What sounded so delightful in Byron’s chatty account marked the beginning of the end for his marriage. That largely liquid supper was one of several gatherings at which Byron and Kinnaird settled their disputes about how to run the Drury Lane Theatre over copious amounts of brandy. Kinnaird was a hardened drinker; Byron had the will, but not the constitution. The effect – as Augusta had previously warned Annabella – was terrifying. Byron, when in his cups – especially when the cups were filled with gin or brandy – was mad, bad and a danger to anybody who happened to cross his path. Sober again, he would recollect none of it.
The Noels, as usual, were kept in the dark. Judith, suffering from a serious ailment that autumn, confined herself to her bed at Mivart’s Hotel in Brook Street (now Claridge’s) just behind Piccadilly. Sir Ralph’s anxiety was lulled by his daughter’s playful account of a visit to Piccadilly Terrace by the woman everybody wished the late Lord Wentworth had married in the first place instead of taking a mistress into his house. Lady Anne (Lindsay) Barnard, a well-travelled Scotswoman of exceptional brilliance and charm, came as chaperone to a group of young ladies who sought to impress Byron with tasteful accounts of the beauty of a Scottish autumn. Byron responded by expressing his personal admiration for the lovelier tint of a good malt whisky. ‘In short,’ wrote Annabella, ‘they yelped and he snapped.’
On 1 November, the day after the drinking banquet described by Byron to Moore, Annabella still felt hopeful enough to draw up one of her earnest projects for Byron’s reform: ‘Wicked people have, for a time, induced him to act on wrong motives, by discrediting his right ones . . . on the contrary, by insisting on the right ones, we may rouse him to do them justice . . .’ She concluded with a scolding for Byron’s ‘indulgence of foibles beyond the Christian temper of forbearance & forgiveness’.
Paper resolutions were all very fine, but the moment for marital reforming had passed. The arrival of a live-in bailiff on the premises meant no more to Annabella than the welcome addition of a much-needed male protective presence in the house. To a man who had been as poor – and who had grown as proud – as Byron, a resident debt-collector became the ultimate humiliation. ‘God knows what I suffered yesterday & am suffering from B’s distraction,’ Annabella confided to Augusta on 9 November, specifying this new ‘distraction’ as ‘of the very worst kind’. The combination of a bailiff and brandy, together with the rising terror – if he did not flee the country first – of bankruptcy and thus of a debtors’ prison, had tipped her husband’s behaviour from the unreasonable into the irrational. ‘I have thought that since last Saturday [the night of Byron’s first drinking dinner with Kinnaird] his head has never been right,’ Annabella wrote, predicting in this same letter that she feared he would add ‘more and more to the cause’. It was the first hint that Annabella had found a new explanation for her husband’s strange behaviour. Byron was not consciously malevolent. He was going insane.
On 11 November, Annabella wrote once again to Mrs Leigh. This time, she issued a direct and urgent appeal. Augusta must come back to London, and soon.
Don’t be afraid for my Carcase – it will do very well. Of the rest I scarcely know what to think – I have many fears.
Let me see you the middle of next week – at latest . . . You will do good I think – if any can be done.
By the time that Annabella despatched her letter to Cambridgeshire, Byron had already informed his wife, with much circumstantial detail (his boast of toying with two naked women at once was a detail that would stay in the mind of Annabella’s straitlaced lawyer for the rest of his days), of his relationship with Susan Boyce. On 15 November, the day that an apprehensive Augusta arrived at Piccadilly Terrace, a grim-faced Byron greeted her with the same information, while adding that he was tired of indulging his expensive young mistress’s whims. A search was currently afoot for a new brooch that Susan had managed to drop in the Byron carriage. For the time, at least, Byron himself dropped Miss Boyce.
A break-up with Susan Boyce was small beer compared to the dismaying change that Augusta instantly perceived in her brother’s behaviour. Both Byron’s valet and Annabella’s maid told Mrs Leigh that they were worried about the safety of Lady Byron and her unborn child. Summoning Mrs Clermont to join the household (with Annabella’s approval), Augusta issued a dramatic warning: ‘God knows what he may do.’ Mrs Clermont, already fearful for her young mistress, came at speed.
It was Annabella who decided to import Byron’s jolly young cousin into the house as a supportive male presence. George, whose future bride had been brought to London by her Derbyshire family, was delighted by the chance to continue his courtship of Elizabeth Chandos-Pole, and from such a fine address. Lady Melbourne, in a letter that has not survived, meanwhile received a troubling hint from her niece that she was ready to ‘break loose’ and leave. Addressing her aunt again early in the New Year, Annabella credited Augusta’s reassuring company with having prevented her from doing so.
Was Annabella preparing the legal ground for a future case for divorce when she gathered these valuable witnesses around her in the house? Or was an intimidated young woman simply surrounding herself with supportive figures during a period of fear and extreme isolation? One of Lady Byron’s earliest retrospective statements about the marriage suggests that the second reason was uppermost. She was not only afraid, but also lonely.
. . . for a considerable time before my confinement he [Byron] would not see me himself for above an hour – or two – if so much throughout the day & left me therefore alone all the evening till Mrs L[eigh] came, for he had always objected to my having any society at home.
When he did stay at home himself, it was to drink Brandy – & he would then dismiss me to my room in the most unkind manner. He told me he must have either his Brandy or his Mistress.
The comfort of Augusta’s presence at Piccadilly Terrace during the month before Ada’s birth was a subject upon which Annabella never deviated. Mrs Leigh’s former relationship with her brother was difficult to dismiss or deny. Those days were seemingly now in the past. Augusta had become unflinching in her efforts to defend a sister-in-law whom she loved, and for whom she feared.
The benefit of a sisterly presence at Piccadilly Terrace was instantly apparent. Byron, after his chilling initial reaction to Augusta’s arrival at his home, swiftly resumed his familiar and enchanting manner. Towards his sister, he was once again affectionate, teasing and amorous. Towards his wife, his behaviour remained ferocious enough for Mrs Clermont to believe him capable of murder.
The impression . . . made upon my mind was that he was likely to put her to Death at any moment if he could do it privately. I told Mrs Leigh such was my opinion. She replied I will never leave him alone until she is brought to bed, and then you must stay always with her.
Dramatic though Mrs Clermont’s statement sounds, it is supported by her assertion in 1816 that she never saw Lord Byron in a rational state at Piccadilly Terrace except during the first days after his daughter’s birth. Alarm was now rife in the household. Fletcher kept close watch on his master’s pistols. Augusta sat up late in order to ensure that a drunken Byron did not try to break past the nightly guard they had established to protect his wife from harm. Even the usually unobservant John Hobhouse, visiting the house on 25 November, noted that things were going badly there and that Byron had spoken out to him against marriage: ‘talking of going abroad – &c.’
Going abroad was a good deal better than going to a debtors’ prison. Hobhouse saw nothing extraordinary in the notion that Byron might abandon his wife. The London house (for which six months’ rent was still unpaid) had only been leased for a year. A wife could always take shelter beneath her parents’ roof. What neither Hobhouse nor anybody else could have predicted in late November was the particular way in which this anticipated result would actually come to pass.
On 9 December, shortly before the beginning of her labour pains, Annabella managed to summon the strength to leave Piccadilly Terrace
for long enough to consult Samuel Heywood, a respected attorney and close friend of the Milbanke family, about the possibility of her making an escape. Augusta’s approval of the project suggests that the contemplated departure was intended to be of a temporary nature. (It was always in the scandal-prone Mrs Leigh’s interests that her brother’s marriage should survive.)
Heywood’s response is unknown, but Byron got wind of the conversation. When Annabella returned and asked for the nurse – labour had already begun – Byron asked her when she meant to leave. Back from the theatre later that night, he sat up in the drawing room, knocking the tops off soda bottles with a poker. (Soda, as Byron would later recall in his Ravenna Journal of 1821, was as necessary to him as brandy during that traumatic autumn of 1815.) The nervous tenor of the household can be gauged from the fact that the racket of flying bottle tops, when heard upstairs, was mistaken for gunshots.
The baby – a healthy girl – was born at one o’clock the following afternoon, 10 December 1815, a Sunday. Annabella’s nurse and her delivering physician, Francis Le Mann, were the sole others in attendance. Strange tales would later emerge. Lord Byron had enquired if the child had been born dead. Inspecting the newborn infant, he had hailed the arrival of a perfect instrument of torture to employ, presumably, against his wife. Annabella was informed by Byron, during labour, that her mother had just died.*
Such obviously anecdotal records, like many of the allegations that later became part of a copiously documented case for legal separation, must be taken with a judicious measure of salt. Mrs Clermont remembered that Byron’s first concern had been to know whether the baby was physically perfect (a reasonable worry for a man born with a deformed foot). Lady Noel, visiting Piccadilly Terrace during the week after her grandchild’s birth (Judith herself was still frail enough to require an invalid couch for her journey up the grand marble staircase to Annabella’s bedroom) noticed nothing that disturbed her. Later, justifying her lack of concern, Lady Noel explained that she had been ‘studiously deceived’, due to her daughter’s wish not to alarm an ailing parent.
Augusta Leigh’s continuing fears for the physical safety of her sister-in-law would form one of the sturdiest pillars in Annabella’s legal case for a marital separation. Two days after the birth of Augusta Ada (named in honour of her chosen godmother), Mrs Leigh confided in Francis Hodgson, the only male friend of Byron’s with whom she had established a close personal friendship. She wanted to meet him urgently, and in private. No direct mention of this request must be made in Hodgson’s response, since Byron was sure to recognise his friend’s handwriting and enquire what was going on. As a future clergyman – and as a man who had observed the siblings’ intimacy during their 1814 summer holiday at Hastings – Hodgson feared the nature of Augusta’s confidences and declined to comply. Instead, acting with Annabella’s approval, Augusta turned to her own aunt.
Miss Sophia Byron was an imperturbable old lady of forthright views. (She often scolded a dieting Byron about his bouts of starvation.) The advice received from this familial quarter was unequivocal. Her nephew’s symptoms suggested insanity, a trait with which Miss Byron had gained first-hand experience from observing the mental instability of her brother, aptly nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’. The best thing Annabella could do, according to this authoritative source, was to have her husband closely observed and then take medical counsel upon the wisest course of action.
Aunt Sophia’s brisk advice stiffened Annabella’s resolve. Derangement required treatment: who better to assist in Lord Byron’s restoration to sanity than a devoted wife? It was at this point that Annabella first formulated a plan by which the patient might be temporarily confined within her parents’ secluded country home and nursed back to health by herself.
Christmas passed unmarked at Piccadilly Terrace. At some stage before the end of December, Annabella wrote a cautious letter to her parents, preparing them for the possibility of a family visit of an unspecified duration. Judith, having consulted Augusta in advance, sent a friendly invitation to her son-in-law, assuring Byron of all the space, peace and freedom that he could possibly wish for either at Seaham, or at Kirkby Mallory. All she asked in return was that ‘a poor Grand-mama’ might be granted the pleasure of wee Augusta’s company. (The Noel family’s use of the name ‘Ada’ emerged only after the Byrons’ separation.) Tactful for once, Judith forbore to mention that the imminent difficulty of renewing an unpaid annual lease on 13 Piccadilly Terrace might make such an offer particularly welcome.
On 3 January 1816, Byron paid one of his rare daytime visits to the room in which Annabella was breastfeeding their daughter. It was a spectacle that gave him no pleasure. (One of Byron’s rare early allusions to Ada, in a letter sent two days later to Tom Moore, noted that the infant ‘squalls and sucks incessantly’.) Still, the visit began agreeably. In March 1816, Annabella stated that Mrs Grimes, the attending nurse, ‘would probably say that she has seen Lord B appear personally fond of me during the few minutes she has seen us together’.
Swiftly, the visitor’s mood changed. It was during this same visit that Byron apparently intimated that he meant ‘to do every thing wicked’ [Annabella’s emphasis] and to begin by resuming his affair with Miss Boyce. He spoke of bringing his mistress to live in the house. And he said more, as if he dreaded what she herself might reveal.
Amongst other unkind things said to me on Jan 3rd was this declaration ‘A woman has no right to complain if her husband does not beat or confine her – and you will remember I have neither beaten nor confined you. I have never done an Act that would bring me under the Law – at least on this side of the Water.’
Byron’s reported declaration was one which would prompt widespread and prurient speculation – it still does – about just what that mysterious act might have been been. Did Byron mean that he had never committed sodomy (a criminal offence in England) in his own country? Or did he mean that he had committed incest (which was a criminal offence only abroad)? How well did Byron himself know the law? And what did Annabella, the woman her husband paid sincere tribute to as ‘Truth herself’, understand by the words that she so carefully set down? These words were not idly recalled. Strikingly, they were added to Annabella’s original statement only after she had decided that for her there could be no going back.
The gravity of Byron’s outburst is underlined by the fact that he avoided his wife for the following three days. On 6 January, however, Augusta was sent upstairs by her brother with a curt note requesting Lady Byron to prepare herself for a visit to her parents’ home at the earliest possible date. The reasons Byron gave were rational enough: bailiffs were closing in on him; the lease was almost up; the time had come to begin dismissing the household.
Byron’s note mentioned that the child and her nurse would ‘of course’ accompany his wife on her journey. He proposed that they should all travel in his personal (and at that time, his only) carriage. There is no indication that Byron was contemplating a permanent break when he dashed off his brusque note. This, however, was the interpretation that Annabella placed upon his letter – or so Mrs Clermont recalled: ‘She [Annabella] cryed & said although I expected it I cannot help feeling this – to think that I have lived to be hated by my husband.’ On the following day, 7 January, Annabella confirmed that she was prepared to leave, as instructed, on the earliest day ‘that circumstances will admit’.
‘Circumstances’ might suggest that Annabella desired time to recover from the shock of childbirth. She meant no such thing. A week before her final departure, the young mother threw herself into establishing by every means in her power that her husband was not responsible for his own behaviour.
Annabella’s mission began with a visit to Matthew Baillie, an eminent London doctor (Baillie’s uncle was the great Scottish surgeon John Hunter) and brother to Annabella’s revered older friends, Joanna and Agnes. Dr Baillie may have imagined that his visitor had come to seek his advice; his role, as he rapidly discovered, was to act as audience
and professional guarantor of a theory that had already been formed.
Annabella wrote up her account of the interview on that same day, 8 January 1816. The impression deliberately conveyed was that Baillie – not she – had presented the case for Byron as a madman. ‘The principal insane ideas are – that he must be wicked – is foredoomed to evil – and compelled by some irresistible power to follow this destiny, doing violence all the time to his feelings.’
In fact, after listening carefully, Baillie had refused to become involved, suggesting that Lady Byron would do better to obtain written evidence from Francis Le Mann, who had treated the ‘patient’ with calomel for his chronic irritability (ascribed to a ‘torpid’ liver). But here, Annabella’s quest once again had fallen short of her hopes. Le Mann would not commit his thoughts on insanity to paper, preferring to fob Lady Byron off with an article about hydrocephalus, a condition in which excess fluid puts pressure on the brain. Passages that seemed relevant to Byron’s case were highlighted. Le Mann did, however, promise to remain watchful and to send a report of his more fully considered view.
On 12 January, Annabella took a step too far. Armed with Le Mann’s marked-up paper, she went to the office of John Hanson, Byron’s lawyer, to present her case. That hasty action betrayed poor judgement. Although it had not yet been proved that Lord Portsmouth was insane at the time of his marriage to Miss Hanson, the last thing Byron’s lawyer needed was to have his chief witness declared a lunatic. Hanson declared that he saw nothing mad at all in Lord Byron’s behaviour. Shortly after Annabella left his house, the alarmed lawyer reported her visit to her husband.
The following day, an enraged Byron spoke to Annabella in a manner that caused her real terror. According to her later statements, this was the only occasion upon which Lady Byron feared for her life.
In Byron's Wake Page 11
