Lady Byron, meanwhile, had finally renewed acquaintanceship with her cleverest and most worldly cousin. Lady Caroline Lamb was dead and her widower had since inherited his father’s title. Meeting Prime Minister Melbourne in January 1836, after a gap of over twenty years, Annabella saw a sharp face that had softened into a poignant echo of Lord Melbourne’s Uncle Ralph, the jovial, loving father whom she had buried eleven years earlier. Plucked suddenly back into the past, she almost wept.
The two-hour meeting between the two middle-aged cousins at Windsor Castle reaped a useful reward. Two years later, when Lady Byron sought to distinguish her daughter (Lady King) from an odious mother-in-law (Lady Hester King) by giving Ada a different name, Lord Melbourne supported Annabella’s request for an upgrade. Lord and Lady King became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace.* Lady Hester’s furious protest at such a step, despatched to a baffled Lord Holland, went unanswered. (Her excessive prejudice against Ada’s husband had become well-known and was widely deplored.)
Writing a character portrait of her daughter during the early years of Ada’s marriage, a doting Lady Byron described an angel: here was a young woman who combined a singing voice ‘like the bonnie bird on the banks of Doone’ with an exceptional talent for studies ‘of a deep and scientific nature’. It was a clear indication of Lady Byron’s approval that the Kings were swiftly lodged at a London house that could stand comparison with Lady Hester’s frigid palace on Dover Street. The Hen’s reward was to be invited to name the baby boy who was born at his parents’ elegant new home, 11 St James’s Square, in May 1836. It surprised neither the Crow nor the Bird that Annabella chose to call the future Viscount Ockham after her late husband, or that she named Byron’s baby sister, born in 1837, Anne Isabella, after herself. History was being deliberately replayed: Byron and Annabella (the name was instantly shortened, as Lady Byron’s own had been) were reborn. Performing the same agreeable role for Ada’s third child in 1839, Annabella chose to echo her husband’s Scottish heritage in Ralph Gordon King’s second name. (‘Ralph’ honoured Lady Byron’s beloved father.)
Ada, who had been playfully writing to Mrs Somerville in the summer of 1836 about her hopes of producing ‘a mathematical child’, was relieved by the painlessness of little Byron’s arrival into the world. The hard part came later. Hester King, William’s sister, gladly obeyed a summons to come and act as a companion and nursemaid to the convalescing young mother. Visiting Lady Byron in Brighton three months after giving birth, Ada could still only walk with the help of a cane and her gentle sister-in-law’s supportive arm. Every evening, the two young women visited Annabella in her own seaside lodgings, where they took turns to read aloud to Lady Byron from her favoured diet of scientific and educational papers. But when Ada accidentally locked herself into her bedroom and had to be rescued by means of a ladder, Hester grew as hysterical with mirth as the prisoner herself. ‘Hester and I are very happy together,’ Ada told William, ‘and it is a real comfort to me to have such a sister.’
It was a comfort for young Hester, too. At Woburn Park, things had been going from bad to worse following Locke King’s marriage to Louisa Hoare, a commanding heiress from Northamptonshire. Sidelined by the new arrangements and angered by Locke’s request that his sisters should display deference to his wife, the girls were making increasingly determined efforts to achieve an independent life. The helping hands of Ada and her mother were evident in the appearance of the two young women that autumn at several of Babbage’s soirées. It was at one of these occasions that Hester fell disastrously in love.
By the summer of 1837, Hester’s calamitous love affair was over and her mother was issuing dire warnings from Woburn of the punishments due to be meted out to neglectful daughters. On 11 June, a sick and pregnant Ada tried to transform an increasingly bitter dispute into an opportunity for peace. Could a truce be called, now that Hester’s love affair was over? Would William’s mother consider paying a visit to Ockham – it was a mere seven-mile drive from Woburn Park – for a few days? ‘You will however I trust remember that if either at present or at any future time, you should feel inclined to prefer inviting us, it would be most welcome,’ a wistful Ada pleaded.
Predictably, Ada’s generous suggestion was rebuffed by silence.
In the early autumn of 1837, when Byron’s baby sister was born, Ada’s sister-in-law once again offered her services as a nurse and companion. The birth process was unexpectedly painful and protracted (which might help to explain Ada’s early animosity to her daughter). She had scarcely begun to recover when a serious attack of cholera – a deadly illness at that time – struck her down. Illness and disappointment – she had made no secret of her hopes for a second boy – contributed to the debilitating combination of frailty and nervousness that Ada would struggle against throughout her adult life. Little Annabella’s birth also marked the onset of Ada’s enduring obsession with weight. She began to starve herself. Her husband – William harboured a curious horror of heavily built people of either sex – approved. Lady Byron’s anxious protests (she told friends that Ada was starting to adopt her late father’s odd eating habits) were ignored.
More troubling than dietary fads, to Hester’s gentle eyes, was Ada’s insouciant attitude to motherhood. And yet, Hester loved her sister-in-law’s wild enthusiasms. She readily joined in with a ‘shilling’ experiment by which a suspended coin chimed out the hours on the side of a glass, while causing heated sensations to the brain. (A thrilled Ada asked Mrs Somerville to alert that wizard of the electrical world, Michael Faraday, to the results of their trial.) While it sometimes worried a conventional young woman that Ada seemed to care more about science than her children, it was to Ada that Hester would still turn for her own salvation.
By the end of the year 1837, matters at Woburn Park had reached such a pass for Charlotte and Hester that the sisters fled to Ockham, vowing never to return. A new and appalling row broke out. Terrible things were said by the mistress of Woburn until Ada, beloved by everyone for her exceptional good nature and her cheerful optimism, thought that she had glimpsed a haughtily extended olive branch. Perhaps, Ada wrote to her mother-in-law on 12 February 1838, Lady Hester did not appreciate the pain she was inflicting and how sad it made Ada herself feel. ‘No matter . . . The occurrence of last week will of course now be blotted out from the record of events.’*
No record survives of what the mysterious ‘occurrence’ was, but Ada’s conciliatory words would be thrown back in her teeth by the venomous Lady Hester eight years later, as offering clear proof that the fault lay all on Ada’s side. On this later occasion, Ada rebelled. The fault was theirs, she wrote fiercely back to Lady Hester’s brother on 23 June 1846. (All direct contact with Lady Hester had already been severed, at her own wish.) It was his sister and her son Locke, with their ‘repeated and unjust condemnations’ of both Lady Lovelace and her husband, who had finally killed ‘the almost romantic generosity & warmth of feeling with which at just 22 years of age I regarded everything relating to Lovelace’s family’.
Poor Ada. She might as well have held her tongue. Nothing would ever have the power to shake William King’s vindictive mother from her invincible pinnacle of self-righteousness.
Ada’s closeness to Hester King the younger is apparent from her sister-in-law’s inclusion in the grand plans being hatched in 1838 for Ada’s two new schools at Ockham. Here, thanks to lavish injections of money from Annabella, the Ealing model was being replicated, but on an expanded scale. Carpentry shops and a printing press had been introduced; a gym and a specially designed music room were next on the agenda. ‘Our school is doing so well, that I am very anxious it should do better,’ an elated Ada proclaimed to the approving Hen. All that they lacked in 1838 were suitable teaching manuals, a deficiency which Ada intended to enlist her sister-in-law’s assistance to remedy.
Naturally, Ada had it all planned out in a trice. Charles Knight, the biggest name in educational books, would be the publisher. William Frend’s d
aughter, Sophia, recently married to Augustus De Morgan, one of the leading logicians of the time, would write on mathematics. Harriet Martineau, the mother of sociology (and respected translator of Auguste Comte), would add a book on rules for a modern education. Ada – besides writing ‘a good and amusing book about geography’ and a children’s version of George Combe’s Constitution – was going to collaborate with Hester on a practical guide to thrift. ‘I think the history of boiling a pot or making a mess of oatmeal porridge might be just as entertaining as the history of anything else,’ a hopeful Ada informed her mother.
Lady Byron approved. Composing a glowing tribute to her clever daughter in her notebooks, Annabella praised her enthusiasm and skill. ‘Ada teaches so that one cannot help learning,’ an admiring friend had exclaimed. Lady Byron herself was especially impressed by the gift for communicating difficult ideas in simple language that Ada had learned from Mary Somerville.
It was not for lack of encouragement that Ada’s schoolbook project collapsed, but because a rescue plan for the King sisters had emerged from Lady Byron’s organising mind, robbing Ada of her chief collaborator. Hester and Charlotte, subsidised by their sympathetic sponsor, were to spend a year in Europe.
In April 1838, Ada and William wistfully put Lord King’s excited sisters on to a boat bound for Antwerp. Charlotte travelled on to Weimar, where she was looked after by Lady Byron’s new friend, Anna Jameson. Hester settled at Dresden as the cherished guest of kindly Robert Noel (just beginning to make his name as one of Germany’s leading phrenologists) and his wife, Louisa von Henniken. That crucial visit to Germany – young Hester’s first journey out of England – would lay the foundations for an enduring friendship. By the following summer, Hester trusted Robert Noel well enough to let him take a ‘living mask’, a process that required her head to be covered by a sheet and smothered with wet plaster. The experience was one that Hester thought equivalent to Ada’s greatest terror; the notion of being buried alive . . .
Years later, Robert Noel took down Hester’s cast from one of his laboratory shelves and wrote up his notes about the sitter. Fond personal recollections played a larger part than phrenological diagnosis when Robert described Miss King as a sweet and touchingly maternal young woman, always cheerful and kind, with a strong sense of the ridiculous (a quality that had always endeared Hester to Ada).
It was on Hester’s dislike of ostentation that Robert Noel would lay particular emphasis in his affectionate word portrait. Returned from Germany in the summer of 1839 and newly established with Charlotte in modest lodgings near Charing Cross (safely out of reach of Woburn Park), Hester was disconcerted to find dolled-up portraits of Ada smiling at her out of all the fashionable printshop windows. The brand-new Lady Lovelace was enjoying a great success at 7s 6d a sale, Hester wrote to Louisa Noel in Germany. Her letter, although spiky, stopped just short of a sneer.
Hester was being unjust. Ada herself had never asked to be made a countess. It was largely to please her mother that she had granted Alfred Chalon’s request to create a marketable image of the young peeress. Chalon was the new queen’s favourite watercolourist and it would have seemed ungracious to refuse, but it’s hard to imagine that Ada relished seeing herself represented as the ringletted heroine of a velvet-covered ladies’ annual, any more than she enjoyed the mandatory court visit to receive Queen Victoria’s formal approval of her elevation to the rank of a countess.
Hester’s greater concern was about Ada’s capriciousness as a mother. Little Byron, described by Hester to Robert Noel’s wife as ‘an exceedingly odd boy’, had already become – and would always remain – his mother’s darling, capable of doing no wrong. If sturdy Byron knocked his tiny sister down, Ada laughed. If he answered his mother back, she laughed again and passed along his commands as jokes (‘Now Ma may go . . . Now Ma can go downstairs’) together with her response (‘No, my dear, I’m not going, so you need not talk about it’). Wee Annabella, meanwhile, was declared to be ‘doggedly naughty’ and ‘to scream like a pig’. When Lady Byron volunteered to take charge of her small granddaughter for a week, Ada wondered how her mother found the patience to suffer so much tiresome ‘chatteration’; she even asked Lady Byron frankly how she ‘could endure her [the child] so much alone with you?’ With ease, it seems. Hester King described Lady Byron to the Noels as a besotted granny, and one who took a keen interest in observing the children’s progress.
Maternity bored Ada and she made no secret of the fact. Five years into her marriage, Lady Lovelace finally admitted to her mother that she would never have chosen to bear a child. She did not quite dare to voice the thought that had perhaps passed through her exiled father’s mind as he contemplated the sale of Newstead, that she had most especially never desired to have a girl.
The acquisition of a new title had no noticeable effect upon Ada. For William, however, his earldom was a righting of all those wrongs inflicted by his mother. Felt as an act of justice, the title conferred a new sense of self-importance upon an insecure man. Invited to become Lord Lieutenant of Surrey, he eyed the neighbours whose homes were being built in the new baronial mode; William’s impulse to outdo both them and his usurper of a younger brother took root. Why should the Earl of Lovelace be outshone by mere bankers like William Currie of East Horsley and Henry Drummond of Albury?
As William became increasingly involved both in the redesigning of his homes and the duties and ritual appropriate to his new rank, Ada remained loyal to the mother who had taught her always to rate intellectual achievement above social position. Back in the autumn of 1835, it was to Lady Byron that Ada had first turned for scientific advice about the refraction of sunlight. Two years later, it was to her mother that she boasted of her victory over a visiting clergyman who queried her belief that Isaac Newton had been a Unitarian: ‘to say the truth I do not think Mr H. Fellows knows much about the Trinity or the Unity either’.
Increasingly, Ada spoke to Lady Byron, not as a parent, but as a colleague and equal. Annabella, too, was growing more relaxed. Her easy communion with Ada was seldom more apparent than in the light-hearted reports she sent home from Germany in the summer of 1838.
Annabella had undertaken this journey abroad as honeymoon companion and purse-carrier to Edward Noel (by now running his Fellenberg-style school on her island estate in Greece) and his bride, the former Fanny Smith. The couple had met at Fordhook the previous year when Edward returned from Euboea to convalesce from a serious illness. Nursing him back to health, Selina Doyle’s pretty niece fell in love. It was a match of which Annabella heartily approved. Her favourite of the Noel boys happily married to her own sweet ‘Fan’ (a young woman to whom Lady Byron sometimes fondly signed herself ‘Your Bag o’Bones’!) What could be better?
It was in the same playful tone as in her letters to Fanny that Annabella wrote to Ada from Germany. Staying at a hotel in Wiesbaden, she merrily reported how – the culprit was seated, all unaware, at a neighbouring breakfast table – a former curate from Ealing had reported upon that village’s best-known inhabitant. Lady Byron was, he bellowed (as if for one and all to hear), a drab little woman, quite undistinguished: ‘very short, of a swarthy complexion . . . looks as if she could never smile’. Edward and Fanny had been outraged. Annabella thought the incident hilarious. ‘I shall get some rouge and a brown wig to make myself captivating,’ she promised Ada. ‘I ought to get stilts too, it seems.’
For four happy years, Ada had enjoyed the rewarding experience of having two formidably intelligent female mentors. While Annabella would always urge her daughter towards science, Mary Somerville sympathised with the passion for music that often drew her away from it. Mrs Somerville’s main role, nevertheless, was to assist Ada with her mathematics. Seeking to scale the abstract slopes of spherical trigonometry in the same year that her eldest son was born, Ada had asked Mary to help her to obtain a full set – ‘all that are used’ – of solid wooden models. That request was made on 2 December 1836. Cooing over her mothe
r’s Christmas present to her of a telescope a week later, Ada’s delight was heightened by learning that it was kind Mrs Somerville who had personally selected the gift. Meekly, she asked Mary’s advice on how best to use this essential instrument for exploring the heavens.
That humble request was symptomatic of Ada’s unassuming attitude towards a woman she wholeheartedly revered. Just occasionally, she forgot herself. In June 1837, Ada fired off an opinionated letter to Mrs Somerville about Charles Babbage’s new contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises (Babbage had attacked William Whewell’s more orthodox view of the universe). Mr Babbage’s work was so careless, so fragmentary and unconnected, Ada announced before going on to deplore the waste of his fine mind on producing such ‘crude outlines . . . I fear the work will be underrated.’ But then Ada remembered to whom she was writing. It would not be well for Mrs Somerville to discover the truth, that Ada was simply quoting her mother’s opinion, not having bothered to read Babbage’s Treatise for herself. A little more candour was in order. ‘I think when I have read it . . . I shall probably give my opinion to Mr Babbage himself,’ Ada declared before another pause, and a further step down. What was Mrs Somerville’s own honest opinion? Would such behaviour be a bit ‘presumptuous, do you think?’
The greatest lesson Mrs Somerville provided was not in mathematics itself, but in how to approach its study. When Ada told Babbage in 1839 that she had acquired ‘a peculiar way of learning’, what she meant was that Mrs Somerville had approved of Dr King’s emphasis upon the discipline of perfectly memorising each new step until it could instantly be recalled, and without conscious effort. That careful approach offered no dazzling leaps, only a slow, tenacious struggle towards what Ada wistfully described to Babbage (in this same 1839 letter) as ‘a very bright light a good way farther on’. Anathema to a young woman of Ada’s mercurial character, this lesson in patience was practised (sporadically) out of an intense respect for the woman who showed her its value. Valuable as a discipline for an impetuous student, it had not been fully absorbed (as Ada’s next tutor would discover), but the foundations had been laid.
In Byron's Wake Page 23
