by Will Durant
Byron, who had not felt any basic urge toward this learned and conscientious lady, took the refusal amiably, and readily found comfort in the arms of the Countess of Oxford, then of Lady Frances Webster, and, concurrently, of his half sister Augusta Leigh. Born in 1783, she was her half brother’s elder by five years. She had now (1813) been six years married to her first cousin, Colonel George Leigh, and had three children. At this juncture she came to London from her home in Six Mile Bottom, Cambridgeshire, to ask Byron’s financial help in difficulties caused by her husband’s losses, and prolonged absences, at racetracks. Byron could not give her much, for his income was precarious, but he entertained her with genial conversation, and discovered that she was a woman.
She was thirty; not quite the femme de trente ans that Balzac praised, for she lacked intellectual background and vivacity; but she was affectionate, accommodating, perhaps a bit awed by her brother’s fame, and inclined to give him whatever she could command. Her long separation from him, added to her husband’s neglect, left her emotionally free. Byron, who had rashly discarded any moral taboo that had not met the test of his young reason, wondered why he should not mate with his sister, as the Pharaohs had done. Later developments indicate that he now, or soon, had sexual relations with Augusta.19 In August of this year 1813 he thought of taking her with him on a Mediterranean voyage.20 That plan fell through, but in January he took her to Newstead Abbey. When, on April 15, 1814, Augusta gave birth to a daughter, Byron wrote to Lady Melbourne that “if it is an ape, that must be my fault”; the child herself, Medora Leigh, came to believe herself his daughter.21 In May he sent Augusta three thousand pounds to clear her husband’s debts. In July he was with her in Hastings. In August he took her to his Abbey.
While he was becoming more and more deeply involved with his half sister, Miss Milbanke was sending him letters whose rising cordiality prompted him to write in his journal under December 1, 1813:
Yesterday a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered. What an odd situation and friendship is ours!—without one spark of love on either side…. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress—a girl of twenty—a peeress that is to be, in her own right—an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess—a mathematician, a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages22
As if she had read this astonishing tribute, her letters in 1814 became increasingly tender, assuring him that she was heart-free, asking for his picture, and signing herself “Affectionately.” Melting in her epistolary warmth, he wrote to her on August 10: “I did—do—always still love you.” She answered that she was unfit for marriage, being absorbed in philosophy, poetry, and history.23 Responding to this challenge, he sent her, on September 9, a second proposal, rather dispassionate, as in a game of chess. If she again refused he planned to leave with Hobhouse for Italy. She accepted.
He approached his fate in alternating order: fear that he was losing the liberty that he had become accustomed to in friendship, sex, and ideas; hope that marriage would rescue him from an entangling web of dangerous and degrading alliances. He explained to his friends: “I must, of course, reform, reform thoroughly …. She is so good a person.” And to his fiancée: “I wish to be good …. I am whatever you please to make me.”24 She accepted her task piously. To Emily Milner she wrote, about October 4, 1814:
It is not in the great world that Lord Byron’s true character must be sought; but ask of those nearest to him—of the unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has blessed, of the dependents to whom he has been the best of masters. For his despondency I fear I am too answerable for the last two years. I have a calm and deep security—a confidence in God and man.25
As the time came for Byron to go to Annabella’s family at Seaham (near Durham) and claim her in marriage, his courage sank. He tarried on the way at Augusta’s home, and there wrote a letter to his fiancée withdrawing from the engagement. Augusta persuaded him to destroy the letter,26 and to accept marriage as a saving tie. On October 29 he continued to Seaham, with Hobhouse, who noted in his diary: “Never was lover less in haste.” The bridegroom found the bride’s family cordial, put on his best manners to please them, and, on January 2, 1815, led her to the altar.
IV. TRIAL BY MARRIAGE: BYRON, 1815–16
After the ceremony they rode on a gloomy winter day to a honeymoon at Halnaby Hall, in a suburb of Durham. He was now nearing twenty-seven, she was twenty-three. He had had eight or more years of irresponsible and almost promiscuous sex, and had seldom associated coitus with love. According to Moore’s report of a passage he had seen in Byron’s memoirs (burned in 1824), the husband did not wait for the night to shroud their consummation; he “had Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner on the day of their marriage.”27 After dinner, if we may trust his recollection, he asked her whether she intended to sleep in the same bed with him, and added, “I hate sleeping with any woman, but you may if you choose.”28 He accommodated her, but he later told Hobhouse that on that first night “he had been seized with a sudden fit of melancholy, and had left his bed.” The next day (the wife claimed) “he met me repellently, and uttered words of blighting irony: ‘It is too late now; it is done, and cannot be undone.’ “29 A letter was handed to him from Augusta Leigh; he read to Annabella its superscription: “Dearest, first and best of human beings.”30 According to the wife’s memory, he complained “that if I had married him two years before, I should have spared him that for which he could never forgive himself. He said he could tell me but it was another person’s secret.… I asked … if——[Augusta] knew it. He appeared terrified.”31 However, Annabella seems to have had no suspicion of Augusta at this time.
After three weeks at Halnaby Hall the newly weds returned to Seaham for a stay with the Milbanke family. Byron adjusted himself and became popular with everybody, including his wife. After six weeks of this he began to long for the excitement of London and the voices of his friends. Annabella agreed. In London they settled in luxurious rooms at 13 Piccadilly Terrace. On the day after their arrival Hobhouse came and Byron recovered his good humor. “For ten days,” his wife related, “he was kinder than I had ever seen him.”32 Perhaps in gratitude, or fearing loneliness, she invited Augusta to spend some time with them. Augusta came in April, 1815, and stayed till June. On June 20 George Ticknor, the American historian of Spanish literature, visited the new ménage, and gave a quite favorable report of Byron’s behavior. On that occasion an uncle of Annabella entered joyfully with the news that Napoleon had just been defeated at Waterloo. “I’m damned sorry for it,” said Byron.
He resumed the writing of poetry. In April, 1815, he joined two Jewish composers in issuing Hebrew Melodies, of which they had written the music and he the words. The collaboration, despite the guinea price, soon sold ten thousand copies. Murray brought out an edition of the poems alone, and this too found a wide sale. In October Byron finished The Siege of Corinth; Lady Byron made the fair copy for the printer. “Annabella,” Byron told Lady Blessington, “had a degree of self–control that I never saw equaled…. This produced an opposite effect on me.”33
He had some excuse for irritability. Assuming that he had sold Newstead Abbey, he had taken expensive lodgings for himself and his wife, and had spent lavishly in furnishing them; but the sale fell through, and Byron found himself literally besieged. In November, 1815, a bailiff entered the apartment, placed attachments on some furniture, and threatened to spend the night there until Byron paid his bills. Annabella’s rich parents, Byron felt, should have contributed more generously to the expenses of the new ménage.
His worries tinged even his spells of tenderness with bitterness or gloom. “If any woman could have rendered marriage endurable to me,” he told his wife, “you would.” But then, “I believe you will go on loving me until I beat you.” When she
expressed the hope and faith that he would learn to love her, he repeated, “It is too late now. If you had taken me two years ago … But it is my destiny to ruin all I come near.”34 Having accepted a place on the governing board of the Drury Lane Theatre, he joined Sheridan and others in much drinking, and took one of the actresses to bed.35 Annabella appealed to Augusta to come again and help her manage him; Augusta came (November 15, 1815), reproved her brother, and found herself joined with Annabella as victim of his rage. “Augusta was filled with pity for her sister-in-law.”36
Through most of those difficult months Lady Byron had been carrying his child. On December 10, 1815, she gave birth to a daughter, who was named Augusta Ada—later just Ada. Byron rejoiced, and became fond of the infant, and, passingly, of the mother. “My wife,” he told Hobhouse in that month, “is perfection itself—the best creature breathing. But mind what I say—don’t marry.”37 Soon after Ada’s birth his furies returned. In one tantrum he threw into the fireplace a precious watch which he had carried since boyhood, and then shattered it with a poker.38 On January 3, 1816, according to Annabella’s account to her father, Byron came to her room and talked with “considerable violence” of his affairs with women of the theater. On January 8 she consulted Dr. Matthew Baillie as to Byron’s sanity; he came, watched the caged poet, but declined to give an opinion.
Apparently Byron consented that Annabella should go, with her child, for a stay with her mother, Lady Milbanke, nee Noel, at the Noel property in Kirkby, Leicestershire. Early on January 15 she left with Ada while Byron was still asleep. At Woburn she stopped to send him a strange hortatory but inviting note:
DEAREST B: The child is quite well and the best of travellers. I hope you are good, and remember my prayers and injunctions. Don’t give yourself up to the abominable trade of versifying—nor to brandy—nor to anything or anybody that is not lawful and right. Though I disobey in writing to you, let me hear of your obedience at Kirkby. Ada’s love to you, and mine.
PIP39
From Kirkby she wrote again, humorously and affectionately, telling him that her parents were looking forward to seeing him. On the same day she wrote to Augusta (who was still with Byron) with Lady Milbanke’s recommendation that she should dilute Byron’s laudanum (opium) with threequarters water.
Gradually, then fully, Annabella told her parents how, in her view, Byron had treated her. Shocked, they insisted on her complete separation from her husband. Lady Milbanke rushed down to London to consult a medical examiner who had watched Byron’s behavior; if she could establish Byron’s insanity the marriage might be annulled without Byron’s consent. The examiner reported that he had seen no signs of insanity in the poet, but had heard of some neurotic outbreaks, as when Byron was seized by a convulsive fit in his enthusiasm over the acting of Edmund Kean. Annabella sent a caution to her mother not to involve Augusta Leigh in the matter, for Augusta had been “the truest of friends to me…. I very much fear that she may be supposed the cause of separation by many, and it would be a cruel injustice.”40
On February 2, 1816, Annabella’s father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, dispatched to Byron a proposal for peaceful separation. The poet replied courteously that he saw no reason why the wife who had so recently sent him messages of affection should have so completely changed her mind. He wrote to Annabella, asking if she had freely agreed to her father’s action. She was moved to “distress and agony” by his letter, but her parents refused to let her reply. Augusta added her own appeal for reconsideration; to which Annabella replied: “I will only recall to Lord Byron’s mind his avowed insurmountable aversion to the married life, and the desire and determination he has expressed, ever since its commencement, to free himself from that bondage, as finding it quite insupportable.”41
On February 12 Hobhouse went to see Byron. On the way he heard some of the gossip circulating in London’s social and literary circles, and implying that Byron had been brutal and unfaithful to his wife. Some items from Hobhouse’s diary for that day:
Saw Mrs. L[eigh] and George B[yron, the poet’s cousin], and from them learnt what I fear is the real truth that B has been guilty of very great tyranny—menaces—furies—neglects, and even real injuries such as telling his wife he was living with another woman—… locking doors—showing pistols … everything she [Lady Byron] seems to believe him to have been guilty—but they acquit him—how? by saying that he is mad…. Whilst I heard these things Mrs. L went out and brought word that her brother was crying bitterly in his bedroom—poor, poor fellow….
I now thought it my duty to tell Byron I had changed my opinion…. When I told him what I had heard in the streets that day he was astounded—he had heard he was to be accused of cruelty, drunkenness, and infidelity—I got him to own much of what I had been told in the morning—he was dreadfully agitated —said he was ruined and would blow out his brains…. Sometimes says, “and yet she loved me once,” and at other times that he is glad to be rid of such a woman—he said if I would go abroad he would separate at once.42
About this time Byron received a bill for two thousand pounds for the coach he had bought for himself and his wife. He could not meet the debt, and had only one hundred fifty available; yet, with his characteristically reckless generosity, about February 16, 1816, he sent a hundred pounds to Coleridge.
On February 22 Annabella came to London and gave to Dr. Stephen Lushington an account that in his judgment made separation necessary. In that week public gossip mentioned Mrs. Leigh, and accused Byron of sodomy. He perceived that any further refusal of a quiet separation would bring a court action in which Augusta would be irrevocably ruined. On March 9 he gave his consent, and offered to resign all rights to his wife’s fortune, which had been bringing the couple a thousand pounds a year; she agreed that half of this sum should be paid to him annually. She promised to publicly renew her friendship with Augusta, and she kept that promise. She did not seek a divorce.
Soon after the separation he composed a poem—“Fare thee well, and if for ever, / Still fare thee well”—and sent it to her. A group of his friends—Hobhouse, Scrope Davies, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Rogers, Lord Holland, Benjamin Constant—came to his rooms to make him forget the collapse of his marriage. Alone and uninvited, Godwin’s stepdaughter “Claire” Clairmont brought him word of admiration from a rival poet, Percy Shelley, and offered her person as a balm for his wounds. He accepted her offer, opening a long concatenation of new griefs. On April 25, 1816, with three servants and a personal physician, he sailed for Ostend, never to see England again.
V. THE YOUTH OF SHELLEY: 1792–1811
Percy commended his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, for having “acted very well to three wives”; moreover, “he is a complete atheist, and he builds all his hopes on annihilation.”43 Sir Bysshe took his unusual “Christian” name from his grandmother’s maiden name. He had a long pedigree, which (like Byron) he traced back to the Norman Conquest; in that distinguished line one Shelley had been hanged for supporting Richard II, another for plotting to kill Elizabeth I. Sir Bysshe eloped with his second wife, buried her, and eloped with a third, who was descended from Sir Philip Sidney. Her fortune swelled that of her husband, and helped him to a baronetcy in 1806. He lived to be eighty-three, much to the annoyance of his children. The eldest of these was Timothy Shelley, who passed through Oxford and into Parliament, where he voted the mildly liberal Whig line. In 1791 he married Elizabeth Pilfold, a woman of great beauty, considerable temper, and some agnosticism,44 all of which reappeared in her eldest son.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, at the family property known as Field Place—a spacious home and estate near Horsham in Sussex. Four sisters were born later, and much later a brother. Percy was brought up in close companionship with his sisters; he may have taken from them some habits of tenderness, excitability, and imagination; and for the eldest of them he developed an intense affection.
At Eton he suffered agonies of injured pride from fagging. He shunned most sport
s except rowing; fatefully he never learned to swim. He was soon proficient in Latin, and changed bullies into friends by helping them with their lessons. His extracurricular reading included many tales of mystery and terror, but also he relished the materialism of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, the science of Pliny’s Natural History, the optimism of Condorcet’s Sketch of a Tableau of the Progress of the Human Mind, and the philosophical anarchism of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. This book, he later wrote, “opened my mind to fresh and more extensive views; it materially influenced my character; I rose from its perusal a wiser and better man…. I beheld that I had duties to perform.”45
During vacations he fell in love, aged sixteen, with a cousin, Harriet Grove, who often visited Field Place. They began a correspondence whose ardor raised them in 1809 to mutual pledges of eternal fidelity. But he confessed to her his doubts about God; she showed his agnostic letter to her father, who advised her to set Percy adrift. When, in January, 1811, Harriet transferred her troth to William Helyer, Shelley wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg a letter worthy of Byron’s wildest heroes: “She is no longer mine, she abhors me as a deist, as what she was before. Oh! Christianity, when I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may God (if there be a God) blast me! … Is suicide wrong? I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die.”46