It was, therefore, a singularly privileged group of some twenty men and women who gathered to meet Mrs Stowe on 24 May at the London home of Elizabeth Jesser Reid. It was at this occasion that Anna Jameson (still struggling to regain Annabella’s friendship) introduced Henry Crabb Robinson to her former soulmate. Robinson’s interest in both Lady Byron and the honoured American guest did not preclude him from observing that the most impressive person in the room was William Craft, the new Ockham school teacher. Mr Craft was, Robinson respectfully noted in his diary (while employing the problematic language of that time), ‘the most intelligent-looking negro I ever saw’.
Recording at a later date the history of her friendship with Lady Byron, Harriet Beecher Stowe described that first encounter at Mrs Reid’s home. She had been struck by Lady Byron’s fetching appearance (slight, pale and silver-haired in a lacy widow’s cap and lavender-coloured gown) and appealing manner (poised, quick and graceful). The topic of slavery was instantly raised; Mrs Stowe was astonished to find how well-informed and astute Lady Byron appeared to be, and how original in her ideas. (‘Many of her words surprised me greatly, and gave me new material for thought. I found I was in company with a commanding mind.’)
In 1856, the Beecher Stowes made a second visit to Europe, both to publicise Dred (Mrs Stowe’s new novel was about the runaway slave leader of a plotted rebellion), and to attend the London stage debut of Mary Webb, the African-American actress for whom Harriet had adapted parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin into dramatised readings, entitled The Christian Slave. Arriving in the dog-day heat of August, the Stowes found London disappointingly empty of smart society. It was during this quiet period that Stowe’s friendship with Lady Byron first bloomed. Annabella, who had already offered loyal support to Mary Webb and her family, invited the Stowes to visit her at home on at least two occasions. On the second, their schoolboy son Henry was introduced to Byron Ockham, a young man whose brilliant eyes and muscular physique (comparable to the Farnese Hercules, gasped well-travelled Mrs Stowe) provided welcome distraction from the subject of the viscount’s unconventional lifestyle. A poised Lady Byron expressed her hope that Lord Ockham was proving to be a good moral influence upon his fellow mechanics at Scott Russell’s shipyard. There was talk of his setting up a new school in the East End. Really, it was quite wonderful to observe how Lady Byron looked for the best in everybody who surrounded her, an admiring Mrs Stowe would later remark.
Following a headily aristocratic September in Scotland (where the Stowes were the guests of the Duchess of Sutherland), Harriet’s husband escorted young Henry back to his American schooling. Meanwhile, Harriet, together with her married sister, Mary Foote Perkins, arranged to visit a personal hero, Charles Kingsley, at his Berkshire rectory, before embarking on her second tour of Europe. It was by happy chance that Annabella’s new abode was at Ham Common, conveniently placed along the westward route from London out to Eversley, Kingsley’s secluded home.
Following a satisfying expedition to Eversley Rectory, Mrs Stowe and her sister spent a night at Aford House. It was now that a key conversation took place between Lady Byron and Mrs Beecher Stowe. Disclosures were ventured on both sides. Harriet’s confession of her youthful adoration of Lord Byron led easily on to an unfolding of the private history of Lady Byron’s marriage. Only the slightest of pauses occurred when Mrs Stowe confessed that she already knew about the incest. (Her source was their mutual American friend, Eliza Cabot Follen.) Nodding swift assent, Annabella passed on to a thrillingly intimate account of her married life.
And what, a pale-faced and emotional Lady Byron asked at the end of her enthralling monologue, should she do now? Plans were once again afoot for a popular edition of her late husband’s poems, prefaced by what threatened to be a wickedly misleading account of Lord Byron’s domestic life. Was it her duty to reveal what she alone now knew to be the Truth? Should she volunteer it herself, or . . .?
Lady Byron’s hesitation was pregnant with implication. Was Annabella hoping that Mrs Stowe would step forward with an offer of her own services, or was she simply seeking practical advice? Mrs Stowe herself was uncertain what was expected from her. Playing for time, she requested a written account of past events to which she could devote herself with scrupulous consideration. To this, Lady Byron readily agreed.
The discussion at Ham took place at the end of October. On 5 November, Mrs Stowe returned the detailed notes (from which Lady Byron had prudently omitted any mention of incest). Twelve days later, on the verge of departing for Paris, Mrs Stowe announced that she had changed her mind ‘somewhat’. Better, perhaps, to publish nothing at this time. Such delicate matters should be placed in the hands of ‘some discreet friends’ who could decide, after Lady Byron’s own demise, what should be done?
Perhaps Harriet sensed that she had disappointed her new friend. Shortly before returning to America in the summer of 1857, Mrs Stowe sent Lady Byron a gift of some little majolica vases from Italy, together with a reassuring message of affection. ‘I often think how strange it is that I should know you,’ she wrote on 5 June, ‘you who were a sort of legend of my early days – that I should love you is only a natural result.’ Omitted from this pleasing tribute was any hint of just what sort of a legend the youthful Lady Byron might have been. It was the poet, not his widow, whom an impressionable young girl had worshipped.
Henry Beecher Stowe drowned shortly after his mother’s return to America. Lady Byron’s silence about the tragedy hurt. ‘I did long to hear from you,’ Harriet confessed on 30 June 1858, ‘because I know that you did know everything sorrow can teach.’
A considerable deterioration in Lady Byron’s already failing health may have contributed to her neglect of a friend in need. She had moved into her final home, a tall, pleasant house in St George’s Terrace, looking out at the steep green ascent of Primrose Hill. All physical endeavours had become a struggle. The next-door and smaller house was being purchased in order to create a practical ground-floor suite for her own use. Ralph, about to go to Oxford (following a meeting with a kind-hearted academic, Professor Donkin), was to be given an upstairs study all his own. A physician was in permanent residence, but the kindest of Lady Byron’s nurses was her own granddaughter.
The two Annabellas enjoyed a delightful friendship, so Mrs Stowe now learned. It was one in which a ‘spirit union’ left plenty of room for lively mutual dissent. Together, they had been reading serialised instalments of Harriet’s new novel, The Minister’s Wooing. Tactfully (for this was not one of Mrs Stowe’s finest works), Lady Byron compared it to Adam Bede (‘the book of the season’) and ingenuously wondered which would prove the more enduring.
Curiously, Annabella made no mention to Mrs Stowe of the fact that she herself was once again planning to write the story of her doomed marriage. On 18 April 1859, she heard from Anna Jones, the vicar’s daughter who had kept up a friendship with both Mary Montgomery and herself ever since those miserable early weeks of 1816 when Annabella had taken refuge at Kirkby. The chief topic of Miss Jones’s letter was the autobiographical book which Lady Byron had declared that she was going to write. While Anna approved (‘The sooner you commence the better’), she qualified her encouragement by adding a curious rider: namely, that ‘many should give opinions and be allowed to revise & find fault’.
The project went no further. The thought of being revised and found fault with was enough to deter an author who detested criticism. But it’s more likely that Annabella, growing weaker month by month, simply ran out of energy.
Harriet Beecher Stowe returned to England in the summer of 1859. Calling upon her old friend and finding an ashen-faced and greatly aged Lady Byron almost unable to speak, Mrs Stowe departed in haste. A second visit took place on a warm summer afternoon. The invalid had recovered enough strength to undertake a pleasant saunter around the garden of her London home. ‘She was enjoying one of those bright intervals of freedom from pain and languor, in which her spirits always rose so buoyant and youthf
ul,’ Harriet would fondly recall. Accompanying her guest to the railway station and noting Mrs Stowe’s sudden dismay at discovering she had left behind her gloves (an essential part of every proper Victorian lady’s attire), Lady Byron impulsively drew off her own. That spontaneous gift, Harriet later observed, was entirely in keeping with her admired friend’s noble character.
Lady Byron died quietly in her bed at St George’s Terrace on 16 May 1860, on the eve of what would have been her sixty-eighth birthday. (Anna Jameson, still unforgiven, had gone to her grave just two months earlier.) Sending the news to Stephen Lushington at 5am, Annabella sadly wrote that ‘my darling’ had died an hour earlier, after undergoing great suffering with patient resignation. The cause of death was identified as cancer of the breast.
Lord Lovelace had never given up hope of a reconciliation. All through these final weeks, he had hovered close by, waiting for any summons from the dying woman which he might receive. It never came. On 18 May, an embarrassed and disapproving Stephen Lushington was forced to tell the unhappy earl (who was, after all, his landlord at Ockham Park) that all three of his children opposed his plan to attend the funeral. If he came, they would not. Given no option, Lovelace stayed away.
Dr Lushington himself was of course present on 20 May 1860, to see his old friend’s coffin lowered into place at Kensal Rise. The grave was discreet: the plain granite slab carried only Annabella’s (misspelt) name, a pair of dates and her county of birth. The burial plot lay close to those of several Lushingtons. The lawyer’s family had become almost an extension of Lady Byron’s own.*
Travelling back from the funeral within a closed carriage together with Lady Byron’s lawyer, Gerard Ford, the 7th Lord Byron made a startling disclosure. It had been made known to him – and apparently to nobody else – by the late Lady Byron that her son-in-law had visited her house and robbed her of a box of the precious letters that she had always protected from public view. Challenged by his younger son in later years, Lovelace flatly denied any such theft. It seems clear now, however, that those abstracted papers – they included letters that had passed between Annabella and Augusta Leigh in 1816–17 – were later loaned or copied for use by hostile critics at the height of the posthumous onslaught on Lady Byron’s reputation. Ralph King, while convinced of his father’s transgression, identified the culprit in Astarte (1905) only as ‘a deceased relative’.†
Lady Byron’s will was – as we might expect – meticulously planned. Ralph, the principal heir of all that it was within his grandmother’s power to bestow (that is to say, the enormous Wentworth estates), was instructed to add Noel and Milbanke to his surname. (Lady Byron had also taken care – while never using it herself – to claim and retain the Wentworth barony for her descendants.) Annabella (who now changed her name to Lady Anne King Noel) received, in addition to investments that provided an annual income of £3,000, all of her grandmother’s jewels, trinkets and ornaments. Mary Carpenter, a trustee, was given Red Lodge, the Bristol property that Lady Byron had purchased to house and rehabilitate young women in difficulties. Edward Noel received £1,000, while £100 went to Charles Noel’s son and namesake. Louisa Noel was given £500. The same sum was bestowed upon the mysterious but memorably named Thomas Horlock Bastard, a Dorset phrenologist.*
Most significant, however, was a clause in the will that concerned Lady Byron’s personal papers. In 1853, the late Thomas Davison, a close friend from Annabella’s early years, had been replaced as one of her three trustees by Henry Bathurst, a lawyer living at Doctor’s Commons. (Henry’s mother, Lady Caroline, was a close friend to Lady Byron.) Instructions were given to Mr Bathurst, together with Mary Carpenter and Frances Carr (Lushington’s unmarried sister-in-law) that all of Lady Byron’s papers should be immediately sealed and deposited at a bank. Lady Byron’s final instruction rang crystal clear. ‘I direct that no one else however closely connected with me shall on any plea whatsoever be allowed to have access.’
Near to death, Annabella believed that she was asking the trustees to act in the best interests of her family when she specified that they were to act with special thought to the welfare of her grandchildren. The intention was good. The result was to prove disastrous, both for the future defence of Lady Byron’s reputation and for the peace of mind of those same beloved grandchildren whom she was so anxious to protect.
* * *
* John Wilson, writing in the voice of ‘The Shepherd’ in Blackwood’s popular Noctes Ambrosianae, in May 1830, had attacked Lady Byron, declaring that a spouse’s first loyalty always lay to her husband, not her parents, however brutal the facts might be.
* Listing Lady Byron’s philanthropic activities would take up an interminable chapter. Here are just two examples. In 1853, possibly moved by her grandson’s accounts, she strongly advocated the need to improve conditions in far-flung penal colonies such as Van Diemen’s Land, while setting up two new schools at home. In 1854, she was the sole funder both of the new Five Points Mission in New York, and of Red Lodge, a refuge and school for young girls set up by Harriet Martineau’s cousin, Mary Carpenter, in Bristol. Numerous other missions, schools, asylums and hospitals received both financial support and the benefit of Lady Byron’s formidable administrative mind.
* The estates included Kirkby Mallory, Knowle in Warwickshire (now a ward of the thriving Birmingham extension town of Solihull), part of Leamington and substantial tracts of land near Darlington in Co. Durham (where her estate was still referred to in the local press in 1834 as belonging to ‘the unfortunate Lady Byron’).
* The Albion is also puzzlingly referred to in letters as the Allum. These would appear to be one and the same ship.
* Robertson’s parishioners had been outraged in 1853 by the Vicar of Brighton’s refusal to enable the hard-pressed cleric to take on an assistant, one whose name had been put forward by Lady Byron in an effort to help her friend. The candidate (Ernest Tower) was the grandson of Isabella Baker, in whose house Annabella herself had been born. Later, Tower took up a post at one of Lady Byron’s parishes in the Midlands.
* A Passport to Hell: The Mystery of Richard Realf by George Rathmell (iuniverse, 2002).
* The analogy to the North Pole suggests that Howitt’s experience may have occurred at uplands, the house near Mortlake at which Annabella laughingly described an unheated chamber in which less-favoured visitors were housed as ‘the Polar Room’. Louisa Noel was among the luckier ones who was promised the cosy downstairs bedroom with its own snug German-style stove.
* Mary Shelley, who copied the play for Byron and much admired it, told its author that she had greatly preferred the task to working on his Don Juan.
* ‘I would not object to a working woman as his wife,’ Lady Byron told Robert Noel on 11 April 1857 (Dep. Lovelace Byron 104).
* It’s hard to keep count of the number of houses at which Annabella lived after Ada’s death. Besides various homes in Brighton, they included Aford House at Ham Common, uplands House at East Sheen, 1 Cambridge Terrace on Regent’s Park, a house in Gloucester Terrace, another which Ralph reported that she was buying from a bankrupt and, finally, two adjacent houses in the then unfashionable location of Primrose Hill.
† George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind (1871).
* Lushington himself chose to be buried, with equal lack of ostentation, in the churchyard at Ockham.
† William Lovelace’s second wife, Jane Jenkins, expressed strong indignation at even this veiled allegation. It was inconceivable that her late husband would have behaved in such an underhand manner, she asserted to her stepson. Posterity has sided with Ralph.
* The will was extensive. The list given here represents only a modest selection of Lady Byron’s bequests.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
OUTCAST
Less than a month after Lady Byron’s death, Harriet Martineau decided to write Annabella’s life. In order to do so, she approached for their views – and anticipated approval from – those reformers and f
riends who were most likely to assist her by providing recollections of an esteemed colleague.
Initially, the response was warm. The approval of Mary Carpenter, a junior trustee, could be relied upon since she was Harriet’s close relation. Elizabeth Jesser Reid was very much in favour, as was Mrs Reid’s present houseguest, Anna Jones, a woman who had known Lady Byron for over forty years. Mary Montgomery, while herself sending along supportive messages, asked Miss Reid to convey that her own houseguest, Julia Smith (Parthe and Florence Nightingale’s formidable aunt), was ‘well pleased’ by Miss Martineau’s proposal.
That initial trail of enthusiasm went cold only when word reached Frances Carr, the senior trustee of Lady Byron’s papers. Fanny – dutifully aware of Annabella’s repetition in her will of her 1849 injunction (stipulating that her papers were to be withheld from family and public view, without exception, for a period of thirty years) – vetoed the project. She was not, however, able to prevent Harriet Martineau from publishing an expansive personal tribute to a woman for whom Martineau entertained both sincere affection and a high esteem.
Martineau’s essay appeared in the first weeks of 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly and the Daily News, the popular British newspaper for which she wrote on a regular basis. Martineau’s tone was laudatory. Lady Byron had loved her husband until the last. ‘She gloried in his fame.’ Her wealth ‘such as her husband left of it’, had been altruistically lavished upon philanthropic causes and educational reform. An unhappy marriage was blamed both for the ‘wretched health’ that made Lady Byron’s survival from year to year ‘a wonder’ even to her doctors, and for ‘the few and small peculiarities’ (the delicate topic of ‘strained affections’ was touched upon) that bespoke ‘irremediable loneliness in life’. As to posterity, Martineau felt confident in stating that Lady Byron’s death would not only create a sense of bereavement ‘wherever our language is spoken’, but that Lady Byron herself would be referred to with tenderness:
In Byron's Wake Page 46
