Page:The Queens of England.djvu/414

 372 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND, fortune of this noble family being confiscated, the bereaved widow and her child were reduced to poverty, and compelled to owe the maintenance of Geraldine to the daughter of him who had wrought their ruin. There was a deep and romantic interest attached to this lady before the chivalrous Surrey had bequeathed her name to posterity, through the medium above all others the most certain to transmit — wedded to immortal verse. The fair Geraldine continued with Mary until her services were transferred to Queen Katherine Howard, in whose courtly circle Surrey had opportunities of beholding her. When the fall of this fair but unfortunate queen dis- persed her ladies, Geraldine accepted the hand of an aged suitor, probably impelled by poverty to form so ill-assorted a marriage, and became the Lady Browne, a homely name, that ill accords with the euphonious one of "Geraldine." In the succeeding years of 1540 and 1541, we find Mary placed in a situation that must command the pity of all, that of having some of the friends whom she most loved hurried by the unrelenting persecutions of her father to the most cruel and ignominious deaths, on the alleged plea of treason, but more truly for their imprudent zeal and determined adherence to that faith of which Henry had now become the declared enemy. The deaths of Dr. Fetherston, the preceptor of her youth, and of Abel, the chaplain of her mother, deeply as they must have afflicted her, were followed by the barbarous execu- tion of her aged and beloved friend, the Countess of Salis- bury, under circumstances of such brutal and revolting cruelty as never to be thought of without horror, and which must have overwhelmed her with grief and fear. The countess's son, Lord Montague, with the Marquis of Exeter, had already on the block paid the penalty of their kinship to Reginald Pole, the staunch opponent of Henry's divorce from Queen Katha- rine, and fulfilled the threat thundered forth by the monster Henry at the time. In 1542 Francis the First again solicited the hand of Mary for his second son, the Duke of Orleans, but the treaty, after it had considerably advanced, was broken off because Henry would not give the fortune with Mary required by France. The whole treaty, as handed down to us, offers an amusing specimen of the manner in which such affairs were then dis- cussed by the diplomatic agents to whom they were intrusted, and proves that Francis the First was no less exacting in his conditions for the dot, than Henry the Eighth was parsimo-