Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

by Stephanie Barron

  “What is to be your programme for Brighton, Jane?” he carelessly asked. “Or do you intend to closet yourself in your room for hours on end, scribbling at your latest oeuvre?”

  “I am hardly proof against the temptations of this town, Henry! How am I to write, when so much that is delightful is spread before my feet! Better to set down my pen until I am back at home, and the rain of June has descended with persistence, and there is nothing but mud and desolation to be had out-of-doors. Then I might give thought to Henry Crawford, and the salvation of his blackened soul.”

  “You admire Brighton, do you?”

  “I have never seen such a place. There is not a beggar or a blight from one end to the other! The buildings, the plants, the horses, the people—all perfectly elegant, all seemingly immune to the decay of nature! How the equipages gleam, and the shop fronts beckon! I should call it unnatural, and the result of witchcraft, were I not aware that a vast sum of money is necessary to its achievement.”

  “Money, indeed—and most of it drawn from taxing the British subject,” Henry returned drily. “It is the pleasure ground of a Prince, remember, and one who is no stranger to debt. Brighton is carried on the backs of the most impoverished denizens of London, and by the nabobs of India; by the canny traders of Chinese cantons and the millworkers of York. But I daresay if you asked the Regent, he would claim credit for the whole.”

  It was true, of course—trust a banker like my brother to advise me of it. Paradise is never granted for halfpence. The Regent had achieved more than fifty years of age without ever having been called to a reckoning of his accounts; a more expensive Royal never lived. Parliament itself had been forced to relieve his debts; he had married his hated cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, merely to obtain a handsome allowance; and was probably a million pounds to the red side of his ledger at present. The Regent remained as enthusiastic as ever in his schemes for the improvement of Carlton House, in London, and the Marine Pavilion here, without the scantest consideration of such an ugly word as cost.

  “You ought to have seen Brighton as I first did, before the Prince discovered it,” Henry murmured, his gaze still following the sailing vessel, on which two or three wind-whipped figures could just be discerned. “It was called Brighthelmston then, and was the simplest of fishing villages—the Pavilion a modest farmhouse Prinny leased for the enjoyment of Mrs. Fitzherbert. They were said to spend the majority of their evenings playing at cards, with their intimates, and retiring early from exhaustion at the salt air. One wag noted that there were more sheep than people on the Channel Coast in those days! An utterly wholesome and rather poignant interlude, in the Regent’s shameful career.”

  Maria Fitzherbert. Unfortunate woman! I could not consider her without a lurch of the heart—for I had made the acquaintance of the Regent’s true wife, the twice-widowed and Catholic beauty who, even in her twilight years, remained devoted to the memory of the Prince for whom she had sacrificed reputation, respectability, and the best years of her youth. I knew such truths of that lady—how she had borne the Prince a son, and been forced to give the child up; nay, how she had acquiesced in sending the boy out of the Kingdom, unacknowledged by his legitimate family, and given over to the kindness of strangers, across the Atlantic in America.

  I had never spoken of these things to Henry; I had been sworn to secrecy; and besides, they formed a part of my own life too painful to contemplate. It was Maria Fitzherbert who had watched with me, as the one man I wholly loved—Lord Harold Trowbridge—drew his final, shuddering breath. It must be impossible to hear her name without the face of the Gentleman Rogue hovering just out of reach, in my mind’s eye.5

  How perfectly marvellous his lordship should appear against this backdrop of sea and Fashion, this playing-field of the Privileged, striding towards us in his impeccably tailored black coat, careless under the gaze of the most lofty—for he was a duke’s son, after all, and no one conveyed such excellent ton, for all his dubious reputation, as Lord Harold.

  I do not like to see you in mourning, Jane, the Rogue’s voice murmured in my ear. Black does not suit you. You should go forever dressed in silk the colour of wine.

  “Are you feeling faint, Jane? Is the wind too chill for your liking?” Henry asked in concern.

  I shook my head, and rallied with an effort. “You have proved the perfect antidote,” I told him. “When I exclaim at Brighton’s perfection, you recall me to the rottenness at its core. I cannot like the Regent; indeed, when I consider his lack of gallantry towards the fairer sex, I could almost hate him. The Prince is no model for his subjects, and I must assume that Brighton has taken its likeness from its patron—a glorious exterior, wrapped about a hollow shell!”

  “Enjoyable enough for a fortnight, despite all that,” Henry remarked comfortably. “Do not become missish, Jane, when you may command a suite of rooms at the Castle! Now—you have not answered my question. I am at your disposal for at least the next ten days. What do you crave, for your dissipation?”

  “Nothing very scandalous. I should like to walk each morning, Henry, and fill my lungs with the tang of salt air, so that I might remember it in August when the drone of bees is soporific in Chawton. I should like to make a trial of the waters, by hiring a bathing machine and taking a dip in the sea. I should like you to drive me along the Lewes road, so that I might have a glimpse of the 10th Hussars at Brighton Camp—I am sure that Lydia Bennet would wish me to see a place of which I have invented so much! I desire to attend the Brighton Races. I should like to dance at the Assemblies—but such a thing is not to be thought of, in our state of mourning; visit this Pavilion, for which it seems we have all paid so much; and take out a subscription at Donaldson’s Circulating Library.”

  “The Library we might manage,” Henry said dubiously, “but as for an invitation to the Pavilion—I confess that may prove to be above even my touch, Jane.”

  “I do not expect you to secure it,” I retorted indifferently. “I shall undertake to do so myself. Lord Moira is an intimate of the Regent’s; and when his flowers arrived in respect of Eliza, the missive bore his direction at the Pavilion. He is even now in residence. He shall not forget us, I am sure.”

  Henry looked impressed.

  “But should his lordship fail me,” I continued, “I shall learn to be content with reading. The Circulating Library is certain to have the latest publications. Perhaps even Lord Byron has been scribbling something—provided Lady Oxford accords him sufficient liberty.”

  “Could not Miss Twining supply the intelligence?”

  “I should never distress her by alluding to his lordship, Henry!” I scolded. “But Miss Twining assures me that all the most respectable persons in Brighton may be found at Donaldson’s. The ladies display their gowns, and the gentlemen consult the London newspapers, and members of both sexes play cards there of an evening. It would not do to be a stranger to Donaldson’s. Besides, I wish to see how often my book is in request. If the Fashionables of Brighton do not constantly solicit the privilege of reading Pride and Prejudice, I shall find no good in them at all—even if Lord Byron is the writer most commonly claimed by the town.”

  “Again, Lord Byron! That gentleman has certainly seized your fancy!”

  “Gentleman?” I repeated, astonished. “—Merely because he claims a title? He is no gentleman, Henry, and well you know it! But I confess Lord Byron has seized my fancy. I should like to make his acquaintance, and tell him in the strongest possible language my opinion of his Turkish treatment of Catherine Twining!”

  “The fellow is a common blackguard, for all he is a lord,” my brother returned. “One has only to consult his past conduct. I do not regard his current inamorata—Lady Oxford is an established woman of the world, and entirely mistress of what she is about; but consider Lady Caroline Lamb! And her unfortunate husband! There one may justly say that hatred for the tender sex, as much as love, has animated Lord Byron.”

  My brother’s intimacy with the Great, tho’ i
t sprang from his banking trade rather than privileged birth, had made me familiar with the names and histories of the gossiping ton. I had even seen Lady Caroline Lamb some once or twice during my sojourns in London; Eliza had been on nodding terms with her ladyship. Caroline Ponsonby was born the Earl of Bessborough’s only daughter; her mother, Lady Bessborough, formed a vital part of the Devonshire House Set; her aunt, Georgiana, was Devonshire’s first Duchess. I was once acquainted with the Cavendish family, during a precious interval in Derbyshire some years ago, when Lord Harold—an intimate of Chatsworth—introduced me to the family’s notice. Caro, as she was called, had grown up in the chaotic and amorous atmosphere of that great Whig establishment, and had emerged as one of its chief eccentrics. Brilliant and charming in conversation, faerie-like in her figure, outrageous in her behaviour, Caro Ponsonby was apostrophised the Sprite by her gallant admirers and took London by storm in her first Season, when she was but seventeen. William Lamb, heir to Viscount Melbourne, married her two years later; and for nearly a decade now had endured her tantrums and scenes. Tho’ Caro screamed hysterics at their wedding, tore her gown in a passion, and was carried fainting from the room, this was considered nothing out of the ordinary Devonshire way—and so William and his Caro determined to be happy. They read Great Works together all day, that Caro might complete her education, and went into Society all night; dressed their pages in a livery of crimson and chocolate; and once sent Caro to the dinner table, naked beneath a chafing dish, as amusement for her relations and friends. A notable Whig orator, William Lamb stood for Parliament and was rumoured for a Cabinet post—until George Gordon, Lord Byron, burst upon the scene with Childe Harold last year.

  His lordship has said that he awoke upon the day of his poem’s publication to discover that he was famous. Certainly no one has shot from obscurity to fame as swiftly before. The street outside his lodgings was blocked with fashionable carriages delivering endless invitations; publick riots broke out whenever his lordship walked abroad. It was inevitable, in such a general fever of admiration, that Caro Lamb must pursue him. Byron’s looks and verse alike were calculated to inflame her wild imagination; all decorum and propriety forgot, she committed every publick folly—riding openly with him in Hyde Park; entertaining him at Melbourne House, where he mounted to her rooms by a back stair; loitering outside the doors of gentlemen’s clubs in the livery of a page. She was said to have entered his rooms by the upper-storey windows, a feat only a monkey might have performed. And like a monkey, she grew a dreaded nuisance on Lord Byron’s back.

  Once ardent and attached, he became, in a matter of mere months, indifferent and cold; met her protests and pleas, her hundreds of letters, with formal refusals; and in sum, cut the connexion dead.

  It was as tho’ he had studied the character of my Willoughby, confronted with an unreconciled Marianne, in his calculated cruelty.6

  Caro, for her part, became nearly lunatic: stalking her Love by night or day; refusing food, refusing sleep; running out into the street, hatless, to pawn her jewels, with the intention of taking ship alone for God Knows Where, provided it were far from England and the desolation of her heart. Alternately disgusted and enthralled by her persistence, Byron played with the lady as a cat might with a mouse—and reduced her to a state of mental and emotional incapacity.

  William Lamb has stood by his wife, but declined to stand again for Parliament. His misery may be observed at any private gathering of the haut ton, by whom he is generally supported.

  “Lord Byron does appear to confuse love and hatred,” I admitted to my brother. “There was nothing very tender in his treatment of Miss Twining today—and yet he must be violently in love with her, to attempt a flight to the Border!”

  “Perhaps he is simply mad,” Henry replied. “A thread of misfortune dogs the Gordon family—and the men die young and violently, it is said.”

  Mad.

  A poet touched by the insane.

  A diabolical figure of licence and flame, armed with a pen.

  Little as I could like him, I should wish to know more of Lord Byron. So few real writers ever come in my way. Perhaps, if I am very lucky, his lordship might yearn to sail again during my stay in Brighton.

  3 Jane probably refers, here, to her entanglement with a notorious Lyme smuggler known as The Reverend, previously related in Jane and the Man of the Cloth (Bantam Books, 1997).—Editor’s note.

  4 The exotic reconstruction of the Royal Pavilion, as it is now called, with its fantastic spires, onion domes, and quasi-Indian style of architecture devised by John Nash, was not begun until 1815, two years after this account.—Editor’s note.

  5 Jane recalls events recorded earlier in the journal account subsequently published as Jane and the Ghosts of Netley.—Editor’s note.

  6 Jane refers here to one of the principal thwarted romances in her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811.—Editor’s note.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Patron of Donaldson’s

  SATURDAY, 8 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON

  THE LOBSTER PATTIES WERE ALL THAT COULD BE DESIRED, the champagne beyond anything I had yet imbibed; and I fell into a dreamless sleep from the moment my head hit the pillow—despite the considerable degree of noise from both within and without the Castle Inn. A party of officers from the Brighton Camp had stormed the neighbouring King’s Arms publick house, with a number of women from the Cyprian Corps—as the local members of the Muslin Company are known, in deference to their military service—and the echoes of rowdy laughter were the last I heard before insensibility claimed me.

  I awoke to a sparkling sea under a brilliant blue sky; a freshening wind; and the chambermaid Betsy, who kindled a fire and placed a pot of tea on a silver tray directly next to my bedside—which unaccustomed luxury quite resigned me to the depravities of the Prince’s chosen pleasure ground. Henry had been correct in turning to Brighton: where I should certainly have fallen into melancholy at Lyme, nursing my grief for Eliza amidst the desolate cliffs and ravines that mark that wilder coast, I could not help but be cheerful in such a place on such a morning—and hoped that the little Comtesse forgave, and somehow approved, my selfish happiness.

  I informed my brother at breakfast that I meant to secure my subscription to Donaldson’s without delay, having left Chawton so swiftly that I had brought little in the way of reading material—only my scribblings of Mansfield Park, in the small hand-sewn booklet of paper I construct for composition. I confess that the thought of sober Fanny Price held little attraction this morning, in the face of Brighton’s charms. She is often a tiresome creature—very nearly as quelling as my sister, Cassandra, when she believes herself to be in the right, which is on almost every occasion; and did I open the composition book, I should be certain to hear Fanny’s reproofs ringing in my ears each time I dawdled before a shop-window. It was not to be borne. Therefore I tucked Mansfield Park into a bandbox for safekeeping. I do not expect to require that bandbox until I am forced to return to Hampshire.

  “I shall accompany you, Jane,” Henry said with alacrity, “that I might have a glance at the morning papers—and learn whether any of my acquaintance are in town.”

  Donaldson’s being but a few steps across the Steyne, our object was very soon achieved. It was a handsome establishment, equal to any circulating library I had experienced in London, and far surpassing those of Bath—elegant, airy, and possessed of a large collection of books neatly bestowed on its shelves. The principal papers and important periodicals were arranged on broad tables, for the greater ease of perusal; and an extensive suite of rooms, becomingly draped and fitted out with occasional chairs, led to apartments at the rear, where card parties were held.

  “We are pleased to offer musical recitals on certain evenings,” Miss Jennings, the excessively genteel proprietress, informed me; “and I think you will find the company most select. Madame Valmy, late of Milan, is to sing airs in the Italian for us tonight.”

  “
And the subscription?”

  “Is five shillings the week,” she returned—which dear sum I offered her with an indifference I should not have been equal to, a few years since. The return on my labour of love, however—my investment on the ’Change of novel-writing—permits me these little luxuries. I have been so happy in the publick’s reception of Pride and Prejudice, which may actually run to a second edition, as to observe a set of the volumes prominently displayed among Miss Jennings’s offerings.

  When her clerk had pocketed my fee, and written my name in the subscribers’ book, I enquired with affected carelessness, “I see that you have that interesting novel everyone is talking of—Pride and Prejudice. I wonder you may keep it on your shelves!”

  “Indeed, I believe the story to be all that is charming,” Miss Jennings said complacently, “—tho’ there are some who will insist it is unpardonably vulgar. To be forever speculating on the matter of fortune in marriage is to appear unpleasantly mercenary—for even if the two are inseparable, it does not do to say so. I confess there is just that indelicacy in the notion of husband-hunting that argues against the work having sprung from a lady’s pen, however boldly the papers may have advertized it as such.”7

  “And yet,” I could not resist observing, “so many young ladies profess to enjoy it!”

  Miss Jennings’s delicate brows knitted in distress. “Indeed—indelicacy is all the rage! How else might one explain the success of Lord Byron? But it is true that Pride and Prejudice was greatly in request among the ton when it first appeared in January. I spend the better part of the winter in London, you must know, and was wont to hear of it everywhere. And so Donaldson’s purchased several sets of the novel on the strength of my regard—but the volumes are less in request at present, the entire world having already looked into them.”