Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  For a man of Byron’s anxious and touchy pride – a crippled Scottish boy brought up by a ghastly mother in obscure Aberdonian poverty – the embarrassments of the last three months had been humiliating, but the truth was that no amount of money was ever going to reconcile him to marriage. The prospect of renewed war had raised his hopes of getting a decent price for Newstead if he could only sell the place, and yet he knew that even if their money worries could disappear – even if the recent death of Annabella’s Wentworth uncle eventually produced something more than a constant stream of hopeful creditors at the door, even if he could bear with her dull, prosing father and put up with his wife’s quiet, prim, bourgeois self-sufficiency, even if there were moments when he still loved her – nothing would ever make him forgive her for not being someone else.

  That someone else was his half-sister, Augusta Byron, whom he had first met when she was a tall slender girl of seventeen and he a lame, overweight Harrow schoolboy four years her junior. From the first brother and sister had been allies in his endless battles with his ludicrous mother, and as Byron moved on from Harrow to Cambridge and his eastern travels with John Cam Hobhouse, and Augusta slid into helplessly fecund motherhood, the memory of her languorous, indulgent, undemanding unaggressive sexuality – the Zuleika of his ‘Bride of Abydos’, the ‘sleepy Venus’ of his Don Juan – became fixed in his mind as a fantasy that consanguinity and the shared Byron name made simultaneously safe and dangerously compelling. ‘For thee. My own sweet sister,’ he would write to her,

  In thy heart

  I know myself secure, as thou in mine,

  We were and are – I am, even as thou are –

  Beings who ne’er each other can resign;

  It is the same, together or apart.

  From life’s commencement to its slow decline

  We are entwined – let death come slow or fast

  The tie which bound the first endures the last!

  This might not have mattered if they had met again at some more stable moment in his life – if there was such a thing – but Augusta had reappeared at the height of his sudden fame when one guttering affair with Lady Oxford and the public melodrama of his relationship with Lady Caroline Lamb made him particularly vulnerable to her attractions. During the season of 1813 the two were constantly seen out together, and at some point over the next weeks or months – perhaps even days if he was telling his discarded lover, Caroline Lamb, the truth – mutual affection and an infinite capacity for self-surrender on her part and self-destruction on his had turned her from sister into lover.

  ‘Partager tous vos sentiments,’ she wrote to him in November 1813, enclosing a lock of her light brown hair, ‘Ne voir que par vos yeux’ … ‘to act only on your advice, to live only for you, that is my only desire, my plan, the only destiny that could make me happy’, and it was a sacrifice that Byron was ready to claim. ‘To soothe thy sickness,’ he had his Zuleika say,

  watch thy health,

  Partake, but never waste thy wealth …

  Do all but close thy dying eye,

  For that I could not live to try;

  For thee alone my thoughts aspire:

  More can I do, or thou require?

  It was a heart-wringing question, but the fatal danger for both Augusta and Byron was that he did require more. The vestiges of a Scottish Calvinist childhood had left him with a sense of sin and guilt that prevented him from even naming her in his journals, but that did not stop the rebel outsider in him – the Byron who had always identified with that ur-Byronic hero, Milton’s Satan – from trailing their relationship in his letters and flaunting their incest in his verse dramas, in showing her off in London or following her home to Newmarket in a suicidal show of moral and social defiance that pitted the Byrons against the world.

  It was never simply or even principally a matter of defiance – the winter idyll of January and February 1814, when brother and sister were snowed in alone at Newstead, had a magic that nothing in Byron’s life ever matched – but beyond the snowbound landscape and buried lanes of Nottinghamshire was a world that could neither be defied nor ignored. In the first flush of their affair they had boldly talked of exile together, but Augusta was a mother as well as a sister, and with a deeply troubled daughter who needed her and a child expected that might well be Byron’s, the small store of courage and even smaller store of egotism that had been hers began to gutter away.

  There seemed only one answer to her, one resort that would put them both beyond temptation and ruin – marriage – and in 1814 the birth of a daughter gave the search for a wife for Byron a new urgency. In a last gesture of defiance they had called the child Medora – the heroine of Byron’s Corsair – but even for Byron it was the gesture of a beaten man. ‘Oh! but it is worthwhile,’ he wrote to Lady Melbourne, ‘I can’t tell you why – and it is not an “Ape” [a medieval incest superstition] and if it is – that must be my fault – however I will positively reform – you must however allow – that it is utterly impossible I can ever be half as well liked elsewhere – and I have been all my life trying to make someone love me – & never got the sort I preferred before. But positively she and I will grow good – and all that.’

  There was no one Byron more admired than Lady Melbourne – ‘the best, the kindest, and the ablest female I have ever known’, he called her – and two years earlier he had made a half-hearted proposal of marriage to her niece Annabella. He had been relieved rather than disappointed at the time when she turned him down, but if he could not have Augusta it really did not seem to matter whom he married, and with her aunt’s help – it was not for nothing she was known as ‘the Spider’ – he set about courting her afresh.

  It was always said of Lady Melbourne that she only had to see a happy marriage to want to destroy it and the thought of creating misery out of nothing must have carried with it its own peculiar pleasure. There is no doubt that she was as fond of Byron as she was capable of being of any human being other than her son, but it is a moot point, as she set about smoothing difficulties and interpreting one to the other, what she would have most enjoyed – the notion of bringing together two people so diametrically ill-suited as Byron and Annabella, the voyeuristic prospect of all those years of marital comedy she could look forward to, or, perhaps most satisfying of all, the pain the marriage would cause her hated daughter-in-law Caroline Lamb.

  It was scarcely a job that was worthy of her skills, though, because if ever a woman was wanting to be convinced it was Annabella Milbanke. In the first weeks of their acquaintance back in 1812, Annabella had prided herself on her indifference to the ‘Byromania’ that was sweeping London, but eighteen months of provincial virtue and lonely moral superiority had been quite enough to bring home how much she had lost in rejecting the most brilliant match in England.

  There were subtler temptations, too, for a woman of her nature, because even as a child she had liked to imagine herself as the self-sacrificing heroine of her daydreams, and with her aunt to encourage her she now found the perfect ‘cause’ in Byron. ‘Surely the Heaven-born genius without Heavenly grace must make a Christian clasp the blessing with greater reverence & love, mingled with a sorrow as a Christian that it is not shared,’ she wrote to her old spiritual confidante Lady Gosford, intoxicated with the thought of saving a fallen angel; ‘Should it ever happen that he & I ever offer up a heartfelt worship together – I mean in a sacred spot – my worship will then be most worthy of the spirit to whom it ascends. It will glow with all the devout and grateful joy which mortal breast can contain. It is a thought too dear to be indulged – not dear for his sake, but for the sake of man, my brother man, whomever he be – & for any poor, unknown tenant of this earth I believe I should feel the same. It is not the poet – it is the immortal soul lost or saved.’

  ‘Early in our acquaintance, when I was far from supposing myself preferred by you, I studied your character,’ she was soon writing to Byron at Lady Melbourne’s prompting. ‘You were, as I con
ceived in a desolate position, surrounded by admirers who could not value you, and by friends to whom you were not dear … No longer suffer yourself to be the slave of the moment … Do good. Your powers peculiarly qualify you for performing those duties with success, and may you experience the sacred pleasure of having them dwell in your heart!’

  It is hard to know which was the more deluded, Byron in imagining he could bear her prosing cant, or Annabella in thinking she could ‘save’ him; but with Byron at least there would seem to have been something more to it than this. It is unlikely that he would have been able to forgive anyone for not being Augusta, but there was something so wantonly blind in his courting a woman who was the incarnation of everything in society he most despised, that it is as if at some level he was determined to make her and their marriage the cause for a final and irreconcilable split with the ‘tight little Island’ that was Britain.

  He might write of her in his letters and journals as his last hope of salvation, and he might even have thought he meant it, but salvation had never been very high on Byron’s list of priorities. Through the summer of 1814 she was away at her father’s estate, but on 9 September he finally brought himself to a proposal, sealing and despatching the letter ‘with the greatest haste’ before he could have second thoughts. ‘I am almost too agitated to write,’ Annabella had answered from her father’s home, Seaham Hall, on the north-east coast – as touchingly honest a letter as she ever wrote; ‘But you will understand. It would be absurd to suppress anything – I am and have long been pledged to myself to make your happiness my first object in life. If I can make you happy. I have no other consideration. I will trust to you for all I should look up to – all I can love. The fear of not realising your expectations is the only one I now feel.’

  She should probably have been more worried that she would meet his expectations but even a fraught week together at Seaham in November was not enough to open her eyes. On 24 December, Byron set off again for the north with his best man Hobhouse, and after a last Christmas with Augusta near Newmarket was married in the Milbankes’ drawing room at Seaham on 2 January 1815. ‘As soon as we got into the carriage his countenance changed to gloom and defiance’, Annabella recalled the first day of her married life, as bride and groom set off on their ‘treacle moon’ at Halnaby together; ‘He began singing in a wild manner as he usually does when angry and scarcely spoke to me till we came near Durham … On hearing the Joy-bells of Durham ringing for us, he appeared to be struck with horror, and said something very bitter about “our happiness” … He called me to account for having so long withheld my consent to marry him, signifying I should suffer for it, and had better not have married him at all.’

  It was the beginning of a nightmare that grew in Annabella’s imagination until nothing else remained, a gothic horror of threats and jibes, of loaded pistols and veiled confessions, of sneering contempt and drunken abuse, of hints of sodomy and incest, which turned their red-curtained marriage bed into a hell for them both. It is clear from her letters rather than her later recollections that these weeks were not all misery, and yet when all the gothic trappings and false memories are stripped away, there can have been no humiliation for a woman of her temperament – for the spoiled child of doting parents, for a girl who had been brought up with a complacent sense of her own worth, for a woman who had startled herself with her own sexual appetite – than to discover that the only thing demanded of her was that she should be someone else.

  And six months later, as darkness fell across Green Park and the immeasurable distance that separated her from her husband, that someone else who had haunted her honeymoon with her absence and her marriage with her presence, was still there. She had been there waiting to greet them on their journey south; she had followed them down to London. ‘You were a fool to let her come,’ Byron had warned her the day that Augusta joined them in Piccadilly, and after ten weeks of misery – ten weeks of wildly lurching fantasies of romantic forgiveness and murderous hatred, of abject self-loathing and pathetic gratitude, of drunken abuse, irrational rages and reconciliations, and all borne with the brave, public face of a happy and pregnant young bride – Annabella was going to be a fool no more. She had, at last, snapped. She had told Augusta to leave. This Sunday in mid-June, in the house that the Spider had found for them – so respectable, so solid from the outside – would be the last that the three of them would ever spend together.

  And at Samuel Rogers’s this night, if ‘Words-words’ was talking, Byron was not listening. Wordsworth family lore recorded that they argued about Bonaparte and the war, but if they did their meeting never so much as registered on Byron’s consciousness. He had other things to think about. If he had married to provoke a crisis in his life, he was about to get his wish. There were three great men destroyed in 1815, Byron liked to say: Bonaparte, Brummell and Byron. Society – that same society that Ellenborough and Garrow had called into vindictive life to punish Lady Rosebery – would have its revenge on the man it had once loved. It was only a matter of time.

  10 p.m.

  Clay Men

  The only thing worse than a battle won, Wellington said, was a battle lost, and few that night from either side would have argued with that. Only morning would reveal the full horror of the field of Waterloo, but the screams and parched groans of the wounded and dying, French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Hanoverian, heaped promiscuously on top of each other, the neighing of torn and shattered horses, the sickening thud of the farrier’s axe and the sporadic sound of a musket – mercy killing or looter – told their own terrible story.

  ‘My Dearest Mama, We are making some clay men and guns and swords for the army,’ a nine-year-old boy had written to his mother from Harrow more than twenty years before. ‘The way we do it is this: we go to the Butts and then we get some clay, and we bring it home, and then we cut it with a knife into different shapes. When we want to make a man, we cut him as like as we can, and we pinch a bit for the nose, eyes and mouth. I like school very much. It is time for marbles. All the boys have got some … The man that sells the soldiers to us thinks we are going to fight France. We have twenty dozen amongst us and fight many battles. I am making a castle, and I am your dutiful son.’

  The boy was the Hon. Frederick Ponsonby, the second son of the Earl and Countess of Bessborough, the favourite brother of Lady Caroline Lamb, and now Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Ponsonby of the 12th Light Dragoons. Over the last fifteen years the boy who had fought so many battles at Harrow had done little else but fight, and now he lay slipping in and out of consciousness in the hollow below La Haye Sainte, the trampled field around him thick with the dead, their limbs and torsos contorted into every grotesque posture imaginable, as if some malevolent or lumpen child had pinched them out of the Waterloo clay to which they were now returning and flung them down in a fit of rage or boredom.

  The 12th had formed the left of Sir John Vandeleur’s 4th Brigade to the east of the Brussels road, and at some time after two o’clock Ponsonby had led his squadrons across the Ohain road and at a gallop down the slope in support of his cousin Sir William Ponsonby’s shattered Union Brigade. On the far left of that brigade the Scots Greys had got as far up the slope as the Grande Batterie before falling back, and as the exhausted and isolated survivors struggled to make their way back to the allied positions, they found themselves helpless against the nine-foot steel-pointed lances of Jacquinot’s light cavalry sweeping down on them from the French right in a classic counter-attack.

  Jacquinot had sent in something like seven hundred lances – the one weapon at Waterloo that no one in the allied armies would ever forget – and as Ponsonby’s Light Dragoons threw themselves at a French column some thousand strong they in turn were engaged in a ferocious battle with the lancers on their flank. The French artillery had now also joined in the action, pouring grape-shot indiscriminately into friend and enemy – three of their own for every dragoon, Ponsonby reckoned – and within moments he had been disabled in both ar
ms, and was being carted helpless into the French positions by his horse when a sabre blow to the head sent him stunned to the ground. ‘Recovering,’ Ponsonby recalled, ‘I raised myself a little to look round (being, I believe, at that time in a condition to get up and run away), when a lancer passing by, exclaimed, “Tu n’es pas mort, coquin!” and struck his lance through my back; my head dropped, the blood gushed into my mouth, a difficulty of breathing came on, and I thought all was over.’

  It was the beginning of an eighteen-hour ordeal for Ponsonby, and a man on the ground of whatever rank and whichever side was fair game to everyone. ‘Not long afterwards, (it was impossible to measure time, but I must have fallen in less than ten minutes after the charge),’ he continued, ‘a Tirailleur came up to plunder me, threatening to take my life. I told him that he might search me, directing him to a small side-pocket, in which he found three dollars, being all I had; he unloosed my stock and tore open my waistcoat, then leaving me in a very uneasy posture.’

  The Tirailleur’s was merely the first visitation, and having regretfully assured the next looter that he had already been plundered, Ponsonby suddenly found an advancing French officer stooping over him. The officer told him that he was unable to help him for the moment as they were forbidden to move even their own wounded, but that the Duke of Wellington was apparently dead and allied battalions surrendering, and once the battle was won ‘every attention in his power should be shewn me. I complained of thirst, and he held his brandy bottle to my lips, directing one of his men to lay me straight on my side, and place a knapsack under my head: he then passed on into the action, and I never shall know to whose generosity I was indebted, as I conceive, for my life – of what rank he was I cannot say, he wore a blue great coat.’