Henry VIII's Last Victim (23 page)

The death of the Duke of Richmond in 1536 had left Mary a young widow. According to her marriage contract, she was entitled to a jointure, but her royal father-in-law was proving slippery in this respect. Henry VIII argued that because Mary and Richmond had never consummated their marriage, he did not owe her a penny. Norfolk did his best to defend Mary’s suit; he consulted a field of experts – ‘all learned men do say that I speak with: there is no doubt of her right’
¹¹
– and sent streams of letters, but he was wary of falling foul of the King. Mary, who seems to have inherited her mother’s fiery nature, was less than satisfied with her father’s efforts and resolved to go to Court to pursue her suit in person. ‘My daughter of Richmond,’ Norfolk grumbled on 6 April 1538, ‘doth continually with weeping and wailing cry out on me to have me give her licence to ride to London to sue for her cause, thinking that I have not effectually followed the same.’
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Mary’s persistence eventually paid off; in 1539 she began to receive payments from the King and the following year she was granted a generous income.
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Norfolk’s attitude to Mary’s independence is typical of the patriarchal age in which they lived. ‘In all my life,’ he admitted to Cromwell, ‘I never communed with her in any serious cause ere now, and would not have thought she had been such as I find her, which, as I think, is but too wise for a woman.’
¹⁴

No records survive about Surrey’s relationship with his younger brother Thomas, who would become Viscount Howard of Bindon in the reign of Elizabeth I, but there is much to suggest that his relationship with Mary was volatile. Born within two years of each other, they had many of the same friends as well as a shared appreciation of literature. It was Mary who inscribed one of Surrey’s poems into the anthology known as the Devonshire Manuscript. She was reputedly a
great beauty and Surrey, like most brothers, was protective of her. According to a Spanish chronicler, he once rebuked her for being ‘too free with her favours’; on another occasion he advised her to temper her zeal for religious reform.
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But Surrey could no more subdue his sister’s passions than he could his own and the effects of their clashes reverberated throughout the household.

Surrey’s relationship with his wife is the hardest of all to gauge, in part because it has been blurred by his posthumous reputation as a romantic hero. This arose from a sonnet he penned in praise of a lady called Geraldine. There are enough biographical clues in the poem to identify her as Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare by his second wife, Elizabeth Grey. Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who served as a lady-in-waiting at the English Court, was some eleven years younger than Surrey and still only a teenager when he died in 1547:

From
^fn2
Tuscan came my lady’s worthy race;

Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat;

The western isle, whose pleasant shore doth face

Wild
^fn3
Chambar’s cliffs, did give her lively heat.

Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast;

Her sire an earl; her dame of princes blood;

From tender years in Britain she doth rest,

With a king’s child,
^fn4
where she tastes ghostly food.

Hunsdon did first present her to mine
^fn5
eyen:

Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she
^fn6
hight;

Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine,

And Windsor, alas, doth chase me from her sight.

Beauty of kind, her virtues from above;

Happy is he that may obtain her love.
¹⁶

What are we to make of this? The Elizabethans had no doubt that it was a sincere profession of love from Surrey to his mistress. Surrey’s first editor furnished it with his own title – ‘Description and praise of his love Geraldine’ – and, in a subsequent edition, replaced the word ‘lady’ in
another of Surrey’s poems with ‘Garret’, a corruption of the Fitzgerald name that was sometimes used by the family.
¹⁷
By 1594 the ‘romance’ between Surrey and Geraldine had gained enough currency for Thomas Nashe to send it up in his novel,
The Unfortunate Traveller
. Here Surrey travels to Florence and visits the house where Geraldine was born. ‘When he came to the chamber,’ Nashe’s protagonist narrates,

where his Geraldine’s clear sunbeams first thrust themselves into this cloud of flesh and acquainted mortality with the purity of angels, then did his mouth overthrow with magnificats; his tongue thrust the stars out of heaven, and eclipsed the sun and moon with comparisons.
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Fired by his passion, Nashe’s Surrey fights in a tournament where he successfully defends Geraldine’s beauty against all comers and ‘so great was his glory that day as Geraldine was thereby eternally glorified’.
¹⁹

Although Nashe’s account is a fictitious parody of Petrarchan romance – Surrey never even set foot in Italy – his contemporaries received it with apparent credulity. Between 1598 and 1599 Michael Drayton composed a pair of elaborate verse epistles. The first he attributed to Surrey pining in Florence; the second was Geraldine’s breathless reply. In his introductory ‘Argument’ and endnotes, Drayton lent an air of authenticity to Nashe’s fiction and claimed that Surrey wrote ‘many excellent poems’ in praise of Geraldine.
²⁰
By the time of Alexander Pope’s
Windsor Forest
of 1713, the idealisation of Surrey as a romantic hero was firmly established:

Matchless his pen, victorious was his Lance,

Bold in the Lists, and graceful in the Dance:

In the same Shades the Cupids tuned his Lyre,

To the same Notes of Love, and soft Desire:

Fair Geraldine, bright Object of his Vow,

Then filled the Groves . . .
²¹

Into the next century the popularity of the story showed no signs of abating. In the hands of Sir Walter Scott (
Lay of the Last Minstrel
, 1805), it was injected with eroticism. As Scott’s Surrey gazes upon a mirror, the image reflected is not of himself but of ‘the slender form’ of a lady reclining on a silken bed in a room ‘party lighted by a lamp with silver beam’ and partly ‘hid in gloom’:

O’er her white bosom strayed her hazel hair,

Pale her dear cheek, as if for love she pined;

All in her nightrobe loose she lay reclined,

And pensive, read from tablet eburnine
^fn7
,

Some strain that seemed her inmost soul to find:

That favoured strain was Surrey’s raptured line,

That fair and lovely form, the Lady Geraldine.
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Following Drayton, Scott appended an authorial note to his work claiming that it was founded on the historical incidents of Surrey’s life.
²³

The Fair Geraldine myth reached its apogee in 1815, when Surrey’s romantic editor, George Frederick Nott, announced that no less than nineteen of Surrey’s poems were inspired by his love for her. Lyrics where Geraldine is nowhere mentioned and where the lady seems little more than a poetic conceit were given titles such as: ‘Surrey complains of the malice of fortune in separating him from the Fair Geraldine; but assures her that absence shall not diminish his love’; ‘He praises the exceeding beauty of the Fair Geraldine’; ‘He reproaches the Fair Geraldine for her fickleness and insincerity’; ‘He sends the Fair Geraldine a tender assurance of his constancy, and tells her that however rewarded, he will love her and serve her faithfully’. And so on and so forth ad nauseam.
²⁴

It is a tribute to the imagination of the Elizabethans and their romantic descendants that such a legend could be inspired by a single sonnet; a sonnet, moreover, where the speaker’s sentiments do not stray from established courtly convention. It is, of course, possible that Surrey took a fancy to the young Elizabeth Fitzgerald and decided to proclaim his devotion to her by composing a poem in her honour, but it is more likely that he had another motive. Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald was in a precarious position at the English Court. In 1534 her father, a suspected traitor, had died in the Tower of London and three years later her half-brother was hanged at Tyburn for leading a rebellion against Henry VIII in Ireland. The disgrace of her family had impoverished Elizabeth and drastically impaired her chances of marriage. It has been convincingly argued that Surrey aimed to boost her prospects by ‘advertising her marriageability’ in verse.
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Surrey’s speaker, struck more by awe than love, trumpets Elizabeth’s credentials – her Tuscan descent (this was semi-mythical but the speaker does not doubt its veracity), her Irish heritage, her pious upbringing ‘in Britain’, her service to the Tudor
dynasty, her beauty and her heavenly virtues. It concludes on an aspirational note intended to reel in the eligible bachelors of the Tudor Court: ‘Happy is he that may obtain her love’. If this was Surrey’s strategy, it worked. In December 1542 Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald wed Sir Anthony Browne, a Howard ally and Henry VIII’s Master of the Horse.

Whatever Surrey’s motive for his sonnet, it reveals nothing about his feelings for his wife. Indeed there is very little extant about their marriage at all. Of Frances, few comments were made, no portraits apart from the early marriage sketch survive, and nothing at all exists in her own hand. Back in the summer of 1537, when Norfolk was concerned about Surrey’s poor health and his prolonged grief for Richmond, he commented that ‘he is there with his wife, which is an ill medicine for that purpose’.
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Maddeningly, he did not elaborate. It should be remembered that Norfolk was never particularly keen on the marriage, having preferred Mary Tudor for his son, and that Frances’ father and he were not friendly. He may, therefore, have been prejudiced against Frances and regarded her as an unfit wife for his son. On the other hand, it could be argued that Norfolk was against Surrey being with Frances at this time because she was too caring, too considerate, too gentle. According to Norfolk, what was needed to rouse his son from his melancholy was some kind of masculine activity, preferably martial service in the North, not inactivity and feminine indulgence.

On 10 March 1538 Frances gave birth to a son.
²⁷
He was the Surreys’ second child, a daughter, Jane, having been born some time between the end of spring 1536 and the beginning of summer 1537.
²⁸
The baby boy was over a month premature. He had been expected ‘after Palm Sunday’, which in 1538 fell on 14 April. Despite this, and the onset of plague in the area, the Duke of Norfolk was able to report on 14 March that ‘the child is as lusty a boy as needeth to be of that age’. He was named Thomas, the traditional name for Howard heirs. ‘I intended to have asked to the King’s Highness to have beseeched him to have had it christened in his name,’ Norfolk told Cromwell, ‘and in likewise to your good Lordship to have been another godfather, but because she was so long delivered before her reckoning, the women here would not suffer me to let the child be so long unchristened.’
²⁹
Even in the sixteenth century there were some areas of the household where the oppressed sex held sway.

Surrey was now in his twenties, but Norfolk’s letter shows how much control he still wielded over his son. It was Norfolk who had preselected the godfathers and it was Norfolk who immediately began to plan his
grandson’s future. In the same letter, he told Cromwell how overjoyed he was that Surrey and his other son Thomas both now had sons of around the same age as Henry VIII’s heir, Prince Edward,

trusting that when time convenient shall be, the King’s Majesty will be content they shall be of the first sort that shall be appointed to await upon him, which to see shall be more to my comfort than I can with my pen express.

Surrey and Frances had three more children in the next five years: Katherine in 1539, Henry the following February and Margaret at the beginning of 1543.
³⁰

Biographers have frequently searched for allusions to Frances in Surrey’s lyrics. A number of poems have been proffered, but only one specifically concerns her. Both internal and external evidence suggests that it was composed between 1544 and 1546, when Surrey was on military service in France. We know that he missed Frances when he was away, as he petitioned the Council more than once for permission to send for her. The poem takes the form of a song performed by a lady lamenting the absence of her lover overseas. She prays for his safe return (‘without which hope my life, alas, were shortly at an end’) and then tells her audience, all women similarly abandoned, about

The fearful dreams I have, oft times they grieve me so

That then I wake, and stand in doubt if they be true or no.

Sometime the roaring seas, me seems, they grow so high,

That my sweet lord in danger great, alas, doth often lie.

Another time, the same doth tell me he is come,

And playing where I shall him find with T. his little son.

So forth I go apace, to see that lifesome sight,

And with a kiss me thinks I say, ‘Now welcome home, my knight;

Welcome, my sweet, alas, the stay of my welfare;