(1813–14)
Not tell Lady Melbourne! How little Annabella knew Byron, or indeed, her aunt. How could she have guessed that – within a fortnight of her own resolutely secret suit to Byron – Lady Melbourne would be sending him (although for what mischievous purpose, it is hard to conjecture) the private list of husbandly requirements that she herself had persuaded Annabella to draw up a year earlier?
Returning that curious document to his favourite correspondent on 5 September 1813, Byron expressed concern that Miss Milbanke’s faith in her own infallibility ‘may lead her into some egregious blunder’. The blunder that he evidently had in mind lay in soliciting the friendship of himself, a rejected suitor. So far, however, Lady Melbourne knew only that he had embarked upon a sentimental correspondence with somebody referred to as ‘X.Y.Z.’. By 7 September, however, Annabella’s aunt had been enlightened. Doubtless, she hoped that this high-minded friendship with her niece might steer a young man she adored away from a far more dangerous relationship: his newly discovered passion for Augusta Leigh.
Byron had entered the month of August 1813 with the intention of running away to Europe accompanied by the latest object of his desire. (Mrs Leigh, he told a horrified Lady Melbourne on 5 August, was even keener than himself on the elopement plan.) By the end of the month, he was having second thoughts. Augusta, for her part, had returned to the ramshackle, debt-ridden house at Six Mile Bottom that she shared with her husband and their three young children. Byron, while dropping enticing hints to his friend Tom Moore on 22 August about having landed himself in a ‘far more serious – and entirely new – scrape’, was by now pondering how best to dig himself out.
On that same day (22 August), Annabella had posted off from Seaham her laboriously prolix request to become Lord Byron’s special penfriend. Love formed no part of her suit: fearful of raising false expectations or – which seems more likely – anxious to save her face, she alluded to another secret and unrequited passion. ‘I signified the existence of an attachment in my mind,’ she would admit to Mary Gosford on 3 December, mournfully adding that she had been betrayed into this uncharacteristic act of deception by her own imprudent enthusiasm.
Annabella’s intentions were sincere; her indication of unavailability acted like catnip upon a man accustomed to reducing ladies to a state of prostrate compliance. But here, incredibly, was one – the only one who had dared to refuse him – calmly announcing that she preferred another man. When Byron wrote back (25 August) to say that he himself ‘still’ preferred her to all others and that friendship was impossible (‘I doubt whether I could help loving you’), Annabella scored another point by retreating. If friendship was not on offer, she announced, ‘I will trouble you no more . . . God bless you.’
Unavailable still? Such coolness was irresistible! On 31 August, an increasingly intrigued Byron wrote back to announce that – despite having once aspired to be her husband – he accepted Miss Milbanke’s newly imposed conditions. Friendship it should be, and he was ready to obey commands: ‘if you will mark out the limits of our future correspondence & intercourse they shall not be infringed. – Believe me with the most profound respect – ever gratefully yrs. Byron.’
And so it all began.
Byron’s letters to Annabella during that autumn, when read alongside the opinions that he was simultaneously expressing to her aunt, might cause an impartial reader to gasp at such insouciant betrayal of a friendship. But Byron’s left hand was seldom aware of what his right was doing. Inconsistency was as instinctive to him as wit. ‘If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to anyone else),’ he would admit to his journal on 6 November, ‘every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.’
Writing to his self-appointed friend (so conveniently remote in her northern fastness), Byron became earnest, sincere and gratifyingly deferential. He told her (when asked) about his childhood introduction by a Scottish nurse to the grim doctrine of Calvinism and a vengeful God, a deity far removed from Annabella’s own forgiving Maker. He chastised her view of his solemnity. (‘Nobody laughs more . . .’) He acquainted her with his notion of the purpose of life (‘The great object of life is Sensation – to feel that we exist even though in pain – it is this “craving void” which drives us to Gaming – to Battle – to Travel . . .’), but expressed warm approval when Miss Milbanke disagreed. He teased her about rumours of a newly rejected lover (Stratford Canning, a cousin of the Whig politician)* and asked her to be kind to his little cousin Eliza Byron, about to go away to school up in the remote north of England. He informed Miss Milbanke that she herself wrote ‘remarkably well’, sulked when Annabella did not respond at once to his own letters, wondered when she next would be in town, and (on 26 September, a month after their correspondence began) humbly sought permission to address her as ‘My dear friend’.
So far, so promising. Writing to Annabella in that same late September letter, Byron asked her (in a tone that sounded agreeably filial) to convey his ‘invariable’ respects to Miss Milbanke’s parents. Of Augusta Leigh, of the always-returning Caroline Lamb and of his new love interest, a certain Lady Frances (the flirtatious wife of his friend, Sir Godfrey Wedderburn Webster), Lord Byron mentioned not one word.* Annabella was to be his mentor, not his confidante. The most that he would allow her to know – driven by a pride that matched her own – was that he did not languish uncomforted.
Writing simultaneously to Lady Melbourne throughout that same autumn of 1813, Byron used an entirely different tone. On 28 September, just two days after requesting the honour of addressing Annabella as his own dear friend, he groaned to her aunt about the persevering epistles of ‘your mathematician’ and mocked the earnestness of such a prim little virgin – ‘the strictest of St Ursula’s 11000 what do you call ’ems’ – who, nevertheless, chose to write letters to a rake. Annabella was unchivalrously categorised behind her back as the kind of young woman who
enters into a clandestine correspondence with a personage generally presumed a great Roué – & drags her aged parents into this secret treaty – it is I believe not usual for single ladies to risk such brilliant adventures – but this comes of infallibility . . .
Ominously, Byron added his opinion that Annabella was doing ‘a foolish thing’ by corresponding with him at all.
Byron’s bravado may have been more of a pose than he himself knew. Ten days later, he failed to disguise his discomfiture when Lady Melbourne revealed that Annabella, while writing to him with all the considerable gravity that she could muster, was meanwhile displaying the gayest of spirits in the letters she despatched to Melbourne House. Was she indeed? – ‘the little demure Nonjuror!’ Byron burst out on 8 October.
He had revealed too much, and it seems that he knew it. Before the end of the month, Lady Melbourne was being untruthfully informed (by Byron himself) that his correspondence with her niece was at an end.
By the close of 1813, so far as her aunt knew, Annabella Milbanke had passed out of her former suitor’s thoughts. On 6 February 1814, Byron mischievously reminded Lady Melbourne of the doomed proposal (‘that brilliant negociation with the Princess of Parallellograms’) he had once persuaded her to make on his behalf. Now, back in London from a long and secluded Christmas at Newstead with the pregnant Augusta and her children, Byron asked his favourite mentor to find him some docile, trouble-free consort: ‘What I want is a companion – a friend rather than a sentimentalist.’
Lady Melbourne knew better than to trust Byron’s shimmering impulses. Annabella was more easily deceived. Bewitched by her correspondence with the most dangerously seductive letter-writer of the age, it took just three months for austere vows of friendship to change into ardent hopes of a requited love. On 26 November 1813, she confessed to Mary Gosford her secret dream of becoming Byron’s wife: ‘a thought too dear to be indulged’. The following day, Annabella set out to charm Byron with a letter in which, shyly angling for a romantic response, she asked whether their closer acquaintanceship might have caused him to like her – less?
The tactic almost worked. Responding on 29 November, Byron sounded both serious and tender. Annabella wronged herself, he told her, both in fearing that ‘the charm’ had been broken by correspondence and in imagining that she had overstepped a mark through her question. ‘No one can assume or presume less than you do,’ he reassured her. As for love, none could supplant her. It was simply the case – she had told him so herself – that ‘the only woman to whom I ever seriously pretended as a wife – had disposed of her heart already . . .’
November 1813 was the month in which Byron first began to keep a journal. On the last day of the month, just after writing that affectionate response to Annabella’s ‘very pretty’ letter, he sat down at his desk in Bennet Street to assess their relationship.
What an odd situation and friendship is ours! – without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general end in coldness on one side, and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress – a girl of twenty – a peeress that is to be, in her own right – an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess – a mathematician – a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages.
Byron had done his homework. Always in debt himself, he was evidently attracted by (it was a charge he would later vigorously deny) Annabella’s position as an only child – and future peeress – who was due to inherit her uncle’s fortune. Overall, nevertheless, the most striking aspect of Byron’s private journal entry was that his exalted respect for Annabella – for all his initial denial of any such implication – came curiously close to love.
Close, but he was not yet ready to be caught. Annabella, by late November 1813, found herself in torment over her own folly. Three times now, she wailed to Lady Gosford, Byron had mentioned her unidentified lover as his sole reason not to propose. How could she now signal her availability without admitting that she had lied – and risk losing his respect? ‘He has never yet suspected me,’ she sighed. Mary Gosford, while sympathetic, could offer no solution.
A deeper question, one that Annabella had perhaps not paused to examine, was whether Byron actually wished to know that his dear friend’s heart was free? In February 1814, Miss Milbanke launched herself upon the impossible mission of acknowledging the deception she had practised without compromising her own lofty integrity. So baffling was her explanation that Byron quoted one sentence back to her with a request for its elucidation. ‘I cannot by total silence acquiese [sic] in that which if supported when its delusion is known to myself would become deception.’ What exactly did she mean by those elaborate words, he asked, before torturing her with the reminder (he had just returned from a private holiday with Augusta at Newstead) of the circumscribed role to which she herself had so strictly confined him: ‘the moment I sunk into your friend . . . you never did – never for an instant – trifle with me nor amuse me with what is called encouragement . . .’
Extracted from its context, this reminder that they were friends – and nothing more – offered scant cause for hope. However, Byron’s long letter (his often matched Annabella’s own voluminous epistles in length) also included expressions of regret that ill-health would keep her from London (Annabella had been ailing for some weeks), flattering comments about some verses that she had thoughtfully sent him, pleasure at her generous tribute to The Corsair (Byron’s most recent eastern romance was enjoying a massive success) and a tender farewell: ‘God bless you.’ Enough emotion was on show here for Annabella to try once more. On 17 February, she again signalled her availability. Byron promptly thanked her for indicating the exact opposite and thereby saving them both a deal of trouble: ‘& so adieu to the subject,’ he wrote with airy dismissiveness, before inquiring her age and revealing that he, at twenty-six, felt ‘six hundred in heart and in head & pursuits about six.’
Annabella’s best chance, as she was too innocent to realise, was in keeping her distance. In March, a month when Byron presided over a cynical alliance – the hastily arranged marriage of Mary Anne Hanson, the toughly sexy daughter of his own unscrupulous lawyer, to the mentally deficient and extremely rich Earl of Portsmouth, whom Hanson also represented – Byron confided to Annabella that religion, advocated by her as a source of comfort, offered no solace to his all too sensitive spirit.* Writing back with complete sincerity that she nevertheless hoped the best for him, as she had always done, Miss Milbanke won his heart. ‘I shall be in love with her again, if I don’t take care,’ Byron warned himself on 15 March. Addressing Annabella directly on the same day, he spoke of his desire for her company.
It was the enticing sentence ‘You do not know how much I wish to see you’ that inspired Annabella to venture one further cautious step. On 13 April, she asked if she had correctly understood that Lord Byron might be willing to visit her at Seaham? This was bold. Byron had expressed no such wish. For a bachelor to invite himself to stay at the house of a young unmarried woman with whom he had been in regular correspondence was tantamount to asking for her hand. How, then, would he answer? The response, written a week later from Byron’s new London lodging at Albany (a bachelor’s set of rooms off Piccadilly that he had inherited from the recently married Lord Althorp), was encouraging. He would visit Seaham Hall with pleasure, requesting only not to intrude upon her studies: ‘you will do as you please – only let it be as you please . . .’ Distance, he added airily of a five-day journey by stagecoach from London, was of no consequence in the matter.
Annabella’s complete ignorance of what was taking place in Byron’s life during the period of her negotiations for a visit helps to explain the extreme distress with which – two years later – she would belatedly unravel the intrigue that had formed the background to Byron’s capricious courtship of herself: a woman whose intelligence and virtuous high-mindedness he had respected almost too much to exploit. Almost, however, was not quite enough.
Byron, at the time he answered Annabella’s timid request, had just learned of the birth (on 15 April) of Augusta Leigh’s fourth child, christened Elizabeth Medora and always known to her family as Elizabeth or Libby. Conception had taken place in July 1813, the month during which Augusta and Byron had first consummated their love. Never supposing that his half-sister might also still be sleeping with her husband (as was the case), the guilty lover assumed from the start that the child was his.
Incapable of keeping a secret, Byron allowed his pen to betray what his lips were forbidden to utter. The Bride of Abydos (November 1813) approached a public confession of his passion, close enough for Byron to hesitate about sending an early copy of his poem to Annabella, while almost begging Lady Melbourne to connect its narrative to his earlier hints of an incestuous love. (The poem’s original version presented the besotted and garrulous Selim as Zuleika’s brother, rather than as her cousin.)
Lady Melbourne remained, as Annabella had become aware, her suitor’s closest confidante. While Annabella herself was writing wistful letters to her aunt throughout the spring of 1814 about a life of studious isolation, Byron was confessing to the unshockable Lady M that he was embarked upon the most enjoyable love affair of his life. ‘However I will positively reform,’ he told her on 25 April:
– you must however allow – that it is utterly impossible I can ever be half as well liked elsewhere – and I have been all my life trying to make someone love me – & never got the sort that I preferred before. – But positively she & I will grow good – & all that – & so we are now and shall be these three weeks & more too . . .*
Byron did not reserve his shocking tales for Lady Melbourne alone. ‘Frightful suspicions’, noted his friend John Cam Hobhouse after visiting the Drury Lane Theatre with Byron on 19 May. Horrors ‘not to be conceived’ were revealed on 24 June to a suddenly prudish Caroline Lamb. Lady Melbourne, however, was not only his confidante but his mentor. In between swaggering about his dreadful wickedness, Byron sought her views about the wisdom of his going to Seaham. By 24 April, the date on which Annabella disclosed that she had herself informed Aunt Melbourne of his proposed visit (of which ‘I think she will be very glad to learn’), Lady Melbourne had thrown icy water upon the project. ‘Credo di No!’ Byron scrawled to the side of Annabella’s words, before underlining his negation. Miss Milbanke’s letter went unanswered.
Hopeful and oblivious, Annabella sailed on towards her destiny. On 29 April, she reminded Byron that her parents still awaited confirmation of his visit. No confirmation arrived.
On 30 April, however, while pleading for Augusta (‘not aware of her own peril – till it was too late’) to Lady Melbourne, Byron began to wonder if marriage to a quietly respectable woman like Annabella might encourage him ‘to sever all other pursuits’. Lady Melbourne, advising him on that same day, had independently reached the same conclusion, but from a more cynical motive. Such a respectable young woman could provide the perfect camouflage for the adulterous siblings, and dear Annabella was far too naive to be suspicious of what was going on: ‘she will understandably make a friend (a female one) of any person you may point out – & all friends is very much to be wished . . .’
Up at Seaham, time crawled. Temporarily deprived of her favourite confidante – Mary Montgomery had gone abroad for her health – Annabella had nobody with whom to share the anxiety she felt about her dismayingly reticent correspondent. She wrote to praise Byron’s ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’. (In Seaham village, a bonfire had been lit to celebrate the emperor’s abdication.) Its author did not respond. Lady Melbourne, writing to Miss Milbanke on 25 May as if Byron was a perfect stranger to her niece, airily declared that Annabella was certain to enjoy the poet’s company when he visited her parents’ northern home. Byron himself said nothing at all.
On 19 June, while Judith Milbanke went to Kirkby Mallory to visit her heartbroken brother – comforting him through Lady Wentworth’s final days – Annabella plucked up the courage to make one final appeal. ‘Pray write to me,’ she pleaded, pathetically adding that she knew Lord Byron would never mean to hurt her. ‘Prim and pretty as usual’ comprised Byron’s tart comment to her aunt. Three days later, writing to Annabella on 24 June, he explained that he was still trying to fix a date for his visit. His sign-off was a little warmer than before: ‘ever yrs most sincerely’ had progressed into ‘very affectly & truly yrs’. From this, Annabella could take her crumb of comfort.
Byron wrote nothing more to Annabella until 1 August. Between times, he had been asking Augusta to scout out his chances for marrying her pretty young friend, Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower. By August, he, Augusta, her children, Byron’s college friend Francis Hodgson and his naval cousin George Byron were all off enjoying a beachside summer holiday at Hastings. Colonel Leigh, as usual, was absent from the party.
Later, after they became close friends, Captain Byron would tell Annabella that Augusta made use of the Hastings summer vacation to urge her brother to press for a marriage to Miss Milbanke. If she did so, it was without success. Annabella had written to Byron at the end of July to hint once more at her availability, while entreating a fixed date for his long-promised visit to Seaham. Responding from Hastings, Byron wilfully misunderstood her. Of course, he knew that she remained committed to another man, he wrote. No need, then, for her to worry that he – blessed with an excellent memory of that unfortunate fact – would intrude upon their happy trysts. Trapped, Annabella could only repeat that his rival had been dispatched (‘nothing could now induce me to marry him’) and ask, wrapping the most transparent of hopes in the most obscurely elaborate language at her disposal, where Byron now stood?
My doubt then is – and I ask a solution – whether you are in any danger of that attachment to me which might interfere with your peace of mind . . . Next, on the supposition of a reply unfavourable to my wishes, I would ask you to consider by what course the danger may be avoided . . .
On 10 August, briefly back at his Albany rooms, Byron replied with something that came thrillingly close to a declaration. ‘I will answer your question as openly as I can,’ he wrote. ‘I did, do, and always shall love you –’ From here, however, he perversely proceeded to remind her that she had already turned him down once and – given the chance – would doubtless do so again. Since she had tendered no offer of affection, he did not intend to sue for pity.
At this point, Annabella lost her temper. Enraged by Byron’s obdurate failure to understand her, she now announced (on 13 August) that her own feelings about him were and always had been limited by the knowledge that she and he were thoroughly incompatible. ‘Not, believe me, that I depreciate your capacity for the domestic virtues . . . Nevertheless you do not appear to be the person whom I ought to select as my guide, my support, my example upon earth . . .’
The: So there! was almost audible. Two formidable personalities had clashed with as much spirit as Petruchio and his shrew; unexpectedly, Byron took his hit on the chin. ‘Very well – now we can talk of something else,’ he responded nonchalantly on the 16th. A short and extremely proper exchange of letters about literature followed on, with Byron’s cancellation of his promised visit softened by his sending (at Annabella’s meek request) his list of recommendations for her reading course. He suggested Sismondi, Hume and Gibbon with the promised loan of his own dual-language Tacitus. Climbing down from her stilts, the scholarly Annabella graciously agreed to give Gibbon a second chance.
At the end of August, Byron and Augusta travelled to Newstead, following the final withdrawal of the Abbey’s dilatory purchaser, Thomas Claughton. There, having learned that the beguiling Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower had rejected the proposal made by Augusta on her brother’s behalf, the couple fell back on their original plan. Terrified by the prospect of a scandal which would jeopardise her social position (Mrs Villiers was helping to smooth the way to a place at court and free lodgings for life), Augusta was desperate to see her brother respectably married. Wealthy, affectionate and seemingly unaware of the scandalous tales that were beginning to be whispered in London, Miss Milbanke eminently fitted the bill.
On 9 September, in a letter which he hesitated a full day before finally despatching, Annabella’s laggardly suitor referred to the petulant August epistle in which Annabella announced that she would never be his because their characters were ‘ill adapted to each other’. Now, Byron humbly asked if that meant all was lost. ‘Are the “objections” – to which you alluded – insuperable?’ And if so, ‘is there any line or change of conduct which could possibly remove them?’ In short, he was finally ready to propose marriage.
On 18 September, Byron was dining alone at Newstead with Augusta and the local apothecary (liver problems had plagued the young poet since his return to England in 1811) when a gardener brought in the late Mrs Byron’s wedding ring. Mysteriously disinterred from a Newstead flower bed just before Miss Milbanke’s prompt consent (she wrote back on the very day that his proposal arrived), ring and letter together were laid upon the breakfast table. It may have been the odd coincidence that caused the intensely superstitious Byron to turn ashen white. Later, and with extraordinary spite, Augusta would add another detail for Annabella’s benefit. Byron’s only response to the news of her acceptance, so she said, had been to comment: ‘It never rains but it pours.’
Lady Melbourne was the first to hear the news, in a letter which once again announced her protégé’s intention of reforming ‘most thoroughly’ (by which, he meant her to understand, his ceasing to sleep with Augusta) in preparation for an altered way of life for which he requested her auntly blessing. Answering Annabella on that same day (18 September), Byron declared that her response, while ‘unexpected’, had given him ‘a new existence’: he was truly moved by her earnest wish to make him happy. ‘It is in your power to render me happy – you have made me so already.’
On the following day, Byron and Augusta walked together into a part of the estate grimly known as Devil’s Wood and carved their names – like the lovers they doubtless still were – into the bark of an old tree. Back in the abbey, Byron wrote to appoint Annabella as his guide, philosopher and friend: ‘my whole heart is yours’. To Thomas Moore, a favourite confidant about financial matters, he announced on that same day that his bride-to-be was both virtuous (a later letter to Moore admiringly described Annabella as ‘a pattern of the north’) and rich.
Annabella’s great expectations formed a regular feature of Byron’s letters to Moore. Confirmation of her status as an heiress had come to him via Lady Melbourne. Apparently, there would be a house, together with a fine second residence and a ‘very considerable’ inheritance. Judith Milbanke had herself informed an attentive sister-in-law of these valuable particulars on 25 September before collapsing into bed, exhausted by the emotional travails of Annabella’s snail-paced journey to the altar with a man – her mother now proudly declared – whom she herself had always known to be The One: ‘and I was right . . .’
Not everybody was so ecstatic. As she opened her letters – from Emily Milner, Selina Doyle and Joanna Baillie – Annabella found her female friends, both old and young, united in one chorus of commiseration. William Darnell, her northern suitor, teased her for yielding her fair person ‘without a sigh’ and ‘to the unspeakable regret of her friends’, to ‘that insatiable Lord’ who now chose ‘talent and beauty as his rightful prey’. Delighted by his own eloquence, Darnell sought approval: ‘Very good – Don’t you think?’ And she did, enough to copy it out, while preserving the undated original into her old age.*
Mary Montgomery, who had always encouraged the match, was still abroad when news of the engagement was given out. Her brother Hugh (yet another of Annabella’s suitors) seems not to have responded to a jaunty proclamation (delivered on 22 September and softened by a sympathetic note from Lady Milbanke) that ‘The Thane is found.’ Mary Gosford, treated on 6–8 October to an artlessly pompous explanation of the care that Annabella had taken to single out Byron as ‘the man most calculated to support me on my journey to Immortality’, was tactfully acquiescent.
Elation swept Annabella along for a couple of joyous weeks. Caroline Lamb managed, despite Byron’s fears of an outburst, to produce a friendly note of congratulation, together with an engagingly naive drawing of the happy couple. Augusta, writing what would be perceived three years later as ‘ingenious compositions’, smoothly apologised for the delays which still kept her brother lingering in the south. Mrs Leigh, so Byron tactlessly boasted to Annabella on 7 October, was ‘more attached to me than anyone in existence can be’. Writing to Lady Melbourne on the same day, he revealed that Augusta, increasingly terrified that scandalous reports might prevent her coveted court appointment, was ‘especially anxious’ for this marriage to take place.
Four weeks after her acceptance, and still separated from an absentee fiancé by almost three hundred miles, Annabella started to fret. Everything seemed like a dream, she confessed to Byron on 10 October, and yet doubts were creeping in. ‘God bless you . . . my own . . . my only dearest.’ Promising her three days later that his lawyer was at last setting off for Durham with the necessary papers (hard legal questions about the validity of Hanson’s daughter’s swift and strangely discreet marriage to Lord Portsmouth would preoccupy the wily lawyer until April the following year*), Byron tried to soothe his fiancée’s nerves. Indeed, he did not deserve either such happiness or her anxiously honourable explanation of the phantom lover with whom she had kept him at bay. But ‘I never doubted you –’ Byron wrote on 13 October: ‘I know you to be Truth herself.’ Augusta was urged to reassure the nervous bride-to-be. ‘I can most fully appreciate the motives for your doubts & fears of being able to make my dear Brother happy,’ she wrote to Seaham on 15 October. ‘He writes me word that he hopes very soon to see you . . .’
Four days later, Byron’s mood had darkened. Writing to Lady Melbourne on 19 October, he blamed Annabella for failing to accept him, back in 1812. Had she done so then (‘if she had even given me a distinct though distant hope’), he now believed that he would have acted upon it and pressed his suit. Augusta (always free of blame in Byron’s eyes) would thus have been spared the unhappiness and guilt for which her brother was now ready to throw all the blame upon a reluctant bride.
A cruelly unjust view had been formulated. It was one from which Byron would never again deviate.
Isolated, apprehensive and perfectly unaware of any sexual flavour in Byron’s relationship to his sister, Annabella wrote on 22 October to thank Augusta for all her kindness and to assure her that such generous warmth would not be forgotten. To Byron (his letters now dwelt with ominous repetitiveness upon his need for a wife who would control his wayward passions), she expressed her wistful hope for news of his visit. Her Uncle Wentworth, travelling up to Seaham from Leicestershire especially to meet her fiancé, was forced to return home unsatisfied. The villagers, while complimenting ‘our Miss’ on her glowing appearance, seemed puzzled by her continuing solitude.
On 29 October, pausing only for an overnight stay at Augusta’s house (it was, so he explained to Annabella, at his sister’s explicit request) and to hurl a final angry instruction at his malingering lawyer to hasten to Durham with the crucial documents, Byron finally set off for Seaham.
It was Lady Melbourne who, writing to a friend about the engagement back in September, had remarked upon the oddity of a courtship carried on entirely by correspondence. When Annabella entered the drawing room in which Byron awaited her, the couple had not even glimpsed each other for fifteen months. He, so she later remembered, fiddled with a large fob watch that dangled from his fingers. Pale and gaunt after one of his ferocious stints of dieting, he made no effort to move towards her. When she held out her hand, he bent his lips to her fingertips.
I stood on the opposite side of the fireplace. There was a silence. He broke it. ‘It is a long time since we have met’, – in an undertone. My reply was hardly articulate. I felt overpowered by the situation . . .
Joined by her parents (at their daughter’s request), Byron grew more conversational, talking about his new hero, Edmund Kean, with an unnatural excitement that Annabella ascribed to nerves. Informed – as the little party picked up their candlesticks at last and climbed Seaham’s airily graceful staircase to their bedrooms – that the family normally rose around ten, Byron kept to his room until midday. Annabella spent a disconsolate two hours in the library before setting off for a solitary stroll. Returning, she found that their guest had also walked out alone.
It was an unpromising beginning. Two days into his fortnight-long visit, on 4 November, Byron despatched the first of three bulletins to Lady Melbourne. Sir Ralph seemed entirely agreeable; Lady Milbanke was tiresomely businesslike, not at all to his taste. More worryingly, Annabella showed no signs of being able to control him (‘& if she don’t it won’t do at all’). Her silence was unnerving: (‘the most silent woman I ever encountered’). Her degree of affection – unfortunately for a man who wrote that ‘I never could love but that which loves’ – remained impossible to judge.
Two days on, Byron wrote again. Annabella and he were getting along famously. She had become more talkative. Her parents were kind. He hoped (once again) she would be happy: ‘I am sure she can make & keep me so if she likes.’
A week later, Byron was at his most mercurial. Perhaps there would be no marriage. Annabella talked interminably about fine feelings, analysed everything he said and retired to bed with an unexplained ailment every third day. Once, to his alarm, she had actually made a scene almost worthy of Caroline Lamb.* Nevertheless, concluding a complaint-filled letter to Lady M with the ungallant recollection of how swiftly a kiss or two could soothe her niece (‘entre nous, it is really amusing’), and how pleasantly ‘caressable’ into good humour she was, Byron decided that Annabella’s temper was not bad, only ‘very self-tormenting – and anxious – and romantic’. Having threatened a rupture, he concluded by declaring after all that ‘if there is a break – it shall be her doing not mine’.
Lady Melbourne offered worldly advice. She herself had seen Annabella display a furious tantrum that ended in a two-day headache, but – since she always hurried to atone and he was so skilful a seducer – ‘everything is in your power – for though you are dextrous in most things, that is your forte’.
The advice proved superfluous. By the time Lady Melbourne’s letter reached Seaham, Byron had already made demonstration of his desire, frightened Annabella, angered her mother and stormed out of the house. His spirits, sullen at the northern staging post of Boroughbridge (from where Annabella learned that he felt ‘cold as Charity – Chastity or any other Virtue’), improved at the pliant Augusta’s home (from which his sister gushed forth ‘her hundred loves’). Safely back in London, he hoped that those ‘hot luncheons of salubrious memory’ had helped to brighten Annabella’s own mood.* Signing his saucy letter off in high good humour, Byron wished a tender good morning – as if across the pillow – to ‘Ma Mignonne’.
The sense of games – dangerously silly games – being played by the amorous siblings is inescapable. ‘Mignonne’ was the pet name Augusta and Byron used for little Elizabeth Medora Leigh. On 15 December 1814 (this letter was one which Annabella would later regard as clear evidence of her husband’s crime), Augusta blithely informed Byron that a visitor ‘has found out a likeness to your picture in Mignonne’ – that is, Medora – ‘who is of course very good-humoured in consequence’. On 30 November, Augusta even dared to tell Annabella that she shared all of her feelings about Byron, causing Annabella to respond – with pitiable innocence – that she expected them to form ‘a very amiable trio’.
Annabella’s obliviousness to what would later be illuminated by the glare of hindsight invites sympathy. But what is to be made of Augusta, blandly reporting to her brother on one day that racecourse bets were being laid against his marriage to Miss Milbanke, and on another that Annabella’s scholarly habits were said to be ruining her health (meaning, her looks)? Was Mrs Leigh really the goose that her young brother affectionately nicknamed her, or was she a jealous sister deliberately throwing spokes in the wheels of a marriage that, if it proved a happy one, might threaten her own secret supremacy?
Certainly, that first and long-awaited visit to Seaham by Byron had not been an unqualified success. The letters that flew after his retreating form were imploring. On 16 November (the day of his departure), Annabella entreated Byron to have faith in her love. On 17 November, she recalled the terrible quarrel that had evidently taken place when she begged him not to ‘turn me out of doors in revenge as you threatened’. Two days later, she urged him not to believe in ‘the grave didactic, deplorable person that I have appeared to you’. Hearing by the same post from an anxious Judith Milbanke that his fiancée had recovered her former good spirits, being ‘delighted and happy with her future prospects’, the bridegroom softened. On 20 November, he signed himself ‘most entirely and unalterably your attached B’. Six days later, Annabella wrote with candid passion of her desire for his embraces: ‘I wish for you, want you, Byron mine, every hour . . . Come, come, come – to my heart.’
‘Remember – I have done with doubts,’ Annabella wrote to Byron on 24 November. But had he? Unexpectedly sympathetic when she told him on the previous day of having to sack a newish maid (‘a hardened sinner’) and take back her old one, Jane Minns, Byron was incensed to hear that the bells of Sunderland Minster had been rung to proclaim his approaching nuptials. ‘Dearest A,’ he snapped on 12 December, ‘I must needs say – that your Bells are in a pestilent hurry . . . I am very glad however that I was out of their hearing – deuce take them . . .’
For Annabella, busying herself with wedding arrangements, arranging for a winter honeymoon at Halnaby and overseeing the sale of Milbanke properties (to boost her dowry and save Seaham Hall, the clifftop home that she adored), all the other problems raised by Byron (the challenges faced by his lawyer over Lord Portsmouth’s mental status; the acquiring of a marriage licence; continuing worries about Newstead’s future) appeared surmountable. All was ready, she pleaded. Her own papers were in perfect order.* Nobody objected to Byron’s request for a simple drawing-room ceremony, least of all a Unitarian bride who would take pride throughout her life in never having attended a church service.
And yet still the bridegroom delayed.
On 16 December, Annabella spoke out plainly, telling Byron that his absence had become ‘as unwelcome as possible to everybody’. (Her northern friends had already been advised of a deferral, from December to January 1815.) Four days later, she told him not to come at all if he had cause for dissatisfaction. Addressing him more directly still in a postscript, she wrote: ‘Are you less confident than you were in the happiness of our marriage?’
Byron’s answer was freezing.
I do not see any good purpose to which questions of this kind are to lead – nor can they be answered otherwise than by time and events. You can still decide upon your own wishes and conduct before we meet – and apprize me of the result at our interview – only make sure of your own sentiments – mine are yours ever, B.
Next day, 23 December, while sullenly preparing to set out for Seaham (via Augusta’s home in Cambridgeshire), Byron fired off a final salvo in which he reminded his bride-to-be of the unhappy way in which they had last parted.
Dearest A – if we meet let it be to marry – had I remained at S[eaham] it had probably been over by this time – with regard to our being under the same roof and not married – I think past experience has shown us the awkwardness of that situation – I can conceive nothing above purgatory more uncomfortable . . . I shall however set out tomorrow . . . Hobhouse I believe accompanies me – which I rejoice at – for if we don’t marry I should not like a 2nd journey back quite alone – and remaining at S[eaham] might only revive a scene like the former and to that I confess myself unequal –
Arriving at Six Mile Bottom armed with a marriage licence and the drafts of his latest work (a ravishing reworking of various psalms, to be set to the music of Isaac Nathan), Byron tactlessly informed Annabella that his beloved sister was looking as perfect as ever (‘better can’t be in my estimation’), before wishing his bride-to-be as pleasant a time as he was having himself at the Leighs’ home: ‘much merriment and minced pye – it is Christmas Day’.
* Stratford Canning is best known as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War.
* Lady Frances’s charms were heightened by the fact that the Wedderburn Websters had recently moved to Aston Hall in Yorkshire. Aston was, as Byron had learned from Augusta, the very house in which she herself had been conceived.
* Hanson promised Byron a substantial amount of money (£30,000) from Lord Portsmouth’s estate in exchange for acting as best man and for later confirming the bridegroom’s sanity at the time of the marriage. Anecdotal report adds that Byron himself had already slept with the bride. So Byron himself later boasted to his own wife – but Byron did love to shock (Elizabeth Foyster, The Trials of the King of Hampshire (Oneworld Publications: 2016)).
* In other words, until Elizabeth Medora was weaned. Making love to a nursing mother was evidently not to Byron’s taste.
* Darnell, who later became the prebendary of Durham Cathedral and had his sermons published in the Edinburgh Review, was devoted to Annabella. In another undated autumn letter, from the Lovelace Byron Papers, he told her that ‘there is no young person to whom I have been so much in the habit of looking up to as yourself’ and sweetly ended by saying he would be proud to call Lady Byron his friend only ‘because she was Miss Milbanke’.
* On 22 November 1814, Portsmouth’s brother (and heir) formally requested that the earl should be certified as a lunatic and thus retrospectively unfit to have married Miss Hanson. Byron’s marriage preparations came further down John Hanson’s list of concerns than protecting the lucrative aggrandisement of his daughter (see E. Foyster, op. cit. pp. 192–3).
* In 1856, Annabella presented an entirely different portrait of the scene to Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this version, she offered to break the engagement if Byron had some private reason to regret his offer. Collapsing on a sofa, Byron had ‘murmured indistinct words of anger & reproach – “you don’t know what you have done”.’ The subject was never renewed except by hints at ‘fearful mysteries’ in the past. This is less convincing than the rage described by Byron. Only in her late twenties did Annabella learn to suppress her own violent temper. (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated (Sampson Low & Son, 1870), p. 289.)
* Byron had previously told Lady Melbourne that he preferred his suppers ‘hot’: the sexual meaning was plain. Here, he is clearly inviting Annabella to recall more than the ‘hot luncheons’ he had enjoyed under her roof.
* Annabella, now aged twenty-two, had unofficially taken on the role of family lawyer. It was one that equipped her well to face the challenges of an unknowable future.