In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  . . . the less I have habitually to do with children the better for them & me. When my sisters are with me, I see far more of the children & am of much greater use . . . because then there is some one exclusively devoted to them, under my direction & superintendence.

  Viewed from the comfortable distance of her study, Ada’s son Byron Ockham, at the beginning of 1841, remained his mother’s firm favourite: ‘His affable, communicative, manly & I may say elegant manners, charm people much,’ Ada wrote to Louisa Barwell, a childcare specialist in whom her mother placed great faith. Little Annabella, meanwhile, remained in the doghouse, a noisy little girl who was notable only for her ‘vile’ chubbiness. (Ada, slender as a reed herself by now and fiercely energetic, had come to share her whippet-thin husband’s view of weight as a symptom of indolence.)

  Writing to Babbage during this same January week – and reminding him to humour her new passion for ice-skating when he visited Ockham – Ada reverted to a more engrossing topic. The results might occur ‘many years hence’, but she wanted to talk ‘most seriously’ about her plans to offer him valuable assistance.

  You have always been a kind & real & most invaluable friend to me; & I would that I could in any way repay it, though I scarcely dare so exalt myself as to hope however humbly, that I can ever be intellectually worthy to attempt serving you.

  In January 1841, Babbage was still aglow from his recent autumn visit to Turin. Unconscious of the disappointments to come, he felt no present need for help. He had not reckoned upon Ada’s persistence. On 22 February, Lady Lovelace wrote again. From hinting at the ‘great good’ likely to emerge from what she saw as ‘the possible (I believe I may say the probable) future connexion between us’, she proceeded to issue commands. Mr Babbage was instructed to visit her London home to discuss plans: ‘the sooner the better’.

  Ada Lovelace was entering one of her mercurial phases. It’s hard to guess how De Morgan felt on being informed that mathematical forms reminded Ada of the fairies she had read about in fiction. It’s equally difficult to imagine how Ada’s mother felt on receiving a letter (it had been written on 6 February 1841) that demanded serious consideration for ‘one of the most logical, sober-minded, cool, pieces of composition (I believe) that I ever penned; the result of much accurate, matter-of-fact, reflection & study’.

  Ada Lovelace’s letter to her mother was not logical; neither was it sober, nor cool. Ada had often speculated upon what her goal in life might be; now, so it seemed, she knew. Thanks to her incredible powers of intuition, reasoning and concentration, she foresaw the time when this ‘scientific Trinity [would] make me see anything, that a being not actually dead, can see & know . . .’ A ‘vast apparatus’ had been put into her power. All that remained was for Lady Lovelace to direct it over the next twenty years (the time scale had increased to thirty before the end of the letter) ‘to make the engine what I please. But haste; or a restless ambition, would quite ruin the whole.’

  So far, so fairly peculiar. It was when Ada proceeded to the bold declaration that ‘I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus’ that her letter appeared to enter the realms of lunacy. Something had evidently tipped the always fragile balance of Lady Lovelace’s dancing, quicksilver mind. What was it that had taken place?

  The most likely cause for Ada’s bizarre demand to be seen as superhuman was that she felt an imperative need to stake her claim to superior powers. Her role as Byron’s only surviving child, the heir to his legendary genius, was under challenge from a usurper. By February 1841, Lady Byron was living in Paris, where an intrusive cuckoo – a rival daughter – had found snug lodgings in an agreeably well-feathered nest.

  Elizabeth Medora Leigh was back in the picture and telling strange tales about her parentage. Was it possible that Ada herself was no longer unique?

  Medora had returned at a moment when Lady Byron found herself – for once in an exceptionally busy period of her life as a reformer – frustratingly underoccupied.

  Reform is seldom a glamorous subject, but it was one in which Lady Byron, by 1841, possessed few peers. It was a role which, as she would ruefully observe in later years, was made more difficult by her social position. (‘The services which I am so willing to render are not asked . . . A Right Honourable wall surrounds me.’)

  Such difficulties were heightened by the fact that Annabella’s formidable administrative skills went hand in hand with an implacable will and a capacity for autocratic behaviour that was not always admired by her fellow reformers. There is no doubt – to take one example from many – that the first Ealing headmaster, Mr Craig, had proven unworthy of the time and money that Lady Byron expended upon sending him out to Hofwyl, before housing his family and even having to supervise the truculent pupils over whom Craig himself failed to exert adequate control. It was the dispute with Mr Craig (he was brusquely dismissed from his post, with modest provision for his future) which led his employer to review the system that had let both her and the unfortunate schoolmaster down.

  Teaching during the 1840s was a thankless and under-funded profession. The country’s attitude to it was dismally reflected in the fact that, in the England of 1840, £30,000 was allocated for national education, while £70,000 was expended upon improving the kennels and stabling at Windsor Castle. Teachers, unlike the clergy, received no pensions; as a result, the church received a great many more worthy applicants than did the schools, which made no special provisions for anybody who did not belong to the gentry class.

  The scheme which Lady Byron devised was simple. If teachers were known to receive a family allowance – Annabella had in mind one that would benefit both widows and orphans – their status would instantly improve. And thus, as she argued in a long and earnest letter to Harriet Siddons, the profession would come to be held in higher regard and ‘persons of a higher cast of mind’ would aspire to become teachers.

  Lady Byron had chosen her correspondent with care. Harriet was asked to show Annabella’s long letter – it bore the look of a meditated formal proposal – to her brother-in-law. George Combe, as Lady Byron was perfectly aware, had become one of the most admired and influential figures in the world of progressive education. The celebrated author of The Constitution of Man was a man who would be able to make things happen.

  In London, throughout the 1840s, Annabella oversaw the gradual transformation of Ealing Grove into a model school (one that she helped to replicate on a larger scale at Ockham). At Battersea Training College, Lady Byron’s fellow reformer, Dr James Kay, trained several of the former Ealing pupils to become future head-masters. Each was taught to follow the Fellenberg principle that Annabella had introduced: the basics of a formal education were to be combined with a training in technical skills that would enable graduates to earn themselves a living in an increasingly mechanised society.

  As in London, so in Leicestershire. By 1840, at least five schools had been set up in the area of Kirkby Mallory. Each school was subsidised by Lady Byron. Each followed the admired Swiss model. In Leicester itself, Annabella helped to fund the city’s first public hospital. At Kirkby, Charles Noel was urged by Lady Byron to improve the cottages and to arrange that each family should have its own vegetable allotment. More impressively, her loyal land agent was instructed to argue for the rights of those families as if he himself stood in their shoes. When a weaving community faced hardship in one of the poorest villages on the estate, Annabella stepped forward to offer funds. When Charles Noel deferred action, she scolded him (‘The great thing is not to delay as the people are starving.’). Urged to reduce the wages of a retired stableman, Lady Byron refused. (‘I do not like the idea of lessening Pegg’s subsistence now that he is old and infirm.’)

  Lady Byron had rounded off the improvements to her family estate, in the summer of 1840, by paying a rare personal visit to Kirkby. Her specific purpose was to inspect a new village school for girls that had been created from a converted cottage. Habitually reticent, Lady Byron was o
vercome by the welcome she received: ‘So many mothers came that it seemed each child had two Mothers!’ Annabella reported to Harriet Siddons, adding that the warmth of her reception encouraged her so much that she had managed to deliver a little speech with absolute confidence: ‘an odd thing in a shy person . . . I acquitted myself well.’ Her reticence returned in force a few weeks later, when she learned that Benjamin Haydon was working on a grand group portrait of the 500 British and American abolitionists who had recently been addressed in London by the elderly Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce’s sturdiest ally in Britain’s campaign against slavery. Haydon did not warm to Lady Byron. Nevertheless, impressed by the evidence of suffering that he saw etched into the wan face of one of the very few Englishwomen who had been permitted to attend, Haydon quietly overruled Annabella’s request to be omitted from the portrait and placed her well to the fore.

  Ada had been scolding her mother – as she frequently did – for putting a frail constitution at risk through overwork. (Ada, as her mother might have countered, was a fine one to talk.) In March, there had been a brief collapse; by July 1840, Annabella was exhausted. It was at this point that Lady Byron decided it would do her good to spend a few months out of the country. George Combe’s brother, Andrew, was too busy to accompany her to Paris; instead Dr Fitton, an elderly geologist, was recruited to act as Lady Byron’s escort.

  It was that exact moment – and it would be interesting to know just how the news of Lady Byron’s vacation plans had reached Pontivy, a remote and tiny village in Brittany – that Annabella’s relatively carefree mind was diverted into a new and dangerous channel of concern. Word reached her from Pontivy, where Augusta Leigh’s 26-year-old runaway daughter Elizabeth Medora was living with her third illicit child, Marie, that the young woman was destitute, dying and in despair. Omitted from this harrowing report was the fact that still on hand, living only four miles away, was a wife-free Henry Trevanion. (Georgiana, together with Henry’s legitimate offspring, remained in England.)

  Medora was not dying, but the doctor whom Lady Byron despatched to Brittany to assess her situation confirmed that the young woman was indeed in dire straits. Requests had been sent to her mother for the deed to a £3,000 gift that Augusta Leigh had – with unusual prudence – put in trust for her unseen little granddaughter, Marie.* But Augusta (possibly conscious that Henry Trevanion was hovering close enough to seize upon any unexpected windfall) had refused to part with the requisite papers. How could a mother possibly be more heartless to her own neglected and penniless child?

  Such a story – as Medora was shrewd enough to intuit – rang like music in the ears of her Aunt Annabella. The always inexplicable affection between two incompatible sisters-in-law had long ago withered into mutual distrust. By 1840, even the levelheaded Mary Montgomery was willing to view Mrs Leigh as ‘one of the wickedest woman ever born’, a sister who had actually continued to sleep with her brother during his marriage. (Mary’s source for this account was a woman whose inviolate truthfulness she would never question: Annabella herself.)

  Here, then, was the dawning of a golden opportunity for Lady Byron to lay claim to the high ground. She herself would rescue Medora Leigh, the unhappy product of a relationship in which Augusta, by her own admission, had always led the way. Annabella had never doubted the paternity to which Byron had alluded in his letters to Lady Melbourne – and of which it seems clear that he boasted in private to his credulous wife. Annabella was simply doing her duty, as Byron himself would have wished her to do, for his own unfortunate daughter.

  Strengthened by this virtuous self-image, and perhaps a little excited by the adventure upon which she had embarked, Lady Byron prepared for action. Summoning Medora to meet her clandestinely at Tours, an out-of-the-way medieval town set on the Loire (and a testing 300-mile journey from Pontivy), Annabella instructed her niece to protect her respectability (and that of her aunt) by posing as a widowed mother, a certain Madame St Aubin.

  Welcomed at Tours, the prodigal completed her redemption at Fontainebleau where, nursing her exhausted aunt through one of Annabella’s most serious collapses, the sinning Elizabeth became the sinned-against Medora. It was there – or that is how she later chose to tell the tale – that Medora first learned the incredible truth about her parentage. By the time the pair of women left Fontainebleau for Paris in the mid-autumn of 1840, Medora’s role as a newly adopted daughter and beloved protégée was secure. Settled into her own handsome suite of rooms on Place Vendôme as Madame St Aubin – Lady Byron’s honoured guest – Medora Leigh could congratulate herself on having brought off the most impressive coup of a hitherto erratic career. Henry Trevanion himself would have applauded.

  Slender, dark-eyed and outrageously charming (her similarity to Ada was often remarked upon), Medora was also a compulsive liar. Quick to appreciate how profoundly her patroness had come to dislike her mother, Medora was still nursing her patient at Fontainebleau when she began to create her poisonous posy of scandalous tales. Every one of them related to Augusta and each became more shocking than the last.

  Publicly, Lady Byron was honoured during her lifetime for her almost superhuman discretion. Privately, Annabella leaked secrets like a bucket with a hole in it. By Christmas 1840, most visitors to her elegant new home on Place Vendôme (one of Paris’s most fashionable addresses) were conscious of Medora’s history. Back in England, Anna Jameson gasped at the horrors that were being unfolded by her respected friend. Had Mrs Leigh actually played a knowing part in the downfall of her daughter?

  I can believe – alas! that I should confess it – even to you – any excess of wickedness in my own sex – even that a mother should conspire against the virtue & chastity of her own child; that she should corrupt one & sell the other – this even I know to be possible . . . or have I mistook – have I fearfully exaggerated the purport of what you tell me?

  No, she was not mistaken, and it says much for Medora’s skill in storytelling that her preposterous tales were believed by women as intelligent as Anna Jameson and Mary Montgomery, who heard most of them first-hand while visiting Paris.

  Fuelled by the wine that Lady Byron herself never touched, Medora recalled how she had been drugged and pinned to the floor by her sister and her mother, while Trevanion raped her. An obsessed Augusta had tried to lure Henry Trevanion into her bed by offering him the use of Emily (Annabella’s god-daughter and the youngest of the Leigh children). All this was merely the beginning.

  Lady Byron was gullible (as Byron had discovered), but she was not a fool. On one level, in the early days, she knew that she was being manipulated by a skilful trickster. Writing to young Olivia Acheson on the brink of moving from Fontainebleau to Paris, Annabella offered a bittersweet account of how judiciously ‘your personified Bon-bon’ was being sweetened with hints and half-truths and outright lies.

  She [Medora] knows that the throat of my conscience is small, and she adapts the sweet sin to the size of it, with wonderful precision . . . One more edifying instance – if you can’t tell a downright falsehood, tell that half of it which will convey the other half inaudibly to the mind of the receiver.

  Six weeks later, however, Medora’s compelling tales had swept all Annabella’s caution away, leaving only a sense of excited outrage. Answering a meek enquiry from Mrs Leigh about her daughter’s health, an almost hysterical Annabella ordered the unfortunate woman to hold her tongue. ‘I would save you, if it be not too late, from adding the guilt of her death to that of her birth. Leave her in peace!’ Mrs Villiers, striving to intercede on Augusta’s behalf, met with complete resistance. Certified statements of Augusta’s goodwill towards her erring child were returned from Paris, unopened.

  All – all – in the wild version of events that Medora depicted and in which Annabella was now eager to believe, was the work of wicked Mrs Leigh. Did Medora’s presence in Paris not prove how things stood? It was to Byron’s wife that his dying child had now turned in her hour of need. It was his forgiving w
idow who had reached out to save Augusta’s abused and wantonly abandoned daughter from her deathbed.

  Etc. No gothic novel could surpass the lurid version of Augusta Leigh’s misdoings that was now being circulated by a woman who had once been praised by Lord Byron for her absolute inability to utter an untruth.

  The only person to whom Annabella delayed in speaking out was her own daughter.

  Back at the beginning of the year 1841, Ada had been writing, with complete control of her wits, an essay about the connection between imagination and scientific thought. She was ready to describe the past six months as the happiest period of her life, a time when the twin deities of music and mathematics had held her in thrall. Of Medora, she knew only that the ever-charitable Lady Byron had taken a hapless daughter of Augusta Leigh’s under her wing in Paris. How typical of the Hen! ‘I quite revere & adore the Hen’s whole conduct & feelings respecting this singular & apparently unfortunate being,’ Ada wrote to her mother in early January, shortly after receiving the unknown Medora’s Christmas gift of a handmade red-and-gold pincushion. ‘It well paints your whole principle & character; – at least it does so to me.’

  And then, the bombshell descended.

  * * *

  * Police suspicions about Fortunato Prandi’s return to Italy increased when it was reported that Prandi himself had not attended the conference. Possibly, Babbage was providing cover. Several years later, in an undated note in the Lovelace Byron Papers, Ada summoned Prandi to a secret midnight tête-à-tête at her London home, but the reason for it remains unknown.