(1812–13)
‘Childe Harold . . . is on every table, and himself courted, visited, flattered and praised whenever he appears. He has a pale, sickly, but handsome countenance, a bad figure, animated and amusing conversation and in short, he is really the only topic of almost every conversation – the men jealous of him, the women of each other . . .’
ELIZABETH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE TO HER SON, SIR AUGUSTUS FOSTER, IN WASHINGTON, 1812
Annabella’s first encounter with Byron took place at Lady Caroline Lamb’s morning waltzing party, held in the glorious entrance hall of Melbourne House. Byron – as he later recalled – was intrigued by Miss Milbanke’s reserved manner and air of ‘quiet contempt’. The curiosity was mutual. Writing up her journal that evening at Lady Gosford’s home, Annabella noted that Lord Byron’s disdainful expression – she drew near enough to notice his restless eyes and the frequency with which he masked the impatient twitch of full lips with his hand – suggested a proper degree of scorn for the frivolity that surrounded him. Lord Byron, lame since birth and always conscious of the halt in his step – he wore loose pantaloons to conceal the defect – declared his preference for boxing to waltzing; Annabella, an enthusiastic dancer, now decided that she, too, despised such trivial amusements.
Writing to her mother the following day with a careful account of Lord Byron’s appearance and manner, Annabella reported that his opinions were both eloquent and sincere. Byron, meanwhile, baffled a captivated Caroline Lamb by the keen interest he displayed in her husband William’s young cousin from the north: ‘the first words you ever spoke to me in confidence were concerning Annabella,’ Caroline later reminded him, before adding with more frankness than tact: ‘I was astonished – overpowered – I could not believe it.’
How much did Annabella already know about the young man whose small, proud head and aloof manner she studied with such eager interest on 25 March?
Reading the Edinburgh Review’s advance puff of Childe Harold and its author in February 1812, Annabella had learned from Francis Jeffrey’s unsigned and influential review that the poem’s author could stand comparison with Dryden and (he was one of Annabella’s particular favourites) George Crabbe. Thrillingly, she learned that there was an evident and powerful connection between the young poet and his poem’s eponymous Childe, a ‘sated epicure . . . his heart burdened by a long course of sensual indulgence’, who wanders through Europe’s loveliest scenery with the restless displeasure of Milton’s Lucifer, ‘hating and despising himself most of all for beholding it with so little emotion’.
Since everybody in London society was talking about Childe Harold’s author by the time that Annabella met him, it’s probable that she also knew that he, like herself, was an only child. (His half-sister Augusta was the daughter of Captain Byron’s first marriage to Lady Conyers, the once wealthy and – so shockingly – divorced wife of the Marquis of Camarthen.) She may not have known that young Byron and his own once wealthy Scottish mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, had been subsequently abandoned by his philandering, financially reckless, and finally debt-ridden father. She would certainly have learned that he had returned from his two-year tour of Europe in the summer of 1811, just before the sudden death of his mother at Newstead Abbey, an appealingly derelict family mansion of precisely the kind that a romantic young poet ought to own. (Byron spent little time at Newstead, leaving it under the sporadic supervision of a cheerful young sailor cousin, his namesake and – at the present time – his heir.)
This was mere background detail. Annabella was more interested to discover that Lord Byron’s scornful expression concealed a generous heart and a strong social conscience, clear evidence of which had already emerged in his first – and widely discussed – public speech.
Byron was paying one of his occasional visits to Newstead in December 1811, when the tranquil surface of country life in Nottinghamshire was ruffled by an outbreak of rioting. The introduction of new mechanical looms threatened the livelihood of stocking-makers at a time when weaving provided the sole source of income for many poor families. A few bold rebels smashed the new frames that were intended to put them out of work. The punishment, at a time of vicious repression, was transportation and fourteen years of exile to a penal colony in Australia. In February 1812, a bill was introduced to change that penalty from deportation to death.
The government’s brutal response to Nottinghamshire’s angry frame-breakers was the subject that Byron picked for his maiden speech in the House of Lords.* Parliamentary speeches during that period tended to be stupefyingly dull. Byron’s, delivered on 27 February, was inflammatory: ‘Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows?’ he demanded of a largely admiring House. A week later, his angry poem on ‘Framers of the Frame Bill’ (‘Who, when asked for a remedy, sent down a rope’) was printed in the Morning Chronicle. The poem appeared anonymously, but Byron’s distinctive voice was easily identified.
Scores of the young ladies who panted after Byron in 1812 were attracted by the mad, bad and dangerous aspect of his volatile personality. Annabella saw a man who – like herself – sought to be of service to the world. Had he not proved it, during their very first conversations, by the concern he evinced for the orphan of her former protégé, Joseph Blacket? (Annabella was unaware that Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, written before his departure for the Continent, had poked fun at the former cobbler for his high-flown poetry.)
Besieged by admirers during that happy spring of 1812 as she had never been before, Annabella’s letters home dwelt increasingly upon one subject. Lord Byron was ‘without exception of young or old more agreeable in conversation than any person I know . . . a very bad, very good man,’ she informed her mother on 16 April. Byron, so Sir Ralph learned on the following day, was ‘deeply repentant’ for his youthful sins; by 26 April, Annabella was ready to proclaim it as her ‘Christian duty’ to offer him spiritual guidance. Was this really a mission to redeem Lord Byron’s soul, her nervous mother wondered, or had Annabella fallen in love with a hardened reprobate? Writing to Lady Melbourne, never her favourite member of the Milbanke family, Judith confessed her fears and solicited – for the first time in her life – that worldly lady’s personal intervention.
Judith’s appeal fell into outstretched hands. ‘My cousins cannot live without me,’ Annabella had innocently boasted to her parents on 15 April, during a month in which she spent almost as much time at Melbourne House as under Mary Gosford’s roof. Flattered by the smooth courtesies of Lady Melbourne and her daughter, Emily (Lady Cowper), Annabella remained blissfully unconscious of her value as a pawn in their scheme to sabotage Byron’s increasingly public relationship with Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law, the lovesick, married and scandal-prone Caroline Lamb.
Judith’s information was swiftly put to use. Hints of Byron’s growing interest in William Lamb’s starchy little cousin were intended to discourage Lady Caroline; instead, they spurred a jealous mistress into action. Towards the end of April, Annabella was persuaded – without much difficulty – to hand over a selection of her own poems, in order – so Caroline sweetly declared – that she might obtain Lord Byron’s sincere opinion of their merit.
Lord Byron did not, as Caroline must have hoped, jeer at Annabella’s high-minded verses: if anything, he rated them too highly. A poem about a cave at Seaham was singled out for its pleasing turn of thought – albeit of a somewhat different turn from his own – while favourable comparisons were made to the works of Joseph Blacket, Annabella’s verses being ‘better much better’.
But these are all, has she no others? She certainly is a very extraordinary girl, who would imagine so much strength & variety of thought under that placid countenance? . . . You will say as much of this to Miss M. as you think proper. I say all this very sincerely. I have no desire to be better acquainted with Miss Milbank [sic]; she is too good for a fallen spirit to know, and I should like her more if she were less perfect.
Although hardly the missive that Caroline had hoped for, Byron’s response offered enough fuel to serve her purpose. On 2 May, Annabella received a morning summons to visit her cousin’s wife in the suite of upper rooms at Melbourne House which Caroline shared with her husband and their lovable, mentally handicapped young son, Augustus.
Caroline kept no record of the encounter; Annabella, with uncharacteristic terseness, noted that she had received Lord Byron’s written opinion of her verses, answered Cousin Caroline’s questions with ‘a painful acknowledgement’ and that she had then – this was most unlike her – returned home to dine alone.
Annabella’s handwritten copy of the letter with which Lady Caroline presented her visitor (it survives within the Lovelace Byron Papers) omitted that final sentence about her own discouraging perfection. There can be little doubt, however, that the letter in its entirety was read aloud to the guest – and taken to heart. Over the next two years, the single fear consistently expressed by Annabella was that Byron would be disillusioned when he discovered her flaws.
And the ‘painful acknowledgement’? An admission that Annabella had already refused George Eden – he remained her most regular escort – is ruled out by Caroline’s insistent assertions, from May on, that Mr Eden was Miss Milbanke’s preferred suitor and that Byron himself stood no chance. More probably, Caroline extracted and then mocked her young cousin’s wistful dream of reforming Byron. Either way, Annabella left Melbourne House in low spirits.
Caroline’s own obsession with Byron found its way into one of Annabella’s rare attempts at comic verse. In ‘Byromania’, an undated satirical poem that seemingly emerged from that spring, she poked fun at her cousin’s wife for ‘smiling, sighing o’er his face’. Fortunately for her own peace of mind, Annabella remained unaware of the extremes to which Caroline was prepared to go in pursuit of the desired object (snippets of her pubic hair were hand-delivered to Byron’s rooms towards the end of the summer) or of the easy duplicity with which Byron himself – while assuring Lady Melbourne that he was doing everything to escape from Caroline’s clutches – continued to dally with a woman he fondly addressed as ‘the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing dangerous fascinating little being that lives’.
While Byron never presumed to call Annabella ‘a fascinating little being’, observers noted his interest and evident respect. Byron liked the idea of Miss Milbanke, Augustus Foster’s mother shrewdly informed her absent son during the summer of 1812, not as a mistress, but as a wife. Caroline, meanwhile, despatched a warning to Annabella to forget all about the salvation of ‘Falling Angels’. Filing this letter of 22 May away for future reference, Annabella pencilled a terse underlined comment on the envelope: ‘Very remarkable’.
By 22 May, Annabella’s parents had been in town for three weeks. It was the mother, so Byron convinced himself, who was responsible for an unwelcome alteration in Miss Milbanke’s manner. Friends with a vested interest hastened to produce other reasons for her coolness: ‘C[aroline] told me she was engaged to Eden, so did several others. Mrs [George] L[amb] her great friend, was of opinion (& upon my honour I believed her) that she neither did could nor ought to like me . . . was I to hazard my heart with a woman I was very much inclined to like, but at the same time sure could be nothing to me . . .?’
It is not necessary to suppose that Byron was being devious in this letter, addressed to Lady Melbourne on 28 September. (She had asked about his intentions towards her niece.) While passion was the keynote of his affair with the married Lady Caroline, an entirely different quality emerged in his search for a perfect wife. The Byron whom Annabella was getting to know was thoughtful, kind, friendly and courteous. ‘I have met with much evidence of his goodness,’ she had informed her mother on 13 April, after only two meetings with Byron. If only – as she continued to wish without results – her new friend would not show quite such respect, and even awe. A pedestal offered a lonely perch for a young lady with a romantic heart.
Outwardly calm, Annabella betrayed her growing feelings for Byron to her journal. On 20 June, she sat near enough to him at a lecture to see that what discomforted him was not Thomas Campbell’s allusion to religion, but the way the audience turned to watch Lord Byron’s reaction. (He was, she was beginning to perceive, intensely shy.) On 14 July, a week after enjoying a friendly chat with Byron at an evening hosted by Sarah Siddons, Annabella met him again at a party given by vivacious old Lady Cork. At this encounter, however, Byron wanted only to know whether she shared his high opinion of Miss Bessy Rawdon, the likeable and well-travelled niece of Lord Moira (later Lord Hastings).
Annabella’s discomfort was increased by her rigorous sense of fair play. Much though she wished it, she could not find a single bad word to say about the admirable Miss Rawdon. Going on from Lady Cork’s soirée to a party given that same night by Lady Melbourne’s married daughter, she felt puzzled by her own unhappiness. Cousin Emily’s evenings were always lively, and yet, alone with her journal, Annabella confessed that she had returned home ‘wearied with want of tranquillity and found no pleasure!’ More revealingly still, Annabella actually confided her jealous fears of the engaging Miss Rawdon to a mother whom she knew for an inveterate chatterbox. Judith, as Annabella had guessed would be the case, took the information directly to her sister-in-law. Who better than Lady Melbourne, so closely involved in all Byron’s affairs, would know where his affections truly lay?
Judith herself, or so she would proudly declare to Lady Melbourne at a later date, had known from the start that Annabella was interested only in one man. Chaperoning her niece around London during late August (the Milbankes had decamped from the sultry city to savour Richmond’s fresher air), Lady Melbourne swiftly reached the same opinion. Plainly, Annabella adored Byron. Far more surprising was the news from Lord Holland’s home at Cheltenham that Byron not only liked her niece, but that he actually wanted to marry her.
Byron’s declarative letter was written in the early autumn, when Caroline Lamb had been whisked away to Ireland and her lover had settled into Lord Holland’s Gloucestershire retreat to work on The Giaour, the first in a series of immensely successful romantic poems featuring an eastern setting. Lady Melbourne had asked what he meant to do about Caroline. Uneasy in the face of such directness, Byron mumbled that writing friendly letters helped to keep her under control. He then, writing on 13 September, sprang his surprise.
Now my dear Ly M. You are all out as to my real sentiments. I was, am & shall be I fear attached to another . . . one whom I wished to marry . . . had not some occurrances rather discouraged me . . . As I have said so much I may as well say all – the woman I mean is Miss Milbank [sic]. I know nothing of her fortune, & am told that her father is ruin’d . . . I never saw a woman whom I esteemed so much. But that chance is gone and there’s an end.
Now – my dear Ly M. I am completely in your power . . . If through your means, or any means, I can be free, or at least change my fetters, my regard & admiration could not be increased, but my gratitude would.
Lady Melbourne had become Byron’s cherished confidante during the course of his hectic six-month affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. No friend had a better understanding than she of the emotional volatility that was deployed with such lethal effect upon the women Byron loved – or thought he loved. But Lady Melbourne had also become quite attached to her strong-willed little niece during a summer in which Annabella had confided some of her own feelings about Byron. Noting that the suitor appeared both to believe that his cause was hopeless and yet to invite her help, Lady Melbourne answered with care. Love had not been mentioned in Byron’s letter; might she learn what he proposed to offer in its stead?
Directness produced as candid an answer as could have been expected from a man who was notoriously capable of changing his affections within the space of a few lines. Was Byron sure of himself? Frankly: ‘no’. Nevertheless, praising Annabella as ‘a clever woman, an amiable woman & of high blood’, Lord Byron believed that she would make him an excellent wife, one who would always find out the best in him.
As to Love, that is done in a week (provided the Lady has a reasonable share) besides marriage goes on better with esteem & confidence than romance, and she is quite pretty enough to be loved by her husband, without being so glaringly beautiful as to attract too many rivals.
Intent on gathering documentary evidence of the sincerity of his feelings for her niece, Lady Melbourne persisted in her quest. Wriggling on the hook that remained firmly in place, Byron displayed a bewildering variety of impulses (sudden enthusiasm for a black-eyed married lady; a dislike of Lady Milbanke; impatience with the time involved in courtship of such a virtuous girl; an ardent wish to address Lady Melbourne as his aunt). On 28 September, in what seems to have been his final letter on the subject, he began by denying his queried interest in Bessy Rawdon, before enquiring whether Annabella intended to marry George Eden. He was halfway through writing it when a frantic letter from the tenacious Lady Caroline galvanised her hounded lover into flight.
I see nothing but a marriage and a speedy one can save me; if your Niece is attainable I should prefer her . . . I wish somebody would say at once that I wish to propose to her – but I have great doubts of her; it rests with her entirely.
The letter was hardly reassuring: Byron had preceded the above announcement by frivolously announcing that everything depended upon whether Annabella waltzed or not. Nevertheless, Lady Melbourne had already decided upon her course of action. On 29 September, in a letter which crossed with Byron’s own to her, she offered hardheaded advice that tallied with the suitor’s own current line of thought: ‘the result of all this seems to me that ye best thing you can do, is to marry & that in fact you can get out of this Scrape by no other means’. At the beginning of October, she sent news to her niece of Byron’s offer to make her his wife.
Curiously, Byron’s proposal by proxy arrived on Annabella’s breakfast table almost simultaneously with a declaration from one of his friends. William Bankes had been courting Annabella since the spring. Having wished Bankes a brisk farewell on his imminent journey to Granada, Annabella (in her journal entry for 6 October 1812) reveals how coolly she dismissed unwelcome suitors. Bankes had already been deemed ‘odious’ for preventing her from talking with Byron at a dinner party; now, he was dismissed as a pathetic waverer, incapable of defending himself. ‘In short he is a feeble character – a good heart without Judgment, Wit & Ingenuity without common sense.’
So much for poor Bankes. Byron, upon whose more thoughtful ‘Character Sketch’ Annabella embarked two days later, was assessed with a shrewder understanding and more forbearance. On the minus side (for which she blamed an indulgent mother), she identified pride, inability to control his passions and a disturbing volatility of temperament: ‘his mind is constantly making the most sudden transitions, from good to evil, from evil to good . . .’ On the plus side (far outweighing the faults listed in her careful appraisal of his personality), she saw chivalrous generosity and kindness: ‘In secret he is the zealous friend of all the human feelings.’ Evidently recalling the tenor of their earliest conversations, she remarked upon his uncommon candour: ‘He is inclined to open his heart unreservedly to those whom he believes good, even without the preparation of much acquaintance. He is extremely humble towards persons whose characters he respects & to them he would penitently confess his errors.’
The choice of words is revealing. Clearly, Annabella relished the prospect of becoming the confessor and saviour of a celebrated rake. Marriage was quite another matter.
On 13 October, Lady Melbourne summoned her niece for an overnight stay at Melbourne House. Together, they attended a performance of Much Ado About Nothing, and heard an actor deliver Byron’s speech in honour of the reopening of Drury Lane (a theatrical project with which Byron had become closely involved). The following morning, Annabella addressed herself to Lady Gosford, while using the letter to clarify her own thoughts.
Annabella, by any reading of the elaborate screed she wrote to Mary Gosford, was flattered both by Byron’s proposal and by the careful selection of his letters through which her Machiavellian aunt had chosen to transmit it. Clearly, it was not his fault that friends had misled him about her relationship with George Eden. Equally apparent was the inherent goodness which would always triumph over his passions. He loved her. Proudly, she quoted Byron’s words about having always wished to marry her, no matter what the future might hold. Complacently, she cited his account of her superiority to all other women.
And yet.
It was the issue of her declared perfection that remained the sticking point. Painfully conscious of her faults, and in particular, of the hot temper which she was still struggling to subdue, Annabella could not bear (or so she wrote to Lady Gosford) the prospect of witnessing his disillusion.
He speaks of my character as the only female one which could have secured his devoted affection and respect. Were there no other objection, his theoretical idea of my perfection which could not be fulfilled by the trial would suffice to make me decline a connection that must end in his disappointment.
A decision had been reached. Having loaned her aunt the character sketch of Byron (of which she was evidently proud), Annabella retreated to her parents’ house at Richmond, before despatching a letter informing Aunt Melbourne that she did not love the noble gentleman enough to marry him. That blunt piece of news was sent on to Byron at Cheltenham, together with a copy of the character sketch. Also transmitted by her aunt was Annabella’s habitual sweetener: the offer of a dignified continuation of friendship, with no reference to the past.
Annabella’s aunt was displeased. Byron’s own chagrin was so well hidden as to pass for relief. Writing back to Lady Melbourne on 17 October, he asked her to reassure Miss Milbanke that discretion would be maintained. A second letter (it was written the following day) began by praising the character sketch of himself as ‘very exact’ in parts, although ‘much too indulgent, overall’. A graceful allusion to Annabella as the ‘Princess of Parallelograms’ (a tribute to her mathematical skill) signalled his own comfortable retreat: ‘we are two parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side but never to meet’. By 20 October, he had drawn a line under the proceedings. Miss Milbanke was to be informed (second-hand, as always), that ‘I am more proud of her rejection than I can ever be of another’s acceptance.’
Two weeks later, Byron hinted at new interests; by 14 November, he was off again, making love to the lusciously available and safely married Lady Oxford. Weary of behaving like the hero of a sentimental novel, he now adopted a tone of brutal honesty. Annabella’s delicacy was all very nice, Lady Melbourne heard from her self-adopted nephew, but ‘I prefer hot suppers.’
Neither Lord Byron nor Annabella had reckoned with the determination of their jointly appointed go-between: the intelligent and blushlessly treacherous Lady Melbourne. Annabella’s rejection – a decided setback in the ongoing battle to extricate Byron from the tenacious grasp of Caroline Lamb – might yet be overcome. And so, having complimented Miss Milbanke on 21 October for the dignity with which she had conducted herself, and having offered assurance that Byron was ‘much touch’d’ by her confidence in his future good conduct, Lady Melbourne summoned her niece back from Richmond for a second interview.
Very sweetly, Lady Melbourne now asked to be told just what dear Annabella did want from a man in order to marry him; very demurely, Annabella presented her written shopping list. Calm, equable, pleasant-looking and of good birth (a title was not required), the ideal husband would consult, but not rely upon, his wife, displaying an attachment that was balanced, never excessive. No emotional displays or ill humour would be permitted at any time, lest they should affect her. ‘I am never sulky,’ she added in an explanatory aside, ‘but my spirits are easily depressed, particularly by seeing anybody unhappy.’
If Annabella was slyly poking fun at her aunt’s blatant determination to marry her off, Lady Melbourne, a woman whose wit was sharper than her sense of humour, failed to see the joke. The wish list was, by and large, granted to her niece; the absurd request for a husband who would always control his feelings in order not to irritate those of his wife was angrily dismissed. Overall, Miss Milbanke was recommended to climb down from her ‘stilts’ and expect a great deal less from any man who was willing to marry her. On the subject of ill temper, she was advised to study self-control: ‘till you can attain this power over Yourself never boast of your command over yr passions, – and till you can practise it – you have no right to require it in others.’
Annabella’s answer was engagingly frank. She had not meant to suggest that she hungered after a righteous prig: ‘I am always repelled by people of that description.’ As to her aunt’s advice against seeking an impossible ideal, surely a young lady might be allowed to hope? And now, ‘After so full an explanation you will perhaps take off my stilts, and allow that I am only on tiptoe.’
Lady Melbourne had been beaten back, but the topic of Byron could never be long avoided. In Richmond, where Mary Montgomery arrived to spend two autumn months, his name was warmly praised by a friend who persisted in seeing the unlikely couple as a perfect match. Reunited with her faithful journal, Annabella approvingly noted that Lord Byron never allowed religion to be mocked at his table and that he had generously given away John Murray’s payment for Childe Harold to Robert Dallas, an impoverished friend. (Dallas had helped to secure the poem’s publication.) Warned against becoming too friendly with Lady Melbourne by Dr Fenwick up in Durham (the canny old practitioner was full of stories about that estimable lady’s deceiving ways), Annabella declined to admit that her aunt’s chief value was as the last remaining line of communication to Lord Byron. Within the privacy of an increasingly wistful Miss Milbanke’s mind her rejected suitor remained firmly to the fore.
In February 1813, newly arrived in London from visiting the Wentworths and then Cousin Sophy, Annabella made the only kind of overture that was now open to her. Lady Melbourne was requested to ask Lord Byron if they could now meet without awkwardness. His response was prompt, but disappointingly casual. Miss Milbanke might be informed that ‘if she does not misunderstand me nor my views – we shall be very good friends – & “live happy ever after” – in that state of life to which “it may please God to call us”.’
Poor Annabella. What was she to make of a man grown heartless enough to add that he had actually smiled at her rejection? Even aloof Mr Darcy (whose character she greatly admired when reading Pride and Prejudice during a second winter visit to Cousin Sophy’s home) would have shown more feeling.
Annabella’s journal reveals little about her thoughts during her final summer on the London marriage market. Arriving in London on 7 May 1813 (following her third stay of the year with Sophy Tamworth), Annabella attended a ball. It was the first occasion of the year at which she set eyes on Byron – but only from a distance. He was present at another party three days later, but there was no chance to speak with him. Nine days later, her private journal expressed disgust at the envy Samuel Rogers – a poet whom Byron rated only just below Walter Scott – betrayed of his literary confrère. The warmth of Annabella’s own feelings is clear in her indignant private comment: ‘I always thought Rogers mean, but I did not think him capable of such petty artifices as he used on this occasion to blast a rival’s name.’
No further mention of Byron’s name appears in the journal. In her private ‘Auto-Description’ of 1831, however, Annabella recalled Byron’s exceptional pallor when she gave him her hand at their first May meeting, and how that betrayal of feeling had given her hope. (‘Perhaps, unconscious as I was, the engagement was then formed on my part.’) Several further such encounters had apparently taken place, ‘but every time I felt more pain, & at last I shunned the occasions’.
Lord Byron, who had been toying with the idea of travelling abroad with his new mistress, the lovely Lady Oxford, overstepped a line when he flirtatiously presented her 11-year-old daughter with some trinkets he had recently retrieved from Caroline Lamb. The Oxfords indicated their displeasure by leaving Byron behind when they went abroad at the end of June 1813. It was at a party given around this time that Annabella observed her former suitor seated on a sofa beside a woman whose pleasant face, framed in corkscrews of brown ringlets, was new to her. Enquiries revealed that the brown-haired lady was Byron’s older and married half-sister, the Honourable Augusta Leigh.
Augusta Leigh was always short of money. She was especially so when she arrived in London at the end of June 1813 (just as the Oxfords set off for the Continent). Colonel Leigh was away, as was his habit, at the races. Their three small children – the eldest, Georgiana, was Byron’s god-daughter – had been left in the care of a nurse at The Paddocks in Six Mile Bottom. (The Leighs’ home suited the sporting Colonel’s wish to live close to the thoroughbred mecca of Newmarket.) Augusta’s choice of city lodgings was a giveaway of her hard-up state. Beginning at the noisily inelegant abode of Byron’s grasping lawyer, John Hanson, she moved on to lodge with Theresa Villiers, a loyal friend whose excellent connections to the royal circle might be worked upon to advantage.
Augusta arrived in town at the very moment when Byron was unattached. Comic, easygoing, delightfully unreproachful and unfailingly affectionate, Augusta’s unhesitating readiness to become Byron’s favourite companion may have been related to the fact that her half-brother – of whose own financial woes she was at best dimly aware – appeared to be a source of wealth.
Few, in the late summer of 1813, saw anything unusual in Byron’s loving reunion with an older sister to whom he had become almost a stranger. Caroline Lamb was merely signalling a frenzied wish to recapture her lost lover’s interest when, on 5 July, she used the occasion of a waltzing party to cut herself with a broken glass before slashing her wrists (not deeply enough, according to an exasperated Lady Melbourne) with a pair of pocket scissors. Hostesses were quick to spread the tale of Lady Caroline’s theatrical stunt, but no eyebrows were raised when Byron requested to bring Augusta to their houses. His own half-sister: what could be more innocently respectable?
Annabella Milbanke was thinking only of how to renew a friendship that she valued and feared she had forever lost – Byron was reported to be departing for the Continent, perhaps never to return – when she wrote once again to Lady Melbourne from Seaham on 18 July. A newspaper had reported that day on Lord Byron’s purported use of legal trickery to enforce the sale of Newstead. Annabella begged her aunt to pass along the fact that she herself knew Lord Byron to be incapable of such base behaviour. Her more ardent message followed.
As I shall not have an opportunity of seeing him again I should be glad if you would tell him that however long his absence may be, I shall always have pleasure in hearing that he is happy, and if my esteem can afford him any satisfaction, he may rely on my not adopting the opinions of those who wrong him.
The newspaper had got its facts wrong. Byron had indeed agreed to sell his crumbling family estate in Nottinghamshire for £140,000 (close to £5 million in today’s terms), back in 1812. Over a year later, he had still received only £5,000. The prospective buyer, a lawyer called Thomas Claughton, was now belatedly questioning the originally agreed price. Responding on 18 July to Lady Melbourne’s letter with an explanation (Byron himself had already seen the article and angrily ordered John Hanson to take corrective action), Byron saved Annabella for his postscript. Miss Milbanke could be told – whatever it pleased her aunt to say: ‘I have not the skill – you are an adept – you may defend me if it amuses you.’ (Lady Melbourne’s envoy to her niece, if she ever wrote one, has not survived.)
The Milbankes had little personal knowledge of Lord Byron – Sir Ralph had met him only once – but they were growing anxious about Annabella.
Evidence of parental concern, rather than of any cunning strategy for their daughter’s future, showed up in their prompt support for Annabella’s decision, on 22 August, to write directly, for the first time in her life, to Lord Byron. Informing him of her parents’ approval, she imposed only one condition upon the epistolary friendship that she wished to initiate: ‘In particular I would not have it known to Ly Melbourne . . . she is perhaps too much accustomed to look for design, to understand the plainness of my intentions . . .’
* Byron’s second speech, given on 21 April 1812, objected to Britain’s ongoing discrimination against Catholics.