In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  Diligently searching – the request had come from her niece – for a rentable London property large enough to suit Byron’s extravagant taste (but cheap enough to satisfy his prudent wife), Lady Melbourne took comfort from Byron’s announcement in this same letter of 2 February 1815 that – moon apart – ‘Bell & I are as lunatic as heretofore – she does as she likes – and don’t bore me . . .’ Familiar with Lord Byron’s capricious moods, Elizabeth Melbourne remained cautiously optimistic. Governing him, and doing so with kindness and affection: this delicate skill, as she never ceased to remind her niece, was the key to a successful marriage.

  Augusta, meanwhile, grew alarmed at hearing that Byron frequently proclaimed his preference for his sister over his wife, introducing mentions of his ‘Gus’ in a way that she unhappily agreed with Annabella was ‘very mal-a-propos’. She took hope, nevertheless, from Lady Byron’s hints at sexual pleasure and – as the chilly days at Seaham lengthened into weeks – signs of a growing companiability.

  Returning alone to Seaham three years later, Annabella would walk down the cliff path to the shore. Here, and out on the moors where she and Byron had once set off on a day-long ‘ramble-scramble-tumble-cum-jumble’ that ended with them floundering, laughing, into a bog, she had merrily followed Byron’s lead. In company, and even in private (as she noticed by his discomfort when they encountered country folk out on the lonely roads around Seaham), her halt-footed husband was always conscious of the painful deformity that a ruthless God had personally condemned him to endure. Alone with her, Byron grew unselfconscious and boyish, ‘jumping & squeaking on the sands’ or scrambling ahead of his wife up to the crag of the Featherbed Rocks where, side by side, the two of them gazed tranquilly out across the white crests of a grey and wintry sea. These small and modest recollections evoked happy memories. When preparing her legal depositions of a wretched marriage, Lady Byron resolved to omit such scenes.

  Annabella’s maid, Jane Minns, concerned by her mistress’s evident sadness during the lonely weeks at Halnaby, had urged her to confide in her father, kind Sir Ralph. Pride forbade it. Augusta, that warmly reassuring unknown sister, was clearly the person who knew Byron best and who was thus most able to advise a wife on how to handle him. True, Byron had dropped mysterious hints of a forbidden relationship with his sister, but there was no serious reason to believe him. Two months of marriage had taught Annabella that Lord Byron was at any moment capable of saying whatever popped into his head, especially after a generous swig from the brandy bottle that was always on hand at hospitable Seaham Hall. (Augusta, knowing him better, futilely entreated Annabella to hide the brandy away.)

  That Byron loved Augusta was beyond doubt; that he might love her more than he should cast only a faint shadow across the unsuspecting mind of his wife. It is likely that Annabella’s firm refusal to stay alone at Seaham while her husband travelled to London – via another visit to The Paddocks* at Six Mile Bottom – was based simply upon an eager desire to meet for herself the charmingly demonstrative Mrs Leigh. Augusta, justifiably fearful of her brother’s intentions, began by opposing any visit by either party, proceeded to the suggestion that the couple should take over some nearby house and ended, joylessly, by acquiescing to Lady Byron’s request to stay under her roof. (Colonel Leigh was not in residence.)

  Byron’s anger at his wife’s wilful insistence upon accompanying him to the Leighs’ Cambridgeshire home evaporated in the face of unexpected good news. The elusive Thomas Claughton was once again considering the purchase of Newstead Abbey and the Duchess of Devonshire’s grand London house in Piccadilly was available for the Byrons to rent. Household arrangements were to be settled between Annabella and Lady Melbourne, who instantly despatched floor maps, inventories and screeds of helpful recommendations. Byron, meanwhile, now informed Tom Moore that he had ‘vastly’ enjoyed his stay at Seaham Hall, where his wife was in ‘unvaried good-humour and behavior [sic].’ A reference to Annabella as being ‘in health’ hinted at a better reason for good cheer than either news about houses or of Milbankian hospitality. Lady Byron believed that she was pregnant. Byron never doubted that their child would be a boy.

  ‘What I suffered at Six Mile Bottom was indescribable,’ Annabella later recalled. As always, the darkest elements came to the fore in quasi-legal statements that required a tale of unmitigated horror. For once, however, she included a moment of unexpected joy. Shortly after leaving Seaham on 9 March, Byron turned to his wife in the carriage and told her that she had succeeded in making him a happy man. Kissed and caressed in front of her own maid, Annabella grew embarrassed; nevertheless, the declaration was truly tender. It made up for the coldness and the ‘sort of unrelenting pity’ she had been subjected to at Halnaby.

  That moment of affection stood out in Annabella’s mind because it contrasted so painfully with what followed. The newly-weds spent three long March weeks under Augusta’s roof. Byron, throughout that period, behaved as if he wished that he had never met his wife. Thwarted by Augusta’s unexpected resistance to his sexual overtures, he reacted with all the considerable malice of which, when denied his wishes, Byron was always capable. His target became Annabella.

  The portrait of life at the Leighs’ isolated house that Lady Byron later painted to her lawyer was unyieldingly grim. Sent early to bed (‘We can amuse ourselves without you my dear’), and greeted by a shriek of ‘Don’t touch me!’ when once she reached towards her husband for comfort in the night, Annabella was meanwhile informed – however absurd she then believed the announcement to be – that little Elizabeth Medora Leigh was Byron’s own child. Instructed to listen while a reluctant Augusta unwillingly read out the letters in which her brother had pondered which wealthy bride to pursue, Annabella was commanded to sit with Mrs Leigh upon a sofa while Byron – lounging between them – decided which of the two women could kiss him more ardently. Constantly exposed to what one of her subsequent accounts simply but eloquently described as ‘deep horrors’, it’s small wonder that Lady Byron’s private record of her feelings at the time included the pitiful line: ‘My heart is withered away, so that I forget to eat my bread.’

  The unexpected result of Byron’s perverse behaviour was to drive the two women (literally, some would suggest) into each other’s arms. Confidences had already been exchanged about Byron’s boasts of an incestuous relationship. Watching Augusta closely throughout the visit, an anxious Annabella noted that Mrs Leigh ‘submitted to his [Byron’s] affection, but never appeared gratified by it’. True, Augusta made a point of wearing her monogrammed brooch containing a lock of hair (Byron had ordered one for his sister and one for himself back at Seaham, when he anticipated staying alone under her roof), but she did so under his instruction. True, Augusta read out painful passages from letters, but it was always at Byron’s insistence. Also true, and less forgivably, Mrs Leigh never protested when her guest was sent off early to bed. (One of Annabella’s most wretched memories of her stay in Cambridgeshire was the sound of Byron and his beloved, merry ‘Gus’ laughing together behind closed doors.)

  Superficially, the new sisters-in-law had little in common. Annabella was cautious, rational, intellectual; Augusta was impulsive, illogical and happy to accept Byron’s affectionate description of herself as ‘a ninny’. What drew the two women together was the callousness with which Byron sought to manipulate their feelings. His success was qualified. Gus – chestnut-haired, hazel-eyed, softly rounded as a damaged peach and nervous as a hunted hare – was awed by the calm dignity with which the younger woman endured her husband’s manic goading. ‘I think I never saw nor heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould than she appears to be,’ Augusta wrote of Annabella in a letter to Francis Hodgson, on 18 March. On 1 April, she wrote to Hodgson again, to announce that her poor brother’s debts had plunged him into despair.

  And throughout all of this, what did Annabella think? ‘She [Augusta] was always devotedly kind to me and consulted my wishes on every occasion,’ Lady Byron firmly stated
a year later, and added: ‘I cannot think how feelingly [Augusta acted] without emotions of gratitude.’ Nevertheless, leaving the Leighs’ cluttered and claustrophobic home for London on 28 March, Annabella experienced profound relief. Augusta had seemed equally thankful for the visit’s end. Recalling their departure in her legal statement the following year, Annabella simply noted that she ‘did not wish to detain us’.

  * * *

  * Thomas and Catherine Noel were the parents of two girls (Mary and Anna) and four boys (Tom Jr, Robert, Charles and Edward).

  * The words ‘bereaved of reason’ were underlined later by John Hobhouse, not by Byron himself.

  * What was the ‘mischief’ involving Annabella’s self-acknowledged ‘ruling passion’? Flagellation? Or is it possible that Byron had introduced his wife to oral and/or anal sex, and that Annabella found that she enjoyed it? At least one later defendant of Lady Byron (John Fox, writing in 1869–71 and seeming to cite Annabella’s lawyer as his authority) hinted that sodomy, rather than incest, was the embarrassing charge of which no proof could be offered to a court.

  * Recently reborn as Swynford Manor, a wedding venue.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  UNLUCKY FOR SOME: 13 PICCADILLY TERRACE

  (1815–16)

  The house which Lady Melbourne had picked out for her niece’s future abode was the London home of Augustus Foster’s mother. (The widowed Duchess of Devonshire – Georgiana’s successor – was solacing herself in Rome.) Built in the 1760s in the neoclassical style, 13 Piccadilly Terrace* looked across the fields of Green Park from the western and airier end of a palatial row of Georgian mansions, beneath the tall windows of which – much to the delight of the late 4th Duke of Queensberry, one of the terrace’s most famously lecherous inhabitants – available ladies marketed their wares. ‘Old Q’ had become quite a feature of the street himself, ogling the passing traffic from a balcony, and then, from an armchair drawn up within a specially designed bay window. The Byrons, to the relief of their neighbours, would prove more reticent.

  An assortment of pets, a long-suffering valet (William Fletcher was helped out by an occasional understudy, James Brown), an eccentric old cleaning lady called Mrs Mule and a formidable wardrobe: these were Lord Byron’s contributions to setting up the household, plus the rent he had agreed to pay of £700 per annum (around £28,000 today). A semi-tame squirrel was installed, together with a bad-tempered parrot – it once bit Annabella’s finger, whereupon Byron hurled it, cage and all, out of the window, only to rush downstairs to save the bird from death – and a mastiff. The dog guarded its master’s door, not from a wife who regularly shared his bed, but from the menace of a swelling band of creditors.

  Annabella’s miserable experiences at Augusta’s Cambridgeshire home were briefly forgotten in the task of setting up a sixteen-bedroom house which, while adequately furnished by the duchess, possessed not one scrap of linen, glass or cutlery. By 5 April, all was orderly enough for John Murray, Byron’s publisher, to be invited in to show off a new bookplate print of the poet (Annabella agreed with her husband that its unflattering predecessor was unusable), a portrait of Byron as he had appeared to visitors at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1814: a glorious figure in Albanian costume, represented to the sitter’s own entire satisfaction by the well-known artist Thomas Phillips. (The painting so enchanted Byron’s proud mother-in-law that she purchased it for herself.)

  Byron was not alone in being able to assume a charming public manner. Mr Murray went away from Piccadilly Terrace with an excellent impression of the poet’s young bride. It was not yet apparent how rare the honour of paying a social visit to these reclusive newly-weds was to be. As a girl, Annabella had enjoyed hosting London dinner parties. There were to be no such occasions at her new home. Among her closest friends – the Milners, the Gosfords, the Doyles, the Montgomerys, the Eden family, Mrs George Lamb – not one seems ever to have crossed the threshold of her marital abode. Lady Melbourne, paying an official call, was turned away. Even Hobhouse, returning from a European trip in the summer of 1815, found it difficult to gain access to his oldest friend.

  Signs of domestic unrest behind the house’s austere façade showed up almost immediately. News had come while the Byrons were still visiting Augusta that Mrs Leigh had secured a £300 per annum appointment as a Woman of the Bedchamber to the Regent’s mother, old Queen Charlotte. Free and spacious lodging in St James’s Palace (a welcome bonus for a couple who had no London home) was not, however, to be provided until 1818. On 31 March, a mere three days after the Byrons’ traumatic stay at The Paddocks, the queen’s new court lady was invited to lodge herself – and to stay for as long as she wished – under her brother’s roof. The offer came not from Byron, but his wife.

  Why did Lady Byron turn so readily to the very woman for whom her husband had recently displayed a woundingly amorous affection? Possibly, Annabella thought it would create an impression of estrangement if Augusta stayed – as she could easily have done – with Mrs Villiers, the worldly older friend who had helped secure her new royal post. (Mr Villiers was a Groom of the Bedchamber to George III.) More likely, having formed a bond of sisterly kinship under stressful conditions, Annabella felt that cheerful, sympathetic Gus was the only person with whom she could safely share her private worries and that she would – Augusta made no secret of her longing for a livelier existence than she could obtain in a Cambridgeshire village – gladly take up the proposal.

  Accepting with speed, Augusta nevertheless displayed unease about the chances for success of the ménage à trois that Annabella had once blithely envisaged as ‘an amiable trio’. ‘You will perhaps be a better judge by & bye [sic] whether I shall not be a plague,’ Mrs Leigh presciently advised her ‘dearest Sis’ on 31 March ‘– & you must tell me truly if I am likely to prove so . . .’

  Augusta arrived at Piccadilly Terrace on 15 April. Accompanying her were a maid and her eldest daughter, Georgiana (‘Gee’), Byron’s quiet, slow-witted godchild. The newcomers had scarcely settled in as guests before – from the debt-ridden Lord Byron’s point of view – good news arrived. Wealthy old Lord Wentworth, grief-stricken since the loss of his lively little wife in the summer of 1814, had been taken ill at his London house. Death was imminent. While Judith hurried to make her way down from Seaham, Annabella set out from Piccadilly Terrace to act as her dying uncle’s companion and comforter. Hints that the early stages of pregnancy were taxing her health appear in the anxious letter Byron sent to Lord Wentworth’s house on 13 or 14 April:

  Dearest –

  Now your mother is come I won’t have you worried any longer – more particularly in your present situation which is rendered very precarious by what you have already gone through. Pray – come home

  Ever thine B

  Lord Wentworth died on 17 April. The anger with which Byron greeted his wife upon her return home – she later recalled that he did not speak to her for four days, preferring to use Augusta as his envoy – was fuelled by a disappointment that he was ashamed to put into words. Lord Wentworth had been expected to leave his fortune to his niece, Annabella. Instead, it was to pass to her only upon the death of his one surviving sister, and with conditions. The Milbankes, in return for adopting Judith’s maiden name (Noel), became the new owners of Wentworth’s London home and of Kirkby Mallory, the Leicestershire estate at which Judith had spent her early years. Lord Wentworth’s money, of which they all stood in urgent need, remained entailed. Sir Ralph was still struggling to raise the last portion of his daughter’s £20,000 settlement (a sum on which Byron, a year after his marriage, was still receiving only the interest). For the present, however, Wentworth’s large legacy was untouchable.

  Chattels offered meagre comfort to a man hounded by creditors. The sole evidence that some of these personal objects did reach Piccadilly Terrace survives in a French violin on which Lord Wentworth had enjoyed duetting with his equally musical wife. Byron’s feelings about the promised legacy can be guessed from
the sour little verse scratched on to its back:

  Hey diddle! diddle,

  I am now Byron’s fiddle,

  Pray what do you think of my shape?

  You may touch me and feel me

  But beware if you steal me

  I may get you into a ‘Scrape!’

  [Signed]: mme Muse 1815

  Annabella later claimed that nursing a dying uncle had been light duty compared to the misery she was enduring at Piccadilly Terrace. Confined to her bedroom for days and sometimes weeks on end by an unexpectedly difficult pregnancy, she found herself torn between gratitude for Augusta’s efforts to act as the buffer between an increasingly estranged couple and growing discomfort about the nature of Byron’s relationship with his sister. Once again, Annabella puzzled over the significance of distant gigglings and laughter. What was taking place elsewhere in the house? How, fed with Byron’s hints about a terrible crime, one for which her original delay in agreeing to marry him was held to be mysteriously responsible, could she not wonder?

  On one humiliating evening, or so Annabella recalled, a smiling Augusta brought a request from her brother that his wife should stop pacing the creaky floorboards of the upstairs library and return quietly to her bed. Just for a moment, young Lady Byron had felt a black desire to plunge a dagger into her gentle rival’s heart. ‘It was an instant of revenge,’ she wrote over a year later:

  and her voice of kindness extinguished it – yet if I ever should go mad perhaps those remembrances would be prevailing ideas, & to a principle of Forgiveness I feel indebted for the possession of my intellects under circumstances that made my brain burn.