Justice Beaumont was a squire of considerable means. When, in 1581, he qualified himself to be Bencher by lecturing at the Inner Temple upon some statute or section of a statute for the space of three weeks and three days, his expenses for the entertainment at table or in revels, alone, must have run to about £1500, in the money of to-day. He held at the time of his death landed estates in some ten parishes of Leicestershire, between Sheepshead on the east and and Coleorton three miles away on the west, and scattered over some seven miles north and south between Belton and Normanton. In Derby, too, he had two or three fine manors. His will shows that he was able to make generous provision for many of his "ould and faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing specifically a handsome sum in money to his daughter Elizabeth. He was a considerate and careful man, too, for the morning of his death he added a codicil to his will: "I have left somewhat oute of my will which is this, I will that my daughter Elizabeth have all the jewells that were her mother's." His sons are not mentioned, for naturally the heir, Henry, would make provision for John and Francis.¹² His chief executor was Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, his kinsman, – worth mentioning here; for at Coleorton another cousin, Maria Beaumont, the mother of the great Duke of Buckingham, had till recently lived as a waiting gentlewoman in the household.

Grace-Dieu where the youth of these children was principally spent, was "beautifully situated in what was formerly one of the most recluse spots in the centre of Charnwood Forest," within a little distance of the turn-pike road that leads from Ashby-de-la-Zouch to Loughborough. It lies low in a valley, near the river Soar. In his Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs, 1639, Thomas Bancroft gives us a picture of the spot:

 
Grace-Dieu, that under Charnwood stand'st alone,
As a grand relicke of religion,
I reverence thine old, but fruitfull, worth,
That lately brought such noble Beaumonts forth,
Whose brave heroicke Muses might aspire
To match the anthems of the heavenly quire:
The mountaines crown'd with rockey fortresses,
And sheltering woods, secure thy happiness
That highly favour'd art (tho' lowly placed)
Of Heaven, and with free Nature's bounty graced.
 

And still another picture of it is painted, a hundred and seventy years later by Wordsworth, the friend of the Sir George Beaumont who in his day was possessed of the old family seat of Coleorton Hall, within half an hour's walk of Grace-Dieu: —

 
Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,
Rugged and high, of Charnwood's forest ground
Stand yet, but, Stranger! hidden from thy view,
The ivied Ruins of forlorn Grace-Dieu, —
Erst a religious house, which day and night
With hymns resounded, and the chanted rite:
And when those rites had ceased, the Spot gave birth
To honourable Men of various worth:
There, on the margin of a streamlet wild,
Did Francis Beaumont sport, an eager child:
There, under shadow of the neighboring rocks,
Sang youthful tales of shepherds and their flocks;
Unconscious prelude to heroic themes,
Heart-breaking tears, and melancholy dreams
Of slighted love, and scorn, and jealous rage,
With which his genius shook the buskined stage.
Communities are lost, and Empires die,
And things of holy use unhallowed lie;
They perish; – but the Intellect can raise,
From airy words alone, a Pile that ne'er decays.¹³
 

So far as the "youthful tales of shepherds" go, Wordsworth is probably thinking of the verses of Francis' brother, Sir John, which open:

 
A shepherdess, who long had kept her flocks
On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks, —
 

written long after both brothers had left boyhood behind; indeed after Francis was dead; or he is attributing to our Beaumont a share in Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse. Francis, himself, has given us nothing of the pastoral vein, save sweet snatches in the dramas "with which his genius shook the buskined stage."

There is no doubt that from childhood up, the brothers and, as I shall later show, their sister Elizabeth breathed an atmosphere of literature and national life. At an early age John was sufficiently confessed a versifier to be assigned the Prelude to one of the nobly patronized Michael Drayton's Divine Poems, and there is fair reason for believing that the younger brother Francis was writing and publishing verses in 1602, when he was barely eighteen years of age. Their father was going to and fro among the great in London who made affairs. The country-side all about them was replete with historic memories and inspirations to poetry. In the Grey Friars' at Leicester, eleven miles south-east, Simon de Montfort allied by marriage to the first Anglo-Norman de Beaumonts, Earls of Leicester, lay buried. There, too, until his ashes were scattered on the waters of the Soar, King Richard the Third. In the Blue Boar Inn of that "toune," – in our young Beaumont's day, all "builded of tymbre," – this last of the Plantagenets had spent the night before the battle of Bosworth. The field itself on which the battle was fought lies but eight miles west of Leicester and about nine south of Grace-Dieu. No wonder that Francis Beaumont's brother John in after days chose Bosworth Field as the subject of an heroic poem:

 
The Winter's storme of Civill Warre I sing,
Whose end is crown'd with our eternall Spring;
Where Roses joyn'd, their colours mixe in one,
And armies fight no more for England's Throne.
 

The Beaumonts were living in the centre of the counties most engaged. Three of their predecessors had fallen fighting for the red rose, John Beaumont of Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at Northampton in 1460, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton in 1461. In his description of the battle, John introduces by way of simile a reference to what may have been a familiar scene about Grace-Dieu:

 
Here Stanley and brave Lovell trie their strength…
So meete two bulls upon adjoyning hills
Of rocky Charnwood, while their murmur fills
The hollow crags, when striving for their bounds,
They wash their piercing homes in mutuall wounds.
 

Lovell, himself, was a Beaumont on the mother's side. And the poet takes occasion to pay tribute, also, to his own most famous ancestor on the grandmother's side, the "noble Hastings," first baron, whose cruel execution in Richard III, Shakespeare had dramatized more than twenty years before John wrote.

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 Phædon 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.

In the history of culture not only John and Francis, but the Beaumonts in general are illustrious. In various branches and for generations the poetic, scholarly, and artistic vein has persisted. John Beaumont's son and heir, the second Sir John, edited his father's poems, and lived to write memorial verses on Ben Jonson, and on Edward King, Milton's "Lycidas"; and another son, Francis, wrote verses. A relative and namesake of the dramatist's father, – afterwards Master of Charterhouse, – wrote an Epistle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, 1598; and still another more distant relative, Dr. Joseph, Master of Peterhouse, and author of the epic allegory, Psyche, was one of the poetic imitators through whom Spenser's influence was conveyed to Milton. The Sir George Beaumont of Wordsworth's day to whom reference has already been made was celebrated by that poet both as artist and patron of art. And, according to Darley,¹⁴ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was of the race and maiden name of our dramatist's mother, Anne Pierrepoint. From which coincidence one may, if he will, argue poetic blood on that side of the family, too; or from Grosart's derivation of Jonathan Edwards from that family, polemic blood, as well.

The three sons of Justice Beaumont of Grace-Dieu were entered on February 4, 1597, at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke, which at that time was one of the most flourishing and fashionable institutions in Oxford. These young gentlemen-commoners were evidently destined for the pursuit of the civil and common law, since, as Dyce informs us, their Hall was then the principal nursery for students of that discipline. But one cannot readily visualize young Frank, not yet thirteen, or his brother John, a year or so older, devoting laborious hours to the Corpus Juris in the library over the south aisle of St. Aldate's Church, or to their Euclid, Strabo, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian. We see them, more probably, slipping across St. Aldate's street to Wolsey's gateway of Christ Church, and through the, then unfinished, great quadrangle, past Wolsey's tower in the southeast corner, and, by what then served for the Broad Walk, to what now are called the Magdalen College School cricket grounds, and so to some well-moored boat on the flooded meadows by the Cherwell. And some days, they would have under arm or in pocket a tattered volume of Ovid, preferably in translation, – Turberville's Heroical Epistles, or Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses, – or Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or Fenton's Tragical Discourses out of Bandello, dedicated to the sister of Sir Philip Sidney – Sir Philip, whose daughter young Francis should, one day, revere and celebrate in noble lines. Or they would have Harington's Orlando Furioso to wonder upon; or some cheap copy of Amadis or Palmerin to waken laughter. And, other days, fresh quartos of Tamburlaine and Edward II and Dido, or Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Lyly's Gallathea, or Greene's Frier Bacon and James IV, or Shakespeare's Richard II, and Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost. These, with alternate shuddering and admiring, mirth or tears, to declaim and in imagination re-enact. And certainly there would be mellow afternoons when the Songs and Sonnettes known as Tottel's Miscellany and The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, with their poems of love and chivalry by Thomas, Lord Vaux, – of which they had often heard from their cousins of Harrowden, – and Chapman's completion of Hero and Leander or Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Drayton's fantastic but graceful Endimion and Phoebe would hold them till the shadows were well aslant, and the candles began to wink them back to the Cardinal's quadrangle and the old refectory, beyond, of Broadgates Hall. For the Char and the boats were there then, and all these El Dorados of the mind were to be had in quarto or other form, and some of them were appearing first in print in the year when Frank and his brothers entered Oxford.

We may be sure, that many a time these brothers and sworn friends in literature, and Henry, too, loyal young Elizabethans, – and with them, perhaps, their cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who was then at Oriel, – strolled northwest from the Cherwell toward Yarnton, and then Woodstock with its wooded slopes, to see the island where Queen Elizabeth, when but princess, had been imprisoned for a twelvemonth, and, hearing a milk-maid singing, had sighed, "She would she were a milkmaid as she was"; and that they took note of fair Rosamund's well and bower, too. They may have tramped or ridden onward north to Banbury, and got there at the same cakeshop in Parsons Street the same cakes we get now. Or, some happy Michaelmas, they would have walked toward the fertile Vale of Evesham, north, first, toward Warwickshire where at Compton Scorpion Sir Thomas Overbury, the ill-fated friend of their future master, Ben Jonson, was born, and on by the village of Quinton but six miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, toward Mickleton and the Malvern Hills; and then, turning toward the Cotswolds, to Winchcombe with its ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south of it Sudely Castle where Henry VIII's last wife, the divorced Catherine Parr, had lived and died, – where Giles, third Baron Chandos, had entertained Queen Bess, and where in their time abode the Lord William. With this family of Brydges, Barons Chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in 1597 at any rate after 1602, when the fifth Baron, Grey, succeeded to the title. For, writing Teares on the death of that hospitable "King of the Cotswolds," which occurred in 1621, John Beaumont describes him with the admiration begotten of long intimacy, – "the smoothnesse of his mind," "his wisdome and his happy parts," and "his sweet behaviour and discourse."

Or, – and how could any young Oxonian fail of it? – they started from Broadgates, down the High, crossed Magdalen Bridge, where the boats were lazily oaring below them, and set out for the climb to Rose Hill; then down by sleepy ways to Littlemore, and to Sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents to Nuneham, – where now, in the fine old manor house, hangs Frank's own portrait in oils, – one of the two contemporary likenesses of him that exist to-day.