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
