THE FAIR GERALDINE AND THE EARL OF SURREY.
The “Fair Geraldine” the general object of Lord Surrey’s empassioned sonnets, is commonly said to have lived at Florence, and to have been of the family of the Geraldi, of that city. This is however, a misapprehension of an expression in one of our poet’s Odes, and of a passage in Drayton’s Heroic Epistles. This lady was Elizabeth, third daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare. She appears to have received her education at Hunsdon House, with the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. It was here she was first seen by the Earl of Surrey, and she immediately became the object of his fervent but fruitless devotion. She was married first to Sir Anthony Browne, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and secondly to Edward Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, surviving by many years her noble and unfortunate admirer. There is a Portrait of the “Fair Geraldine” in the Woburn collection.
It is not precisely known at what period the Earl of Surrey began his travels. They have the air of a romance. He made the tour of Europe in the true spirit of chivalry, and with the ideas of an Amadis; he proclaimed the unparalleled charms of his Mistress, and prepared to defend the cause of her beauty with the weapons of Knight-errantry; nor was this adventurous journey performed without the intervention of an enchanter. The first city in Italy which he proposed to visit was Florence, the capital of Tuscany, and the original seat of the ancestors of his Geraldine.
In his way thither he passed a few days at the Emperor’s court; where he became acquainted with Cornelius Agrippa, a celebrated adept in natural magic. This visionary Philosopher shewed our hero in a mirror of glass, a representation of Geraldine, reclining on a couch, sick, and reading one of his most tender sonnets by a waxen taper. His imagination, which wanted not the flattering representations and artificial incentives of illusion, was heated anew by this interesting and affecting spectacle. Inflamed with every enthusiasm of the most romantic passion, he hastened to Florence; and on his arrival, immediately published a defiance against any person who could handle a lance and was in love, whether Christian, Jew, Turk, Saracen, or Cannibal, who should presume to dispute the superiority of Geraldine’s beauty. As the lady was pretended to be of Tuscan extraction, the pride of the Florentines was flattered on this occasion; and the Grand Duke of Tuscany permitted a general and unmolested ingress into his dominions of the combatants of all countries, until this important trial should be decided. The challenge was accepted, and the Earl proved victorious. The shield which was presented to him by the Duke of Tuscany before the tournament began, is exhibited in Vertue’s valuable print of the Arundel family, and was actually in the possession of one of the late Dukes of Norfolk.
These heroic vanities did not, however, so totally engross the time which the Earl of Surrey spent in Italy, as to alienate his mind from letters; he studied with the greatest success a critical knowledge of the Italian tongue; and that he might give new lustre to the name of Geraldine, attained a just taste for the peculiar graces of the Italian poetry.
He was recalled to England for some idle reason by the king, much sooner than he expected; and he returned home the most elegant traveller, the most polite lover, the most learned nobleman, and the most accomplished gentleman of his age. Dexterity in tilting and gracefulness in managing a horse under arms, were excellencies now viewed with a critical eye, and practised with a high degree of emulation. In 1540 at a tournament held in the presence of the Court at Westminster, and in which some of the principal nobility were engaged, Surrey was distinguished above the rest for his address in the use and exercise of arms.
But all these accomplishments, and the popularity that attended them, laid the foundation of a fatal death for this illustrious nobleman. They excited the jealousy of his capricious monarch Henry VIII. Lord Orford says “The unwieldy king growing distempered and froward, and apprehensive for the tranquillity of his boy-successor, easily conceived or admitted jealousies infused into him by the Earl of Hertford and the Protestant party, though one of the last acts of his fickle life was to found a convent.” Treason was therefore objected to the Earl of Surrey upon the most frivolous pretences; of which the principal was, his quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor with those of Howard, though even this insignificant fact had been justified by the practice of his family, and the sanction of the heralds. He was arraigned in the Guildhall, London, found guilty by a jury, and judgment of death being given, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, in January, 1547.
The Earl of Surrey was professedly a man of gallantry and pleasure, possessing a highly cultivated mind, and excelling in all the polite and elegant accomplishments of the age in which he lived. The flattery which has been bestowed upon his character by Poets, Heralds, and Genealogists, has not ceased to flow from his death to the present hour. A recent genealogical writer has been superlatively lavish of his panegyrics upon the excellencies and even upon the morals of the gallant Earl. There is, however, one extraordinary circumstance in the life of this nobleman which has been entirely overlooked by all his encomiasts. This is, that while his father urged him to connect himself in marriage with one lady; while the king was jealous of his designs upon a second; and while he himself as may be collected from his poem “To a Lady who refused to dance with him,” made proposals of marriage to a third, he was during all this time married to the lady Frances,[[6]] daughter of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, by whom he had five children, namely, two sons and three daughters. The sons were Thomas, afterwards fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Henry, created Earl of Northampton, by king James the First. To this lady the Earl of Surrey was united at the age of fifteen, and several years after his premature death, we find her bearing the title of Countess of Surrey, and possessing the guardianship of his children, therefore it is apparent they were never divorced. Can it be supposed that the example of a lustful king had instructed his courtiers, among their other accomplishments, to find pretexts for the dissolution of the marriage tie, whenever interest or their guilty passions prompted them to such baseness? Yet this is the man whose moral, as well as poetical and literary character, we are told “it is delightful to contemplate.”
The Earl of Surrey had one sister, Mary, who was married to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, natural son of Henry VIII. who died in 1536 at the age of seventeen without issue. There is a most beautiful portrait of this lady in Chamberlaine’s collection of the Holbein Heads. Mr. Lodge exclaims pathetically “Would that her story had died with her; and that we might have been at liberty to fancy the character of so fair a creature as fair as her countenance. But the truth must be told. At the iniquitous trial of her brother in 1547, this lady was called on as a witness and brought forward a body of evidence against him so keenly pointed, and so full of secrets, which from their nature must have been voluntarily disclosed by her, that we cannot but suspect her conduct of a degree of rancour, unpardonable in any case, but in this unnatural.”