The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  William’s pent-up feelings showed themselves in a bitter, steadily growing hatred of Byron. That he should have seduced Caroline was bad enough; but that he should turn against her afterwards was even more shocking to his honourable spirit. When he heard that Byron was threatening to cut her publicly, all William’s own injuries at her hands were forgotten in a sudden flare of indignation. Byron thought this very inconsistent of him. But it was Byron’s misfortune not to appreciate the workings of a generous nature. Nor would he have understood why William resented his relationship to Lady Melbourne. To William it was acutely painful that his own mother should have so little sense of his feelings as to conspire against his wife with that wife’s lover. Only here again affection made him put the chief responsibility on Byron. With the sharp eye of hatred, he penetrated, as Lady Melbourne had failed to do, the essential duplicity of Byron’s character. “He was treacherous beyond conception,” he said in later years. “I believe he was fond of treachery. He dazzled everybody and deceived them: for he could tell his own story very well.” To desert the victim of such a ruffian, at the moment when she was desolate, was against William’s most sacred instincts. If he could not leave the Whig Party when its fortunes were at a low ebb, how much less could he leave his own wife. For the next two years he hardly quitted her side.

  People noticed that grey streaks were appearing in his black curls. No wonder; it must have been a dreadful strain. Caroline, though at first a little subdued by misfortune, was no more rational than before; her moods still varied between wild gaiety, fits of rage and bursts of tears. Miss Webb, a companion who had been engaged to help look after her, recommended that she should play the harp, which she considered a sovereign remedy for mental disorders. Whether she was right must remain doubtful. For Caroline would not look at the harp. She preferred the organ, on which she would play all night, till she was frozen with cold. She also kept the house awake, by stalking the passages like a ghost, till the early hours of the morning. In the day time she often refused to eat. William bore it all as best he could. Sometimes his temper broke out. “It is too bad of you,” he would cry out. “If you fret so, I will send you to live with your grandmother.” The graceful rooms which had provided so harmonious a setting for the careless sunshine of their honeymoon hours, now resounded all too often with Caroline’s wails, with William’s oaths and exasperated laughter. And from his relations at any rate he no longer tried to hide what he thought of Caroline’s character. “When Mr. C. spoke to Caroline about the road,” we find him writing to his mother, “she was too happy in the opportunity of at once abusing them, and making an excuse for herself.”

  But on the whole he was extraordinarily patient and sympathetic. He made the most of her rare moments of good humour; if her depression became intense, he could be absolutely depended upon to give support and comfort. And for the rest he took advantage of his leisure to meditate and study.

  Now and again, they made a brief excursion into the great world. We catch a sight of them during the summer of 1814 at a masquerade ball given in honour of the victory over Napoleon, at Wattier’s Club; William handsome, but a little self-conscious, in a costume of conspicuous splendour; Caroline prancing about in green pantaloons—“masked,” said Byron, a sardonic observer of the couple, “but always trying to indicate who she was to everybody.” The following year they were abroad for several months. Caroline’s brother, Frederick, had been wounded at Waterloo; so she hurried out to Brussels, her fancy fired by the picture of herself as ministering angel at the bedside of a hero. In practice, however, she found it boring; and preferred to promenade the streets of Brussels; where she shocked Miss Burney, by appearing with arms, shoulders and back bare, but for a floating scarf of gauze.

  We next hear of the Lambs in Paris, during its triumphant occupation by the allies. “Nobody is agissant but Caroline William in a purple riding habit, tormenting everybody,” writes her cousin Harriet, now wife of the English Ambassador, Lord Granville, “but, I am convinced, ready primed for an attack on the Duke of Wellington; and I have no doubt but that she will to a certain extent succeed, as no dose of flattery is too strong for him to swallow or her to administer. Poor William hides in a small room, while she assembles lovers and tradespeople in another. He looks worn to the bone.”

  Lady Granville was right in her prophecies. Caroline was still sufficiently her old self to be stirred to instant pursuit of the acknowledged hero of Europe: the Duke was at once gratified by her adulation and amused by her oddness. The next glimpse we get of her, she is giving occasional “screams of delight” as she dines alone with him and Sir Walter Scott.

  Indeed the whole world seemed to be in Paris. Every night the Lambs were out meeting distinguished personages, Talleyrand, Metternich, Lord Castlereagh, Kings and Queens. William enjoyed it all. It appealed to his interest both in historic events and public characters. He sought to improve his appearance by having his grey hairs pulled out: and never went to bed before four in the morning. Caroline, too, was in a good humour with him. “Whom do you imagine I consider the most distinguished man I ever met?” she suddenly asked a neighbour at dinner. “Lord Byron,” he replied tentatively. “No, my own husband, William Lamb,” said Caroline.

  Her good humour, however, was not to be depended upon. A Mr. and Mrs. Kemble met the Lambs at dinner one night with Lord Holland, “when accidentally the expected arrival of Lord Byron was mentioned,” writes their daughter. “Mr. Lamb had just named the next day as the one fixed for their departure, but Lady Caroline immediately announced her intention of prolonging her stay, which created what would be called in French chambers ‘sensation’. When the party broke up, my father and mother, who occupied apartments in the same hotel as the Lambs—Meurice’s—were driven into the courtyard, just as Lady Caroline’s carriage had drawn up before the staircase leading to her rooms . . . A ruisseau, or gutter, ran round the courtyard, and intervened between the carriage step and the door of the vestibule, and Mr. Lamb, taking Lady Caroline, as she alighted in his arms (she had a very pretty, slight, graceful figure) gallantly lifted her over the wet stones . . . My mother’s sitting-room faced that of Lady Caroline and before lights were brought into it she and my father had the full benefit of a curious scene in the room of their opposite neighbours. Mr. Lamb, on entering the room, sat down on the sofa, and his wife perched herself on the end of it, with her arm round his neck, which engaging attitude she presently exchanged for a still more persuasive air, by kneeling at his feet, but upon his getting up, the lively lady did so also, and in a moment began flying round the room, seizing and flinging on the floor, cups, saucers, plates—the whole cabaret, vases, candlesticks, etc., her poor husband pursuing and attempting to restrain his mad moiety, in the midst of which extraordinary scene the curtains were abruptly closed, and the domestic drama finished behind them, leaving no doubt, however, in my father and mother’s minds, that the question of Lady Caroline’s prolonged stay till Lord Byron’s arrival in Paris had caused the disturbance they had witnessed.”

  Indeed, for all she might say, she had never brought herself to give up hope of getting Byron back. At times the scales did fall from her eyes. Byron, she told a friend, would have stuck to her, if she had been celebrated enough as a beauty to be a credit to him. But such moments of insight into his true nature were fleeting; she could not for long give up her intoxicating dream. He was still deluged at intervals with spates of letters from her: during her visit to London in the summer of 1814, she once more took to haunting his rooms. On one occasion she created a great deal of embarrassment by suddenly bursting in dressed up as a carman, at a moment when he was intimately entertaining another lady. On another he came home to find the words “Remember me” scrawled in Caroline’s hand on a book that lay on the writing table.

  “Remember thee,” he wrote, “remember thee!

  Till Lethe quench life’s burning streams

  Remorse and shame shall cling to thee<
br />
  And haunt thee like a feverish dream.

  Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not,

  Thy husband too shall think of thee,

  By neither shalt thou be forgot,

  Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!”

  To Lady Melbourne he lamented in a less stormy strain, but with equal irritation. “You talk to me about keeping her out. It is impossible, she comes in at all times, at any time; the moment the door is open, in she walks. I cannot throw her out of the window.”

  He felt very much inclined to. When she was badgering him, he hated her as much as ever. But he was inconstant in hate as in love. If Caroline was quiet for a month or two, dislike of losing his power over her would combine with a genuine impulse of affection, to produce a fitful revulsion in his feelings. He wrote to her kindly; he even felt a curious desire to see her again.

  In such circumstances they continued to meet on and off, for at least eight months more. In the spring of 1814 they had a scene of farewell at his rooms; when, so Caroline says, Byron confided to her such dreadful revelations about himself, that she vowed never to see him again. But, in view of her previous history, it is extremely unlikely she would have kept this vow, had not Byron a few months later got engaged to Miss Milbanke. Certainly he was in a fever lest the announcement of the engagement should provoke one of Caroline’s old explosions. However, for a wonder she kept fairly quiet, contenting herself with telling other people that “Byron would never pull together with a woman who went to church punctually, understood statistics, and had a bad figure.”

  She was quite right, it needed less than a year to prove it. The crash, when it came, gave Caroline a last chance to display to her lover the bewildering contradictions of her nature. There is reason for thinking that it was she who spread abroad those reports of Byron’s intrigue with his sister, which made any reconciliation with his wife finally impossible. On the other hand, to Byron himself Caroline wrote urging moderation and magnanimity; and even offered to tell Lady Byron that any stories she was told against Byron had been invented by herself—Caroline—out of jealousy. Was this offer just a final theatrical gesture: or did she, confronted for once by a real tragedy, rise above her egotism to that level of heroic self-sacrifice to which she professed to aspire? Either is possible. As it was the last communication she ever held with Byron, we may be allowed to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  * * *

  4 There are several accounts of this celebrated episode—by Byron, by Caroline, by Lady Melbourne and by various social gossips of the period—agreeing in the main but differing in detail. When in doubt I follow Lady Melbourne. She had more chance of knowing the truth than the gossips and less motive than Byron or Caroline for misrepresenting it.

  Chapter Seven

  Frustration

  Alas, there was no doubt about her behaviour to the rest of the world. In spite of William and Miss Webb, Caroline’s condition of mind during the last two years had progressively deteriorated. The disaster at Lady Heathcote’s ball had finally undermined her belief in her illusions; she had realized her failure there, too keenly for her to be able ever again to play the role of heroine with her old confidence in its success. Yet her vanity was too fundamental for her to be able to profit by the stern lessons of experience. She could not face the fact that she was wrong; so she was unable to reform herself. Instead, bewildered, terrified and resentful, she rushed blindly about, seeking, she hardly knew how, to put her shattered day-dreams together again. At times, as we have seen, she made futile efforts to behave with her former self-assurance; chased after the Duke of Wellington, paraded the streets of Brussels half naked. But for the most part, she stayed at home where, surrounded by a swarm of page boys whom she alternately spoiled and bullied, she tried to forget her gnawing sense of shame by indulging every whim of fancy, yielding to every gust of distraught temper. Her eccentricities grew more and more marked, her tantrums wilder than ever before. It became growingly impossible to live with her. The breaking-point was reached in April, 1816, when, provoked by some trifling act of mischief on the part of one of her pages, she flung a ball so hard at his head that it drew blood. “Oh, my Lady, you’ve killed me!” he cried out. “Oh, God!” she yelled, tearing out into the hall, “I have murdered the page.”

  As a matter of fact he was hardly hurt. But there was no telling, the Lambs felt, what might happen next time. Caroline was certainly a lunatic, and probably a dangerous one. They made up their minds that it was impossible for William to live with her any longer. In a body they went to William and once more demanded a separation. This time he did not refuse.

  Formal separations, however, entail lengthy preliminaries. For three weeks Melbourne House was made hideous by a succession of appalling scenes, in which the Lambs told Caroline, with brutal frankness, that she was mad, and she in return now stormed, now pleaded. Neither was of any avail: the arrangements went inexorably on. Beside herself with fury and despair, Caroline resolved on revenge. Before she was cast out of the house, she would at least publish her story to the world in such a way, as to justify herself and confound her enemies. Accordingly, dressed for some mysterious reason in page’s costume, she proceeded to sit up day and night writing. Some weeks later an old copyist called Woodhouse was summoned to Melbourne House, where, to his astonishment, he was confronted by what he took at first to be a boy of fourteen, who presented him with the manuscript of a novel. Before the end of May this novel, Glenarvon, made its appearance on the book-sellers’ tables.

  It is a deplorable production: an incoherent cross between a realistic novel of fashionable life and a fantastic tale of terror, made preposterous by every absurd device—assassins, spectres, manacled maniacs, children changed at birth—that an imagination nurtured on mock-Gothic romance could suggest. But it has its interest, as revealing the way that Caroline contrived to reshape her story so as to please her vanity. She appears as Calantha, a heroine, noble, innocent, fascinating, but too impulsive for success in a hard-hearted world. Her husband, Lord Avondale, otherwise William, in spite of the fact that he too is unusually noble-hearted, neglects her, and corrupts her morals by his cynical views. In consequence, she yields to the temptations of a depraved society and finally, though only after heroic resistance on her part, is seduced by Byron, here called Glenarvon. He is Byronism incarnate; beautiful and gifted beyond belief, but driven by the pangs of a conscience burdened with inexpiable crimes, to go about betraying and ruining people in a spirit of gloomy desperation. Though Calantha is the love of his life, he deserts her out of pure devilry. The heartless world turns against her; she dies of a broken heart: Avondale dies shortly afterwards out of sympathy. For Glenarvon a more sensational fate is reserved. He jumps off a ship into the sea after sailing about for days, pursued by a phantom vessel manned by revengeful demons of gigantic size.

  The tension of this dramatic tale is relieved by some thinly veiled satirical portraits of the Lamb family, the Devonshire family, Lady Oxford, Lady Holland, and a number of other leading social figures, notably the influential Lady Jersey. Its moral is that Caroline’s misfortunes were Byron’s fault, William’s fault, society’s fault—anyone’s fault, in fact, but her own.

  The world did not accept this view. Glenarvon had a success of scandal; three editions were called for within a few weeks. But it dealt the death blow to what remained of Caroline’s social position. Ever since Lady Heathcote’s ball she had kept it on sufferance; certain people had continued to countenance her out of affection for her relations. Now she had set out deliberately, and in print, to insult these last of her supporters. It is not surprising that they too turned against her. In desperate bravado she had continued to go into society, at the time the book was appearing; only to find that her cousins avoided her, Lord Holland cut her dead, and Lady Jersey scratched her name off the list of Almack’s Club. At last she had succeeded in putting herself completely outside the pale. And she
was never to get inside it again.

  As for the Lambs, they were almost out of their minds. For many years, so they not unjustifiably considered, they had endured Caroline’s goings-on with singular patience. And in return she had chosen to wound them in their two tenderest points, family loyalty and regard for appearances. To people brought up with Lady Melbourne’s tradition of discretion, no worse torment can be imagined, than to have the intimacies of family life displayed in public. And in such an unfavourable light! What cause for odious triumph would the book not give to that dowdy and envious section of society which had always maligned them? While, when they thought what their beloved William must be feeling as he saw Glenarvon lying open on the tables of every house he entered, their fury almost suffocated them.