When the Earl entertained company, the ladies and gentlemen, it seems, all dined together in the “great chamber,” and there were often as many as twenty to fifty guests staying in the house. Their names include nearly all the leading aristocracy of the time, among them being Lady Jane Grey’s father and mother, the Lord Marquis of Dorset and the Lady Frances; Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; the Lady Wyndham, the Lady Parker, the Lady Essex; Mrs. Brian, afterwards governess to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth; the Lady Vere, the “old” Lady of Oxford,[85] etc. The ladies attending on the visitors[86] dined at my Lady’s mess, the gentlemen in the hall. When Mr. Thomas Reddynge, a gentleman of the Duke’s household, brought his bride to Tenderinge Hall for her honeymoon, “all the company dined and supped in the bride’s bedroom.” The little Lord Thomas Howard, afterwards Earl of Surrey, dined in the nursery.
Hospitality was exchanged between the Howards and the Dorsets almost to the end of the Duke’s life. The Marquis and Marchioness of Dorset (the Lady Frances Brandon), Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, were certainly at Hunsdon[87] on more than one occasion, and when the two families were in town there was, doubtless, constant visiting between them. It must be remembered that the Duke of Norfolk, being uncle-by-marriage to the King, was also uncle to the Lady Frances’s mother, Mary Tudor, the royal Queen-Duchess of Suffolk. Little Lady Jane must often have sat perched on Surrey’s knee and listened with delight as he whispered in her ear those tales of fairy enchantment he himself loved so well. Owing to her tender age, Jane may never have been told the details of the closing scenes of her gallant kinsman’s life, but she must surely have noticed that on a certain day in January 1547–8 the curtains of her father’s house were drawn, as for a family in mourning; that her parents moved about with pale and saddened faces; and that the servants stirred noiselessly and spoke under their breath. The shadow lay everywhere, and the various chronicles of the period afford abundant proof that there was a genuine sorrow felt in the city on the day of Surrey’s death.
And there is yet another link between Lady Jane Grey and the unhappy Surrey. The name of her kinswoman, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the “fair Geraldine,” must ever be associated with that of the poet-Earl, for she is as indissolubly connected with him as is Laura with Petrarch, or Leonora with Tasso. A daughter of Oge, Earl of Kildare,[88] by his wife, the Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter of the first Marquis of Dorset, the fair Fitzgerald was a not distant cousin to Lady Jane Grey, and there were but a few years between them. She was born in Ireland, probably at Maynooth Castle, somewhere in 1528, and was brought to England whilst yet an infant. In 1533 her father died in the Tower, broken-hearted at the news that his son, whom the Irish cherished as a patriot and the English hated as a rebel, had been captured and brought to London. A few days after his father’s decease, the young man was hanged at Tyburn with some seventeen other Irishmen. Henry VIII appears to have pitied the widowed Lady Kildare, who was reduced to the verge of starvation after her husband’s death. A small pension was granted her, and her children were dispersed among the leading families of the aristocracy, to receive an education worthy of their rank. Elizabeth, “the fair Geraldine,” an extremely beautiful child, was placed under the guidance of the Princess Mary.[89] It was probably in the year 1542, whilst attending Her Highness on a visit at Hunsdon, that she first fell under the notice of Surrey, who, though already married, became desperately enamoured of her. The young lady cannot have been more than fourteen or fifteen at this time, but in those days this was quite a marriageable age. We have Surrey’s own word for it that it was at Hunsdon he first beheld the “fair Geraldine”—
“Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyen:
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine;
And Windsor, alas! doth chase her from my sight.
Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above.
Happy is he that can obtain her love!”
They appear to have met again at Hampton Court, and we seem to have evidence that the “fair Geraldine” yielded to some extent to her suitor’s prayers. They danced together, no doubt, in the Great Hall, which still delights us with its lofty beauty and rich arras. They sat side by side in the oriel windows, or romped among the flower-beds of the palace garden. But the lovely Irish girl, true to her race, was chaste as snow, and when Surrey’s ardour grew too hot for modest endurance, he was firmly repulsed. One thing is quite certain, that “Geraldine” was very beautiful, with Irish sea-green eyes[90] and glorious fair hair. She seems otherwise to have been a very matter-of-fact young lady, who presently bestowed her hand on the rich old Sir Anthony Browne.[91] After his death, in 1548, she re-entered the household of her royal mistress, and as the Lady Frances and her daughter paid several visits to their cousin, Princess Mary, in 1551, Jane Grey must often have seen the bella ma fredda innammorata of poet Surrey. After Queen Mary’s death the “fair Geraldine” consoled herself with a second husband, in the person of Clinton, Earl of Lincoln. An account of her funeral still exists, according to which sixty-one old women walked in the procession, each wearing a new suit of clothes and carrying a loaf of bread, their number recording the fact that the lady they mourned had reached sixty-one years at the time of her decease.
The Duchess of Richmond seems ultimately to have repented to some extent of her wickedness. At any rate, her father left her £500 in his will—a considerable sum of money in those days—in acknowledgment of the expense and trouble she had borne to obtain his liberation, and of her care of her brother’s children. She died of the plague in 1556.
It is curious that Surrey’s children should have been placed under his sister’s charge, since their mother, an eminently respectable woman, was living, and they were with her at the time of their father’s death. She was, however, a Catholic, whereas the Duchess had for some years past rather ostentatiously proclaimed herself a Protestant. Somerset’s religious opinions may have had something to do with this transaction, concerning which there is a strange legend. Three days after the Earl of Surrey’s execution, Foxe, the martyrologist, was sitting in St. Paul’s Cathedral, pale, haggard, and almost dying of misery and starvation. Presently a gentleman approached him and placed a considerable sum of money in his hand, bidding him be of good cheer, for that “luck was coming to him at last.” A few days later Somerset appointed him tutor to the children of the late Earl of Surrey, then under the charge of their aunt, the Lady of Richmond. Notwithstanding his ardent Protestantism, Foxe was never able to completely detach the future Duke of Norfolk from the older faith; but he gave his pupil a sound and virtuous education, and won his enduring affection. This Duke shared his father’s fate; he was beheaded, in the reign of Elizabeth, for espousing the cause of Mary Stuart. From him the present Duke of Norfolk is descended in a direct line.
The Countess of Surrey resided for many years at Kenninghall, but, as usual in those days, she presently took a second husband, in the person of Mr. Thomas Steyning, of Woodford, Suffolk, most likely her steward or secretary. She lived to an advanced age, and is buried in Framlingham Parish Church, under the elaborate monument she erected to the memory of her husband, whose remains, however, are by some believed to be still lying in the interesting church of All Hallows’, Barking, near the Tower, where they were certainly interred immediately after his decapitation.