Henry remained assiduous and Augusta had a weakness for a handsome face: Henry’s reminded her of Byron’s own. Frantic to do something that might bind this solicitous youth to herself (Henry’s precise role in Augusta’s life remains murky, but it involved a strong sexual frisson), Mrs Leigh enlisted the aid of Annabella. Glad to assist Byron’s god-daughter along the road to happiness, Annabella provided a discreet loan of £200 via Louisa Chaloner. It was enough to ensure that a strangely low-key wedding was able to take place in London on 4 February 1826. The ceremony’s sole guests were Augusta, her friend Colonel Henry Wyndham (standing in for the absent and furious George Leigh) and 12-year-old Elizabeth (at this point known as ‘Libby’) Medora, the child whom both Byron and Augusta believed to be their own.
Mrs Leigh’s valiant endeavours to stay out of debt had never been helped by a wastrel husband and her own weak grasp of finance. Annabella, trained from her youth to act as her family’s lawyer and accountant, was an excellent businesswoman, one who always saw to it that she was well advised. Since her father’s death, she had added an inheritance of substantial coal-mining interests in the north to a portfolio that she managed with exceptional competence. In judgement of character, however, Annabella was often just as fallible as her sister-in-law. Both women were to be deceived by Henry Trevanion and by Elizabeth Medora Leigh in a saga that finally snapped the frail chain of duty by which Lord Byron sought to ensure the future security and comfort of his sister, Augusta.
‘Look after Augusta,’ Byron had insisted to Annabella, both during and after the couple’s separation. Annabella had kept her word, but the limited personal affection she retained for Mrs Leigh was already dwindling by 1828, when the first warning signs emerged of serious trouble ahead.
In 1828, Augusta casually announced that she had authorised her charming son-in-law to edit a selection of Byron’s letters, through which young Trevanion had already been trawling. Murray had sensibly steered clear of the negotiations, but Henry Colburn, one of the sharpest publishers in London, had offered £300. Augusta, delighted for her protégé, sought Annabella’s approval for a done deal.
A close perusal of Byron’s letters may have introduced Henry Trevanion to the possibility that Georgiana’s younger sister was the product of an incestuous relationship. It is not known whether any of Byron’s rashly intimate correspondence with Lady Melbourne was intended to form part of the published selection; certainly, the inclusion of such explosive material would explain Henry Colburn’s eagerness and Annabella’s dismay. Laying their own past differences aside, John Cam Hobhouse and Lady Byron united forces to scotch a project that they both believed would worsen Byron’s still badly damaged reputation. Augusta, whose only concern was to please the beguiling Henry, announced in April 1829 that she felt personally ‘very hurt’.
Annabella followed her blocking of the Colburn publication by refusing to give Augusta the thousand-pound sweetener she required as balm for her disappointment. Nevertheless, Augusta was a skilful piercer of Lady Byron’s tender conscience about the harm that had been caused both by the separation and by Annabella’s own meditated silence. Reputations had been damaged and the fault lay with Lady Byron. (‘My sin is ever before me’ ran the sad opening line of one of Annabella’s private poems.*) Now, however, while financial assistance was withheld, practical help might still be bestowed.
In April 1829, Annabella informed Augusta that she was willing to lend her own newly vacated house to Byron’s homeless godchild and her husband, a man whom she herself had never yet met. (She never did.) Sending thanks, Augusta neglected to mention that the couple would be accompanied to Bifrons by Georgiana’s sister. Tall, lively and high-spirited, the 15-year-old Libby would act as a companion to the pregnant Georgiana, while entertaining her charming Henry: this, so it seems, was the idea that Augusta had hatched. It remains unguessable whether Mrs Leigh fully recognised what a gift she was making to a bored and unprincipled young man. Perhaps, the answer is best summed up by Annabella, when she commented upon Mrs Leigh’s curious lack of any form of moral principle. Augusta simply didn’t register the rights and wrongs of such behaviour. Nevertheless, she guessed what Lady Byron’s views would be shrewdly enough to hold her tongue.
Eighteen-twenty-nine would prove to be an active and stressful year for Lady Byron. Concerned about Ada, and far from well herself, she was busily engaged in helping to set up a number of co-operative schools, and also farms where – a bold concession at that time – tenants could unite to buy their own plots of land. Sailing around the coast from Brighton to Bristol and from Devon to Newport in her search for pleasing locations in which to establish these new ventures, Lady Byron’s wealth was revealed by the fact that she now travelled on her own yacht, the Prince Leopold.
At Hastings, taking advice from William Frend, Annabella set up a co-operative institute in George Street. In London, she conducted discussions with Robert Owen about methods of schooling for the underprivileged whose chances in life she was determined to improve. (A shocking 90 per cent of all children received neither formal education nor apprenticeship training in early nineteenth-century England.) At Liverpool, she talked with Arabella Lawrence about Miss Lawrence’s own successful school for the city’s poor. At Brighton, Annabella formed a new and enduring friendship with zealous Dr King, founder of that town’s own first co-operative. Annabella’s reaction of dislike to Robert Owen, whom she swiftly judged to be both complacent and autocratic, was soon forgotten in her wholehearted enthusiasm for the modest, religious – and most obligingly compliant – William King.
In the early autumn of 1829, Augusta Leigh took it upon herself to criticise Byron’s executor, Douglas Kinnaird, causing him to resign. A new trustee was required. Augusta put forward a Leigh family supporter, Colonel George D’Aguilar. Annabella, who had been exchanging friendly notes with Augusta about the injustice of denying Lord Byron a monument in Westminster Abbey, now suggested that the more experienced Dr Lushington might offer better service. Lushington had acted as her own lawyer for the past twelve years. His wife Sarah Carr, handpicked by Annabella, was one of her closest friends. Nobody could be more suitable.
By the end of November, the discussion between the two ladies had turned quarrelsome. Annabella was insistent; Augusta refused to back down. Mrs Leigh’s reason was transparent; the cultured and agreeable Colonel D’Aguilar was ready to do just as she pleased. Lushington, who held as low an opinion of Augusta’s prudence as of her morals, would sanction nothing without careful consideration. (In fact, Lushington strove to help the Leighs, a family whose attitude to money remained alarmingly close to that of Mr Micawber’s.) By 1 December, Annabella was feeling angry enough to identify Lushington to young Lizzie Siddons as ‘my protector when injury (I speak the language of the world for I know no injuries) was designed by the very person I was seeking to serve!’ By January 1830, the two ladies were quivering with mutual resentment and indignation.
The voices that speak out from ancient, tissue-thin letters still vibrate with animosity and distrust, but it was Augusta’s offer of forgiveness that finally tipped the balance for a furious Lady Byron.
Augusta Leigh (undated, but probably 16 January 1830):
I can forgive and do forgive freely, all and everything that has antagonised and I may say almost destroyed me. I can believe that you have been actuated throughout by a principle which you thought a right one, but my own self-respect will never allow me to acknowledge an obligation where none has been originally conferred . . .
Writing her response from Ealing (where she was renting a second home close to a projected school) on 17 January 1830, Annabella was at her chilliest and most implacable:
From your representations and the conclusions you draw, it is evident to me that your mind is not in a state to admit the truth – I must therefore decline any further discussion of facts which are already as well known to you as to me.
Believe me, ever faithfully yours
A I Noel B
yron
The deliberate use by Lady Byron of her formal name was indicative of her rage. The employment of that innocuous word ‘faithfully’ conveyed a stinging reminder of the promise she had been compelled to make to her late husband. The Leigh family might drive Annabella up the wall, but they would never be deprived of what Byron’s wife recognised to be their rightful due.
Augusta’s refusal to acknowledge any obligation to a patient and on the whole generous benefactor was absurd, but it was the use of that awful word ‘forgiveness’ that had caused such anger. ‘I can never pass over her insolence,’ Lady Byron informed Sarah Lushington on 27 February 1830. She meant it. Augusta’s decorous gift of a prayer-book for Ada’s fourteenth birthday in December 1830 produced no response. Silence was an insult that Mrs Leigh did not forget. Relations between the two women, for the entirety of a fierce decade, would become nearly non-existent.
Augusta was evidently unconscious of any particular reason why such characteristic behaviour on her own part (voluminous lamentations about Mrs Leigh’s sufferings and her shortage of money habitually followed Lady Byron around the country like a Greek chorus) had provoked such unreasonable wrath. A reason existed, however, and it was not a pretty one.
It was during the autumn of the ongoing dispute about trusteeship that Annabella had received disquieting news from George and Mary Byron. (That kind and cheerful couple’s loyalty to Annabella since 1816 had been rewarded in 1824, when Lady Byron put them in receipt of an annual £2,000, having learned that her husband had disinherited his cousin: this was Byron’s punishment for siding against himself during the separation.) George, now 7th Lord Byron, had recently been approached by William Eden, the vicar of a church not far from Bifrons. Eden’s parishioners reported tales of dreadful goings-on at Lady Byron’s home since the Trevanions and Miss Leigh had moved into it that spring. Young Miss Leigh was now visibly pregnant. The Bifrons workforce spread the news that Henry Trevanion was responsible.
Annabella’s first shocked thought was that the past had repeated itself, under her own roof, seemingly with her own approbation. On 4 December 1829, Lady Byron wrote to Georgiana Trevanion. A carefully phrased letter indicated that, while offended by Augusta’s quarrelsomeness about the new trustee, and appalled by these new revelations, she would stand by her promise to help her husband’s family. In January 1830, she arranged and paid for the disgraced trio to sail together to Calais. There, in lodgings that were paid for by Annabella, the illicit child was born. (Farmed out for adoption, the little boy died later that summer.) Augusta, while dimly conscious of a move to France, presumably for financial reasons, remained unaware either of her doomed first grandchild’s birth or that Lady Byron was discreetly paying all the Trevanions’ household bills.
Given this bizarre background scenario, it is not surprising that Annabella rejected Augusta’s offer of forgiveness. Quite possibly, Lady Byron relished a moment of justifiable scorn. What kind of mother could conceivably have placed her 15-year-old daughter in such a compromising situation? How different was her own devoted care for poor, fragile Ada!
Annabella’s indignation would have justifiably increased, had she been informed of what happened next. Slipping quietly back into England during the following summer (1830), the Trevanions lodged at a family house in Chelsea, from which Henry paid regular visits to his unabashed young mistress, demurely lodged at her mother’s apartment in St James’s Palace. In February 1831, Trevanion informed an appalled Mrs Leigh that he and her younger daughter were expecting a child. (No mention was made of the previous pregnancy, or of Lady Byron’s assistance.)
Augusta’s response was hysterical. To Henry, she despatched a plaintive squawk of command: ‘You will comfort me! I need not point out the means! Your own heart will dictate them – and as you are dear! MOST dear! Much, MUCH is in your power!’ Elizabeth Medora, meanwhile, was apprised by Mrs Leigh of the agonies she had inflicted upon a mother’s tortured soul: ‘I have suffered much – long (neither you or ANY human Being knows how much) but – I never knew sorrow like this . . . I was not prepared for this wretchedness – Spare! Oh spare me, Dearest!’ The greatest of all Augusta’s sorrows, so it appeared from an interminably theatrical lament, was that her cherished daughter would not now be able to complete her religious education. (‘You know that I confidently hoped and intended you to be confirmed this Easter! I suppose it is now hopeless – consult your own heart and wishes!’) As was aptly observed in 1929 by Ethel Mayne, first biographer of Lady Byron: ‘The pitiful absurdity of these letters paralyses the judgement.’
Plainly, little help for Henry and his victim (this was the role that Miss Leigh adopted, and maintained) was to be expected at this juncture from an agonised mother; Annabella, who supposed the trio still to be safely lodged (at her own expense) in France, was equally unlikely to prove sympathetic. Retiring to a village near Bath, the Trevanions and Elizabeth Medora decided to lie low. This was the point at which – informed at last by Henry Wyndham of what had been hidden from view for two full years – a distraught Colonel Leigh intervened. Never the brightest of men, George Leigh’s solution was to abduct his unmarried and once again pregnant child and lock naughty Libby up within a discreet abode in north London. Following suit with the support of an eagerly collaborative Georgiana and (it is conjectured) funded by the ever-gullible Augusta – Henry Trevanion now ‘liberated’ a most co-operative young mistress and carried Medora (as we will from now on, for convenience, name Elizabeth Medora Leigh) off to live with him in France.
Nothing improved. In England, a husbandless Georgiana struggled to bring up three small children on her own. In France, in 1836, a penniless Trevanion set about raising funds against his abandoned wife’s marriage settlement in order to buy himself – but not Medora – a home. Back in England, John Hanson (Byron’s unsavoury lawyer had by now been publicly disgraced for his exploitation of the lunatic Lord Portsmouth) piously opined that ‘poor Mrs Leigh and all connected with her are mad’. In 1838, Medora, still in France, was striving to obtain the title deed to a £3,000 settlement extravagantly promised by Augusta to Marie, Medora’s illegitimate 4-year-old child.* (Henry Trevanion was, once again, the father.)
Trevanion remained the nemesis to whom Medora always returned. It was he – or he and Georgiana – who had first informed her that she was Byron’s daughter.† In 1840, that alleged parentage would be used to clinch Medora’s hold over Lord Byron’s always wistful and conscience-stricken wife.
By the spring of 1830, while the Trevanions and Medora were still living at Calais, illness had muted Ada’s vibrant, quirky voice for almost a year. In March, the kindly old Baillie sisters expressed a hope that their young friend might soon be well enough to venture outside the house. Three months later, at Mortlake, Ada admitted to her correspondence tutor, Arabella Lawrence, that she was often in too much pain even to sit upright. Chair rides (or an occasional stumbling walk) along the terrace above the Thames to watch the boats and river birds now represented her entire external life. Within the seclusion of The Limes and with her closest girlfriend, Flora Davison,* for an audience, Ada – on her good days – endeavoured to practise the piano (‘I especially love the waltz’), and – with characteristic gallantry – attempted little jokes. Selina Doyle and she were struggling to read German together, she told Robert Noel, a fluent speaker of the language who was himself now out in Dresden studying phrenology: ‘und wie der Lahme und der Blinde helfen wir uns einander’ (‘and are as much use to each other as the lame and the blind’).
One of Ada’s greatest resources was an absolute refusal to repress her feelings, in marked contrast to the self-control that Annabella had determinedly acquired. Writing to Miss Lawrence in Liverpool from her Mortlake sickroom, the pupil made no secret of her despair: ‘This has been a sad irregular week. Monday I missed nothing but was [so] desponding & despairing that I could have cried with very great pleasure.’ On another day during that same bleak July of 1830, Ada grew tearful abo
ut the difficulties of German grammar: ‘I began to read it [her grammar book] as usual, not thinking right . . . however, I found my head in a state of sad confusion, and getting extremely discouraged began to cry.’ Striving to keep a full record of a life in which there was a pitiful dearth of distraction from her pain and isolation, Ada acknowledged that she remained ‘very far’ from any condition that could in any way be described as happiness.
Arabella Lawrence had known about Ada ever since she despatched young Miss Lamont to Kirkby Mallory as a governess, back in the summer of 1821. Now, visiting Mortlake during her holiday breaks, Lawrence was quick to realise that her pupil disliked rules and thrived upon imaginative stories. History was consequently taught, not by rote, but according to whichever period Ada might suddenly find appealing. Debate was never discouraged. Laughing at her own ‘disputation habits’, Ada blamed her relish for a good argument on ‘the quiet & unvaried life I have necessarily led for the last year and a half’.
But Lady Byron worried about such capriciousness. Constantly peering over Ada’s shoulder, while adding comments to the young invalid’s pencil-written letters, she asked Miss Lawrence to help her to control this argumentative tendency in her daughter. It came (she felt) too close to disrespect. Ada continued to tease. How restful it would be over the holidays with Miss Lawrence to decide everything for her, she wrote: ‘it will be so nice . . . and I shall have no trouble in making up my mind about anything’.
In Byron's Wake Page 18
