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 eyes90 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.