The marriage of a noble Geraldine widower to a girl of the rival Butler clan seemed an odd alliance, but Eleanor remained loyal to her husband, the 15th Earl of Desmond, right through his rebellion against the Tudors and his grim years as a fugitive in the woods and bogs of Munster. She was, on the whole, a stronger and shrewder character than her husband, and she outlived him and virtually all her contemporaries, dying at a great age, as documented in Anne Chambers's biography. Apart from her husband's abortive rebellion, the great tragedy of her life was the fate of her son James, who was a pawn in Anglo-Irish politics and died in the Tower of London aged 30, in rather dubious circumstances. Eleanor married again and outlived her second husband, leaving large sums to charity when she died in her 90s.