The Romance of Biography Volume I Part 12

She was born and nurtured in Ireland--

Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast.

Her father was the Earl of Kildare, her mother allied to the blood royal.

Her sire an Earl, her dame of Prince's blood.

She was brought up (through motives of compa.s.sion, after the misfortunes of her family,) at Hunsdon, with the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, where Surrey, who frequently visited them in company with the young Duke of Richmond,[65] first beheld her.

Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyes.

She was then extremely young, not above fourteen or fifteen, as it appears from comparative dates; and Surrey says very clearly,

She wanted years to understand The grief that he did feel.

But even then her budding charms made him confess as he beautifully expresses it--

How soon a look can print a thought That never may remove!

It was during the festivals held at Hampton Court, whither she accompanied the Princesses, that her conquest was completed; and Surrey being afterwards confined at Windsor,[66] was deprived of her society.

Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight; Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine, Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight.

Hampton Court was the scene of their frequent interviews. Surrey mentions a certain recessed or bow window, in which, retired apart from the gay throng around them, they held "converse sweet." Here she gave him, as it seems, some encouragement; too proud of such a distinguished suitor to let him escape. He in the same moment confesses himself a very slave, and betrays an indignant consciousness of the arts by which she keeps him entangled in her chain.

In silence tho' I keep to such secrets myself, Yet do I see how she sometime, doth yield a look by stealth; As tho' it seemed, I wis,--"I will not lose thee so!"

When in her heart so sweet a thought did never truly grow.

He accuses her expressly of a love of general admiration, and of giving her countenance and favour to unworthy rivals. In "The Warning to a Lover how he is abused by his Love," he thus addresses himself as the deceived lover:--

Where thou hast loved so long, with heart and all thy power, I see thee fed with feigned words, &c.

I see her pleasant cheer in chiefest of thy suit: When thou art gone, I see him come who gathers up the fruit; And eke in thy respect, I see the base degree Of him to whom she gives the heart, that promised was to thee![67]

The fair Geraldine must have been a practised coquette to have sat for a picture so finished and so strongly marked: yet before we blame her for this disdainful trifling, it should be remembered that Lord Surrey, at the time he was wooing her with "musicke vows," was either married or contracted to another,[68]--a circ.u.mstance quite in keeping with the fashionable system of Platonic gallantry introduced from Italy--

O Plato! Plato! you have been the cause, &c.

and so forth. I forbear to continue the apostrophe.

According to the old tradition, repeated by all Surrey's biographers, he visited on his travels the famous necromancer Cornelius Agrippa, who in a magic mirror revealed to him the fair figure of his Geraldine, lying dishevelled on a couch, and, by the light of a taper, reading one of his tenderest sonnets.

Fair all the pageant, but how pa.s.sing fair The slender form that lay on couch of Ind!

O'er her white bosom strayed her hazel hair, Pale her dear cheek, as if for love she pined.

All in her night-robe loose, she lay reclined, And pensive read from tablet eburnine, Some strain that seemed her inmost soul to find;-- That favoured strain was Surrey's raptured line, That fair and lovely form, the Lady Geraldine![69]

This beautiful incident is too celebrated, too touching, not to be one of the articles of our poetical faith. It was believed by Surrey's contemporaries, and in the age immediately following was gravely related by a grave historian. It shows at least the celebrity which his poetry, unequalled at that time, had given to his love, and the object of it. In fact, when divested of the antique spelling, which, at the first glance, revolts by the impression it gives of difficulty and obscurity, some of the lyrics of Surrey have not since been surpa.s.sed either in elegance of sentiment, or flowing grace of expression:--for example--

A Praise of his Love, wherein he reproveth them that compare their Ladies with his.

Give place ye lovers here before, That spent your boastes and braggs in vain, My ladye's beauty pa.s.seth more The best of yours, I dare well sayne, Then doth the sun the candle light, Or brightest day the darkest night.

And thereto hath a truth as just, As had Penelope the fair: For what she sayeth you may it trust.

As it by writing sealed were; And virtues hath she many moe, Than I with pen have skill to show.

The following sonnet is rather a specimen of versification than of sentiment: the subject is borrowed from Petrarch.

A COMPLAINT, BY NIGHT, OF A LOVER NOT BELOVED.

Alas! so all things now do hold their peace, Heaven and earth disturbed in no thing; The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease, And the night's car the stars about doth bring: Calm is the sea, the waves work less and less: So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring, Bringing before my face the great increase Of my desires, whereas I weep and sing, In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.

For my sweet thoughts, some time do pleasure bring; But by and by, the cause of my disease, Gives me a pang, that inwardly doth sting, When that I think, what grief it is again To live, and lack the thing should rid my pain.

Geraldine was so beautiful as to authorise the raptures of her poetical lover. Even in her later years, when as Countess of Lincoln, she attended on Queen Elizabeth, she retained so much of her excelling loveliness, that the adoration paid to her in youth, was not wondered at; and her celebrity as Surrey's early love, is alluded to by cotemporary writers.[70] There can be no doubt that she was an accomplished woman: the learned education the Princesses received at Hunsdon, (in the advantages of which she partic.i.p.ated,) is well known.

Her father, Lord Kildare, was a man of vigorous intellect and uncommon attainments for the age in which he lived. He was the eighth Earl of his n.o.ble family, and being engaged in the disturbances of Ireland, then a scene of eternal dissension and bloodshed between the native princes and the lords of the English pale, he fell under the displeasure of Henry the Eighth: his eldest son, and his five brothers, who had been seized as hostages, were executed on the same day at Tyburn, and the "stout old Earl," as he is called in history, died broken-hearted in the Tower.

The mother of Geraldine is rendered interesting to us by a little family trait, related by one of our old Chroniclers.[71] Lord Kildare, he tells us, "was so well affected to his wife, as he would not at anie time buy a suite of apparel for himself, but he would suite her with the same stuffe; the which gentlenesse she recompensed with equal kindnesse; for after that he, the said Earle, deceased in the Tower, she did not onely live a chaste and honourable widow, but also nightly, before she went to bed, she would resorte to his picture, and there, with a solemn _cong_, she would bid her Lorde good nighte."

This Countess of Kildare was Lady Elizabeth Grey, granddaughter of that famous Lady Elizabeth Grey, whose virtue made her the queen of Edward the Fourth. Thus the fair Geraldine was cousin to the young princes who were smothered in the Tower, and may truly be said to have been of "Prince's blood."

It must be admitted that the general tone of Surrey's poems does not give us a favourable idea of the fair Geraldine's manners and character.

She was variable, coquetish, and fond of admiration;--on this point I have offered some apology for her. She is accused also of marrying twice, from _mercenary_ motives, and thus forfeiting the attachment of her n.o.ble and poetical lover.[72] This is unfair, I think; there is no _proof_ that Geraldine married solely from _mercenary_ motives. Surrey was himself married, and both the men to whom she was successively united,[73] were eminent in their day for high personal qualities, though in comparison with Surrey, they have been reduced to hide their diminished heads in peerages and genealogies.

The Earl of Surrey was beheaded in 1547. The fair Geraldine was living forty years afterwards: she survived for a short time her second husband, Lord Lincoln; and with him lies buried under a sumptuous tomb at Windsor: she left no descendants. Her youngest brother, Edward Fitzgerald, was the lineal ancestor of the present Duke of Leinster.

The only original portrait of the fair Geraldine, now extant, is in the gallery of the Duke of Bedford, at Woburn; and I am told that it is sufficiently beautiful to justify Surrey's admiration.[74]

FOOTNOTES:

[63] "Those bears of English--those barbarous islanders," are common phrases in the Italian writers of that age.

[64] Surrey introduced the sonnet, and the use of blank verse into our literature. It is a curious fact, that the earliest blank verse extant was written by Saint Francis.

[65] Natural brother of the princesses: he was the son of Henry VIII. by Lady Talbot.

[66] He was imprisoned for eating meat in Lent.

[67] Lady Frances Vere.

[68] Surrey's Works: Nott's Edit. 4to.

[69] Lay of the Last Minstrel.

[70] Queen Elizabeth's Progresses, vol. i.

[71] Holinshed.

[72] See Nott's edition of Surrey's Works.

[73] She was the second wife of Sir Anthony Browne, and the third wife of the Earl of Lincoln, ancestor to the Duke of Newcastle.