Ada was desolate. She had loved Hester Crauford like a sister. Anguish of a similar nature was felt by Annabella in February 1849, when news reached Lady Byron of the death of gentle, affectionate Sophy Tamworth, the orphaned older cousin with whom she had grown up at Seaham. That first and always fondly remembered home had been haunting Lady Byron’s thoughts. In 1847, while suffering a long spell of ill health, Annabella wrote a tender account of her own northern upbringing, in which she attributed the birth of her powerful impulses towards philanthropy to parents who deserved more recognition, as she now believed, for their many acts of kindness to the local poor. The death of William Melbourne in November 1848 was dutifully recorded by his cousin; the loss of Cousin Sophy went far deeper. Evidently, there had been a falling-out at some point in the past between Annabella and members of Sophy’s family. It comforted Lady Byron to learn from Sophy’s brother, Lord Scarsdale, that no rancour now remained: there was ‘nothing to forgive’.
The older generation were falling away. The closest bond holding together that intense little triangle of the Hen, the Bird and the Crow throughout the 1840s was that of a second threesome: the children.
Mr Herford, the tutor selected by Annabella after William Carpenter’s belated exit, arrived at Ashley Combe in November 1846, bringing with him a reticent and distinctly undernourished 7-year-old Ralph. Lady Byron’s attitude to meals was notoriously vague (on one occasion, she entirely forgot to provide lunch for her guests); nevertheless, both Ada and Lovelace respected Annabella’s grandmotherly skills and her evident enjoyment of the role.
On 28 January 1847, Lady Byron notified the childless Robert Noel that she would shortly be taking over the supervision of both Ralph and his 9-year-old sister, her namesake. She herself would be dividing her time between a new house at Southampton and her customary home at Esher. The children, living at Moore Place, would have the company of little Hugh Montgomery and the Bence-Joneses. (Lady Gosford’s eldest daughter, Millicent, was occupying the second of Annabella’s two Esher houses, together with her Irish husband and three small children. It suited Annabella’s needs to have a doctor on call; Henry Bence-Jones was an experienced physician.)
All began well. The Irish-born Miss Lamont, Ada’s own first attendant, was recruited to take care of young Annabella and to instil what Ada (remembering the Pearces’ account of her daughter’s insolence) described as the manners ‘peculiarly appropriate to this young lady’. Visiting her beloved friend in the early summer of 1847, Anna Jameson congratulated Lady Byron upon a marked improvement in her granddaughter’s behaviour: ‘excellent stuff in that child’.
Ada did not question her mother’s decision to take Ralph off on his own to the seaside for a while (Ralph was the most sickly of the three children). Neither did she protest when – possibly for the same reason – Ralph and his tutor were despatched to Hofwyl in 1848. Republican Switzerland remained a safe haven amid the revolutionary storms. Although Ralph pined for the company of his sister during a lonely sojourn in the second Mr Fellenberg’s house, away from the other boys, it was nevertheless this first short foreign adventure that engendered his lifelong passion for mountaineering and grandly isolated landscapes.
Annabella King began her lifelong habit of diary-keeping in 1847. It seems to have been a comfort during the long periods of Ralph’s absence. Comically prosaic at times (‘the morning went, the afternoon came’), the diary also reveals how close the relationship was between the two namesakes, old and young. Lady Byron was at her best in this relationship, fondly recording the child’s first jokes and puns and making sure – thanks to the Bence-Jones family next door – that she was not too lonely. Besides long foraging expeditions for mushrooms and blackberries in the nearby Ockham woods, there were picnics at Claremont (accompanied by a flock of tin cows and goats), rides (the little girl was given her own small mount, a pony called Seagull) and many presents. One that especially excited a child whose future would be spent as an intrepid traveller in the Middle East was a book called Travels in Persia. The two Annabellas read it together at Lady Byron’s Southampton house.* Nevertheless, Annabella missed her mother and beautiful Ashley Combe. It was beyond her understanding that Mamma could not look after her because she had no governess to provide.
One of Ada’s motives for borrowing money from Henry Currie had been that she wanted to assume personal responsibility for her daughter’s education. By 1848, she was in a position to do so. The governess she had found, Miss Wächter, was recommended to her by Robert and Louisa Noel at a time when many clever young German women were forced into exile by political events on the Continent.
First, however, Annabella had to be extricated from Moore Place, where she was happily assisting Miss Lamont to ‘make things’ intended to raise money for the suffering Irish. Ada’s excuse was that Miss Lamont had been behaving in an unseemly fashion.
Like her father, Ada, who could be so progressive and even revolutionary in her ideas, could also be breathtakingly conventional. Back in 1835, she had been outraged by the portrait-painter Margaret Carpenter’s habit of stretching herself out, in full view of their guests, upon the drawing-room carpet at Ockham. Poor Miss Lamont’s crime was merely to have introduced her young pupil to friends of her own, met by chance while strolling through Esher.
Ada was outraged. It was not to be tolerated, she stormed to her astonished mother; Charlotte Stamp, that paragon among governesses, would have been horrified! Such behaviour was absolutely unacceptable in ‘families of my circle’. Five days later, a command was delivered for the sacking of Miss Lamont and the immediate restoration of Lady Annabella to her parents.
Ada’s bizarre outburst came in April 1848, when she had just received the news of Hester’s death, while agreeing to the painful decision that her oldest and favourite child – Byron Ockham was not yet twelve – should go to sea the following year. But Ada was also seizing a pretext to reclaim her only daughter, a child who displayed increasing signs of possessing a sensitive spirit and a rare gift for art. (Her tutor at Moore Place was a colleague of Ruskin’s, Thomas Boys.)
The appointment of Miss Wächter as Annabella’s new home governess proved an unqualified success. Lovelace liked the young woman, Annabella adored her, and Lady Byron offered no opposition. In October 1848, Ada rather tactlessly informed her mother that Annabella had improved under the new governess’s care. ‘She is not like the same girl,’ the proud mother announced from Ashley Combe on 10 October; five days later, while extolling her daughter’s exceptional love for natural history and animals, she declared the delightful Miss Wächter to be all that a mother could desire. As a result, Annabella had grown ‘remarkably well, & wonderfully happy’.
Ada’s growing affection was reciprocated. In an undated December letter from the following year, a wistful young Annabella wrote a poignant letter from Horsley, to tell her ailing mother how much they all – herself, Papa, Miss Wächter and the dogs – were missing her and longing for her return.
Ada’s older children, Byron and Annabella, had been deliberately – and somewhat peculiarly – named by their grandmother, as a homage, as if to mirror a marriage of which her memory was retrospectively creating an increasingly distorted view. By 1849, all the blame for that marriage’s failure had been placed – within Lady Byron’s own mind – upon the unconscious shoulders of Augusta Leigh: the same woman whom Annabella had once held as dear to her as a sister. Augusta’s name had scarcely been mentioned since Medora’s wine-and-fantasy-based disclosures of 1841. Eight years on, Medora was dead – at the pathetically youthful age of thirty-five – and the very thought of Mrs Leigh prompted anxious questions in Lady Byron’s mind. What would future generations think of her for having left her famous husband? How would she be judged by her own descendants?
It was during 1849, after one of many lengthy sojourns with Stephen Lushington’s family at Ockham, that Annabella decided to consign a large number of her private papers to his sister-in-law. Frances (always know
n as ‘Fanny’) Carr was impressed with the importance of protecting these precious documents – their owner stipulated a minimum of thirty years – from the eyes of curious outsiders. Doubtless, Miss Carr was also provided with a slanted version of the past; by 1849, Annabella’s fondness for confiding secrets had become dangerously allied to her eagerness to remember what she wished had happened, as opposed to what had actually occurred.
It was also at the beginning of 1849 that Lady Byron acquired a new and pleasingly responsive friend, one who seemed ideally suited to become her future champion. Frederick Robertson, a personable and intelligent young man, had long been – unknown to Annabella herself – her ardent admirer. While staying at Cheltenham three years earlier, he had defended Lady Byron’s name from idle gossip with the enigmatic phrase: ‘I have reasons.’ In the autumn of 1848, while taking a holiday health break in Bohemia, Robertson met Robert Noel who, discovering that the handsome clergyman was working at Brighton, promptly supplied an introduction to his own revered relation.
Ada, who was visiting with her mother in Brighton early in 1849, while preparing to charm the elderly and stone-deaf Duke of Wellington, disliked Frederick Robertson from her first glimpse of his curly brown hair and sapphire-blue eyes. But Lady Byron was bewitched, charmed by the obliging Robertson’s willingness to see her as she now viewed herself: the woman who (had she only been allowed) could have redeemed her adored husband from the hell into which a wanton elder sister had led him. By 1849, William Lovelace was proving to be a less biddable adoptive son than in the past. Here was the ideal substitute: an intelligent, thoughtful and principled young man who never questioned Lady Byron’s veracity and never doubted the accuracy of her recollections. Robertson should be her recorder; from him, her grandchildren would learn Lady Byron’s own indisputable account of the past.
Frederick Robertson arrived in Lady Byron’s life at the moment when her oldest grandchild’s fate had been temporarily settled by booking little Lord Ockham on to a ship bound for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). It was, so Lovelace and Ada had unhappily agreed in February 1848, the best that could be done for their recalcitrant eldest son. But this was to be no ordinary voyage. Byron Ockham left Plymouth aboard the Swift in June 1849. He was just thirteen years old. It would be over three years before – as a young man of sixteen – he would return to England.
Of Lord Byron’s three grandchildren, his namesake was the one he would most readily have identified as a chip off the old block. Ockham was only five when Annabella scolded his parents for allowing the Lovelace heir to grow up as a backstairs boy, ‘the servants’ plaything’. Nothing changed. Spending most of his early life down at remote Ashley Combe, Ockham grew fond of the roughly spoken Porlock labourers and builders who taught him jokes and practical skills. Aged ten, he was teaching his siblings how to swear. Aged twelve, while being educated in Brighton by the eminently worthy Dr William King and teaching tricks to a pet puppy, Frisk, Ockham was writing letters to Ralph – aged nine at the time – which (so Lovelace, having intercepted one such private missive, opined) were infected by a ‘free and easy tone’ that leaned towards ‘downright impertinence’.*
A new line was taken in 1848. Sending Ockham and his new personal tutor to reside with Charles Noel’s family at Peckleton House in Leicestershire was part of a plan to prepare a small and stubborn viscount for his future duties as a great landowner and peer of the realm. Charles Noel would instruct him about land management; Mr Pennington was paid £110 per annum to present Latin, Greek, German and the sciences to the boy in short and easily digestible lessons. A descent into a local mine for educational purposes was permitted (the boy was much struck by the hardship inflicted upon horses living underground). All forms of drawing – young Byron had developed a naughty gift for caricature – were banned.
Engagingly affectionate and physically attractive (Ockham had dark curly hair, an olive skin, brilliant eyes and the muscular hands of a young blacksmith), the Lovelaces’ eldest child never had difficulty in winning friends. Rebellious and hard to teach though Ockham was (‘he is so slow that I do not suppose you could get more out of him,’ Charles Noel told Ada on 11 April 1849), Charles nevertheless doted upon his young lodger.
Here at Peckleton, although the Noels had two small daughters of their own, there was never any sense of sexual unease. Reunited with his family at Ashley Combe in the autumn of 1848, troubling ghosts of the past arose to haunt the present. A curious set of letters that passed between Ada and her mother reveal that both of them were haunted by the same fear: what if Ockham had inherited his grandfather’s troubling attraction to a female sibling? Byron was ‘never alone’ with Annabella, Ada reassured her mother, while stressing in the same letter of 6 November that there were indeed ‘many reasons to keep them apart’.
Unlike her husband, Ada became anxious even about allowing their oldest son to visit Ashley when little Annabella was also there. Lady Byron, while approving of her daughter’s concern, went further still, suggesting that Ralph should also be separated from his sister. Reluctantly, Ada agreed. She would see to it that Ralph was ‘never alone with Miss W[ächter] and Annabella at Horsley,’ she wrote back, ‘supposing that is your wish’.
Miss Wächter, who personally found Byron Ockham to be an irresistible little charmer, was baffled by this strange insistence upon separation between the siblings. The first effect of her elder brother’s charismatic personality upon Lady Annabella’s manners and ideas might prove disquieting, the governess conceded; nevertheless, ‘the real and more lasting effects’ of sisterly friendship with such a beguiling youth were surely ‘very valuable’.
Ada was torn. Evidently, she shared her mother’s uneasiness. And yet, she adored her firstborn son. (A letter written in July 1848 fondly described young Byron, just home from Brighton, as ‘brown as a nut, & looking more manly in face, and strikingly handsome’.) He, of Ada’s three children, had always been the most eager to canter out with his mother across Exmoor, to show an interest in her beloved pack of dogs (Sirius the swift Dalmation was his favourite, while his sister preferred Nelson, the big family dog) and to tease her, proposing that Papa’s grand tower room at Horsley would be ‘a capital place to have tea’. Ockham was always the first to sense his mother’s mood, the one who knew just how to make her laugh.
A solution to the concern about the children’s intimate relationships was already in place. Plans for Byron to go to sea had been made and advice was now taken from the Lushingtons and Greigs, both families being possessed of excellent naval connections. Ada dreaded his going. In the autumn of 1848, she began pleading with her mother to send Ralph home for a while, because of the long separation between the brothers – she sadly wrote that it might be one of ‘very many years’ – which lay ahead. Lady Byron remained nervous and obstinate. Ralph was only permitted to rejoin his own family in October 1849, when young Lord Ockham was safely away on the other side of the world. And still, Lady Byron dreaded repetitions of the past. Ralph must be tutored separately from his sister, she wrote. The children should at all times be watched.
Ada agreed.
The decision to book Ockham as a midshipman on to the Swift for this particular voyage across the world was equally strange, and strangely fortuitous. Both at Harrow and later, at university, William Lovelace and William Greig had studied alongside an exceptional man. Today, his statue occupies a position of honour on O’Connell Street in Dublin; back in July 1848, William Smith O’Brien was a charismatic leader of the Young Ireland movement, a man who had been arrested when he called for armed rebellion in the cause of Irish independence. O’Brien was the first Irish rebel who had been born into the landed gentry; with Queen Victoria embarrassingly due to pay a visit to Ireland within a few months of his conviction, the Irish rebel’s sentence was hastily commuted from hanging to being transported to Van Diemen’s Land, along with his three principal collaborators.
The Swift, then, was a convict ship with a difference. Here, in pla
ce of dark holds filled with sick children, pregnant women and desperate men, were four well-educated and elegantly dressed prisoners who strove to hold tedium at bay during a three-month voyage by playing backgammon and chess. And by chat.
Chat must surely have encompassed talking to a young man who bore the intriguing name of Byron Ockham and who turned out to be the son of O’Brien’s Trinity colleague, now married to Lord Byron’s daughter. The Swift’s crew consisted of only sixty-six men, and a midshipman’s duties would certainly have taken him to the deck where the four Irish prisoners passed much of their time. To Byron (who would later preach the virtues of the French Revolution to his younger brother), Smith O’Brien must have seemed a true hero, a man who had placed his convictions first and who – Byron Ockham was there to see him set ashore at Van Diemen’s Land on 27 October – honourably refused to accept the ‘ticket-of-leave’ which would have allowed the gallant prisoner parole and considerable freedom.
Byron’s experiences on board the Swift confirmed a road upon which – even at the tender age of thirteen – he was already firmly set. For the rest of his short, strange life, Lord Ockham would always take the side of the underclass against the privileged group into which he had been born. Arriving at Valparaíso on the Daphne in the summer of 1850, the 14-year-old Byron promptly led an unofficial project to divert water from the verdant hilltop garden of Admiralty House into that of a far less privileged – and doubtless very grateful – Chilean neighbour. Invited because of his rank to attend an elegant ball, the mutinous viscount accepted – and sent a midshipman chum along to masquerade as Lord Ockham in his place. It was a pity, Ockham’s kindly new Captain mused, that such ‘a very clever but wild young fellow’ had been given ‘no chance of starting well in life’. Captain Fanshawe was not ready to write the boy off. He only doubted that Ockham would ever fit the aristocrat’s role for which he had been bred.
In Byron's Wake Page 36
