Lovelace never came closer to his mother-in-law than in their discussions about God. What, speaking as one convinced Unitarian to another, should he tell the grandchildren? Naturally, Lovelace wished to acquaint his eldest son and daughter with the New Testament: how could he do it without warning them that the Bible was ‘mistaken’ and the text ‘interpolated with fables’? Should he confess that he did not believe in the Immaculate Conception? Ada had suggested bringing young Annabella to Brighton, where she could be educated by the earnestly religious wife of Dr King, their old family friend. But what should they do when Mrs King’s beliefs contradicted their own Unitarian tenets? Was it right to force such young children to choose whom they should trust?
These questions, for people like the Lovelaces and Lady Byron – they believed that Jesus was a good man, but not the son of God – were difficult to address without causing gossip. John Cam Hobhouse was genuinely shocked when Ada (after seating her father’s oldest friend next to herself at a London dinner party in June 1846) confessed that she did not believe in immortality.
John Hobhouse was not a warm man, but he had grown fond of Byron’s unconventional daughter. In 1845, she visited his home expressly to see the curly-haired and broad-shouldered bust of her father that Hobhouse had commissioned in Rome, in 1817, from the admired Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen. A month earlier, Ada had expressed her distaste for Thorwaldsen’s full-length statue of the poet, a grand memorial for which Hobhouse had vainly struggled to secure a place in Westminster Abbey.* Confronted by this smaller and more lifelike bust of the father she had never known, Ada came visibly close to tears. Her host was touched.
Discussing Ada’s lack of religious faith at dinner in the summer of 1846, Hobhouse was alarmed to see how ill his young hostess looked. While noting in his diary for 3 June 1846 that the Lovelaces seemed ‘much attached’ to each other, he sadly predicted that their happiness, ‘if happy they are, will soon be at an end’.
A few days later, Ada apologised to the grandson of Byron’s publisher for having fainted while dining at his house. The Murrays had assumed for one dreadful moment that all was at an end. Their guest’s capacity for miraculous recovery remained as extraordinary as the swiftness of the attacks that she described to Mr Murray as spasms of the heart. A week later, Ada was well enough to host an intriguing dinner party of her husband’s contriving.
Over twenty years later, much public merriment would be expressed when Harriet Beecher Stowe, launching her passionate defence of the late Lady Byron, would describe the reclusive Lord Lovelace as ‘a man of fashion’. Back in 1846, however, Stowe’s description seemed to fit. Newly situated at Horsley Towers (Ockham Park had been conveniently rented to Stephen Lushington), William wanted to expand his social circle. One of his letters instructed Ada to invite the eminent geologist Sir Roderick Murchison to stay, simply because of the Murchisons’ access to a large and influential group of friends. In the country, William began making week-long visits to those fellow landowners who shared his passion for Gothic architecture. In London, shortly after Ada’s collapse at John Murray’s house, the earl urged his wife to invite a fashionable Italian lady to dine at their home.
Light-hearted references in Ada’s letters to ‘Countess Italia Italia’ have led biographers to deduce that Lord Lovelace was planning to entertain Teresa Guiccioli at St James’s Square. But Byron’s ageing inamorata was still in Italy (from where Mrs Jameson maliciously reported to Lady Byron on 12 November 1846 that the fair contessa had lost her looks and even her pleasant smile, while still displaying a superabundance of radiant hair). In fact, and to Ada’s consternation, the exotic lady whom her husband was so anxious to invite to dinner was the notorious Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn, author of Countess Faustine, a book about a beautiful courtesan. The infamous authoress, so an apparently gratified Lovelace had been accurately assured, bore a striking resemblance to none other than his own wife.
The problem was not with the countess, nor with her book, but with her companion. Turning to Babbage (an unlikely master of etiquette) for advice, Ada expressed uncharacteristic concern about society’s view. She herself did not mind if the countess brought along her lover, Baron Bystram. Lovelace himself was entirely open-minded on such matters. But what would others say? Would such behaviour get her into ‘a scrape with the other lady-guests’, or even with society in general? No further mention being made of the dinner invitation, it seems that the plan was abandoned. The incident stands as an intriguing example of Ada’s Byronically unpredictable nature.
Where Lovelace’s own difficult family were concerned, Lady Lovelace remained fiercely loyal to her husband. On 22 June 1846, Ada fired off a furious letter to William’s maternal uncle, reminding Lady Hester’s brother – in the haughty third person – of ‘the repeated & unjust condemnations of Lady Lovelace’s husband during this series of years’, accusations which had caused her own feelings for Lady Hester to have passed beyond forgiveness. Secretly, however, Ada knew that her odious mother-in-law’s claims to be terrified of her eldest son were not without justification. William did have a fearsome temper. Visiting Ashley Combe that autumn, Ada herself was briefly exposed to the blackness of spirit that may have helped to earn her husband his teasing nickname of the Crow.
The details are vague. The Lovelaces drove along the coast to Minehead, where they dined with old friends, the Pearces, who offered their frank opinion that Byron Ockham and his sister were turning into rude little beasts. (The Pearces’ criticisms were confirmed by Ada’s request to her mother on 7 October to find a governess who could teach better manners to her outspoken daughter. Young Byron’s impudence was a continual source of anxiety.)
The Pearces’ comments rankled. After dinner, while still seated at the table, the earl lost his temper and vented it on Ada. Backed by her shocked hosts, Ada decided not to go back to Ashley that night. Instead, she went straight from Minehead to join her mother at Moore Place, Lady Byron’s Surrey home. She said nothing about her return. Lovelace, she believed – and Lady Byron agreed with her daughter – deserved a fright.
He got one. Dismayed and crestfallen, Lovelace told the Pearces that he believed his wife had gone for good. Six weeks later, accompanied by young Ralph and his new tutor, Ada was welcomed back to Ashley Combe. Lovelace was all deference and affection. The Hen’s advice had been spot on, Ada cheerfully reported to her mother. A stern peck from his little brown Thrush was all that had been required to bring her moody old Crow back into line.
Further evidence of Ada’s closeness to her mother at this time surfaced ten days later. Writing to Annabella from Ashley Combe on 29 November, Ada confirmed that everything was going smoothly and according to the plans that the two of them had hatched during her stay at Moore Place. Stroppy little Lord Ockham was to be packed off to Kirkby the following year for a few months of tuition in schoolwork and estate-craft training by Charles Noel. Ralph, accompanied by Mr Herford, would shortly be returning to live with his grandmother at Esher. Lovelace’s proposed annual payment of £100 towards his youngest son’s upkeep sounded about right, Ada added. It wasn’t much, but any more would give William a feeling that he had the right to intervene: this was something that neither Ada nor her mother wished to happen. Ada, it is clear, favoured her mother’s skills as an educationalist and mentor over those of her husband.
The year 1846 ended with a crash. On 10 December, her thirtieth birthday, Lady Lovelace wrote to tell her mother that she had just undergone a near brush with death. Out driving a light open phaeton with Lovelace late at night on the treacherously steep and narrow lanes around Ashley Combe, an accident had occurred. The sporty little carriage overturned, flinging Ada herself into the verge. The huge wheels came off; the night air was filled with the sounds of grinding metal and the high whinnying of the horses. For one terrifying moment, flat on her face in the muddy depth of a country ditch, Ada believed herself in hell.
Ada’s account was shocking. (She spared her mother nothi
ng when relating the daily dramas of her life.) But why had the Lovelaces risked their lives by careering through narrow combes and twisting lanes on a dark December night in that most precarious of vehicles, a rickety high-wheeled phaeton? Had they quarrelled? Had the driver been drunk? Whose hands had held the reins?
Although no explanation was forthcoming (the incident was never again mentioned), it is tempting to speculate that the thirty-year-old countess was guiding the horses herself when her thoughts drifted off, whirling her away into that hidden and feverish drama of a life that was beginning to spiral out of control.
By December 1846, Ada’s beloved John Crosse was involved with another woman. Five months later, he married Susan Bowman. Their child (the first of three) was born, but not registered, in March 1848. Crosse himself, when in London, resided at Park Street, near Grosvenor Square. His secret wife was despatched to live at Reigate, a quiet little town in Surrey. Nobody, even in Reigate itself, had the faintest idea that John Crosse was Bowman’s husband. The reasons for this curious act of subterfuge remain obscure.
Even in December 1846, when the carriage accident occurred, Ada must have suspected that something odd was going on from the fact that her lover had started to press her for financial assistance. Seemingly, Crosse told Ada only that he needed to buy and furnish a house in Reigate. How much more – if anything – he may have disclosed remains unclear: all incriminating correspondence on both sides was destroyed in the 1850s.
What Ada did know by December 1846, the month of the carriage accident, was that Crosse wanted money and that she had agreed to provide it. The question of precisely how a wife living on a miserly allowance of £300 a year was to lay her hands on ready cash without arousing the suspicions of her husband and a fiercely prudent mother was the problem that now began to dominate Ada Lovelace’s turbulent existence.
* * *
* Visiting Rouen asylum – supposedly a model of its kind – in 1838, a shocked Annabella compared the use of permanent leg chains to kindly Hanwell, where mentally disturbed inmates were encouraged to garden and practise handicrafts, and where solitary confinement ended as soon as the patient felt willing to socialise. In 1834, she made Hanwell the subject of a laudatory poem. Orderliness, in Annabella’s methodical view, was crucially connected to mental stability. She would have been appalled by Fyne Court.
* The little that has been identified of Ada’s published writings outside the Menabrea ‘Notes’ and contributions to her husband’s occasional articles about the science of agriculture is frankly disappointing. In 1842, she reviewed a novel called Morley Einstein, three volumes of tosh in the silver-fork genre that was popular at the time. The author was the prolific George Payne Rainsford James. Ada’s claim to have admired its stance on penal reform and the arts and sciences makes one wonder how closely she had read a book which says so little upon these topics. Frequent references in her letters to her mother about papers on which she was working suggest that she planned to write many more reviews and articles. The only other one that seems to have survived, again written in collaboration with John Crosse, was of the pioneering experiments in mesmerism being carried out in Germany by Baron von Reichenbach. The unpublished review, which contains early observations about photography, suggests that Crosse himself was no feminist. Reading Ada’s own approving comment on the Baron’s use of experiments that could be undertaken by amateurs of both sexes, he excised it.
* There was always a striking contrast between what Lady Byron preached and what she practised. Writing to Ada on 30 August 1848, while Ralph was still in his grandmother’s care, she announced that moral obedience should be obtained by ‘physical obedience . . . obedience resulting from fear’. There is no hint in the family memoirs that such tyranny was ever employed.
* Nevertheless, both Ada and her mother had supported Byron’s right to a place in the abbey. The rejected statue was finally granted a place in the Wren Library at Trinity by its new master, William Whewell. Byron would not be granted a memorial in the abbey until 1969.
CHAPTER TWENTY
VANITY FAIR
(1847–50)
Although William Thackeray wrote his finest novel during the mid-1840s, he set his savagely witty lesson in the art of survival – the survival of the toughest, not the best – thirty years earlier, in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Becky Sharp carved her road to social success through an England in which a shocked young Percy Shelley saw starving, homeless families crying by the roadside. In 1812, Ada’s father spoke out for the rights of the machine-smashing weavers of the Midlands; these were people whose existences, so the well-travelled Byron claimed, were more wretched than those he had observed in any part of Eastern Europe.
Ada Lovelace, who would always prefer reading facts to fictions, may not have followed the serial parts in which Thackeray’s novel first appeared in 1847. But by 1847, she herself was a participant in the devastating social divide that his book covertly portrayed. The Hungry Forties were the years of revolution and famine, the years when great fortunes were made and lost. In Ireland, potato blight was starving a million people to death. A further million emigrated, never to return. Out in Rome, that exceptionally resilient Irish invalid Miss Mary Montgomery joined forces with Anna Jameson’s friend Ottilie von Goethe, to raise money for her destitute compatriots by means of a grand subscription ball. (The Irish-born Mrs Jameson, writing to tell Annabella that she herself would not attend the ball, expressed unease about such a blatant conjunction of wealth and poverty.)
In 1848, revolution swept through Europe. Its force petered out in England, where the great Chartist march ended with the people’s leaders being shepherded across the Thames from Kennington, in three small, metered public carriages, on a rainy April afternoon. Universal suffrage and democratic reform would have to wait.
A generous contributor to the relief of famine in Ireland, Lady Byron viewed atrocious social conditions at home as a call to arms. As with her earlier purchase of land in Greece to honour Byron’s crusade, she took inspiration from her late husband’s youthful challenge to a heartless government.
Back in 1816, Byron had stood up for the weavers and their rights. In 1843, the beleaguered frame-workers rose again. When 25,000 signatories petitioned for the right to work, the government averted its eyes. Annabella took action. Throughout the Hungry Forties and on into the next decade, Lady Byron lavished money on new schools, churches and hospitals upon her huge Midlands estates. Charles Noel was once again instructed to care for the poor, rather than their patron. Greeting an embarrassed Lady Byron in 1851 by doffing their caps in gratitude for the ‘many sums of money’ that had come their way, the Leicestershire villagers and farm folk were rewarded with a brisk reminder of the 10 per cent bonus gift awaiting anyone prepared to entrust Lady Byron with their savings for future investment.
Annabella Byron, had she been born a century later, might have become the model director of a bank. Ruthlessly stingy to any employees whom she believed had wronged her, she was a meticulous keeper of records and fulfiller of legal commitments. Distributing funds wherever she felt they might best serve society, she never for a second lost sight of what was being done with her money.
A clear example of Annabella’s combination of financial acumen with a stern social conscience surfaces in a remarkable letter written in January 1846 to Elizabeth Rathbone, a Quaker friend in Liverpool. Lady Byron’s topic was the misappropriation by a certain Mr Johns of the funds of a philanthropic trust that Annabella had set up. Those funds, as she had just discovered, were being used, without her permission, for Mr Johns’s other and less noble projects. A reprimand had been followed by their swift recall for investment by Mrs Rathbone’s more biddable son-in-law, John Paget, a barrister at the Middle Temple. ‘I have written to Mr J. Paget,’ Annabella informed Mrs Rathbone in her best regal style (tenants often commented upon Lady Byron’s similarity to Queen Victoria), ‘from whom I shall hope to obtain more details than it is Mr Johns’ habit to gi
ve.’
The letter to Mrs Rathbone offers useful insights into the enlightened nature of Annabella’s social views. Alluding to Cardinal Newman’s recent denunciation of Mrs Rathbone’s old friend Joseph Blanco White as insane (White had questioned both the authority of the Gospels and the divinity of Christ), Lady Byron grew indignant and then passionate. Was it not disgraceful that such a ‘superior’ thinker as Mr White should be treated as a lunatic, while criminals ‘of the low & ferocious classes’ – people who might more justifiably be considered mad than he – were sent to the gallows instead of to St Luke’s Asylum, where ‘humanising experiments’ might reform their behaviour? Had Mrs Rathbone read the excellent new pamphlet against capital punishment? ‘But this being a subject I have so much at heart, is apt to lead me on . . . A heated head bids me stop.’ Calming herself, Annabella asked for news of the Rathbones’ good friend Dr Beecher, a member of the American group of abolitionists and reformers among whom Lady Byron also moved.*
Given his mother-in-law’s rare combination of altruism with financial acumen, it is unsurprising that William Lovelace chose, in the mid-1840s, to cede administration of the two Ockham schools to Lady Byron and the widowed Stephen Lushington’s sisters-in-law, now snugly settled into the old King home. The Ockham schools had been going downhill. One of Annabella’s first actions was to sack a matron who was taking older girls out for evening jollities at the local pub and entertaining young men in her rooms until 2am. Slowly, the schools began to recover their reputations.
As Annabella’s philanthropic zeal waxed, William Lovelace’s waned. Depressing proof of this fact emerged in 1848 when, two weeks after the doomed Chartist march, Lovelace told his 12-year-old heir that ‘the poor’ had thankfully become ‘too poor to cause trouble’. Further evidence of how far Lovelace was removed from social reality surfaced in a request for Ada to send along his article on ‘Nobility’ to her new friend, Charles Dickens. Had Lovelace ever bothered to read Dickens’s novels, he would have known how maliciously the aristocracy were pilloried in that author’s works.
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