Diligently though the arguments were set out and substantiated by the letters of which Ralph by then owned the largest collection in the country, the tiny print run of a mere three dozen copies for Lady Noel Byron and the Leighs (1887) ensured that its influence was negligible. Recipients of the hand-delivered copies (primarily friends and relatives) already shared Ralph’s view: these sympathisers included his sister, his brother-in-law, various Noels, the De Morgans, and Ralph’s sympathetic young half-brother, Lionel, born in 1865 from Lord Lovelace’s second marriage.
Lord Lovelace, perhaps because (in characteristic fashion) he was off busily building himself a vast new home – his fourth – near Lake Torridon in north-west Scotland, was unavailable for comment.
In 1893, the old earl died. Lionel, who had been left Horsley Towers and the Scottish estate, while Ashley Combe and Ockham Park went to his older brother, touched Ralph’s heart by instantly offering to send him the family portraits that still adorned Horsley’s Great Hall: the Margaret Carpenter painting of Ada, in the year of her marriage; the Albanian portrait of Lord Byron; Hoppner’s representation of little Annabella Milbanke in a high-waisted white dress. Brought back to Wentworth House,* these striking images were on show by 5 February 1895, when Henry James, accompanied by his London neighbour, Mary De Morgan, was invited over to view the most incriminatingly incestuous letters that were by now in Ralph’s possession. (Loaned the Byron–Melbourne correspondence by Hobhouse’s daughter, Lady Dorchester, Ralph prudently made copies.)
Returning to his own home later that night, Henry James recorded in his notebook that he had already been considering a brother–sister drama when he was shown the letters. James went a little further, stating for his own peace of mind that nothing so ‘nefarious’ as the Lovelace letters had even crossed his mind.
So Henry James said and doubtless he believed what he wrote down. But when he went on to write The Turn of the Screw (1897), was the novelist’s perception of the strange, hidden relationship between the two children of Bly – Miles and Flora – and their ghostly alter egos, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, affected by what he had read and heard two years earlier at Wentworth House? Might Byron’s letters to Lady Melbourne, and to Augusta, have contributed to the sense of something lubricious and elusive, never quite visible, that makes James’s self-styled ‘potboiler’ feel so troubling to its readers? Had Ralph talked about his grandmother’s strange insistence that young Byron Ockham should be kept away from his sister at all times? Impossible to prove, the disturbing influence of the letters that Henry James was shown by Ralph Lovelace, upon his own story of two intensely close siblings and their ambiguous interpreter, merits, perhaps, a consideration that it has not, as yet, received.
The final stage in Ralph’s long battle to reclaim the high ground for his grandmother was triggered by a disagreement arising from John Murray’s end-of-the-century edition of Byron’s letters. Handsomely bound in gold and sea-blue cloth, the volumes were annotated and edited by Rowland Prothero. Ralph withdrew from his role in the project as editor-in-chief after reading The Times review of Volume 3, in which the anonymous reviewer asserted (once again), that it was now clear that Lady Byron had no reason to leave her husband. To Ralph, it seemed that Prothero and Murray had combined to strengthen the case against his grandmother, and to vindicate Mrs Leigh. Determined to proclaim the truth, once and for all, the 2nd Lord Lovelace now embarked upon the immense project that would absorb him almost until his death in 1906. (Mary, his widow, recalled that her often sad and distrait husband had never appeared so calm and at ease as when he was at work upon this final endeavour.)
Huge, unwieldy and cumbersomely written, Astarte, or A Fragment of the Truth (Ralph’s title alluded to the female figure in Byron’s Manfred) remains a cobwebbed treasure trove for Byron scholars. But it is not the hagiography one might expect. Ralph spoke candidly about what he now recalled as a miserable upbringing and an unsatisfactory education. He deplored some of his grandmother’s ‘despotic’ ways.* Astarte nevertheless offered the clearest account that had yet been provided of the Byron marriage, together with the clearest justification for Annabella’s departure from it. Privately, however, Ralph blamed his grandmother’s parents for their excessive influence upon a conscientiously dutiful daughter. Leaving Byron, so Ralph Lovelace had come to believe, was the source of all his grandmother’s sorrows. Like Henry Crabb Robinson, Ralph never forgot the wistfulness with which Lady Byron talked about her husband during her own last years, as if entombed within a prison of her own regrets.
Ralph died peacefully while standing on the terrace at Ockham one warm early evening in August 1906. Eight months earlier, he had received a courteous tribute to Astarte from Henry James (who gently expressed the wish that its author had been just a little less reticent).† It may have been as well that Lord Lovelace died just before the publication of a book (Lord Byron and his Detractors deliberately echoed ‘Lord Byron and his Calumniators’, the title of John Paget’s scurrilous essay for Blackwood’s in January, 1870) in which John Murray IV and Rowland Prothero stubbornly asserted that no substantial proof had yet been provided of Mrs Leigh’s guilt. Without the admission that Lady Byron had failed to obtain from an evasive Augusta Leigh at their ill-fated Reigate encounter, so Lord Byron’s staunchest defenders asserted, Ralph Lovelace’s charge of incest remained unproven.
In 1907 (in a book commissioned by John Murray IV), Richard Edgcumbe entered the lists with Byron: The Last Phase. The truth, so Edgcumbe laboriously explained to credulous readers, was that the bearer of Byron’s secret child had been his first love, Mary Chaworth. Augusta had gallantly faked a pregnancy in order to save from social disgrace a married woman to whom Mrs Leigh, like her brother, remained deeply attached. Every incriminating verse that Byron had addressed to his beloved sister had in fact been written to Mary Chaworth. Entertaining to read, Edgcumbe’s book is best treated as an extravagant fiction.
How much did Rowland Prothero and John Murray IV know of the true story? The awkward answer peeps through Marie Belloc Lowndes’s record of a conversation which took place on 4 December 1911. Dining at the Murrays’ Wimbledon home, Hilaire Belloc’s clever older sister learned that her host privately accepted the story of incest, but believed that he, as the indebted descendant of Byron’s own publisher, had a duty to suppress that fact.
In 1920, the widowed Mary Lovelace made her own contribution to the reclamation of Lady Byron. To a second and expanded edition of Astarte, Mary now added the letters which Ralph himself had been criticised for excluding. (The fault was not altogether his: Lady Dorchester had refused to permit the inclusion of Byron’s most revealing letters to Lady Melbourne, while the discreetly manipulative Leslie Stephen had dissuaded Ralph from publishing several self-incriminating letters written by Mrs Leigh.) Writing an affectionate memoir of her husband during that same post-war period, Ralph’s widow quietly emphasised the burden that the issue of his grandmother’s reputation had become for him, and how hard an honourable man had always striven to do what he believed to be right.
Forty years of experience of dealing both with Lady Byron’s papers and a sensation-loving press had taught the second Lady Lovelace the value of discretion. Writing about Ralph’s sister in 1920, three years after Anne’s death, Mary glided placidly over the details of the Blunts’ bizarre and frequently wretched marriage. (It had ended in 1906, the year of Ralph’s death.) Instead, she dwelt upon Anne’s exceptional courage, resilience, vigour (she could still vault on to a horse at the age of seventy-seven) and high intelligence. Blessed (in her sister-in-law’s admiring words) with the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child and the soul of a saint, Anne had spent her last ten years living in Egypt. She died as Baroness Wentworth in 1917, having outlived her niece, Molly King-Noel (the title’s previous bearer since Ralph Lovelace’s death), by just six months.
Judith, Anne’s only child, was divorced from her artistic husband, Neville Lytton, in 1923. The couple had been marr
ied for twenty-four years. Like her mother, and like Ada, Lady Lytton (also known as Baroness Wentworth) had an uncommon affinity with animals, and above all, with horses. When she died in 1957, the Crabbet Stud still comprised seventy-five of the world’s most beautiful horses, colourful murals of which adorned the ceilings of Crabbet Park, the graceful house designed by Judith’s mother. The stud was later sold – and subsequently dismantled – by one of Judith’s two daughters, Lady Winifrid Tryon. The house, happily, survives.
Houses, as much as their owners, have stories to be told. Seaham is now a spa. Halnaby has gone. Newstead Abbey’s future is currently far from secure.
Horsley Towers was sold by Ralph’s widow, Mary Lovelace, in 1920 to the great aircraft designer Sir Thomas Sopwith. Now a hotel, it retains the exterior and many of the internal features of William Lovelace’s extravagant creation, including the chapel, Ada’s tower and the mausoleum in which William and his second wife were buried. In 2018, a magnificent self-portrait of Sir Hubert Herkomer still hangs in Horsley’s entrance hall, signalling its architectural influence upon Lululaund, the Bavarian polymath’s own spectacular fantasy home (long since destroyed) at Bushey, in Hertfordshire.
Woburn Park has gone. At nearby Brooklands, Hugh Locke King created England’s first motor-racing track in 1907. (The house, built by Lady Hester King for her favourite son, is now a college.) The Lovelaces’ house at Ashley Combe has been demolished. So has Kirkby Mallory, better known today as Mallory Park, a motorbike track. The church and graveyard survive, as does Ada’s unkempt shrine.
Fire destroyed the main house at Ockham Park in 1948, seven years after Mary Lovelace’s death. The family papers escaped the blaze, having been stored in the separate stable block (which survives). In 1957, they were moved to Crabbet, to be divided between Judith Lytton’s two daughters and her son, grandfather of the present Lord Lytton.
POSTSCRIPT
Lady Byron’s fate, following her mauling at the hands of the gentlemen of the Victorian press, was to continue to be perceived as they had described her. Ralph’s two books, reaching a tiny, well-informed audience, caused no shift in the public’s perception of her as a coldly vindictive woman. Neither, in 1929, did Ethel Colburn Mayne’s redemptive account of a maligned philanthropist. Visitors to Kensal Rise need sharp eyes to discover Lady Byron’s name on the 1885 Reformers’ Memorial. (She is listed alongside Barbara Bodichon, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Butler and Robert Dale Owen.)
Thirty years after the publication of Mrs Mayne’s book, access to the Lovelace Papers was independently granted to Malcolm Elwin (working on the papers held at New Buildings, a house on the Crabbet Estate, by the Earl of Lytton) and to that ardent Byronophile, Doris Langley Moore (working on the papers held at Crabbet by Lord Lytton’s sisters).* It was unfortunate for Lady Byron, already in the doghouse, that neither Elwin nor Moore liked her. Malcolm Elwin’s books (the second of which was completed by another hand and published after his death in 1973) confirmed the grim portrait of Lady Byron given in works by Mrs Moore, books which reached a far wider audience.
A respected authority upon Lord Byron, Langley Moore’s enduring prejudice against his wife has exerted an unfortunately baleful influence. The origin of her somewhat excessive devotion to the poet and his works, as her unpublished memoir makes clear, was touchingly romantic. Growing up in Johannesburg, where her father was the editor of the Sunday Times, Doris Langley-Levy became addicted to Byron’s works at an early age. Her father gave her a copy of Childe Harold in 1917, when she was just fifteen years old; when she arrived in England six years later, Langley-Levy was carrying the book and had set her heart on entering the world of Byronic studies. Warmly supported by John Murray VI (‘Jock’), she went on to write several magnificent books about the poet. The strength of her attachment to him is apparent in the fact that she was married while standing upon the – rather fragile – slab that covers the Byron family vault at Hucknall Torkard. (The slab has since then been placed under a protective raised box with a see-through lid.) While Robin Moore became the biographer’s official husband, it is hardly an exaggeration to state that his wife’s heart, until the day she died, belonged to Lord Byron.
Immense though Mrs Moore’s contribution to the world of Byron scholarship has been, her espousal of the poet resulted in a uniquely skewed take upon his life. Viewing herself almost in the role of a consort, it proved impossible for Moore to take an impartial view of the actual wife who had, after a single year, abandoned Lord Byron and left his house. She herself, she must have felt, would never have shown such disloyalty.
Drawing upon the wealth of family letters which was placed in her hands at Crabbet and working in close correspondence at all times with Leslie Marchand, the magnificent second editor of Byron’s letters (Rowland Prothero was the first), Mrs Moore used that rich resource to create an unforgettable portrait of Lady Byron as a neurotic hypochondriac, a mutton-stuffing glutton, a grudging giver and a humourless despot.
The truth about Annabella, as Julia Markus set out to demonstrate in Lady Byron and Her Daughters (2015) – following the trail explored by Ethel Coburn Mayne (1929) and Joan Pierson (1992) – is both more complex and more nuanced. Annabella was undeniably a controlling, over-legalistic and often difficult woman, one whose enlightened attitude to reform and whose generous use of a great fortune to improve social conditions went hand in hand with an attitude that can, at best, be described as interventionist. She did bear grudges, as William Lovelace discovered to his cost. Loyal to her friends and kind to the less fortunate of her family, Annabella never ceased to love the captivating and capricious genius with whom she lived as his wife for just one year. As the mother of his child, she did what she sincerely believed was best for a young woman whose personality resisted moulding. She took great pride in Ada, never ceasing to encourage her in her studies, while worrying about her always fragile health and changeable spirit. She turned against William Lovelace only when she felt that he had betrayed his position as a fellow guardian of this precious, but erratic, young woman. At the time of her death, Lady Byron commanded almost universal respect, admiration and – from those who had known her as a loyal friend – love.
Annabella’s daughter has suffered a different fate. After a century of obscurity, Ada Lovelace stands in danger of becoming lost behind the growing radiance of a reputation that perceives her largely as an icon: an exceptional female pioneer of computer technology.
In 1869, Ada Lovelace signified nothing more to Harriet Beecher Stowe than the fact that she was married to an aristocrat. Not until the 1950s and the dawn of the computer age did it begin to be realised just how exceptional a contribution Byron’s daughter made to a technological future that she would have embraced with delight. It is a future that has retrospectively embraced her. In 2018, we have an Ada Lovelace Day, a NASA language named in her honour, two documentaries about her and a burgeoning Ada Institute for Digital Technology. There are blogs about Ada, courses upon Ada, conferences about Ada, exhibitions about Ada, biographies of Ada, a (magnificent) graphic novel about Ada and children’s books about Ada. In Britain and America, the name of Ada Lovelace now carries as much, if not more, weight than that of her celebrated father.
Ada revered her father. In celebrating Lovelace’s powerful intelligence and her predictive gifts, however, it is crucial that we recognise the twin sources of Ada’s extraordinary personality: that combination of her mother’s enquiring, scholarly intelligence with her father’s imagination and volatile temperament; a dangerous blend of fierce self-discipline and unbridled euphoria.
Ada Lovelace spent most of her short life trying to live up to her mother’s high expectations, while striving to compete against a father who increasingly haunted her imagination. Poetically, he soared above her; in personality, with all its attendant risks, Ada was – and gloried in being – the daughter of Lord Byron, through and through.
Annabella’s role in controlling and encouraging the Byr
onic side of her daughter’s vivid personality cannot be overestimated. We can never hope to understand Lady Byron if we fail to accept how torn she was between a romantic desire to see her beloved husband recreated – Annabella’s tender pride in Ada’s own late-flowering (and not terribly good) poetry speaks for itself – and a prudent terror of seeing reborn in her child the violent demons that she had personally confronted in her husband.
One thing is certain. Lady Byron followed her husband’s wishes concerning his daughter to the letter. Ada was brought up – and brought up with far greater consideration, sympathy and love than has been granted in the past – by her mother. But the setter of the ground rules – the watchful advisor from afar during the first eight years of his daughter’s life – was that astonishing, legendary father whom Ada never knew.
* * *
* It was Lord Lovelace who had urged his son to take on the barony, in order to keep the Wentworth title in the family. It would pass from Ralph (d.1906) to Ralph’s daughter (d.1917) and then, via Ralph’s sister, Anne (d.1917) to her daughter, Judith.
* Sold by John Murray IV and since demolished, ‘Newstead’ now lies under Centre Court, Wimbledon. A local street, Newstead Way, still marks its past presence – and offers fine views of Centre Court.
* A further work, a life of the Marquis de Boissy, (‘mon bon mari’) remained unfinished. A third, The Life of Lord Byron in Italy, was published (with more praise rightly being granted to its translator, Michael Rees, and heroic editor, Peter Cochran, than to its long-winded author) in 2005.
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