The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  Amid all this hullabaloo, one person remained quiet, William. Alone among those closely concerned, he realized the essential unreality of the situation. It was long since he had believed in Caroline’s grand passions; and his sharp eye soon perceived that Byron’s was no more sincere. The famous Byronic charm had not worked on him. He admitted Byron was handsome and amusing. But he thought his expression unpleasant and his agreeability an uncertain quantity: while himself genuinely well-bred, genuinely detached, genuinely disillusioned, he was not taken in by Byron’s pretence of these qualities. As for his Childe Harold airs, William thought them ludicrous affectations: he enjoyed making fun of them to the infuriated Caroline. But he was sure that two such poseurs would never do anything that would seriously endanger their popularity with their public. The idea that they might elope—which haunted Lady Bessborough—did not worry him for a moment. “They neither wish nor intend going,” he said, “but both like the fear and interest they create.” It was only a repetition of the Webster affair. In indolent, mocking silence, William waited for it to end as quickly.

  However, even without his assistance, the family pressure soon grew so strong as to plunge the hero and heroine of the drama into a tumult of perturbation. Byron felt torn in two. By now he cursed the day he ever met Caroline: but he could not face the idea of a clean break. It meant surrendering a conquest, and it would involve a painful scene. Besides, he did not like being unkind if he could help it. All he could bring himself to do was to try and cool her down by urging self-control. Nothing could have been more futile. Caroline was even more divided against herself than he was. Every breath of disapproval stung her like the lash of a whip; on the other hand she was prepared to suffer anything, rather than lose Byron. Under the strain of her mingled feelings, her words took on the wild intensity of tragic poetry. “You think me weak and selfish, you think I did not struggle to withstand my feelings. But it is indeed expecting more than human nature can bear. When I came in last night—when I heard your name announced—the moment after I heard nothing more . . . How very pale you are, a statue of white marble, and the dark hair and brow, such a contrast. I could never see you without wishing to cry.”

  At home she acted as though frantic. Lady Melbourne, summoned upstairs by the sound of Caroline’s cries, would find her prone on the floor in hysterical sobs. The climax was reached on the morning of 13th August. Lady Bessborough, calling at Melbourne House, found Lord Melbourne deathly pale, screaming to the servants to stop Caroline. She had, it appeared, in a fit of temper, told him she intended to go to Byron. “Go and be damned,” he had retorted, “but I don’t think he’ll take you.” Before he had finished speaking, she had rushed, hatless and without a penny, into the street. Poor Lady Bessborough, almost out of her mind, drove all day up and down London searching for Caroline—in vain. It was not till late that night that Caroline was brought home by Byron, who had found her in a surgeon’s house at Kensington; preparing, on the proceeds of a ring she had pawned, immediately to set sail she did not know where, on the first ship she could find.

  Clearly such an episode must not be repeated. After a hasty consultation between the two families, it was decided that her family should take her and William on a round of visits to Ireland. Alas, it was easier said than done. Caroline, now to all appearance abjectly repentant, professed complete submission. But when it actually came to making a move, at once she began to raise difficulties. She was too ill, her mother was too ill, wouldn’t it do as well if she just went to Brocket? And though promising again and again not to communicate with Byron, she met him secretly, and wrote to him three times a day. He, for his part, while assuring Lady Melbourne that he never wished to see Caroline again, lingered on in London; and answered her letters with protestations of constancy, in which he explained that any apparent coldness was only assumed, to quiet the suspicions of her relations. Lady Bessborough, now almost desperate, demanded that William should act. But William provokingly still refused to take the affair seriously. At heart he did not want to. Much suffering at Caroline’s hands had forced him to grow a shell of smiling indifference, which he shrank from breaking. Besides, though he saw through her completely, she still had the power to get round him. After a little cajoling, she had him laughing and reading her mother’s letters aloud to her.

  There was also a more serious reason for his inertia. Caroline’s conduct had not been the only sorrow of his married life. His child, Augustus, within two or three years of his birth, had begun to show unmistakable signs of mental deficiency. Since then Caroline had twice had a miscarriage. To William, so dependent on family affection and so tragically disappointed of it in his wife, all this came as a great blow. Now Caroline—whether seriously or as an excuse to stay in England, it would be uncharitable for posterity to decide—told him that she was once more with child. Rather than risk an accident to the unborn baby, William was prepared to yield to her everything she asked. It seemed as if they would never get away. However, at last Byron announced that he was leaving for Cheltenham. Caroline’s motive for staying was removed: her interesting condition mysteriously disappeared: by the end of August the whole party was safely across the Irish Channel.

  They were far from the end of their troubles though. Caroline was the most trying holiday companion that can be imagined. The wear and tear of the last few months had intensified her nervous instability as never before; her moods now changed, not every day but every hour. Sometimes she seemed completely her old enchanting self. “Hart and C.,” writes Lady Bessborough from Lismore Castle, where they were staying with her cousin Harrington, “had many disputes on the damp, when last night she suddenly opened the door very wide, saying, ‘pray walk in, Sir. I have no doubt that you are the rightful possessor, and my cousin only an interloper, usurping your usual habitation.’ For a long time nothing came, when at last with great solemnity and many poses, in hopped a frog, Caroline following with two candles to treat the master of the castle with proper respect, she said.”

  Elsewhere she was the breath and soul of the social life of the neighbourhood, flirting outrageously with the local men and footing it in the Irish jig with untiring spirit. But the very same evening the household might be kept up ministering to her, as she screamed and swooned and lay drumming with her heels on the floor. At one moment she would lament her torturing incurable love for Byron; the next, with equal vehemence, she asserted that it was William alone who had always possessed her heart; and she delighted to caress him in front of other people. The whole countryside talked of how fond Lady Caroline seemed of her husband. “When they say this to me,” remarked the exasperated Lady Bessborough, “I want to bellow.”

  The unfortunate William might well have bellowed too. For on him fell the brunt of Caroline’s hysteria. If she could not sleep, she woke him up; when he suggested going alone to Dublin for a few days, she fell into transports of agitation, swearing that, if he did, she would never see him again. However, he rose to the occasion. In the sustained intimacy of country life he began to realize how serious her condition was. And, with this realization, the unselfish tenderness of his nature came to the surface. He devoted himself to her with a patience and sympathy that brought tears to Lady Bessborough’s eyes; gave up going to Dublin without a word of protest; sat up till daybreak three nights running, holding her head in order to soothe her. On one occasion only is he recorded to have betrayed the strain he was feeling. During one of Caroline’s nocturnal paroxysms, a deafening thunder-storm burst out. “The storm outside,” said William to her with a rueful humour, “is hardly more than that inside.”

  Meanwhile Byron, on the other side of the sea, was showing himself equally unstable. He had bidden farewell to Caroline with words of undying fidelity. “All will be done to make you change,” he said, “but it is only you I am afraid for; for myself there is no fear.” And for the first few weeks after she had left he wrote to her lovingly. But by the same post he also sent letters to Lady M
elbourne saying that all was finally over between them, and talking airily of other flirtations. Lady Melbourne, always anxious to make trouble between them, duly reported his words to Caroline. Immediately torrents of accusation, lamentings, and abuse began to pour over from Ireland on his head. From force of habit he denied Lady Melbourne’s reports. But as a matter of fact he was glad enough of an occasion for quarrel. Caroline’s absence had made him realize how delightfully quiet life could be without her. By the end of August he had made up his mind he must be free of her before she came back.

  His best method seemed to be to involve himself with another woman. Accordingly, prompted partly by Lady Melbourne, he sent a proposal of marriage to her niece, Miss Annabella Milbanke. Miss Milbanke refused him: with a certain relief, Byron turned to less responsible forms of love. And by the middle of October, he was up to the neck in an affair with Caroline’s old friend, Lady Oxford. It seems odd that he should have left one professional romantic for another. But Lady Oxford’s romanticism was very different from Caroline’s, a fashionable pose that had no connection with the cool and easy-going sensuality which in fact directed her conduct. “A broken heart is nothing but a bad digestion,” she told Byron; and in her company he could relax to enjoy the pleasures of the body, safe from fear of subsequent scenes and heart-burnings. Only Lady Oxford exacted one condition in return for her favours. Relations with Caroline must be broken off finally, and at once.

  Byron did not hesitate. Apart from his own irritation with Caroline, the same weakness that had kept him so long tied to her, now made him wax in Lady Oxford’s hands. But, like all weak people when driven at last to take a strong line, he lost his head and acted far too violently. In a tremble of fear lest he should lose his newfound tranquillity, and determined by one blow to save himself from any further trouble with Caroline, he wrote off to her, without any preliminary warning, the most unforgivable letter he could concoct. “As to yourself, Lady Caroline,” it ended, “correct your vanity which has become ridiculous—exert your caprices on others, enjoy the excellent flow of spirits which make you so delightful in the eyes of others, and leave me in peace.” Caroline, receiving this incredible document at the Dolphin Hotel, Dublin, whence she was preparing to set sail for England, took to her bed for a fortnight in a state of nervous convulsions.

  It was the end, as far as any hope for her was concerned. Byron, once free, was never going to allow himself to fall into her clutches again. But it was not in Caroline to face an unpleasant fact. And for the next six months she fought a desperate rearguard action, if not to win him back, at any rate to remain a leading figure in his life. Indeed, even less than usual was she in a condition to listen to reason. Byron’s letter had thrown her already tottering mind, for the time being, completely off its balance. Ghastly pale, bone-thin, and with eyes starting from her head, she looked insane; and throughout the winter, derangement also betrayed itself in a series of actions, fantastic, ludicrous and distressing. She offered herself to young men on condition that they challenged Byron to a duel; she forged a letter from Byron to a picture-dealer in order to get possession of his portrait; she put her men servants into a new livery, on the buttons of which were engraved “Ne crede Byron”—Do not believe Byron. But her most singular performance was a bonfire at Brocket, on which Byron’s presents to her were solemnly burnt; whilst some village girls dressed in white capered round the flames in a ritual dance of triumph, and a page recited verses composed by Caroline for the occasion.

  “Ah look not thus on me,” so they adjured her audience,

  “So grave and sad.

  Shake not your heads nor say the lady’s mad.”

  They did say so, nevertheless.

  Meanwhile she continued to bombard Byron with menaces of vengeance—“Very like the style of Lucy in the Beggar’s Opera,” said Byron, “and by no means having the merit of novelty in my ears”—incoherently interspersed with agonized pleadings for some sign of relenting; a letter, a bracelet of his hair, above all an interview.

  Some time in the spring the interview did take place. According to Caroline it was very affecting; Byron, bathed in tears, implored her forgiveness. But it is difficult to believe this in the light of the letters he wrote about her to others. For the time being at any rate he positively hated her. Exasperation at her persecution of him had called up all that ultimate antagonism to women which childish misfortunate had implanted at the root of his character. On Caroline he visited all the sins of her worthless and predatory sex. He replied to her appeals with studied cruelty, and answered her request for a bracelet, first by sending one made of Lady Oxford’s hair, which happened to be the same colour as his own; and then by relating the deception as an excellent joke to all his friends, including Lady Melbourne. What made him particularly angry was that the noise created by the affair was doing him harm socially. Caroline abused him as loudly as he abused her: some people believed her; as the year advanced, Byron, always sensitive to public opinion, began to notice a party was forming against him. “With regard to the miseries of ‘this correct and animated waltzer’, as The Morning Post entitles her,” he complained to Lady Melbourne, “I wish she would not call in the aid of so many compassionate countesses. There is Lady W. (with a tongue, too) conceives me to be the greatest barbarian since the days of Bacchus; and all who hate Lady Oxford—consisting of one half of the world, and all who abominate me—that is the other half—will tear the last rag of my tattered reputation into threds, filaments and atoms.”

  Scandal had yet to reach its climax. On 5th July, Byron and Caroline met at a ball given by Lady Heathcote. It was the first time they had been together in society, since the previous summer: and Caroline arrived, determined to make one last effort to rekindle Byron’s flame. She went straight up to him; and in order to pique his jealousy, said, “I presume now I am allowed to waltz.” He replied, with contempt, that she could do as she liked, as far as he was concerned. And a few dances later, brushing past her in a doorway, “I have been admiring your dexterity,” he whispered sarcastically. Wild with rage, and resolved in revenge to bring him to public shame at whatever cost to herself, she rushed into the supper-room; and, breaking a glass, began to gash her naked arms with the pieces. Immediately the place was in a tumult; women screamed; only Lady Melbourne, with her usual presence of mind, seized Caroline’s hands and held her down. A few minutes later, still jabbing at herself with a pair of scissors, she was carried from the room.4 Lady Melbourne reserved her comments for Byron’s ears. “She is now like a Barrel of Gunpowder and takes fire with the most trifling spark. She has been in a dreadfull—I was interrupted & obliged to put my paper into my drawer, & now I cannot for my life recollect what I was going to say—oh now I have it!—I was stating that she had been in a dreadful bad humour this last week. With her, when the fermentation begins there is no stopping it till it bursts forth . . . I must do Ly. Bessborough the justice to say that her representation of her violence in these paroxysms was not at all exaggerated. I could not have believed it possible for any one to carry absurdity to such a pitch. I call it so, for I am convinced she knows perfectly what she is about all the time, but she has no idea of controlling her fury.” Byron was quick to reply to this communication in a similarly scornful strain. But secretly he could not help feeling gratified at having been the occasion of so memorable a scene. After his death, carefully preserved among his papers, was found a faded invitation card to the party. “This card I keep as a curiosity,” he had scribbled on it, “for it was at this ball that Lady C.L. performed ye dagger scene—of indifferent memory.”

  Next day London was ringing with the incident. A scandal was just what was needed to revive the excitement of a dying season; and such a scandal! Everywhere the story was told and re-told, each time with some new dramatic detail added; letters of condolence poured in on the outraged Lamb family; a scurrilous paper, The Satirist, published a leading article on the subject. The uproar grew so vio
lent that it became impossible for Caroline to remain in London. She was packed off to spend the rest of the summer at Brocket.

  It was a turning point in her life. Up till now, though she had shocked public opinion, she had always managed not to put herself outside the pale of society. The cousin of the Duke of Devonshire, the wife of William Lamb, was allowed to get away with a great deal that would have ruined a less glorious personage. Caroline’s paroxysms of actual violence, too, had always been kept relatively private. But now she had given way to one in public; she had also published her infidelity to her husband in a way that not even Lady Oxford had ever done. And though the influence of her friends still kept her from being made an open outcast, for the rest of her life she was a marked woman.

  She felt it with all the force of her nature. “I see the sharp censures ready to start into words in every cold, formal face I meet,” she cried. And people noted that for the first time she showed genuine signs of shame. It was not only that she was tormented by the consciousness of other people’s disapproval; a death blow had been struck at the security of that palace of illusions in which alone she could happily live. At last she had managed to involve herself in a scene as spectacular as any in poetry or romance. And what had been the effect on the world? Not admiration, not even sympathy; but harsh disapprobation and derisive contempt. Such a catastrophe made its impression. No longer could she persuade herself that the world thought her the heroine she wished to be. A subtle change began to penetrate her outlook. That supreme self-confidence, which had enabled her to survive so many set-backs, for the first time began to give way.

  It was left to William to administer such comfort as could be found. Poor William! One wonders what his thoughts were. But history tantalizingly is silent; and perhaps he never gave them utterance. Throughout the long ordeal of the preceding winter he had maintained to the outward world his shell of apparent indifference. “William Lamb laughs, and eats like a trooper,” said an observer who saw him on their return from Ireland. And during the events that followed, during all Caroline’s bonfires and forgeries, he continued, as far as we can gather, to eat and laugh. Caroline professed herself very much hurt, that he, in particular, should not have fought a duel on her behalf; she said that it would have brought her back to him. And it is possible that some such picturesque gesture might for a moment have revived her romantic interest. But it was not in William to make gestures. And besides, he did not think they would do any good. By now he had few illusions left about her; certainly he thought it was no use trying to control her vagaries. All the same, he would not cut himself completely free from her. His family wanted him to. Furious at the disgrace which “the little beast” had brought upon them, from this time on they were always pressing him to get a separation. But he refused. It came partly from the same apathy that stopped him trying to influence her actions: it came also from pity. Ever since Ireland, he had felt so sorry for her that he could not help being lenient. After all, he tried to persuade himself, she should not be blamed too much; the trouble was chiefly Byron’s fault.