In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  Medora’s paternity was never mentioned by Lady Byron to Dr Lushington, but the little girl was pointedly singled out in a later journal entry of Annabella’s in which, having just seen the Leigh children, she described her own ‘most tender affection for — . What is the reason?’ That coy query, together with the omitted name, leaves scant room to doubt that Annabella, by 1820, believed little Miss Leigh, then aged six, to be her husband’s child.

  Heaping his fury upon the hapless head of Mrs Clermont offered little solace to Byron for the experience of becoming a social outcast. On 8 April 1816 (following the distressing and long-deferred sale by legal order of personal chattels that included his beloved books), the poet attended an evening hosted by Lady Jersey, one of London’s most respected hostesses. His companion was the heavily pregnant Augusta Leigh. Byron expected to be cold-shouldered. What hurt him more was to see Augusta being ignored and snubbed by everybody other than their hostess and Miss Mercer Elphinstone, a sweet-natured heiress to whom Byron had once considered proposing. ‘Stanzas to Augusta’, written the following day, was Byron’s tender tribute to his sister’s unfaltering devotion.

  The three-month separation battle had reached its end. On 14 April, Henry Brougham, an ardent supporter of Annabella, mischievously arranged for Byron’s sentimental ‘Farewell’ to be published alongside his excoriation of Mrs Clermont in The Champion newspaper. (Annabella sent the ‘Farewell’ to her mother the following day, together with a gratefully punning tribute to Brougham as ‘my warmest champion throughout’.)

  On the day that The Champion poems appeared, Byron addressed his wife once more. From Augusta – with whom he had just parted for the last time – he had asked only that she should keep him informed about herself, her dog, his god-daughter Georgiana, and Medora (or little ‘D’), the dark-haired child whose pet name was so like the one he had bestowed upon wee Augusta Ada (‘little Da’). Writing to Annabella, Byron reminded her that he had already changed his will in order to leave all that he owned to his sister and her children (their own daughter being well provided for ‘by other & better means’). All he asked now was that his wife should recall Mrs Leigh’s kindness to herself and repay it. Implicit in that request was the hope that Annabella would help to combat the continuing rumours of incestuous behaviour on Augusta’s part.

  Byron enclosed with his letter a gift for his daughter: a ring beneath the sealed lid of which, so Byron believed, a strand of Charles I’s hair lay coiled. On Annabella herself, he bestowed only his old coach, the one that had carried her to Kirkby.

  On 23 April, Byron left Piccadilly Terrace for the last time. A thoughtfully alerted crowd had gathered to observe his departure for Dover and to admire the poet’s flamboyant new carriage. (Unpaid for, it was modelled on the one used by another fallen hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, when travelling across Europe.) Minutes later, the bailiffs swooped on Piccadilly Terrace to reclaim the unpaid half-year’s rent in chattels. Among the household goods that they confiscated from the abandoned house were Byron’s pet squirrel and caged parrot.

  * * *

  * Teasing, because Annabella was a lifelong admirer of Byron’s poetry, large tracts of which she committed to memory. One of her last marital duties had been to copy out Parisina and The Siege of Corinth, published on 7 February 1816. When a nervous Murray expressed concern about the incest references in Parisina, Byron reassured him (this was the day before Annabella’s departure in January 1816) that ‘my copyist would write out anything I desired in all the ignorance of innocence’. (BL&J, 5)

  * Hobhouse ascribed the peculiarity of Byron’s appearance at this time to liver trouble; he remarked that one eye had shrunk up, giving his poor friend a squint (Hobhouse’s Diary, 12 February 1816).

  * On 6 April 1816, Byron sent on to Selina Doyle a packet of letters that Annabella had copied after writing to her friend. Annabella had – deliberately? – left this clear proof of her unhappiness at Piccadilly Terrace lying in an unlocked drawer. The letters have not survived.

  * Lushington wanted to avoid any hint that his client had condoned either incest or sodomy by remaining in the marriage. Adultery, menaces and insulting behaviour offered more substantial cause for a legal separation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN THE PUBLIC EYE

  (1816–24)

  Viewed as part of the public relations exercise by a departing husband portraying himself as a martyred hero, Byron’s ‘Fare Thee Well’ was not a complete success. In America (if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s memory of her impressions as a 5-year-old were to be trusted), the poem was set to music and sung, with appropriate sobs, by heartbroken schoolgirls. In England, it invited public mockery. Isaac Cruickshank’s The Separation, or A Sketch from the private Life of Lord Iron, pictured a balding Byron setting off for Europe with his arm wrapped around a buxom actress. George Cruickshank (Isaac’s more famous son) depicted the poet waving a gallant handkerchief to a shorebound mother and child, while reciting ‘Fare Thee Well’ to a boatload of adoring strumpets.

  Up in Scotland, a month after Byron’s departure, one of his warmest admirers poked gentle fun at the poet’s double standards. ‘In the meanwhile,’ Walter Scott wrote to his friend J. B. S. Morritt on 16 May 1816:

  I think my noble friend is something like my old peacock who chooses to bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window to keep me awake with his screeching lamentations. Only I own he is not equal in melody to Lord Byron, for Fare-thee-Well . . . is a very sweet dirge indeed.

  Looking back in the summer of 1831 at the 15-year-old scandal of Lord Byron’s separation, Thomas Macaulay employed his review of Moore’s recent two-volume Life and Letters of Lord Byron to point up the dangers that had arisen from confusing the poet with his heroic persona. How was it possible, Macaulay asked, to equate the lone and brooding Childe, celebrated for the scorn with which he abjured public sympathy, with a man who wanted the entire world to weep over the supposedly private farewell that he had flamboyantly offered to his wife and daughter?

  Macaulay cast no aspersions upon Lady Byron for leaving a husband whom he designated a spoiled child (‘not merely the spoiled child of his parents, but the spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society’).* The target of his witty but fair-minded essay in the Edinburgh Review was the great British public which, having begun by idolising a libertine genius, had gleefully sacrificed their hero in one of its ‘periodical fits of morality’. Byron, so Macaulay argued, had probably done nothing more dreadful than a great many other English husbands. His misfortune had been the celebrity which allowed him to be transformed overnight from an unsatisfactory spouse into a universal scapegoat.

  True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing anything whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public indignation.

  Focussing on the poet and on the ephemeral nature of mortal fame (‘a few more years will destroy whatever remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron’, Macaulay predicted with unfounded confidence), the young critic found almost nothing to say about Lord Byron’s wife. Not a word was spared to consider the impact upon Annabella’s life of such an immense and public scandal as the separation from her husband had proved to be. Neither – perhaps Macaulay was among the very few who had failed to read them – did the future historian comment upon the privately printed and widely distributed ‘Remarks’ of 1830 in which Annabella defended her dead parents from Moore’s
proposal that they, not she, had led the way in separating an innocent young wife from a troubled but hardly diabolical husband.*

  Annabella, in the month when Byron left England, was still living with her parents. She remained extremely apprehensive about her personal reputation. For the present, discretion seemed to be working in her favour. Satirised by the cartoonists, excoriated in the papers, cut in public and denounced from the stage, Lord Byron – as Macaulay would note – had been transformed from the nation’s melancholy hero into a monster capable of any heinous act that could conceivably be attributed to his name. That such a change had been achieved without any visible act of vindictiveness on her own part was remarkable.

  The public’s mood could alter in a flash, and Annabella had lived alongside celebrity long enough to know it, better than Stephen Lushington, who advised her to stop worrying about her image; better than pugnacious Lady Noel, who was still itching for a court case and the satisfaction of yet further public revenge. ‘How can you be so inconsiderate for me as to wish that the Cause had come into court?’ Annabella asked her mother on 21 April 1816:

  For I should have died of it certainly – and now every object is attained without an exposure which revenge only could have desired, and which would have reflected some of its disgraceful consequences upon myself?

  Preserving herself and her child from calumny now became Annabella’s chief objective. It was a goal for which she was prepared to undertake considerable sacrifices. For her estranged husband, lovers would never be in short supply. Shortly before leaving England, he had enjoyed a covert affair with Claire Clairmont, the clever but egregiously pushy step-sister of Mary Shelley. (Mary, Claire and Shelley would soon join Byron beside Lake Geneva for that now legendary summer of 1816 during which Frankenstein would be conceived.) For Annabella, a 24-year-old mother and wife – the Byrons were never to divorce – there could be no such recklessness, no romance, no unconsidered steps. Her only chance of escaping scandal was to behave impeccably, and to choose her friends with scrupulous care. Among the first was Anna Jones, step-daughter of the vicar who altruistically took services at Kirkby Mallory. (The living and its proceeds still belonged to Annabella’s absentee cousin, Thomas Noel.) Anna Jones, safely remote from London society, received many of Annabella’s confidences about her marriage – and seemingly kept them to herself.

  The first threat to Lady Byron’s privacy came with the publication on 9 May 1816 of Caroline Lamb’s sensationally revealing novel, Glenarvon. Byron was thinly disguised as the licentious and glamorously heartless Lord Ruthven. Annabella’s fate was merely to seem insipid. Robert Wilmot, writing on 17 May, told her that she appeared in the book as Miss Monmouth, ‘a most delightful person’; Lady Caroline’s sister-in-law, Mrs George Lamb, opined that the portrait was ‘very indulgent’. Miss Monmouth, as Annabella herself eventually discovered, was in fact dull as a dry ditch.

  Byron had only been out of the country for a fortnight when Glenarvon returned him to centre stage. In London, so Mrs Lamb said, the book was the talk of the town. Retreating from gossipy Leicestershire to Lowestoft, a quiet seaside town on the remote coast of East Anglia, Annabella stopped to rest along the way at Ely and Peterborough. Writing the first of many imaginary baby letters to ‘Dear GrandMama’ at Kirkby, Annabella recorded in little Ada’s fictive voice that the ‘people at Ely and Peterborough Stared at us very much, and Mama said we were Lionesses – pray what does that mean?’ Lady Byron’s adopted tone was jaunty; the humiliation of being pointed out and stared at by groups of strangers was one that Annabella in her old age could still recall with pain. A private tour of Ely’s majestic cathedral as guest of the dean’s wife offered scant consolation.

  Safely arrived at Lowestoft, Annabella took a seafront house next to her old (and herself also now separated) friend, Lady Gosford, returning to her Suffolk roots as little Mary Sparrow, the heiress to Worlingham Hall. Annabella was welcomed as an intermediary and peacemaker, the go-between for Mary and a widowed Irish aunt, Lady Olivia Sparrow, who presided nearby over a sternly evangelical household.

  The irony of her new situation was not lost upon Annabella. Invited by Lady Olivia to meet her close friends, the Vicar of Lowestoft and his wife, she found herself being patronised by the very people she had once mocked – and still did within the safety of letters to her parents – as ‘pye-house’ bores. Lady Olivia was condescendingly kind. The Reverend Francis Cunningham, however, proved unexpectedly agreeable. Following a happy September return to George Eden’s family home in Kent, Annabella agreed to visit Mr Cunningham’s brother, William, the Vicar of Harrow. Byron had gone to school at Harrow. Annabella, who would also pay a secret visit to Newstead Abbey in 1818, could not resist the chance to see a place so intimately connected with her husband’s past. Once there, laying aside her Unitarian principles, she even attended the services over which Mr Cunningham (Trollope’s model for the unctuous Obadiah Slope) mellifluously presided.

  Times were rapidly changing in England. Six years later, when seeking to erect a burial plaque at Harrow’s church for ‘Little Illegitimate’, his tragically short-lived daughter by Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron was informed that Dr Cunningham objected because Allegra’s plaque would be within sight from the hallowed pew of his own valued friend, Lady Byron.* The notion that his wife would ever occupy a pew at Harrow’s church – let alone keep company with Dr Cunningham, at whom he could clearly recall her having poked fun – struck her husband as hilarious. Initially, Byron refused to believe it.

  The report was true and her behaviour was part of a conscious choice. Annabella Byron and her little daughter each now carried around her neck the millstone of a name that instantly connected them to a man who had become as notorious for his lifestyle as for the ferociously witty poetry in which, with increasing contempt for the cant of a newly prudish England, he exposed his country’s hypocrisy. If Lady Byron wished to keep her name free from the scandal in which her husband appeared to revel, her only option was to undertake good works, live in quiet places and keep company solely with reformers who at their best were thoughtful, intelligent and kind, while others proved to be sanctimonious bores of the Obadian variety. It was circumstance, allied to a passionate desire to be of service to society, that led Annabella into her long, productive career as an enlightened educational reformer, a passionate opponent to slavery and earnest advocate of a kinder penal system. Her achievements would eventually earn her an honoured place on the Reformers’ Memorial at Kensal Rise. Sadly, she did not live to know it.

  Concern for her own reputation caused Annabella to reassess some of her closest friendships. When Mary Montgomery returned to England in 1818, Annabella felt nervous. Miss Montgomery had lived in Venice. She had been on visiting terms with Byron at a time when the scandalous poet boasted of having at least two mistresses on the go, both equipped with husbands. An old and deep friendship was renewed and lovingly maintained, but only after Selina Doyle had been delegated to evaluate the moral status of a dangerously well-travelled lady.

  Mrs Clermont was less gently dealt with. Although often at loggerheads with each other, Lady Noel and her daughter both agreed that Clermont’s role in the separation, followed by the glare of public interest that Byron’s satire had attracted, made any continued intimacy impossible. Revisiting Seaham at a time when the house was being rented by her old friends the Bakers of Elemore Hall, Annabella received a request from Mrs Clermont, who was by then living nearby, to pay a visit. The risk of gossip just when Annabella was arranging to set up a new school for Seaham was too great. She turned the appeal down.

  Ill health would plague Annabella for the rest of her life. Sending a report to John Hobhouse (evidently at Byron’s request) soon after seeing her niece in October 1816, Lady Melbourne remarked that Lady Byron’s face was ‘sad and strained’. Her nerves were plainly ‘shatter’d’, Annabella’s aunt continued, adding that ‘although she might have conducted herself better, yet she is much to be pitied as her
sufferings must be great’. (The letter, evidently designed to be seen by Byron, ascribed much of the blame for those sufferings upon the young woman’s interfering parents.) Percy Shelley, meanwhile, brought news to Lake Geneva that Lord Byron’s estranged wife had undergone a miraculous recovery. Douglas Kinnaird had pronounced her to be ‘in perfect health’. What was more, Kinnaird knew for a certainty ‘that she was living with your sister’. And thus, Shelley happily told Byron, an end could be put to all that nasty gossip about incest: ‘the only important calumny that ever was advanced against you’.

  Kinnaird’s own gossip contained a kernel of truth. In the spring of 1816, Mrs Leigh had briefly experienced the pain of becoming a social outcast. When Annabella invited a resumption of friendship, following Byron’s departure, Augusta accepted with alacrity. The two women met frequently and exchanged many affectionate letters during the late summer of 1816. They would remain – so long as a subdued Augusta addressed Lady Byron as her ‘guardian angel’ and obeyed her commands – upon careful but cordial terms for a further fourteen years.

  Financially, socially and morally, Annabella held almost every card in the altered relationship with her once-beloved sister-in-law. To retain any contact with Byron, however, she remained unwillingly dependent upon Augusta’s aid. Annabella, plainly, could not continue to write to her husband herself, nor seek to receive letters from him. The agreement initiated by her, and reluctantly accepted by Mrs Leigh, was that Augusta would – without ever allowing her brother to know it – share all of their own private correspondence with Byron’s wife.