(1829–35)
Utterly mysterious in its origins – Annabella theorised about a latent weakness of the spine – Ada Byron’s state of semi-paralysis lasted for three years. Short periods of improvement were followed by sharp relapses. By the summer of 1830, following one of these brief respites from invalidism, 13-year-old Ada – formerly an active girl, one who had been eager to take up riding at the time of her collapse – had become chronically bedbound. Letters to her new tutor were shakily written in pencil (to avoid spattering the bedlinen with ink). Brief expeditions, when not confined to a wheelchair, were taken on crutches, with the gold-braided and wasp-waisted black jacket of a hussar that she adopted for these excursions lending a frail but resolutely cheerful Ada the look – although nobody dared to comment on it – of the dashing boy-heir for whom her father had longed. (The birth of a son, as the often surprisingly conventional Lord Byron once remarked, would have made him think twice about parting with Newstead, the ancestral home that he had profitably sold off in 1818 to Thomas Wildman.)
A dashingly Byronic young man had formally joined Ada’s larger family circle in 1826, when Henry Trevanion married Byron’s niece and god-daughter, Georgiana Leigh. Three years later, impoverished and homeless, Georgiana and Henry were generously installed at Bifrons, Annabella’s rented country home near Canterbury. Ada, meanwhile, was brought away from Bifrons to live on the fringes of London, first at Notting Hill and then, during 1830, at The Limes, a large, pretty house standing above the Thames at Mortlake. Here, close to the best physicians that London could provide, no expense was spared in Lady Byron’s attempt to cure her daughter’s baffling condition.
Annabella had first heard about Henry Trevanion, a Cornish-born youth with Byronic connections (the poet’s grandfather, best known as Admiral Byron of the Wager, had married Sophia Trevanion of Caerhays), from Augusta Leigh. On 9 December 1825, Mrs Leigh had sent Lady Byron a gushing account of Sophia’s personable 21-year-old descendant as ‘the Hero of my present fate’. Penniless – his father had disinherited him – and on the make, Henry had recently presented himself as a suitor to Georgiana, the Leighs’ eldest daughter. Augusta’s widely reported role as her brother’s heir added pound signs to the attraction of marrying a slow-witted but exceptionally docile 17-year-old.* Unfortunately for Augusta’s wish to support the marriage, her husband detested Trevanion. Together with Henry’s father, Colonel Leigh refused to grant consent.
Henry remained assiduous and Augusta had a weakness for a handsome face: Henry’s reminded her of Byron’s own. Frantic to do something that might bind this solicitous youth to herself (Henry’s precise role in Augusta’s life remains murky, but it involved a strong sexual frisson), Mrs Leigh enlisted the aid of Annabella. Glad to assist Byron’s god-daughter along the road to happiness, Annabella provided a discreet loan of £200 via Louisa Chaloner. It was enough to ensure that a strangely low-key wedding was able to take place in London on 4 February 1826. The ceremony’s sole guests were Augusta, her friend Colonel Henry Wyndham (standing in for the absent and furious George Leigh) and 12-year-old Elizabeth (at this point known as ‘Libby’) Medora, the child whom both Byron and Augusta believed to be their own.
Mrs Leigh’s valiant endeavours to stay out of debt had never been helped by a wastrel husband and her own weak grasp of finance. Annabella, trained from her youth to act as her family’s lawyer and accountant, was an excellent businesswoman, one who always saw to it that she was well advised. Since her father’s death, she had added an inheritance of substantial coal-mining interests in the north to a portfolio that she managed with exceptional competence. In judgement of character, however, Annabella was often just as fallible as her sister-in-law. Both women were to be deceived by Henry Trevanion and by Elizabeth Medora Leigh in a saga that finally snapped the frail chain of duty by which Lord Byron sought to ensure the future security and comfort of his sister, Augusta.
‘Look after Augusta,’ Byron had insisted to Annabella, both during and after the couple’s separation. Annabella had kept her word, but the limited personal affection she retained for Mrs Leigh was already dwindling by 1828, when the first warning signs emerged of serious trouble ahead.
In 1828, Augusta casually announced that she had authorised her charming son-in-law to edit a selection of Byron’s letters, through which young Trevanion had already been trawling. Murray had sensibly steered clear of the negotiations, but Henry Colburn, one of the sharpest publishers in London, had offered £300. Augusta, delighted for her protégé, sought Annabella’s approval for a done deal.
A close perusal of Byron’s letters may have introduced Henry Trevanion to the possibility that Georgiana’s younger sister was the product of an incestuous relationship. It is not known whether any of Byron’s rashly intimate correspondence with Lady Melbourne was intended to form part of the published selection; certainly, the inclusion of such explosive material would explain Henry Colburn’s eagerness and Annabella’s dismay. Laying their own past differences aside, John Cam Hobhouse and Lady Byron united forces to scotch a project that they both believed would worsen Byron’s still badly damaged reputation. Augusta, whose only concern was to please the beguiling Henry, announced in April 1829 that she felt personally ‘very hurt’.
Annabella followed her blocking of the Colburn publication by refusing to give Augusta the thousand-pound sweetener she required as balm for her disappointment. Nevertheless, Augusta was a skilful piercer of Lady Byron’s tender conscience about the harm that had been caused both by the separation and by Annabella’s own meditated silence. Reputations had been damaged and the fault lay with Lady Byron. (‘My sin is ever before me’ ran the sad opening line of one of Annabella’s private poems.*) Now, however, while financial assistance was withheld, practical help might still be bestowed.
In April 1829, Annabella informed Augusta that she was willing to lend her own newly vacated house to Byron’s homeless godchild and her husband, a man whom she herself had never yet met. (She never did.) Sending thanks, Augusta neglected to mention that the couple would be accompanied to Bifrons by Georgiana’s sister. Tall, lively and high-spirited, the 15-year-old Libby would act as a companion to the pregnant Georgiana, while entertaining her charming Henry: this, so it seems, was the idea that Augusta had hatched. It remains unguessable whether Mrs Leigh fully recognised what a gift she was making to a bored and unprincipled young man. Perhaps, the answer is best summed up by Annabella, when she commented upon Mrs Leigh’s curious lack of any form of moral principle. Augusta simply didn’t register the rights and wrongs of such behaviour. Nevertheless, she guessed what Lady Byron’s views would be shrewdly enough to hold her tongue.
Eighteen-twenty-nine would prove to be an active and stressful year for Lady Byron. Concerned about Ada, and far from well herself, she was busily engaged in helping to set up a number of co-operative schools, and also farms where – a bold concession at that time – tenants could unite to buy their own plots of land. Sailing around the coast from Brighton to Bristol and from Devon to Newport in her search for pleasing locations in which to establish these new ventures, Lady Byron’s wealth was revealed by the fact that she now travelled on her own yacht, the Prince Leopold.
At Hastings, taking advice from William Frend, Annabella set up a co-operative institute in George Street. In London, she conducted discussions with Robert Owen about methods of schooling for the underprivileged whose chances in life she was determined to improve. (A shocking 90 per cent of all children received neither formal education nor apprenticeship training in early nineteenth-century England.) At Liverpool, she talked with Arabella Lawrence about Miss Lawrence’s own successful school for the city’s poor. At Brighton, Annabella formed a new and enduring friendship with zealous Dr King, founder of that town’s own first co-operative. Annabella’s reaction of dislike to Robert Owen, whom she swiftly judged to be both complacent and autocratic, was soon forgotten in her wholehearted enthusiasm for the modest, religious – and most obligingly compliant – William King.
In the early autumn of 1829, Augusta Leigh took it upon herself to criticise Byron’s executor, Douglas Kinnaird, causing him to resign. A new trustee was required. Augusta put forward a Leigh family supporter, Colonel George D’Aguilar. Annabella, who had been exchanging friendly notes with Augusta about the injustice of denying Lord Byron a monument in Westminster Abbey, now suggested that the more experienced Dr Lushington might offer better service. Lushington had acted as her own lawyer for the past twelve years. His wife Sarah Carr, handpicked by Annabella, was one of her closest friends. Nobody could be more suitable.
By the end of November, the discussion between the two ladies had turned quarrelsome. Annabella was insistent; Augusta refused to back down. Mrs Leigh’s reason was transparent; the cultured and agreeable Colonel D’Aguilar was ready to do just as she pleased. Lushington, who held as low an opinion of Augusta’s prudence as of her morals, would sanction nothing without careful consideration. (In fact, Lushington strove to help the Leighs, a family whose attitude to money remained alarmingly close to that of Mr Micawber’s.) By 1 December, Annabella was feeling angry enough to identify Lushington to young Lizzie Siddons as ‘my protector when injury (I speak the language of the world for I know no injuries) was designed by the very person I was seeking to serve!’ By January 1830, the two ladies were quivering with mutual resentment and indignation.
The voices that speak out from ancient, tissue-thin letters still vibrate with animosity and distrust, but it was Augusta’s offer of forgiveness that finally tipped the balance for a furious Lady Byron.
Augusta Leigh (undated, but probably 16 January 1830):
I can forgive and do forgive freely, all and everything that has antagonised and I may say almost destroyed me. I can believe that you have been actuated throughout by a principle which you thought a right one, but my own self-respect will never allow me to acknowledge an obligation where none has been originally conferred . . .
Writing her response from Ealing (where she was renting a second home close to a projected school) on 17 January 1830, Annabella was at her chilliest and most implacable:
From your representations and the conclusions you draw, it is evident to me that your mind is not in a state to admit the truth – I must therefore decline any further discussion of facts which are already as well known to you as to me.
Believe me, ever faithfully yours
A I Noel Byron
The deliberate use by Lady Byron of her formal name was indicative of her rage. The employment of that innocuous word ‘faithfully’ conveyed a stinging reminder of the promise she had been compelled to make to her late husband. The Leigh family might drive Annabella up the wall, but they would never be deprived of what Byron’s wife recognised to be their rightful due.
Augusta’s refusal to acknowledge any obligation to a patient and on the whole generous benefactor was absurd, but it was the use of that awful word ‘forgiveness’ that had caused such anger. ‘I can never pass over her insolence,’ Lady Byron informed Sarah Lushington on 27 February 1830. She meant it. Augusta’s decorous gift of a prayer-book for Ada’s fourteenth birthday in December 1830 produced no response. Silence was an insult that Mrs Leigh did not forget. Relations between the two women, for the entirety of a fierce decade, would become nearly non-existent.
Augusta was evidently unconscious of any particular reason why such characteristic behaviour on her own part (voluminous lamentations about Mrs Leigh’s sufferings and her shortage of money habitually followed Lady Byron around the country like a Greek chorus) had provoked such unreasonable wrath. A reason existed, however, and it was not a pretty one.
It was during the autumn of the ongoing dispute about trusteeship that Annabella had received disquieting news from George and Mary Byron. (That kind and cheerful couple’s loyalty to Annabella since 1816 had been rewarded in 1824, when Lady Byron put them in receipt of an annual £2,000, having learned that her husband had disinherited his cousin: this was Byron’s punishment for siding against himself during the separation.) George, now 7th Lord Byron, had recently been approached by William Eden, the vicar of a church not far from Bifrons. Eden’s parishioners reported tales of dreadful goings-on at Lady Byron’s home since the Trevanions and Miss Leigh had moved into it that spring. Young Miss Leigh was now visibly pregnant. The Bifrons workforce spread the news that Henry Trevanion was responsible.
Annabella’s first shocked thought was that the past had repeated itself, under her own roof, seemingly with her own approbation. On 4 December 1829, Lady Byron wrote to Georgiana Trevanion. A carefully phrased letter indicated that, while offended by Augusta’s quarrelsomeness about the new trustee, and appalled by these new revelations, she would stand by her promise to help her husband’s family. In January 1830, she arranged and paid for the disgraced trio to sail together to Calais. There, in lodgings that were paid for by Annabella, the illicit child was born. (Farmed out for adoption, the little boy died later that summer.) Augusta, while dimly conscious of a move to France, presumably for financial reasons, remained unaware either of her doomed first grandchild’s birth or that Lady Byron was discreetly paying all the Trevanions’ household bills.
Given this bizarre background scenario, it is not surprising that Annabella rejected Augusta’s offer of forgiveness. Quite possibly, Lady Byron relished a moment of justifiable scorn. What kind of mother could conceivably have placed her 15-year-old daughter in such a compromising situation? How different was her own devoted care for poor, fragile Ada!
Annabella’s indignation would have justifiably increased, had she been informed of what happened next. Slipping quietly back into England during the following summer (1830), the Trevanions lodged at a family house in Chelsea, from which Henry paid regular visits to his unabashed young mistress, demurely lodged at her mother’s apartment in St James’s Palace. In February 1831, Trevanion informed an appalled Mrs Leigh that he and her younger daughter were expecting a child. (No mention was made of the previous pregnancy, or of Lady Byron’s assistance.)
Augusta’s response was hysterical. To Henry, she despatched a plaintive squawk of command: ‘You will comfort me! I need not point out the means! Your own heart will dictate them – and as you are dear! MOST dear! Much, MUCH is in your power!’ Elizabeth Medora, meanwhile, was apprised by Mrs Leigh of the agonies she had inflicted upon a mother’s tortured soul: ‘I have suffered much – long (neither you or ANY human Being knows how much) but – I never knew sorrow like this . . . I was not prepared for this wretchedness – Spare! Oh spare me, Dearest!’ The greatest of all Augusta’s sorrows, so it appeared from an interminably theatrical lament, was that her cherished daughter would not now be able to complete her religious education. (‘You know that I confidently hoped and intended you to be confirmed this Easter! I suppose it is now hopeless – consult your own heart and wishes!’) As was aptly observed in 1929 by Ethel Mayne, first biographer of Lady Byron: ‘The pitiful absurdity of these letters paralyses the judgement.’
Plainly, little help for Henry and his victim (this was the role that Miss Leigh adopted, and maintained) was to be expected at this juncture from an agonised mother; Annabella, who supposed the trio still to be safely lodged (at her own expense) in France, was equally unlikely to prove sympathetic. Retiring to a village near Bath, the Trevanions and Elizabeth Medora decided to lie low. This was the point at which – informed at last by Henry Wyndham of what had been hidden from view for two full years – a distraught Colonel Leigh intervened. Never the brightest of men, George Leigh’s solution was to abduct his unmarried and once again pregnant child and lock naughty Libby up within a discreet abode in north London. Following suit with the support of an eagerly collaborative Georgiana and (it is conjectured) funded by the ever-gullible Augusta – Henry Trevanion now ‘liberated’ a most co-operative young mistress and carried Medora (as we will from now on, for convenience, name Elizabeth Medora Leigh) off to live with him in France.
Nothing improved. In England, a husbandless Georgiana struggled to bring up three small children on her own. In France, in 1836, a penniless Trevanion set about raising funds against his abandoned wife’s marriage settlement in order to buy himself – but not Medora – a home. Back in England, John Hanson (Byron’s unsavoury lawyer had by now been publicly disgraced for his exploitation of the lunatic Lord Portsmouth) piously opined that ‘poor Mrs Leigh and all connected with her are mad’. In 1838, Medora, still in France, was striving to obtain the title deed to a £3,000 settlement extravagantly promised by Augusta to Marie, Medora’s illegitimate 4-year-old child.* (Henry Trevanion was, once again, the father.)
Trevanion remained the nemesis to whom Medora always returned. It was he – or he and Georgiana – who had first informed her that she was Byron’s daughter.† In 1840, that alleged parentage would be used to clinch Medora’s hold over Lord Byron’s always wistful and conscience-stricken wife.
By the spring of 1830, while the Trevanions and Medora were still living at Calais, illness had muted Ada’s vibrant, quirky voice for almost a year. In March, the kindly old Baillie sisters expressed a hope that their young friend might soon be well enough to venture outside the house. Three months later, at Mortlake, Ada admitted to her correspondence tutor, Arabella Lawrence, that she was often in too much pain even to sit upright. Chair rides (or an occasional stumbling walk) along the terrace above the Thames to watch the boats and river birds now represented her entire external life. Within the seclusion of The Limes and with her closest girlfriend, Flora Davison,* for an audience, Ada – on her good days – endeavoured to practise the piano (‘I especially love the waltz’), and – with characteristic gallantry – attempted little jokes. Selina Doyle and she were struggling to read German together, she told Robert Noel, a fluent speaker of the language who was himself now out in Dresden studying phrenology: ‘und wie der Lahme und der Blinde helfen wir uns einander’ (‘and are as much use to each other as the lame and the blind’).
One of Ada’s greatest resources was an absolute refusal to repress her feelings, in marked contrast to the self-control that Annabella had determinedly acquired. Writing to Miss Lawrence in Liverpool from her Mortlake sickroom, the pupil made no secret of her despair: ‘This has been a sad irregular week. Monday I missed nothing but was [so] desponding & despairing that I could have cried with very great pleasure.’ On another day during that same bleak July of 1830, Ada grew tearful about the difficulties of German grammar: ‘I began to read it [her grammar book] as usual, not thinking right . . . however, I found my head in a state of sad confusion, and getting extremely discouraged began to cry.’ Striving to keep a full record of a life in which there was a pitiful dearth of distraction from her pain and isolation, Ada acknowledged that she remained ‘very far’ from any condition that could in any way be described as happiness.
Arabella Lawrence had known about Ada ever since she despatched young Miss Lamont to Kirkby Mallory as a governess, back in the summer of 1821. Now, visiting Mortlake during her holiday breaks, Lawrence was quick to realise that her pupil disliked rules and thrived upon imaginative stories. History was consequently taught, not by rote, but according to whichever period Ada might suddenly find appealing. Debate was never discouraged. Laughing at her own ‘disputation habits’, Ada blamed her relish for a good argument on ‘the quiet & unvaried life I have necessarily led for the last year and a half’.
But Lady Byron worried about such capriciousness. Constantly peering over Ada’s shoulder, while adding comments to the young invalid’s pencil-written letters, she asked Miss Lawrence to help her to control this argumentative tendency in her daughter. It came (she felt) too close to disrespect. Ada continued to tease. How restful it would be over the holidays with Miss Lawrence to decide everything for her, she wrote: ‘it will be so nice . . . and I shall have no trouble in making up my mind about anything’.
It was while her daughter was still bedridden that Annabella decided to introduce Ada to her father’s poems. A first copy of every new poem and play her husband produced had been provided to Lady Byron by John Murray (at her own request) every year since 1816. The works she chose to read aloud to the poet’s own child upon this momentous occasion were strangely chosen. ‘Fare Thee Well’ was understandable, as were the romantic lines about Greece which Lady Byron selected from The Giaour. But why would Annabella have singled out ‘The Satire’, Byron’s vicious demolition of their old family friend, Mrs Clermont, for the ears of his ailing and sensitive daughter?
Ada’s response was disappointing. To Annabella (who loved to write verse herself), all the glory of her late husband lay within his work. To Ada, while she expressed polite enthusiasm for The Giaour, Byron’s enchantment derived entirely from his legend. The father she already admired was the glowing hero of the ‘hidden’ portrait (that shrouded image behind its alluringly mysterious green curtain): an image of which only her mother seemed to imagine that an inquisitive and intelligent girl of fourteen might remain unaware.
Lord Byron was much in Annabella’s thoughts in 1830. Thomas Moore’s newly published Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life had done no favours to Byron’s widow. But what distressed Annabella most was Moore’s assumption (it was based upon his subject’s own notoriously volatile letters) that the Byron couple’s separation had been arranged and controlled by Annabella’s parents. Lady Byron’s dignified response was bound – with the consent of John Murray, Moore’s publisher – into the second edition of Moore’s book. Her ‘Remarks’ included a letter from Stephen Lushington, in which the now-eminent lawyer stated that it had been Lady Byron’s own account, not that of her parents, which had led him to advise her against a marital reconciliation.
What hovered, unspoken, behind the careful phrases in a letter from Lushington which Annabella had solicited and personally revised, was the question of what it had been, precisely, that Lady Byron had divulged to him. Annabella would never publicly accuse her sister-in-law of incest. She must have been aware, nevertheless, that by including Lushington’s letter within the ‘Remarks’, she was giving new life to a half-forgotten but deliciously scandalous tale.
Towards the memory of Byron himself, Annabella remained supportive and loyal. On 2 August 1831, she revealed to Robert Noel her plans to send his younger brother Edward out to Greece. The connection was never explicitly stated, but it is clear that, by purchasing from its Turkish owner a 15,000-acre estate on Euboea (modern Evia), where Edward and a German friend intended to set up a school on the Hofwyl model, Lady Byron was following what she believed would have been her late husband’s wishes. Byron would have applauded the establishing of a family connection to Greece (one which survives until this day).*
‘The vagrant is located at last. I have bought Mr Duval’s house,’ Annabella announced to Harriet Siddons on 29 August 1831. Duval’s home was Fordhook, a gentrified and bay-windowed farmhouse in which the novelist Henry Fielding had once lived. Situated amidst flat fields to the east of Ealing Common, Fordhook was conveniently close to Acton Lodge (where Mary Montgomery frequently visited her brother Hugh).
Dr Fellenberg’s renowned school had not done quite so well by the temperamental Edward Noel as Lady Byron had hoped, but Annabella still chose the Swiss establishment for her model as she moved on from making loans to the co-operative schools which focussed on technical education for the poor, to set up her own new school at Ealing. The difference that set Annabella’s project apart from the co-operatives, from Hofwyl and even from the school (one she greatly admired) set up at Cheam in 1826 by Dr Charles Mayo and his sister, was the focus upon constant occupation, and upon character development rather than any religious doctrine. It was one of the most remarkable features of Lady Byron’s educational system that it was open to all creeds, or even none.
Ealing Grove was a bold venture, one which would become Lady Byron’s most influential educational monument. There were many teething problems, especially with finding the right headmaster and with administering a pioneering allotment scheme that enabled the poorest pupils to pay their modest fees by selling produce that they themselves had grown. By 1836, however, Joanna Baillie was impressed by the spectacle of sixty attentive and happy pupils. Other educationalists began paying visits to Ealing, to learn from Lady Byron’s success.
Sixteen years later, writing to a new friend, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Annabella explained that her project had simply been to offer a basic education, sound morals and clear personal goals to children who would always have to earn their own keep in life.
Today, this sounds unremarkable. Back in the 1830s, however, Annabella’s undidactic and humane approach was revolutionary. Everything about the programme of education that she described to Dr Blackwell proclaimed Lady Byron’s enduring abhorrence of the English public-school system that she believed had caused such damage to her husband. The banning of any form of religious teaching headed her list of directives for a scheme in which benevolence was united with discipline.
No creed. No scripture books. No continual sedentary indoor employment. No under-demand on any of these faculties. No over-excitement of feelings by prizes or other artificial stimulants. No definite boundary between work and play, the former as much as possible a pleasure, the latter not a contrast with lessons. No corporal punishment. No over-legislation.
Annabella’s school, despite the problem of finding male teachers who would consent to be controlled and supervised by a formidably demanding woman, was a success. Turning to her own daughter, however, Lady Byron sometimes forgot her policy of making work pleasurable. Ada, it was always understood, would not only learn, but excel. Aged fifteen, she spoke three languages. In basic arithmetic, she was advanced for her age, but no prodigy. In her knowledge of history and current affairs, however, coached by a mother whose knowledge of global politics had once so impressed young George Ticknor, Ada was precociously well informed. Granted the freedom to read as she wished during three years of extreme ill health, her exceptional powers of imagination had also flowered, unrestrained. ‘God knows I have enough of it, and a great plague it often is,’ Ada later told a mother who possessed no imagination (and who feared its liberating powers). A plague to its possessor, perhaps, but mathematics alone would never have enabled Ada Lovelace to become a visionary prophet of our own technological age.
By the summer of 1832, while mother and daughter were still settling into their new home at Ealing, 16-year-old Ada had recovered her health enough to accompany Lady Byron on a first jaunt to Brighton, favourite home of William IV, England’s sea-loving king. There, at long last, Ada was deemed well enough to indulge her cherished childhood dream: to ride upon a horse. At the beginning of that year, Joanna Baillie had praised Miss Byron’s ability to amble upon a docile mount across Fordhook’s two outlying fields; by August, in Brighton, Ada was able to boast to Selina Doyle’s illegitimate niece, Fanny Smith,* that both her riding-master and ‘Mamma’ were delighted by her equestrian progress. She could actually canter up the curving street to their hotel (Albion House in Preston Street)! What was more, she had been professionally advised that she now held her reins to perfection!
There was more. Not without triumph, Ada informed Fanny that she had just started taking guitar lessons from a Spanish count, a truly romantic exile who (so an admiring Ada thought) produced the sounds of an entire orchestra from his soulfully plucked strings.
‘[T]ake care to keep strait Dear,’ an anxious Lady Gosford counselled Ada on 13 September 1832. She was referring, not to Ada’s riding, but to an exuberant young lady’s need to be prudent.
Like many others in Lady Byron’s watchful circle of female friends, Mary Gosford was reassured when she learned that Ada’s new project – allegedly inspired by the allotment scheme that her mother was pioneering in Ealing – was to become a farmer. ‘Mamma encourages me very much,’ Ada reported to Fanny Smith. Mamma was considerably less delighted to learn from Selina Doyle, early in 1833, that her daughter’s ardent interest in the Ealing allotments had become a cover for secret meetings in a Fordhook garden shed, where she exchanged passionate embraces – and something more – with a young man who had been recruited to teach Miss Byron shorthand (for taking lecture notes).† Ordered to behave herself, Ada ran away and promptly showed up at her lover’s family home. His parents, fearful of angering so powerful a figure as Ada’s mother, just as promptly escorted the young lady back to Fordhook.
Years later, and plainly relishing a chance to shock one of her most susceptible confidantes, Ada boasted to Mary Somerville’s son that relations between the unnamed youth and herself went ‘as far as they could without actual penetration [the word ‘connexion’ was later coyly substituted in Woronzow Greig’s unpublished record] being actually completed.’ Miss Byron’s public disgrace had just been avoided, but enough people in Lady Byron’s own social circle knew what had happened for her daughter commonly to be perceived as damaged goods.* It is noteworthy that one of the first letters Ada would one day write to her future husband thanked him for overlooking her blotted past, and for a consequent debt of gratitude ‘of which I am so sure I shall never need to be reminded by you’.
‘Make amends to your mother before it is too late!’ Nanny Briggs scolded Ada on 6 March 1833. Two days later, Ada announced her reform to her mother by stating, with heavy underlinings, that ‘I am an altered person.’
Repentance proved shortlived. By 27 April, as a letter written a full year later reveals, Ada was already hatching plans to resume the affair.† When a scandalised and despairing Annabella announced that she herself had been appointed ‘by God forever’ to supervise and restrain her wayward daughter, Ada struck back. She was willing to be guided, but not even by divine appointment would she be governed by her mother. Writing from Brighton in May 1833, Ada set out the case for her right to be free.
I cannot consider that the parent has any right to direct the child or to expect obedience in such things as concern the child only. I will give a practical illustration of my meaning. [The example given was of a window to be closed in Annabella’s own room by her own instructions – fair enough – or of a window in Ada’s chamber: unacceptable.] . . . The one case concerns you & your comfort, the other concerns me only and cannot affect or signify to you. Do you see the line of distinction that I draw? I have given the most familiar possible illustration, because I wish to be as clear as possible. Till 21, the law gives you a power of enforcing obedience on all points; but at that time I consider your power and your claim to cease . . .
Smart, fierce and articulate, Ada’s letter marked the beginning of a lifelong battle between two intransigent characters: an exceptionally strong-willed mother and her equally strong-willed daughter. The letter also demonstrates that Miss Byron, now seventeen, had developed an uncommon gift for expressing herself. This faculty, as much as her still nascent mathematical ability, would prove crucial to Ada’s remarkable future.
The stronger Ada grew (she could by now rejoice at her skill in ‘leaping’ a horse over a gate), the more complex her relationship with Annabella became. She had fired off her letter of teenage defiance while consenting – as a sop to her mother – to make her first presentation curtsey in that summer of 1833 at the Brighton-based court of William IV. Arrayed in white satin and tulle and still limping a little as the 7th Lord Byron’s wife gently shepherded her towards the throne, Ada betrayed the same critical eye that her mother had trained on London society when she herself first arrived there from the north of England. Healthy enough by now to stand for fifteen minutes – but no more – without fatigue, Miss Byron was introduced to the Duke of Orléans (‘very pleasing’), to Wellington (who passed muster) and to Talleyrand (whose face reminded her of an old monkey). Visiting Brighton again in the autumn of 1833, a proud Ada boasted to Fanny Smith about how warmly her mother had been received by the royal couple. Lady Byron had actually been invited to sit next to the queen and had conversed at length with the king, Ada informed her friend. Dressed (so Ada bragged) in a dashingly low-cut dress of crimson brown and wearing a pale straw hat decorated with white feathers, ‘my illustrious parent’ had looked ‘very pretty indeed’. Lady Byron herself was shyly surprised by the kindness of the welcome she had received. The king and queen had been really friendly to her, Annabella wrote with evident pleasure to Sophia Frend.
Ada’s pride in her mother’s warm reception did not mean that she herself had become suddenly submissive. Over a decade later, she would offer a heartfelt apology for the way she had behaved as a wilful teenager, deceiving Lady Byron about ‘all my real feelings’. (Ruefully, she added: ‘And a pretty mess I made of it.’) Back in 1833, a less conscience-stricken Ada evinced every sign of becoming alarmingly uncontrollable. At the end of the year, running short of ways to rein her daughter in, an exhausted Annabella turned to religion for salvation. Perhaps contemplation of the heavens would serve to calm the rattled nerves, not only of a volatile daughter, but of a mother unsettled by the recent evidence of new and shocking misbehaviour by the erring Mrs Leigh.* By March 1834, Ada noted that her mother and she were reading together and enjoying Dr Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise. A religious interpretation of Laplace’s theorising of a godless universe, Whewell’s contribution to the series of treatises commissioned on his deathbed by the Earl of Bridgewater appealed greatly to Ada’s growing interest in astronomy.
It was around this time that Annabella settled upon the earnest and flawlessly respectable Dr William King as that ideal tutor who might combine sober instruction in calming mathematics for her daughter with an uplifting course of religious education. Ada’s response was suspiciously meek. Mrs King, who had previously been shocked to hear about Miss Byron’s Ealing romance, was demurely informed by her husband’s new pupil that religion was having an excellent effect. Ada took such comfort from the ‘pleasant walks’ and interesting discussions she had been experiencing with kind Dr King. She was absorbing his wise advice about controlling her imagination. She was so truly grateful for his thoughtful care.
Evidence that Ada was receiving instruction from somebody with a far livelier mind than Dr King began to appear that spring. On 15 March 1834, while reading Whewell and being urged by Dr King to lift up her thoughts unto God, Ada wrote to consult her mother’s old tutor, William Frend, about rainbows.
Dogmatic though Frend could be upon certain topics – he had controversial views on algebra and rejected the idea of negative numbers – he had never underrated Ada’s capacity to look at life from original angles. Her new preoccupation concerned prismatic light. ‘I cannot make out one thing at all,’ Ada wrote to his London home in Gower Street, ‘viz: why a rainbow always appears to the spectator to be an arc of a circle. Why is it a curve at all, and why a circle rather than any other curve?’ Sadly, Frend’s response to an intriguing but not unanswerable question is not preserved.*
It was precisely this enterprising, inquisitive aspect of Ada’s mind that Dr King had been urged to harness. A careful examination of the lengthy and seemingly dutiful letter Ada wrote to him on 9 March that year should have warned the earnest cleric that he was on a hiding to nothing. Ada was perfectly aware that mathematics had been singled out by her mother as a means to shackle her unruly mind. Here, however, she gave a completely different reason for her interest in the subject. ‘My wish is to make myself well acquainted with Astronomy, Optics & c,’ Ada explained to her well-meaning instructor, ‘but I find I cannot study these satisfactorily for want of a thorough acquaintance with the elementary parts of Mathematics.’ Mathematics, in fact, was perceived by Ada as a crucial stepping stone on an adventurous journey not into the conventional world of Dr King’s theology, but into the mysterious realm of physics.
Ada already possessed a skill with words that enabled her to encircle, bewilder and trounce poor Dr King. While sweetly assenting to the prudence of controlling that dangerous imagination of hers, Miss Byron invited him to consider the worrying vacancy that might be created by the sudden extinction of any source of excitement. How fortunate that science offered a better solution – as she was about to explain:
[For] nothing but very close & intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement. I am most thankful that this strong source of interest does seem to be supplied to me now almost providentially, & think it a duty vigorously to use the resources thus as it were pointed out to me.
And on Ada smoothly passed, requesting Dr King to be so gracious as to counsel her as to the best ‘plan’ of study: ‘I may say that I have time at my command, & that I am willing to take any trouble.’ Dr King, in short, was to advise, but not control. His pupil would herself make the final decision about what she wished to learn from him. As to the ultimate purpose of her researches, she would keep that secret to herself.
Ada’s reference to her new and unexpected access to ‘subjects of a scientific nature’ held the clue – had Dr King been able to follow it – to what had happened. In February that year, she had found a new and sympathetic mentor in her mother’s friend Mary Somerville, a slight, smiling, pink-cheeked Scotswoman who was recognised to be one of the most brilliant expositors of science in England. The following month, Ada – for once, without her mother – attended a party held at the London home of one of Mary Somerville’s closest friends. His name was Charles Babbage.
* Had Henry Trevanion known of the arrangements restricting Mrs Leigh’s access to funds that were held in trust, he might have thought twice. Even so, Georgiana’s marriage settlement proved substantial enough for him to raise £8,332 against it in 1836.
* ‘Those who, like myself, are animated by an ever-new succession of hopeful visions, have dangers of a different kind to contend with . . .’ Annabella wrote to Lizzie Siddons on 13 June 1834, adding revealingly that: ‘my states of depression . . . arise, not from apprehension of the future, but from regret for the past’. (HRC, bound vol.1, Byron Collection)
* Augusta’s settlement was predicated upon the always sickly Lady Byron’s early death. None of the money could be released until that eventuality.
† Georgiana, for reasons that remain obscure, was always a co-operative member of the trio. By telling Medora that she was not the daughter of Colonel Leigh, she seemingly intended the girl to feel less guilt about sleeping with Henry Trevanion, her own sister’s husband.
* Flora’s father was one of Lady Byron’s closest friends and advisors. He was among the initial three trustees she later appointed to protect her personal papers from scrutiny. On his death, Mr Davison was replaced in that role by Henry Bathurst.
* The Noel-Bakers are landowners in modern Evia.
* Fanny Smith was the child of Selina Doyle’s handsome second brother, Charles (‘Carlo’), and an Indian begum whom he was not able to marry. Fanny had known Ada since 1828, when Miss Smith promised to practise flying with her at Bifrons. Fanny became like a second daughter to Annabella during the Fordhook years. Later, she married Edward Noel.
† The abrupt termination of William Turner’s employment as a shorthand teacher suggests that he was Ada’s first beau, although the culprit was never named.
* Evidence that gossip had spread appears in The New York Mirror of 1833, which told its readers that ‘Ada Byron, the sole daughter of the “noble bard”, is the most coarse and vulgar woman in England’. Small wonder that Annabella was dismayed.
† On 27 April 1834, Ada referred to her state of mind ‘this very day last year– believing myself most noble & virtuous, [while] I was made up of deceit & selfishness’ (AAB to Mrs William King, 27 April 1834, Lovelace Byron Papers: the italics are my own).
* On 22 July 1833, Annabella confided to Harriet Siddons that ‘Self-will has involved one to whose moral and religious welfare all my efforts have been directed, in evils of the greatest magnitude, such as must bring retribution . . .’ Reference to Mrs Leigh rather than to Ada’s recent misdemeanours is clear from the fact that she turned calmly to Ada in the next paragraph: ‘Ada is quite well. We shall move soon . . .’ It remains unclear what Augusta Leigh had done to incur Lady Byron’s wrath on this particular occasion (HRC, bound vol. 1, Byron Collection).
* The higher the sun, the more of a rainbow’s circle do we perceive. At a certain height, where the horizon presents no cut-off, the whole circle (caused by varied wavelengths of light being refracted off raindrops) becomes visible.