Annabella herself, when not seeking release from unhappiness in reckless rides across the frost-bound fields surrounding Kirkby Mallory, remained divided. She feared the scandalmongers would blame poor Augusta for her own departure (‘a cruel injustice’, so Lady Byron told her mother on 26 January). She wept at the thought of all the love she had expended upon her husband, seemingly to no avail. ‘It is worth the sadness if it brings anything good to him,’ Annabella wrote in an earnest little memorandum which set out her determination to maintain loyalty and goodwill. For the present, she struggled to remain calm. The visible and daily failure of that daily attempt was daily witnessed by Mrs Fletcher, her observant maid.
On 28 January, following the arrival at Kirkby of Lady Noel, Mrs Clermont and Selina Doyle, Sir Ralph drew up and took to town for Dr Lushington’s approval a letter in which he told Byron the reasons for his daughter’s decision to leave. Augusta, recognising the untidy handwriting and guessing what Sir Ralph would have to say, sent his letter back unopened. On 30 January, the newly married Captain Byron, who was househunting in Leicestershire for a future marital home, visited Kirkby Mallory to comfort Annabella. He sent a report to London. Judith, writing to her husband at Mivart’s Hotel in London, passed along to him George’s belief that their daughter’s actions had merely pre-empted Byron’s own. Had Annabella not left him, George Byron declared, her husband would certainly have left her. In fact, he could now disclose that Byron had talked about going abroad alone ever since the birth of the couple’s daughter.
It cannot have been a coincidence that Byron chose Friday, 2 February – the very day that he received Sir Ralph’s re-sent letter – to make hasty preparations for a visit to Leicestershire. Annabella had heard nothing from him since she left. On 3 and again on 5 February, her husband belatedly attempted to fill up the gap. Striving for nonchalance, Byron sounded apprehensive. At first, he suggested that Sir Ralph must have written without Bell’s approval. Two days later, he announced that his wife had only to speak the word and – it was a bad moment to cast Annabella as Shakespeare’s stroppy Shrew to his own fancy-free Petruchio – ‘Kate! I will buckler thee against a million!’
Annabella understood her husband better than he did her. On 7 February, she coolly reminded Byron of ‘the misery that I have experienced almost without an interval from the day of marriage’. So now he missed her? How predictable! ‘It is unhappily your disposition to consider what you have as worthless – what you have lost as invaluable. But remember that you believed yourself most miserable when I was yours.’
These were brave words and ones which commanded Byron’s grudging respect. A third and far more passionate epistle from her husband (‘did I deem you so – did I ever so express to you – or of you – to others?’) almost undid her: almost, but not quite. Collecting her thoughts for the benefit of Dr Lushington, Annabella acknowledged that her own ‘softness’ was making resistance difficult: ‘one tender remembrance sweeps away accumulated injuries. I have a good Memory – but it is sad to employ it in recollecting wrongs’. In an afterthought addressed to Mrs Clermont, the carrier of her letter to Lushington’s home in Great George Street, Lady Byron added that the baby girl had now been ‘necessarily’ weaned. The necessity was due to the fact that Annabella, usually blessed with a fine appetite, had nearly ceased to eat.
In London, news of the separation was beginning to spread. On 12 February, Lady Melbourne asked her brother Ralph why he had instructed friends ‘to give the event every possible publicity’. Had he not considered the consequences for his daughter, who had now become ‘the subject of conversation for every gossiping Man & Woman in town without knowing what to contradict or assert’?
Visiting Kirkby in February, the ageing Sarah Siddons grieved over Annabella’s sufferings, while marvelling at ‘the unexampled gentleness, goodness, and wise forbearances of the perfectest of human beings imaginable.’ Mrs Siddons had caught the mood of the times. It was Byron, not his wife, of whom nothing quite bad enough could now be proclaimed. As young Thomas Macaulay would remark in 1831, when reviewing Moore’s Life and Letters of Lord Byron, the handsome poet who had been society’s darling had grown ripe for his comeuppance: ‘he had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; he had been over-praised’.
The source of some of the most vicious anti-Byron gossip was Lady Caroline Lamb. Annabella’s marriage had compelled an unforgiving Caroline to hold her tongue about the lover who had once rejected her so publicly. Now, having ransacked Lady Melbourne’s papers and revisited her own copious records of a tumultuous affair, Caroline was ready to let rip. Hobhouse, on 9 February 1816, noted that Lady Caroline had accused Byron of ‘[-----]’, by which he almost certainly meant sodomy. On 13 February, Mrs Clermont informed Annabella that ‘very scandalous tales’ had reached Dr Lushington from Brocket, the Lamb family’s Hertfordshire home. On 17 February, an agonised Augusta (she was now doing everything in her power to persuade Lady Byron to return to her husband and forgive him) told Annabella that the latest stories were ‘of a nature too horrible to repeat . . . Every other sinks into nothing before this most horrid one.’ Byron himself had apparently declared that for a man to have such a thing said of him ‘is utter destruction & ruin to a man from which he can never recover’. When Annabella coolly answered (19 February) that she would certainly speak out against anything she personally knew to be untrue, Augusta panicked. How much exactly did Annabella know? What might she not dare to declare in public?
On 20 January, Augusta wrote once more to Annabella, this time in a tone that combined shameless cajoling (‘I do think in my heart dearest A, that your return might be the saving & reclaiming of him’) with threats (‘Most likely you are aware you will have to depose against him yrself, & that without witnesses yr depositions will go for nothing’).
Augusta’s letter was ill-timed. It reached Kirkby Mallory on the day that Annabella, accompanied by her father, returned to London, where they stayed at Mivart’s Hotel. On the evening of 22 January, Annabella paid her first visit to Dr Lushington’s home in Great George Street.
Slight, pale, calm and exceptionally articulate, Annabella created a very different impression from that made upon Lushington by the intemperate Judith Noel. It is not certain that Annabella mentioned incest, but it is striking that Lushington instantly requested (Annabella would disobey) a severance of all communication with Augusta. The following day, 23 January, Annabella asked her mother to follow Dr Lushington’s wishes by maintaining only a cautiously friendly tone to Mrs Leigh, ‘as being essential to my justification, whatever she may turn out’. (The emphasis was Annabella’s own.) The lawyer’s third request was that Lady Byron’s maid should immediately be released from duty to rejoin her husband (Byron’s valet) in London, even if this event should later lead to an unhelpful deposition – as indeed it did.
Fifty-five years later, Sir John Fox, a Master of Chancery who was friendly with Stephen Lushington, published part of a private letter in which the great lawyer, following Lady Byron’s death, had revealed some of the details that had so shocked him back in 1816. Fox himself was too prim to include Lushington’s report of Byron’s boasts to Annabella ‘of his adulteries and indecencies with loose women, toying with more than one at the same time naked’.
Incest; sodomy; unseemly revelations; acts of violence: whatever it was that Annabella revealed on that chilly March evening at Lushington’s home, it shook the lawyer to the core. Writing to Lady Byron (she would become his family’s lifelong friend) in 1830, Lushington confirmed that ‘when I was informed by you of facts utterly unknown, as I have no doubt, to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel . . . my opinion was entirely changed: I considered a reconciliation impossible’. Lushington went further than that. From then on, he refused to assist in the pursuit of any course but separation.
‘I am in boundless respect of her,’ Lushington would write years later of his favourite client: ‘. . . of her heart, intellect and governed mi
nd.’ Back in 1816, however, Lushington chafed against the way in which, while determined to achieve a dignified separation from her husband while retaining custody of her daughter, Annabella continued to defend her adversaries. She had no wish to slander Byron. She actively sought to protect Augusta Leigh from being engulfed by a scandal that was reaching uncontainable proportions.
Shortly after visiting Lushington, Annabella sent a confidential letter to Mrs Leigh’s aunt, Sophia Byron. On 29 February, that spirited sexagenarian confirmed that she herself had attempted to persuade Augusta to leave Byron’s house: ‘Le Sposo [Colonel Leigh] and her friends have been equally anxious for it,’ Sophia wrote. There was no need to spell out the reason why. On 26 February, Annabella reassured Augusta’s friend, Mrs Villiers, that she had never personally sanctioned the ugly tales that were beginning to taint the name of Mrs Leigh. On 5 March, Annabella held a private interview with Augusta. It was the first time the two women had met since Lady Byron’s departure on 15 January from Piccadilly Terrace.
The meeting had been requested by Lord Byron and it is unclear what Annabella expected to achieve by it. Possibly, she hoped to plead against Byron’s reported plan to abduct her baby daughter and place the little girl under Aunt Augusta’s guardianship. (Frank Doyle warned Lady Noel on 4 March to defend the child ‘with every possible vigilance’ against ‘a coup de main’.) Possibly, Annabella hoped Augusta might persuade Byron to sign the preliminary deed of separation which had been delivered to Piccadilly Terrace on 2 March. But Augusta, while horrified by Annabella’s gaunt appearance (‘positively reduced to a skeleton – pale as ashes’, she lamented to Francis Hodgson on the day of the meeting), was pursuing her own agenda. Once more, while delivering a letter in which her brother begged Annabella to accept his regret for ‘unknown faults’ and to respect her high position as his wife (‘Oh – Bell – to see you thus stifling and destroying all feeling, all affections – all duties’), Augusta entreated Annabella to come back. Byron, she averred, remained bewildered by his wife’s protracted absence. What unforgivable injuries had he committed? What were these awful charges that Bell refused to name? Why would she not return home and grant her remorseful husband a second chance?
A return was not on the cards. Following the meeting with Augusta, Annabella instantly wrote to tell Byron that she had no intention of rejoining him. Contrary to his fixed belief that her parents, abetted by Mrs Clermont, were controlling her actions, the decision to leave him was hers and hers alone: ‘for the consequences I alone am responsible’. Byron was unconvinced. ‘Her nearest relatives are a ***** [sic],’ he angrily informed an inquisitive Thomas Moore on 8 March. Nevertheless, while eager to remove his child ‘from the contagion of its grandmother’s society’, Byron had nothing but good to say to Moore about his wife. None could be more agreeable. Never once in their time together had Annabella given him the least cause for reproach.
It is possible that Byron’s affectionate words were fuelled by a sincere relief. On the evening of 9 March, a rejoicing Augusta told Francis Hodgson that ‘L[ad]y Byron has given a written contradiction of the 2 principal and most horrible reports into Mr Wilmot’s hands.’ Robert Wilmot – a country cousin of Byron’s who sympathised with Annabella’s decision to leave him – had delivered this document to her husband. Byron promptly agreed to the separation.
Drawn up by Lushington and revised by Annabella, the document of retraction had not said quite what Augusta supposed. The ‘horrible reports’ (incest and sodomy) had neither been contradicted nor denied. A promise had, however, been made that these particular accusations would not be included in Lady Byron’s formal charges if matters should ever come to court.*
On 11 March, primed by John Hanson with warnings about the need to protect his claim upon Annabella’s expected fortune, Byron reneged on the deal. Wilmot was so angry that he considered challenging his cousin to a duel. As the alarming possibility of a public court case began to loom, Annabella once again took steps to protect the reputation of Augusta Leigh.
Lushington’s respect for Annabella was constantly tested by her loyalty to Augusta, a woman whom the lawyer himself regarded as not only unprincipled but immoral. On 10 March, Annabella suggested that a personal commitment from Augusta to stay away from the baby girl would prevent ‘the cruel necessity of stigmatising [her] either directly or indirectly’. When Lushington disagreed, Annabella composed a statement by which she intended to protect from further harm Augusta’s already damaged reputation.
Annabella’s handwritten defence of her sister-in-law was both warm and generous. Reshaped by the super-cautious Stephen Lushington, it became a nebulous web of conditionals and hypotheses. Tribute was still paid to Mrs Leigh’s attempts to protect Lady Byron from her husband’s ‘violence & cruelty’. (These claims of abuse were crucial to Lushington’s case.) Regarding the ‘suspicion’ of incest, Annabella was allowed only to say, amidst a web of ‘mays’ and ‘mights’, that the offence might – just possibly – not have taken place during her own marriage to Lord Byron.
Annabella’s fears for Augusta were heightened by the growing likelihood of a public trial. On 14 March, she told her mother that Byron’s sudden backtracking upon their agreement had been ‘a dirty job’, and one for which she blamed his advisors (meaning Hanson and Hobhouse).
It was at this point that a new and yet more explosive report was first mentioned.
The precise nature of this mysterious accusation has never been established, but the charge seems to have frightened Byron almost out of his wits. The most likely possibility is that Annabella had passed on to Lushington her earnest conviction that Byron, during a past paroxysm of madness, had committed murder. Mention was made of this belief during one of Lady Byron’s many statements about their marriage. Certainly, Byron had alluded to some unnameable crime in his past. He had also intimidated Annabella by reminding her of Caleb Williams, William Godwin’s gothic tale – much admired by both the Byrons – of a man who will stop at nothing to conceal the murders he has committed. Shocking a woman as innocent as Annabella amused Byron a great deal. It never occurred to him that his colourful romancing might one day be recalled as gospel truth.
Was there any truth in the suspicion? It is striking that Augusta instantly guessed the content of this new rumour. Reporting on it to Hodgson on 14 March, Mrs Leigh referred to a notorious case in which Lord Ferrers had been hanged for murdering a servant. Was it possible, she wondered, that her brother, while deranged, could once have committed ‘some act which he would not avow even to his dearest friend – scarcely to his own soul’? Byron’s present state of terror certainly pointed to some such horror. Ironically – remembering Annabella’s theory of her husband’s insanity – Byron himself now told Augusta that (if accused) he would plead madness as his defence.
This frightening moment was the one at which Byron reconciled himself to legal surrender and exile. On Sunday 17 March, a relieved Annabella told her mother that her husband had finally signed his name to the beginning of procedures. It was time for Judith to relax – ‘for I really think it all finished in the best possible manner’.
As often before, Lady Byron’s faith in the word of her unpredictable husband proved premature. On 20 March 1816, a poem arrived in Annabella’s post. It carried the harrowing title: ‘Fare Thee Well.’ Filled with wrenching images (the broken-hearted husband – the remorseless wife – the fatherless child), the poem was swiftly published in a limited edition of fifty copies. Reading of the poet’s blighted future, Byron’s royal admirer, young Princess Charlotte, declared that she had wept ‘like a fool’. Annabella herself was sufficiently affected to share her softened feelings with her mother.
From saccharine sentiment, Byron swung back to savage fury.
Mrs Fletcher’s March deposition to John Hanson had convinced Byron that the true enemy of his marriage – worse even than the Noels – was Mrs Clermont. On 25 March, while accusing Annabella of helping to blacken his name (‘as if it w
ere branded on my forehead’), he circulated fifty copies of ‘A Sketch from Private Life’, a vicious skit which spared nothing but her name to the woman he called ‘this hag of hatred’. Passing along Mrs Clermont’s indignant request to her accuser for any proofs of his slanderous allegations, Annabella received in response a rant even more violent than the poem.
The curse of my Soul light upon her & hers forever! – may my Spirit be deep upon her in her life – & in her death – may her thirst be unquenchable – & her wretchedness irrevocable – may she see herself only & eternally – may she dwell in the darkness of her own heart & shudder – now & for existence. Her last food will be the bread of her enemies – I have said it. –To you dearest Bell – I am as ever, very truly BYRON
Annabella declined to comment upon this remarkable document. She returned it to her husband only after having copied it in her own clear hand.
Annabella’s feelings towards both her husband and his sister had begun to harden. On 25 March, Mrs Leigh offended Lady Byron by publicly refusing, at a supper given by the Wilmots, to shake Selina Doyle by the hand. Two days later, meeting Caroline Lamb by arrangement at the house of Caroline’s sister-in-law and namesake, Annabella’s suspicions of Byron’s incest were finally converted – as she wrote to Lushington that night – into ‘absolute certainty’. Lady Caroline had arrived armed to the teeth with proofs. Among her bulky sheaf of documents were extracts from Lady Melbourne’s exchanges with Byron about the birth of Augusta’s fourth child, Elizabeth Medora Leigh.
In Byron's Wake Page 13
