(1816–24)
Viewed as part of the public relations exercise by a departing husband portraying himself as a martyred hero, Byron’s ‘Fare Thee Well’ was not a complete success. In America (if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s memory of her impressions as a 5-year-old were to be trusted), the poem was set to music and sung, with appropriate sobs, by heartbroken schoolgirls. In England, it invited public mockery. Isaac Cruickshank’s The Separation, or A Sketch from the private Life of Lord Iron, pictured a balding Byron setting off for Europe with his arm wrapped around a buxom actress. George Cruickshank (Isaac’s more famous son) depicted the poet waving a gallant handkerchief to a shorebound mother and child, while reciting ‘Fare Thee Well’ to a boatload of adoring strumpets.
Up in Scotland, a month after Byron’s departure, one of his warmest admirers poked gentle fun at the poet’s double standards. ‘In the meanwhile,’ Walter Scott wrote to his friend J. B. S. Morritt on 16 May 1816:
I think my noble friend is something like my old peacock who chooses to bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window to keep me awake with his screeching lamentations. Only I own he is not equal in melody to Lord Byron, for Fare-thee-Well . . . is a very sweet dirge indeed.
Looking back in the summer of 1831 at the 15-year-old scandal of Lord Byron’s separation, Thomas Macaulay employed his review of Moore’s recent two-volume Life and Letters of Lord Byron to point up the dangers that had arisen from confusing the poet with his heroic persona. How was it possible, Macaulay asked, to equate the lone and brooding Childe, celebrated for the scorn with which he abjured public sympathy, with a man who wanted the entire world to weep over the supposedly private farewell that he had flamboyantly offered to his wife and daughter?
Macaulay cast no aspersions upon Lady Byron for leaving a husband whom he designated a spoiled child (‘not merely the spoiled child of his parents, but the spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society’).* The target of his witty but fair-minded essay in the Edinburgh Review was the great British public which, having begun by idolising a libertine genius, had gleefully sacrificed their hero in one of its ‘periodical fits of morality’. Byron, so Macaulay argued, had probably done nothing more dreadful than a great many other English husbands. His misfortune had been the celebrity which allowed him to be transformed overnight from an unsatisfactory spouse into a universal scapegoat.
True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing anything whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public indignation.
Focussing on the poet and on the ephemeral nature of mortal fame (‘a few more years will destroy whatever remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron’, Macaulay predicted with unfounded confidence), the young critic found almost nothing to say about Lord Byron’s wife. Not a word was spared to consider the impact upon Annabella’s life of such an immense and public scandal as the separation from her husband had proved to be. Neither – perhaps Macaulay was among the very few who had failed to read them – did the future historian comment upon the privately printed and widely distributed ‘Remarks’ of 1830 in which Annabella defended her dead parents from Moore’s proposal that they, not she, had led the way in separating an innocent young wife from a troubled but hardly diabolical husband.*
Annabella, in the month when Byron left England, was still living with her parents. She remained extremely apprehensive about her personal reputation. For the present, discretion seemed to be working in her favour. Satirised by the cartoonists, excoriated in the papers, cut in public and denounced from the stage, Lord Byron – as Macaulay would note – had been transformed from the nation’s melancholy hero into a monster capable of any heinous act that could conceivably be attributed to his name. That such a change had been achieved without any visible act of vindictiveness on her own part was remarkable.
The public’s mood could alter in a flash, and Annabella had lived alongside celebrity long enough to know it, better than Stephen Lushington, who advised her to stop worrying about her image; better than pugnacious Lady Noel, who was still itching for a court case and the satisfaction of yet further public revenge. ‘How can you be so inconsiderate for me as to wish that the Cause had come into court?’ Annabella asked her mother on 21 April 1816:
For I should have died of it certainly – and now every object is attained without an exposure which revenge only could have desired, and which would have reflected some of its disgraceful consequences upon myself?
Preserving herself and her child from calumny now became Annabella’s chief objective. It was a goal for which she was prepared to undertake considerable sacrifices. For her estranged husband, lovers would never be in short supply. Shortly before leaving England, he had enjoyed a covert affair with Claire Clairmont, the clever but egregiously pushy step-sister of Mary Shelley. (Mary, Claire and Shelley would soon join Byron beside Lake Geneva for that now legendary summer of 1816 during which Frankenstein would be conceived.) For Annabella, a 24-year-old mother and wife – the Byrons were never to divorce – there could be no such recklessness, no romance, no unconsidered steps. Her only chance of escaping scandal was to behave impeccably, and to choose her friends with scrupulous care. Among the first was Anna Jones, step-daughter of the vicar who altruistically took services at Kirkby Mallory. (The living and its proceeds still belonged to Annabella’s absentee cousin, Thomas Noel.) Anna Jones, safely remote from London society, received many of Annabella’s confidences about her marriage – and seemingly kept them to herself.
The first threat to Lady Byron’s privacy came with the publication on 9 May 1816 of Caroline Lamb’s sensationally revealing novel, Glenarvon. Byron was thinly disguised as the licentious and glamorously heartless Lord Ruthven. Annabella’s fate was merely to seem insipid. Robert Wilmot, writing on 17 May, told her that she appeared in the book as Miss Monmouth, ‘a most delightful person’; Lady Caroline’s sister-in-law, Mrs George Lamb, opined that the portrait was ‘very indulgent’. Miss Monmouth, as Annabella herself eventually discovered, was in fact dull as a dry ditch.
Byron had only been out of the country for a fortnight when Glenarvon returned him to centre stage. In London, so Mrs Lamb said, the book was the talk of the town. Retreating from gossipy Leicestershire to Lowestoft, a quiet seaside town on the remote coast of East Anglia, Annabella stopped to rest along the way at Ely and Peterborough. Writing the first of many imaginary baby letters to ‘Dear GrandMama’ at Kirkby, Annabella recorded in little Ada’s fictive voice that the ‘people at Ely and Peterborough Stared at us very much, and Mama said we were Lionesses – pray what does that mean?’ Lady Byron’s adopted tone was jaunty; the humiliation of being pointed out and stared at by groups of strangers was one that Annabella in her old age could still recall with pain. A private tour of Ely’s majestic cathedral as guest of the dean’s wife offered scant consolation.
Safely arrived at Lowestoft, Annabella took a seafront house next to her old (and herself also now separated) friend, Lady Gosford, returning to her Suffolk roots as little Mary Sparrow, the heiress to Worlingham Hall. Annabella was welcomed as an intermediary and peacemaker, the go-between for Mary and a widowed Irish aunt, Lady Olivia Sparrow, who presided nearby over a sternly evangelical household.
The irony of her new situation was not lost upon Annabella. Invited by Lady Olivia to meet her close friends, the Vicar of Lowestoft and his wife, she found herself being patronised by the very people she had once mocked – and still did within the safety of letters to her parents – as ‘pye-house’ bores. Lady Olivia was condescendingly kind. The Reverend Francis Cunningham, however, proved unexpectedly agreeable. Following a happy September return to George Eden’s family home in Kent, Annabella agreed to visit Mr Cunningham’s brother, William, the Vicar of Harrow. Byron had gone to school at Harrow. Annabella, who would also pay a secret visit to Newstead Abbey in 1818, could not resist the chance to see a place so intimately connected with her husband’s past. Once there, laying aside her Unitarian principles, she even attended the services over which Mr Cunningham (Trollope’s model for the unctuous Obadiah Slope) mellifluously presided.
Times were rapidly changing in England. Six years later, when seeking to erect a burial plaque at Harrow’s church for ‘Little Illegitimate’, his tragically short-lived daughter by Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron was informed that Dr Cunningham objected because Allegra’s plaque would be within sight from the hallowed pew of his own valued friend, Lady Byron.* The notion that his wife would ever occupy a pew at Harrow’s church – let alone keep company with Dr Cunningham, at whom he could clearly recall her having poked fun – struck her husband as hilarious. Initially, Byron refused to believe it.
The report was true and her behaviour was part of a conscious choice. Annabella Byron and her little daughter each now carried around her neck the millstone of a name that instantly connected them to a man who had become as notorious for his lifestyle as for the ferociously witty poetry in which, with increasing contempt for the cant of a newly prudish England, he exposed his country’s hypocrisy. If Lady Byron wished to keep her name free from the scandal in which her husband appeared to revel, her only option was to undertake good works, live in quiet places and keep company solely with reformers who at their best were thoughtful, intelligent and kind, while others proved to be sanctimonious bores of the Obadian variety. It was circumstance, allied to a passionate desire to be of service to society, that led Annabella into her long, productive career as an enlightened educational reformer, a passionate opponent to slavery and earnest advocate of a kinder penal system. Her achievements would eventually earn her an honoured place on the Reformers’ Memorial at Kensal Rise. Sadly, she did not live to know it.
Concern for her own reputation caused Annabella to reassess some of her closest friendships. When Mary Montgomery returned to England in 1818, Annabella felt nervous. Miss Montgomery had lived in Venice. She had been on visiting terms with Byron at a time when the scandalous poet boasted of having at least two mistresses on the go, both equipped with husbands. An old and deep friendship was renewed and lovingly maintained, but only after Selina Doyle had been delegated to evaluate the moral status of a dangerously well-travelled lady.
Mrs Clermont was less gently dealt with. Although often at loggerheads with each other, Lady Noel and her daughter both agreed that Clermont’s role in the separation, followed by the glare of public interest that Byron’s satire had attracted, made any continued intimacy impossible. Revisiting Seaham at a time when the house was being rented by her old friends the Bakers of Elemore Hall, Annabella received a request from Mrs Clermont, who was by then living nearby, to pay a visit. The risk of gossip just when Annabella was arranging to set up a new school for Seaham was too great. She turned the appeal down.
Ill health would plague Annabella for the rest of her life. Sending a report to John Hobhouse (evidently at Byron’s request) soon after seeing her niece in October 1816, Lady Melbourne remarked that Lady Byron’s face was ‘sad and strained’. Her nerves were plainly ‘shatter’d’, Annabella’s aunt continued, adding that ‘although she might have conducted herself better, yet she is much to be pitied as her sufferings must be great’. (The letter, evidently designed to be seen by Byron, ascribed much of the blame for those sufferings upon the young woman’s interfering parents.) Percy Shelley, meanwhile, brought news to Lake Geneva that Lord Byron’s estranged wife had undergone a miraculous recovery. Douglas Kinnaird had pronounced her to be ‘in perfect health’. What was more, Kinnaird knew for a certainty ‘that she was living with your sister’. And thus, Shelley happily told Byron, an end could be put to all that nasty gossip about incest: ‘the only important calumny that ever was advanced against you’.
Kinnaird’s own gossip contained a kernel of truth. In the spring of 1816, Mrs Leigh had briefly experienced the pain of becoming a social outcast. When Annabella invited a resumption of friendship, following Byron’s departure, Augusta accepted with alacrity. The two women met frequently and exchanged many affectionate letters during the late summer of 1816. They would remain – so long as a subdued Augusta addressed Lady Byron as her ‘guardian angel’ and obeyed her commands – upon careful but cordial terms for a further fourteen years.
Financially, socially and morally, Annabella held almost every card in the altered relationship with her once-beloved sister-in-law. To retain any contact with Byron, however, she remained unwillingly dependent upon Augusta’s aid. Annabella, plainly, could not continue to write to her husband herself, nor seek to receive letters from him. The agreement initiated by her, and reluctantly accepted by Mrs Leigh, was that Augusta would – without ever allowing her brother to know it – share all of their own private correspondence with Byron’s wife.
The most intriguing feature about this remarkable arrangement was the readiness with which Augusta complied. Perhaps, she embraced the sense of power that it placed in her hands. Lady Byron could force her to grovel. She could – and did – withdraw all access to little Ada. (Lady Noel replaced Augusta in the promised role of godmother at a private autumn christening to which neither Colonel Leigh nor his wife were invited.) But Augusta could still inflict pain. She could read Byron’s letters and transmit as many of them (or as few) as she chose. She could relish the hurt that Annabella must surely have felt to see how lovingly her husband wrote to his half-sister and how savagely he wrote about his wife.
The cruellest of Byron’s letters were withheld by Augusta until 1834, by which time the relationship between the two women was beyond repair. Enough had already been shown to inflict a pain that Annabella struggled hard to conceal.
Had Augusta swiftly revealed the letter-passing arrangement to her self-exiled brother? That possibility would help to explain the consistent malice with which Byron wrote to Augusta about his wife. On 9 September 1816, he compared Annabella to an elephant who had clumsily trodden on his heart, before going on to announce that a charmingly determined young lady (Claire Clairmont) ‘had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise me’. Forwarding the letter to her ‘Guardian Angel’, Augusta twisted her own knife in the wound by confessing that she, not Byron, had been the chief mover in their incestuous affair: ‘in fact I am the one much the more to blame . . . quite inexcusable’. In a letter to Augusta (likewise in a poem to John Murray which Byron’s publisher declined to print), Lady Byron was described as a ‘moral Clytemnestra’,* one who had been ‘formed for my destruction’ (28 October). On 11 November 1816, Annabella was damned as a heartless torturer and on 18 December as a ‘virtuous monster’, one whose memory her husband intended to eradicate. On 17 May 1819 (Annabella’s birthday, as Byron assuredly knew), the poet described his wife to Augusta as ‘that infamous fiend who drove me from my Country & conspired against my life’.
And yet, writing directly to Annabella, as he had promised not to do, Byron was all tenderness. One letter pleaded that he was miserable without her, pining only for her love. Another (1 November 1816) assured her that ‘if there were a means of becoming reunited to you I would embrace it’. As always, Byron seems to have been guided by the impulse of the moment. Writing to Augusta, he cursed the implacable wretch who had separated him from the woman he loved best. Writing to Annabella, he rued the bitterness of banishment, and regretted the loss of his admired wife.
John Murray’s decision not to print one of Byron’s most direct attacks upon his wife was an act of caution, but also of affectionate respect. Following the separation, Lady Byron signalled (27 March 1816) her wish to maintain a friendly relationship with the publisher. Murray, a regular visitor to Branch Hill Lodge, an eighteenth-century mansion amply decorated with gloomy stained-glass windows by a previous owner, in which Annabella intermittently dwelt upon the airy heights of Hampstead from 1817 until 1825. He was meticulous in supplying her with early copies of all his publications. Naturally, these included Byron’s works. In the autumn of 1816, when the ranting ‘Lines, on Hearing Lady Byron was Ill’ arrived from Italy, the separation scandal was still vivid in the public’s mind. Murray’s decision not to publish a poem that referred to Annabella as ‘The Moral Clytemnestra of Thy Lord’ was motivated by concern for Lady Byron as much as for the damage it might inflict upon the sales of a lucrative author. Byron’s poem was filed away, to remain unpublished until 1832, when Moore’s affectionate life of the poet had helped usher in a more forgiving attitude towards his misdeeds.
Externally, Lady Byron appeared relaxed about her husband’s satiric use of her. Writing to Theresa Villiers on 15 July 1819 about her appearance as Donna Inez, the hero’s prim mother, in Don Juan, Annabella remarked that Byron’s satire was ‘so good as to make me smile at myself – therefore others are heartily welcome to laugh’.
Given such a good-natured approach, Murray felt no qualms, in February 1817, about informing Lady Byron that her husband’s latest work was selling well, although ‘not quite up to the mark of former times’. The news disturbed Annabella less than Murray’s gift of the very first copy of the Autumn 1816 Quarterly Review.* The journal, as its publisher proudly pointed out, carried ‘an article on a great Poet . . . written in a tone calculated to do some good’.
It did none for Annabella. Walter Scott’s long essay, ostensibly a review of Canto III of Childe Harold, was both lavish in its generosity and unintentionally comical in the earnest way that it dwelt upon Byron’s noble antecedents. What angered Annabella was the great Scottish writer’s determination to present her husband as a victim.
Annabella was staying with Scott’s close friends, Agnes and Joanna Baillie, at their own Hampstead home when Murray’s gift was delivered. Letters from her mother and from the Wilmots (Byron’s cousins) declared Scott to be outrageously prejudiced: action must be taken! But Annabella recognised the danger of antagonising one of Britain’s most admired authors. Instead, she adopted a course which would soon become familiar to those who had angered or distressed her. She did not write to Scott herself. Instead, the Baillie sisters were asked to convey their house guest’s detection of a criticism of herself which – as even Annabella had to admit – Scott had ‘not expressed, but I think directly implied’.
The technique worked. Scott, under pressure, apologised. Visiting one of her literary heroes at Abbotsford by her own request, late in the summer of 1817, Annabella’s graceful acceptance of her sad situation, one ‘which must have pressed on her thoughts’, caused a penitent Scott to describe his guest to Joanna Baillie as one of the most interesting women he had yet encountered. They walked together along riverbanks. Annabella admired the landscape. No reference was made to Scott’s article in the Quarterly.
It was by such circuitous routes – hiding behind the testimony of friends, citing trusted supporters, and quoting copiously from Byron’s past correspondence (of which she made and preserved meticulous copies) – that Annabella increasingly chose to defend her reputation. Insistent, elaborate and always self-righteous, Lady Byron’s tactics would unfortunately contribute to her posthumous reputation as a hypocritical tamperer with the truth.
And yet, initially, there was no need for such paranoia. Byron’s name, not his wife’s, had been severely damaged by the scandal surrounding the couple’s separation. In ‘Canto IV’ of Childe Harold, he offered what appeared to be a profession of remorse, causing one of his more loyal supporters, Francis Jeffrey, in the December 1816 Edinburgh Review, to bestow upon the author the famous epithet of a ‘ruined archangel’. But Childe Harold’s remorse was not a confession of his creator’s guilt. That admission never came. Byron’s one passionate document of self-defence, written on 9 August 1817 at La Mira, a villa near Venice, was circulated to friends and journalists on the express understanding that it must not be published. Clearly, Byron feared the legal consequences of such a public step.
The British public had always preferred to follow the lead of its press. Encouraged by Francis Jeffrey and his literary colleagues, public disapproval of Byron began to wane after the appearance in the winter of 1816 of ‘Canto IV’ with its sorrowing Childe. Outrage would flare to new heights again in the summer of 1819, with the appearance of the first jaunty canto of Don Juan. Blackwood’s, a magazine that was partly run by Walter Scott’s future son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, was first to leap into the fray. How could the seemingly chastened author of Childe Harold’s final canto stoop to producing such impious filth? For Lord Byron to offend his wife was wrong – and to desert her was frankly ungentlemanly – ‘but to injure, and then to desert, and then to turn back and wound her widow’d privacy with unhallow’d strains of cold-blooded mockery was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean’. Only an insensate brute would dare ‘to pour the pitiful chalice of his contumely on the surrendered devotion of a virgin’s breast, and the holy hopes of the mother of his child’. And so on.*
This was harrowing stuff and Annabella won further support by expressing only quiet amusement at Byron’s mocking portrait of herself as Juan’s sedate mamma. It’s unlikely that she knew of the far crueller skit in which, writing to Tom Moore on 10 December 1820, Byron lampooned his wife as ‘The Witch’. The spur, on this occasion, was a newspaper cutting that announced Lady Byron’s role as patroness of a town hall charity dance. To Byron, at his most irrational, a Leicestershire soirée glittered with all the brilliance of the humiliating Almack’s Assembly at which he and Augusta had been so stonily received.
And yet, Byron’s feelings about his wife still veered like a weathercock in a storm. Despatching to Moore a snappy epigram upon marriage a month earlier, Byron had identified Annabella both as Medea and Penelope. Which was she: demon or angel? Until the end, her husband never could decide.
And neither, even thirty years after his death, could his widow make up her mind about her husband. Byron had something of the angel in him, the ageing Annabella would murmur to her confidantes, including an avidly attentive Harriet Beecher Stowe. None of these intimates dared to enquire why she had abandoned such a paragon.
Back during Byron’s lifetime, a sensation-loving press faced no such quandaries. ‘I was thought a devil, because Lady Byron was allowed to be an angel,’ the poet sighed to a sympathetic Lady Blessington at Genoa in 1823.
One year later, Byron’s unexpected death, aged thirty-six, while risking himself in the cause of rescuing Greece from her Turkish oppressors, triggered the beginning of the poet’s slow redemption. Writing in Blackwood’s (August 1825), John Gibson Lockhart invited his readers to admire the heroic spectacle ‘of youth, and rank, and genius, meeting with calm resignation the approach of death, under circumstances of the most cheerless description . . .’
‘Let people think as they please – it matters little now,’ Augusta Leigh had entreated Annabella back on 28 February 1822. But Lady Byron would never cease to care what people thought. Justifying the role that she had played in her husband’s life, while blaming others – and blaming, above all, Augusta for contributing to the destruction of a marriage increasingly gilded by memory’s broad and idealising brush – would become the occupation and obsession of a lifetime. It was an obsession that would shape the way that an earnest and well-meaning mother would seek to govern and protect the one precious gift left by her celebrated husband: their brilliant, wayward child.
* The phrase ‘spoilt child’ [sic] was frequently applied to Lady Byron, but never to her late husband, during the posthumous attacks upon her reputation that were to be published in 1869–70.
* It is especially strange that they went unmentioned by Macaulay, given that the ‘Remarks’ were subsequently bound in with Moore’s 1831 edition, at Annabella’s request.
* Byron’s former master at Harrow, Dr Drury, arranged for Allegra’s burial close to the church door. A plaque was finally erected in 1980.
* Byron used this startling epithet on several occasions: it appears in BL&J (5) on pp. 144, 186, 191, and in BL&J (10) on p. 142.
* Late publication was a regular occurrence with journals of that time.
* The author of the Blackwood’s review was John Wilson.