The crowds at the church gate were large. The funeral itself was an intentionally private ceremony. The widowed Sir George Crauford and Peter Locke King represented the widower’s family, with the 7th Lord Byron and Charles Noel appearing for the Byron side. The only outsiders, with the exception of the Wildmans of Newstead, were the two lawyers who now faced the tricky task of reconciling Lady Byron with her unhappy son-in-law.
Woronzow Greig had wasted no time. While still at Newstead, he read aloud to Lushington the ardent appeal that he himself had prepared. Gratitude was now Lord Lovelace’s chief thought, Greig wished Lady Byron to understand. Every shadow of (unjust) reproach would be withdrawn. A full admission would be made of how her son-in-law had wronged her, when visiting Leamington in June 1851, by undervaluing the real concern Lady Byron felt for her only child. The earl was willing to become as wax in her hands, to remodel as she pleased, if only Lady Byron would not abandon him in this time of affliction.
Stephen Lushington suggested a different approach. He advised that the appeal should come directly from Lovelace himself – and that it should be sent out before Lady Byron issued her own commands. The thinking was surely right, but neither Greig nor Lushington had appreciated the high degree of Lovelace’s pride or of Lady Byron’s stubbornness. Lovelace might well be feeling remorseful, but he was not willing to forgive the fact that the double pawning (bluntly referred to by the earl as ‘the robbery’) of his jewels had been concealed from him until after his wife’s death. Annabella’s tart response, delivered via Lushington – Lady Byron now declined to address her son-in-law directly – was that, since she herself had uncomplainingly borne the total cost of their double recovery, the earl had nothing to grumble about. He had his diamonds; what, then, was his complaint? And how dared Lovelace compare her prudent discretion to his own deceit about – and complicity in – her daughter’s gambling! Annabella did not resist the opportunity to remind her son-in-law of the ‘unlimited confidence’ he had formerly expressed in the very man responsible for the ‘robbery’: John Crosse.
There is no doubt that Lady Byron was being extremely harsh. (Ralph would later hold the mean-spirited and blame-filled letters despatched to his father after the trauma of Ada’s death as responsible for an ineradicable hardening in Lord Lovelace’s personality.) But other elements were also at work. It was during the week that the earl received this ferocious letter (it was written on 16 December 1852) that the bereft Lovelace finally began to comprehend how deeply his beloved wife had betrayed him with John Crosse. Writing back the following day to beg the Hen for an interview – it was never granted – Lovelace described the desolation that he felt, now that ‘every cherished conviction of my married life has been unsettled’. Did Lady Byron seek to augment his sorrows? If only she would tell him what, precisely, it was that he had done to displease her! All he begged for now was the chance to understand, and to be understood.
The more that Lovelace grovelled, the more merciless his adversary became. Any hint of criticism of Ada from her husband was seized upon as evidence of the wretched earl’s vindictive and unforgiving spirit. And how dared he breathe a word (he hadn’t) against ‘the Mother whose child you depreciate & condemn beyond measure’!
On 11 January 1853, Woronzow Greig advised his bewildered friend to recognise that Lady Byron’s views were indeed ‘very peculiar’ and stop arguing. Better if he had. Instead, within a day, the distraught Lovelace had ignited another row. Rashly, he accused his mother-in-law of using ‘casuistry’ to score cheap points. The earl had forgotten that Lady Byron always liked to have the last word in a dispute. Retreating behind a wall of silence, she simply closed the door.
Where the law was concerned, however, Lady Byron was meticulous. She promised and paid £5,000 towards Ada’s debts (after deducting the cost of recovering Lord Lovelace’s pawned jewels). She was scrupulous in following Ada’s wishes concerning the future of the children. Annabella would spend six weeks of each year with her grandmother. Ralph would remain entirely under Lady Byron’s supervision. Since Lord Ockham wanted no part of his heritage, arrangements would be made for her younger grandson to become her legal heir. Young Annabella, too, would receive a generous bequest. All this, Lady Byron was prepared to do – and nothing more.
Excluded from his mother-in-law’s life, Lovelace finally found a way to express his feelings when, in 1862, he decide to honour the memory of his late wife, deep within the heart of Horsley Towers.
Vaulted, spangled, pillared and painted, the earl’s secret shrine to Ada Lovelace is a gilded treasure box of fantasy run wild. High above the unconsecrated altar of his private chapel, William Lovelace installed two large grey tablets. The one on the left, named for Ada, has been pointedly emblazoned with the ten commandments that Ada so often chose to ignore. Facing it across the altar is an identical slab of slate.
Not one word of eulogy or indictment appears upon the tablet that bears only Lady Byron’s name. Lord Lovelace’s tribute to the woman he had venerated, trusted and finally lost speaks for the depth of his bitterness by the absolute blankness of its face.
The joyous old days when the Hen and the Crow fondly conspired about how best to protect and cherish their elusive and enchanting charge, the Bird, were gone, never to return. On 9 February 1853, Annabella icily reminded her son-in-law that she held his own imprudent behaviour responsible for what she now vaguely referred to as her daughter’s ‘aberrations’. Greig meanwhile advised his sympathetic colleague, Stephen Lushington, that the hapless Lord Lovelace had just discovered ‘an additional act of treachery’ on the part of his late wife.
Prior to the final stages of her illness, Lady Lovelace had been persuaded by some of her racing acquaintances to insure her life for £600. In January 1853, Mr Fleming, Dr Malcolm and John Crosse lined up to submit their rival claims to that sum. Fleming had already persuaded the dying countess to assign him sole rights for a paltry ten shillings. Dr Malcolm, to whom Ada had earlier persuaded her husband to loan £1,800 (only £200 had been repaid at the time of her death), stated that he also deserved the insurance money, in lieu of his personal discharge of Ada’s liabilities. (The fact that the Zetlands’ physician had actually won £2,000 from Ada’s tips went unmentioned.) John Crosse’s claim took the nastier form of blackmail. He already held a cache of Ada’s letters. By 9 February 1853, Lovelace knew that his wife had also given her lover the letter in which the earl had incriminated himself by personally authorising her betting activities. Crosse now threatened to publish it.
By 26 February, an exhausted Woronzow Greig was able to report to Lovelace that, while he himself had ‘fairly broken down under the part which I have taken in these matters’, control of this nightmarish situation had been regained. Scurrilous though they were, Dr Malcolm and Mr Fleming were men who cared intensely about their social status. Artfully, Greig indicated that the only hope for each of retaining his modest perch in society was instantly to drop their spurious claims against a dead woman whose name was catnip to a hungry press. He capped this by producing a document that proved Ada had always paid – perhaps with Padwick’s loans – her own racing losses. As to Ada’s alleged ‘gift’ of the insurance policy to Mr Fleming, her signature had not been witnessed. Fleming took fright when Greig threatened him with the possibility that the insurance company might well come after him for felonious behaviour.
Greig was tough, but John Crosse was wily. By early February, Greig knew that Crosse had no interest in behaving like a gentleman. He owned 108 letters from the late countess. Many of these could further damage her already spotty reputation. By April, however, Crosse had agreed to take £600 in exchange for the eighteen incriminating letters in which Ada spoke of her love for him, together with the betting authorisation from Lord Lovelace that she had voluntarily placed in John Crosse’s hands.
All seemed to be proceeding smoothly. Crosse’s attorney consented to the burning of the returned nineteen documents in the presence of Henry Karslake, Lord Lovelace’s Surre
y solicitor. Crosse’s attorney had approved the final arrangement. It was at this delicate moment of imminent exchange that Lady Byron, whom Greig and Lushington had taken care to exclude from their negotiations, discovered what was being planned.
Annabella, with some sense, opposed buying off Crosse. If he could get such a generous sum for a few letters, what more might such a man be encouraged to demand for his silence? ‘Can she desire to force us into Court? What else can be her object?’ a despairing Greig asked Dr Lushington on 2 April. On this crucial occasion, Lady Byron’s wishes were overruled. The letters were handed over to Karslake. John Crosse’s further demand (he wanted a written exoneration of his part in the betting clique) was rejected. Mr Crosse, so a disgusted Woronzow Greig informed William Lovelace on 14 April, was no better than a felon: a man entirely ‘destitute of honour and principle’.
So John Crosse appeared to them all in the way that he sought to exploit, even in death, the woman whose trust he had abused during her life. Nevertheless, the fact that Ada had written Crosse ninety letters which contained nothing compromising attests that there had been another, unsexual side to this relationship, as does the further and intriguing fact that Greig was in no hurry to destroy the four packets of Crosse’s letters which were still in Ada’s possession when she died. (They were spoken of as being in existence months after Mrs Clark’s bonfire at Great Cumberland Place.) Even the innocuous gifts which the countess strove to bequeath to Crosse (by using Charles Babbage as her unofficial executor) could argue that an intense friendship, rather than a romantic passion, had prevailed.
This was not how Ada’s bequest to Crosse was perceived by Lushington and Greig. To their legal minds, it seemed pure madness to place the late countess’s ‘unreformed’ writing box, just as Ada had left it, in the possession of such an unscrupulous man. Neither did they trust Crosse to make an appropriate selection when it came to carrying away twelve ‘WORKS (not vols)’ of his own choice from Ada’s personal library. They did not even care to allow him the coroneted and monogrammed gold pencil case she bestowed as a souvenir of the literary interests they had shared.
The concerted attempt to make John Crosse vanish from Ada Lovelace’s history proved remarkably effective. Publicly, Ada featured in the memoir later written by Andrew Crosse’s second wife only as a frequent visitor and occasional witness to scientific experiments carried out at Fyne Court. Privately, John Crosse’s family disapproved of his murky relationship with the countess. Bitter altercations would take place between father and son before Andrew Crosse died in 1855, pointedly bequeathing his eldest son only the suggestive gift of an organ. (John Crosse had inherited none of his father’s musical skill.) Fyne Court was left to Andrew Crosse’s second wife, Cornelia. In 1859, John Crosse would change his name to Hamilton in order to receive a substantial legacy from that very uncle whose name he had cheerfully impugned to William Lovelace, ascribing spurious misdemeanours to a respectable relative in order to conceal his own secret family at Reigate. Almost the first use Crosse made of that bequest was to reclaim Fyne Court for his own family seat.
Evidence survives that the enigmatic Mr Crosse did retain affectionate feelings for Ada Lovelace. He never parted with the precious relics which offer the ultimate proof of Ada’s attachment to him. In 1880, John’s son and namesake would inherit from his father a gold ring that Lord Byron had bestowed upon his infant daughter, together with a miniature copy of the romantic poem ‘Maid of Athens’, and a precious lock of Byron’s hair. The fact that John Crosse chose to preserve those items as family heirlooms, suggests – at the least – that he shared Ada Lovelace’s reverence for her father.*
At Brown’s Hotel, the owners went out of their way to comfort an honoured guest during a period in which Lady Byron came, for the first time since the separation from Byron in 1816, close to breaking point. When the lawyers, early in 1853, discreetly spoke to the distraught Lord Lovelace about Lady Byron’s ‘very peculiar’ views, while urging him to comply with whatever his mother-in-law might request him to say, the subtext was that Lushington and Greig were dealing with an unknown quantity.
For Annabella, even more than for her son-in-law, the discovery of the near-criminal world in which her daughter had become mired was devastating. By 5 February 1853, Lady Byron felt wretched enough to tell a new confidante, the American poet and abolitionist Eliza Cabot Follen, that Ada’s death had been ‘necessary’, and that she herself had become towards the end ‘unequal to the task’ of supporting her poor daughter. By the following month, the search for a culprit on whom to lay the blame for Ada’s destruction had switched away from her broken son-in-law to Charles Babbage.
The extent of Babbage’s role in Ada’s clandestine life among tipsters and semi-criminals remains extremely unclear. The mass of Lady Lovelace’s letters to Babbage that are lodged at the British Library contains (as one would expect) no hint of a link between the inventor and the horse-racing world. Yet the perseverance of his loyalty to, and defence of, Mary Wilson is hard to ignore. If Babbage had been entirely innocent, would he not have come to share Lady Byron’s view of Miss Wilson, rather than vigorously opposing it?
On 12 August 1852, Ada had secretly attempted to appoint Babbage as her executor. Through this most indiscreet of men, Lady Lovelace hoped to settle all the financial problems that beset her, to make provision for Mary Wilson, and to arrange for John Crosse to receive her private legacy. She also invited Babbage to make himself a present of any twelve ‘works’ (possibly meaning sets, rather than single books of the kind she had tried to bestow upon John Crosse) that he might wish to take from her library after her death. Babbage carried a substantial selection of the countess’s papers away with him that day. Ada had authorised him to destroy or to preserve what he thought fit. Here, once again, the evidence points towards Babbage’s intimate knowledge of her private affairs. While he may never have participated in Ada’s gambling activities, he most certainly knew what was going on.
Ada had not inherited her mother’s legal skills. Without a witness to a will, its executor’s delegated powers are redundant. This is something that Babbage was slow to realise. On 13 December, just over two weeks after Ada’s death, Lady Byron issued a formal request for the return of her daughter’s papers, claiming that this had been her daughter’s final wish. Babbage refused. Defending himself to Stephen Lushington later that month, the inventor volunteered to provide – should Lady Byron so wish it – an account of the invaluable support that Mary Wilson had offered to Ada. It was, he believed, appropriate that both Mary and her brother, Stephen, should be rewarded. Mary herself was willing to confirm that, back on 18 August 1852, Lady Lovelace had promised to repay her handsomely for unspecified good services.
On 5 January 1853, while considering Babbage’s request, Lady Byron learned from Mrs Jameson that the inventor was holding discussions with John Murray about his wish to publish a ‘memoir’ of Ada. The following day, Annabella offered to pay Mary Wilson £100. Anxious to avoid any suggestion of a bribe to a woman whose chief services had been to Ada’s racing ring, Lady Byron demanded written confirmation that this sum was given in lieu of any financial loss Miss Wilson had personally suffered by taking up service with Lady Lovelace. Ill-advised by the choleric Charles Babbage, Mary refused. On 25 February, Annabella decided to cut her losses and withdraw the offer, salting the wound with the observation that ‘I think it well she [Mary] has not received the £100.’*
The impulse towards self-justification had always been strong in Lady Byron. On 9 March, Annabella wrote to Woronzow Greig and, at much greater length, to his mother. The subject of these two documents of record (Mary Somerville was instructed not to burn her letter) was Charles Babbage, and what incensed Lady Byron most now was that he had dared to speak ill of the dead. To Greig, she reported upon a letter from Babbage, just received, ‘full of much bitter vituperation, and containing a reflection upon her so malignant that I cannot describe it’. Somewhat alarmingly, given Babbage�
�s reported wish to publish a memoir, his letter amounted almost to a formal document. A solicitor had clearly overseen and revised the letter before its despatch. Babbage stated that he had himself retained a copy.
Writing to Mrs Somerville, out in Florence, Annabella attempted to reconstruct the past. Rumours (she wrote) might have reached the Somervilles out in Italy that Lady Byron had excluded Charles Babbage from her daughter’s home. Such gossip was ill-founded. Ada had ‘never hinted at any wish to see him’. This was untrue. Ada had specifically requested her mother to copy out a letter from Charles Locock in which the sympathetic doctor confirmed his patient’s eagerness to see Babbage. The wish had been there, but Annabella chose to draw a very fine line of distinction between the doctor’s letter and Ada’s own expressed desire. Mrs Somerville, while dutifully preserving Lady Byron’s letter, was prudent enough not to respond.
The fault lay on both sides. Annabella blamed Babbage for helping to lead Ada down from the sunny heights of science on which Lady Byron had yearned for her brilliant child to secure an enduring and eminent position. Babbage, for his part, felt that both he and the Wilsons had been badly treated. Like Lady Byron, Babbage was a man who did not easily forgive.
Talking to an admiring American visitor a full two years after Ada’s death, Charles Babbage became unexpectedly garrulous on the unexpected topic of Lady Lovelace’s hatred of her mother and her husband. Of Ada herself, Babbage apparently spoke with sad affection: ‘there was so much feeling in both his words and manner that I did not feel at liberty to question him as to the nature of the unhappiness of the life he was speaking of . . .’ So sombre and altered was Babbage’s manner at this point that the visitor, one Henry Hope Reed, was led to assume that the unknown lady at issue must have killed herself.
The interview (it appeared in an American journal several years after Mr Hope Reed’s death) is fascinating in what it reveals about Babbage himself. The problem with Ada Lovelace, Babbage informed his attentive visitor, was that she was ‘utterly unimaginative’. You could say anything you liked (‘all sorts of extraordinary stories’) and that ‘matter-of-fact mind’ of hers would accept them all as plain fact. Really, it was quite hilarious to see how solemnly the countess swallowed them down.
In Byron's Wake Page 43
