There was no tokyn in hir suete face.”
Then follows a young poet’s lovely and rapturous description of the fair vision, who was, indeed, the Lady Jane, or Johanna Beaufort, daughter of John, Earl of Somerset, and granddaughter of John of Gaunt.
Their loves prospered, as they deserved to do, and James married Lady Jane, at Windsor; the hero of Agincourt being then our king. James was crowned King of Scotland in 1424, and the lovely lady that he loved so well was his Queen.
In 1437, at the Abbey of Black Friars at Perth, James, who strove in vain to rule his turbulent and brutal nobles, was murdered by Sir Robert Graham; what time the heroic Catherine Douglas tried to bar the door against murder, and had her fair arm broken, while the brave and loving Queen was wounded by the assassins.
Surely this royal love romance may give us sweet and tender fancies as we gaze upon the gardens and the towers of Royal Windsor. The story is a true Thames episode.
We may glance for a moment at another noble captive in Windsor—at the Earl of Surrey, likewise a poet; and, indeed, the poet who was the first writer of English blank verse. Impetuous of temper, heady of will, the gallant Surrey developed a lawless ambition which, on the 21st of January, 1547, led him to the Tower block. He was, says Mr. Robert Bell, “formed out of the best elements of the age, and combined more happily, and with a purer lustre than any of his contemporaries, all the attributes of that compound, and, to us, almost fabulous character, in which the noblest qualities of chivalry were blended with the graces of learning and a cultivated taste. It might be said of him that he united in his own person the characteristics of Bayard and of Petrarch;” and yet all these fine qualities led only to the scaffold.
Surrey is connected with Windsor because he was educated and spent his youth there, together with the Duke of Richmond, base son of Henry VIII., who married Surrey’s sister; and, further, because, in his day of misfortune, he became a sad prisoner in the castle in which he had spent so many joyous youthful days. Surrey was contracted when he was sixteen, and was only twenty when he became a father. He married, in 1535, the Lady Frances Vere, daughter of John, Earl of Oxford; but romance links his name for ever with that of the fair Geraldine, who was the Lady Elizabeth, daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, and of Margaret, daughter of Thomas Gray, Marquis of Dorset.
Geraldine, when Surrey died at the age of thirty, was but nineteen years of age. It was the fashion of that day for gallants to wear the sleeve of a mistress of the imagination; and Surrey’s passion for the fair young girl was probably fantastic and partly feigned. The fair child was an adopted ideal of a knightly poet’s passion. In the only one of Surrey’s poems in which he speaks openly of her, he says:—
“From Tuscane came my lady’s worthy race;