by Edna O'Brien
Byron had applied to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a special licence, so as to be married anywhere, anytime and without fuss. Bridegroom and his best man Hobhouse set out on Christmas Eve, Hobhouse dispatched to Cambridge while Byron made a detour to Six Mile Bottom, for his last rending hours with Augusta, thwarted somewhat at finding that Colonel Leigh was actually at home. On Christmas Day, with the thermometer way below freezing, he writes to Annabella wishing her ‘much merriment and mince pye’. It was Augusta who had to persuade him to set out on Boxing Day, Hobhouse noting that never was lover in less haste.
When the two men arrive at Seaham late on 30 December the mood is one of gloom and disquiet. Lady Judith has taken to her bed and Annabella, as Hobhouse saw, ‘so doatingly fond’ of Byron, she threw her arms around him and burst into tears. He also noted that she was dowdy-looking in her long high dress, but that ‘her feet and ankles [were] excellent’. Next day the papers were signed, a mock marriage was performed, with Hobhouse standing in for Annabella, to familiarise the clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Noel, Lord Wentworth’s illegitimate son, with the proper procedure. The evening dinner was conducted with a strained merriment.
On the morning of 2 January 1815, Byron in full dress paced the garden, the Reverend Noel, clerically clothed, sat silent at the breakfast table, Lady Judith so jittery she could not pour tea. Kneelers borrowed from the church were set down in the alcove of the bay window in the first-floor drawing room as the 22-year-old bride was being dressed by Mrs Clermont. Just before eleven o’clock, Annabella descended the stairs on her father’s arm, wearing a white muslin gown trimmed with lace and a muslin jacket. Reciting the wedding vows, Annabella seemed to Hobhouse to be firm as a rock, Byron, as he later claimed, ‘saw nothing, heard nothing’ and while saying the vows, albeit stumblingly, a mist seemed to float before his eyes and he recalled his first sweetheart Mary Chaworth and their parting in a room at Annesley.
Afterwards, Lady Judith gave her son-in-law a tepid kiss, then to his annoyance there was a rowdy carillon of bells from the nearby Saxon church, muskets were fired and local miners in pantaloons enacted a version of a sword dance in which the fool figure was beheaded. Hobhouse presented Annabella with a set of Byron’s poems bound in Moroccan leather, wishing her many years of happiness. With a naïveté, she said if she were not happy it would be her own fault. Then of his friend Byron, Hobhouse took ‘a melancholy leave’.
Melancholy and worse characterised the forty-mile journey to Halnaby, another of the Milbanke houses, in Yorkshire, which Sir Ralph had loaned them for their honeymoon. Snow and rain outside and inside the carriage an eruption. Bare of all reason and even sanity, Byron embarked on a singing spree, then turned on her, saying he was a devil and that he would prove it, that he had committed crimes which she, for all her catechising, could not redeem him of and that she would pay for the insult of having refused him two years earlier. Moreover, her dowry was a pittance. At Durham, as joy bells rang out to honour their passing, the execration grew worse, presaging the three bizarre, unhinging weeks that in his blither moments he referred to as ‘the treacle moon’.
Their arrival has the suspense and thrall of gothic fiction–a sprawling mansion, a fall of snow, servants holding lit tapers, noting that the bride looked listless and frightened and that her husband did not help her down from the carriage. And so began the most public marriage of any poet, so infamous in its time that it was lampooned in John Bull magazine and the subject of endless scrutiny, helped by the confessions of Byron himself in his Memoirs, as Tom Moore recalled it, and by Lady Byron’s numerous and increasingly incriminating testaments to her lawyers and afterwards for her own ‘Histoire’. Though professing to Moore a reluctance to ‘profane the chaste mysteries of the Hymen’, Byron, according to Moore, ‘had Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner’.
His tenets regarding the sleeping arrangements were categoric. Enquiring if she meant to sleep with him, he claimed to have an aversion to sleeping with any woman, but that she could if she wished, one animal being the same as the next, provided it was young. She who in her charter for a suitable husband had recoiled from insanity was to have her fill of it. Their wedding night has its literary correlation in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a crimson curtain catching fire, a hallucinating bridegroom believing he was in hell, then pacing the long ghostly gallery with his loaded pistols.
By morning Annabella would say that ‘the deadliest chill’ had fallen upon her heart. By morning also she was to conceive of her first suspicion of Augusta, ‘transient as lightning, but no less blasting’. Meeting her in the library, Byron waved a letter from Augusta in which she had addressed him as ‘Dearest first and best of all human beings’. Augusta described being clairvoyantly at one with his agitation at the precise moment that the marriage vows were exchanged in Seaham, likening it to a sea trembling when the earth quakes. The letter, as Annabella noted, affected him strangely and sent him ‘into a kind of fierce and exulting transport’. Augusta’s spectre stalked Halnaby and breaking down in front of her maid Mrs Minns, Annabella said that she feared something dreadful had formerly happened between brother and sister. There would be many portents, such as a chance remark of hers on Dryden’s Don Sebastian, the story of a sinning brother and sister, sending him into a violent rage as he took up his dagger, which was on the table next to his loaded pistols, and disappearing to the gallery that adjoined his bedroom. In those black moods he hinted at unspeakable crimes that preyed upon him, saying he already had fathered two natural children and that they were fools to have married. He then set about her re-education, telling her that right and wrong were merely conventional phrases. Morality was one thing in Constantinople and quite another in Durham or London. Yet his letters to the outside world were filled with his customary banter; to Lady Melbourne, not ‘waxing confidential’ any more, he said that Bell and he got on extremely well and so far she had not bored him.
His moods would run the whole gamut from taunts to savagery, to hallucination and even to momentary contriteness when he said she should have a softer pillow than his heart to rest on, and she retaliating by asking whose heart would break first, his or hers. She describes the tears that would suffuse his eyes, then freezing there and giving the appearance of icy hardness. Soon she is writing to Augusta, her one solace, craven letters, asking that this sister-in-law be ‘her only friend’ and the crooked reply, ‘Oh yes I will indeed be your only friend.’ Augusta’s letters to her ‘dearest sis’ are masterpieces of ambivalence. Annabella is deemed the most sagacious person to have discovered the art of bringing B back to good humour and giggles and when Annabella, in glaring contradiction to her reserved nature, admits to her tireless enthusiasm for sex, even when menstruating, Augusta retaliates with a rapier thrust–‘I’m glad B’s spirit does not decrease with the moon. I rather suspect he rejoices at the discovery of your ruling passion for mischiefs in private.’ Smarting at receiving no ‘scribbles’ from Byron himself, she justifies it by listing his many occupations, walking, dining and playing at drafts etc., while warning Annabella to keep him away from the brandy bottle, an injunction that was in vain.
Before returning to London, Byron decided he would visit Six Mile Bottom, encouraging Bell to stay with her parents or go on to London, something she bridled at, what with her suspicions aroused.
When she crossed the threshold of that ‘most inconvenient dwelling’, she was to step into a sexual labyrinth. Augusta came from upstairs, her ringlets carefully coiled, and while in her letters sisterly sentiment had brimmed over, she shook Annabella’s hand ‘in a manner sedate and guarded’, then embraced Byron, who was in great perturbation. With Colonel Leigh being absent, the couple were bequeathed the marital bedroom!
‘We can amuse ourselves without you, my charmer’ Annabella was told after supper, as Byron dispatched her to bed and so initiated the hideous game in which she would lie awake each night listening to their laughter in the room below and then hours later, his ‘terrible s
tep’ as he arrived to bed drunk, swearing at Fletcher, who had the job of undressing him, then taunting her, ‘Now I have her, you will find I can do without you as well in all ways.’
The fifteen days that followed were enough to send any young woman, let alone a bride who had scarcely left the cocoon of her family, into the throes of hysteria, but Annabella kept her composure, this self-command driving Byron to worse furies. In the evenings, flush with brandy, he conducted his cruel pantomimes, his ‘facon de Parler’ as Augusta preferred to call them. She would be ordered to read aloud copies of the letters he had sent her, charting his courtship of Annabella, hollow and treacherous epistles, as they now proved to be. Yet Guss complied because Goose must not be driven to a tantrum or worse, a silent rage in which he might even stab himself. Lying on the sofa he insisted that both women embrace him so that he could then, in the grossest language, compare their ardour. He wrote to Hobhouse that he was ‘working both women well’, his own perfidy not dilated upon, except to add that it was tumblers of brandy at night and magnesia in the morning.
There were no confrontations, no showdowns, each playing her or his part in this macabre ritual. Just as Byron had lied to himself during the courtship, a lie that he was now exacting vengeance for, Annabella would construct her own edifice of lies. She was present, as she would later testify in Beeby’s shorthand to her father’s lawyers, when Byron rose at dawn and went across to Augusta’s room, she was made barbarously aware of Augusta refusing him during her menstruation, and Byron alluding to it with ‘So you wouldn’t, Guss’ and returning to make gross professions of desire to her. Yet she never questioned. She saw that brother and sister brazenly wore identical gold brooches with locks of their hair and crosses that signified consummation, but she rationalised, equivocated, convinced herself that Augusta was a victim just as she herself was, that both were instruments of his brutishness. She even told herself that although Augusta submitted to his affections, ‘she never appeared gratified by them’. On their walks together Augusta, however, gave her no encouragement, Byron perhaps did not love her, but with perseverance and habit, to which he was susceptible, she might win over his affections.
The presence of children did not seem to intrude at all on the various and infernal parlour games, but according to Ethel Mayne, Annabella’s biographer, Byron did once point to Medora and say ‘You know that is my child’, then went on to calculate the time of Colonel Leigh’s absence from the family home, proving that it could not be the husband’s.
It was Augusta, ultimately, who instigated their departure, Byron reluctant to leave and as his wife noted, waving his handkerchief passionately, straining for a last glimpse; then sinking down beside her, he asked her what she thought of the other A.
To Tom Moore he was proud to announce that Bell was showing ‘gestatery symptoms’ but for her part, Annabella in her commonplace book wrote, ‘My heart is withered away, so that I forget my bread.’
SIXTEEN
When Byron and Annabella moved into 13 Piccadilly Terrace, a house rented from the Duchess of Devonshire, Byron’s two burning objectives were deliverance from that marriage and funds to go abroad. In a letter to Hobhouse while on his honeymoon, appealing to him to ‘fix’ on the useless Mr Hanson, Byron outlined his financial ruin–
Newstead must be sold without delay–and even at a loss…my debts can hardly be less than thirty thousand–there is six thousand charged to a Mr Sawbridge–a thousand to Mrs Byron at Nottingham–a Jew debt of which the interest must be more than the principal–another Jew debt…a good deal of tradesmen…a loan of sixteen hundred pounds to Hodgson–a thousand pounds to ‘bold Webster’…three thousand to George Leigh…necessities–luxuries–fooleries and money to whores and fiddlers.
Annabella’s dowry proved more theoretical than actual, as the main inheritance would come only at the death of her uncle Lord Wentworth, but Byron feared the said Baronet was eternal, the Viscount was immortal and both men were cutting a second set of teeth. The thousand pounds per year, £700 for him and £300 for her towards her pin money, merely covered the rent. Then there were horses, a carriage and coachman, numerous servants, drinking, gaming and his box at Drury Lane Theatre to which Annabella was not invited. He had begun to dress completely in black, to emphasise both his ravaged spirit and the nobility of his lineage. Meeting with Walter Scott in John Murray’s office, the older author was struck by Byron’s noble character and melancholy vein. The two men swapped gifts, though the dagger, mounted on gold, which Scott gave him, was hardly ideal for a man who kept a sword and loaded pistols beside his bed, Fletcher having the onerous task of ensuring that they were not used. Byron’s return gift to Scott was a large funerary urn in silver, filled with bones and bearing an inscription from Juvenal.
For a while, all the outside niceties were maintained. Annabella, in her white satin, paid her ‘wedding visits’, was a guest at Queen Charlotte’s ‘teas’ and shown off to his influential friends, politicians, poets and bankers. To her father she wrote arch descriptions of their visits, the salmon not quite fresh, the sheep’s wool still on the mutton fat, amiability masking the ‘varnish of vice’.
His letters to friends closed with a customary flourish–‘Lady Byron is very well and desires her compliments…’–but indoors a gothic nightmare was unfolding, her air of virtue, her sense of infallibility, her incarnate conscience were driving him mad and eventually, as he would tell Hobhouse, he felt himself to be ‘bereaved of reason’. What servants would witness in Piccadilly Terrace hardly befitted the actions of a peer, Byron wrecking furniture, grinding his gold watch to pieces, then flinging it in the ashes, determined to spread misery on all those around him, but especially on his wife.
Augusta’s visit in April, which he warned Annabella against, exacerbated the tensions. Intimacy, baby talk and late-night canoodling between brother and sister were resumed and in Annabella’s graphic account of it one wishes that she had taken the path of a poet and not been given to liturgical epistles–‘I used to lay awake watching for that footstep by which my hopes and fears were decided…it was always expressive of the mood that had the ascendancy. It was either the stride of passion, which seemed to print its traces on the ground with terrific energy’, or the animal spirits and laughter that confirmed his satisfaction. Pacing in the room above and charged by ‘the continual excitement of horrible ideas’, the thought crossed her mind to pick up one of Byron’s daggers and plunge it through her rival’s heart. After a stay of two months, Augusta was asked to leave.
The ‘sweets and sours’ of married life was how she had described things in the early and tolerable months, but as things worsened she had to suppress her jealousy and throw herself at the mercy of Augusta, ‘her only friend’, asking how long more she could bear it. Bailiffs had installed themselves in the downstairs hall, poised to repossess their furniture, Byron’s library and the very beds they slept on. According to Annabella, one of the bailiffs became ‘the subject of her husband’s romance’, upon learning that he had camped in the house of Richard Brinsley Sheridan for an entire year. Annabella wrote wretchedly to her father about their distressing circumstances, but Sir Ralph wrote back to say he could not raise mortgages on his properties and had narrowly missed jail himself. The hue of opulence was going, as was the hue of her hopes. In a poem that she wrote at that time, she describes her husband’s tread at which she used to rejoice now filling her with mortal fear.
Yet to others, at that very same time, Byron could summon all his old gallantry and generosity of spirit. When Mr Murray learnt that Byron was obliged to sell his library because of his increased expenses and the new mode of his life, he sent a letter with an enclosure of £1,500 and the assurance that another sum of that same amount should be at his service in a few weeks. Byron replied almost immediately–
I return your bills not accepted, but certain not unhonoured. Your present offer is a favour which I would accept from you, if I accepted such from any man. Had such been my
intention, I can assure you I would have asked you fairly, and as freely as you would give; and I cannot say more of my confidence or your conduct.
The circumstances which induce me to part with my books, though sufficiently, are not immediately pressing. I have made up my mind to them and there’s an end.
Had I been disposed to trespass on your kindness in this way, it would have been before now, but I am not sorry to have an opportunity of declining it, as it sets my opinion of you, and indeed of human nature, in a different light from that in which I have been accustomed to consider it.
But for Annabella the situation was becoming more hideous and she told herself that his treatment of her was due to his being temporarily mad. She would consult medical journals to diagnose his condition and secretly met with Dr Baillie, who had known Byron since his Harrow days, to talk of any earlier telling symptoms. Subsequently she consulted her own physician, Francis Le Mann, and with her governess Mrs Clermont, whom Byron loathed, watched for signs of his escalating eccentricities. When they saw that he took to lowering his head, then gazing from under his eyebrows, they saw it as resembling the King’s caprices before his descent into madness.
It was said of Byron that he had never let imagination usurp the place of reason, but in those few months before her accouchement his reason failed him, his hatred of Annabella spiralling, describing her as ‘a nice little sullen nucleus of concentrated savageness’. The situation became so unbearable that she invited Augusta to be with her, deciding now that he loved and hated them together. The end of the marriage might in Goethe’s estimate be ‘poetical and in keeping with Byron’s genius’, but to those in Piccadilly Terrace it was inexorable nightmare; the servants including Fletcher in terror and Augusta no longer able to restrain him, had to ask their cousin Captain George Byron to come as their protector.