(1835–40)
By the spring of 1835, when Ada had just turned nineteen, Mrs Somerville regarded her almost as a daughter, a substitute for her first and long-departed child. Mary was well aware of Ada’s intense but mercurial nature and her delicate physical health. (The two were, as she soon realised, closely entwined.) Mrs Somerville also knew how profoundly anxious Lady Byron was about her only child, and how fearful for her reputation.
If only a husband could be found for the young woman, some special man who would cherish and understand this rare, eccentric girl. But where was a mother to find such a paragon? Annabella had not taken to the smoothly eligible youths who swarmed around her daughter in the year of Ada’s debut at court. Ada, to be fair, had not helped herself. An engaging lack of concern for how she dressed attracted censorious comment. The folly of her runaway affair had caused a scandal, whispers of which had even crossed the Atlantic. Her enthusiasms – whether for maths, for riding, or for music – were always too fervent and extreme. Clearly not cut out to become a bishop’s wife or even a conventionally well-behaved lady of the manor, Miss Byron now stood in real danger of joining Mary Montgomery, relegated in her maturity to the position of a clever semi-invalid, one who was forever socially dependent upon the indulgent care of understanding friends.
Such a future was not the one that any loving mother would wish upon her child. It was then with real pride, if not relief, that Mary Somerville identified a man who seemed (at least, in the opinion of her own son) to be the ideal candidate for Ada’s hand. His name was Lord King. He had for some time lived abroad, remote from spiteful gossip about Ada’s misdemeanour. Better still, Lord King was utterly captivated by the legendary figure of Lord Byron.
Woronzow Greig, Mary’s son, had become acquainted with the reclusive and intelligent William King in the mid-1820s, when both young men were being tutored by William Whewell at Trinity, the former college of Byron himself. Stories of the poet’s wild exploits, his brilliance and his eccentricity still abounded at Trinity in 1824, the year of Byron’s tragically premature death. It was not by chance that Lord King, after leaving Cambridge, took up an invitation to work as secretary to his cousin and fellow-Byronist, Lord Nugent, High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands that Byron had visited during his doomed journey to Greece. There, living on Corfu while he saturated himself in Byron’s poetry, William commissioned a portrait of himself in full Byronic mode.
A brocaded Ionian costume and fez cap failed to bestow quite such an aura of panache upon William King as had the dashing Albanian turban donned by Byron for Thomas Phillips’s famous portrait (the one that had officially been hidden from view behind its own green curtain throughout Ada’s youth). But William King’s intense sense of identification would never wane. One of his first actions after returning to England in 1833 had been to rename the fields of his newly inherited Surrey estate after his hero’s poems. The map still exists on which the new names are carefully penned in: Lara’s Field, Corsair’s Field, Ali’s Field, Harold’s Meadow, Chillon. All that was missing from this exoticised landscape was the ultimate connection to Lord Byron himself: the intimate link that only Ada Byron herself could provide.
William King had grown up in the expectation of becoming a grand landowner. The King family possessed large estates in Surrey and North Somerset, to which his mother, Lady Hester Fortescue, had added her own West Country domains and considerable personal wealth. It’s unlikely that William’s father had meant to cause difficulties for his heir when he made his wife the interim beneficiary of his will. William certainly foresaw no trouble when he wrote home from Corfu on 29 June 1833 that – following the news of his father’s untimely death, aged fifty-seven – he intended Lady Hester and his four siblings to lack for nothing in the future. William was aware that his mother preferred her second son, Locke. (Peter Locke King’s middle name honoured John Locke, the most famous of the family’s ancestors.) Nevertheless, so William assured Lady Hester, ‘nothing shall be wanting on my part to you and for you . . . to meet all your wishes will always be my first duty’s pleasure’.
William was in for a shock. Reaching home two weeks later, he discovered that Lady Hester was making full use of her new powers. Locke had already been granted an extensive portion of the King estate in Surrey. In the West Country, while William was permitted to retain the steep and wooded hillside enclosing his father’s hunting lodge above Porlock, Locke had been given the giant’s share. William had scarcely set his foot within Ockham Park, the King family’s principal home near Guildford, when Lady Hester had it gutted. The furniture, as she barely troubled to explain, would be divided between 38 Dover Street, the Kings’ London residence (it was now to become her personal domain) and Woburn Park, the new Surrey mansion in which Locke King, together with two of his three young sisters, Hester and Charlotte, were to live as their mother’s companions. (A third and mentally impaired daughter, Emily, was packed off to London to act as a companion to ‘Aunt Lucy’, an elderly relative who was eking out an existence in Charlotte Street and to whom, when Lady Hester deigned to remember, she would grudgingly send money for coals and rent.)
It’s an awful story and there’s little room for doubt that Lady Hester was an awful woman. Every year, with tenacious glee, she once more wrote out a new will in which she once again bestowed the generous sum of just ten pounds upon her eldest son. (Seeking to justify her abominable treatment of William, his mother once drafted a letter in which she said that he intimidated her by asking difficult questions and that she would fear being alone in the presence of her firstborn.) Locke salved his own conscience by offering his older brother £3,000 raised from personal investments.
Locke’s position was in fact as unenviable as was William’s. Chained to a tyrant mother, he dwelt with his sisters in what was effectively Lady Hester’s private prison at Woburn Park. Designed by William Kent, Woburn stood ostentatiously close to Ockham, which it dwarfed. Nominally under Locke’s control, it was ruled by the iron fist of his mother, who ran it as her own fiefdom. The son whose obligations included writing his mother an annual letter of obsequious homage (while apologising every time he went away for more than a day) was in effect a mere dependant.
Lady Hester’s callous behaviour had not only robbed William King of the major portion of his inheritance, but it aimed to separate him from the young sisters who adored him. No communication was permitted between the two estates. When Hester and Charlotte King visited Ockham, they did so clandestinely, rather than risk the scourge of their mother’s displeasure.
It is unclear how much Mrs Somerville herself knew of this ugly history, but it is likely that William King, who had few friends, shared most of it with Woronzow Greig, his lifelong confidante and loyal supporter.*
Encountering William in 1835, for the first time in several years, Greig saw a handsome and thoughtful man, almost eleven years older than Miss Byron, who worshipped Ada’s late father, took a keen interest in the world of science and who plainly stood in need of a wife. Ockham Park had been robbed of its pretty old furniture, its charming paintings and its library (even the contents of the wine cellar and William’s own amateur science laboratory – left over from his college days – had been carried off to Woburn). Nevertheless, the King family’s principal home remained ready to enchant a new young mistress. Serene, light and spacious, Ockham stood at the end of an avenue lined by stately trees. Its windows looked out across rolling parkland. Close by, the family church housed a glorious Rysbrach monument to William’s forbears. And how could Byron’s daughter not fall in love with Ashley Combe, a remote and ravishingly beautiful West Country estate of twisting paths and forested cliffs, its shimmering, sealike views across the Bristol Channel rivalling those that Ada’s father had enjoyed during his summer beside Lake Geneva? All that Ockham and Ashley lacked in 1835 was a mistress worthy of their master.
The connection seemed simply to rise up and stare the Somervilles in the face. Here, close to the heart of their own family, stood Miss Byron’s ideal mate. While no correspondence survives through which to trace the trail of discussion, it is clear that Greig’s notion was put to Lady Byron by his mother, and found pleasing. Towards the end of May 1835, Ada was despatched on a visit to Warwickshire. There, William King was due to attend a ball being held at Weston House, the newly Gothicised home of Sir George Philips, founder of the Manchester Guardian. A jovial textile magnate whose strong interest in science had brought him into contact with the Somervilles and Charles Babbage, Sir George had met Annabella and her daughter the previous year during their inspection tour of Midlands factories. A regular visitor that summer both to Fordhook and to the Somervilles’ house at Chelsea, Sir George and his brightly social wife were eager to assist in the plot to further what all parties perceived to be an ideal alliance.
Introduced to each other by their hostess (elegant Lady Philips did not approve of Miss Byron’s evidently home-made frock), the meeting of William and Ada proved an instant success. The couple danced several quadrilles together, during one of which William plucked up the courage to tell Ada that he would love to show her Ockham Park and its pretty little church. ‘I thought to myself how few young men whom one meets at balls would talk with so much feeling about their country church,’ Ada demurely wrote to him, ‘& I admired you very much.’
Admiration had burgeoned into love. A week after the Weston ball, William and Ada rode together along the banks of the Thames. By the time that they returned to the Somervilles’ home at Chelsea, William’s proposal had been accepted. Four days later, on 8 June, Ada was saucily reminding him about a certain ride ‘of which it is possible you may have some recollection’, before teasing him with the news that she was just off on a similar excursion, with jolly Sir George as her escort. Writing from Somerset, where he was busily hewing down trees around what he tenderly referred to as Ada’s very own hermitage, William confessed that he felt as though he were living in a dream. ‘How I envy your chaperon his ride with you.’
Fearful that Lord King might hear about Ada’s past history from the wrong person, Annabella asked Woronzow Greig to deliver a discreet account of the elopement incident. Writing to her fiancé shortly after that difficult disclosure, Ada expressed her gratitude to him for overlooking her imprudence. She promised to reward William’s trust by becoming a model wife, one who would never forget his generous behaviour. ‘Now do not be angry with me, because I have only just spoken the truth – neither more nor less.’ A week later, Ada’s mood had shifted. Did she actually possess ‘the requisite perseverance & self denial’ to make a dutiful spouse? But if William grew apprehensive about his fiancée’s changeability – and it seems likely that he did – he could always take comfort from the evident fact that Lady Byron, so calm, so kind, so splendidly rational, exerted a powerful influence over her skittish daughter.
Lady Byron herself was delighted by the match. Writing to Harriet Siddons, Annabella praised Lord King, not merely as ‘a man of rare worth and superior abilities’, but because ‘he has returned good for evil towards those who have wronged him.’ Her allusion was plainly to the Woburn branch of Lord King’s family. The tale was deplorable, but it enabled an admiring Annabella to highlight William’s magnanimous nature. ‘Schooled in adversity and guided by Christian principles, he has reached the age of 30 without a stain upon his reputation.’ His tastes, so Harriet learned, were reassuringly domestic. Best of all, from a loving mother’s point of view, Ockham Park was only half a day’s carriage drive away from Annabella’s own house at Ealing.
Given Lady Hester’s hostility to her eldest son, it was clear that she would forbid any member of the Woburn-based family to attend the wedding. It was probably in order to suppress public comment upon this scandalous absence that the wedding was celebrated quietly – as Annabella’s own had been – at home. Samuel Gamlen, a kindly and broadminded vicar whom Ada often treated as a substitute father, travelled down to Ealing from his Yorkshire rectory. On 8 July 1835, Gamlen presided over the nuptials at Fordhook. Little Olivia Acheson (Lady Byron’s own special favourite among Mary Gosford’s three daughters, singled out by Ada from a yearning trio of candidates) was the only bridesmaid. The following day, while the newly-weds visited Ockham, en route to a two-month West Country honeymoon at Ashley Combe, Annabella threw a party for both servants and her friends at which – so she gaily reported to the absent Ada – Fordhook’s roof almost caved in from all the cheers.
No tears were shed in Ealing that Lord Byron’s last mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, attempting to gatecrash the wedding of the great man’s daughter, had turned up instead at a smart London church where, thanks to her choice of a coyly revealing veil, the countess was recognised and publicly mocked for making a fool of herself. Writing her voluminous homage to Byron some thirty years later, Teresa repaid his widow for that painful hour of humiliation with an acid portrait, one of such peculiar venom that it would help to destroy Annabella’s hard-won status as one of the secular saints of Victorian England.
Before the marriage came the settlements. The documents were intimidating and vast: the History Centre in Woking, Surrey still holds the bullhide on which – despite the gifting to Locke King, via Lady Hester, of at least an equal part of the family estates – over 200 King properties were recorded under William’s name, bringing in an annual income of £8,000 (around £396,000 in modern terms). What catches the eye, however, is not the handsome flourishes which adorn the names of Ada, of the 7th Lord Byron and – he was the well-meaning peacemaker in the conflicted King family – of Lady Hester’s brother, Lord Ebrington. Two names dominate all the others: those of Lord King and his formidably wealthy future mother-in-law, Lady Byron.
Writing to Robert Noel in Dresden on 28 July (Robert happened also to be getting married, to the well-born and charming Louisa von Henniken), Lady Byron described Lord King’s fortune as ‘sufficient, though not ample’. An immediate gift of £30,000 from Lady Byron helped to remedy matters. Given his mother-in-law’s notoriously fragile health, William naturally assumed that he might soon receive a good deal more. Ada, meanwhile – although her mother was keen to point out that the cost of her trousseau alone equalled the expense of educating eighty poor children – was to receive precisely the same figure that her mother had herself been granted as a wife back in 1815. The modest sum of £300 a year (around £13,500 in modern terms) was expected to cover the cost of all Lady King’s personal expenses, including her books, travel, pets, a maid and even her best clothes.
The amount, for a bride of Ada’s status, was startlingly meagre. (Tom, the oldest of the four Noel brothers, was given £500 a year by Annabella during that same period; Annabella presented Robert Noel with £100 at the same time, merely as Ada’s personal wedding gift for Louisa and himself.) ‘Dear little Canary Bird, may the new “cage” be gladdened by your notes,’ Annabella wrote to her daughter on 9 July, the day after Ada’s wedding. The allusion to a cage, however playful, suggests that Annabella still regarded Ada as in need of supervision.* Her recollection of Byron’s own extravagance had not dimmed. Confining her daughter to a tiny budget was Lady Byron’s way of protecting an impetuous and financially naive young woman from running amok.
* Greig’s name was given in honour of his Russian godmother, Countess Woronzow (pronounced Voronzoff), daughter of Russia’s ambassador to Britain. She married Lord Pembroke.
* Ada’s husband and mother were still describing – to each other – her marital home as a ‘cage’ in 1844.