(1850–1)
In 1850, Ada found herself enjoying an unusually protracted spell of robust good health. Making the most of this unfamiliar sense of well-being during an autumn visit to the Lake District, the 34-year-old Lady Lovelace managed both to climb up to the 900-metre-high plateau that crowns Helvellyn and to attempt the marginally lower ridge of Skiddaw, where only bad weather forced her to halt. ‘The mountain air & mountain life does wonders,’ Ada exulted to her mother, before adding her intention of returning for further and bolder ascents.
The trip to Cumbria formed the climax to a tour that (ironically, as it turned out) was planned as a diversion from the Lovelaces’ ongoing worries about money. No investors had shown an interest in supporting the building of Charles Babbage’s pioneering but expensive machine. The plans for marketing a games-playing automaton that were discussed in Ada and Babbage’s shared ‘book’ had come to nothing. Providing Annabella with a home education was a continuing expense for which Ada had undertaken personal responsibility. A more problematic expenditure, since she could discuss it with nobody (Ada herself knew only a carefully edited version of the truth), was John Crosse’s ongoing need to provide for his secret family.
Early in December 1849, Lady Byron had made her son-in-law a welcome loan of £4,500 to assist with the purchase of 6 Great Cumberland Place. A further £1,500 was offered later that month. The loan was generous, but it was insufficient for the requirements and aspirations of a very ambitious earl. (Having been thwarted in his desire to become secretary of state, Lovelace now had his eye fixed on obtaining a post at the Admiralty.) At the beginning of 1850, however, the Lovelaces secured a secret benefactor.
In 1846, Anna Jameson and her niece Gerardine [sic] had formed part of the elopement party that accompanied the newly-wed and fled Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning from Paris to Pisa. Living abroad, Mrs Jameson relied upon Lady Byron to invest the substantial income she was accruing back in England, the fruits of her successful career both as art historian and travel writer. Annabella’s financial acumen was becoming legendary. Anna Jameson’s investments grew. Her letters of gratitude were heartfelt.
Seeking financial aid at a time when she did not dare ask her mother to produce more than a meagre £50 travel fund for her autumn tour, Ada bethought herself of the indebted and always friendly Mrs Jameson. On 9 February 1850, Anna was summoned for a visit to Horsley Towers. Ada’s note was imperious. She herself was just off to see little Ralph at Southampton, where Lady Byron was supervising her younger grandson’s schooling at Drew’s Academy. Mrs Jameson was instructed to send her response to William, who ‘is anxious to know as soon as possible. He hopes you will not say us Nay . . .’
Sitting in Horsley Towers’ newly furnished Great Hall beneath Phillips’s celebrated portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress (the poet stood between Mrs Carpenter’s painting of Ada as a bride and Hoppner’s painting of his wife as a child), Mrs Jameson might have wondered why the owners of such a splendid home and such fine possessions were short of money. Nevertheless, perhaps at this initial point – and certainly later on – Anna agreed to help out with a loan, while promising to say nothing to her appointed soulmate, Lady Byron. That recklessly given assurance of secrecy was to have devastating consequences for a treasured friendship.
Money continued to leak away. In May 1850, Ada evinced her first flicker of real interest in a sport that offered the possibility of raising a fortune by the use of her mathematical skills. Lady Byron, meanwhile, had just paid a visit to Horsley with the objective of meeting one particular fellow guest. Lord Clare, now stoutly middle-aged, had been Lord Byron’s first great love. Sadly, no record survives of what thoughts were shared, perhaps because of an anxious grandmother’s greater concern about young Annabella, who had just had her first period. It was at precisely this stage and at the same age (thirteen) that Ada had been struck down by the paralysis that crippled her for almost three years. Writing to reassure a worried Lady Byron on 30 May, Ada promised that every care would be taken of her granddaughter’s health. Only the quietest forms of exertion would be permitted; nothing reckless. These comforting words were an afterthought, tacked on to the end of a letter that was largely devoted to Ada’s latest interest.
Voltigeur was a three-year-old Yorkshire-bred colt belonging to Thomas Dundas, 2nd Earl of Zetland. The Zetlands had been friends of the Milbanke family since Annabella’s childhood at Seaham. Paying a March visit to Aske Hall, the Zetlands’ Yorkshire home, Lovelace heard little beyond his host’s high expectations for their exceptional horse.
Lord Zetland’s hopes had been confirmed on 29 May, when his colt won the Derby, the world’s greatest flat horse race, historically held on the downs at Epsom. Merrily, Ada’s letter of the following day warned her mother to look out for reports of Lord Lovelace’s imminent destitution, due to the reckless gambling of his wife. To write in this way to a mother who loathed all forms of speculation – Lady Byron had even distributed anti-gaming posters in the casino-rich town of Wiesbaden, back in 1838 – was typical provocation by a saucy daughter who loved to tease her mother. Lady Byron was not amused to hear that her giddy darling was ‘in danger of becoming a sporting character’. Her silence had its usual effect. The subject was dropped.
The year 1850 was one of vigorous social activity for the Lovelaces. In March, the earl had visited both Aske and Floors Castle, the Duke of Roxburghe’s enormous Scottish residence. Early in May, plans were hatched to welcome an eminent American historian to their own new London home. (Ada was a keen admirer of William Prescott’s 1843 masterpiece, The History of the Conquest of Mexico.) Robert Noel, paying a rare visit to England from Dresden, was invited to join a gathering of scientific luminaries at Great Cumberland Place at the end of that month. At the opera, William and Ada weighed the merits of ‘the Swedish nightingale’ Jenny Lind against her rival, Henriette Sontag, and found in favour of the sweettoned German soprano. Dutifully attending two royal balls, Lady Lovelace was still angling for the post of unofficial scientific advisor to the queen’s husband. Instead, to her annoyance, she learned from Woronzow Greig that her name had once again become the subject of scandalous gossip. A certain gentleman had been identified – but Greig refused to divulge his name.
The haughty tone of Ada’s response contrasted oddly with the fervency of her denials. Such stories were pitifully out of date, she wrote. Did Greig (Ada wrote to him, as she did to Babbage and Wheatstone, man to man, using his surname alone) not know that the mere fact that she was Byron’s daughter meant that she was saddled with a new lover every three years – and would be until she was too old for such silly tales to carry conviction? No need for Greig to mention the gossip to her mother, who was well used to hearing such foolish gossip. Lovelace, however, must be informed. The name of this mystery lover had better be supplied to her at once.
Ada’s tone was both defensive and aggressive. Was she afraid that John Crosse had been identified by a sharp-eyed friend? It’s hard to tell. Sophia De Morgan was mentioned as a prime culprit in the spreading of injurious tales. But Ada expressed no guilt. She acknowledged nothing. As before, Greig was reminded of a line beyond which it was unwise for him to step. Lady Lovelace might choose to confide in him; she would never accept interrogation or criticism.
It was, nevertheless, important for Ada not to offend the Greigs in the summer of 1850. Woronzow had played a large part in arranging for Byron Ockham’s transfer to the Daphne, captained by his own friend Edward Fanshawe, and now safely anchored at Valparaíso. Meanwhile, Agnes, Greig’s gentle Scottish wife, had just volunteered to chaperone young Annabella around Europe, an expedition of the same kind that Ada herself had enjoyed as a young girl. The project suited Mrs Greig, who had been seriously ill during the previous year. It also freed the Lovelaces to pursue their plan for a round of northern visits.
Money worries were still preying on Ada’s mind as she prepared for the autumn tour. Writing to her daughter out in Germany on 25 August, she confessed to her horse-loving child that economy had compelled the sale of several of their favourites from the stud. As a further saving, only the Wilson siblings, Stephen and Mary (the Babbage family’s former servants), would accompany the Lovelaces down to Ashley at the end of the year: ‘rents are half paid, we are in some difficulty . . .’
One of the greatest treasures to which Ada possessed unfettered access was the Lovelace diamonds. This magnificent set of jewels, given to his wife at her marriage, formed a regular feature of William’s letters to Lady Byron as he questioned – always a little anxiously – how they were being cared for. The idea of raising money on the jewels first lodged itself in Ada’s mind in July 1850, when she asked Charles Babbage to arrange for a private inspection of ‘the diamonds’ at the ‘Exhibition d’Industrie’, adding that this ‘would help me’. Since Ada cared nothing for diamonds, it’s hard to see why she would have thought such an experience useful, if not to assess the sale value of Lord Lovelace’s most prized heirloom.*
Ada’s worries were not alleviated by the insistence of Lady Byron that her daughter should be constantly available to provide companionship to herself as and when a widowed mother might require it. On the brink of the Lovelaces’ northern tour, Annabella stepped up the pressure. Their departure date was set for the last week in August; on 19 August, two piteous requests for a last little glimpse of Lady Byron’s only child reached Great Cumberland Place. Accusations followed. How could Ada have neglected to visit Moore Place the previous week, when she was staying at Horsley Towers, a mere half-hour’s drive away?
Annabella knew how to tweak her daughter’s conscience. Truly, they had believed the Hen still to be at Brighton, responded Ada within an hour. Of course, she would try to rectify such an oversight. Indeed, she would take the London train down to Esher that afternoon and then return to the city on that same night. But the Hen must promise not to become ‘frightened or astonished or otherwise affected’ if she failed in the attempt. The Bird was going to do her best.
Ada was always vulnerable to Lady Byron’s reproaches, but she had become wearily familiar with her mother’s methods. Further complaints from Moore Place were forestalled by posting a precise itinerary. Referring to their money difficulties with artful indirectness, Ada experimented with using a bit of emotional blackmail. A lack of funds, she hinted, might well oblige the Lovelaces to linger on at Ashley Combe after the trip ‘by way of economy’. Ashley was the one place from which Lady Byron could not reasonably demand daily companionship. It was too remote, and Ada knew it. The implication was clear; if Annabella wanted her daughter to nurse and humour her, very well. But she must pay for the privilege.
The response was predictable. Perhaps from meanness, but more probably from habitual obstinacy, Lady Byron refused to be drawn. If extravagance forced her profligate children into seclusion, so be it. They and she must endure the consequences.
The autumn tour began with a long-promised visit to Knebworth, a Hertfordshire mansion which Edward Bulwer-Lytton had richly Gothicised in the style most admired by William Lovelace.* From there, the travellers proceeded to William and Fanny Nightingale’s Derbyshire home, Lea Hurst, and on to Thrumpton Hall, a recently ‘improved’ Jacobean mansion in Nottinghamshire inhabited by Captain George Byron and his young wife, Lucy Wescomb, who owned the house.
George had been Ada’s childhood friend, but no record survives of whether the cousins discussed Newstead Abbey, the nearby house at which the Lovelaces planned to pass a few days. George Byron’s father had spent many happy months roaming through the Newstead woods in search of rabbits and pheasants to shoot, while his more brilliant cousin was off being lionised in London. Probably, Ada admired the young garden oak being grown at Thrumpton, an offshoot from one that Byron, as a boy, had planted at Newstead. The sturdy sapling was a gift from Newstead’s new owners, the Wildmans, of whom both George and Lucy Byron spoke with great affection. (Wildman had apparently just turned down an offer from Barnum to purchase the celebrated scrap of bark on which Byron and Augusta had carved their initials.) Ada’s own feelings about Newstead remained ambivalent. She was half-dreading the visit.
On 7 September, the Lovelaces arrived at the house which was now Thomas Wildman’s home. Ada’s mother, who had paid just one covert, inquisitive visit to Newstead shortly after her separation from Byron in 1816, had seen the old house at its lowest ebb, grown almost as derelict as the gaping, glassless window (a relic of the ancient abbey) that soared above it. Since then, under Colonel Wildman’s energetic ownership, a transformation had taken place. A fortune had been lavished upon the rescue mission which, at the time of Ada’s visit, was virtually complete. Showing off his achievement with forgivable pride, the kind-hearted colonel – he had spent days swotting up on scientific subjects in advance – was baffled by Ada’s reticence. Surely, it must give dear Lady Lovelace pleasure to see how faithfully he had followed the old designs? Why did she look so sad? He could not understand it. It was not until the third day of Ada’s visit that Colonel Wildman dared directly to ask her for the reason. Talking to her sympathetic host about her growing regrets that the abbey was no longer a Byron house, Ada seemed transformed, a different woman.*
Her correspondence reflected the change that had taken place. Arriving at Newstead, Ada had confided to her mother on 8 September a feeling of overpowering sadness. (‘All is like death around one; & I seem to be in the Mausoleum of my race.’) William, meanwhile, sent the Hen dismissive accounts of a dreary village filled with poachers and stocking-makers. Newstead itself was nothing compared to Horsley Towers. Wildman’s interiors were overdone. As for the miserable little church at nearby Hucknall Torkard, where Byron was buried: ‘The tablet I need not describe.’
It’s evident that William Lovelace had not yet registered the shift in his wife’s feelings. (Before she left Newstead, Ada told Wildman that she wished to be buried there, and to lie at her father’s side.) On 15 September, while snugly lodged at Radbourne Hall, the elegant Derbyshire family home of Captain Byron’s mother, Ada informed her own mother about her change of heart. If visiting Newstead had begun as a descent into the grave, a resurrection had taken place. ‘I do love the venerable old place & all my wicked forefathers,’ Ada declared. An ancient prophecy was mentioned, predicting that the Byrons would leave the house at the very time that her father sold it, and ‘that it is to come back [two heavy underlinings] in the present generation’.
Ada gave no thought to what the impact of such a bold declaration on her mother was likely to be. For herself, thoughts of Newstead – and indeed, her mother – were swept aside a couple of weeks later when her hosts at Aske Hall, the Zetlands, invited Lady Lovelace to accompany them to Doncaster, to see how their Derby-winning colt would fare in two of the last big events of the flat-racing season. William, off to investigate new agricultural methods in Lincolnshire, agreed to rejoin the party on the third day.
Doncaster Races took place, as they still do, on a pear-shaped track. Unlike today, there were then no stands and no barriers. No rules of etiquette kept separate classes of racegoers apart. The sense of communion on a mud-spattered field was close to that of an old-fashioned point-to-point: informal, boisterous and electrically intimate. As at Epsom, crowds of the Zetlands’ employees and tenants had come along to bet and cheer their ‘Volti’ on to triumph in the St Leger, before collecting the prize money (no horse appeared to compete against him) in the Scarborough Handicap.
Lord Lovelace arrived at Doncaster in time to see their friends’ athletic colt beat his greatest rival of the age, Lord Eglinton’s The Flying Dutchman, in a hair-raising tie-breaker for the Doncaster Gold Cup. (The two horses were the only runners and Eglinton’s jockey had been drinking hard before the race.) Writing to his mother-in-law, Lovelace observed that his clever wife was being admired by all for her skill in picking out the best points of a horse, while he – poor chap – had succeeded only in having a few pounds picked from his pockets. Ada’s maid had apparently turned a little profit on her bets, but their silly coachman had lost 18 shillings – not enough to stop him from trying his luck again. As for Ada:
I am threatened with proofs by an eager ardent avis, that this
business is profitable – much more so than the training them . . .
Nobody knows what conversations and encounters had taken place at Doncaster prior to William’s arrival, but it was here that Ada took the fateful decision to retrieve the Lovelace fortunes by making a new kind of book.
Arriving back at Aske in time to share the celebrations, Ada collapsed and had to take to her bed, where (so she assured an alarmed mother on 26 September) she was miraculously restored to health by the Zetlands’ wonderful physician. His name was Dr Malcolm and – as Ada prudently failed to add – he took a keen interest in his captivating patient’s explanations of how she could use her mathematical skills to outwit experienced bookmakers on the turf. Ada’s problem was that she – as Byron’s somewhat notorious daughter – could never allow her own name to be used for placing bets. But if Lady Lovelace could find a few obliging friends to help, friends who might like to make a little money themselves by the use of her computations . . .
Dr Malcolm encouraged her. Working for the Zetlands, the doctor had plenty of contacts in the bookmaking world. Why should Lady Lovelace not rally up a circle of discreet enthusiasts like himself and form her own private ring? He had the names. She had the brains. How could she – how could they – lose?
Writing to her mother at this momentous time, Ada demurely reported how much she liked the Zetland’s prizewinning colt. Voltigeur was both quiet and amiable: ‘a most earnest, conscientious sort of horse’. She could as well have been talking of Tam o’Shanter and Zigzag, the horses on which she loved to ride out across Exmoor. About her thoughts for a racing future, there was not a word.
Evidence that Ada’s enterprising mind had alighted upon a new interest continued to surface through the rest of the autumn. A puzzled but dutiful daughter, back from her educational tour of Germany, and visiting her grandmother, was asked to hurry over to Horsley and despatch to Ada the doubling dice that she would find there, lodged within a backgammon board. Meanwhile, Charles Babbage received a message on 1 November about the usefulness of ‘Erasmus Wilson’ in helping her mistress to a new cure and of Ada’s urgent need to meet Babbage’s ‘medical friend’ as soon as she herself returned to London from her hill-climbing exploits in the Lake District. (‘Some very thorough remedial measures must be pursued,’ Ada warned him, ‘– or all power of getting any livelihood in any way whatever, will be at an end.’)
It sounded almost like a threat. Since Ada was simultaneously boasting to her mother and Agnes Greig that her northern physician (Dr Malcolm) was responsible for an astonishing improvement in her health, ‘Erasmus Wilson’ was surely a code for Mary, the servant who had once worked for Babbage and who was now placing discreet bets on her mistress’s behalf. It’s reasonable to surmise that the curiously underlined ‘medical friend’ was in fact a potential recruit for Ada’s ring of investors.*
By Christmas 1850, while paying a visit to her mother at Esher, Ada was studying the new season’s printed programme for steeplechases. All the best bets had been clearly marked up for her by one of Dr Malcolm’s tipsters. In a word, Lady Lovelace was hooked.
At any other moment in her cautious life, the prudent Lady Byron might have been thoroughly alarmed by Lovelace’s allusion to Ada’s fancy for becoming a breeder of horses. (William himself seems to have been largely unconscious of Ada’s enthusiasm for placing bets until the following spring.) But Annabella had been sidetracked by her daughter’s altered view of Newstead, and the bold admiration with which she now extolled her father and his gambling forebears. Of what use was the careful version of past events that she herself had recently revised and polished and submitted to an admiring Frederick Robertson for his approbation, if Ada were to embrace her unredeemed papa? What could Lady Byron herself do to regain ascendancy over her wilful daughter?
Initially, Annabella resorted to threats. If this was how Lord Byron was to be viewed, then she would play no further part in the upbringing of her grandchildren. They would never see her again! Somewhat, but not entirely, soothed by pleading letters of reassurance that her version – and only her version – of the past would prevail, Lady Byron came up with a new proposal. If Ada loved Newstead so much, then she should have it. William could appraise its value. The money could be raised by selling some of the Wentworth estates around Birmingham. The idea, once Annabella began to consider it (the feelings of the poor Wildmans were entirely disregarded), proved curiously appealing. The house would be her gift to Ada, but the person who owned Newstead – just as she still owned everything to do with the Wentworth estates – would be herself. Annabella, not Ada, would become the presiding angel of Byron’s ancient home.
The Lovelaces were not averse to the Hen’s proposal. ‘Will you sometime write me a letter about a possible exchange of Newstead,’ Ada wrote to her mother on 24 December. She added that Lovelace thought that a deal might indeed be done without too much impact on the Wentworth property. The possibility of acquiring the abbey intrigued them both.
And then, with no explanation, the whole fantastic plan was dropped. By January 1851, Ada (while up to the neck in her plans to set up a racing ring) was making pleasant arrangements for the Wildmans to come and stay at Horsley with Captain Byron and his wife.* Annabella, meanwhile, her mind aswirl with the turbulent emotions that talk of Newstead had brought rushing to the surface, was diverted by another connection to the past.
Augusta Leigh’s raffish old husband had died at the age of seventy-nine in May 1850, the month of Voltigeur’s first triumph at Epsom. By the end of the year, largely on account of her late husband’s outstanding debts, Augusta was destitute. She still had her rooms at St James’s Palace. What she lacked, as ever, was ready cash. She knew that Lady Byron had recently reconciled herself with Mrs Villiers. Was this not the ideal moment to remind Byron’s wealthy little widow that there still existed a sister for whom she had, at one time, felt the most tender sentiments of affection?
The moment was indeed timely. Annabella’s lengthy conversations with the attentive Frederick Robertson had recently included a pious wish that she might meet with Augusta Leigh for one last occasion. On New Year’s Day 1851, she told the impressionable clergyman that – as for herself – she ‘loved her still. I cannot help it.’ On 8 January, Lady Byron dropped a hint about the tales she might tell Mr Robertson – if she wished – about the true nature of Byron’s relationship with his older half-sister.
This was awkward. Anybody living in Lady Byron’s circle would have had to be exceptionally ill-informed not to have heard, by 1850, at least a whisper about Byron’s scandalous relationship with Augusta Leigh. Nervous of causing offence, Robertson expressed careful surprise – and even horror. Could it be that Byron and Mrs Leigh . . .? Was his ‘dreadful fancy’ based upon fact? It was. Expanding graciously, Lady Byron offered the receptive cleric that version of the past to which she herself was now entirely wedded.
Byron had always loved her. Even after his wife left him, he had written those very words. ‘I was his best friend,’ Annabella had recently reminded her daughter (17 September 1850), before quoting Byron’s passionate declaration (‘I did – do – and ever shall – love you.’) But he was not allowed to love her. Another, more wicked influence had prevailed. Augusta Leigh, jealous of a young wife’s spiritual power over the husband she had left, had twisted the evidence. Acting (admittedly under Annabella’s own instructions) as the marital go-between during the last eight years of Byron’s life abroad, Mrs Leigh had fuelled her brother’s hatred of his wife. She had manipulated the truth. This gospel testimony of Lady Byron – ever since Medora had produced in the winter of 1840–1 her own imaginative version of past events – had become plain fact. All that was lacking, as Annabella explained to her fascinated listener, was the oral proof, the confession that only Augusta Leigh herself could provide.
A wiser clergyman might have smiled. Robertson, while widely admired in Brighton as a magnificent speaker – and a very handsome man – was both naive and an unconscionable prig. The actress Fanny Kemble, visiting Brighton in the late autumn of 1850, had been appalled to discover that Lady Byron, urged on by Robertson, was planning to write a cautionary preface to the readers of a new cheap edition of Byron’s works. Fanny, who had always opposed the public view of Byron’s widow as a cold-hearted prude, believed the enterprise would do great harm to her old friend. ‘I had always admired the reticent dignity of her silence,’ Kemble wrote in her entertaining Records of Girlhood. And besides, ‘what could Byron do to the young men of 1850?’ But Annabella was not to be dissuaded.
‘Nobody’ she [Lady Byron] said, ‘knew him as I did . . . nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the injury he might do to others, in some of his writings.’
The clinching argument for this ludicrous project (it never saw the light) had come from Frederick Robertson. It was he, so Mrs Kemble learned, who had solemnly advised Lady Byron of the dangers of her husband’s poetry ‘to a class peculiarly interesting to him . . . and of course his [Robertson’s] opinion was more than an overweight for mine’.
With such an ally at her side, Lady Byron was ready for action. Her opportunity came in February 1851, when word reached her from Admiral Lord Byron (George’s father) that Miss Emily Leigh had been in touch regarding her mother. A response was promptly issued. A week later, Augusta herself wrote to accept Lady Byron’s proposal for a meeting. It might, Augusta hopefully wrote, do both of them good to have a free and frank discussion after so long a silence. She welcomed this opportunity to clear the air.
Annabella does not appear to advantage during the elaborate negotiations over which, counselled by Robertson at every step, she presided during the next few weeks. Augusta, who had never been on a train in her life, was instructed to make her way alone to Reigate station. There, at a convenient but obscure destination midway between Brighton and London, an inconspicuously dressed servant (meaning, he would wear no livery buttons on his coat) would meet and conduct Mrs Leigh to a nearby – and flawlessly sedate – coaching inn called The White Hart. Following her brief introduction to a neutral witness, the two women would be left alone. Augusta’s feeble protests about this sudden inclusion of a stranger at such an intimate occasion were crushed by Annabella’s representation of Robertson as ‘the Genius of the Soul’s World’. One might as well (so Lady Byron haughtily implied) deny a birthplace to the Christchild as exclude the Reverend Frederick Robertson of Brighton from the Reigate inn.
The interview took place in a back room at The White Hart on 8 April. No records were made. Later, however, Annabella recalled her dismay at realising that Mrs Leigh, an inveterate chatterbox, meant to produce nothing more confessional than a babble of pleasantries. ‘Is that all?’ Lady Byron had burst out. ‘I felt utterly hopeless, and asked to be left alone to compose myself.’ Rejoining Robertson and their bewildered guest after this moment of solitude, Annabella moved into attack mode. Armed with assertions of which a list had been prepared (‘you kept up hatred; you put things in a false light’), she tried to coerce a response. Eager to please, and thus to get some financial recompense for her journey, Augusta agreed that her brother had often uttered ‘dreadful things’. She refused to say that she had encouraged him. Pressed harder, Mrs Leigh grew annoyed. Lady Byron had been allowed to bring Mr Robertson along as her supporter. Well, she had one, too: Sir John Hobhouse. Augusta was ready to state that Hobhouse had once actually warned her not to be so unflinchingly loyal to Annabella – unless she herself actually wished to lose her brother’s affection.
This declaration was the modest boast that tipped the balance of Annabella’s fiercely governed mind. ‘At such a testimony I started up,’ Lady Byron admitted afterwards. ‘I was afraid of myself . . . the strongest desire to be out of her presence took possession of me, lest I should be tempted beyond my strength’. Some answer was tearfully jerked out, some phrase about a kind blessing that she now felt herself unable to confer – and the meeting was over.
Annabella had once described Byron’s sister as having been born in a state of moral idiocy. The validity of that brusque observation was never more pathetically apparent than in Augusta’s readiness to view the Reigate meeting as a success. Writing to thank Annabella for her ‘exertions’, she ‘could not resist’ signing herself as ‘Yours affectionately’. A furious Annabella responded that the required confession had been entirely inadequate. Adding not one word of reciprocal affection, Lady Byron signed her answer: ‘Farewell’. Growing apprehensive, Augusta wrote again, this time to offer Frederick Robertson proofs of her innocence. Impossible, the clergyman bleakly responded on 21 May. Such proofs could only be produced in the presence of Lady Byron and the word ‘farewell’ was surely clear enough? There would be no further meetings. Mrs Leigh could console herself with the thought of clearing her conscience at another encounter, one ‘which must be heard very, very soon, when you meet God face to face’.
And that was that.
While the Reigate meeting and its aftermath do not reflect well upon either Lady Byron or her advisor, it is worth noting that Augusta’s half-sister, the widowed Countess of Chichester, wrote some years later expressing a friendly desire to meet with Annabella at Brighton. Apparently, Lady Chichester wanted to express the deep gratitude ‘I have ever entertained of yr kindness to my Sister & several members of her unfortunate family’.
There’s no doubting the sincerity of Lady Chichester’s words. Clearly, she was recalling the unpleasant drama of Medora. It’s likely that she was also remembering how promptly Annabella had paid the bills and offered to cover the cost of all that was required for comfort when Augusta, just six months after the Reigate meeting, lay at death’s door. Possibly, Lady Chichester had also learned from Emily Leigh of Lady Byron’s final moment of humanity, a written wish that Emily might whisper to her mother ‘from me the words Dearest Augusta – I can’t think they could hurt her’.
On 5 October 1851, Emily reported that she had done as requested. Her mother seemed much pleased and affected. She had made a lengthy response. Only – alas for a hungry Annabella, still yearning for that unreceived confession – Mrs Leigh had lost her voice. ‘I could not hear distinctly,’ Emily wrote. ‘– I dare say she will mention the subject again.’
She never did. On 12 October 1851, Augusta Leigh died in faded dignity, attended by her daughter and a physician, in the rooms at St James’s Palace that she had inhabited for thirty-three years. On 16 October, Annabella, who had been lingering at a London hotel in the vain hope of a last-minute summons, wrote on black-edged paper to ask if she might be allowed to visit her god-daughter, to hear a private confidence that would never be shared. That Emily had none to offer was, perhaps, as well. Augusta’s secrets, if indeed she had any to disclose, would assuredly not have gone untold.
None of Byron’s family attended Mrs Leigh’s interment at Kensal Rise. On 2 July 1852, however, Annabella wrote to inform Emily that, despite appearances, she had always been her mother’s truest friend. ‘Mine is not a nature in which affection can pass away,’ Lady Byron announced: ‘nearly forty years have shown this in regard to her’.
There is no doubt that Annabella herself believed this remarkable statement to be no less than the truth.
The Lovelace children once again spent the Christmas of 1850 in separate places. Lord Ockham remained in Chile under the supervision of the Greigs’ friend, Captain Fanshawe. Annabella had been shifted from Lady Byron’s home, to the Greigs, and on to Ockham, where old Stephen Lushington treated her as a cherished grandchild of his own. (A glimpse of their affectionate relationship peeps through accounts of afternoon games of billiards and the lawyer’s teasing comments about Annabella’s salamander-like love of a blazing fire.) Meanwhile, Ada’s younger son, Ralph, remained in fog-drenched London with his mother, where Ada herself – between paying snugly wrapped visits with Babbage to the semi-completed and ice-cold ‘Glass House’ in Hyde Park – scolded the boy for his sulks about the absence of Ockham’s promised tales of his nautical adventures. (If any such letters did arrive, we might suspect that Lord Lovelace saw fit to confiscate them.)
Aged eleven, Ralph was beginning to make his own complex personality felt. Ada, writing to her mother in December 1850, following a happy reunion with the Greigs and her daughter at their London home, reported that Ralph’s new tutor, Mr Kensett, was taking a firm line with his stroppy little pupil, and that she approved.
While Lord Lovelace pondered his chances of getting into the Admiralty (Ada agreed with Lushington that her husband was too touchy and impractical for such a post), his wife’s private thoughts dwelt continuously upon how to lay hands on the money of which both she and the earl increasingly stood in dire need. Going abroad was a popular move back then, both to escape debts and to improve poor health. Mrs Somerville had done it. So had the Brownings. Perhaps the Lovelaces should follow suit? Lady Byron (despite the inevitable sacrifice of Ada’s company) favoured this course. By 23 December 1850, Ada was ready to pursue it.
I think we shall let our house in May, & go to the Pyrenees,
I am not joking. I reflected on yr suggestion, & soon got accustomed to it. It frightened me at first . . . It would set me up for years (& set our purses up too).
The idea was not abandoned; Ada mentioned it again on 21 April 1851 as a project for the following month – ‘but nothing is yet settled’. By May, however, Ada’s health was too seriously impaired for a journey abroad to be considered. She had, besides, embarked at full tilt upon an entirely different enterprise, the nature of which her mother was to learn in full only after its catastrophic failure.
By January 1851, Ada had set up her ring of fellow gamblers and was ready to beat the bookies at their own game. John Crosse was involved, while Babbage was evidently aware of what was going on. A certain William Nightingale, identified as the father of two sons, may have been connected to Florence’s family. Almost nothing is known about Mr Fleming, but it is likely that he was a friend of the Zetlands’ physician, Doctor Malcolm, since the two names are often mentioned in conjunction. Malcolm himself was a man of modest means who, like Ada, was struggling to live on £300 a year. Richard Ford was another matter.
Sir Richard Ford was a gentleman of means. The author of Murray’s celebrated Handbook to Spain was a brilliant art historian (he introduced Velázquez’s paintings to their English audience), and a close friend of George Borrow. An ardent traveller in post-Napoleonic Europe, Ford had returned to England in the 1830s to create Heavitree House, a Spanish-style reconstruction of an Elizabethan cob cottage, perched on a hilltop just outside the city of Exeter. Ford had been at Trinity College, Cambridge, ten years before William Lovelace. Like William, he was a self-taught architect. The two men knew each other well. In 1835, Ford was one of the first to hear about his friend’s young bride and to share with a mutual acquaintance William’s enthusiastic account of her.
From the Baron’s account she [Miss Ada Byron] must be perfection . . . highly simple, hateth the city and gay world, and will not be likely to turn up her nose at you and me, the respectable aged friends of her lord.
In 1849, Sir Richard Ford had lost both his mother and his wife. (His second marriage to Mary Molesworth, sister to the owner of the Westminster Review, would not take place until the summer of 1851.) In the winter of 1850–1, then, Sir Richard Ford was a lonely widower. It is clear that his main contact in the racing ring was Ada herself, it is also incontrovertibly apparent from Ford’s involvement that William Lovelace must have known something about what was going on. While it remains impossible to establish just how much William was personally involved in the booking and laying of bets, but the presence of his friend in Ada’s ring makes it clear that Lord Lovelace was never an innocent bystander.
It was Ada, however, who led the way and her elderly ring were awed by the (initially) elaborate nature of her strategies. On 13 January, a respectful Richard Ford told Ada that he and Nightingale (Ford referred to him as ‘the sportive Nightingale’) were planning to meet in London ‘to talk over the wonderful combinations in your letter’. A financial innocent himself, Ford frankly stated that he would never want to bet more than £5 and that he imagined ‘making a book’ to be like ‘living at the brink of a precipice’ (27 January). Nevertheless, Ada’s confidence was infectious. ‘£3,000 this year!’ Ford exclaimed in another undated letter. ‘How my mouth waters at such draughts. But by what magic is such a sum to be obtained & how is Chiles [Samuel Chiles was a Vauxhall-based bookmaker, seemingly recommended by Dr Malcolm] become so suddenly consumed into the depositing of thousands from not having a halfpenny?’
Ford’s willingness to be drawn into Ada’s net of speculators reminds us of just how dangerously alluring Byron’s daughter could be. By March 1851, Sir Richard himself was paying regular visits to bookmakers to negotiate terms and deals about which he patently had not the faintest degree of understanding. Between times, he advised Ada about her plans for the Pyrenees, paid visits to Horsley Towers, arranged jolly dinner parties for the ring (but only when his daughters were out of the way) and even blithely reported that he was off to dine in ‘The Enemy’s Camp’ with Lord Eglinton, the owner of Voltigeur’s greatest challenger, The Flying Dutchman.
How good was Ada at bookmaking (or more accurately, at gambling on horses)? The fact that her ring stuck with her through at least one full racing season suggests that she must have had some degree of success. Nevertheless, the few scraps of notes and papers that survive from the bookmakers themselves suggest that the excited countess was doing little more than following tips – for which she paid quite handsomely – and making judgements based on the odds that were being laid. Occasionally, a kindly tipster warned ‘Her Ladyship’ away from an impulsive choice. Ada, blithe as a lark despite her increasing ill health and the fact that she was now seldom able to walk for more than a few yards without pain, ignored them all.
Disaster sprang upon her like a beast from the jungle. On 1 May 1851, in what has ever since been known as The Great Match, Lord Eglinton’s Flying Dutchman challenged Voltigeur (‘The Flyer’ and ‘Volti’ by now, to their adoring fans) to an eagerly anticipated rematch at York, running on the old Knavesmire course. (It was where Dick Turpin, one of the most infamous horsemen of all time, had been hanged in 1739.) The crowds were immense, since both the champions were Yorkshire bred. Many of the 130,000 people present had walked fifty miles to watch the event. Ada’s ring, led by herself, had backed the Zetlands’ colt.
Ada was not present in person (she was too ill to leave her bedroom at this time) to learn the catastrophic news that Lord Eglinton’s horse had beaten the prodigious Voltigeur by a length. Ten days later, Teddington won at Epsom. The odds on the Derby’s confidently predicted winner were 3/1. Ada, who had persuaded Lovelace to loan the impecunious Dr Malcolm £1,800 to bet against Teddington, had now in total suffered losses of £3,200, while also bearing full financial responsibility for the losses of her disappointed ring.
It remains unknowable to what extent either John Crosse or Charles Babbage were directly involved at this point in Ada’s ring. It is known that Ada was personally responsible during this time for obtaining the living at Ockham for Andrew Crosse’s eldest son, Robert, and that Robert’s father expressed his gratitude for her assistance at a time when his son (who had a young family to support) had been seriously ill. Equally apparent from the friendly letters that Robert and Andrew Crosse wrote to Ada in 1851 is the fact that they knew nothing about either a racing or a romantic connection between Lady Lovelace and Robert’s older brother, John.
Charles Babbage falls under more suspicion than Crosse because of the incontrovertible fact that his former servant, Mary Wilson, ran bet-placing errands and allowed her name to be regularly invoked in the covert dealings of the ring. But did this mean that Babbage himself was involved? The long and mysterious correspondence with Ada about a shared ‘book’, while it clearly predates her activity in the racing world, has helped to muddy the waters. Thus, when Babbage suddenly again mentions ‘a book’ to Ada on 13 January 1851, it sounds intriguing. Babbage’s letter recommends that when ‘the book’ arrives, Ada herself should read out Sir James South’s instructions to her maid, ‘in order for your influence in causing them to be followed’. While it is tempting to construe South as the ‘medical friend’ Ada had previously mentioned with such curious emphasis, Sir James was no doctor, but an eminent astronomer. The likelihood is that Mary Wilson was simply being instructed about the sighting of stars on certain nights, an activity that had always enthralled Ada. Nevertheless, her earlier reference to Babbage’s unnamed ‘medical friend’ remains a puzzle.
What is certain is that Babbage wrote to Ada on 13 May 1851, the day of the Epsom Derby, in a way that shows he knew this was a special day for her. Had she passed a good night? What were her commands for the day? She must not exert herself with writing: ‘a visit from your own Lady-Bird will be sufficient’. The degree of attentiveness being shown here, on this particular date, is highly suggestive, although (once again), nothing can be confirmed.
Even today, our understanding of the connection between mind and body remains frustratingly theoretical. However, it’s hard to dismiss the sudden decline in Ada’s health following her major losses at Epsom and York. Enough concern was felt for Charles Locock to summon Sir James Clark, Prince Albert’s personal physician, to diagnose one of Locock’s own favourite patients. Clark’s interest in the case was doubtless heightened by the fact that the patient in question was Lord Byron’s daughter.
Examinations were made of the painful and intimate kind to which Ada Lovelace was now obliged to subject herself on a regular basis. A sheet masked Ada’s genitalia from view as the middle-aged gentleman probed cold instruments – or even inquisitive fingers – towards her womb, searching for an explanation of the irregular bleeding and continuous pain that the 35-year-old patient endured with a courage and good humour that commanded their awed respect.
On 15 June, Charles Locock submitted their findings to the earl. For himself, while acknowledging the presence of extensive ulceration in the cervix, he was ready to describe the young countess’s large internal ‘sore’ as ‘healthy’ and to pronounce that it was curable – with prudent care. Sir James Clark, long since recovered from the stain to his reputation of a misdiagnosed court pregnancy in 1839 (poor Lady Flora Hastings was in fact dying of a cancerous tumour that distended her belly), offered a grimmer diagnosis. Cancer was clearly present, he stated. Nothing could now be done to restrain it. Lady Lovelace’s days were numbered.
Clark’s verdict was bleak and it could not be ignored. Understandably, at the time of terrible racing losses of which he was at the very least partially aware, Lord Lovelace shrank from breaking such black news to his fragile and suffering wife. Four days later, however, the earl could restrain himself no longer. Who better to confide in than the compassionate, maternal and understanding Hen?
A few hours after despatching a long and anguished letter to his mother-in-law (he had mentioned money problems and debts, as well as the gravity of Ada’s condition), Lovelace regretted the impulse. It was now that he took one of the worst decisions of his life. Instead of waiting for a response, he bolted off across the country to Leamington Spa, where Annabella was spending a few restorative days after paying a business-related visit to the nearby Kirkby Mallory estates. There, in a darkened town of immense gentility, an astonished Lady Byron opened her front door an hour before midnight, and found herself overwhelmed by a distraught, frightened and – in his present emotional state – alarmingly vehement son-in-law.
The location for Lovelace’s impromptu confessional visit was as ill chosen as his timing. Leamington was a town that was filled with Wentworth properties and connections. Edward Noel was living nearby. (His wife Fanny had died here in 1847.) Charles and Mary Anne Noel frequently stayed with Annabella at Leamington during visits of the official kind that she had just been paying to her estate. Miss Montgomery, too, was a regular visitor. For Lord Lovelace to show up in the middle of the sleeping spa, emerging from his private coach at dead of night, was to set tongues wagging – and there was nothing that Lady Byron feared more in this particular part of the world than gossip.
It has never been clear just what was said during what Annabella later described as ‘that hour of agony’. We know from a bitter letter that Lovelace wrote eighteen months later (17 December 1852) that the earl felt that his mother-in-law had been ‘slightingly’ dismissive about the severity of Ada’s illness. We know from the document Annabella drew up with the assistance of Stephen Lushington at Ockham on 1 July, two weeks after the Leamington meeting, that she believed William Lovelace had betrayed his clearly understood duty to protect a wife who knew no more about money (let alone professional horse-racing) than an untutored child. Lovelace had not stood up to Ada. Instead, fearing the turbulence of his wife’s powerful impulses and emotions, he had allowed her to do as she wished. He had, above all, been unforgivably irresponsible in allowing Lady Lovelace to go without him to Doncaster racecourse and thereafter, to mix with ‘low & unprincipled associates’.
Writing to Lovelace a full nineteen months later (9 January 1853) about their fateful interview, in one of a series of savagely recriminatory letters, Lady Byron accused her son-in-law of having ‘unconsciously’ disclosed to her that dreadful night at Leamington a prospect so appalling that ‘disease itself was to be looked upon as a blessing to my daughter’. That prospect was not Ada’s death. It was that Lord Lovelace had allowed his headstrong and (in the view of a stern mother) financially irresponsible young wife to gamble.
Grudgingly, Annabella would eventually concede that her son-in-law appeared not to share her personal horror of speculation. ‘You did not, you do not, view these things as I do,’ she granted in the same chilling letter of reproach that she wrote to Lovelace on 9 January 1853. Acknowledgement of that crucial difference of view was made. Forgiveness was implacably withheld.
A month earlier, on 11 December 1852, during another of these bitter exchanges (they dragged on over a period of almost two years), Annabella reminded Lovelace once again of his behaviour at Leamington. It was his fault and his alone, she wrote then, that a devoted mother had subsequently become estranged from her only child: ‘your conduct with regard to me since June 19 1851, affected my daughter most lamentably, & so long deprive[d] me of intercourse with her.’
It had not been so simple as that. On 3 July 1851, while obstinately refusing to disclose precisely what had so disturbed her during the Leamington interview, Annabella told her daughter how gladly she would have solved any financial problems, had she only been asked. The following day (tactfully omitting to point out that Lady Byron had recently begrudged loaning her daughter a few hundred pounds), poor Ada did her best to clear the air. She promised to visit her mother’s Brighton home, both to see her 12-year-old son, and to discuss what she carefully referred to as ‘recent occurrences’. Anxious not to have a quarrel, she mentioned the potential danger to her own delicate health of ‘agitating influences’.
No settled plan was made, possibly because Ada was too ill to travel. Ten days later, Lady Byron noted that she herself had resorted to her sad practice, in times of extreme despair, of going out alone in an open boat in order to vomit up her anguish, safely out of reach of public view.
Four weeks went by.
On 8 August, a frail Ada took a train to Brighton. What was said there remains unknown, but Lady Byron did not relent. Having bidden her mother farewell two days later, Ada wrote one of her most wistfully elusive notes: ‘I never remember to have quitted you with so much regret. Why, I cannot say: althou’ I have some vague idea about the whys of the case.’
If Ada believed that peace could be restored, she deceived herself. Enduring war had been declared by the Hen upon the Crow. William Lovelace, until the end of his days, would never comprehend what he had done to merit such unyielding wrath.
On 10 April 1852, eight months on, Ada wrote to her mother to express regret that ‘that interview’ (William’s visit to Leamington) had ever taken place. She now wished she had taken a sterner line during her August visit to Brighton. ‘I never felt so tempted to step out of all the usual bounds of filial propriety,’ she wrote. But what would have been the use of pleading William’s cause?
Pray do not be angry at my having the idea (never likely to be practically attempted) of ever persuading you to anything! It is only an idea, a wish!
‘I am,’ Ada added with a sudden burst of candour, ‘rather unhappy about it all.’
Illness was nothing new to Ada. She had spent most of her short life battling invalidism, proving over and again that the ‘wiry little system’ in which she took such pride would enable her to battle her way back to health. The battle continued through the months that followed William’s dash to Leamington. By the late summer of 1851, it was only the frail, tormented body that could no longer keep up with Ada’s passion for achievement and her absolute refusal to give up hope. ‘Life is so difficult,’ she wrote to her mother on 15 October, underlining every word; a sentence or two later, she was willing to believe that she might yet have another thirty years to enjoy before – so she hoped – a quick and gentle death.
It seems clear that Ada – however valiant her attitude – was at least partly conscious that the end was near. Her health was already failing when she split her energies into the pursuit of her two consuming passions. By the summer of 1851, she had become fatally addicted to the gambling mania which – as she was perfectly aware since the Newstead encounter with her father’s ancestry – was an obsession that ran in her blood. Since then, Ada’s attachment to her Byron lineage had grown steadily more pronounced.* But Lady Lovelace was also and always her mother’s child and, above all, Ada longed to please Lady Byron by making her individual mark in science.
* Tempting though it is to correct the date here to the opening of the Great Exhibition (1851), Ada needed no special permission to view the gems when all was open to the public. More likely, she was hoping for an advance private inspection of the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, which the 13-year-old Duleep Singh brought over from India in July 1850 as part of the Treaty of Lahore negotiated by Lord Dalhousie after the conquest of the Punjab. Babbage was preparing a guide for the 1851 Exhibition, which probably gave him special access rights.
* The Knebworth archive contains three letters from Edward Bulwer-Lytton to his young daughter Emily written in June 1847, when EBL hoped the Lovelaces might soon visit his home. Emily, living alone at Knebworth in unhappy circumstances, feared Ada’s ‘disastrous influences’, but her father thought the young countess might prove ‘a good friend’ to his nervous and intelligent daughter. Three days earlier, he had described Ada to Emily as ‘a very remarkable person, extremely original – but too prononcée for my taste, womanly in mienne [sic] but masculine in mind’ (Letters of 16 and 19 June 1847, Knebworth Archive, Box 88).
* Visiting the abbey in 1857 as part of a tourist jaunt, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne heard the tale of Ada’s visit and her change in manner from their voluble landlady at a nearby inn. Sophia, a great admirer of Lord Byron (Nathaniel was said to resemble the poet), recorded the story in her journal. Washington Irving popularised the anecdote in Bracebridge Hall, a book which included his own visit to the iconic Newstead.
* It would be easier to interpret Ada’s puzzling letter to Babbage as being concerned (as it purports to be) with the writer’s health, had it had not been written while Lady Lovelace was shinning up mountains in the Lake District and boasting of her wonderfully restored health.
* Declining on 29 March 1851, on account of ‘poor George’s health’ (although the invitation to Horsley was planned for the following winter), Lucy Byron asked Ada to tell her the truth about something. It’s unclear whether Lucy had heard rumours about buying Newstead, but it is noteworthy that the Wildmans also turned down the Lovelaces’ invitation. (Lovelace Byron Papers.)
* On 22 August 1851, Ada asked Charles Babbage to purchase Byron’s rifle and pistols from one of Augusta Leigh’s sons as ‘a favour to us’. Nine days later, following a day’s visit from Ralph to Horsley Towers, she told her mother that the boy needed her own care. (‘Set a Byron to rule a Byron! – For Ralph is a Byron – three-quarters at least.’) Commenting on Augusta Leigh’s death to Annabella six weeks later (15 October), Ada ominously alluded to her own dread of ‘that horrible struggle, which I fear is in the Byron blood’.