ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



A visitation of the archdeaconry in 1607 showed seven churches in 

 decay, and nine chancels. Three parish priests (at Mowsley, Arnesby, and 

 Laughton) refused to wear the surplice or follow the rubrics of the Book of 

 Common Prayer. At Thurlaston and Fenny Drayton several people refused 

 to kneel at their communions ; and a woman at Thurlaston had gone out of 

 the parish for her confinement in order to escape churching and the baptism 

 of her child with the sign of the cross. A man at Thornton had taken his 

 child a long way by water to get it baptized without the cross. One or two 

 schoolmasters had given trouble : Richard Houghton at Wymondham had 

 been specially irreverent, keeping school in the church without licence, and 

 bidding his scholars one day hang out two freshly-steeped ox hides to dry 

 there. Numerous cases of immorality were presented. 171 



Recusants presented at this time were very few, but there is one name 

 amongst them of considerable interest. It is not usually known that Sir John 

 Beaumont, brother of Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, was all his life a faithful 

 adherent of the ' old religion.' 17a His grandmother had been a notable 

 recusant, but his father, Judge Beaumont, had conformed outwardly at least to 

 the English Church. 173 As soon as John Beaumont, by the death of his elder 

 brother in 1605, became the owner of Grace Dieu, he withdrew himself 

 finally from his parish church, and continued a recusant till his death in 

 i627. m His religion from the time of his retirement to domestic life in the 

 country was evidently a matter of quiet lamentation ; his devotional poems 

 display no bigotry or bitterness, and are so catholic in their inspiration that 

 an ordinary reader would suppose him to be of the same school as Andrewes 

 and George Herbert. He maintained his acquaintance with a large circle of 

 the nobility and literary men of his day, and wrote courtly verses to the king 

 and royal family to the last ; but his verses on Sin, Contrition, Comfort, 

 Desolation, and Hope could only have been written by one whose chief 

 interest was in things spiritual. 



An outbreak of popular superstition in Leicestershire during the early 

 part of the seventeenth century serves to illustrate one of time's strange 

 revenges. Even Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, gravely discusses the 

 powers ascribed to witches, to raise and to quell storms, to cure and to do 

 hurt, and to carry heavy objects through the air to a great distance ; and he 

 concludes that most lawyers, divines, physicians, and philosophers really 



171 Assoc. Archil. Soc. xxii, 120-8. 



I7> Neither the account of him in Wood's Athenae Oxonitnscs nor Grosart's life prefixed to his poems in 

 Fuller Worthies' Library contains any notice of his religion, and the writer of the article in The Dictionary 

 of National Biography makes the extraordinary statement that he was 'a Puritan in religion.' But the case is clear 

 from the visitation of 1 607 mentioned above. The entry stands (under Belton parish), ' Mr. John Be amon esquier 

 for not frequenting his parish churche these xii monethes. Uxor praefati m' ri Beamon for the like.' That is 

 just after he came to Grace Dieu. He is named again among recusants, whose homes were searched for arms in 

 1625 ; in S.P. Dom. Chas. I, x, 54. His eldest son, the second Sir John Beaumont, was in trouble in 1641 

 for his recusancy, accused before the Lords of using violence to the churchwardens when they came to demand 

 subsidies ; Lords' Journ. iv, 3 1 8. Another son is said by Wood to have become a Jesuit ; it is likely enough, 

 but it is strange that, if true, this fact should have escaped so careful a collector as Fr. Henry Foley. 



173 He was buried at Belton church. 



174 One of his best poems, on the concurrence of Easter-day with the Feast of the Annunciation, must 

 have been written only a few weeks before his death ; it was in 1627 that the two feasts fell together, and he 

 was buried in Westminster Abbey 29 April, 1627. (See Grosart's preface to his works.) The subject-matter 

 of his poems to James I and Charles I, as well as his much-praised lines on the death of his own son Gervase 

 (which must have been 1621), are proof enough that he went on writing at Grace Dieu, and not only 

 in his early youth, as Wood implies. 



i 377 48 



