The final step was probably taken on 14 January. Entering her husband’s dressing room, Annabella searched it for evidence to support her theory of Byron’s madness. (Later, she fiercely denied having picked the locks of her husband’s letter trunks in order to carry off a marked-up copy of de Sade’s notorious Justine. If she did so, she chose not to preserve such a controversial book.)
Armed with Dr Le Mann’s instructions upon how best to proceed with the salvation of a husband whom she still adored, Annabella left 13 Piccadilly Terrace in the cold dawn of 15 January 1816. Some kind of parting ceremony took place on the previous evening. Annabella had – or so her romantic memory later recalled – entered the drawing room in which Byron stood talking to Augusta by the fireplace. Asked by him (with a mocking nod to Macbeth’s three witches) when she thought the three of them might next meet, Annabella responded with the pious wish that it might be in heaven, before fleeing the room – this motif was a regular feature of her recollections – in order to conceal her tears.
Leaving at last, Annabella paused – or so she remembered the scene – outside her sleeping husband’s door. Looking down at his mastiff’s empty mat, she felt an urge to curl up on it and stay. Instead, Lady Byron hurried downstairs and out to the carriage where Nurse Grimes and baby Ada awaited her, together with her maid, the newly married Susan Fletcher, and a young footman. Nobody wished her farewell. Nobody knew of her departure.
Halting for a night at Woburn along the road to her parents’ new Leicestershire home, Annabella wrote two letters. The first, despatched to Mrs Clermont, explained that she intended to comply with the advice given by Augusta Leigh (whom Mrs Clermont then held in high regard) and Dr Le Mann. She would immediately write to Byron with affection and without reproach. Her plan was to lull any suspicion, preparing the way for a country reunion with the troubled and violent man whom she hoped to nurse back to his senses.
Annabella’s letter from Woburn was the first of two by her that would later contribute more than anything else to the view that Byron’s young wife was either a liar or a hypocrite. Both letters are given here in full, just as Byron himself first saw them.
Woburn, January 15 1816
Dearest B –
The Child is quite well, and the best of Travellers, and quite well. I hope you are good, and remember my medical prayers & injunctions. Don’t give yourself up to the abominable trade of versifying – nor to brandy – nor to anything nor any body that is not lawful & right.
Though I disobey in writing to you, let me hear of your obedience to Kirkby.
Ada’s love with mine – Pip
The second letter was seemingly written on the following day, shortly after Annabella had settled into her parents’ home.
Kirkby Mallory, January 16 1816
Dearest Duck
We got here quite well last night, and were ushered into the kitchen instead of drawing-room, by a mistake that might have been agreeable enough to hungry people. Of this and other incidents Dad wants to write you a jocose account, & both he & Mam long to have the family party completed. Such a W.C. and such a sitting-room or sulking-room all to yourself. If I were not always looking about for B. I should be a great deal better already for country air. Miss finds her provisions increased, & fattens thereon. It is a good thing she can’t understand all the flattery bestowed upon her, ‘Little Angel’. Love to the good goose, & everybody’s love to you both from hence.
Ever thy most loving
Pippin . . . Pip—ip
Certainly, these letters succeeded in their immediate purpose. Whatever Byron’s own intentions may have been during January 1816 with regard to going abroad or staying with his wife (and Byron during this period changed his mind from hour to hour), even he probably never imagined, while reading these cheery bulletins from an unshakably rational spouse, that he would never again set eyes either upon his wife or his child.
* * *
* Still standing, 13 Piccadilly Terrace has been renumbered as 139.
* Since 13 Piccadilly Terrace was the home of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, it is reasonable to imagine that a copy of her close friend Georgiana’s play would have been in its library.
* Byron had half-remembered a cluster of lines from Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ that an admiring Walter Scott had recited to him earlier that summer.
* The stories in circulation about what might have been said and done by Byron during his marriage have gained much in colour from their retelling. It is not necessary to assume that his question about the baby’s being dead or alive was put (to Augusta) in a vindictive spirit: Byron displayed a keen interest in the production of an heir. Annabella herself stated to a sympathetic Lady Anne Barnard only that Byron looked ready to use the baby as a perfect instrument of torture. The more credible version of his remark about Lady Noel (who was indeed seriously ill, worn out by money worries and taking over the running of a new estate) was that her condition had become critical.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SEPARATION
(1816)
‘Where there is blame, it belongs to myself, and if I cannot redeem, I must bear it.’
BYRON TO THOMAS MOORE, MARCH 1816
Forty-three years later, in 1869, the letters which Annabella Byron wrote to her husband on 15 and 17 January 1816 were published as evidence of her duplicity. How could a woman who was intending either to leave her husband or else presently to put him under private restraint have written to him in such an apparently loving way? What might also have been asked, however, was why Byron himself saw nothing unusual in the playfulness of her tone, perplexed only by her teasing suggestion that he should give up his ‘abominable habit of versifying’*? Evidently, although Annabella preserved scant evidence of any such trait in her archives, she was capable of being as light-hearted in her relationship with her husband as she was with her father. (Annabella’s letters to Sir Ralph were full of saucy puns and jokes.) Sensing nothing odd about his wife’s two letters, and evidently untroubled by her recent departure, Byron did not even feel the need to answer them. It was almost three weeks before he did, and he did so then for a very particular reason.
Annabella was conscious of Dr Le Mann’s advice to adopt a reassuring tone, but her letters offer no evidence of hypocrisy. At the time that she despatched them, Lady Byron was confidently anticipating medical confirmation that her husband had become temporarily insane (and thus, crucially, not responsible for his many recent acts of cruelty towards her). If such proved to be the case, she planned to begin by nursing Byron back to health. Such was her strategy.
The Noels were expecting Byron to join them when Annabella left London. On 13 January 1816, two days before her departure, Sir Ralph had innocently asked his daughter when his hopes of ‘seeing you all here in a moment’ were to be gratified. On the 16th, the day of Annabella’s own arrival at Kirkby Mallory, she confirmed to Augusta that the expectation of Byron’s imminent arrival remained firmly in place.
By 17 January, Annabella had shared with her parents the news of Byron’s volatile state and secured their support for her plan. Lady Noel despatched a friendly assurance to Piccadilly Terrace that her son-in-law would be granted as much rest and privacy as he could wish for at their new home in the Midlands. Annabella followed up with a letter to Captain Byron, urging him to press her husband (referred to as ‘the Patient’) to join her at her parents’ house. ‘I deem the change of scene of greatest consequence – and this place particularly eligible,’ Annabella wrote on 18 January. Mention had previously been made that the Noels’ family house contained a magnificent library. Probably, Lady Byron remembered how much her husband had been delighted by the library at Halnaby.
But Byron remained oddly silent. On 16 January, Augusta had reported that she saw good signs of ‘ye possibility of his following you’. Next day, John Hobhouse (regarded as a thoroughly bad influence on his friend by everybody but Byron himself) appeared at Piccadilly Terrace. The effect of Hobhouse’s visit w
as disastrous. Writing the occasion up in his diary, Hobhouse cheerfully recorded that Byron and he had stayed up drinking brandy on 17 January till two in the morning and that his friend had grown decisive: ‘Lady Byron into the country – Byron won’t go!’
The following day, while Captain Byron crossed London to propose marriage to the soberly pretty Elizabeth Chandos-Pole (she accepted), Augusta tried to persuade Annabella that Byron’s new decision was in fact an act of prudence. He looked ill and swollen-faced after his drinking exploits; Hanson, Mrs Clermont and Le Mann all agreed that it would be dangerous at the moment to put pressure on him to leave.*
It’s unlikely that Augusta was being devious. Life in Piccadilly Terrace during this period was exceptionally difficult. Every day, and sometimes every hour, Byron changed his mind. At one moment, he was calling for Le Mann and calomel pills for his liver; at the next, he demanded brandy, the theatre and diversion. (Miss Boyce had been traded in for one of her colleagues, a Miss Cooke.) On the night of 17 January, Hobhouse helped convince Byron not to go to Kirkby. Two days later, Byron decided (but without communicating the change of heart to his wife) that country air was just what his constitution required.
On 19 January, seemingly unaware of how serious the situation had become, Augusta despatched two letters to Kirkby. Writing to Lady Noel, she supported Dr Le Mann’s proposal to keep her brother under close medical supervision in London. Writing less formally to Annabella, Augusta passed along a bizarre piece of information. Byron had arranged for a fashionable artist, John Holmes, to paint a miniature of his sister. Augusta’s likeness was to be twinned with a portrait of himself, and the pair of paintings sent ahead to Kirkby. Only think what wicked tales would be told about such a shocking coupling by Caroline Lamb, tittered Augusta, not to mention all the gossips at Melbourne House, ‘a fine affair in their imagination your absence – & my story!’
Granted, Augusta was not an especially intelligent or intuitive woman. Nevertheless, this was a strange way to write to a wife who was supposedly oblivious to the rumours of incest. While Augusta’s letter shows that Annabella was already acquainted with the gossip, it also explains why Mrs Leigh was simultaneously begging her husband to join her in London, thereby adding a tenuous veneer of respectability to Lord Byron’s depleted household. (Cousin George had now left, and Byron was living there alone with Augusta and a handful of servants.)
Augusta plainly believed that Annabella would dismiss this new cause for gossip as just that: fodder for the spiteful anecdotes that seemed to be forever swirling around the doors of Melbourne House. Augusta was right. Annabella had already considered what she would later describe as ‘intimations’ of an unnatural relationship between Byron and Augusta. Lacking any tangible proof, she had firmly dismissed the rumours from her mind. Augusta could gossip and giggle. Annabella herself intended to protect a goose-like but beloved sister by keeping quiet. She was, as her younger friend the actress Fanny Kemble would later remark, always good at holding her tongue.
Public silence, however, went hand in hand with a less heroic trait in Annabella’s character, one for which Sir Francis Doyle would scold her in a year when she found herself constantly torn between the need both for public discretion and for private declarations. Lady Byron, as Frank Doyle memorably observed, had a ‘too confiding disposition’. It was this impulse that had led Annabella, throughout the last and most agonising months of her marriage, to share all her most secret fears and apprehensions with Doyle’s sister, Selina. Writing to Annabella on 18 January 1816, Selina stated that ‘I have gone over the same ground so often with you that you will be able to fill up the chasms.’*
Selina, who herself would never marry, had been profoundly shocked by Annabella’s tales of Byron’s cruelty. Personally, she favoured the pursuit of a permanent separation. Sir Frank shared that opinion. Shortly before Annabella left Piccadilly Terrace, the Doyles had urged their friend to abandon her romantic dream of restoring a possibly mad husband to his senses, and to leave him forever.
Writing to Selina from Woburn, twelve hours or so after quitting Piccadilly Terrace, Annabella reviewed the possible consequences of taking what the Doyle siblings darkly referred to as ‘the final step’. She did not wholly oppose their counsel, she told Selina. What she requested now was a reasoned letter that stated precisely why Frank believed that she should undertake ‘that Measure, which Duty, not Timidity, now determines me to postpone for a short time’.
Annabella must have known what she was doing when she solicited that written response and asked for it to be sent to Kirkby Mallory. Her parents knew the Doyles well. Selina’s neat hand would be instantly familiar to them; letters, back in 1816, were commonly regarded as shared property within a family group. (Caroline Lamb had felt no compunction about reading and copying juicy extracts from the letters about the birth of Elizabeth Medora Leigh that passed between Byron and Lady Melbourne in 1814.) The Noels would be eager to know what dear Selina had to say – and Annabella knew that fact just as well as she knew in advance what Selina’s letter would disclose.
Selina’s prompt response reached Kirkby Mallory – a compactly handsome greystone house that commanded broad views across a Leicestershire landscape of sloping fields and scattered hamlets – on 19 January 1816. The letter was not circumspect. Reading of ‘the outrages committed one after another’ and of ‘ill treatment & every thing calculated to inspire hatred’, Lady Noel saw confirmation of all her darkest fears about her beloved daughter’s marriage. (‘I had many suspicions but . . . dreaded agitating Lady B by questions,’ she explained later that same week to a lawyer.) Sir Ralph was equally dismayed. Selina wrote that her brother believed the time had come for action. For the shocked Noels, Frank Doyle’s view was decisive.
No clear account survives of what happened during the rest of that traumatic day of revelations. Annabella wrote to Mrs Clermont in London that she had suffered ‘one wild fit’ which rendered her ‘frantic’; apparently, her mother ‘had agonised me about the child’. Ann Rood Fletcher later recalled that her mistress had been continuously low and depressed since her departure from London, and that she broke down, on certain occasions, in hysterical fits of sobbing.
Annabella was evidently conflicted. (She begged Lady Noel not to record anything she might rashly disclose in conversation.) Nevertheless, the written statement of her trials that she submitted to her mother on the evening of 19 January (she misdated it as the 18th and continued to misdate her letters throughout a long and anxious week) was both articulate and detailed. This testimony was, so Annabella informed Mrs Clermont that evening, ‘the strongest statement that I can swear to’. What she meant – although she did not say so in her letter to Mrs Clermont – was that she had made no allusion to the pernicious gossip about Augusta.
The omission was prudent. Armed with her daughter’s statement, a furious, red-faced and wigless Lady Noel (Judith was still suffering from erysipelas, the vicious skin ailment that had plagued her throughout the previous autumn) hurried off for a week of fierce activity in London. Lawyers were visited, while Mrs Clermont was briefed to act as a recording scribe. Both Augusta and George Byron proved willing to declare that Annabella’s life would be in danger if she returned to Piccadilly Terrace. Byron, still (astonishingly) oblivious to what was going on, assumed – or so Augusta reported to Annabella – that Lady Noel was enraged because her son-in-law had not yet gone to Kirkby.
Augusta wrote this on 23 January. It was on the same day that Lady Noel reported to Sir Ralph and Annabella that both Sir Samuel Romilly and their legal friend Sergeant Heywood agreed with Frank Doyle: Byron must from now on be kept away from his wife. Dr Le Mann, Judith added almost as an afterthought, had been unable to find any conclusive proof of insanity. Lord Byron was judged to be – and, more significantly, to have been throughout his abusive marriage – in full possession of the rational forces of his mind. He knew what he was doing.
Lady Noel was clearly relishing her moment of p
ower. Annabella, always afraid of her mother’s terrible loquacity, entreated her to be discreet. ‘I hope you will keep my Mother sober,’ she wrote to Mrs Clermont, one of the few people capable of subduing Lady Noel’s temper. ‘She will break my heart if she takes up the thing in bitterness against him. The more I think of the whole conduct on his part, the more unaccountable it all is. I cannot believe him all bad.’
Judith Noel, amidst her bustling and rushing and rage, had been compelled to confront a disquieting possibility. Sir Samuel Romilly, one of England’s most eminent legal figures (and a personal friend of the Noels), did not think Lord Byron would wish to end the marriage voluntarily. To leave his wife – as Byron had upon occasion told both Hobhouse and Cousin George that he intended to do – was one thing. For Byron himself to be left by his young spouse – with all the humiliation that such an act implied – was quite another. A nuanced approach was required. Romilly knew just the man to undertake it.
In 1816, Stephen Lushington, the first man later to be offered (and twice to refuse) a life peerage for his services to the law, was thirty-four years old. Handsome, reserved and coolly intelligent, Lushington was a Fellow of All Souls, a passionate opponent to the Slave Trade and a rising star in the world of civil law. On 23 January 1816, Lady Noel showed Lushington her daughter’s statement about the marriage (and doubtless added a great many comments of her own). ‘I would not but have seen Lushington for the World,’ Judith wrote to Annabella with unguarded satisfaction: ‘he seems the most gentlemanlike, clear headed and clever Man I ever met with – and agrees with all others that a proposal should be sent by Your Father for a quiet adjustment.’
Lushington had told Lady Noel only what he sensed that she wished to hear. Writing to Annabella fourteen years later, he confirmed that her mother’s voluble account of a husband’s threats, his keeping of a mistress and of Byron’s cruel aversion to his wife’s company rendered separation ‘justifiable’, but not ‘indispensable’. While prepared to supervise and edit the declaration of intent that Sir Ralph (so all the lawyers agreed) must now despatch to Lord Byron, Lushington felt uneasy about the process. Based upon what he had so far heard, the lawyer had privately ‘deemed a reconciliation with Lord Byron practicable, and felt most sincerely a wish towards effecting it’.
In Byron's Wake Page 12
