It’s an awful story and there’s little room for doubt that Lady Hester was an awful woman. Every year, with tenacious glee, she once more wrote out a new will in which she once again bestowed the generous sum of just ten pounds upon her eldest son. (Seeking to justify her abominable treatment of William, his mother once drafted a letter in which she said that he intimidated her by asking difficult questions and that she would fear being alone in the presence of her firstborn.) Locke salved his own conscience by offering his older brother £3,000 raised from personal investments.
Locke’s position was in fact as unenviable as was William’s. Chained to a tyrant mother, he dwelt with his sisters in what was effectively Lady Hester’s private prison at Woburn Park. Designed by William Kent, Woburn stood ostentatiously close to Ockham, which it dwarfed. Nominally under Locke’s control, it was ruled by the iron fist of his mother, who ran it as her own fiefdom. The son whose obligations included writing his mother an annual letter of obsequious homage (while apologising every time he went away for more than a day) was in effect a mere dependant.
Lady Hester’s callous behaviour had not only robbed William King of the major portion of his inheritance, but it aimed to separate him from the young sisters who adored him. No communication was permitted between the two estates. When Hester and Charlotte King visited Ockham, they did so clandestinely, rather than risk the scourge of their mother’s displeasure.
It is unclear how much Mrs Somerville herself knew of this ugly history, but it is likely that William King, who had few friends, shared most of it with Woronzow Greig, his lifelong confidante and loyal supporter.*
Encountering William in 1835, for the first time in several years, Greig saw a handsome and thoughtful man, almost eleven years older than Miss Byron, who worshipped Ada’s late father, took a keen interest in the world of science and who plainly stood in need of a wife. Ockham Park had been robbed of its pretty old furniture, its charming paintings and its library (even the contents of the wine cellar and William’s own amateur science laboratory – left over from his college days – had been carried off to Woburn). Nevertheless, the King family’s principal home remained ready to enchant a new young mistress. Serene, light and spacious, Ockham stood at the end of an avenue lined by stately trees. Its windows looked out across rolling parkland. Close by, the family church housed a glorious Rysbrach monument to William’s forbears. And how could Byron’s daughter not fall in love with Ashley Combe, a remote and ravishingly beautiful West Country estate of twisting paths and forested cliffs, its shimmering, sealike views across the Bristol Channel rivalling those that Ada’s father had enjoyed during his summer beside Lake Geneva? All that Ockham and Ashley lacked in 1835 was a mistress worthy of their master.
The connection seemed simply to rise up and stare the Somervilles in the face. Here, close to the heart of their own family, stood Miss Byron’s ideal mate. While no correspondence survives through which to trace the trail of discussion, it is clear that Greig’s notion was put to Lady Byron by his mother, and found pleasing. Towards the end of May 1835, Ada was despatched on a visit to Warwickshire. There, William King was due to attend a ball being held at Weston House, the newly Gothicised home of Sir George Philips, founder of the Manchester Guardian. A jovial textile magnate whose strong interest in science had brought him into contact with the Somervilles and Charles Babbage, Sir George had met Annabella and her daughter the previous year during their inspection tour of Midlands factories. A regular visitor that summer both to Fordhook and to the Somervilles’ house at Chelsea, Sir George and his brightly social wife were eager to assist in the plot to further what all parties perceived to be an ideal alliance.
Introduced to each other by their hostess (elegant Lady Philips did not approve of Miss Byron’s evidently home-made frock), the meeting of William and Ada proved an instant success. The couple danced several quadrilles together, during one of which William plucked up the courage to tell Ada that he would love to show her Ockham Park and its pretty little church. ‘I thought to myself how few young men whom one meets at balls would talk with so much feeling about their country church,’ Ada demurely wrote to him, ‘& I admired you very much.’
Admiration had burgeoned into love. A week after the Weston ball, William and Ada rode together along the banks of the Thames. By the time that they returned to the Somervilles’ home at Chelsea, William’s proposal had been accepted. Four days later, on 8 June, Ada was saucily reminding him about a certain ride ‘of which it is possible you may have some recollection’, before teasing him with the news that she was just off on a similar excursion, with jolly Sir George as her escort. Writing from Somerset, where he was busily hewing down trees around what he tenderly referred to as Ada’s very own hermitage, William confessed that he felt as though he were living in a dream. ‘How I envy your chaperon his ride with you.’
Fearful that Lord King might hear about Ada’s past history from the wrong person, Annabella asked Woronzow Greig to deliver a discreet account of the elopement incident. Writing to her fiancé shortly after that difficult disclosure, Ada expressed her gratitude to him for overlooking her imprudence. She promised to reward William’s trust by becoming a model wife, one who would never forget his generous behaviour. ‘Now do not be angry with me, because I have only just spoken the truth – neither more nor less.’ A week later, Ada’s mood had shifted. Did she actually possess ‘the requisite perseverance & self denial’ to make a dutiful spouse? But if William grew apprehensive about his fiancée’s changeability – and it seems likely that he did – he could always take comfort from the evident fact that Lady Byron, so calm, so kind, so splendidly rational, exerted a powerful influence over her skittish daughter.
Lady Byron herself was delighted by the match. Writing to Harriet Siddons, Annabella praised Lord King, not merely as ‘a man of rare worth and superior abilities’, but because ‘he has returned good for evil towards those who have wronged him.’ Her allusion was plainly to the Woburn branch of Lord King’s family. The tale was deplorable, but it enabled an admiring Annabella to highlight William’s magnanimous nature. ‘Schooled in adversity and guided by Christian principles, he has reached the age of 30 without a stain upon his reputation.’ His tastes, so Harriet learned, were reassuringly domestic. Best of all, from a loving mother’s point of view, Ockham Park was only half a day’s carriage drive away from Annabella’s own house at Ealing.
Given Lady Hester’s hostility to her eldest son, it was clear that she would forbid any member of the Woburn-based family to attend the wedding. It was probably in order to suppress public comment upon this scandalous absence that the wedding was celebrated quietly – as Annabella’s own had been – at home. Samuel Gamlen, a kindly and broadminded vicar whom Ada often treated as a substitute father, travelled down to Ealing from his Yorkshire rectory. On 8 July 1835, Gamlen presided over the nuptials at Fordhook. Little Olivia Acheson (Lady Byron’s own special favourite among Mary Gosford’s three daughters, singled out by Ada from a yearning trio of candidates) was the only bridesmaid. The following day, while the newly-weds visited Ockham, en route to a two-month West Country honeymoon at Ashley Combe, Annabella threw a party for both servants and her friends at which – so she gaily reported to the absent Ada – Fordhook’s roof almost caved in from all the cheers.
No tears were shed in Ealing that Lord Byron’s last mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, attempting to gatecrash the wedding of the great man’s daughter, had turned up instead at a smart London church where, thanks to her choice of a coyly revealing veil, the countess was recognised and publicly mocked for making a fool of herself. Writing her voluminous homage to Byron some thirty years later, Teresa repaid his widow for that painful hour of humiliation with an acid portrait, one of such peculiar venom that it would help to destroy Annabella’s hard-won status as one of the secular saints of Victorian England.
Before the marriage came the settlements. The documents were intimidating and vast: the History Centre in Woking, S
urrey still holds the bullhide on which – despite the gifting to Locke King, via Lady Hester, of at least an equal part of the family estates – over 200 King properties were recorded under William’s name, bringing in an annual income of £8,000 (around £396,000 in modern terms). What catches the eye, however, is not the handsome flourishes which adorn the names of Ada, of the 7th Lord Byron and – he was the well-meaning peacemaker in the conflicted King family – of Lady Hester’s brother, Lord Ebrington. Two names dominate all the others: those of Lord King and his formidably wealthy future mother-in-law, Lady Byron.
Writing to Robert Noel in Dresden on 28 July (Robert happened also to be getting married, to the well-born and charming Louisa von Henniken), Lady Byron described Lord King’s fortune as ‘sufficient, though not ample’. An immediate gift of £30,000 from Lady Byron helped to remedy matters. Given his mother-in-law’s notoriously fragile health, William naturally assumed that he might soon receive a good deal more. Ada, meanwhile – although her mother was keen to point out that the cost of her trousseau alone equalled the expense of educating eighty poor children – was to receive precisely the same figure that her mother had herself been granted as a wife back in 1815. The modest sum of £300 a year (around £13,500 in modern terms) was expected to cover the cost of all Lady King’s personal expenses, including her books, travel, pets, a maid and even her best clothes.
The amount, for a bride of Ada’s status, was startlingly meagre. (Tom, the oldest of the four Noel brothers, was given £500 a year by Annabella during that same period; Annabella presented Robert Noel with £100 at the same time, merely as Ada’s personal wedding gift for Louisa and himself.) ‘Dear little Canary Bird, may the new “cage” be gladdened by your notes,’ Annabella wrote to her daughter on 9 July, the day after Ada’s wedding. The allusion to a cage, however playful, suggests that Annabella still regarded Ada as in need of supervision.* Her recollection of Byron’s own extravagance had not dimmed. Confining her daughter to a tiny budget was Lady Byron’s way of protecting an impetuous and financially naive young woman from running amok.
* * *
* Greig’s name was given in honour of his Russian godmother, Countess Woronzow (pronounced Voronzoff), daughter of Russia’s ambassador to Britain. She married Lord Pembroke.
* Ada’s husband and mother were still describing – to each other – her marital home as a ‘cage’ in 1844.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AN UNCONVENTIONAL WIFE
(1836–40)
Ada’s marriage marked the beginning of a halcyon five years both for the newly-weds and for the mother whom they now fondly called ‘the Hen’. (William was quickly nicknamed ‘the Crow’ for his glossy dark hair and slender legs, while flighty, elusive Ada became ‘the Bird’.) A disappointingly pompous George Ticknor, calling in at Fordhook to inspect Lady Byron’s Ealing school just a few days after the wedding, carried away the impression of an earnest little widow, whose gravity was appropriate to her ‘peculiar’ position in the world. To nearer friends, Annabella seemed almost giddy with joy. Witnessing Ada’s happiness had at last secured her own, she confided to Robert Noel, while thanking him for introducing her to a wonderful new friend, Mrs Anna Jameson, the art historian. Writing to Harriet Siddons on 22 July, Lady Byron admitted that ‘for the first time in my life – I may say that I feel without a care on earth . . .’
Settled into a modest seaside cottage at Southampton for the autumn, Annabella remained almost girlishly merry. Chugging along the Solent on one of the popular steam packets that marked the advent of public tourism, she gloried in a spectacular sunrise and wondered that her fellow passengers appeared to be so oblivious. Snug in her newly rented home, she stitched herself a working-woman’s hemp frock (both Annabella and her daughter were deft needlewomen) and got the giggles when young William, her only manservant, dropped a plate of chicken fricassee – there was nothing else in the larder that night – on the floor. William was a sweet boy, but hopelessly clumsy, she wrote to Harriet Siddons’s daughter, Lizzie: perhaps her giggles gave off the wrong message? ‘These catastrophes are very frequent in my house, I think I will act being in a rage next time . . .’ Signing off her letter to this cherished correspondent, Lady Byron cheerfully referred to herself as ‘The Old Pup’ – she was forty-three – ‘[who] sometimes frets to think you will scarce know it again with its unwearied degree of tabbyism’.
Lizzie Siddons’s mother, Harriet, came down to Southampton from Edinburgh that September, eager to discuss the philanthropic ambitions that the two women shared. Annabella had finally reached the day when she felt able to step back from the Ealing school, where a new headmaster had replaced an annoying Mr Craig who, despite being trained in the Fellenberg system, had proved both ineffectual and sullen. (‘Did not this answer for his truthfulness and humility!’ Annabella burst out to Mrs Siddons, after hearing the Heep-like Craig tell the pupils how fortunate he felt to be supervised by a patron who could teach him so much.) Together, the two ladies discussed prison design (Annabella favoured Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a central watchtower, thus saving on the cost of numerous guards). Together, they went over an article that Lady Byron was writing about industrial schools and the innovative system pioneered by Fellenberg at Hofwyl. Possibly, the two women also discussed phrenology. Robert Noel was exploring the idea of using head casts taken from the skulls of felons, in order to examine criminal traits. Nobody was more influential in the phrenological world than Harriet’s handsome brother-in-law, George Combe, author of the wide-ranging The Constitution of Man (1828), a book that had become more widely read and discussed than any other in England, bar the Bible.*
October brought a happy and newly pregnant Ada to her mother for a two-week stay. Writing to her husband, she playfully reported that the Hen would have to inform William about a ‘bad bird’, so bad that she had failed to pay her tuppence for walking along Southampton’s pier, and had gambled away four whole shillings at a charity auction ‘in exchange for a most vile basket’. Meanwhile, Ada pined for livelier company than her mother’s estimable circle of fellow reformers at the seaside. The absent William had turned from a crow into his wife’s ‘dear cock’: ‘I want my Cock at night to keep me warm.’
Ada’s sexual message is hard to miss, both here and in a later request to William not to ‘eat her up’ at their next reunion. (‘Ou won’t hurt her I think, will ou?’) Chatting to Mary Somerville’s attentive son during the 1840s about her sexual life, Ada revealed to Woronzow Greig that she and her husband always slept together, and were always naked under the sheets between which their firstborn had often been allowed to romp with his parents, just so. It’s fair to deduce that this good-looking, strong-willed and most unconventional couple were happy during their first years of matrimony.
Annabella’s pride in Ada’s marriage showed itself in her decision, following the Southampton visit, to commission an official portrait of her daughter, one that could be embarked upon before her pregnancy began to show. Ada was enthused neither by the project nor the artist, an outspoken Scotswoman called Margaret Carpenter. Writing to Mrs Somerville, the reluctant sitter assured her mentor that such trivia would never distract her from mathematics, the study of which had recently been resumed. (‘I . . . am occupied with Trigonometry in the preliminaries of Cubic and Biquadratic equations’.) Grumbling to the Hen, she complained that Mrs Carpenter had worse manners than her harp teacher; Miss d’Espourrin would never dream of stretching out on the Ockham drawing-room floor for a refreshing nap. (Ada had inherited her father’s paradoxically conventional streak; always wild herself, she wished others to behave with propriety.) Worse still, Mrs Carpenter had scraped her sitter’s bright brown hair off her face to emphasise her jaw. The result, in the view of a displeased Ada, was that she looked like ‘a crop-eared dog’.
Ada joked that the only use of owning an unusually broad jawbone was to write the word ‘mathematics’ across it. To Annabella, as to her Byron-worshipping son-in-law, the entire poi
nt of the Carpenter portrait was to maximise that feature in which Ada’s genetic heritage was most apparent. Mrs Carpenter was simply following orders. The three-quarter profile view of Lady King’s head that she produced for her full-length portrait was an exact replication of Byron’s stance in the Albanian portrait that had been long ago acquired by Lady Noel. Annabella, inspecting the result on 26 November, was delighted. The likeness to Lord Byron was declared by her to be ‘most striking’. As a mark of her approval, she sent her mother’s magnificent purchase along, cleaned and reframed, to adorn Ada’s new country home. Mrs Carpenter’s Byronic Ada received disappointingly muted praise the following summer when displayed at the Royal Academy.
The first winter of Ada’s marriage was a time of great contentment. Ada, visiting Fordhook in early December, wrote fondly to William of plans hatched by ‘the dear old Hen’ to introduce her son-in-law to the poet’s publisher, John Murray. The Somervilles and Charles Babbage spent Christmas together with Lady Byron and their hosts at Ockham Park. In February 1836, Ada invited the Somervilles’ two daughters to rejoin their lawyer half-brother, Woronzow, for a further few days at her home in Surrey. Writing to their mother, Ada teased that warnings would be sent if either Martha or Mary decided to elope, although she intended to keep the musically minded sisters occupied in accompanying, on the piano and in song, her newest pieces for the harp.
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