Sir John Beaumont

Sir John Beaumont (1583–1627), 1st Baronet, was born at Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire, the elder brother of the dramatist Francis Beaumont, whose death he mourns in one of the epitaphs printed here. He was a country gentleman and a baronet rather than a professional writer, and his poems circulated among friends and were not collected in his lifetime.

His verse appeared posthumously in Bosworth-field, with a Taste of the Variety of Other Poems (1629), set forth by his son. The book joins a long historical poem on the battle that ended the Wars of the Roses with devotional pieces, verses to the Stuart court and the Duke of Buckingham, elegies and epitaphs, and translations from Virgil, Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Ausonius, Claudian and Prudentius. His easy, balanced couplets are often seen as a forerunner of the polished heroic couplet of later in the century. The 1629 text is damaged in the EEBO-TCP transcription, so lost letters and words are shown in square brackets; two pages of the book (181 and 182), following the epitaph on Lord Wriothesley, are missing from that transcription altogether.