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 participated,) 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 noble 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 congé, 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 noble 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.