(1853–60)
‘[W]hat might have been, had there been one person less among the living when she married . . . Then her life would not have been the concealment of a Truth, while her conduct was in harmony with it (no wonder if she was misunderstood).’
FRAGMENT OF A THIRD-PERSON MEMOIR,
BEGUN BY LADY BYRON,
BRIGHTON, 1851
Having done all she could to protect her dead daughter’s name from being mired in a public scandal, Lady Byron’s thoughts turned again to the question of her own future reputation.
Two years earlier, she had sketched out the beginnings of a memoir, in the hope of encouraging Frederick Robertson to publish her history. A mass of private papers had been placed in his safe-keeping for just that purpose. By the beginning of 1853, however, the ill and overworked Brighton cleric (now married and responsible for two young children) was unable to contemplate such a taxing commission. Instead, he read Annabella’s fragment and offered an honest opinion. What was needed, Robertson advised, was for Lady Byron to write the book herself, but in language that was more comprehensible and far less veiled. Why not just state Augusta’s name when she wrote of her wish that there had been ‘one person less living’ when she married Lord Byron? And why not give her husband’s dreadful sin a name instead of hinting at some unspeakably mysterious ‘Truth’? Annabella could and did speak about these sensitive issues in private, among her chosen friends. Why then, once she picked up her pen, must Lady Byron become so wilfully obscure?
Lady Byron had no answer to that cogent query, except to say that the one occasion when she had come before the public to defend her parents (in the ‘Remarks’ printed as an inserted appendix to Moore’s Life and Letters of Lord Byron), her words had proved of little service either to them or to herself.*
The trouble was that Annabella wanted the truth to be told and yet not to break her promise to Byron that she would protect his sister and her family. Lady Byron had never doubted that Medora was her husband’s child. She believed that Byron’s fear of scandal about Augusta had driven him – with her wicked Aunt Melbourne’s active encouragement – into marrying herself, Annabella Milbanke, a woman he no longer loved. He might even (although this was a point upon which Annabella often contradicted herself, perhaps from genuine uncertainty) have continued sleeping with his sister during intervals of their marriage, and most especially following Ada’s birth. How could Lady Byron, knowing herself to be regarded as one of England’s most admired philanthropists – a woman whose generous help to the young mothers of illegitimate children was as highly praised as the progressive schools she endowed and the daringly enlightened penal system that she vigorously advocated – how could the illustrious, 62-year-old Lady Byron set down such a shameless history and yet hope to escape everlasting notoriety?*
Annabella’s grandchildren were very dear to her and she took great pride in them. She had always stood up for Ockham, arguing to Ada back on 30 November 1844 that while the boy had suffered ‘great disadvantages’ from his Somerset upbringing, there was ‘much good in him’. Ralph, then aged seven, was praised in that same letter for being both grown up and ‘full of fun’, while Annabella’s gift for phrase-making was fondly quoted. (‘I am so happy this evening that I wish it could be pulled out like a telescope,’ the child had just announced.) Now, they were growing up and their future perception of her (a topic frequently mentioned to her circle of confidantes) offered cause for legitimate concern. She was clear about how they should regard their famous grandfather: her birthday gift to 15-year-old Ralph of Childe Harold was inscribed with an injunction to admire Lord Byron’s poems, but to distrust the great poet’s personality. How could she make them understand why she had left such a remarkable man, without revealing the scandal about Byron’s sexual involvement with a carelessly amoral sister, that shadowy figure about whom Annabella’s own feelings remained tormentingly conflicted?
Meanwhile, Lady Byron followed Ada’s last wishes where her children were concerned. Annabella King – to the considerable regret of a clever, artistic girl who adored her high-minded but gently humorous grandmother – was largely confined to the ever more fancifully embellished Surrey home that she mischievously renamed Glum Castle. Lovelace, to do him justice, oversaw an educational programme that included languages, music (Charles Hallé himself gave Annabella nine piano lessons), and even – when Ruskin came for a solitary Christmas in 1854 – drawing advice from the great man himself. But life at Horsley, enlivened only by an annual visit to Europe with Mrs Greig, was dominated by the earl’s obsession with his arches and tunnels. The visits paid by Annabella to her grandmother’s airy Brighton home each spring appeared to a lonely girl like scenes from a beautiful dream, one in which the happiest moments were connected to the annual reunion with her younger brother. The brevity of these cherished interludes served to increase their charm.
The plan to separate the children was maintained. Ralph – the grandson upon whom Lady Byron’s hopes for the preservation of the enormous Wentworth estates were now fixed* – was compelled to remain, by Ada’s wish and with Lord Lovelace’s formal agreement, under his grandmother’s roof for all but a short period of every year. From 1852, until 1859, when the 20-year-old youth was despatched to lodge under his tutor’s roof at University College, Oxford, Ralph was educated at home in Brighton and Southampton. His resentment about this cloistered life among elderly, controlling figures emerged in a plaintive letter which his grandmother passed along to Harriet Siddons’s son-in-law in 1857. Ralph’s strong objections to ‘the restraint of a tutor’ created persistent problems, Lady Byron confided to Arthur Mair. Earlier, while seeking to lodge the travel-hungry boy (then eighteen) at the Mairs’ northern home en route to his proposed lone footslog around Scotland, Annabella admitted her fears. She never minded Ralph going out to Hofwyl, where he was under supervision. She could not trust a naive and troublingly irresponsible youth to travel unaccompanied. ‘To this I cannot consent.’
Lady Byron was not inflexible. It was arranged that Ralph should hike around the Highlands together with one of the Mairs’ sons. He returned home radiant. Such adventures (when carefully controlled) always did the poor boy good, his relieved grandmother observed.
While Ralph’s growing passion for travel became powerful enough for his grandmother eventually to stipulate in her will that he must reside in England for at least a part of every future year, she wanted her granddaughter to see more of the Continent. In 1855, Annabella visited Mary Somerville in Florence and travelled on to Germany with her Noel cousins. In 1856, while Lovelace consented to host a debutante daughter’s ball at Horsley, the trouble of arranging Annabella’s presentation at court fell to her grandmother.
The search for an appropriate chaperone enabled Lady Byron to make cautious overtures of friendship to those members of William Lovelace’s family with whom the earl’s own relationship remained glacial. In 1855, Lady Hester King had expressed an interest in Ralph’s academic progress; now, Lady Byron enquired whether Lady Hester’s niece, Viscountess Ebrington, might wish to undertake the task.
A hand of friendship had been offered, and was accepted. By the late 1850s, both Annabella and the younger grandchildren were paying regular visits to their King relatives at Woburn Park and Dover Street. The ground was laid at this time for Ralph (whose relationship with his own father would never become cordial) to find a future substitute in Peter Locke King, Lord Lovelace’s detested younger brother. Lady Hester must have been delighted.
The question of what was to become of Byron Ockham was one which independently troubled both Lord Lovelace and his mother-in-law. Neither knew what best to do for this handsome and increasingly wayward youth. Established by the early summer of 1853 at the Malta station on the Albion,* a ship under the command of one of Stephen Lushington’s naval relations, Viscount Ockham (or J. Aker, as Byron often now signed himself to a sister he urged to stand up for her rights) was well-placed to earn the promotion that his father craved. Malta stood at the centre of Britain’s strategy to intervene in Russia’s escalating war against Turkey. By the summer of 1853, well-informed Londoners were already siding with Turkey (‘the sick man of Europe’ was Tsar Nicholas’s notoriously derogatory term for his targeted foe) in what was about to become Britain’s largest wartime engagement since Waterloo.
Lord Lovelace, himself confined to wearing a uniform that had never seen a battlefield (he donned it for official appearances as Surrey’s long-serving lord lieutenant), was keen for his oldest son to see live combat. By the late summer of 1853, however, Byron Ockham’s commander had resolved to send the intractable young aristocrat home, following his persistent defiance of various orders from his superiors. Byron’s infractions had included going AWOL, sneaking liquor into his berth and – worst of all – falsely accusing Captain Lushington’s personal protégé, a young Mr Dundas, of stealing his own (illegally acquired) gin. Asked to apologise to the youth – a member of the Zetland family – Lord Ockham had flatly refused.
What was to be done? A plea from Charles Noel to allow the youth to join his own family’s new home at Leamington Spa was brusquely rejected by Lady Byron. Annabella had formed a more romantic plan. She herself still owned large tracts of Euboea in Greece, although much of this extensive estate had been transferred to the widowed Edward Noel. What could be more appropriate than that a second Byron should take up residence in Greece? This was the proposal that Annabella asked Charles Noel to put to Lord Lovelace (all direct communication between herself and her son-in-law having been severed) on 28 August 1853.
It was not to be. Ockham, having abruptly left Lushington’s ship without leave – after failing to secure his father’s permission for an official release – vanished from public view. Back in England, during the autumn of 1853, a court martial was discussed. Out in the Dardanelles, the young sailor found a job on the Inflexible, a coal ship carrying fuel to the fleet. In 1854, he made an ill-fated attempt to start a new life in America. By the spring of 1855, after working his way back to England from New York, Byron was reluctant to undertake any more foreign adventures. For the time being, appalled by her grandson’s wretched appearance and evident ill health, Lady Byron arranged for him to live under her roof at Brighton, while taking tuition from Lieutenant Arnold, a son of Rugby’s celebrated schoolmaster.
Byron Ockham was not yet nineteen. Ever hopeful, a doting grandmother had faith that Ada’s favourite son might yet make a success of his life.
The brusqueness of Annabella’s response to Charles Noel’s kindly offer to care for her rebellious grandson at Leamington owed much to the fact that it was penned on 15 August 1853, the day that Frederick Robertson died. Robertson was only thirty-seven. Overworked and depressed, he died of ‘inflammation of the brain’, a form of stroke. Local newspapers reported that Lady Byron had joined the mourners who followed the young clergyman’s coffin on foot in one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Brighton. (In fact, Annabella – always averse to any form of self-publicity – had watched the shuffling crowds from a discreet distance.)
The loss was devastating. Robertson had been her advisor, her confidant and friend. Rumours of a love affair between the pair were groundless, but an athletic build and exceptional good looks had added to the charismatic charm for the susceptible Lady Byron of a young preacher whose vivid and erudite weekly sermons at Holy Trinity, Brighton, were regularly attended by congregations larger than the church could hold.* (It was not uncommon for London worshippers to travel down simply for the benefit of listening to a man widely regarded as the finest preacher in the country.)
Privately, Annabella later admitted to her younger grandson that her chief regret about philanthropy was the obligation to deal with so many plain-faced men. None of them – certainly not kind, loyal, worthy Dr King, still living in Brighton and supporting Annabella in the world of good works – ever came near to replacing Robertson in her affections. The subsequent discovery that the admired cleric, married, and with two young children, had been dallying with one of Lady Byron’s own social circle, the respectably married Lady Augusta Fitzpatrick, was brushed off by his fondest admirer as a mere irrelevance.
Initially, Lady Byron had wanted Robertson to present her record of an ill-fated marriage to the public. The roles were now reversed. In September 1853, after providing funds to educate Robertson’s fatherless children, Lady Byron started to interview various people who might contribute to a biography of her brilliant friend. It would be modelled, so she told one of Robertson’s greatest admirers, Henry Crabb Robinson, upon the hugely successful recent life and letters of Margaret Fuller that she had (somewhat insensitively) presented to her daughter shortly before Ada’s death. Annabella’s failure to carry this ambitious project through owed more to her increasingly poor health than to any lack of commitment. Instead, Lady Byron became an assiduous circulator of the first published version of Robertson’s celebrated sermons. It’s highly probable that she also commissioned the death mask of Robertson which was taken by Robert Noel (now owned by University College, London).
Crabb Robinson, who had first met Annabella in that summer of 1853 at a party for the literary phenomenon of the year, Harriet Beecher Stowe, left their discussion filled with respect for this quietly dressed and unassuming woman. ‘I was much pleased with Lady Byron’, the savvy old gentleman noted that night. ‘I consider her one of the best women of the day.’ Such words were high praise from a man who had met almost every great figure of the age, including Wordsworth and Goethe. Annabella might lack the wit that had charmed Henry Crabb Robinson when he met Madame de Staël, but he was impressed by her rare combination of intelligence and integrity. Later, he would describe Lady Byron as the noblest woman he had ever known.
Thomas Noel – the illegitimately born relative who had presided over Annabella’s wedding to Byron at her parents’ home – died in the summer of 1853, aged seventy-seven. It came as a shock to Mr Noel’s family to learn that the cantankerous old man had excluded the third of his four sons from his will, seemingly out of pique at Charles’s readiness to manage the Kirkby Mallory estate as Lady Byron’s agent. (Thomas Noel Senior regarded all Wentworth property as rightfully belonging to himself.) Charles’s older brothers, Robert and Thomas Junior (author of one much admired poem, ‘The Pauper’s Drive’), promptly made over to Charles a generous share of their own bequests. Edward Noel proved less forthcoming.
Although it is not certain that Annabella came to Charles Noel’s assistance, the likelihood is that she did, especially since the news of Charles’s disinheritance came shortly after an unfortunate incident for which Lady Byron was partly to blame.
Richard Realf had just turned eighteen in 1852, when Annabella first heard about the handsome son of a Sussex blacksmith, an admirer of Lord Byron who was hoping to publish his own poems. Guesses at the Beautiful reads today as dreadfully as its dismal title might suggest. Perhaps Annabella, who was financially responsible for shepherding Realf’s slim volume into print before proudly circulating it among her Brighton friends, was recalling her youthful patronage of Joseph Blacket, the penniless bard of Seaham. Early in 1853, mindful of the fact that poetry alone is no way for any young man without means to support himself, she packed her protégé off to the Midlands, to study agriculture with Charles Noel. Perhaps, too, she sensed an absence in the life of Charles, whose son and namesake had recently left home to work for a firm of silk merchants in London.
By the end of the year, unwelcome news reached Lady Byron’s Brighton home. Richard Realf had fallen in love with the Noels’ 15-year-old daughter. Alice, a quiet girl blessed with large eyes and long, strikingly beautiful blonde hair, was infatuated. Her parents were horrified, not least by the violence of Alice’s passion. (A letter from Charles Noel’s wife, Mary Anne, informed Lady Byron – who promptly passed the news along to Mrs Cabot Follen, her favourite American confidante – that at last the poor child’s eyes had stopped glaring like the headlights of a train.)
Reprehensible though Lady Byron’s indiscretion might seem in spreading family gossip, she was seeking advice. Advised by Mrs Follen, Annabella arranged for Alice’s sweetheart to be despatched to America and given a teaching post at the new Five Points Mission in New York. Realf was accepted without question; Lady Byron had, after all, contributed £6,500 (in excess of £3 million in today’s currency) towards setting up Five Points. By 1858, the young man was out in Kansas, fighting alongside John Brown and writing to bless Lady Byron, herself an ardent abolitionist, as his generous benefactor.
This ill-starred love story had no happy ending. Alice, adopted by her uncle after her parents’ death of smallpox in 1857, became Edward Noel’s eerily intimate companion. Seduced at one point by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – seduction was a rite of passage for female guests at the future marital home of Ada’s daughter – Alice never married. Richard Realf, despite a rackety existence abroad that included a bigamous marriage, never forgot his first love. When he took his own life, aged forty-six, in Oakland, California, one imaginative biographer has claimed that Realf was still wearing a locket that contained a strand of Alice Noel’s bright yellow hair.*
Annabella had struggled against ill health ever since the traumatic marital separation that marked her transformation from an active young woman into a semi-invalid whose condition – a hardening of the arteries – worsened progressively with age. On 2 February 1854, Dr King explained to her new Brighton friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, that, although often confined to working from her sickroom, Lady Byron’s mental state was never impaired. She had been at her most impressive, Dr King considered (and Stephen Lushington agreed), when forced to undergo the daily agony of witnessing her daughter’s slow and painful death.
King was a devotee. William Howitt, a Quaker reformer and author, offered a harsher portrait of his wealthy patron. Howitt would deliver his recollections to the popular Daily News in September 1869, nearly a decade after Lady Byron’s death. Rankling in Howitt’s mind after all those years was the memory of Ephraim Brown, a Nottingham man whose services he had once recommended to Lady Byron as a teacher in one of her Leicestershire schools. Trained up by her at Ealing, Brown had been given a post for which, according to Howitt, Brown sacrificed other opportunities. Lady Byron had then sacked him, casting both the teacher and his penniless family adrift. While it remains unclear in what way Brown had offended his employer, his banishment did not discourage Howitt from submitting further educational projects to the same hard-hearted patron.
It was during one such discussion that Howitt (as he later reported) witnessed the shocking change that ill health could wreak upon Lady Byron. Speaking with him over the dinner table at her home, and in the best of spirits, she had agreed to support and help fund Howitt’s latest school proposal. Coming down to breakfast the following morning, he entered the presence of an altered woman. White as paper and cold to the touch as the North Pole (in Howitt’s striking account), Lady Byron spoke only to whisper a withdrawal of her promise. No explanation was given, no apology made. The subject was closed.*
Untypical though Howitt’s account sounds – Lady Byron was known and widely praised for the exceptional generosity of her philanthropy – it fits with the adamantine side of Annabella’s nature that had been experienced with such pain by William Lovelace and by Anna Jameson. Undeniably, Annabella could be both harsh and unforgiving. Even her devoted granddaughter, finally listening to her father’s side of the story of their terrible quarrel (this conversation took place many years after Lady Byron’s death), began to wonder about the way Lord Lovelace had been treated. Annabella’s own godchild, Emily Leigh, seeking help to purchase herself a home in 1855, was dismayed to receive only a bleakly pragmatic recommendation to economise by going into lodgings. Such acts of coldness were not forgotten.
The deaths of Ada Lovelace and Frederick Robertson, together with her estrangement from Anna Jameson and William Lovelace, left Annabella in a position of emotional isolation. Philanthropy, assuredly, brought many acquaintances and admirers into her life. Her relationship with Parthenope and Florence Nightingale had deepened to the point where Lady Byron would become a recipient and proud transmitter of what amounted to Nightingale’s news bulletins from the frontline, at the height of the Crimean War. But professional colleagues – women like Arabella Lawrence in Liverpool, Mary Carpenter in Bristol, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Jesser Reid (founder, in 1849, of Bedford, London’s first women’s college) – were themselves energetic reformers with lives of their own. These collaborations were of a warm but practical nature, focussed upon ways to rectify injustice and improve social conditions.
It was, then, a rare treat for Annabella to find that her plans with Henry Crabb Robinson to found a new magazine, The National Review, were assisting the development of a friendship that allowed her to speak freely about the one subject of which she never grew tired. Discussing Lord Byron with his widow, an intrigued Robinson enquired about the poet’s own dark brand of religion. If only she could have turned her husband away from his Calvinistic beliefs and towards her own faith in a forgiving God, Annabella sighed. Did Robinson wonder that she still, after all these years, shrank from reading Byron’s 1822 play (it was partly based on Goethe’s Faust), The Deform’d Transformed? The play distressed her, she explained, because she read into it her superstitious husband’s belief that lameness marked him out – from the first moment of his birth – as cursed by God.*
Byron Ockham’s period of tuition by Lieutenant Arnold proved to be short-lived. In the summer of 1855, the young man headed north from Brighton to take a job screening coal in Sunderland. (As a child, Ockham had been greatly excited by the descent into a Midlands mine arranged by Charles Noel and his tutor.) By December, he had returned to London and signed up to a five-year contract riveting metal plates on to the iron flanks of the Great Eastern, the massive steamship being built at Millwall under the direction of Isambard Brunel and his engineering partner, John Scott Russell.
To an anxious grandmother, the last hope for establishing Ockham in a respectable life lay in ensuring that he had proper lodgings. Conscious that Louisa and Robert Noel were returning from Dresden, Annabella offered them her grandson as a paying lodger for three months. The case was becoming a desperate one, she confessed to Louisa on 26 June: ‘now or never will he form desirable connections. The ball is thrown into the air – who is to catch it?’
The Noels did not step forward to catch it, and it is unlikely that Byron would have accepted such a restricting proposal. By 6 September 1856, only the viscount’s sister and faithful confidante knew that he was living on the Isle of Dogs, where J. Aker’s favourite pastime was to run up different flags in front of his lodgings – Russian one day, American the next – in order to cause a bit of a stir. He was saving hard with a friend, in order to buy a small schooner. He also had plans – shades of his grandfather! – to buy a bear cub. Nothing, however, was said to Byron’s sister about the fact that her brother was hoping to marry Mrs Low, the divorced daughter of his East End landlord. (Conscious of his title and responsibilities, Mrs Low turned him down.)*
Unsurprisingly, Lord Ockham’s twenty-first birthday was not marked at Horsley by the traditional family celebrations for an eldest son.
Lady Byron’s generosity was legendary among those whom she loved. Always on the move, Annabella looked upon her various homes chiefly as useful places in which to provide a refuge for any friends who were poor, unhappy or simply undergoing a time of crisis. In the autumn of 1855, the hard-up De Morgans were offered the loan for as long as they wished of a country house. Making a similar proposal in 1856 to another, much younger couple, Annabella offered George and Louisa MacDonald part of Aford House, her new residence at Ham Common, out beyond Richmond. They should have their own entrance and come and go as they pleased, she promised, but they must never feel excluded from her personal domain. ‘When socially disposed, you will invite yourself,’ their new friend instructed them. ‘My house has often been called Liberty Hall.’*
Annabella was writing primarily to George, the 31-year-old author of ‘Within and Without’, a poem that Lady Byron admired for its intimations of an afterlife. MacDonald went on to write a book – if a personal intrusion can be excused – that held me spellbound when I was a child. ‘I have been asked to tell you about the back of the North Wind,’ the book began.† I doubt if I was the only reader who wept when I reached the moment when Diamond, the boy-hero, is found, stretched out upon his little bed in the hayloft from which the capriciously beautiful North Wind used to carry him away on extraordinary adventures. ‘I saw at once how it was. They thought he was dead,’ MacDonald wrote (as the tale’s narrator). ‘I knew that he had gone to the back of the north wind.’ And that, as MacDonald’s admirers learn to accept, was the best place that any moderately unhappy and imaginative child could hope to be.
The friendship began in 1855, when Annabella wrote an admiring letter to the author of ‘Within and Without’. Soon after this, Lady Byron confessed her personal longing for a spiritual reunion with a reformed and Augusta-free husband. MacDonald, as he came to know Annabella better, never doubted that – until the end of her life – she always had and forever would love Lord Byron.
Poor, lively, warmhearted and high-principled, George and Louisa MacDonald brought as much to their new friend in pleasure as Lady Byron returned to them in munificence. At the time Annabella met him, George MacDonald had exchanged his life as a country parson for badly paid teaching work in Manchester. An active frame belied MacDonald’s lifelong ill health; the following year, Annabella funded the couple’s three-month visit to Algeria, where a dry climate helped the invalid to regain his energy. In 1858, she commissioned Augustus De Morgan’s exceptionally artistic son, William, to do up the MacDonalds’ home, instructing him to combine elegance with every possible comfort. It’s likely that she also engineered MacDonald’s 1859 appointment to lecture at Bedford, the pioneering London women’s college with which Lady Byron had been closely involved for a decade.
This late-flowering friendship was one of which Lady Byron’s closest friends warmly approved. Mary Montgomery, meeting them at Lady Byron’s last London home in 1858, thought the MacDonalds were delightful. Crabb Robinson, encountering the couple there during the following spring, was impressed both by the boldness of MacDonald’s religious views, and by (Lady Byron always favoured a handsome man) the former clergyman’s arresting good looks.
George MacDonald would later become famous, prosperous and a towering influence upon other writers, notably Lewis Carroll. (Tolkien and C. S. Lewis freely acknowledged the Victorian author as their first teacher in the world of fantasy fiction.) He never forgot Lady Byron’s kindness to him in more straitened times. To their children, the MacDonalds always spoke of Lady Byron as the woman who had given George hope and practical help when he most needed it. (Help included an unexpected £300 legacy in her will.) A decade later, at the absolute height of the posthumous public attack upon Lady Byron’s reputation, George MacDonald made a point of dedicating his latest novel to her memory.
Another and more significant friendship was formed around this time. In this case, it was generated by one of the most burning topics of the day. Abolitionism was the common cause that united Lady Byron’s friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain had abolished slavery in 1834; nevertheless, by 1850, over three million African slaves in America, and in other parts of the world, remained in bondage. In 1850, Ellen and William Craft were among the tiny group who escaped from the slave-owning Southern states in America and avoided recapture in the North under the draconian terms of the new Fugitive Slave Act. The Crafts began their new, free lives in England as teachers at Lady Byron’s Ockham school. In that same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the story through which its young author would help to change the course of American history.
By April 1853, when Mrs Beecher Stowe and her family arrived in London for the beginning of a four-month lecture tour, Stowe had overtaken even Dickens, to become the world’s best-known living writer. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold 300,000 copies in America during its first year of publication, despite being a banned book throughout most of the Southern states. In London, one year later, ten different dramatic adaptations of Stowe’s novel were being staged. Everybody wanted to meet and pay tribute to its celebrated author.
It was, therefore, a singularly privileged group of some twenty men and women who gathered to meet Mrs Stowe on 24 May at the London home of Elizabeth Jesser Reid. It was at this occasion that Anna Jameson (still struggling to regain Annabella’s friendship) introduced Henry Crabb Robinson to her former soulmate. Robinson’s interest in both Lady Byron and the honoured American guest did not preclude him from observing that the most impressive person in the room was William Craft, the new Ockham school teacher. Mr Craft was, Robinson respectfully noted in his diary (while employing the problematic language of that time), ‘the most intelligent-looking negro I ever saw’.
Recording at a later date the history of her friendship with Lady Byron, Harriet Beecher Stowe described that first encounter at Mrs Reid’s home. She had been struck by Lady Byron’s fetching appearance (slight, pale and silver-haired in a lacy widow’s cap and lavender-coloured gown) and appealing manner (poised, quick and graceful). The topic of slavery was instantly raised; Mrs Stowe was astonished to find how well-informed and astute Lady Byron appeared to be, and how original in her ideas. (‘Many of her words surprised me greatly, and gave me new material for thought. I found I was in company with a commanding mind.’)
In 1856, the Beecher Stowes made a second visit to Europe, both to publicise Dred (Mrs Stowe’s new novel was about the runaway slave leader of a plotted rebellion), and to attend the London stage debut of Mary Webb, the African-American actress for whom Harriet had adapted parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin into dramatised readings, entitled The Christian Slave. Arriving in the dog-day heat of August, the Stowes found London disappointingly empty of smart society. It was during this quiet period that Stowe’s friendship with Lady Byron first bloomed. Annabella, who had already offered loyal support to Mary Webb and her family, invited the Stowes to visit her at home on at least two occasions. On the second, their schoolboy son Henry was introduced to Byron Ockham, a young man whose brilliant eyes and muscular physique (comparable to the Farnese Hercules, gasped well-travelled Mrs Stowe) provided welcome distraction from the subject of the viscount’s unconventional lifestyle. A poised Lady Byron expressed her hope that Lord Ockham was proving to be a good moral influence upon his fellow mechanics at Scott Russell’s shipyard. There was talk of his setting up a new school in the East End. Really, it was quite wonderful to observe how Lady Byron looked for the best in everybody who surrounded her, an admiring Mrs Stowe would later remark.
Following a headily aristocratic September in Scotland (where the Stowes were the guests of the Duchess of Sutherland), Harriet’s husband escorted young Henry back to his American schooling. Meanwhile, Harriet, together with her married sister, Mary Foote Perkins, arranged to visit a personal hero, Charles Kingsley, at his Berkshire rectory, before embarking on her second tour of Europe. It was by happy chance that Annabella’s new abode was at Ham Common, conveniently placed along the westward route from London out to Eversley, Kingsley’s secluded home.
Following a satisfying expedition to Eversley Rectory, Mrs Stowe and her sister spent a night at Aford House. It was now that a key conversation took place between Lady Byron and Mrs Beecher Stowe. Disclosures were ventured on both sides. Harriet’s confession of her youthful adoration of Lord Byron led easily on to an unfolding of the private history of Lady Byron’s marriage. Only the slightest of pauses occurred when Mrs Stowe confessed that she already knew about the incest. (Her source was their mutual American friend, Eliza Cabot Follen.) Nodding swift assent, Annabella passed on to a thrillingly intimate account of her married life.
And what, a pale-faced and emotional Lady Byron asked at the end of her enthralling monologue, should she do now? Plans were once again afoot for a popular edition of her late husband’s poems, prefaced by what threatened to be a wickedly misleading account of Lord Byron’s domestic life. Was it her duty to reveal what she alone now knew to be the Truth? Should she volunteer it herself, or . . .?
Lady Byron’s hesitation was pregnant with implication. Was Annabella hoping that Mrs Stowe would step forward with an offer of her own services, or was she simply seeking practical advice? Mrs Stowe herself was uncertain what was expected from her. Playing for time, she requested a written account of past events to which she could devote herself with scrupulous consideration. To this, Lady Byron readily agreed.
The discussion at Ham took place at the end of October. On 5 November, Mrs Stowe returned the detailed notes (from which Lady Byron had prudently omitted any mention of incest). Twelve days later, on the verge of departing for Paris, Mrs Stowe announced that she had changed her mind ‘somewhat’. Better, perhaps, to publish nothing at this time. Such delicate matters should be placed in the hands of ‘some discreet friends’ who could decide, after Lady Byron’s own demise, what should be done?
Perhaps Harriet sensed that she had disappointed her new friend. Shortly before returning to America in the summer of 1857, Mrs Stowe sent Lady Byron a gift of some little majolica vases from Italy, together with a reassuring message of affection. ‘I often think how strange it is that I should know you,’ she wrote on 5 June, ‘you who were a sort of legend of my early days – that I should love you is only a natural result.’ Omitted from this pleasing tribute was any hint of just what sort of a legend the youthful Lady Byron might have been. It was the poet, not his widow, whom an impressionable young girl had worshipped.
Henry Beecher Stowe drowned shortly after his mother’s return to America. Lady Byron’s silence about the tragedy hurt. ‘I did long to hear from you,’ Harriet confessed on 30 June 1858, ‘because I know that you did know everything sorrow can teach.’
A considerable deterioration in Lady Byron’s already failing health may have contributed to her neglect of a friend in need. She had moved into her final home, a tall, pleasant house in St George’s Terrace, looking out at the steep green ascent of Primrose Hill. All physical endeavours had become a struggle. The next-door and smaller house was being purchased in order to create a practical ground-floor suite for her own use. Ralph, about to go to Oxford (following a meeting with a kind-hearted academic, Professor Donkin), was to be given an upstairs study all his own. A physician was in permanent residence, but the kindest of Lady Byron’s nurses was her own granddaughter.
The two Annabellas enjoyed a delightful friendship, so Mrs Stowe now learned. It was one in which a ‘spirit union’ left plenty of room for lively mutual dissent. Together, they had been reading serialised instalments of Harriet’s new novel, The Minister’s Wooing. Tactfully (for this was not one of Mrs Stowe’s finest works), Lady Byron compared it to Adam Bede (‘the book of the season’) and ingenuously wondered which would prove the more enduring.
Curiously, Annabella made no mention to Mrs Stowe of the fact that she herself was once again planning to write the story of her doomed marriage. On 18 April 1859, she heard from Anna Jones, the vicar’s daughter who had kept up a friendship with both Mary Montgomery and herself ever since those miserable early weeks of 1816 when Annabella had taken refuge at Kirkby. The chief topic of Miss Jones’s letter was the autobiographical book which Lady Byron had declared that she was going to write. While Anna approved (‘The sooner you commence the better’), she qualified her encouragement by adding a curious rider: namely, that ‘many should give opinions and be allowed to revise & find fault’.
The project went no further. The thought of being revised and found fault with was enough to deter an author who detested criticism. But it’s more likely that Annabella, growing weaker month by month, simply ran out of energy.
Harriet Beecher Stowe returned to England in the summer of 1859. Calling upon her old friend and finding an ashen-faced and greatly aged Lady Byron almost unable to speak, Mrs Stowe departed in haste. A second visit took place on a warm summer afternoon. The invalid had recovered enough strength to undertake a pleasant saunter around the garden of her London home. ‘She was enjoying one of those bright intervals of freedom from pain and languor, in which her spirits always rose so buoyant and youthful,’ Harriet would fondly recall. Accompanying her guest to the railway station and noting Mrs Stowe’s sudden dismay at discovering she had left behind her gloves (an essential part of every proper Victorian lady’s attire), Lady Byron impulsively drew off her own. That spontaneous gift, Harriet later observed, was entirely in keeping with her admired friend’s noble character.
Lady Byron died quietly in her bed at St George’s Terrace on 16 May 1860, on the eve of what would have been her sixty-eighth birthday. (Anna Jameson, still unforgiven, had gone to her grave just two months earlier.) Sending the news to Stephen Lushington at 5am, Annabella sadly wrote that ‘my darling’ had died an hour earlier, after undergoing great suffering with patient resignation. The cause of death was identified as cancer of the breast.
Lord Lovelace had never given up hope of a reconciliation. All through these final weeks, he had hovered close by, waiting for any summons from the dying woman which he might receive. It never came. On 18 May, an embarrassed and disapproving Stephen Lushington was forced to tell the unhappy earl (who was, after all, his landlord at Ockham Park) that all three of his children opposed his plan to attend the funeral. If he came, they would not. Given no option, Lovelace stayed away.
Dr Lushington himself was of course present on 20 May 1860, to see his old friend’s coffin lowered into place at Kensal Rise. The grave was discreet: the plain granite slab carried only Annabella’s (misspelt) name, a pair of dates and her county of birth. The burial plot lay close to those of several Lushingtons. The lawyer’s family had become almost an extension of Lady Byron’s own.*
Travelling back from the funeral within a closed carriage together with Lady Byron’s lawyer, Gerard Ford, the 7th Lord Byron made a startling disclosure. It had been made known to him – and apparently to nobody else – by the late Lady Byron that her son-in-law had visited her house and robbed her of a box of the precious letters that she had always protected from public view. Challenged by his younger son in later years, Lovelace flatly denied any such theft. It seems clear now, however, that those abstracted papers – they included letters that had passed between Annabella and Augusta Leigh in 1816–17 – were later loaned or copied for use by hostile critics at the height of the posthumous onslaught on Lady Byron’s reputation. Ralph King, while convinced of his father’s transgression, identified the culprit in Astarte (1905) only as ‘a deceased relative’.†
Lady Byron’s will was – as we might expect – meticulously planned. Ralph, the principal heir of all that it was within his grandmother’s power to bestow (that is to say, the enormous Wentworth estates), was instructed to add Noel and Milbanke to his surname. (Lady Byron had also taken care – while never using it herself – to claim and retain the Wentworth barony for her descendants.) Annabella (who now changed her name to Lady Anne King Noel) received, in addition to investments that provided an annual income of £3,000, all of her grandmother’s jewels, trinkets and ornaments. Mary Carpenter, a trustee, was given Red Lodge, the Bristol property that Lady Byron had purchased to house and rehabilitate young women in difficulties. Edward Noel received £1,000, while £100 went to Charles Noel’s son and namesake. Louisa Noel was given £500. The same sum was bestowed upon the mysterious but memorably named Thomas Horlock Bastard, a Dorset phrenologist.*
Most significant, however, was a clause in the will that concerned Lady Byron’s personal papers. In 1853, the late Thomas Davison, a close friend from Annabella’s early years, had been replaced as one of her three trustees by Henry Bathurst, a lawyer living at Doctor’s Commons. (Henry’s mother, Lady Caroline, was a close friend to Lady Byron.) Instructions were given to Mr Bathurst, together with Mary Carpenter and Frances Carr (Lushington’s unmarried sister-in-law) that all of Lady Byron’s papers should be immediately sealed and deposited at a bank. Lady Byron’s final instruction rang crystal clear. ‘I direct that no one else however closely connected with me shall on any plea whatsoever be allowed to have access.’
Near to death, Annabella believed that she was asking the trustees to act in the best interests of her family when she specified that they were to act with special thought to the welfare of her grandchildren. The intention was good. The result was to prove disastrous, both for the future defence of Lady Byron’s reputation and for the peace of mind of those same beloved grandchildren whom she was so anxious to protect.
* John Wilson, writing in the voice of ‘The Shepherd’ in Blackwood’s popular Noctes Ambrosianae, in May 1830, had attacked Lady Byron, declaring that a spouse’s first loyalty always lay to her husband, not her parents, however brutal the facts might be.
* Listing Lady Byron’s philanthropic activities would take up an interminable chapter. Here are just two examples. In 1853, possibly moved by her grandson’s accounts, she strongly advocated the need to improve conditions in far-flung penal colonies such as Van Diemen’s Land, while setting up two new schools at home. In 1854, she was the sole funder both of the new Five Points Mission in New York, and of Red Lodge, a refuge and school for young girls set up by Harriet Martineau’s cousin, Mary Carpenter, in Bristol. Numerous other missions, schools, asylums and hospitals received both financial support and the benefit of Lady Byron’s formidable administrative mind.
* The estates included Kirkby Mallory, Knowle in Warwickshire (now a ward of the thriving Birmingham extension town of Solihull), part of Leamington and substantial tracts of land near Darlington in Co. Durham (where her estate was still referred to in the local press in 1834 as belonging to ‘the unfortunate Lady Byron’).
* The Albion is also puzzlingly referred to in letters as the Allum. These would appear to be one and the same ship.
* Robertson’s parishioners had been outraged in 1853 by the Vicar of Brighton’s refusal to enable the hard-pressed cleric to take on an assistant, one whose name had been put forward by Lady Byron in an effort to help her friend. The candidate (Ernest Tower) was the grandson of Isabella Baker, in whose house Annabella herself had been born. Later, Tower took up a post at one of Lady Byron’s parishes in the Midlands.
* A Passport to Hell: The Mystery of Richard Realf by George Rathmell (iuniverse, 2002).
* The analogy to the North Pole suggests that Howitt’s experience may have occurred at uplands, the house near Mortlake at which Annabella laughingly described an unheated chamber in which less-favoured visitors were housed as ‘the Polar Room’. Louisa Noel was among the luckier ones who was promised the cosy downstairs bedroom with its own snug German-style stove.
* Mary Shelley, who copied the play for Byron and much admired it, told its author that she had greatly preferred the task to working on his Don Juan.
* ‘I would not object to a working woman as his wife,’ Lady Byron told Robert Noel on 11 April 1857 (Dep. Lovelace Byron 104).
* It’s hard to keep count of the number of houses at which Annabella lived after Ada’s death. Besides various homes in Brighton, they included Aford House at Ham Common, uplands House at East Sheen, 1 Cambridge Terrace on Regent’s Park, a house in Gloucester Terrace, another which Ralph reported that she was buying from a bankrupt and, finally, two adjacent houses in the then unfashionable location of Primrose Hill.
† George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind (1871).
* Lushington himself chose to be buried, with equal lack of ostentation, in the churchyard at Ockham.
† William Lovelace’s second wife, Jane Jenkins, expressed strong indignation at even this veiled allegation. It was inconceivable that her late husband would have behaved in such an underhand manner, she asserted to her stepson. Posterity has sided with Ralph.
* The will was extensive. The list given here represents only a modest selection of Lady Byron’s bequests.