by Edna O'Brien
While Caroline’s vengeance was in full spate, in 1812 and 1813, Lady Melbourne was still urging her son William to seek a divorce, except that he hesitated. He cannot have been too displeased at seeing Byron, a man he hated, mauled and humiliated by his wife. Years later, when he became Prime Minister, he told Queen Victoria that Byron ‘was treacherous beyond conception…he dazzled everybody and deceived them’.
Byron and Lady Oxford would both say that for those seven or eight months they lived like ‘the gods of Lucretius’, their harmony shattered only by a slight distress when Lady Oxford thought she was pregnant, jolting Lord Oxford from his pusillanimous and admirable tolerance. It turned out to be a false alarm, but a certain dimming of the passions ensued and in that mysterious way in which marriages can be redeemed, Lord and Lady Oxford, by then heavily in debt, sailed for the Continent, leaving a somewhat peeved Lord Byron behind, who confessed to Lady Melbourne that he was more ‘Carolinish’ than he could have imagined.
A new sensation he might call it, an emotional hurricane would be more precise. Augusta Leigh, Byron’s half-sister and five years his senior, has been variously depicted as scatterbrained, a moral idiot and a schemer, her childhood as fractured and peripatetic as Byron’s own. Her mother Amelia fell in love with the charismatic Mad Jack, Byron’s father, and when she told her husband, Lord Carmarthen, that she was leaving him and their three children, he is said ‘to have fainted away three times’. Soon after Augusta was born, Amelia, still infatuated with the errant Mad Jack, rose too soon from her confinement to follow him on a hunt. She caught a lingering disease and died on Augusta’s first birthday and her child was raised by her aristocratic relatives. Byron and Augusta had met only occasionally down the years and at Cambridge he had enlisted her in his vendettas against the woman he was ‘ashamed to call mother’. However, he felt an affinity for her and believed that between them there existed a mystical thread.
Now, at the zenith of his fame, Augusta is asking for his help. Her husband, Colonel George Leigh, former equerry of the Prince of Wales, a man of the turf, an habitué of the gaming tables, charming to women and overbearing to subordinates, is mired in debt. Arriving in London in April 1813, she had to leave her house at Six Mile Bottom near Newmarket in Cambridgeshire to escape the bailiffs, her three children elsewhere and her husband on an extended visit to his racing friends.
Byron, though still smarting from Lady Oxford’s defection, is pleased at the announcement of her arrival and has asked Lady Melbourne to get him a ‘she-voucher’ for Almack’s Dancing Palace in King Street, a hundred-foot assembly room to which only the privileged were admitted. Augusta is in his rooms in Bennett Street, his books and his sabres along the walls, rooms where women were rarely admitted, tired from the coach journey, somewhat dowdy, given to blushing and shy as a hare, like Byron himself. She is to stay with her cousin, the Hon. Theresa Villiers, in nearby Berkeley Street and already Byron is promising to watch over her as if she were an unmarried woman. Her presence is soon a delight, that softening influence that he always sought in women, Augusta making the short journey each day to be with him, chatty, pliant and silly with her large grey eyes and her baby talk, she seems to understand him as no woman previously had. It’s crinkum and crankum and laughter, pulling him out of his grumps, and the lame foot that he had so determinedly hidden from all others, not hidden from her and christened by them ‘the little foot’. And so it is Guss and Goose and Baby Byron and foolery and giggles, Augusta wearing the new dresses and silk shawls he has bought for her, the thrill of showing her off to the acerbic hostesses, home in his carriage at five or six in the morning, gabbling, mimicking the hoi polloi and somehow it happened, the transition from affection to something untoward. Never, he said, ‘was seduction so easy’. They are besotted, they are in love, they are confused, travelling from London to Six Mile Bottom, then back to London again, making irrational plans to go abroad. Soon there are hints to his friends, Lady Melbourne informed of the Gordian knot tied too close to his heart, and to Tom Moore he writes, ‘I am, at this moment, in a far more serious and entirely new scrape than any of the last twelvemonths, and that is saying a great deal.’
To himself he admits that this love is a mixture of good and diabolical as all passions are. He gives Colonel Leigh £1,000, cancels a passage that he was to make alone on a ship and prepares to elope with Augusta, possibly to Sicily. Augusta wishes to bring one of her daughters with her, but Byron detests children and says anyhow a child can be conceived on the spot. Confiding in her few friends, Augusta is told to recall her mother’s madness at leaving a husband for Mad Jack and precipitating her own death. Lady Melbourne, her suspicions founded, tells him, ‘If you do not retreat, you are lost forever, it is a crime for which there is no forgiveness in this world or in the next.’ The plans to travel begin to falter. There is a plague across Europe, there is their mounting trepidation and the condemnation of the world waiting to fall upon them. He resolves to go away anyhow, to cut himself off from her, a passage in any ship, Cadiz, St Petersburg, Italy, anywhere. Deeply in debt, horrified at casting up his moral accounts, he nevertheless prepares for this flight by ordering swords, guns, mahogany dressing boxes, writing desks, uniforms, umpteen pairs of nankeen trousers, scarlet officers’ coats, gold epaulettes, snuff boxes, telescopes and precious gifts for Mussulman nobles.
Lady Melbourne warns him never to return to Six Mile Bottom, he does anyhow, leaves after twenty-four hours, he and Scrope Davies that night consuming six bottles of claret and burgundy in Cambridge. He returned to London a distraught man. Bizarrely, he resumes a correspondence with Annabella Milbanke, saying that on the score of friendship he cannot trust himself as he could not help but love her. His doctor, unsurprisingly, diagnoses an awryness of mind and body, emotions out of compass, which he ascribes to a life of prodigal excesses. To vanquish his ‘demon’, which is to say the conquering of his love for Augusta, he accepts an invitation from his Cambridge friend, ‘that fool of fools’, Sir Wedderburn Webster.
TWELVE
Sir Wedderburn, that ‘glorious object for cuckoldom’, recently married to Lady Frances, daughter of the Earl of Mountnorris, invited Byron to visit them at Aston Hall, near Rotherham in Yorkshire. Augusta, at Byron’s request, has also been invited, but she declines, now finding herself pregnant and therefore queasy and also guessing that she might be a wallflower in that company. Accepting, Byron requests that he be excused from going to the races at Doncaster and also from dining with them, as he does not dine at all.
The ensuing farcical goings-on, what with misplaced passion and clandestine glances, could easily have been penned by the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whom Byron greatly admired.
Lady Frances proves to be pretty and pleasing, but in delicate health and according to Byron, ‘close to decline’. Webster, ‘jealous to jaundice’, gives orations on his wife’s beauty, kisses her hand several times at table, overtures which she receives with a noticeable lifelessness. The other guests are frightful, facetious and frivolous. Byron, despite his earlier demur, does attend dinners, Webster droning on about his wife’s virtues and high principles, comparing her morals to Christ, at which Byron, fortified with claret, laughs so exceedingly that his host is outraged and harmony only restored because as Byron said the devil himself thought it proper to do so. Daily missives are dispatched to Lady Melbourne and for secrecy’s sake the denomination of ‘Ph’ is given to Lady Frances, whose virtue must be preserved.
Webster warns Byron that ‘femme’ must not see Byron’s copies of Dante or Alfieri, which would do her infinite damage. Yet ‘femme’ is beginning to show a certain interest in Byron, evidenced by her eyes, her change of colour, a trembling hand and a devotional attitude. Meanwhile, Webster, the Othello monopolist, who in his leisure time writes pamphlets, expounds at table on what he would do to any man who gazed too long at his wife or sought to compromise her–he would exterminate such a brute. Byron concludes to Lady Melbourne that his throa
t might soon be cut, but vows to retaliate with a ‘roughing’ and with shaming Webster by citing the country wenches that he has been pursuing.
Augusta’s frantic letters go unanswered, as Byron has found another perch.
The topography of the house however is not ideal for the putative but by now more manifest lovers. In the billiards room, ‘amidst the clashing of billiard balls and the barking Nettle’, a poodle which the Websters have given Byron as a present, a declaration is made. Ph asks Byron how a woman who liked a man could inform him of it. Imprudently, as he tells Lady Melbourne and ‘in tender and tolerably turned prose’, he risks all by writing a letter. He hands it to Ph in the billiards room, when, to their consternation, ‘Marito’, whom Byron wished at the bottom of the Red Sea, enters, but the Lady with great presence of mind deposits the letter inside her gown and close to her heart. So begins another amatory correspondence under Webster’s roof, Byron also writing to Annabella Milbanke, addressing her as ‘My dear friend’. For Byron, Ph’s letters, which he leaves on the desk in his bedroom, reek too much of virtue and the soul, but then again she is a woman who takes prayers morning and night and as he tells Lady Melbourne, ‘is measured for a Bible every quarter’. Yet he can report that they have, in a sense, ‘made love’ and that Platonism is in peril. All that is needed is the privacy to consummate it. Apart from Sir Wedderburn’s vigilance, which is manic, Byron also suspects one of the other male guests of having cast himself in the Iago mode, and her sister Lady Catherine, recently jilted, seems to cling over-duly to Ph.
It is decided that the house party will repair to Newstead, the ‘melancholy mansion’ of Byron’s forebears and where he hopes the residing genii will foster his intentions. During dinner Ph announces to her husband that her sister shall share her room at Newstead, whereupon Webster thunders about his rights and maintains that none but a husband has any legal claim to divide the spouse’s pillow. Lady Frances, in a rare moment of spiritedness, whispers to Byron–‘N’importe, this is all nothing’, a remark which perplexes him greatly. At Newstead he has one of the mounted skulls filled with claret, which he downs in one go, incurring a fit which bars him from being with the ladies, convulsions followed by such motionlessness that Fletcher believes that his master is dead. But his master revives in order to resume the courtship.
The opportunity at last presents itself. It is two in the morning at Newstead and they are alone, Ph’s words so sincere, so serious, she is in a perplexity of love, she owns up to a helplessness, saying she will give herself to him but fears that she will ‘not survive the fall’. Byron is flabbergasted, he is used to women saying no while meaning yes, and this sincerity, this artlessness, this ingenuousness is too much altogether so that he wavers and in a burst of chivalry that he would come to regret, he feels he cannot take advantage of her. Each and every nuance is relayed to the scrutinous Lady Melbourne, who of course is impatient to know if he is willing to go away with Ph. The answer is Yes. To the ends of the earth if necessary, because he loves her, adding that if he had not loved her he would have been more selfish when she yielded.
When the party return to Aston Hall, the entire household is thrown into bile and ill temper, Sir Wedderburn prating at servants in front of the guests, sermonising his wife and her sister in front of the guests, and a general feeling that something catastrophic is about to occur.
What transpires is that Byron is due to leave, Frances’s heart, though broken, is cemented to his as she gives him the gift of a seal, asks that he be faithful to her and vow that they meet in the spring.
On the eve of departure, Sir Wedderburn plays a caddish card, tells his wife that Byron confessed to him that he had only come and stayed to seek the hand of Lady Catherine, the drooping sister. Ph is devastated. Byron has deceived her. There is weeping and gnashing at their last secret rendezvous in the garden. Then Webster borrows £1,000 from his befuddled houseguest. The following morning as Byron prepares to step into his carriage, Webster confounds matters by professing such a friendship that he will accompany Byron to London. On the wearisome journey, Webster assures him that he and his wife are totally in love and marriage the happiest of all possible estates.
Meanwhile, Lady Frances has begun her copious correspondence, penning letters that extend to eighteen pages, dilating on Byron’s beauty and her ‘bursting heart’. Borne out in a poem, ‘Concealed Griefs’, Lady Melbourne, who is privy to this dotage, does not doubt Ph’s sincerity, but pronounces her ‘childish and tiresome’.
Byron had not, as he believed, exorcised the love of Augusta and with his mind in such ‘a state of fermentation’ he was obliged to discharge it in rhyme. A first draft of The Bride of Abydos was completed in four days, the ‘lines strung as fast as minutes’. It recounts the passion and doomed love of Princess Zuleika and her brother Selim, Zuleika lamenting her solitary plight as she is banished to a tower. Fear of detection, as he wrote to Dr E.D. Clarke at that time, and his recent intrigue in the north, induced him to alter the consanguinity of the lovers and confine them to cousinship.
‘Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed’ Byron wrote, borrowing from, though misquoting, Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard. Though the names and the narrative were ascribed to the East, the emotional turmoil certainly belonged in Bennett Street, with traces of Augusta everywhere and his inability to break with her. Publish it he must, suggesting to John Murray that it might steal quietly into the world with The Giaour, which featured a Venetian noble, intent on the rescue of a slave girl, Leila, from the harem of her vicious pasha. Deferring to the mores of the time, while realising that it would weaken its inner voltage, Byron agreed to make a change in The Bride, so as to remove the frightful taboo of incest. Brother and sister were altered to being first cousins. Though not a poet, Augusta felt compelled to respond to it in verse and by not being a poet her reply is all the more moving. Writing in French and with a haunting poignancy, she wished to share all his feelings, to see through his eyes, to live only for him, he being the only destiny that could make her happy. In the sheet of paper she had also enclosed a curl of her chestnut hair, tied with white silk. Byron kept it all his life and on the folded paper wrote ‘La Chevelure of the one I most loved’. Her signature ended with the branches of a cross, the mathematical symbol confirming the secret of their love, and Byron had two seals made for a brooch that they would wear.
Within three months the love for Lady Frances had waned and hearing that he was with his sister, she envied that ‘happy happy woman’ and hoped that Augusta would not despise her. In vain and on bended knees she asked for her letters to be returned, but the request was ignored. He had tired of her, her constancy and her naiveté. Her tedious use of aimer merely confirmed for him the blindness of nature.
THIRTEEN
In January 1814 the River Trent was frozen, the Great North Road heaped with snowdrifts as Byron’s carriage wended its perilous way north, to Newstead Abbey. Augusta, ‘big with bairn’, was with him and it would be her first visit to their ancestral home. The four weeks they would spend there constituted a honeymoon for them both, Byron saying, ‘We never yawn or disagree, and laugh more than is suitable to so solid a mansion.’ The snow swirled outside, the footpaths and oak trees were thick with it, the oak trees weighed down and Joe Murray kept fires crackling in rooms, corridors and bedrooms. The coal, as Byron reported, was excellent, the wine cellar was full and his head emptied of all his London cares.
In his bulletins to Lady Melbourne, which were half swagger and half confession, he admitted that the kind of feeling which had lately absorbed him had ‘a mixture of the terrible which renders all passion insipid to a degree’. He was speaking, or rather intimating, his love for his sister, ‘the one soft breast he knew’. It was one part innocence because of their missed companionship in childhood, but it was also damnation. Any error Augusta might have committed was his fault entirely, Augusta was not aware of her peril until it was too late.
Those weeks in which Augusta was
wife and sister to him were the happiest of his life. She sympathised with his black moods and the violent arc of his feelings, saw the loaded pistols kept beside his bed and witnessed the nightmares in which he cried out, sometimes beset by a ghost. She ministered to him, loved him and put a napkin between his teeth because he ground them so in his sleep. In short, she was not afraid of him.
The Corsair, which Mr Murray had just published, was an immediate success and Byron once again seen as a celebrity. It was a Turkish tale ‘scribbled’ during his disquietude while he believed himself to be in love with both Lady Frances and Augusta. Byron used a motto from Tasso to describe Conrad the Pirate–‘Within him his thoughts cannot sleep.’ A man of mystery and loneliness, he is espoused to Medora, the fair Penelope waiting in her tower, and Gulnare, the dark bewitching Circe, imprisoned in a harem by Pacha Seyd. Conrad manages to rescue Gulnare, whereupon she falls madly in love with him and murders her Pacha. He cannot escape the fact that lovers become murderers, something true for both men and women, he causing Medora to die of a broken heart, and Gulnare in her love-frenzy, the murderer of Seyd. The scenario of two women fighting for the love of a man would be re-enacted in Byron’s life, between Augusta and Annabella Milbanke, Byron himself pitched into a similar hideous ‘sepulchre’ as Conrad was, doomed to a wandering life.
The predictable indignation from the Tory press was ‘vehement and unceasing loud’, Conrad, the alter ego of Byron, called an infidel and a devil was likened to Richard III, wringing from him the crisp rejoinder that ‘lame animals cover best’. But these cavils and calumnies were mitigated by a rapturous letter from John Murray: ‘I believe I have now sold 13,000 Copies, a thing perfectly unprecedented & the more grateful to me too as every buyer returns with looks of satisfaction & expressions of delight.’ Princess Charlotte, he added, had devoured it twice in the course of the day, but its fame spread beyond royal circles and there was not a man in the street ‘who [had] not read or heard-read The Corsair’. Some passages, as Murray noted, were ‘written in gold’, a gold that Robert Dallas was still the lucky recipient of.