(1815–16)
The house which Lady Melbourne had picked out for her niece’s future abode was the London home of Augustus Foster’s mother. (The widowed Duchess of Devonshire – Georgiana’s successor – was solacing herself in Rome.) Built in the 1760s in the neoclassical style, 13 Piccadilly Terrace* looked across the fields of Green Park from the western and airier end of a palatial row of Georgian mansions, beneath the tall windows of which – much to the delight of the late 4th Duke of Queensberry, one of the terrace’s most famously lecherous inhabitants – available ladies marketed their wares. ‘Old Q’ had become quite a feature of the street himself, ogling the passing traffic from a balcony, and then, from an armchair drawn up within a specially designed bay window. The Byrons, to the relief of their neighbours, would prove more reticent.
An assortment of pets, a long-suffering valet (William Fletcher was helped out by an occasional understudy, James Brown), an eccentric old cleaning lady called Mrs Mule and a formidable wardrobe: these were Lord Byron’s contributions to setting up the household, plus the rent he had agreed to pay of £700 per annum (around £28,000 today). A semi-tame squirrel was installed, together with a bad-tempered parrot – it once bit Annabella’s finger, whereupon Byron hurled it, cage and all, out of the window, only to rush downstairs to save the bird from death – and a mastiff. The dog guarded its master’s door, not from a wife who regularly shared his bed, but from the menace of a swelling band of creditors.
Annabella’s miserable experiences at Augusta’s Cambridgeshire home were briefly forgotten in the task of setting up a sixteen-bedroom house which, while adequately furnished by the duchess, possessed not one scrap of linen, glass or cutlery. By 5 April, all was orderly enough for John Murray, Byron’s publisher, to be invited in to show off a new bookplate print of the poet (Annabella agreed with her husband that its unflattering predecessor was unusable), a portrait of Byron as he had appeared to visitors at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1814: a glorious figure in Albanian costume, represented to the sitter’s own entire satisfaction by the well-known artist Thomas Phillips. (The painting so enchanted Byron’s proud mother-in-law that she purchased it for herself.)
Byron was not alone in being able to assume a charming public manner. Mr Murray went away from Piccadilly Terrace with an excellent impression of the poet’s young bride. It was not yet apparent how rare the honour of paying a social visit to these reclusive newly-weds was to be. As a girl, Annabella had enjoyed hosting London dinner parties. There were to be no such occasions at her new home. Among her closest friends – the Milners, the Gosfords, the Doyles, the Montgomerys, the Eden family, Mrs George Lamb – not one seems ever to have crossed the threshold of her marital abode. Lady Melbourne, paying an official call, was turned away. Even Hobhouse, returning from a European trip in the summer of 1815, found it difficult to gain access to his oldest friend.
Signs of domestic unrest behind the house’s austere façade showed up almost immediately. News had come while the Byrons were still visiting Augusta that Mrs Leigh had secured a £300 per annum appointment as a Woman of the Bedchamber to the Regent’s mother, old Queen Charlotte. Free and spacious lodging in St James’s Palace (a welcome bonus for a couple who had no London home) was not, however, to be provided until 1818. On 31 March, a mere three days after the Byrons’ traumatic stay at The Paddocks, the queen’s new court lady was invited to lodge herself – and to stay for as long as she wished – under her brother’s roof. The offer came not from Byron, but his wife.
Why did Lady Byron turn so readily to the very woman for whom her husband had recently displayed a woundingly amorous affection? Possibly, Annabella thought it would create an impression of estrangement if Augusta stayed – as she could easily have done – with Mrs Villiers, the worldly older friend who had helped secure her new royal post. (Mr Villiers was a Groom of the Bedchamber to George III.) More likely, having formed a bond of sisterly kinship under stressful conditions, Annabella felt that cheerful, sympathetic Gus was the only person with whom she could safely share her private worries and that she would – Augusta made no secret of her longing for a livelier existence than she could obtain in a Cambridgeshire village – gladly take up the proposal.
Accepting with speed, Augusta nevertheless displayed unease about the chances for success of the ménage à trois that Annabella had once blithely envisaged as ‘an amiable trio’. ‘You will perhaps be a better judge by & bye [sic] whether I shall not be a plague,’ Mrs Leigh presciently advised her ‘dearest Sis’ on 31 March ‘– & you must tell me truly if I am likely to prove so . . .’
Augusta arrived at Piccadilly Terrace on 15 April. Accompanying her were a maid and her eldest daughter, Georgiana (‘Gee’), Byron’s quiet, slow-witted godchild. The newcomers had scarcely settled in as guests before – from the debt-ridden Lord Byron’s point of view – good news arrived. Wealthy old Lord Wentworth, grief-stricken since the loss of his lively little wife in the summer of 1814, had been taken ill at his London house. Death was imminent. While Judith hurried to make her way down from Seaham, Annabella set out from Piccadilly Terrace to act as her dying uncle’s companion and comforter. Hints that the early stages of pregnancy were taxing her health appear in the anxious letter Byron sent to Lord Wentworth’s house on 13 or 14 April:
Dearest –
Now your mother is come I won’t have you worried any longer – more particularly in your present situation which is rendered very precarious by what you have already gone through. Pray – come home
Ever thine B
Lord Wentworth died on 17 April. The anger with which Byron greeted his wife upon her return home – she later recalled that he did not speak to her for four days, preferring to use Augusta as his envoy – was fuelled by a disappointment that he was ashamed to put into words. Lord Wentworth had been expected to leave his fortune to his niece, Annabella. Instead, it was to pass to her only upon the death of his one surviving sister, and with conditions. The Milbankes, in return for adopting Judith’s maiden name (Noel), became the new owners of Wentworth’s London home and of Kirkby Mallory, the Leicestershire estate at which Judith had spent her early years. Lord Wentworth’s money, of which they all stood in urgent need, remained entailed. Sir Ralph was still struggling to raise the last portion of his daughter’s £20,000 settlement (a sum on which Byron, a year after his marriage, was still receiving only the interest). For the present, however, Wentworth’s large legacy was untouchable.
Chattels offered meagre comfort to a man hounded by creditors. The sole evidence that some of these personal objects did reach Piccadilly Terrace survives in a French violin on which Lord Wentworth had enjoyed duetting with his equally musical wife. Byron’s feelings about the promised legacy can be guessed from the sour little verse scratched on to its back:
I am now Byron’s fiddle,
Pray what do you think of my shape?
You may touch me and feel me
But beware if you steal me
I may get you into a ‘Scrape!’
[Signed]: mme Muse 1815
Annabella later claimed that nursing a dying uncle had been light duty compared to the misery she was enduring at Piccadilly Terrace. Confined to her bedroom for days and sometimes weeks on end by an unexpectedly difficult pregnancy, she found herself torn between gratitude for Augusta’s efforts to act as the buffer between an increasingly estranged couple and growing discomfort about the nature of Byron’s relationship with his sister. Once again, Annabella puzzled over the significance of distant gigglings and laughter. What was taking place elsewhere in the house? How, fed with Byron’s hints about a terrible crime, one for which her original delay in agreeing to marry him was held to be mysteriously responsible, could she not wonder?
On one humiliating evening, or so Annabella recalled, a smiling Augusta brought a request from her brother that his wife should stop pacing the creaky floorboards of the upstairs library and return quietly to her bed. Just for a moment, young Lady Byron had felt a black desire to plunge a dagger into her gentle rival’s heart. ‘It was an instant of revenge,’ she wrote over a year later:
and her voice of kindness extinguished it – yet if I ever should go mad perhaps those remembrances would be prevailing ideas, & to a principle of Forgiveness I feel indebted for the possession of my intellects under circumstances that made my brain burn.
By the autumn of 1816, when Annabella recorded this memory, she had no doubt that there had been a pre-marital relationship between brother and sister, and that Byron had always been eager to resume it. Back in the summer of 1815, uncertainty was overruled by a grateful consciousness that Augusta, during the two summer months that Mrs Leigh resided at Piccadilly Terrace, was doing everything to help that lay within her power.
It is tempting to dismiss Annabella’s elaborate retrospective statements about her marriage as jealous fantasies, but Lady Byron was not a fanciful woman. The upstairs room in which she paced was clearly identified by her as having ‘then’ been the library, thus indicating a subsequent change of use. The dagger that she had longed to plunge into Augusta’s heart was identified as having always been kept in Byron’s adjacent bedroom. These are concrete details, and convincing ones. Likewise, when Annabella recalled how Byron had tried to frighten her with Harriet Lee’s The German’s Tale (1801) by associating himself with its protagonist (a son who murders to obtain a legacy), the accuracy of the memory is confirmed by Lady Byron’s recollection that her husband began writing a play based upon Lee’s tale. Passages were read out to her, but ‘I believe he burnt it afterwards.’
Annabella was correct. Byron did write an early draft of Werner (1822), a play based on Lee’s tale and also, perhaps, upon a dramatic version written by Elizabeth Devonshire’s friend and predecessor, Georgiana.* But was Annabella right to see personal menace in her husband’s presentation of himself as another such murderer? Byron’s hints at having committed a homicide haunted her. It seems more likely that a sometimes unkind husband stored up trouble for himself by his spoofing of a credulous and increasingly terrified bride.
‘My Night Mare is my own personalty [sic],’ Byron confessed to his close friend Douglas Kinnaird in 1817. Throughout their courtship, Annabella had presented herself as eager to play what we would today see as the therapist’s role to a troubled man of whose essential goodness she remained convinced. Byron encouraged her to assume the part, urging her to act as his friend and guide. ‘I meant to marry a woman who would be my friend – I want you to be my friend,’ Annabella remembered him insisting. So, were Byron’s declarations and hints intended to wound and alarm, or was he simply treating his wife as the understanding mentor and mother confessor that she had promised to become? Who was failing whom?
Some light on Byron’s increasingly erratic behaviour is cast by his frustrated knowledge that Annabella’s well-meant endeavours could do nothing to alter the circumstances in which he found himself trapped.
The year 1815 was when Byron’s personal crises reached a head. His financial problems seemed insoluble. Laudanum and calomel (a powerful mercury-based medication) were failing to ease the continual irritation caused by a diseased liver. His feelings about Augusta remained both strong and ambivalent (he was damned by having slept with her; it was intolerable that she should be under the same roof and yet resist him). Gentle reason – Annabella’s mild panacea for all his troubles – drove him mad.
Back in November 1813, while attempting to identify the source of his own quicksilver emotional transitions in the journal that he had just begun to write, Byron believed that he had brought an ungovernable temper almost under control. One unfailing goad to fury remained: ‘unless there is a woman (and not any or every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy’. Annabella was precisely that stubborn woman who, by standing in the way, brought out the worst in her husband. Faced by his wife’s implacable, maddening tranquillity, Byron set out to shatter it. He did so with all the considerable verbal and imaginative power at his disposal. Later, Annabella would recall every last wild word, claim and threat that had been used to provoke a reaction from her heroically imperturbable self. Unfortunately for Lord Byron, she took his taunts and violent dramatics very seriously indeed.
Five months into the Byrons’ marriage, Annabella had good reason to feel both unhappy and isolated. Apart from Augusta, she had nowhere to turn for help. Mrs Clermont, who had stayed elsewhere in London throughout the summer, was apparently in receipt of daily confidential letters, as – to a lesser degree – was Selina Doyle. Neither woman could offer more than sympathy. The Noels (the Milbankes legally changed their name in May, a month after Lord Wentworth’s death) were kept at arms’ length by a husband who had no wish to dance attendance either on a woman he disliked or her garrulous old husband. The fact that Sir Ralph, an ardent Whig, shared both Byron’s elation at Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the poet’s disgust at the outcome of Waterloo, provided a route through which Annabella struggled to promote a friendship between the two men in her life. ‘B has just found out an Etymology for Blücher’s name which is quite in your way,’ she wrote to her father, before carefully spelling out his pun upon the name of Wellington’s ally on the battlefield: ‘ “There goes the Blue Cur”.’ On another occasion, Byron had noticed the word ‘Dad’ scrawled on a Piccadilly wall: ‘B said it was a memento left us by our honoured parent.’
Such well-meant efforts proved useless. Byron rejected all invitations to the Noels’ new London and country homes (formerly Lord Wentworth’s properties), leaving Annabella to travel alone to the family celebration of her birthday on 17 May 1815. The most her husband would do was to extend an occasional family invitation to a play. (Douglas Kinnaird had just persuaded Byron to join the committee of the Drury Lane Theatre.) Byron did, however, consent to accept the occasional gift of food. ‘Yours confectionately,’ Annabella signed off her filial thanks for a homebaked goose pie, ‘gratefully acknowledged by B’s voracious stomach.’ Her figure-conscious husband had apparently polished off at the same meal an entire turbot.
Hard though it is today to interpret the Byrons’ secretive marriage, it presented an equally inscrutable façade to their contemporaries. George Ticknor’s record of his week in London offers a good example.
George Ticknor was a New Englander whose father had set up Boston’s first free primary schools, a parent enlightened enough to allow his son to exchange a legal career for the study of languages and literature. Arriving in London in the summer of 1815, en route to the University of Göttingen, young Ticknor requested an interview with Byron, one of his literary heroes.
The American visitor proved personable, well-read and in complete agreement with his host in his dislike of the boarding-school system that Lord Byron had experienced at Harrow. Paying his first visit to Piccadilly Terrace on 20 June (just after Augusta and little ‘Georgy’ Leigh had returned to Cambridgeshire), Ticknor caught no more than a glimpse of Annabella as she set off for a drive. Seeing her again three days later, he was impressed by Lady Byron’s eloquent face and intelligent conversation.
She is diffident – she is very young, not more, I think, than nineteen – but is obviously possessed of talent, and did not talk at all for display. For the quarter of an hour during which I was with her, she talked upon a considerable variety of subjects – America, of which she seemed to know considerable; of France, and Greece, with something of her husband’s visit there – and spoke of all with a justness and light good humour.
Byron, with whom the young American subsequently spent a full hour discussing contemporary literature, was much taken by his visitor. Bidden to return on 26 June, Ticknor noticed on that occasion how affectionately his host saw Lady Byron to her carriage, walking her to the door and shaking her hand as warmly ‘as if he were not to see her for a month’. On 27 June, Ticknor went to watch a historical drama, Charles the Bold, from Byron’s Drury Lane box. The only other guests that night were Annabella’s parents, of whom Ticknor greatly preferred Sir Ralph to his ‘fashionable’ wife. Lady Byron, in comparison, was ‘more interesting than I have yet seen her’, while Byron himself was praised for his kindness, gentle manners and unaffected ways. The poet, Ticknor noted with faint regret, was not in the least like the gloomy heroes of his romances.
Ticknor was a rare witness to the fact that the Byrons’ marriage could have a happy side. Annabella was, so her husband declared when he was feeling sentimental, ‘a good kind thing’; ‘the best little wife in the world’. Writing several months later to Tom Moore (in March 1816), Byron rhetorically demanded to be told whether ‘there ever was a better or even brighter, a kinder or a more amiable & agreeable being than Lady B’. Sleeping together regularly and seemingly with pleasure, the young couple employed tender nicknames: ‘Duck’ for him, ‘Pippin’ (from her round and rosy cheeks) for her.
Their affectionate diminutives were already in regular use by 7 July when, shortly after George Ticknor’s week of visits, Annabella’s father offered to loan the couple his own recently vacated Durham home, ordering Seaham to be cleaned and whitewashed in preparation for their visit. Lady Noel, hearing that the Byrons planned to retreat there only for the December lying-in, grew anxious. ‘Annabella I am sure requires country air,’ she urged her son-in-law in August, a month when most Londoners who could afford it left town; ‘her looks shew it, and it will do you both good’. Byron did not take kindly to instructions. Unusually for their social class, the couple remained in residence at their London home throughout the parched height of summer and on into the autumn.
Annabella, writing to Augusta early in August to express her approval of Byron’s drawing up a new will (one that provided support for the improvident Leighs), admitted that this protracted London sojourn was not ideal. Confiding her longing to be out of ‘this horrid town’ to her ‘Dearest Lei’, she dwelt upon the dwindling prospect of Seaham where, she was sure, her spirits and her looks ‘(if I was ever blest with any)’ would soon be restored. Was it to console her, she wondered, that Byron had unexpectedly invited Lady Noel to visit Seaham for the lying-in, or was it a thoughtful Augusta who had proved quietly persuasive? ‘I always feel,’ Annabella wrote with interesting ambivalence, ‘as if I had more reasons to love you than I can exactly know’.
Annabella’s gratitude to a loving sister-in-law was put to the test in early September. Byron had been in unusually savage spirits at the end of August, due in part to the increasing pressure of his debts. The Leighs, during this same period, were seeking to preserve Colonel Leigh’s right to a relative’s bequest, defending it from an unexpected challenge. Augusta, afraid that her husband’s habitual inertia would cause them to lose out, summoned her brother to their aid.
Byron left for Cambridgeshire on 31 August, accompanied by his valet, the faithful William Fletcher. Requesting ‘Dearest Pip’ to send his forgotten medical drops, Byron tactlessly announced an instant and marvellous improvement in his temper. (A coded ‘Not frac.’ signified ‘not fractious’.) Writing back to her ‘Darling Duck’ later the same day, Annabella adopted a characteristically optimistic tone.
I feel as if B— loved himself, which does me more good than anything else, and makes young Pip jump.
You would laugh to see and still more hear the effects of your absence in the house – Tearing up carpets, deluging staircases, knocking, rubbing, brushing!– By all these I was early awakened, for Ms Mew [sic] seems convinced that my ears and other senses have departed with you. She no longer flies like a sylph on tip-toe, but like a troop of dragoons at full gallop. The old proverb –
‘When the Cat’s away, the Mice will play –’
They shall have their holiday, but I can’t fancy it mine. Indeed indeed nau [naughty] B– is a thousand times better than no B.
I dare not write any more for fear you should be frightened at the length, and not read at all. So I shall give the rest to Goose [Augusta].
I hope you call out ‘Pip, pip, pip’ – now & then. I think I hear you – but I won’t grow lemoncholy –A—da!
The allusion to ‘nau B’ glossed the aggression to which Annabella had been exposed during the days leading up to his departure from Piccadilly Terrace for Six Mile Bottom. ‘I was very ill,’ she later recalled: ‘– he had kept me awake almost all the previous night to exercise his cruelty upon my feelings, & notwithstanding the self-command I could generally maintain, my convulsive sobs at last forced me to get up & leave the room.’ From a safe distance, however, Byron was now ready to become a devoted husband. A second letter to ‘Dearest Pip’ was filled with jokes about Fletcher’s courtship by letter of Annabella’s maid, Susan Rood, while ‘Goose’ took ‘a quill from her wing to scribble to you’. Byron’s own was signed, as Annabella’s had been, with the mysterious ‘–A—da’, raising the intriguing possibility that little Augusta Ada Byron’s second name contained some secret meaning for her parents.
Whatever grief Annabella may have been experiencing in private, she maintained before others a tranquil face. Judith, on 4 September, heard only that her daughter was ‘marvellous happy’ at the prospect of Byron’s return and that Augusta reported his having been ‘very disconsolate’ without his wife. When Judith insisted that the Byrons should relocate to Kirkby Mallory, Annabella responded with a firm refusal: ‘I wish I could see the practicality of our going to Kirkby,’ she wrote to her mother on 8 September, ‘but I do not.’ Byron was apparently willing for her to travel alone, but ‘I will not. As long as I am with him I am comparatively comfortable.’ ‘Comparatively’ was a word that tempted further questioning, but Lady Noel, yielding to a will as firm as her own, backed down. It was agreed that Annabella’s confinement would take place in town. Her choice of a reputable but unfashionable accoucheur, Dr Francis Le Mann of Soho Square, was also approved.
Money remained a subject for intense concern. Up in the north, Annabella’s parents had been hit hard by the failure of the Durham Bank. While Judith painted a shrewdly optimistic picture of the future value of country estates like Kirkby Mallory, the shortage of available cash made it difficult for the Noels to help a needy son-in-law. Annabella, during her husband’s absence in Cambridgeshire, paid hasty visits to Mr Hanson and her uncle, Sir James Bland Burges, executor of Lord Wentworth’s will. Sir Francis Doyle, reported by his sister Selina to have ‘a good deal of intercourse with people of business’, was consulted about the possibility of taking out a mortgage on Kirkby Mallory. Sadly, as Annabella wrote to her mother on 30 August, Sir Frank had dashed any hopes of raising money by that route. Or any other. Even Sir Ralph’s effort to realise some of the marriage settlement money – it had been due to Byron since May – by the sale of farms near Seaham was blocked by the ludicrous raising of a legal possibility that the 64-year-old Lady Noel might bear a second child. It was at this point that an exasperated Sir Ralph left William Hoar for a sharper firm of lawyers. Wharton & Ford would still be satisfactorily representing his descendants in 1900.
At Newstead, meanwhile, where young Captain Byron was acting as his cousin’s unpaid agent and gamekeeper, Mr Claughton continued to dither over his prospective purchase with no imminent sign of reaching a decision.
Wherever the Byrons looked, the route to financial security was barred. The poet’s creditors were reaching the end of their patience. On 8 September, in the letter explaining her decision to remain at Piccadilly Terrace, Annabella dropped the first hint of her husband’s darkest fears. If Lord Byron were presently to leave town now for more than a few days, she warned her mother, ‘some measures that are now suspended would immediately ensue’. Three days later, Annabella mentioned the possibility that Byron’s beloved library of books would be seized for sale. A month on, she observed that only the prospect of becoming a father was giving her husband a little comfort amidst ‘the very distressing circumstance to which we must look forward . . . It seems a labyrinth of difficulties.’
Writing to his friends and literary confrères during the autumn of 1815, Byron sounded his normal self. Samuel Coleridge, from whom Byron entreated a play to put on at Drury Lane, was charmed by the thoughtfulness of a younger man who took the trouble to apologise about having unconsciously lifted a couple of lines from his own unpublished ‘Christabel’ for the almost completed The Siege of Corinth, the last and possibly the best of Byron’s wildly successful Turkish tales.* Leigh Hunt was also moved by Lord Byron’s generous enthusiasm and suggestions for the poem that Hunt rightly believed would be his masterpiece: The Story of Rimini. (Annabella shared her husband’s admiration and copied out a long extract of Hunt’s poem.) At the theatre, where Byron was playing an increasingly active role in commissioning new works, his indiscreet relationship with Susan Boyce, a young actress with a fondness for expensive jewellery, seemed par-for-the-course behaviour from a randy Regency rake whose wife was in the last stages of pregnancy.
Tom Moore, seeking advice from Byron – of all people! – on the stockmarket, received a letter on 31 October which indicated that his friend was still anxiously awaiting the promised marriage payment from Sir Ralph. Annabella was rather coolly described as ‘in full progress’ towards the production of a son. (Always referred to as ‘Pip’ by his mother and as ‘Byron’ by the rest of the family, the baby’s sex remained a foregone conclusion.) The main substance of Byron’s letter to Moore, a drinking crony, concerned the first of a series of dinners that Annabella would learn to dread.
As described by one of the world’s most enchanting correspondents, the occasion sounded hilarious. The theatre crowd (it included the ageing and always convivial playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Byron’s close friend, Douglas Kinnaird) had foregathered for an evening of hard drinking in an upstairs dining room. Here, the party rapidly progressed from being ‘silent’ to ‘talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk’. Kinnaird and Byron, between them, had managed to guide an intoxicated Sheridan down ‘a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors’. All had ended in ‘hiccup and happiness’.
What sounded so delightful in Byron’s chatty account marked the beginning of the end for his marriage. That largely liquid supper was one of several gatherings at which Byron and Kinnaird settled their disputes about how to run the Drury Lane Theatre over copious amounts of brandy. Kinnaird was a hardened drinker; Byron had the will, but not the constitution. The effect – as Augusta had previously warned Annabella – was terrifying. Byron, when in his cups – especially when the cups were filled with gin or brandy – was mad, bad and a danger to anybody who happened to cross his path. Sober again, he would recollect none of it.
The Noels, as usual, were kept in the dark. Judith, suffering from a serious ailment that autumn, confined herself to her bed at Mivart’s Hotel in Brook Street (now Claridge’s) just behind Piccadilly. Sir Ralph’s anxiety was lulled by his daughter’s playful account of a visit to Piccadilly Terrace by the woman everybody wished the late Lord Wentworth had married in the first place instead of taking a mistress into his house. Lady Anne (Lindsay) Barnard, a well-travelled Scotswoman of exceptional brilliance and charm, came as chaperone to a group of young ladies who sought to impress Byron with tasteful accounts of the beauty of a Scottish autumn. Byron responded by expressing his personal admiration for the lovelier tint of a good malt whisky. ‘In short,’ wrote Annabella, ‘they yelped and he snapped.’
On 1 November, the day after the drinking banquet described by Byron to Moore, Annabella still felt hopeful enough to draw up one of her earnest projects for Byron’s reform: ‘Wicked people have, for a time, induced him to act on wrong motives, by discrediting his right ones . . . on the contrary, by insisting on the right ones, we may rouse him to do them justice . . .’ She concluded with a scolding for Byron’s ‘indulgence of foibles beyond the Christian temper of forbearance & forgiveness’.
Paper resolutions were all very fine, but the moment for marital reforming had passed. The arrival of a live-in bailiff on the premises meant no more to Annabella than the welcome addition of a much-needed male protective presence in the house. To a man who had been as poor – and who had grown as proud – as Byron, a resident debt-collector became the ultimate humiliation. ‘God knows what I suffered yesterday & am suffering from B’s distraction,’ Annabella confided to Augusta on 9 November, specifying this new ‘distraction’ as ‘of the very worst kind’. The combination of a bailiff and brandy, together with the rising terror – if he did not flee the country first – of bankruptcy and thus of a debtors’ prison, had tipped her husband’s behaviour from the unreasonable into the irrational. ‘I have thought that since last Saturday [the night of Byron’s first drinking dinner with Kinnaird] his head has never been right,’ Annabella wrote, predicting in this same letter that she feared he would add ‘more and more to the cause’. It was the first hint that Annabella had found a new explanation for her husband’s strange behaviour. Byron was not consciously malevolent. He was going insane.
On 11 November, Annabella wrote once again to Mrs Leigh. This time, she issued a direct and urgent appeal. Augusta must come back to London, and soon.
Don’t be afraid for my Carcase – it will do very well. Of the rest I scarcely know what to think – I have many fears.
Let me see you the middle of next week – at latest . . . You will do good I think – if any can be done.
By the time that Annabella despatched her letter to Cambridgeshire, Byron had already informed his wife, with much circumstantial detail (his boast of toying with two naked women at once was a detail that would stay in the mind of Annabella’s straitlaced lawyer for the rest of his days), of his relationship with Susan Boyce. On 15 November, the day that an apprehensive Augusta arrived at Piccadilly Terrace, a grim-faced Byron greeted her with the same information, while adding that he was tired of indulging his expensive young mistress’s whims. A search was currently afoot for a new brooch that Susan had managed to drop in the Byron carriage. For the time, at least, Byron himself dropped Miss Boyce.
A break-up with Susan Boyce was small beer compared to the dismaying change that Augusta instantly perceived in her brother’s behaviour. Both Byron’s valet and Annabella’s maid told Mrs Leigh that they were worried about the safety of Lady Byron and her unborn child. Summoning Mrs Clermont to join the household (with Annabella’s approval), Augusta issued a dramatic warning: ‘God knows what he may do.’ Mrs Clermont, already fearful for her young mistress, came at speed.
It was Annabella who decided to import Byron’s jolly young cousin into the house as a supportive male presence. George, whose future bride had been brought to London by her Derbyshire family, was delighted by the chance to continue his courtship of Elizabeth Chandos-Pole, and from such a fine address. Lady Melbourne, in a letter that has not survived, meanwhile received a troubling hint from her niece that she was ready to ‘break loose’ and leave. Addressing her aunt again early in the New Year, Annabella credited Augusta’s reassuring company with having prevented her from doing so.
Was Annabella preparing the legal ground for a future case for divorce when she gathered these valuable witnesses around her in the house? Or was an intimidated young woman simply surrounding herself with supportive figures during a period of fear and extreme isolation? One of Lady Byron’s earliest retrospective statements about the marriage suggests that the second reason was uppermost. She was not only afraid, but also lonely.
. . . for a considerable time before my confinement he [Byron] would not see me himself for above an hour – or two – if so much throughout the day & left me therefore alone all the evening till Mrs L[eigh] came, for he had always objected to my having any society at home.
When he did stay at home himself, it was to drink Brandy – & he would then dismiss me to my room in the most unkind manner. He told me he must have either his Brandy or his Mistress.
The comfort of Augusta’s presence at Piccadilly Terrace during the month before Ada’s birth was a subject upon which Annabella never deviated. Mrs Leigh’s former relationship with her brother was difficult to dismiss or deny. Those days were seemingly now in the past. Augusta had become unflinching in her efforts to defend a sister-in-law whom she loved, and for whom she feared.
The benefit of a sisterly presence at Piccadilly Terrace was instantly apparent. Byron, after his chilling initial reaction to Augusta’s arrival at his home, swiftly resumed his familiar and enchanting manner. Towards his sister, he was once again affectionate, teasing and amorous. Towards his wife, his behaviour remained ferocious enough for Mrs Clermont to believe him capable of murder.
The impression . . . made upon my mind was that he was likely to put her to Death at any moment if he could do it privately. I told Mrs Leigh such was my opinion. She replied I will never leave him alone until she is brought to bed, and then you must stay always with her.
Dramatic though Mrs Clermont’s statement sounds, it is supported by her assertion in 1816 that she never saw Lord Byron in a rational state at Piccadilly Terrace except during the first days after his daughter’s birth. Alarm was now rife in the household. Fletcher kept close watch on his master’s pistols. Augusta sat up late in order to ensure that a drunken Byron did not try to break past the nightly guard they had established to protect his wife from harm. Even the usually unobservant John Hobhouse, visiting the house on 25 November, noted that things were going badly there and that Byron had spoken out to him against marriage: ‘talking of going abroad – &c.’
Going abroad was a good deal better than going to a debtors’ prison. Hobhouse saw nothing extraordinary in the notion that Byron might abandon his wife. The London house (for which six months’ rent was still unpaid) had only been leased for a year. A wife could always take shelter beneath her parents’ roof. What neither Hobhouse nor anybody else could have predicted in late November was the particular way in which this anticipated result would actually come to pass.
On 9 December, shortly before the beginning of her labour pains, Annabella managed to summon the strength to leave Piccadilly Terrace for long enough to consult Samuel Heywood, a respected attorney and close friend of the Milbanke family, about the possibility of her making an escape. Augusta’s approval of the project suggests that the contemplated departure was intended to be of a temporary nature. (It was always in the scandal-prone Mrs Leigh’s interests that her brother’s marriage should survive.)
Heywood’s response is unknown, but Byron got wind of the conversation. When Annabella returned and asked for the nurse – labour had already begun – Byron asked her when she meant to leave. Back from the theatre later that night, he sat up in the drawing room, knocking the tops off soda bottles with a poker. (Soda, as Byron would later recall in his Ravenna Journal of 1821, was as necessary to him as brandy during that traumatic autumn of 1815.) The nervous tenor of the household can be gauged from the fact that the racket of flying bottle tops, when heard upstairs, was mistaken for gunshots.
The baby – a healthy girl – was born at one o’clock the following afternoon, 10 December 1815, a Sunday. Annabella’s nurse and her delivering physician, Francis Le Mann, were the sole others in attendance. Strange tales would later emerge. Lord Byron had enquired if the child had been born dead. Inspecting the newborn infant, he had hailed the arrival of a perfect instrument of torture to employ, presumably, against his wife. Annabella was informed by Byron, during labour, that her mother had just died.*
Such obviously anecdotal records, like many of the allegations that later became part of a copiously documented case for legal separation, must be taken with a judicious measure of salt. Mrs Clermont remembered that Byron’s first concern had been to know whether the baby was physically perfect (a reasonable worry for a man born with a deformed foot). Lady Noel, visiting Piccadilly Terrace during the week after her grandchild’s birth (Judith herself was still frail enough to require an invalid couch for her journey up the grand marble staircase to Annabella’s bedroom) noticed nothing that disturbed her. Later, justifying her lack of concern, Lady Noel explained that she had been ‘studiously deceived’, due to her daughter’s wish not to alarm an ailing parent.
Augusta Leigh’s continuing fears for the physical safety of her sister-in-law would form one of the sturdiest pillars in Annabella’s legal case for a marital separation. Two days after the birth of Augusta Ada (named in honour of her chosen godmother), Mrs Leigh confided in Francis Hodgson, the only male friend of Byron’s with whom she had established a close personal friendship. She wanted to meet him urgently, and in private. No direct mention of this request must be made in Hodgson’s response, since Byron was sure to recognise his friend’s handwriting and enquire what was going on. As a future clergyman – and as a man who had observed the siblings’ intimacy during their 1814 summer holiday at Hastings – Hodgson feared the nature of Augusta’s confidences and declined to comply. Instead, acting with Annabella’s approval, Augusta turned to her own aunt.
Miss Sophia Byron was an imperturbable old lady of forthright views. (She often scolded a dieting Byron about his bouts of starvation.) The advice received from this familial quarter was unequivocal. Her nephew’s symptoms suggested insanity, a trait with which Miss Byron had gained first-hand experience from observing the mental instability of her brother, aptly nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’. The best thing Annabella could do, according to this authoritative source, was to have her husband closely observed and then take medical counsel upon the wisest course of action.
Aunt Sophia’s brisk advice stiffened Annabella’s resolve. Derangement required treatment: who better to assist in Lord Byron’s restoration to sanity than a devoted wife? It was at this point that Annabella first formulated a plan by which the patient might be temporarily confined within her parents’ secluded country home and nursed back to health by herself.
Christmas passed unmarked at Piccadilly Terrace. At some stage before the end of December, Annabella wrote a cautious letter to her parents, preparing them for the possibility of a family visit of an unspecified duration. Judith, having consulted Augusta in advance, sent a friendly invitation to her son-in-law, assuring Byron of all the space, peace and freedom that he could possibly wish for either at Seaham, or at Kirkby Mallory. All she asked in return was that ‘a poor Grand-mama’ might be granted the pleasure of wee Augusta’s company. (The Noel family’s use of the name ‘Ada’ emerged only after the Byrons’ separation.) Tactful for once, Judith forbore to mention that the imminent difficulty of renewing an unpaid annual lease on 13 Piccadilly Terrace might make such an offer particularly welcome.
On 3 January 1816, Byron paid one of his rare daytime visits to the room in which Annabella was breastfeeding their daughter. It was a spectacle that gave him no pleasure. (One of Byron’s rare early allusions to Ada, in a letter sent two days later to Tom Moore, noted that the infant ‘squalls and sucks incessantly’.) Still, the visit began agreeably. In March 1816, Annabella stated that Mrs Grimes, the attending nurse, ‘would probably say that she has seen Lord B appear personally fond of me during the few minutes she has seen us together’.
Swiftly, the visitor’s mood changed. It was during this same visit that Byron apparently intimated that he meant ‘to do every thing wicked’ [Annabella’s emphasis] and to begin by resuming his affair with Miss Boyce. He spoke of bringing his mistress to live in the house. And he said more, as if he dreaded what she herself might reveal.
Amongst other unkind things said to me on Jan 3rd was this declaration ‘A woman has no right to complain if her husband does not beat or confine her – and you will remember I have neither beaten nor confined you. I have never done an Act that would bring me under the Law – at least on this side of the Water.’
Byron’s reported declaration was one which would prompt widespread and prurient speculation – it still does – about just what that mysterious act might have been been. Did Byron mean that he had never committed sodomy (a criminal offence in England) in his own country? Or did he mean that he had committed incest (which was a criminal offence only abroad)? How well did Byron himself know the law? And what did Annabella, the woman her husband paid sincere tribute to as ‘Truth herself’, understand by the words that she so carefully set down? These words were not idly recalled. Strikingly, they were added to Annabella’s original statement only after she had decided that for her there could be no going back.
The gravity of Byron’s outburst is underlined by the fact that he avoided his wife for the following three days. On 6 January, however, Augusta was sent upstairs by her brother with a curt note requesting Lady Byron to prepare herself for a visit to her parents’ home at the earliest possible date. The reasons Byron gave were rational enough: bailiffs were closing in on him; the lease was almost up; the time had come to begin dismissing the household.
Byron’s note mentioned that the child and her nurse would ‘of course’ accompany his wife on her journey. He proposed that they should all travel in his personal (and at that time, his only) carriage. There is no indication that Byron was contemplating a permanent break when he dashed off his brusque note. This, however, was the interpretation that Annabella placed upon his letter – or so Mrs Clermont recalled: ‘She [Annabella] cryed & said although I expected it I cannot help feeling this – to think that I have lived to be hated by my husband.’ On the following day, 7 January, Annabella confirmed that she was prepared to leave, as instructed, on the earliest day ‘that circumstances will admit’.
‘Circumstances’ might suggest that Annabella desired time to recover from the shock of childbirth. She meant no such thing. A week before her final departure, the young mother threw herself into establishing by every means in her power that her husband was not responsible for his own behaviour.
Annabella’s mission began with a visit to Matthew Baillie, an eminent London doctor (Baillie’s uncle was the great Scottish surgeon John Hunter) and brother to Annabella’s revered older friends, Joanna and Agnes. Dr Baillie may have imagined that his visitor had come to seek his advice; his role, as he rapidly discovered, was to act as audience and professional guarantor of a theory that had already been formed.
Annabella wrote up her account of the interview on that same day, 8 January 1816. The impression deliberately conveyed was that Baillie – not she – had presented the case for Byron as a madman. ‘The principal insane ideas are – that he must be wicked – is foredoomed to evil – and compelled by some irresistible power to follow this destiny, doing violence all the time to his feelings.’
In fact, after listening carefully, Baillie had refused to become involved, suggesting that Lady Byron would do better to obtain written evidence from Francis Le Mann, who had treated the ‘patient’ with calomel for his chronic irritability (ascribed to a ‘torpid’ liver). But here, Annabella’s quest once again had fallen short of her hopes. Le Mann would not commit his thoughts on insanity to paper, preferring to fob Lady Byron off with an article about hydrocephalus, a condition in which excess fluid puts pressure on the brain. Passages that seemed relevant to Byron’s case were highlighted. Le Mann did, however, promise to remain watchful and to send a report of his more fully considered view.
On 12 January, Annabella took a step too far. Armed with Le Mann’s marked-up paper, she went to the office of John Hanson, Byron’s lawyer, to present her case. That hasty action betrayed poor judgement. Although it had not yet been proved that Lord Portsmouth was insane at the time of his marriage to Miss Hanson, the last thing Byron’s lawyer needed was to have his chief witness declared a lunatic. Hanson declared that he saw nothing mad at all in Lord Byron’s behaviour. Shortly after Annabella left his house, the alarmed lawyer reported her visit to her husband.
The following day, an enraged Byron spoke to Annabella in a manner that caused her real terror. According to her later statements, this was the only occasion upon which Lady Byron feared for her life.
The final step was probably taken on 14 January. Entering her husband’s dressing room, Annabella searched it for evidence to support her theory of Byron’s madness. (Later, she fiercely denied having picked the locks of her husband’s letter trunks in order to carry off a marked-up copy of de Sade’s notorious Justine. If she did so, she chose not to preserve such a controversial book.)
Armed with Dr Le Mann’s instructions upon how best to proceed with the salvation of a husband whom she still adored, Annabella left 13 Piccadilly Terrace in the cold dawn of 15 January 1816. Some kind of parting ceremony took place on the previous evening. Annabella had – or so her romantic memory later recalled – entered the drawing room in which Byron stood talking to Augusta by the fireplace. Asked by him (with a mocking nod to Macbeth’s three witches) when she thought the three of them might next meet, Annabella responded with the pious wish that it might be in heaven, before fleeing the room – this motif was a regular feature of her recollections – in order to conceal her tears.
Leaving at last, Annabella paused – or so she remembered the scene – outside her sleeping husband’s door. Looking down at his mastiff’s empty mat, she felt an urge to curl up on it and stay. Instead, Lady Byron hurried downstairs and out to the carriage where Nurse Grimes and baby Ada awaited her, together with her maid, the newly married Susan Fletcher, and a young footman. Nobody wished her farewell. Nobody knew of her departure.
Halting for a night at Woburn along the road to her parents’ new Leicestershire home, Annabella wrote two letters. The first, despatched to Mrs Clermont, explained that she intended to comply with the advice given by Augusta Leigh (whom Mrs Clermont then held in high regard) and Dr Le Mann. She would immediately write to Byron with affection and without reproach. Her plan was to lull any suspicion, preparing the way for a country reunion with the troubled and violent man whom she hoped to nurse back to his senses.
Annabella’s letter from Woburn was the first of two by her that would later contribute more than anything else to the view that Byron’s young wife was either a liar or a hypocrite. Both letters are given here in full, just as Byron himself first saw them.
Woburn, January 15 1816
Dearest B –
The Child is quite well, and the best of Travellers, and quite well. I hope you are good, and remember my medical prayers & injunctions. Don’t give yourself up to the abominable trade of versifying – nor to brandy – nor to anything nor any body that is not lawful & right.
Though I disobey in writing to you, let me hear of your obedience to Kirkby.
Ada’s love with mine – Pip
The second letter was seemingly written on the following day, shortly after Annabella had settled into her parents’ home.
Kirkby Mallory, January 16 1816
Dearest Duck
We got here quite well last night, and were ushered into the kitchen instead of drawing-room, by a mistake that might have been agreeable enough to hungry people. Of this and other incidents Dad wants to write you a jocose account, & both he & Mam long to have the family party completed. Such a W.C. and such a sitting-room or sulking-room all to yourself. If I were not always looking about for B. I should be a great deal better already for country air. Miss finds her provisions increased, & fattens thereon. It is a good thing she can’t understand all the flattery bestowed upon her, ‘Little Angel’. Love to the good goose, & everybody’s love to you both from hence.
Ever thy most loving
Pippin . . . Pip—ip
Certainly, these letters succeeded in their immediate purpose. Whatever Byron’s own intentions may have been during January 1816 with regard to going abroad or staying with his wife (and Byron during this period changed his mind from hour to hour), even he probably never imagined, while reading these cheery bulletins from an unshakably rational spouse, that he would never again set eyes either upon his wife or his child.
* Still standing, 13 Piccadilly Terrace has been renumbered as 139.
* Since 13 Piccadilly Terrace was the home of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, it is reasonable to imagine that a copy of her close friend Georgiana’s play would have been in its library.
* Byron had half-remembered a cluster of lines from Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ that an admiring Walter Scott had recited to him earlier that summer.
* The stories in circulation about what might have been said and done by Byron during his marriage have gained much in colour from their retelling. It is not necessary to assume that his question about the baby’s being dead or alive was put (to Augusta) in a vindictive spirit: Byron displayed a keen interest in the production of an heir. Annabella herself stated to a sympathetic Lady Anne Barnard only that Byron looked ready to use the baby as a perfect instrument of torture. The more credible version of his remark about Lady Noel (who was indeed seriously ill, worn out by money worries and taking over the running of a new estate) was that her condition had become critical.