Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above;
Happy is he that can obtain her love!”
The Lady Elizabeth was one of the ladies in attendance on Mary Tudor, and Surrey probably went with the Duke of Richmond to Hunsdon, there to visit the Lady Mary; and on that visit he first saw Geraldine. Later, when a captive, Surrey sings—
“So cruell prison howe could betide, alas,
As proude Windsor, where I in lust and joye,
With a kinges son my chyldysh years did pass,
In greater feast than Priam’s sonnes of Troy.”
The contrast was indeed cruel between Windsor as a palace and Windsor as a prison. Scott, like a true poet, lays hold of the romance of Surrey’s reputed love for Geraldine, and entrusts to “Fitztraver of the Silver Song” that almost matchless ballad which tells how the wise Cornelius, across the ocean grim, showed to the gallant Surrey the vision of the peerless Geraldine. Who, asks Walter Scott—
“Who has not heard of Surrey’s fame?