By the autumn of 1816, when Annabella recorded this memory, she had no doubt that there had been a pre-marital relationship between brother and sister, and that Byron had always been eager to resume it. Back in the summer of 1815, uncertainty was overruled by a grateful consciousness that Augusta, during the two summer months that Mrs Leigh resided at Piccadilly Terrace, was doing everything to help that lay within her power.
It is tempting to dismiss Annabella’s elaborate retrospective statements about her marriage as jealous fantasies, but Lady Byron was not a fanciful woman. The upstairs room in which she paced was clearly identified by her as having ‘then’ been the library, thus indicating a subsequent change of use. The dagger that she had longed to plunge into Augusta’s heart was identified as having always been kept in Byron’s adjacent bedroom. These are concrete details, and convincing ones. Likewise, when Annabella recalled how Byron had tried to frighten her with Harriet Lee’s The German’s Tale (1801) by associating himself with its protagonist (a son who murders to obtain a legacy), the accuracy of the memory is confirmed by Lady Byron’s recollection that her husband began writing a play based upon Lee’s tale. Passages were read out to her, but ‘I believe he burnt it afterwards.’
Annabella was correct. Byron did write an early draft of Werner (1822), a play based on Lee’s tale and also, perhaps, upon a dramatic version written by Elizabeth Devonshire’s friend and predecessor, Georgiana.* But was Annabella right to see personal menace in her husband’s presentation of himself as another such murderer? Byron’s hints at having committed a homicide haunted her. It seems more likely that a sometimes unkind husband stored up trouble for himself by his spoofing of a credulous and increasingly terrified bride.
‘My Night Mare is my own personalty [sic],’ Byron confessed to his close friend Douglas Kinnaird in 1817. Throughout their courtship, Annabella had presented herself as eager to play what we would today see as the therapist’s role to a troubled man of whose essential goodness she remained convinced. Byron encouraged her to assume the part, urging her to act as his friend and guide. ‘I meant to marry a woman who would be my friend – I want you to be my friend,’ Annabella remembered him insisting. So, were Byron’s declarations and hints intended to wound and alarm, or was he simply treating his wife as the understanding mentor and mother confessor that she had promised to become? Who was failing whom?
Some light on Byron’s increasingly erratic behaviour is cast by his frustrated knowledge that Annabella’s well-meant endeavours could do nothing to alter the circumstances in which he found himself trapped.
The year 1815 was when Byron’s personal crises reached a head. His financial problems seemed insoluble. Laudanum and calomel (a powerful mercury-based medication) were failing to ease the continual irritation caused by a diseased liver. His feelings about Augusta remained both strong and ambivalent (he was damned by having slept with her; it was intolerable that she should be under the same roof and yet resist him). Gentle reason – Annabella’s mild panacea for all his troubles – drove him mad.
Back in November 1813, while attempting to identify the source of his own quicksilver emotional transitions in the journal that he had just begun to write, Byron believed that he had brought an ungovernable temper almost under control. One unfailing goad to fury remained: ‘unless there is a woman (and not any or every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy’. Annabella was precisely that stubborn woman who, by standing in the way, brought out the worst in her husband. Faced by his wife’s implacable, maddening tranquillity, Byron set out to shatter it. He did so with all the considerable verbal and imaginative power at his disposal. Later, Annabella would recall every last wild word, claim and threat that had been used to provoke a reaction from her heroically imperturbable self. Unfortunately for Lord Byron, she took his taunts and violent dramatics very seriously indeed.
Five months into the Byrons’ marriage, Annabella had good reason to feel both unhappy and isolated. Apart from Augusta, she had nowhere to turn for help. Mrs Clermont, who had stayed elsewhere in London throughout the summer, was apparently in receipt of daily confidential letters, as – to a lesser degree – was Selina Doyle. Neither woman could offer more than sympathy. The Noels (the Milbankes legally changed their name in May, a month after Lord Wentworth’s death) were kept at arms’ length by a husband who had no wish to dance attendance either on a woman he disliked or her garrulous old husband. The fact that Sir Ralph, an ardent Whig, shared both Byron’s elation at Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the poet’s disgust at the outcome of Waterloo, provided a route through which Annabella struggled to promote a friendship between the two men in her life. ‘B has just found out an Etymology for Blücher’s name which is quite in your way,’ she wrote to her father, before carefully spelling out his pun upon the name of Wellington’s ally on the battlefield: ‘ “There goes the Blue Cur”.’ On another occasion, Byron had noticed the word ‘Dad’ scrawled on a Piccadilly wall: ‘B said it was a memento left us by our honoured parent.’
Such well-meant efforts proved useless. Byron rejected all invitations to the Noels’ new London and country homes (formerly Lord Wentworth’s properties), leaving Annabella to travel alone to the family celebration of her birthday on 17 May 1815. The most her husband would do was to extend an occasional family invitation to a play. (Douglas Kinnaird had just persuaded Byron to join the committee of the Drury Lane Theatre.) Byron did, however, consent to accept the occasional gift of food. ‘Yours confectionately,’ Annabella signed off her filial thanks for a homebaked goose pie, ‘gratefully acknowledged by B’s voracious stomach.’ Her figure-conscious husband had apparently polished off at the same meal an entire turbot.
Hard though it is today to interpret the Byrons’ secretive marriage, it presented an equally inscrutable façade to their contemporaries. George Ticknor’s record of his week in London offers a good example.
George Ticknor was a New Englander whose father had set up Boston’s first free primary schools, a parent enlightened enough to allow his son to exchange a legal career for the study of languages and literature. Arriving in London in the summer of 1815, en route to the University of Göttingen, young Ticknor requested an interview with Byron, one of his literary heroes.
The American visitor proved personable, well-read and in complete agreement with his host in his dislike of the boarding-school system that Lord Byron had experienced at Harrow. Paying his first visit to Piccadilly Terrace on 20 June (just after Augusta and little ‘Georgy’ Leigh had returned to Cambridgeshire), Ticknor caught no more than a glimpse of Annabella as she set off for a drive. Seeing her again three days later, he was impressed by Lady Byron’s eloquent face and intelligent conversation.
She is diffident – she is very young, not more, I think, than nineteen – but is obviously possessed of talent, and did not talk at all for display. For the quarter of an hour during which I was with her, she talked upon a considerable variety of subjects – America, of which she seemed to know considerable; of France, and Greece, with something of her husband’s visit there – and spoke of all with a justness and light good humour.
Byron, with whom the young American subsequently spent a full hour discussing contemporary literature, was much taken by his visitor. Bidden to return on 26 June, Ticknor noticed on that occasion how affectionately his host saw Lady Byron to her carriage, walking her to the door and shaking her hand as warmly ‘as if he were not to see her for a month’. On 27 June, Ticknor went to watch a historical drama, Charles the Bold, from Byron’s Drury Lane box. The only other guests that night were Annabella’s parents, of whom Ticknor greatly preferred Sir Ralph to his ‘fashionable’ wife. Lady Byron, in comparison, was ‘more interesting than I have yet seen her’, while Byron himself was praised for his kindness, gentle manners and unaffected ways. The poet, Ticknor noted with faint regret, was not in the least like the gloomy heroes of his romances.
Ticknor was a rare witness to the fact that the Byrons’ marriag
e could have a happy side. Annabella was, so her husband declared when he was feeling sentimental, ‘a good kind thing’; ‘the best little wife in the world’. Writing several months later to Tom Moore (in March 1816), Byron rhetorically demanded to be told whether ‘there ever was a better or even brighter, a kinder or a more amiable & agreeable being than Lady B’. Sleeping together regularly and seemingly with pleasure, the young couple employed tender nicknames: ‘Duck’ for him, ‘Pippin’ (from her round and rosy cheeks) for her.
Their affectionate diminutives were already in regular use by 7 July when, shortly after George Ticknor’s week of visits, Annabella’s father offered to loan the couple his own recently vacated Durham home, ordering Seaham to be cleaned and whitewashed in preparation for their visit. Lady Noel, hearing that the Byrons planned to retreat there only for the December lying-in, grew anxious. ‘Annabella I am sure requires country air,’ she urged her son-in-law in August, a month when most Londoners who could afford it left town; ‘her looks shew it, and it will do you both good’. Byron did not take kindly to instructions. Unusually for their social class, the couple remained in residence at their London home throughout the parched height of summer and on into the autumn.
Annabella, writing to Augusta early in August to express her approval of Byron’s drawing up a new will (one that provided support for the improvident Leighs), admitted that this protracted London sojourn was not ideal. Confiding her longing to be out of ‘this horrid town’ to her ‘Dearest Lei’, she dwelt upon the dwindling prospect of Seaham where, she was sure, her spirits and her looks ‘(if I was ever blest with any)’ would soon be restored. Was it to console her, she wondered, that Byron had unexpectedly invited Lady Noel to visit Seaham for the lying-in, or was it a thoughtful Augusta who had proved quietly persuasive? ‘I always feel,’ Annabella wrote with interesting ambivalence, ‘as if I had more reasons to love you than I can exactly know’.
Annabella’s gratitude to a loving sister-in-law was put to the test in early September. Byron had been in unusually savage spirits at the end of August, due in part to the increasing pressure of his debts. The Leighs, during this same period, were seeking to preserve Colonel Leigh’s right to a relative’s bequest, defending it from an unexpected challenge. Augusta, afraid that her husband’s habitual inertia would cause them to lose out, summoned her brother to their aid.
Byron left for Cambridgeshire on 31 August, accompanied by his valet, the faithful William Fletcher. Requesting ‘Dearest Pip’ to send his forgotten medical drops, Byron tactlessly announced an instant and marvellous improvement in his temper. (A coded ‘Not frac.’ signified ‘not fractious’.) Writing back to her ‘Darling Duck’ later the same day, Annabella adopted a characteristically optimistic tone.
I feel as if B— loved himself, which does me more good than anything else, and makes young Pip jump.
You would laugh to see and still more hear the effects of your absence in the house – Tearing up carpets, deluging staircases, knocking, rubbing, brushing!– By all these I was early awakened, for Ms Mew [sic] seems convinced that my ears and other senses have departed with you. She no longer flies like a sylph on tip-toe, but like a troop of dragoons at full gallop. The old proverb –
‘When the Cat’s away, the Mice will play –’
They shall have their holiday, but I can’t fancy it mine. Indeed indeed nau [naughty] B– is a thousand times better than no B.
I dare not write any more for fear you should be frightened at the length, and not read at all. So I shall give the rest to Goose [Augusta].
I hope you call out ‘Pip, pip, pip’ – now & then. I think I hear you – but I won’t grow lemoncholy –A—da!
The allusion to ‘nau B’ glossed the aggression to which Annabella had been exposed during the days leading up to his departure from Piccadilly Terrace for Six Mile Bottom. ‘I was very ill,’ she later recalled: ‘– he had kept me awake almost all the previous night to exercise his cruelty upon my feelings, & notwithstanding the self-command I could generally maintain, my convulsive sobs at last forced me to get up & leave the room.’ From a safe distance, however, Byron was now ready to become a devoted husband. A second letter to ‘Dearest Pip’ was filled with jokes about Fletcher’s courtship by letter of Annabella’s maid, Susan Rood, while ‘Goose’ took ‘a quill from her wing to scribble to you’. Byron’s own was signed, as Annabella’s had been, with the mysterious ‘–A—da’, raising the intriguing possibility that little Augusta Ada Byron’s second name contained some secret meaning for her parents.
Whatever grief Annabella may have been experiencing in private, she maintained before others a tranquil face. Judith, on 4 September, heard only that her daughter was ‘marvellous happy’ at the prospect of Byron’s return and that Augusta reported his having been ‘very disconsolate’ without his wife. When Judith insisted that the Byrons should relocate to Kirkby Mallory, Annabella responded with a firm refusal: ‘I wish I could see the practicality of our going to Kirkby,’ she wrote to her mother on 8 September, ‘but I do not.’ Byron was apparently willing for her to travel alone, but ‘I will not. As long as I am with him I am comparatively comfortable.’ ‘Comparatively’ was a word that tempted further questioning, but Lady Noel, yielding to a will as firm as her own, backed down. It was agreed that Annabella’s confinement would take place in town. Her choice of a reputable but unfashionable accoucheur, Dr Francis Le Mann of Soho Square, was also approved.
Money remained a subject for intense concern. Up in the north, Annabella’s parents had been hit hard by the failure of the Durham Bank. While Judith painted a shrewdly optimistic picture of the future value of country estates like Kirkby Mallory, the shortage of available cash made it difficult for the Noels to help a needy son-in-law. Annabella, during her husband’s absence in Cambridgeshire, paid hasty visits to Mr Hanson and her uncle, Sir James Bland Burges, executor of Lord Wentworth’s will. Sir Francis Doyle, reported by his sister Selina to have ‘a good deal of intercourse with people of business’, was consulted about the possibility of taking out a mortgage on Kirkby Mallory. Sadly, as Annabella wrote to her mother on 30 August, Sir Frank had dashed any hopes of raising money by that route. Or any other. Even Sir Ralph’s effort to realise some of the marriage settlement money – it had been due to Byron since May – by the sale of farms near Seaham was blocked by the ludicrous raising of a legal possibility that the 64-year-old Lady Noel might bear a second child. It was at this point that an exasperated Sir Ralph left William Hoar for a sharper firm of lawyers. Wharton & Ford would still be satisfactorily representing his descendants in 1900.
At Newstead, meanwhile, where young Captain Byron was acting as his cousin’s unpaid agent and gamekeeper, Mr Claughton continued to dither over his prospective purchase with no imminent sign of reaching a decision.
Wherever the Byrons looked, the route to financial security was barred. The poet’s creditors were reaching the end of their patience. On 8 September, in the letter explaining her decision to remain at Piccadilly Terrace, Annabella dropped the first hint of her husband’s darkest fears. If Lord Byron were presently to leave town now for more than a few days, she warned her mother, ‘some measures that are now suspended would immediately ensue’. Three days later, Annabella mentioned the possibility that Byron’s beloved library of books would be seized for sale. A month on, she observed that only the prospect of becoming a father was giving her husband a little comfort amidst ‘the very distressing circumstance to which we must look forward . . . It seems a labyrinth of difficulties.’
Writing to his friends and literary confrères during the autumn of 1815, Byron sounded his normal self. Samuel Coleridge, from whom Byron entreated a play to put on at Drury Lane, was charmed by the thoughtfulness of a younger man who took the trouble to apologise about having unconsciously lifted a couple of lines from his own unpublished ‘Christabel’ for the almost completed The Siege of Corinth, the last and possibly the best of Byron’s wildly successful Turkish tales
.* Leigh Hunt was also moved by Lord Byron’s generous enthusiasm and suggestions for the poem that Hunt rightly believed would be his masterpiece: The Story of Rimini. (Annabella shared her husband’s admiration and copied out a long extract of Hunt’s poem.) At the theatre, where Byron was playing an increasingly active role in commissioning new works, his indiscreet relationship with Susan Boyce, a young actress with a fondness for expensive jewellery, seemed par-for-the-course behaviour from a randy Regency rake whose wife was in the last stages of pregnancy.
Tom Moore, seeking advice from Byron – of all people! – on the stockmarket, received a letter on 31 October which indicated that his friend was still anxiously awaiting the promised marriage payment from Sir Ralph. Annabella was rather coolly described as ‘in full progress’ towards the production of a son. (Always referred to as ‘Pip’ by his mother and as ‘Byron’ by the rest of the family, the baby’s sex remained a foregone conclusion.) The main substance of Byron’s letter to Moore, a drinking crony, concerned the first of a series of dinners that Annabella would learn to dread.
As described by one of the world’s most enchanting correspondents, the occasion sounded hilarious. The theatre crowd (it included the ageing and always convivial playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Byron’s close friend, Douglas Kinnaird) had foregathered for an evening of hard drinking in an upstairs dining room. Here, the party rapidly progressed from being ‘silent’ to ‘talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk’. Kinnaird and Byron, between them, had managed to guide an intoxicated Sheridan down ‘a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors’. All had ended in ‘hiccup and happiness’.
In Byron's Wake Page 10