A main object of Grey's attack both on the O'Connors and the O'Briens may have been to get possession of the heir of Kildare, whose half-sister was married to the chief of Offaly. It is difficult to avoid the thought that Grey had a private as well as a public object in persecuting to the death all members of the fallen family except the children of his own sister. The rebel Earl had five uncles, all men of fair ability and great influence, and Brabazon seems first to have suggested that they ought to be kept in England. Grey asked Sir James Fitzgerald and his brothers Walter and Richard, all of whom had opposed the rebellion, to dine with him at Kilmainham, and in the middle of dinner they were all seized and handcuffed. Sir John and Oliver were arrested before they had heard of their brothers' capture, and the five were lodged in the castle. Grey always plumed himself on this exploit, though he admitted that some of the prisoners were innocent. The Irish Council approved the deed and applauded its secret handling, but none of the Irish officials knew that they were sending these men to the scaffold; the guilt of that must rest on Henry and Cromwell. Aylmer and Alen accompanied them to England, and the chronicler tells us that Richard, who had literary tastes, relieved the tedium of a sea-voyage by singing songs and repeating apophthegms. When he heard that the ship was called 'The Cow,' he was much dismayed, for there was a prophecy that five Earls' brethren should be carried to England in a cow's belly, and should never return. 'Whereat,' says Stanihurst, 'the rest began afresh to howl and lament, which doubtless was pitiful, to behold five valiant gentlemen, that durst meet in the field as sturdy champions as could be picked out in a realm, to be so suddenly terrified with the bare name of a wooden cow, or to fear like lions a silly coxcomb, being moved (as commonly the whole country is) with a vain and fabulous old wives' dream.' On reaching London they were at once sent to the Tower, and left it only to take the last sad journey to Tyburn.[194] [Sidenote: Survivor of the Kildare family. The 'Fair Geraldine.']