snuff into the nostril, all which artillery may be of gold or silver, if he can reach his several tricks in taking it, as the whiff, the ring, &c., for these are complements that gain gentlemen no mean respect.”[233]It was the custom to raise the snuff with a spoon to the nose; the snuff or pouncet-box having been long in vogue, charged, before the discovery of Ralegh, with cephalic powder, known since the time of Herodotus:--

“He was perfumed like a milliner,And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he heldA pouncet-box, which ever and anonHe gave his nose.”[234]

“He was perfumed like a milliner,

And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he held

A pouncet-box, which ever and anon

He gave his nose.”[234]

It was in vain that every power was combined to crush the practice of smoking, of the inveteracy of which Bishop Fletcher affords a memorable example. Monarchs united to oppose it, and it was even condemned on religious grounds; but that plea made no impression on Bishop Fletcher. Elizabeth had published an edict against it, assigning as a reason that her subjects, by employing the same luxuries as barbarians, would become barbarous. James I. published his famous counterblast to tobacco, comparing it to the “horrible Stygian smoake of the pit that is bottomless;” and imposed on it a prohibitory duty of six shillings and eight-pence per pound on its importation--an impost which Charles continued, making tobacco a royal monopoly, as it still is in France and the Netherlands--the duty having been only twopence a pound in the reign of Elizabeth. Still smoking prevailed; Ralegh had introduced it after the return of Sir Francis Drake from America, and all fashionable men practised it. Villiers, more especially, was probably among the most inveterate, after his residence in Spain; a pipe, a mug of ale, and a nutmeg were the right style at the Mitre and the Mermaid; and probablyfound toleration even in the hall of Burleigh, or at New-hall.

It seems hard to challenge the self-indulgence of Bishop Fletcher, or to grudge him a luxury which assisted Sir Isaac Newton in his contemplative mood, and soothed Hooker when a shrewish wife nearly drove him mad with vexation. Nevertheless, smoking, or taking snuff, is said to have ended Dr. Fletcher’s days. He had also trials of another kind to his health. He was the bishop who offended Elizabeth by taking a second wife, and that wife a handsome widow, Lady Baker, of Kent. The Queen, thinking that one wife was enough for a bishop, forbade him her presence, and ordered Archbishop Whitgift to suspend him, and whether from her Majesty’s displeasure, or from the effects of tobacco, he died suddenly in his chair; “being well, sick, and dead in one quarter of an hour.”

The family of Fletcher were largely imbued with poetic fervour. Giles, the bishop’s brother, was a man of great learning; and his two sons, John and Phineas, were conspicuous during the reign of James I. for their learning and poetry. Phineas, whose name occurs in the biography of Villiers, wrote “The Purple Island,” an allegorical description of man--a much extended version of “Spenser’s Allegory” in his secondbook. He also composed “Piscatory Eclogues and Miscellanies;” and his time was divided between the duties of his calling (for he was a clergyman) and the delight of composition. His brother Giles was, says Anthony Wood, equally “beloved of the muses and the graces.” The Fletchers were, indeed, remarkable for their gifts. Benlowes, in his verses to Phineas, thus expresses his sense of their family attributes:--

“For ’twere a stain, Nature’s, not thy own;For thou art poet born; who know thee know it;Thy brother, sire--thy very name’s a poet.”

“For ’twere a stain, Nature’s, not thy own;

For thou art poet born; who know thee know it;

Thy brother, sire--thy very name’s a poet.”

The fame of Giles Fletcher rests chiefly on his poem called “Christ’s Victory,” which is printed with the “Purple Island” by his brother Phineas.

Another of the young lawyers whose genius irradiated the drama in the time of Villiers--was John Ford, a great genius, and a prudent man, as far as we can judge by the close of his career. Like Fletcher and Beaumont, Ford was well-born, and had a great advantage in being descended, on his mother’s side, from the Chief Justice Popham. He came to London and entered at Gray’s Inn, then, as Stowe tells us, “a goodly house,” now the veryacméof dismal and decaying dinginess. It was illumined by the presence of Lord Bacon, as it had recently been by that of Lord Burleigh; and when Ford tookchambers in the Inn, there were pleasant gardens for the gay young students, in which they could walk and ruminate at their leisure; whilst Gray’s Inn Lane, furnished with fair buildings and many tenements, as Stowe also tells us, opened on the north with a view of the fields leading to Highgate and Hampstead; and there, too, dwelt Hampden and Pym, the vicinity of whom must have stirred up the spirits of the young disputants, whose ardour for liberty was excited during the days of the Remonstrance--the time of Buckingham’s impeachment--and in those when the first tax for the navy was levied.

Ford, however, cared little, it appears, for those stormy questions, but much for the drama, and more for the law, to which he was brought up, and in the practice of which he was wise enough to continue. A young man of a dramatic turn had many temptations, in those days, to sacrifice the hopes of a slow advancement for the brilliant success of a poet’s career. Ford, however, had a staid cousin at Gray’s Inn, at the time when he became a member of the Middle Temple, in 1602. This relative, also a John Ford, persuaded him “to stick to the law;” and Ford, in after-life, recorded the obligation with gratitude.

Ford’s first production was not dramatic. When only seventeen years of age, he wrote“Fame’s Memorial,” a tribute to one of the most popular, and at the same time one of the most unfortunate, noblemen of the day. The fate of the ill-starred Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy--afterwards Earl of Devonshire--impressed the young poet so forcibly as to impel him, without any personal knowledge of this hero, to write thisIn Memoriam. “The life of Lord Mountjoy,” remarks Hartley Coleridge, “is the finest subject of biography unoccupied.” He was the generous rival of Essex, with whom, nevertheless, he had in early life fought a duel. Blount being “a very comely man,” attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth. He distinguished himself at a tilt, and she sent him a chess-queen of gold, enamelled, which he tied on his arm with a crimson ribbon. Essex, on seeing this, laughed scornfully, and said, “Now I perceive every fool must have a favour!” Blount challenged him, and they fought at Marylebone, where the Earl was disarmed and wounded. Nevertheless, the combatants became firm friends even in early life, and, in their later days, generous rivals.

Unhappily, an attachment was formed between the handsome Charles Blount and the Lady Penelope, the sister of Essex. She was, however, under the guardianship of what was then called the Court of Wards. She was, therefore,forced to marry Lord Rich. The result was melancholy; and she became henceforth the mistress of the brave, but unhappy, Blount, now Lord Mountjoy, and their connection was well known. On the death of Rich, the guilty pair were married by Laud, then Bishop of London. King James, on that occasion, said to Mountjoy, “You have married a fair woman with a foul heart.” Perhaps he was too severe in his judgment, yet the gallant Mountjoy felt the opprobrium. His worldly prospects were marred by the union; so long as the attachment with Lady Penelope had been merely understood, the world had received her, and honoured him; but, when they were married, the guilty pair were slighted and contemned. “However bitter the cup of duty may be, duty commands us to drink it even to the dregs.”[235]The sentiment is just, and Mountjoy felt it so. His error was redeemed by suffering. He died, it is said, of a broken heart, having long pined away under neglect and mortification.[236]

To the Lady Penelope, the survivor of this sad romance, Ford addressed his “Fame’s Memorial.” Mountjoy’s great valour in Ireland--of which he was the true conqueror--had won him undying renown. His domestic life touched the young poet’s feelings; and upon it he wrote histragedy of the “Broken Heart.”Penthea’slamentation for her “enforced marriage” recalls, in that exquisite play, poor Lady Penelope’s story:--

"Penthea.--How, Orgilus, by promise I was thineThe heavens do witness!. . . . . How I do love theeYet, Orgilus, and yet, must best appearIn tendering thy freedom.. . . . . Live, live happy--Happy in thy next choice.And oh! when thou art married, think on meWith mercy, not contempt! I hope thy wife,Hearing my story, will not scorn my fall.Now let us part."

"Penthea.--How, Orgilus, by promise I was thine

The heavens do witness!

. . . . . How I do love thee

Yet, Orgilus, and yet, must best appear

In tendering thy freedom.

. . . . . Live, live happy--

Happy in thy next choice.

And oh! when thou art married, think on me

With mercy, not contempt! I hope thy wife,

Hearing my story, will not scorn my fall.

Now let us part."

For some time Ford merely assisted other dramatists in their compositions; it was not until 1628 that he produced “The Lover’s Melancholy,” which he dedicated to the “Noble Society of Gray’s Inn.” This play was suggested by Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” from which Ford, as well as Sterne, freely borrowed. After describing the rapidity, the impelling necessity with which the works of Massinger and Jonson were produced, it is agreeable to think of an author who was able “to write up to his own ideal.” Ford not only disdained all pandering to the public taste, but even regarded the emolument arising from his plays as a secondary consideration, after he was once fairly established in his profession. Nor was it then thought incompatibleto unite the character of a play-writer with that of a lawyer. The Templars, and other learned societies, were the great patrons of the drama. Often were the quaint halls of the Temple and of Gray’s Inn formed into temporary theatres for some favourite piece; and the talk of the young Templar was always of Blackfriars, the Curtain, or the Rose--of Will Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, and Ford.

Ford conceived that his powers lay in the delineation of dark and horrible crimes; in the exhibition of a mysterious and hopeless melancholy. The moral of his dramas, whatever aspect it may bear in our days, was intended to be good; but the grossness of the times marred that intention, and his works show how impossible it is to be at once moral and indelicate. EvenPentheain the “Broken Heart,” exquisitely as her character is drawn, lessens our sympathy by expressions which no woman of the present day would utter in the presence of a lover, and that lover for ever severed from her by her indissoluble bonds with another man.

But Ford wrote in the spirit and language of his time, with a high purpose, and a coarse taste. “His genius,” it has been well remarked, “is as a telescope, ill-adapted for neighbouring objects, but powerful to bring within the sphere of visionwhat nature has wisely placed at an unsociable distance.”[237]

He chose for the subject of his historical play the story of “Perkin Warbeck.” With great skill he made this hero believe in his own royalty; and he has left in this play, according to the opinion of good judges, the best specimen of an historical tragedy after Shakspeare.

Ford resembled Shakspeare in some particulars of his fate. Happier in that than his associates, he was able to retire, at an early age, to his native Devonshire, where, tradition says, he lived to old age. It is stated that he married, and had children; but even of this there is no certainty. One thing alone is clearly shown, even in Ford’s dim history, that he regarded literature as the relaxation, and not the labour of his life; that he steadily pursued the profession in which untiring work, honourable conduct, and fair talents generally find an ultimate reward; that he was independent of patronage; that he could treat those to whom he addressed his dedications as men whom he was complimenting, not benefactors whom he was suing; and lastly, that he was able to leave the world of law and letters before that world’s enjoyments had been exhausted, or its disappointments had soured and wearied his spirit.

His last play was the “Lady’s Trial;” but his fame chiefly rests on “Perkin Warbeck” and the “Broken Heart.” It is a proof of the great esteem entertained for genius by the Earl of Newcastle, “poor Ben’s” patron, that he was also friendly to Ford, who dedicated “Perkin Warbeck” to that nobleman.

It was not only by necessitous men of obscure extraction that poetry was cultivated in those times; on the contrary, some acquaintance with the Muses, although not thought essential in those who would fain rise to distinction as courtiers, was, at all events, deemed ornamental and advantageous. The name of Thomas Carew was distinguished in the reign of Charles I., as one of the most intellectual of his young courtiers.

He was a man of an ancient Gloucestershire family; a branch of that race settled in Devonshire, and his education was that usually assigned to youths of good birth and expectations. He was entered at Corpus Christi College, in Oxford, and his academical career was succeeded, as was customary in those times, by travelling. From the grand tour, Carew returned replete with wit, fancy, and with a high reputation for accomplishments.

He was, therefore, almost instantly noticed by Charles I., and, it is evident, enjoyed the favourof Buckingham, to whom he addressed “Lines on the Lord Admiral’s recovery from sickness.” Charles made him one of his gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and Sewer in ordinary--appointments which brought the poet into an immediate contact with the principal characters of the Court; and he became the intimate associate of Lord Clarendon, the eulogist of Villiers, and the friend of Ben Jonson. As a writer of love sonnets, Carew has had few equals; and he may be termed, in that respect, the Moore of his age. His charming qualities as a companion, and the elegance of his verses, are praised by Clarendon; whilst his contemporaries--even those less happy than himself--saw in him, whom they declared to be one of a “mob of gentlemen,” who aspired to be eminent in polite literature, one whose career added lustre to the pursuits of literature. Strange to say, Carew was beloved and extolled by his less fortunate contemporaries; and even Ben Jonson gave him his meed of praise, which Carew returned with sympathy and admiration.

After Jonson’s unlucky play, “The New Inn,” had been hissed off the stage, and Jonson had vented his rage in an ode, Carew addressed the angry poet in lines full of good sense, wit, and good feeling; and yet, he hints, with a sincerity as rare as it is fearless, that his powers weresomewhat weakened since poor Ben had brought out the “Alchemist.”

“And yet ’tis trueThy cousin muse from the exalted line,Touched by the alchemist, doth since declineFrom that her zenith, and foretells a redAnd blushing evening when she goes to bed;Yet such as shall outshine the glimmering lightWith which all stars shall gild the following night.”

“And yet ’tis true

Thy cousin muse from the exalted line,

Touched by the alchemist, doth since decline

From that her zenith, and foretells a red

And blushing evening when she goes to bed;

Yet such as shall outshine the glimmering light

With which all stars shall gild the following night.”

Again he adds:--

“Let others glut on the extorted praiseOf vulgar breath, trust thou to after-days:Thy laboured works shall live when Time devoursThe abortive offering of their hasty hours.Thou art not of their rank--the quarrel liesWithin thine own verge; then let this sufficeThe wiser world doth greater thee confessThan all men else, than thyself only less.”

“Let others glut on the extorted praise

Of vulgar breath, trust thou to after-days:

Thy laboured works shall live when Time devours

The abortive offering of their hasty hours.

Thou art not of their rank--the quarrel lies

Within thine own verge; then let this suffice

The wiser world doth greater thee confess

Than all men else, than thyself only less.”

Carew, notwithstanding the highly virtuous tone of the Court in which he lived, led an irregular life; and lived to mourn, in deep repentance, for that more than wasted portion of his existence, in which he gave way to the worst parts of his otherwise fine nature. When Ben Jonson had ceased to write, Carew was selected as the poet most calculated to supply the place of that great genius in providing masques for the Court. Only one, however, produced by him, remains. It is called “Cœlum Britannicum.”

Inigo Jones was again summoned to be one ofthe “Inventors,” to place the masque on the stage, and Henry Lawes composed the airs, and superintended the musical performance; but those to whose splendour and genius the perfection of this species of entertainment was owing, were no longer there. Villiers was gone; Ben Jonson had virtually quitted “the detracting world,” which he had once defied from his proud pre-eminence. The country was even then split up into factions. Happily for himself, Carew escaped their outbreak. He died in 1639, expressing heartfelt religious convictions and penitence.

Amongst the gentlemen writers, as they were styled, was Edmund Waller, who, at the time of Buckingham’s death, was a young man of twenty-three years of age. The lines addressed by him to Charles I., on the extraordinary composure which the King showed on hearing of that event, are well known. Even then Waller had been a member of Parliament, and had been elected to sit in that assembly whilst he was in his seventeenth year. Waller’s circumstances, his destiny, his views of life, his genius, his disposition, were as opposite to those of Massinger and Ben Jonson as can possibly be conceived. He seemed born a courtier; and every effort he made was to advance himself at first in that career, and afterwards as a politician. His first appearance as a poet, in hiseighteenth year, was to congratulate King James on the escape of Prince Charles at St. Audera, when returning from Spain; and in this poem his polished verses, perfected, he alleged, by the study of Fairfax’s “Tasso,” were so turned as to excite the admiration of the literary world, by whom he was deemed the model of English versifiers. But, in spite of his alleged devotion to Charles, and notwithstanding his continuing to sit in Parliament, Waller sheltered himself during the storm that ensued, and went to study chemistry under the guidance of his kinsman, Bishop Morley--emerging only from his retreat at Beaconsfield to mingle in the delightful circle of wits and incipient heroes of whom the noble Falkland was the centre.

He married early; having, with a fortune of nearly four thousand a-year, espoused a city heiress, who died and left him a widower at the age of twenty-five. Then this accomplished man of the world looked out for rank, and paid his addresses, poetically at all events, to the lovely Dorothy Sidney, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Sidney. He apostrophized her as Saccharissa. She was, or he made her out to be, a proud and scornful beauty, and he turned to his "Amoret"--Lady Sophia Murray; but, though well-born, rich, favoured by Charles, and nephew of John Hampden byhis mother’s side, so that he seemed secure of rising under any faction, Waller’s loves did not prosper in the direction to which he at first guided them; for he was wise in his generation, and could control his fancies by views of interest.

He married, therefore, a second time, “loving, doubtless, wisely and not too well;” but neither the name, condition, nor fortune of his second wife is mentioned by his biographers.

From this time Edmund Waller’s career was despicable. In his heart a Royalist, he absented himself from the House of Commons whenever there was a chance of his being of service to the King, or of his committing himself. Yet he sent Charles a thousand gold pieces when the Royal standard at Nottingham was set up--and concocted, with a conspirator named Tomkyns, a plot for delivering the City and the Parliament into the hands of the Royalists. Nevertheless, he had been seconding “my Uncle Hampden” in the House, in his censure of Ship-money. When his plot--still called in history Waller’s plot, for he had the chief blame--when this base conspiracy, unworthy of any cause, was discovered, Waller confessed everything, and criminated everybody. Confounded with fear, he had yet the consummate hypocrisy to talk of his “remorse of conscience,” adding one to the long list of crimeswhich that abused word is called to sanction or excuse. It is a satisfaction to know that he was nearly being hanged--that he was expelled the House--fined ten thousand pounds--and then “contemptuously suffered to go into exile.” Never was that party more fortunate than in getting rid of such a man.

He took refuge at Rouen, and lived there and in Paris until all his wife’s jewels were sold--for on them he lived. He was, however, at last allowed to return home, and again he sullied Beaconsfield with his presence. He hastened to flatter Cromwell, and even to propose, in his smooth and flattering verses, the substitution of a crown of gold for bays:--

“His conquering head has no more room for bays,Then let it be as the glad nation prays;Let the rich ore be melted down,And the State fix’d by making him a crown:With ermine clad and purple, let him holdA royal sceptre made of Spanish gold!”

“His conquering head has no more room for bays,

Then let it be as the glad nation prays;

Let the rich ore be melted down,

And the State fix’d by making him a crown:

With ermine clad and purple, let him hold

A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold!”

Cromwell, however, was far too wise to take the bait. The sycophant thought it expedient to write an ode on his death--for he was not certain that the great man’s power might not be perpetuated by his son. The instant, however, that the Restoration placed Charles II. on the throne, Waller was ready with his congratulatory ode.He dwelt on the guilt of the Rebellion; and, except that the flavour of spicy flattery was so poor as to provoke abon motfrom Charles II. he might have succeeded. “Poets,” said the witty monarch, “succeed better in fiction than in truth.” But with Waller it was all fiction.

He was soon a favourite at that easy, merry court; his poetry caused his unconquerable duplicity to be forgotten--or, if not forgotten, looked on even complacently by courtiers who held all virtue to be hypocrisy. He managed to please everybody; though a water-drinker, he was the life of Bacchanalian parties. It is owing to Clarendon that the renegade was not made Provost of Eton--a post for which he had actually the audacity to ask. He thence became the friend and ally of George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, to whose age and time, rather than that of the subject of this memoir, one would gladly consign the apostate poet.

One of his worst acts was to vote for the impeachment of Lord Clarendon; and here one would gladly end the record of the misdeeds of an able and accomplished man, distinguished almost as much for his eloquence as for his poetic productions. But Waller lived on; he was favoured by James II., who seems to have been cajoled by the flatteries which his royal brother had detected.Waller again in parliament, and now eighty years old, was permitted to speak jocularly with the monarch. One day he called Queen Elizabeth, in James’s presence, the “greatest woman in the world.” "I wonder," answered his Majesty, “you should think so; but it must be allowed she had a wise council.”

"And when, sire," cried Waller, “did you ever hear of a fool choosing a wise one?”

When it was known that the veteran courtier was going to marry his daughter to Dr. Birch, a clergyman, James sent a French gentleman to ask him how he could think of marrying his daughter to a falling church.

“The King does me great honour,” was the reply, “to concern himself about my affairs; but I have lived long enough to observe that this falling church has got a trick of rising again.”

He foresaw the coming crisis, but lived not to have an opportunity of writing odes to William III. and his Queen. He now composed “Divine Poems,” and began to think, at the age of eighty-three, that possibly this world, and the courts of the Charles’s and James’s, were not everything that there was to value in life. When he found himself sinking, he said, “Take me to Coleshill” (his native place); “I should be glad to die, like the stag, where I was roused.”

He was, however, too near death to be removed; and he expired at Beaconsfield, in October, 1678, and thus escaped being the witness of another revolution.

Such were some of the eminent contemporaries of George Villiers, in an age so rich in intellectual force as to constitute it, in that respect alone, one of the most remarkable periods of English history.

But there were, among theliteratiof that day, two men whose observations were peculiarly directed towards the career of Villiers--these were James Howell, the letter-writer, and Sir Henry Wotton.

Howell’s well-known name is mixed up repeatedly in the various passages of the Duke of Buckingham’s foreign life. Howell was the son of a clergyman, at Abernant, in Carmarthenshire; was accordingly entered at Jesus College, Oxford, the great emporium of the Jones’s, Williams’s, Morgans, and Howells.

He was, like many of his countrymen, “a true cosmopolite,” born, says Anthony Wood, neither to “house, land, lease, or office.” He had not the misfortune of having a position in life to lose, so he went to London, and became, through the interest of Sir Robert Mansel, steward to a glass-house in Bond Street, glass being a monopoly; whilst his elder brother rose to be Bishop of Bristol.

Glass being by no means in its perfection, the proprietors of the work sent James Howell abroad, in order to hire foreign workmen, and to buy the best materials for a manufacture which they wished to improve; and James Howell joyfully accepted the mission. He travelled into France, Holland, Flanders, Spain, and Italy; and, setting off in 1619, encountered George Villiers in his French tour, came across him in Spain, and heard of him all the good and bad that he has detailed in his letters to England.

He gave up his stewardship, and posted again into Spain, in 1623, and was in that country when Charles I. and Buckingham were at Madrid. Like persons in the pit of a great theatre, Howell, in his half-commercial, half-diplomatic capacity, saw a great deal which the actors in that brilliant scene overlooked.

His ostensible reason for going to Spain was to reclaim a rich English ship which had been seized by the Viceroy of Sardinia; his real occupation was that of watching the Royal “wooer,” and his scarcely less conspicuous companion, Buckingham. Meantime, Howell was made a Fellow of Jesus College; and, in accepting this honour, he said he “should reserve his Fellowship, and lay it by as a warm garment against rough weather,should any fall on him.” And certainly he was destined to experience the changes and chances of fortune in no ordinary degree. He returned to London, and was appointed secretary to Lord Scrope, who was made Lord-President of the North. Howell, therefore, was transplanted to York; and, whilst there, was chosen member for Richmond, an honour for which he had not canvassed. He sat, therefore, in the parliament which opened in 1627--a session so important to Buckingham, and so fraught with consequences to the country.

Still, the apparently fortunate man was without any fixed employment. He had, however, talents which were then rare in this country; he spoke seven modern languages--and, without recording his own remark, which borders on levity, on that score, it must be admitted that few Englishmen either in that age or this can do the same. His merits were, in this respect, estimated by Charles I., who sent him in the quality of secretary to Robert, Earl of Leicester, to Denmark, when it became necessary to condole with the King of that State on the death of his consort, Charles’s Danish grandmother. Next, Howell was despatched to France, and subsequently to Ireland, where the Earl of Strafford appreciated his wonderful industry, and welcomed him kindly;he was intrusted by that ill-fated nobleman with business, first in Edinburgh and then in London; but his hopes of rising were crushed by the ruin of Strafford, and by the crash which ensued.

Charles, however, again despatched him to France, and made him, on his return, Clerk of the Council.

Poor Howell now believed that he had secured a permanent post, a fixed income, and a most agreeable residence, an apartment being allotted to him in Whitehall. The greater part of the old Tudor palace was then still standing; the noble gates built by Henry VIII. remained; the Banqueting-house was partially finished; all but the paintings by Vandyck, who was to have adorned the sides of that room, now used as a chapel, with paintings of all the history and procession of the Order of the Garter, were completed--that symmetrical fragment stood then as it now stands. Charles I. could as little have anticipated that George of Hanover would have made the room he destined for Ben Jonson’s masques into a chapel, with the apotheosis of James I. upon the ceiling, as he could have foreseen that one day he should be led out from one of the windows of the Banqueting-house to Whitehall-gate, where “cords to tie him down to the block had been prepared, had he madeany resistance to that cruel and bloody stroke.”[238]

Equally unconscious of his royal patron’s doom as of his own fate, Howell established himself in that palace, the only danger of which seemed to be the frequent inundations of the Thames, by which Whitehall was often half submerged. But shortly afterwards the King left that palace to which he never returned but as a captive; and Howell also departed. But, coming back to London on private business, he was, in 1643, thrown into prison, his papers were seized, and he was committed in close custody to the Fleet.

This ancient prison had been, until that time, a place of durance for persons sentenced by the Council Table, then called the Court of the Star Chamber--so that Howell had the additional vexation of being apprehended by one of the warrants which he would himself have issued had the troubles of the Rebellion never commenced;--had things remained as they were when Lord Surrey suffered from its pestilent atmosphere, and when the importunate Lady Dorset was silenced in what was truly called by Surrey, “that noisome place.”

The Star Chamber was, however, it appears, abolished before the time when James Howell, descending Whitehall stairs, was rowed up theriver Fleet, to a gate as portentous in its aspect and associations as the Traitor’s-gate at the Tower; and thence conducted to what was afterwards called the Common side of the prison.[239]When the letter-writer entered its miserable courts, the Fleet had lost the dignity of a state prison for minor political offences, and was a place for debtors, and divided into two sides, the Master’s side and the Common side. In the Common side, to complete the horrors, was a strong-room, or vault, which has been described “to be like those in which the dead are interred, and wherein the bodies of persons dying are usually deposited till the coroner’s inquest has passed them.”

Howell, as he entered the Common side, probably thought that he might live to be one of the mute inhabitants of that ghastly chamber--for he was not only suspected by the Parliament, but in debt. Wood, indeed, ascribes his captivity wholly to the curse of debt, brought on by his own extravagance; and since Howell, like many public men of the day, had no “income but such as he scrambled for,” and since it was an age of careless expenditure, Wood is, perhaps, in this statement, as he generally is, correct.

The character of the man of desultory life roseunder the trial. During five years the once free and happy James Howell lay in that den of misery--rendered more miserable by all that was going on in the world, of which he heard enough in his durance, perhaps too much. During that period Charles was beheaded; the gay precincts of Whitehall were stained with the blood of one whom Howell had reverenced as a royalist, but whose advisers, Buckingham, Laud, and Strafford, he had censured, as a man of the world, of sense and candour, could not fail to do. Whilst he lay in the place where Falkland had been sent for sending a challenge--where Prynne had paid the penalty for his “Histriomastix,” Howell’s thoughts no doubt reverted to the pleasant days of Charles’s youth, in the fields near Madrid, where plumed knights ran a course--or to the arena of the bull-fight. He dreamed, perhaps, of the incomparable Infanta, or of the stately Philip, and his gallant, flattered, sanguine English guests.

But he did better. Howell is not the only writer who has tried to bind up the wounds of a broken heart by authorship; or has succeeded in dissipating the hours of a long imprisonment by communicating not only with the world of letters, which was nearly extinct in general literature during the first year of the Protectorate, butwith those among the free, the sympathetic, and the celebrated who remembered the poor debtor in his cell. One of his most notable efforts was his own epitaph, beginning--

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