(JANUARY TO MARCH 1815)
The role of elder sister had been vacant in Miss Milbanke’s home circle ever since Sophy Curzon left Seaham Hall to marry Lord Tamworth in 1800. Annabella was fondly imagining she had found a Sophy substitute (Augusta was nine years older than herself) when she invited Mrs Leigh to join the wedding party and to accompany the couple, as was a regular convention in those days, on their January honeymoon.
Augusta’s explanation for refusing this invitation – Byron enclosed it with his own Christmas letter to Annabella from the Leighs’ Cambridgeshire house – was strikingly lame. The four young children (whom Augusta produced as her sole reason for staying at home) had never yet prevented their mother from going wherever she wished. When the fact that Byron did not once write to his increasingly plaintive sister during the entire first two months of his marriage is added to his almost hysterical opposition to the two women’s initial encounter in March, it becomes clear that it was he, not Augusta, who feared the consequences of such a meeting. Guilt, a quality upon which Byron’s work flourished (while his spirit suffered), was – and would remain – entirely foreign to Augusta’s cheerful and less complex personality. Years later, an enlightened Annabella would ascribe Mrs Leigh’s sins to the state of ‘moral idiotcy’ [sic] in which she seemed to thrive.
Augusta Leigh had a vested interest in supporting a marriage that would help to divert growing public attention from Byron’s illicit affection for herself. John Hobhouse, accompanying Byron on the bachelor’s last and far from hasty stage of his carriage journey towards matrimony, held a different view. Byron had alarmed Hobhouse in the summer of 1814 by hinting about lurid secrets in his private life. Six months later, those unnamed secrets had been forgotten and Hobhouse was conscious only of the fact that he was about to lose his cherished friend and fellow rake to a dowdy little North Country bride. Hobhouse’s Diary, our main guide to the wedding visit, is richly peppered with qualifications and barbs. In tone and content, it denigrated pretty much everything except his own friendship with Byron.
The Milbanke family’s continuing fears of a last-minute matrimonial cancellation were apparent from the moment that Byron’s carriage drew up at Seaham. It was eight in the evening. Supper had been eaten, the shutters long since closed. A distraught Lady Milbanke had retired to her room. Annabella, intercepting Byron as he limped upstairs to his former bedroom, flung her arms around his neck and burst into tears. (‘She did this not before us,’ Hobhouse noted with queasy relief.) Subsequently, meeting the bride-to-be by candlelight in the Seaham library, the rakish young man noted a frank manner, expressive eyes and good ankles. Miss Milbanke’s dresses, as Byron had previously warned him, were unfashionably long and high-necked, affording little chance for an intimate assessment of the young lady’s assets. To her credit (in the diarist’s opinion), their hostess showed no affectation either in the way she greeted her guest or in the way she behaved with Byron, ‘gazing with delight on his bold and animated face – this regulated however with the most entire decorum. Byron loves her personally when present,’ Hobhouse noted, before adding a snide qualification of his own: ‘as it is easy for those used to such indications to observe.’
A night’s rest helped to thaw Hobhouse’s reservations. Marriage settlement documents were signed first thing next morning in the presence of William Hoar, the Milbankes’ lawyer, who had come up weeks earlier from London for that specific purpose, and who departed the following day. Celebratory entertainments provided by the Seaham villagers included a colliers’ sword dance that culminated in a sinister little ritual, the beheading of the fool. At the hall, a mock wedding ceremony was rehearsed, with Hobhouse playing an improbable bride to Mr Hoar’s stately groom. Annabella, having gained Hobhouse’s respect during the morning’s discussions with Hoar about Byron’s financial position, was now declared to be ‘most attractive’, while her father’s stories (since Hobhouse was hearing them for the first time) seemed pleasantly entertaining. Only Byron, after a muted family supper, appeared wistful. (‘Well H, this is our last night – tomorrow I shall be Annabella’s – absit omen!!’) That Byron might have been joking about his desire for a last-minute reprieve was beyond the imagining of his fond but humourless companion.
Mr Hobhouse’s temper had been improved by the acquisition of an unexpected admirer. Thomas Noel, Lord Wentworth’s illegitimate son and the absentee Rector of Kirkby Mallory, was invited to preside at his cousin Annabella’s wedding as a special honour; alluring promises had been made (Noel was always short of money) of a handsome gift from the groom. Having already cooled his heels among the anxious family for three long weeks while the wedding plans went on hold, Thomas Noel was hungry for entertainment; Hobhouse and Byron offered all that a lively and most unclerically minded rector could have wished for.
The groom, so Noel informed Kitty and their family of six on his return home,* was not in the least surly and aloof. Far from it. The melodious-voiced Lord Byron (as young Mary Noel was happy to pass along to her favourite female correspondent of the time, ‘is very engaging in his manners, exceedingly good-humoured, and has great spirits’. Mr Hobhouse, who spoke of Lord Byron’s goodness, nobility and generosity in the highest of terms, had proved equally delightful, telling stories of his travels ‘in such pleasing language that Papa says he could never be tired of listening to him’.
What Thomas Noel did not tell his children was that Mr Hobhouse had privately urged him to do everything in his power to stop the marriage going ahead, advice that Noel decided to ignore.
On 2 January 1815, the long-awaited ceremony took place with the couple kneeling upon on two hard little cushions (Byron later remarked that he thought they were stuffed with peach stones) in Seaham’s airy first-floor drawing room. Hobhouse, while omitting to record his friend’s oddly informal wedding attire (a black coat instead of the customary blue, and loose trousers instead of the wedding breeches that would draw attention to the thinner calf above his deformed foot), noted that Annabella was simply dressed in white muslin (‘very plain indeed’), and that she spoke her responses clearly (‘firm as a rock’). Following the bride’s quick change into a warmer dress and fur-trimmed grey travelling pelisse, the couple had both sat quietly in the room. Tellingly, Hobhouse observed that he felt ‘as if I had buried a friend’.
Byron’s devoted comrade provided a final glimpse of his own feelings as the honeymooners set off on their thirty-mile carriage journey inland to Halnaby, near Darlington. Annabella, to whom Hobhouse had condescendingly presented a yellow morocco-bound set of her husband’s works (as if she did not already have copies of her own!), confided that any future absence of happiness would be entirely her own fault. Innocently stated, the remark would be stored up by the resentful Hobhouse as a declaration of Annabella’s personal responsibility for the fate of the marriage. Byron, meanwhile, had seemed to cling to Hobhouse’s hand as the two friends bade a last farewell. Or was it the other way round? ‘I had hold of his out of the window when the carriage drove off,’ Hobhouse reported.
The Reverend Thomas Noel’s feelings were less tender. Something ‘substantial’ had been promised for his time and efforts. His recompense consisted of a mere ring pulled by the poet off his own white finger (rings, frequently conferred, were an item of which Byron always possessed a superabundance) and a request to wear it in remembrance of the donor.
Mr Wallis, the Seaham vicar who was also in attendance, got nothing at all.
Until now, Annabella had spent little time alone with her spouse. If her frequently revised later accounts are to be trusted, solitude brought a sharp awakening. Journeying to Halnaby with his new bride in a closed private carriage, Byron began by singing, fell into silence and then informed Bell (the pet name he bestowed upon his bride from this point on) that she should have married George Eden. When this produced no results, he announced, firstly, that she would learn to regret not having accepted his own first proposal; secondly, that she should not have married him at all; and finally, that he shared the dislike which Lady Melbourne had told him she felt for Annabella’s mother.
Byron was as capricious in his moods as the wind. He was also suffering from a filthy cold, one that lasted throughout the entire first week of the honeymoon. Ill health did not improve his spirits. It is entirely possible that he did indeed say all these attributed unpleasantries, and mean them. It is also well within the bounds of belief that Byron announced, shortly after their first dinner as a married couple, a strong preference for sleeping alone, and that he greeted Annabella’s arrival in the Halnaby library the following morning with the announcement that she had married into a family rich only in insanity. Apparently, he added that he had damned himself by marrying her.
So Lady Byron recorded later and – prone though Annabella became to dressing her marital recollections in the plumage of a bad gothic novel – there is no reason to doubt that their essential basis was factual. Byron, referring to his estranged wife as ‘Truth herself’, meant to convey that Annabella did not lie. What she may have done instead was to focus an obliging memory upon those truths that would most help to make her legal case for separation. Those truths – and no others – were what Lady Byron presented in her formal depositions. That purposeful testimony tells part of the story, but not the whole.
Annabella was not alone in creating the myths in which the three-week January honeymoon at Halnaby has been enshrouded as thoroughly as by the snow which marooned the handsome, bleak old house, blanketing its long stone terraces and holding the world outside at bay. Jane Minns, reporting that her young mistress had been all smiles on her arrival at Halnaby (Mrs Minns had travelled ahead to prepare the household), was herself looking back over a gap of fifty-four years. Tom Moore’s frequently repeated tale of Byron ravishing his wife on a Halnaby sofa within minutes of their arrival is not verified elsewhere. Moore claimed to have come across the scene in Byron’s unpublished memoirs, but no other reader – and there were many – alluded to any such memorable occasion. A rape scene is hard to square with Byron’s only extant mention of a sofa encounter at Halnaby, when he informed Lady Melbourne that he and his Bell were snugly sharing a couch even as he wrote (she being curled up fast asleep in its far corner). ‘You would think,’ he complacently reported on this first day of wedlock, ‘that we had been married these fifty years.’
It was perhaps inevitable that the honeymoon of such a notorious literary figure would invite embellishment. Samuel Rogers also cited the conveniently unverifiable Byron ‘Memoirs’ (they were burned in John Murray’s Albemarle Street drawing room in 1824) as his source for a story of the poet waking his wife from slumber during their first night at Halnaby with a shriek of terror. Firelight, flickering behind the closed red damask curtains of the couple’s four-poster bed, had caused a guilty spirit to picture himself in Hell.
Again, this was a case of fanciful thinking. The anecdote was first published in 1856 by Rogers’ personal Boswell, Alexander Dyce, as an example of his hero’s lively table talk. Rogers was evidently conflating the Byrons’ imagined wedding night with a subsequent event at Seaham Hall, when Annabella rescued her sleeping spouse from being suffocated by the noxious fumes of sea coal. (An intoxicated Byron had imprudently doused the smoking fire in his dressing room with a bucket of water.) That incident was widely reported, especially since Byron took great pride in his wife’s resourcefulness. ‘This has been a trial of Bell’s presence of Mind, & adroitness which I am delighted to hear she possesses,’ Lady Melbourne complimented her protégé on 11 February, six days after his account of the event.
What do we know for certain about the week during which Byron laid aside his charming surface (Annabella later wistfully referred to it as his ‘company kindness’), allowing her to see the personality which Walter Scott privately described as ‘irritable to the point of mental disease’ (and which Byron himself would later plead made him ‘violent’, but ‘not malignant’)?
We know that, early on the first morning of their marriage, a misadventure occurred. Finding her fingers too slender for the wedding ring that had belonged to Byron’s chubbier mother, the new Lady Byron hung it around her neck on a black ribbon. For Byron, that innocent act was bad enough; a black ribbon signified misfortune to his superstitious mind. Worse followed when the ring fell into the fireplace; here was sure evidence that trouble lay in store for their marriage.
A letter was delivered to Byron while the honeymooners consumed their first post-nuptial breakfast. Augusta, never diplomatic, had seized the occasion to hail her younger brother as the ‘Dearest, best & first of human beings’ before informing him that she herself had trembled like the sea in an earthquake during his wedding ceremony. Byron read the letter aloud to Bell and asked for her thoughts. She told him (Annabella’s calmness in the face of provocation always infuriated her husband) that the letter was very agreeable. ‘My answers on all such occasions appeared to convince him of my unsuspecting goodwill towards her [Augusta],’ she would tell her lawyer the following year.
It is unlikely that the newly married Annabella felt anything other than ‘unsuspecting goodwill’ towards the unknown sister-in-law with whom she swiftly began to share her concerns about Byron’s odd behaviour. While Byron cheerfully informed Lady Melbourne that Halnaby was ‘just the spot’ for a honeymoon and that he now entertained ‘great hopes this match will turn out well’ (7 January 1815), Augusta tried to reassure his anxious wife. ‘At Halnaby he did several times declare that he was guilty of some heinous crime,’ Annabella later recalled. But Augusta asserted that such tales were all a sham. ‘It is so like him to try and persuade people that he is disagreeable and all that Oh dear!’, she lamented to Annabella on 9 January 1815. Nine days later, she countered news of Byron’s ‘fit of grumps’ and ‘malicious insinuations’ with praises for the way that Annabella had taken control:
I think and with joy that you are the most sagacious person and have in one fortnight made yourself as completely Mistress of the ‘art of making B happy’ as some others would in 20 years.
Strangely, given Annabella’s lawyerly habit of making copies of everything she wrote, no trace remains of her own side of the copious correspondence with Augusta during those first months of 1815. But Augusta’s eulogy suggests that the stay at Halnaby was less resolutely black than Annabella’s memory later painted it. Expeditions were rendered impossible by heavy snow. Music offered no diversion for a couple who neither played instruments nor – apart from Byron’s occasional wild Albanian chantings – sang. In certain other respects, they were well matched. Insistently though Annabella would later dwell upon Byron’s belief in a vengeful God, he was intrigued by her own more forgiving creed. At Halnaby, she read a discussion of miracles, at his request, and argued the case against atheism. Byron was listening to his hardheaded wife when he briskly instructed John Hanson, on 19 January 1815, to start raising money from his encumbered estates in Nottinghamshire and Lancashire.
Money worries would haunt Byron throughout his marriage, leading to times (so he later told Hobhouse) when he was ‘bereaved of reason during his paroxysms with his wife’.* Money was preying on his mind following the couple’s return to Seaham Hall for the second part of their honeymoon. On 26 January, five days after their arrival back at the Milbankes’ home, Byron glumly told Hobhouse that his debts were in excess of £30,000 (just under £2.5 million in today’s money). Unmentioned was the £30,000 he was due to receive in three annual payments, a reward for supporting John Hanson’s underhand marriage of his daughter to the wealthy – and mad – Earl of Portsmouth.
Privately, Byron was uneasy. Publicly, the handsome young husband was all smiles. Lady Milbanke complacently reported to her remarried brother-in-law, Sir James Bland Burges, that the newly-weds were ‘well, and as happy as youth and love can make them . . . neither of them seems in any haste to visit London’. In 1846, Mrs Clermont would declare that Annabella had left Seaham for Halnaby looking like ‘a flower’ and returned looking ‘as if she cared for nothing’, but that ardent supporter’s memory may have been corrupted by subsequent events and the passage of over thirty years.
In 1818, Annabella would return to Seaham for the express purpose of reliving her joyful memories of this visit to her family home as a honeymooning bride. Down in Cambridgeshire, Augusta heard about jolly games of charades, in which a frisky Byron had pulled off Lady Milbanke’s wig while Annabella donned his greatcoat and yachting cap, together with false whiskers and a moustache. What a pity that ‘certain people whom I know & many others whom I don’t know could not peep through the door’, Augusta giggled on 28 January. And how splendid that Byron was in such spirits! ‘I rather suspect he rejoices at the discovery of your “ruling passion” for making mischief in private,’ she added, leaving her sexual innuendo almost as naked as the guilelessness of an artless Annabella’s confidence.*
Less reassuring were the Bouts-Rimés that were forwarded to Augusta from Seaham the following day. The game had been to write alternate lines of rhymed verse; the result was a tease with a troublingly barbed edge. Annabella (or so she later recalled) had annoyed her husband by innocently suggesting that each line-maker should mark their contribution with an ‘X’, not knowing that this was the code symbol for sex used by Byron in his relationship with Augusta. Two lines run as follows:
BELL: The lord defend us from a honeymoon.
BYRON: Our cares commence – our comforts end so soon.
The sour tone of the jangling rhymes (of which there were many more) was echoed in the letters which Byron fired off from Seaham during the following days. So, ‘the treaclemoon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married,’ he wrote to Tom Moore on 2 February, adding that he missed their friend Douglas Kinnaird’s brandy and was bored of dancing to the jangle of the Milbankes’ tea bell (‘damn tea’). Lady Melbourne, busily urging her protégé to put himself under his wife’s affectionate direction, received a similar signal (‘the Moon is over’), together with a reminder of Byron’s persisting passion for Augusta, although ‘I have quite enough at home to prevent me from loving any one essentially for some time to come’.
Diligently searching – the request had come from her niece – for a rentable London property large enough to suit Byron’s extravagant taste (but cheap enough to satisfy his prudent wife), Lady Melbourne took comfort from Byron’s announcement in this same letter of 2 February 1815 that – moon apart – ‘Bell & I are as lunatic as heretofore – she does as she likes – and don’t bore me . . .’ Familiar with Lord Byron’s capricious moods, Elizabeth Melbourne remained cautiously optimistic. Governing him, and doing so with kindness and affection: this delicate skill, as she never ceased to remind her niece, was the key to a successful marriage.
Augusta, meanwhile, grew alarmed at hearing that Byron frequently proclaimed his preference for his sister over his wife, introducing mentions of his ‘Gus’ in a way that she unhappily agreed with Annabella was ‘very mal-a-propos’. She took hope, nevertheless, from Lady Byron’s hints at sexual pleasure and – as the chilly days at Seaham lengthened into weeks – signs of a growing companiability.
Returning alone to Seaham three years later, Annabella would walk down the cliff path to the shore. Here, and out on the moors where she and Byron had once set off on a day-long ‘ramble-scramble-tumble-cum-jumble’ that ended with them floundering, laughing, into a bog, she had merrily followed Byron’s lead. In company, and even in private (as she noticed by his discomfort when they encountered country folk out on the lonely roads around Seaham), her halt-footed husband was always conscious of the painful deformity that a ruthless God had personally condemned him to endure. Alone with her, Byron grew unselfconscious and boyish, ‘jumping & squeaking on the sands’ or scrambling ahead of his wife up to the crag of the Featherbed Rocks where, side by side, the two of them gazed tranquilly out across the white crests of a grey and wintry sea. These small and modest recollections evoked happy memories. When preparing her legal depositions of a wretched marriage, Lady Byron resolved to omit such scenes.
Annabella’s maid, Jane Minns, concerned by her mistress’s evident sadness during the lonely weeks at Halnaby, had urged her to confide in her father, kind Sir Ralph. Pride forbade it. Augusta, that warmly reassuring unknown sister, was clearly the person who knew Byron best and who was thus most able to advise a wife on how to handle him. True, Byron had dropped mysterious hints of a forbidden relationship with his sister, but there was no serious reason to believe him. Two months of marriage had taught Annabella that Lord Byron was at any moment capable of saying whatever popped into his head, especially after a generous swig from the brandy bottle that was always on hand at hospitable Seaham Hall. (Augusta, knowing him better, futilely entreated Annabella to hide the brandy away.)
That Byron loved Augusta was beyond doubt; that he might love her more than he should cast only a faint shadow across the unsuspecting mind of his wife. It is likely that Annabella’s firm refusal to stay alone at Seaham while her husband travelled to London – via another visit to The Paddocks* at Six Mile Bottom – was based simply upon an eager desire to meet for herself the charmingly demonstrative Mrs Leigh. Augusta, justifiably fearful of her brother’s intentions, began by opposing any visit by either party, proceeded to the suggestion that the couple should take over some nearby house and ended, joylessly, by acquiescing to Lady Byron’s request to stay under her roof. (Colonel Leigh was not in residence.)
Byron’s anger at his wife’s wilful insistence upon accompanying him to the Leighs’ Cambridgeshire home evaporated in the face of unexpected good news. The elusive Thomas Claughton was once again considering the purchase of Newstead Abbey and the Duchess of Devonshire’s grand London house in Piccadilly was available for the Byrons to rent. Household arrangements were to be settled between Annabella and Lady Melbourne, who instantly despatched floor maps, inventories and screeds of helpful recommendations. Byron, meanwhile, now informed Tom Moore that he had ‘vastly’ enjoyed his stay at Seaham Hall, where his wife was in ‘unvaried good-humour and behavior [sic].’ A reference to Annabella as being ‘in health’ hinted at a better reason for good cheer than either news about houses or of Milbankian hospitality. Lady Byron believed that she was pregnant. Byron never doubted that their child would be a boy.
‘What I suffered at Six Mile Bottom was indescribable,’ Annabella later recalled. As always, the darkest elements came to the fore in quasi-legal statements that required a tale of unmitigated horror. For once, however, she included a moment of unexpected joy. Shortly after leaving Seaham on 9 March, Byron turned to his wife in the carriage and told her that she had succeeded in making him a happy man. Kissed and caressed in front of her own maid, Annabella grew embarrassed; nevertheless, the declaration was truly tender. It made up for the coldness and the ‘sort of unrelenting pity’ she had been subjected to at Halnaby.
That moment of affection stood out in Annabella’s mind because it contrasted so painfully with what followed. The newly-weds spent three long March weeks under Augusta’s roof. Byron, throughout that period, behaved as if he wished that he had never met his wife. Thwarted by Augusta’s unexpected resistance to his sexual overtures, he reacted with all the considerable malice of which, when denied his wishes, Byron was always capable. His target became Annabella.
The portrait of life at the Leighs’ isolated house that Lady Byron later painted to her lawyer was unyieldingly grim. Sent early to bed (‘We can amuse ourselves without you my dear’), and greeted by a shriek of ‘Don’t touch me!’ when once she reached towards her husband for comfort in the night, Annabella was meanwhile informed – however absurd she then believed the announcement to be – that little Elizabeth Medora Leigh was Byron’s own child. Instructed to listen while a reluctant Augusta unwillingly read out the letters in which her brother had pondered which wealthy bride to pursue, Annabella was commanded to sit with Mrs Leigh upon a sofa while Byron – lounging between them – decided which of the two women could kiss him more ardently. Constantly exposed to what one of her subsequent accounts simply but eloquently described as ‘deep horrors’, it’s small wonder that Lady Byron’s private record of her feelings at the time included the pitiful line: ‘My heart is withered away, so that I forget to eat my bread.’
The unexpected result of Byron’s perverse behaviour was to drive the two women (literally, some would suggest) into each other’s arms. Confidences had already been exchanged about Byron’s boasts of an incestuous relationship. Watching Augusta closely throughout the visit, an anxious Annabella noted that Mrs Leigh ‘submitted to his [Byron’s] affection, but never appeared gratified by it’. True, Augusta made a point of wearing her monogrammed brooch containing a lock of hair (Byron had ordered one for his sister and one for himself back at Seaham, when he anticipated staying alone under her roof), but she did so under his instruction. True, Augusta read out painful passages from letters, but it was always at Byron’s insistence. Also true, and less forgivably, Mrs Leigh never protested when her guest was sent off early to bed. (One of Annabella’s most wretched memories of her stay in Cambridgeshire was the sound of Byron and his beloved, merry ‘Gus’ laughing together behind closed doors.)
Superficially, the new sisters-in-law had little in common. Annabella was cautious, rational, intellectual; Augusta was impulsive, illogical and happy to accept Byron’s affectionate description of herself as ‘a ninny’. What drew the two women together was the callousness with which Byron sought to manipulate their feelings. His success was qualified. Gus – chestnut-haired, hazel-eyed, softly rounded as a damaged peach and nervous as a hunted hare – was awed by the calm dignity with which the younger woman endured her husband’s manic goading. ‘I think I never saw nor heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould than she appears to be,’ Augusta wrote of Annabella in a letter to Francis Hodgson, on 18 March. On 1 April, she wrote to Hodgson again, to announce that her poor brother’s debts had plunged him into despair.
And throughout all of this, what did Annabella think? ‘She [Augusta] was always devotedly kind to me and consulted my wishes on every occasion,’ Lady Byron firmly stated a year later, and added: ‘I cannot think how feelingly [Augusta acted] without emotions of gratitude.’ Nevertheless, leaving the Leighs’ cluttered and claustrophobic home for London on 28 March, Annabella experienced profound relief. Augusta had seemed equally thankful for the visit’s end. Recalling their departure in her legal statement the following year, Annabella simply noted that she ‘did not wish to detain us’.
* Thomas and Catherine Noel were the parents of two girls (Mary and Anna) and four boys (Tom Jr, Robert, Charles and Edward).
* The words ‘bereaved of reason’ were underlined later by John Hobhouse, not by Byron himself.
* What was the ‘mischief’ involving Annabella’s self-acknowledged ‘ruling passion’? Flagellation? Or is it possible that Byron had introduced his wife to oral and/or anal sex, and that Annabella found that she enjoyed it? At least one later defendant of Lady Byron (John Fox, writing in 1869–71 and seeming to cite Annabella’s lawyer as his authority) hinted that sodomy, rather than incest, was the embarrassing charge of which no proof could be offered to a court.
* Recently reborn as Swynford Manor, a wedding venue.