He disembarked at the port of Sheerness, not the most poetic of landscapes then or now, and a portent of what lay in wait for him in London: debts, homophobia and death. In spite of some promising
offers Newstead remained unsold, the Nottinghamshire mines were still in a legal quagmire and his debts were stubbornly unresolved - and in fact worsened by the Grand Tour. In the meantime London had become gripped by a fashion for homophobia. While homosexuality in general and sodomy in particular were still illegal, the degree of enforcement rose and fell to no particular rhythm. When he had left two years earlier there was some degree of tolerance in the air, but now the tide had swung and men were being imprisoned and pilloried with excrement. His friends were quick to point out the dangers, Hobhouse in particular warning him of the changed climate and off loose talk or explicit written references to what Hobhouse himself had seen on the Grand Tour.
But if debts could be imagined away and homophobia avoided by discretion and bisexuality, it was the four deaths which brought him back to the realities of life in England after the frippery of the East. The first to go was his mother, who died after his arrival at Sheerness but before he could see her again at Newstead. She was only 46, but overweight and overanxious. Although, like his father, he got on best with his mother from afar, her death hit him hard. He made the arrangements for a lavish - and of course unaffordable - funeral, which he himself could not bear to attend. Then two old friends died: from the Harrow days John Wingfield and, worse, his witty and articulate Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews, drowned slowly in distressing circumstances. But emotionally the worst loss was John Edleston, the chorister with whom he fell in passionate love at Cambridge, and who was always to remain as Byron’s ideal of boyish beauty and desire.
Back in London his interests were poetic and politic. His new publisher, John Murray, was enthralled by Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage and was preparing the presses. Meanwhile Byron had taken up the cause of the Nottinghamshire frame breakers in their fight against new machinery for his maiden speech in the House of Lords. He spoke lucidly for their plight and against the Tories’ plan for dealing with that plight: ‘I have traversed the seat of war in the peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country. How will you carry the Bill into effect? Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows?’ The Bill was defeated by one vote, in Byron’s mind his vote.
Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage was a sensational success across Europe from the first edition, and the success snowballed with each reprint in each translation. Readers were transported to exotic places, to balmy climes and endless days, to dangerous foes and daring deeds, and came to feel that they too were there with Childe Harold. The Spenserian stanzas were ideally suited to the long narrative: the stanzas easy on the eye, the rhymes and rhythms easy on the ear, and each stanza reading like a paragraph in a novel. The secret of the epic was its accessibility to readers sophisticated and less so, the very beauty of the language, the lilting emotions it stirred, the longing for a life that would never be lived and the daring for a passion that would never be felt. Women in particular responded to its magnetic hints of the erotic and to the tastes of the exotic, the romance of the settings, the vulnerability of the players and the tenderness of the very words. The autobiographical nature of the poem was clear. Who was Childe Harold? Who is Lord Byron? Soon the fan mail started, and Byron pronounced: ‘I awoke and found myself famous.’
Famous indeed. The toast and the talk of the town. The international success of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage and the fame attached to its success immediately propelled Byron to the highest reaches, the most exclusive salons, of London’s political and cultural society. The deaths and homophobia were to be put aside, and as if to show he was alive and heterosexual Byron embarked on a giddying series of affairs and dalliances and flirtations and courtships and conquests. Unfortunately when it mattered most he chose unwisely - could hardly have chosen less wisely - for among the most prominent of these were three totally disastrous relationships, with Lady Caroline Lamb, with his half- sister Augusta Leigh and with Annabella Milbanke, who became Lady Byron.
The centre of intrigue was Melbourne House in Whitehall, the headquarters of the Whig hierarchy. Lady Melbourne was forty years his elder and had, in the vernacular, been around the block a few times. A born survivor, she had reinvented herself many times from courtisane to femme fatale to confidante to grande dame. She was just too late to have been the inspiration for Madame de Merteuil in the recently published Les Liaisons Dangereuses, but could easily have been her. She took to Byron immediately, seeing in him an endless source of scheming, scandal and intrigue. He took to her immediately too, seeing in her humour, wise counsel and discretion - the perfect preceptress. Their uninhibited letters still remain the best biography of his ‘years of revellery’, and reveal a lot of his character in those days. He had been propelled by his fame into a world which his minor title would not alone have admitted him. He was by nature shy with strangers and always self-conscious of his lameness. Lady Melbourne allayed his doubts and bolstered him and guided him. At his first visit to Melbourne House he met Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law, the fateful Lady Caroline Lamb, Caroline’s mother Lady Blessington- another piece of work in her own right - and Caroline’s husband’s cousin, the fatal Anne Isabella - Annabella - Milbanke, the future Lady Byron. If only he had known then what a vipers’ nest he had just fallen into he might well have turned on his heel, but the reality was that his fate, of which he was never in control, made him fall in even faster.
His life in London soon became a parody of an Oscar Wilde parody of a William Congreve restoration comedy. With Lady Melbourne directing the cast and extras he was soon partying at Lady Holland’s, Lady Westmoreland’s, Lady Cowper’s and Lady Davy’s; flirting with Lady Rancliffe, Lady Jersey and Lady Forbes; cavorting with the Princess of Wales and Princess Caroline of Brunswick; Guinevere-ing with Lady Wedderburn-Webster and when not proposing to her sister Lady Annesley faux-proposing to Lady Leveson-Gower; scandalising with Lady Shelley; overnighting with Lady Heathcote; warding off Lady Falkland; coinciding with Lady Rosebury; nestling with Lady Holland and nesting - in several trees - with the redoubtable Lady Oxford. Some good came of it: at Lady Sitwell’s he met his stunning cousin-in-law Anne Wilmot, and the next morning, according to legend with a pounding hangover, he remembered her through the haze and wrote the three verses which start:
She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
As the most eligible bachelor in London society in that summer of 1812 Byron could have chosen any one of these socially suitable and well financed, and mostly virginal, women to court and marry, but being Byron he chose a train crash instead. Lady Caroline Lamb was - where shall we start? - emotionally neurotic, trouble with a capital T. But then, albeit to a less violent extent, so was he. They were pulled at each other like a collision, and he found her as she found him: passionate, erratic, unstable, irascible, treacherous, capricious, bisexual, jealous, obsessive, compulsive and possessive. She famously wrote after their first meeting that he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’; he could with even more justification have written the same about her. She also presented more practical difficulties: she was married, and married well to a future prime minister, frequented the best salons in London, was five years older than Byron, and totally, unabashedly, ostentatiously indiscreet. She wrote of Byron, with some prescience, a few days after they met, ‘that beautiful pale
face is my fate.’
Their open affair scandalised London, and even Lady Melbourne, and Hobhouse, were soon trying to backpedal them. But they were inseparable: in private exchanging bloodied pubic hairs, cross dressing, Byron (unwisely in retrospect) confessing his homosexual exploits East, and she role playing accordingly; in public attending balls and receptions as one, and as one shouldn’t. But soon even Byron felt their relationship spiralling out of control as she shifted from obsession to jealousy, and then from jealousy to treachery, and treachery to blackmail and forgery. She had always been unhinged, but now as he was hinting at a tactful separation the door had come off altogether. Her infatuation and cold revenge would carry right through to his own marriage separation and beyond.
Having survived, just, the emotional ballistic missile known as Caroline, Byron then found himself reunited with his half-sister Augusta. They had not seen each other for four years, since before the Grand Tour, and had hardly known each other as children. She was five years older, married to her rather dull army cousin, and often alone. They hit it off immediately, and spent hours and days and weeks and months talking and laughing about being a Byron. With Augusta, as with no other woman before or after, he was totally relaxed. She knew exactly how to handle his moods, mostly by laughing them off, which in turn caused him to laugh at his own absurdities too. He wrote to Hobhouse: ‘We never yawn or disagree; and laugh much more than is suitable to so solid a mansion [Newstead]; and the family shyness makes us more amusing companions to each other than we could be to anyone else.’ He had found his soul mate, and she had found hers.
They became closer and closer, living in increasingly idyllic isolation, and soon the hermits were forgetting the taboos of sibling celibacy and drifting inexorably into incest. The family had some form on this front as their father ‘Mad Jack’ had had an incestuous relationship with his sister Frances, herself the mother to Augusta’s cousin-husband. One could say it was a family affair.
For Byron this was a respite of happiness and productivity. The Giaour had been published in editions of increasing length, and work continued apace on his new poem The Corsair. He would, as was his habit when composing, work well into the night, and brandy to hand often finished 200 lines before retiring at first light. It seemed that Newstead had at last been sold, even as they were living in it, and for the first time he would be free of debt. His plans now had shifted from a career in politics to more travel abroad, this time with Augusta, and he proceeded to outfit them for the journey, ordering swords, guns, desks, boxes, uniforms, saddles, beds and all the accoutrements of the famous Byron baggage train. He drew up plans for a replica of Napoleon’s carriage. But then the Newstead sale fell through, and now faced with even higher debts he had to give up plans for the new journey eastwards.
Although Byron and Augusta were not themselves deterred by the taboo of incest, as suspicion spread and rumours crept others were less circumspect. It was his mentor Lady Melbourne - and again Hobhouse, his other soul mate, now back from military duty abroad and of whom Byron wrote at the time ‘he is my best friend, the most lively, and a man of most sterling talents extant’ - who pulled them back from the brink. We shall never know, but the deduction from timing and the decoding of letters to Lady Melbourne would lead one to suspect that Augusta’s daughter Medora (born on 15 April 1814) was also Byron’s.
Augusta herself was by now becoming aware of the whispering campaign and, determined to avoid a scandal, decided that the best course of action would be for Byron to marry. Lady Melbourne agreed, with the additional thought of heading off Caroline who had by now re-appeared from abroad and was circling above like a buzzard ready to swoop. Together Lady Melbourne and Augusta suggested to Byron not any of the eminently suitably ladies, most Ladies, with whom he had been disporting before the Caroline adventure, but Lady Melbourne’s niece Annabella Milbanke. They had met a year before and exchanged pleasantries, and the routine light flirtation, but nothing more. They could hardly have been more different, but Byron did remember her with amusement and wrote to Lady Melbourne that he was ‘intrigued by the amiable mathematician. I thank you again for your efforts with the Princess of Parallelograms, who has puzzled you more than the Hypotenuse. Her proceedings are quite rectangular, or rather we are two parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side, never to meet.’ Well, most of that was true, except the part that mattered - the last three words.
In Caroline he had escaped from the obsession of the mostunsuitable woman in London with whom to have an affair; he now rebounded by pursuing Annabella, the most unsuitable woman in England with whom to tie the knot. Whereas Caroline bore her brain in her heart, Annabella hid her heart in her brain, and hid it very well indeed.
What on earth he thought he was doing it is hard to imagine; it was not after all that he lacked experience in conjugal relationships or judgement of others’ characters. Three months before proposing he had described her as ‘the most prudish and correct person I know’, a description he would not expect anyone to bestow on him. It was not even as though she was easy to woo, living as she did in Seaham on the far north-east coast of England, a mighty trek from London today and a serious undertaking of discomfort and risk back then. She did not even have much of a fortune, being merely comfortably off when nothing less was commonplace. Nevertheless even though he had not seen her for a year he proposed to her, by letter, and she accepted but only at the second time of asking. To pursue her at all was the biggest error of judgement he ever made, and not to accept the first rejection the second biggest. If creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, here was the proof. When Caroline heard of their engagement she commented that ‘he would never be able to pull with a woman who went to church regularly, understood statistics and had a bad figure.’
Annabella was not in herself a bad person, not at all, but she had a personality that was prissy and pious and prickly and prim, an overconfidence in the rightness of her deductions and an unwavering belief that the deductions must be correct because they were hers. She would brook no dissent in her rigid beliefs, her rights and her wrongs. She would have made the ideal wife of the local clergyman, just as she was to make a disastrous wife to a poet prone to mood swings, atheism and alcohol.
It is possible that he was attracted to her for the very reason she was attracted to him; the chance to bring about the other’s redemption, or at least reformation. Where she felt she was different from the other women in his life was that she, and only she, could save him from himself. Byron later mused that ‘She married me from vanity, and the hope of reforming and fixing me.’ There’s an inbuilt part of the feminine psyche that wants to reform the rake. From Byron’s view he may have felt the opposite needed to be applied; not exactly corrupting her, but at least liberating her from herself. She was after all the only woman playing hard to get - not that she was playing the game seductively or with wiles, but really was hard at heart and hard to get. Perhaps Byron mistook this as demanding a challenge from himself.
Byron found the courtship uncomfortable. It was not just the physical discomfort of visiting her so far away, but also the behavioural discomfort of playing the role of fiancé to an innocent and inexperienced girl. All his other lovers had been either married, or male, or clandestine, or offshore, or servants or spoke no English. Annabella, a young twenty-two, had not lived at all except through her books, and these were not fiction or poetry but textbooks and bibles.
Yet for better or worse, richer or poorer, in good health and bad, on 2 January 1815 marry they did. Hobhouse was the best man, and noted that ‘never was a lover in less haste’ as they went north for the marriage, ‘the bridegroom more and more less impatient’. At the vow ’Byron looked at me with a small grimace’. Hobhouse felt he had ’buried a friend.’
The honeymoon, or ‘treacle moon’ as Byron described it, was a disaster, but merely set the scene for what was to follow. On the wedding night, Byron awok
e, saw a candle burning on the other side of the scarlet bed-curtains, and exclaimed, ‘Good God! I am fairly in Hades, with Proserpina by my side!’ At least her feelings would not have been hurt; she would have had no idea to what he was referring.
Clearly Byron was far from faultless. She loved him, wanted to love him as she had read she should be loving him, and so when he was kind she over loved him. But he chose not to control his moods and when he was cruel, as was often, she was correspondingly devastated. She was after all a closeted, impressionable and highly inexperienced young girl and one whom Byron could have moulded any way he liked. But for all her brain power she was really still just a child in the world, and one with no idea how to handle a man, especially one who frequently behaved like a spoiled child himself. Her mind was literal, whereas he dealt in irony as a common currency. When he threw words around as he did she took each one literally and instead of laughing them off as the playthings they were, as Augusta would have done, she analysed every supposed nuance until her nascent inferiority complex had bloomed into a tearful neurosis.
They say no man is a hero to his valet. Fletcher, who had seen his master with dozens of women in hundreds of circumstances in all manner of moods, observed: ‘It is very odd, but I never knew a lady not manage my Lord, except my Lady.’ Caroline’s mother, Lady Blessington, who had also come to know him well agreed: ‘he gives the idea of being the man the most easily managed of any I ever saw; I wish Lady Byron had discovered the means.’
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