Byron in Love

by Edna O'Brien

  Annabella and Augusta were both pregnant, swollen bodies which Byron loathed, comparing them with the sylph-like figure of his mistress, the actress Susan Boyce, whom he was threatening to bring to live under the same roof. In the last week of Annabella’s confinement, Byron said that he hoped that both mother and infant would die and as she went into labour he left for the theatre. Returning at a late hour he sat in the room beneath, striking the necks of soda water bottles with the butt of his pistol, the impact of the glass pinging on the ceiling as Annabella laboured in the room above. On 10 December 1815, ‘the winged creature’ that he had imagined as being a son was a daughter, and looking at her his first words were said to be ‘Oh! What an implement of torture I have acquired in you’.

  But it was for Annabella that his greatest tortures were reserved. Two days later he burst into her bedroom, dismissed the servants and locking the door, he insisted on his conjugal rights, the dark and deviant demands evidenced in sworn statements to her lawyer, speaking of his untoward abuse of her, and the subsequent legalistic warning–‘A woman has no right to complain if her husband does not beat or confine her–and you will remember that I have neither beaten nor confined you. I have never done an act that would bring me under the law–at least on this side of the water.’

  On 6 January 1816 Annabella received her ultimatum from him in a letter delivered by Augusta–‘When you are disposed to leave London it would be convenient that a day should be fixed and if possible not a very remote one for that purpose. Of my opinion upon that subject you are sufficiently in possession and of the circumstances which have led to it, as also to my plans or rather intentions for the future.’ Bowing to his authority, she replied the next morning, ‘I shall obey your wishes and fix the earliest day that circumstances will admit for leaving London.’ Very early on the morning of 15 January, with her maid and the infant Augusta Ada, the carriage already waiting, she left the house. Passing Byron’s bedroom, she noted the large mat on which his Newfoundland dog was to lie and for a moment was tempted to throw herself on it and await all hazards, but it was only for a moment.

  Surprisingly, she wrote two friendly letters on the journey to Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire, where her parents now resided, since the demise of Lord Wentworth. She hoped that he was remembering her medical prayers and injunctions and not giving himself up to what he had called ‘the abominable trade of versifying’ and refraining from the brandy. From Kirkby, she addressed him as ‘dearest duck’, saying that both her father and mother were eager to have the family party completed and that there was ‘a sulking room’ to which he could retire. Later she would say that she had written these letters on medical advice and that it was not to revive ‘diseased associations’ with him. Within twenty days she would metamorphose from accommodating wife to avenging Fury, as the quotidian nightmare of her marriage was brought home to her. Ann Rood, her maid and the future Mrs Fletcher, described her riding her horse wildly along the sands to ‘stun her sconce’ and at other times gave a picture of her rolling around the floor of her bedroom in paroxysms of grief. Meanwhile, in Piccadilly Terrace, Dr Le Mann could discover nothing like ‘settled lunacy’ in Byron, irritability yes, weeping, the shakes, spells of grandiosity, pains in the hip, pains in the loins, a torpid liver, but not settled lunacy. Augusta was ‘in an agony of nerves’, receiving irate summonses from her sposo to come home, trying to restrain Byron from drinking with Hobhouse, whom she wished dead, and most of all wishing for Annabella’s return in order to avoid the shocking revelations that were bound to ensue.

  Lady Judith wore her nightcap to dinner because the pressure of her wig was too great as she set about the rigorous interrogation of her daughter and was to hear, with hesitation, the ordeal of the thirteen months. Having consulted a young lawyer, Stephen Lushington, she hurried to London, bringing with her a memo written by Annabella, documenting some of the wrongs and grievances she had endured. From Mivart’s Hotel she enlisted the services of Sir Samuel Romilly, a barrister in Chancery, whom Byron called a monster of perfidy, and even in exile, hearing of Romilly’s suicide, hoped that in his annihilation he felt a portion of the pain he had inflicted on others. The Milbanke team of litigants would prove to be jackals in comparison with Byron’s dilatory and more anarchic crew. When Stephen Lushington suggested to Hanson that he should interrogate his client a little more stringently with regard to the several accusations against him, Hanson foolishly replied that Byron’s memories were ‘very treacherous’.

  On 29 January, a letter addressed to Byron from Sir Ralph, drafted by Lushington, was delivered to Piccadilly Terrace. Augusta, guessing its contents, returned it unopened to Annabella, saying that for once in her life she ventured to act according to her own judgement, warning of a host of evils if Annabella did not return. When Byron himself finally received the letter a few days later, he was, as Hobhouse said, ‘completely knocked up by it’: ‘Circumstances have come to my knowledge which convince me that with your opinions, it cannot tend to your happiness to continue to live with Lady Byron. I am yet more forcibly convinced that her return to you after her dismissal from your house and the treatment she experienced while in it is not consistent with her comfort, or, I regret to add, personal safety.’ Sir Ralph proposed that each party should appoint a lawyer to discuss the terms of separation. Byron fumed. Replying haughtily, he said that as to the vague and general charges against him, he was at a loss to answer them and would anyhow confine himself to the tangible fact, which was that Sir Ralph’s daughter was his wife, the mother of his child, and it was with her he would communicate.

  He spent hours in his room, the doors locked, firing his pistols intermittently and writing a slew of letters to Annabella that veered from affectionate to righteous to desperate. He admitted to his phases of gloom, to his ‘deviations from calm’, but assured her that he would not be parted from her without her express and expressed refusal, their hearts still belonged to one another and she had only to say so and like Petruchio he would ‘buckler his Kate against a million’. The twenty days since she left, had, as he said, poisoned her better feelings, but with each passing day those poisons would be magnified. Annabella was compiling her deadly narrative, which would make him regret the boast of sticking to tangible facts.

  Annabella herself was soon installed in Mivart’s Hotel, having brought her commodious memoranda to show to Stephen Lushington. When she told him of her suspicion of an incestuous relationship between Byron and Augusta, Lushington was at first too shocked to believe it, but mindful of her undeviating rectitude, he then did believe it but said it could not be raised in the separation wrangle, because she as a wife was barred from giving evidence and the charge could not be proved. He advised that they should stay narrowly within the bounds and cite ‘brutally indecent conduct and language’.

  But the ‘great gulph’ was widening and Byron began to falter. He begged her to see him and when she refused, Augusta went as his advocate to Mivart’s Hotel, finding ‘a woman pale as ashes, her voice quite altered, yet manifesting a deathlike calm’. She also saw that Annabella was resolute and would not be swayed. Byron’s friends were alarmed by the rumours that began to circulate, escalating day by day and garlanded with both salacious and criminal accusations. When Kinnaird told Hobhouse of the homosexual charges, Hobhouse quaked at the very word and in his diary denoted it with a dash.

  So it was a round of letters, pleadings, rancour, gossip, betrayals, accusations, Byron hitting on the bizarre idea that he could sue those who were estranging him from his wife and when that failed, following with a childlike plea: ‘Dearest Pip, I wish you would make it up, for I am dreadfully sick of all this’, except that Dearest Pip was on her crusade of retribution. Caroline Lamb, the ‘villainous intriguante’, asked for a meeting with Annabella, saying she had secrets to tell, that if Byron were merely menaced with them, he would tremble and capitulate. They met at night and Annabella took minutes of the conversation in which she was told that her wicked hu
sband had admitted to corrupting his page, Robert Rushton, and that he had perverted three young boys at Harrow. Worse, Caro produced copies of intimate letters that Augusta had written to Byron and that he had treacherously passed on to her. Annabella brought this new incriminating evidence to Lushington, who congratulated her on her lucky escape from the contamination of Byron.

  The tide had indeed turned, vials of wrath poured upon him from high and low, Lady Melbourne’s letter brief but merciless: ‘I cannot see you at home’ was followed with a perfunctory note to Hobhouse requesting that all her correspondence to Byron be burnt. Mary Godfrey, writing to Tom Moore, said ‘The world are loud against him and vote him a worthless profligate’ and so it was. In the Tory newspapers he was likened to Henry VIII, George III, Nero, Caligula and Epicurus. Byron teetered between outrage and self-aggrandisement, his name, which had been a knightly and noble one since his forefathers had helped to conquer England for William the Norman, was being ‘tainted’. Stephen Lushington, ever assiduous, had learnt that Susan Boyce was dismissed from Drury Lane Theatre because of having contracted syphilis from him, and another actress, Mrs Mardyn, who barely knew him, was dismissed because a cartoon had depicted them cavorting. Byron was advised by Hobhouse not to go to the theatre lest he be hissed at, nor to Parliament, yet Byron paid a visit which he knew would be regarded as abhorrent.

  It was to a glittering gathering of Lady Jersey’s, the reigning beauty and hostess of the period, that Byron went in April, bringing Augusta, eight months pregnant, with him. Disbelief at his audacity was soon followed by the scurrying feet, the shocked enamelled faces of the ladies frozen in indignation and the men refusing to shake the hand of this ‘second Caligula’. The black and blighting calumnies were no longer mere speculation, all London knew of the dawn flight of his wife of one year with her infant daughter, of the diabolical fact of his relationship with his half-sister, affirmed by Byron’s own imprudent boasting of it and worst, the repugnant crime which could not be spoken, which could scarcely be whispered, the sodomising of his wife, a sin that could not be mentioned among Christians. Only Lady Jersey and a skittish young heiress, Miss Mercer Elphinstone, spoke to Byron, Miss Elphinstone chiding him for not having married her. Byron leant upon the chimneypiece and stared back at the room, silent, adjudicating and contemptuous. Why they went remains a mystery, considering that Byron had described Lady Jersey as ‘the veriest tyrant that ever governed Fashion’s fools’, but why they stayed is at once a testament to his pride and the lonely leave-taking of the world he longed to be accepted in.

  As the wrangling and menaces between the lawyers continued, Byron knew that worst crime with which he could be charged and even likened himself to the sodomite Jacopo Rusticucci in Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell who, because of his shrewish wife, succumbed to the errors of sodomy; but he also knew that his own shrewish wife and her team of jackals, terrified of lurid public opinion, would not dare bring the charge to an open court and that for all their threats, the only expedient would be a private separation. Hobhouse, still, though somewhat comically, mindful of Byron’s reputation, advised that he get a disclaimer from Lady Byron, disavowing cruelty, systematic unremitting neglect, gross and repeated infidelities, incest and so on. Annabella did send the memorandum, but what she disavowed was her accusation of those dire deeds and not the acts themselves. As Byron waited for the separation papers to be signed, Augusta paid her last visit on Easter Sunday morning, bringing as a gift a Bible, which Byron would keep until his death. She was going home to Six Mile Bottom to give birth to her fifth child and guessing that they would not meet again, Byron wept uncontrollably and when she had gone wrote his bitterest letter ever to Annabella: ‘I have just parted from Augusta–almost the last being you had left me to part with–& the only unshattered tie of my existence–wherever I may go–and I am going far–you and I can never meet again in this world–nor in the next…if any accident occurs to me–be kind to her.’

  On 21 April the separation papers were finally signed, the carriage that had been their wedding coach he bequeathed to his wife, wishing her a more propitious journey in it, and the wedding ring, though of no lapidary value, containing the hair of a king and ancestor, he wished preserved for Ada, whom he referred to as Miss Byron. In the muddy matter of finances, he was the loser, having to agree to arbitration on Kirkby Mallory upon the death of Lady Milbanke, something he did not see as being very imminent.

  Piccadilly Terrace was like a sacked house, his library and furniture having been sold, only a few faithful servants and his animals. Nightly visits from Hobhouse and Kinnaird sometimes ended in drunken brawls, Byron challenging his friends to a duel. It is astonishing that in such frenzied circumstances, Byron should have found another perch for his heart to alight upon. He began to be besieged with letters from a young lady who signed herself Jane, Clara, Clare and eventually Claire Clairmont and whose command of English contrasted greatly with the stilted and obfuscating language of the law. How refreshing for him to be asked: ‘If a woman whose reputation has yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control her she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she had borne you for many years…could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?’ Byron did not answer at first, but when she begged to be admitted alone to meet him and in the utmost privacy, so as to gain advice on a theatrical career, he relented. Aged seventeen, somewhat buxom, she did not have the antelope looks that he was drawn towards, yet he was intrigued by her flashing intelligence and the fact that her stepsister Mary Godwin lived with Shelley, who was one of his avowed admirers. What he did not know then was that Shelley was also open to Claire’s electrical charms and had christened her his ‘little comet’.

  Her next letter to him had some of Caroline Lamb’s audacity. She suggested that they go out of town, some twelve miles or so, by stage or mail, to a quiet place where they were not known, she offering that which had been the passionate wish of her heart to give him. Whether they went out of town or met in London, ten minutes of happy passion, as she put it, would discompose the rest of her life.

  In his book The Love Affairs of Lord Byron, Francis Gribble paints a scenario of Byron hounded, ‘his household Gods shivering around him and the world training its hose of virtuous indignation upon him’. Byron put it more bluntly–‘I was unfit for England…England was unfit for me.’

  Though financially mired, he prepared for exile like a nobleman. He appropriated the name Noel from the Milbanke family, following the death of Annabella’s uncle, so that the carriage made by a Mr Baxter bore the initials NB and the coach itself was copied from one the Emperor Napoleon had seized at Cenappe. His retinue included a Swiss named Berger, Fletcher, the loyal but truculent valet, Robert Rushton, no longer his lover, now relegated to cleaning his armoury, and a private physician, Dr Polidori (‘Polly Dolly’), a putative author, who before leaving England had secured from John Murray the sum of £500, to write a diary of the forthcoming eventful journey.

  Hardly had they left Piccadilly Terrace when the bailiffs arrived, finding nothing to seize except the servants’ fripperies, some squawking birds and a scabby monkey.

  At the Ship Inn in Dover where the party, which included Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, had taken lodgings, great quantities of French wine were consumed, while they suffered a reading of an atrocious play by Polly Dolly and local ladies disguised as chambermaids came to gape at the notorious Lord. Earlier in the evening he had gone to visit the grave of a satirist, Charles Churchill, and in some funerary symbolism had lain down on it and later paid the verger a crown to have it returfed.

  Early next morning, as the vessel set out on a rough sea with a hard wind, Byron stood on deck and raised his cap in farewell to Hobhouse, who ran to the end of the pier showering blessings on the friend of such gallant and kind spirit. He would never see England again.

  In the sixteen-hour journey crossing the Channel, while his co
mpanions yielded to seasickness, Byron resolved to seize the themes that had been occupying him in those last frightful weeks. He began Canto Three of Childe Harold, of which Sir Walter Scott would say that it mirrored the genius of a powerful and ruined mind, like a shattered castle with its sorcerers and wild demons.

  When the steamer arrived at Ostend at midnight, the restraints and detractions of England behind him, a great surge of creativity upon him, he felt such an exhilaration that when they arrived at the Coeur Impérial Hotel, much to Polidori’s dismay, Byron fell ‘upon the chambermaid like a thunderbolt’.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘I breathe lead’ he said, at last recognising that by losing Augusta, his sweet sis, the only selfless love he had known, the rock of his hopes and of his life had foundered. In the lyric ‘The Castled Crag of Drachenfels’, which he sent her along with some lilies of the valley, the poet celebrates the earthly paradise that he had lived with her, lamenting its loss and imploring her soul to come to his:

  But one thing want these banks of Rhine–

  Thy gentle hand to clasp in mine!

  Later on, as he crossed the Alps on horseback and mules, the scenery beautiful as a dream, glistening peaks, crevices, storms, crashing avalanches, he enjoined her to love him, as she was beloved by him. He did have to confess to the ‘interlude’ with Claire Clairmont, asking her not to scold him, saying a foolish girl had come after him and he was fain to take a little love by way of novelty. What he did not tell her was that Claire was pregnant and had gone home to England ‘in order to people that most desolate isle’.

  Since leaving England, he had been adding verses on scraps of paper for Canto Three of Childe Harold; as he wrote to Tom Moore, he was ‘half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love inextinguishable, thoughts unutterable and the nightmare of [his] own delinquencies’. But his grief was no longer merely subjective, it was assimilated into the greater and irreparable tragedy of war. In May 1816, derouted to Brussels on account of the stately carriage breaking down, Byron paid a visit to the fields of Waterloo, with Polidori and an acquaintance from childhood, Major Pryse Lockhart Gordon.