by Edna O'Brien
She dispatched an anonymous letter to Byron, suggested they meet at Hookham’s Bookshop and maybe indulge in a ‘drop’, while also implying that she was married and a woman of consequence. On first seeing him at Lady Westmorland’s, surrounded by so many beautiful and designing women, Caro turned on her heel and declined to be presented, leaving him somewhat piqued. A few days later, returning from a gallop in Hyde Park, all ‘filthy’ and ‘heated’, as she sat with Tom Moore and Rogers, Byron was announced. She flew out of the room to change her habit and returned in a beautiful diaphanous gown, the sort of dress she wore at the waltzing parties in Melbourne House and Almack’s Club, where heiresses went in search of husbands and married women in search of dalliances to avenge their ever-faithless husbands. The imperial waltz, imported from the Rhine, was all the rage, Byron however detesting it, since he could not himself dance, and in a scathing verse rebuked the wanton willing limbs and the grotesque figure of the Prince of Wales, who ‘with his princely paunch’ was regarded as an expert waltzer.
However, he was captivated by Caro, her boyish good looks, her pale gold bobbed hair, her bewitching voice and intermittent lisp. She claimed not to know where bread and butter came from, ate only off silver and believed that England was comprised of marquises, earls and beggars. She and her husband William Lamb lived under the same roof as the scrutinous Lady Melbourne, a strategy which both mother-in-law and husband resolved upon, to curb some of Caro’s wilder sallies. At her wedding to William she had a hysterical fit, tore her wedding gown and collapsed at the altar. She would later, in a scalding letter, tell her mother-in-law that William was a flagellist, that he had schooled her in the most unusual sexual deviations and sabotaged the few virtues that she had possessed.
Before the evening ended Byron asked if he could meet her alone and next day she ordered that a rope handrail be fitted to the three flights of stone stairs to serve as an impromptu banister. The first roses and carnations which he sent her carried a note alluding to the fact that ‘Her Ladyship’ liked everything that was new and rare. These flowers, dried and preserved, were found in a book in her room in Melbourne House after her death in 1828. Byron’s visits were tolerated by husband and mother-in-law because they believed, as with all her cravings, her passions would subside. She already had had an affair with Sir Godfrey Webster, who gave her a farewell gift of a dog, which bit her six-year-old son Augustus. Byron would arrive at eleven in the morning and sit with her in the tiny bedroom that overlooked St James’s Park, where she was to be found opening her letters, choosing her dresses for the day or playing ball with little Augustus, whose sickness was believed to be a consequence of hereditary syphilis. She had cancelled her waltzing mornings.
To his male friends Byron was penning jaunty bulletins of the progress he was making, but his letters to her allow for no doubt of his having fallen in love–
Then your heart, my poor Caro (what a little volcano!), that pours lava through your veins; and yet I cannot wish it a bit colder…you know I have always thought you the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now, or ought to have lived 2000 years ago. I won’t talk to you of beauty; I am no judge. But our beauties cease to be so when near you, and therefore you have either some, or something better.
Her heart and all else did not only meet his, but flew before it and never would she forget when he first kissed her in the carriage and drew her to him ‘like a magnet’. At its zenith, he decided they should elope, a proposal she thrilled to, proving herself to be surprisingly practical, even arranging to sell her jewels to go to the ends of the earth with him, but Byron was already hesitating. She had grown supine, the very haughtiness, the disdain, the unpredictability that had intrigued him were no more. A clinging Caro, she was ‘the unworthy sunflower basking in the light of the unclouded Sun God’. He had misread his little enfant terrible. In a chastened letter he wrote to say ‘the dream and delirium must pass away, the veil of illusion must be lifted from [their] eyes, a month’s absence and [they] would become rational’.
She would have none of it. She did foolish, precipitous and humiliating things. No longer Ariel or Titania, she was ‘poor Caro William’ whom hostesses were ridiculing in their smug exchanges between one another. She laid siege to Byron. She made friends with Fletcher so as to gain admittance to Byron’s rooms in St James’s Street, to rifle through his letters and journals for evidence of betrayal, she would plead to be asked to suppers where he had been asked and if refused she would wait in the garden or talk to the coachmen, believing that her status set her above ridicule, except that it didn’t. Dallas describes a page in scarlet Hussar jacket and pantaloons, appearing in Byron’s rooms, the light hair curling about the face and a fancy hat in the hand, who turned out not to be a page but Caroline herself in disguise. Byron sat mutely, because he disliked scenes, but he was also fascinated by Caro’s androgyny and powerless to tear himself completely away from her mischiefs and her declared transgressions with her pages, male and female. Hobhouse describes another incursion, thunderous raps on the door, Caroline climbing the garret stairs in a man’s heavy overcoat with a page’s attire underneath, shouting that there would be blood spilt, if Byron tried to escape from her. She still believed she could win him back and Hobhouse, knowing Byron’s vacillating temperament, also feared such an outcome.
Byron himself shilly-shallied, saying at one point that there was no alternative but for him and Caroline to go away together. Hobhouse, with the help of the shopkeeper downstairs, escorted her out of there into a series of carriages and eventually she was brought back to her distraught mother and her incensed mother-in-law. Next day, Byron received a cutting of her auburn pubic hair tinged with blood, asking that he send the same in return, his wild antelope adding, ‘I asked you not to send blood but yet do–because if it means love I like to have it.’ Her capriciousness knew no bounds, she would be missing, she would be found hiding in a chemist’s in Pall Mall or selling her opal ring to take a stagecoach to Portsmouth, refusing Lady Bessborough’s plea that they go to Ireland, then claiming that she was pregnant and that with a long journey there she might miscarry. The Prince of Wales, hearing of these lunacies, as indeed everyone had, claimed that Byron had bewitched the whole Melbourne household, mothers, mothers-in-law and daughters all, making fools of them. Lady Bessborough finally made her decision and so mother, daughter and Sir William set out for one of the Bessborough estates in County Waterford in Ireland.
Byron shed tears of agitation at their parting and his farewell letter to her, which she kept to the end of her days, confirms him as one of the most ardent lovers on the page–‘Do you think now I am cold and stern and artful?…“Promise not to love you!” Ah, Caroline, it is past promising…You know I would with pleasure give up all here and all beyond the grave for you…’
Caroline was devastated, a cousin who met them en route described her as ‘worn to the bone, pale as death, her eyes staring out of her head’, while William laughed away and ate like a trooper.
With the rolling seas between them, Byron could afford to be gallant, though Lady Melbourne is advocating ruthlessness, better as she put it a little present pain to avoid future ruin. To Caro he dispatched ‘absurdities’ to keep her gay, his equilibrium somewhat rattled when she reminded him that only eight guineas and the mail boat lay between them or when her letters became more threatening. She also began a correspondence with her detested mother-in-law Lady Melbourne, wishing it known and therefore relayed to Byron that she had kept his letters, brimming as they did with passion. Byron quaked at the thought that a volley of intemperate and by now hollow declarations would be exposed to the world. Marriage, he decided, was the only way to escape from her, and marriage within three weeks at that. Fletcher, his valet since his youth, who had travelled with him to the Levant, proposed a Dutch widow who had moved to London, ‘a woman of great riches and rotundity’, her little maid Abigail a possible catch for Fletche
r himself.
Byron had set his sights elsewhere.
At one of the waltz parties in Melbourne House, Caroline in full plumage, Byron had noticed another young woman, unattached, a little plump and decidedly reserved. This was Annabella Milbanke, Lady Melbourne’s philosophically minded niece. In her diary that same evening, Annabella did not dilate on his being her fate, instead she described a mouth that betrayed an acrimonious spirit, a man full of disdain which he did not always try to conceal. In a letter to her mother she said that she had made no overtures at the shrine of Childe Harold, while conceding that she would not refuse the offer of his acquaintance. Byron noted her apparent modesty, her fresh complexion, her round pink cheeks which were in contrast to the artificiality of most of the ladies present; however, he mistook her for a lady’s companion rather than an heiress in her own right. It was Tom Moore who apprised him of her fortune and said, ‘Marry her and repair Newstead.’
‘I was, am and shall be I fear attached to another, one to whom I have never said much’, so he announced to Lady Melbourne. Surprised at it being her gauche niece, her crisp retort was that poor Annabella’s looks might improve if she should be in love with him. Nevertheless and despite her possessiveness of him, she thought marriage might free him from Caroline, whose spell he had not fully thrown off, and also she was flattered at his declared delight at the pleasure of being able to call her ‘aunt’. It was she, on Byron’s behalf, who dispatched the formal proposal and it was to her the disappointing reply came–‘Believing that he will never be the object of that strong affection which could make me happy in domestic life I should wrong him by any measure that might even indirectly confirm his present impressions.’ Byron could, Annabella added, excite affection perhaps in her, but she was uncertain if he could inspire esteem. However, to her friend Lady Gosford, she confessed to being in a state of high excitement and felt the necessity to alter the channel of her feelings.
Byron took the refusal blithely, said she would have been a cold collation, whereas he preferred hot suppers. Lady Melbourne, at her own initiative, decided to pursue matters, asking Annabella what qualities she would require in a husband. Annabella followed with a list that included duty, strong and generous feelings, reason, economy, manners rather than beauty, adding that she would not ‘enter into a family where there is a strong tendency to Insanity’. Lady Melbourne replied, saying it was doubtful that Annabella would ever find a person worthy to be her husband while she remained on her stilts, reminding her that marriage was a sort of lottery.
Byron, buoyed somewhat by the supposed sale of Newstead, believed that he was about to receive £25,000 from the deposit paid by Mr Claughton, a Lancashire lawyer; he decided to go to Cheltenham to take the spa waters, resume his rigorous fasting for his various maladies and avail himself of the society ladies, all of whom went there in September, sated from the summer revels. Mr Claughton however only paid £5,000, a sum which Byron after a lapse of years, felt obligated to repay to Scrope Davies, but he set out for Cheltenham anyhow. His first female consolation was an Italian songstress with dark eyes and a poetical voice, who spoke no English, which for Byron was a blessing. Their dalliance was marred only by her huge appetite, consuming chicken wings, sweetbreads, custards, peaches and port wine, an affront to the 24-year-old poet who had told Lady Melbourne that ladies should only partake of lobster salad and champagne.
But Caro had not fallen silent or been locked away, as Byron might have hoped. Express letters flowed from her, castigation, abject pleadings or boasts of the men who did love her, the Duke’s mob and all the Waterford swains. Byron was advising her to curb her vanity, which was ridiculous, and to exert her caprices on some new conquest, he himself having gained the attentions of a most egalitarian lady.
ELEVEN
Lady Oxford, formerly Lady Jane Elizabeth Scott, a rector’s daughter, beautiful, enlightened and unconventional, had, as she would tell Byron, been forced into marriage at the age of twenty-two, to the fifth Earl of Oxford, an out-and-out dullard. She had given her favours to other men quite soon after marriage and her children were sired by five different men. Her husband, with an estimable complacency, was said to have forgiven her, being so struck by her candour and frank confession. Lady Oxford considered herself an intellectual, was a stalwart of the Whig Party and a member of the Hampden Club, where gentlemen radicals and blackguards mingled in the wan hope of reforming one another. She professed to live her life according to the tenets of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and so she would become Byron’s enchantress and ‘titular genius’. She urged him to be more politicised, something to which he was not tractable, seldom seen in the House of Lords, where he made only three speeches, one on behalf of the Nottingham weavers and the second on behalf of five million Irish Catholics whose condition he said was worse than that of black slaves. He had gone there reluctantly from a dinner party and by his wit and invective, kept the House in roars of laughter through the night, his presence however providing that majority of one for the motion to be passed.
Lady Oxford was thirty-eight when she and Byron met, her ripe charms suggesting to him a Claude Lorrain painting at sunset, its last dying beams having a singular radiance. He was invited to spend two months at their country mansion, Eywood, in Herefordshire, and soon unwisely relays to Lady Melbourne that he is in the ‘bowers of Armida’. Sensing her chagrin he wrote again to reassure her that her spells for him retained their full force. The countryside is wild and beautiful, Byron plays blind man’s buff with Lady Oxford’s children, they go sightseeing, days and nights are passed in unparalleled quiet and contentment and he has not yawned once, which is a phenomenon for him. How gratifying it would be for us to have a picture of those drawing rooms, those galleries and staircases where servants came and went, privy to so many indiscretions, to know what Lady Oxford, the ‘enchantress’, wore for dinner or how draughty it might have been in the big dining room when Lord Oxford’s elderly aunts, who lived upstairs in retirement, were allowed down. But Byron does not tell us, having no time for domestic minutiae, since his tastes were for the more grandiose.
There were days when he felt that perhaps he should be setting out for London, but then the roads were flooded and anyhow his male friends in the capital were preoccupied with politics and debt and gout. He had cast himself as Rinaldo in Tasso’s Gerusalemme, whose amours kept him from his duties as a crusader.
He had been pleading with Lady Melbourne, his ‘dear Machiavel’, to manage Caro and since it proved fruitless, he decided on harsher measures, resolving to become ‘as treacherous as Talleyrand’. Caroline had asked for a lock of his hair and instead he had sent one of Lady Oxford’s, along with her seal, which bore her initials. Recognising it, Caroline was aghast. Lady Oxford had been her dear friend. Had they not conducted a literary correspondence, cogitating on whether Greek purified or inflamed the passions, and now that selfsame friend, her mentor, her Aspasia, had deceived her. She dashes off a letter, a ‘German tirade’ as he called it, to Lady Oxford, to force the truth, to know what is between them. Lady Oxford does not condescend to reply, but when the threats become more urgent, when couriers arrive with twenty-page letters, when Caro threatens to inform Lord Oxford himself and worse to call on them, Byron is told by his balmy mistress to sever the connection. He does so in a manner that could only succeed in unhinging Caro even more–‘Our affections are not in our power,’ he wrote. ‘My opinion of you is entirely altered…I love another.’
Within a week the postmark is from Holyhead, signalling that Caro and family are returning. En route, she has collapsed and has had to be bled and leeched at ‘the filthy Dolphin Inn’ in Cornwall. Once installed at Brocket Hall, the Melbourne country estate, she insists that they should meet but is refused. She is asking for a ring and trinkets that she gave him to be returned. Byron no longer has them as, unwisely, he has given them to Lady Charlotte, Lady Oxford’s eleven-year-old daughter, for whom he had formed an unhealthy passion, something her mother summar
ily put a stop to.
Caro was insatiate. She gave herself the name of Phryne, Horace’s vengeful Roman courtesan. She was seen riding wildly on the turnpikes of Hertfordshire, near Brocket Hall, had Ne Crede B–in contradiction of his family motto Crede Byron–inscribed on the buttons of her servants’ livery and wheedled a miniature of Byron, which was meant for Lady Oxford, from his publisher John Murray. She staged an auto-da-fé in the gardens at Brocket Hall, whereby an effigy of Byron met the same fate as that of Guy Fawkes. Young girls from the nearby village of Welwyn were recruited, dressed in white and put to dance around a fire onto which an exulting Caro, half Ophelia, half Lady Macbeth, threw copies of Byron’s letters, along with rings, flowers and trinkets, while her pages recited the verse she had composed–
Burn, fire, burn,
While wondering boys exclaim,
And gold and trinkets glitter in the flame.
The brutal letter in which he had said ‘Our affections are not in our power–mine are engaged. I love another’ would be embodied in her sensational novel, Glenarvon, written in a feverish month and published in 1816, much to the chagrin of London society, whom she also pilloried. Hobhouse noted that the novel ‘rendered the vicious little author more odious if possible than ever’. The Melbournes had her declared insane and persuaded William to divorce her, except that on the morning he was to sign the necessary papers, Caroline was seen sitting on his lap feeding him bread and butter. When Byron read it in Geneva, after his exile, he merely said, ‘I read Glenarvon too…God Damn.’
