The most intriguing feature about this remarkable arrangement was the readiness with which Augusta complied. Perhaps, she embraced the sense of power that it placed in her hands. Lady Byron could force her to grovel. She could – and did – withdraw all access to little Ada. (Lady Noel replaced Augusta in the promised role of godmother at a private autumn christening to which neither Colonel Leigh nor his wife were invited.) But Augusta could still inflict pain. She could read Byron’s letters and transmit as many of them (or as few) as she chose. She could relish the hurt that Annabella must surely have felt to see how lovingly her husband wrote to his half-sister and how savagely he wrote about his wife.
The cruellest of Byron’s letters were withheld by Augusta until 1834, by which time the relationship between the two women was beyond repair. Enough had already been shown to inflict a pain that Annabella struggled hard to conceal.
Had Augusta swiftly revealed the letter-passing arrangement to her self-exiled brother? That possibility would help to explain the consistent malice with which Byron wrote to Augusta about his wife. On 9 September 1816, he compared Annabella to an elephant who had clumsily trodden on his heart, before going on to announce that a charmingly determined young lady (Claire Clairmont) ‘had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise me’. Forwarding the letter to her ‘Guardian Angel’, Augusta twisted her own knife in the wound by confessing that she, not Byron, had been the chief mover in their incestuous affair: ‘in fact I am the one much the more to blame . . . quite inexcusable’. In a letter to Augusta (likewise in a poem to John Murray which Byron’s publisher declined to print), Lady Byron was described as a ‘moral Clytemnestra’,* one who had been ‘formed for my destruction’ (28 October). On 11 November 1816, Annabella was damned as a heartless torturer and on 18 December as a ‘virtuous monster’, one whose memory her husband intended to eradicate. On 17 May 1819 (Annabella’s birthday, as Byron assuredly knew), the poet described his wife to Augusta as ‘that infamous fiend who drove me from my Country & conspired against my life’.
And yet, writing directly to Annabella, as he had promised not to do, Byron was all tenderness. One letter pleaded that he was miserable without her, pining only for her love. Another (1 November 1816) assured her that ‘if there were a means of becoming reunited to you I would embrace it’. As always, Byron seems to have been guided by the impulse of the moment. Writing to Augusta, he cursed the implacable wretch who had separated him from the woman he loved best. Writing to Annabella, he rued the bitterness of banishment, and regretted the loss of his admired wife.
John Murray’s decision not to print one of Byron’s most direct attacks upon his wife was an act of caution, but also of affectionate respect. Following the separation, Lady Byron signalled (27 March 1816) her wish to maintain a friendly relationship with the publisher. Murray, a regular visitor to Branch Hill Lodge, an eighteenth-century mansion amply decorated with gloomy stained-glass windows by a previous owner, in which Annabella intermittently dwelt upon the airy heights of Hampstead from 1817 until 1825. He was meticulous in supplying her with early copies of all his publications. Naturally, these included Byron’s works. In the autumn of 1816, when the ranting ‘Lines, on Hearing Lady Byron was Ill’ arrived from Italy, the separation scandal was still vivid in the public’s mind. Murray’s decision not to publish a poem that referred to Annabella as ‘The Moral Clytemnestra of Thy Lord’ was motivated by concern for Lady Byron as much as for the damage it might inflict upon the sales of a lucrative author. Byron’s poem was filed away, to remain unpublished until 1832, when Moore’s affectionate life of the poet had helped usher in a more forgiving attitude towards his misdeeds.
Externally, Lady Byron appeared relaxed about her husband’s satiric use of her. Writing to Theresa Villiers on 15 July 1819 about her appearance as Donna Inez, the hero’s prim mother, in Don Juan, Annabella remarked that Byron’s satire was ‘so good as to make me smile at myself – therefore others are heartily welcome to laugh’.
Given such a good-natured approach, Murray felt no qualms, in February 1817, about informing Lady Byron that her husband’s latest work was selling well, although ‘not quite up to the mark of former times’. The news disturbed Annabella less than Murray’s gift of the very first copy of the Autumn 1816 Quarterly Review.* The journal, as its publisher proudly pointed out, carried ‘an article on a great Poet . . . written in a tone calculated to do some good’.
It did none for Annabella. Walter Scott’s long essay, ostensibly a review of Canto III of Childe Harold, was both lavish in its generosity and unintentionally comical in the earnest way that it dwelt upon Byron’s noble antecedents. What angered Annabella was the great Scottish writer’s determination to present her husband as a victim.
Annabella was staying with Scott’s close friends, Agnes and Joanna Baillie, at their own Hampstead home when Murray’s gift was delivered. Letters from her mother and from the Wilmots (Byron’s cousins) declared Scott to be outrageously prejudiced: action must be taken! But Annabella recognised the danger of antagonising one of Britain’s most admired authors. Instead, she adopted a course which would soon become familiar to those who had angered or distressed her. She did not write to Scott herself. Instead, the Baillie sisters were asked to convey their house guest’s detection of a criticism of herself which – as even Annabella had to admit – Scott had ‘not expressed, but I think directly implied’.
The technique worked. Scott, under pressure, apologised. Visiting one of her literary heroes at Abbotsford by her own request, late in the summer of 1817, Annabella’s graceful acceptance of her sad situation, one ‘which must have pressed on her thoughts’, caused a penitent Scott to describe his guest to Joanna Baillie as one of the most interesting women he had yet encountered. They walked together along riverbanks. Annabella admired the landscape. No reference was made to Scott’s article in the Quarterly.
It was by such circuitous routes – hiding behind the testimony of friends, citing trusted supporters, and quoting copiously from Byron’s past correspondence (of which she made and preserved meticulous copies) – that Annabella increasingly chose to defend her reputation. Insistent, elaborate and always self-righteous, Lady Byron’s tactics would unfortunately contribute to her posthumous reputation as a hypocritical tamperer with the truth.
And yet, initially, there was no need for such paranoia. Byron’s name, not his wife’s, had been severely damaged by the scandal surrounding the couple’s separation. In ‘Canto IV’ of Childe Harold, he offered what appeared to be a profession of remorse, causing one of his more loyal supporters, Francis Jeffrey, in the December 1816 Edinburgh Review, to bestow upon the author the famous epithet of a ‘ruined archangel’. But Childe Harold’s remorse was not a confession of his creator’s guilt. That admission never came. Byron’s one passionate document of self-defence, written on 9 August 1817 at La Mira, a villa near Venice, was circulated to friends and journalists on the express understanding that it must not be published. Clearly, Byron feared the legal consequences of such a public step.
The British public had always preferred to follow the lead of its press. Encouraged by Francis Jeffrey and his literary colleagues, public disapproval of Byron began to wane after the appearance in the winter of 1816 of ‘Canto IV’ with its sorrowing Childe. Outrage would flare to new heights again in the summer of 1819, with the appearance of the first jaunty canto of Don Juan. Blackwood’s, a magazine that was partly run by Walter Scott’s future son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, was first to leap into the fray. How could the seemingly chastened author of Childe Harold’s final canto stoop to producing such impious filth? For Lord Byron to offend his wife was wrong – and to desert her was frankly ungentlemanly – ‘but to injure, and then to desert, and then to turn back and wound her widow’d privacy with unhallow’d strains of cold-blooded mockery was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean’. Only an insensate brute would dare ‘to pour the pitiful chalice of his contumely on the surrendered devotion o
f a virgin’s breast, and the holy hopes of the mother of his child’. And so on.*
This was harrowing stuff and Annabella won further support by expressing only quiet amusement at Byron’s mocking portrait of herself as Juan’s sedate mamma. It’s unlikely that she knew of the far crueller skit in which, writing to Tom Moore on 10 December 1820, Byron lampooned his wife as ‘The Witch’. The spur, on this occasion, was a newspaper cutting that announced Lady Byron’s role as patroness of a town hall charity dance. To Byron, at his most irrational, a Leicestershire soirée glittered with all the brilliance of the humiliating Almack’s Assembly at which he and Augusta had been so stonily received.
And yet, Byron’s feelings about his wife still veered like a weathercock in a storm. Despatching to Moore a snappy epigram upon marriage a month earlier, Byron had identified Annabella both as Medea and Penelope. Which was she: demon or angel? Until the end, her husband never could decide.
And neither, even thirty years after his death, could his widow make up her mind about her husband. Byron had something of the angel in him, the ageing Annabella would murmur to her confidantes, including an avidly attentive Harriet Beecher Stowe. None of these intimates dared to enquire why she had abandoned such a paragon.
Back during Byron’s lifetime, a sensation-loving press faced no such quandaries. ‘I was thought a devil, because Lady Byron was allowed to be an angel,’ the poet sighed to a sympathetic Lady Blessington at Genoa in 1823.
One year later, Byron’s unexpected death, aged thirty-six, while risking himself in the cause of rescuing Greece from her Turkish oppressors, triggered the beginning of the poet’s slow redemption. Writing in Blackwood’s (August 1825), John Gibson Lockhart invited his readers to admire the heroic spectacle ‘of youth, and rank, and genius, meeting with calm resignation the approach of death, under circumstances of the most cheerless description . . .’
‘Let people think as they please – it matters little now,’ Augusta Leigh had entreated Annabella back on 28 February 1822. But Lady Byron would never cease to care what people thought. Justifying the role that she had played in her husband’s life, while blaming others – and blaming, above all, Augusta for contributing to the destruction of a marriage increasingly gilded by memory’s broad and idealising brush – would become the occupation and obsession of a lifetime. It was an obsession that would shape the way that an earnest and well-meaning mother would seek to govern and protect the one precious gift left by her celebrated husband: their brilliant, wayward child.
* * *
* The phrase ‘spoilt child’ [sic] was frequently applied to Lady Byron, but never to her late husband, during the posthumous attacks upon her reputation that were to be published in 1869–70.
* It is especially strange that they went unmentioned by Macaulay, given that the ‘Remarks’ were subsequently bound in with Moore’s 1831 edition, at Annabella’s request.
* Byron’s former master at Harrow, Dr Drury, arranged for Allegra’s burial close to the church door. A plaque was finally erected in 1980.
* Byron used this startling epithet on several occasions: it appears in BL&J (5) on pp. 144, 186, 191, and in BL&J (10) on p. 142.
* Late publication was a regular occurrence with journals of that time.
* The author of the Blackwood’s review was John Wilson.
PART TWO
Ada
‘I really believe that you hatched me simply for the entertainment of your old age’
AUGUSTA ADA BYRON TO HER MOTHER,
10 OCTOBER 1844
CHAPTER TEN
IN SEARCH OF A FATHER
‘The little boy [Hugo, an orphaned nephew of Mary Montgomery] is a very nice child on the whole he speaks nothing but Italian and Spanish which I now perfectly understand.’
ADA BYRON AGED EIGHT, TO HER MOTHER,
7 DECEMBER 1824
Lord Byron was exceptionally angry to discover, early in 1817, that Annabella, advised by his own former legal counsel, Sir Samuel Romilly, had made their daughter a Ward of Chancery.* (Formally, Ada remained in Chancery until 1825, a year after her father’s death.) Nevertheless, he never doubted that his estranged wife would make an excellent and conscientious parent to little Ada. ‘A girl is in all cases better with the mother,’ Byron informed Augusta Leigh (by then the mother of seven) on 21 December 1820, ‘unless there is some moral objection.’
Claire Clairmont, having courageously decided to bring up Clara Allegra, her illegitimate child by Byron, as part of Percy Shelley’s bohemian household, was granted less respect. Byron liked Shelley and admired the poet’s wife, Mary, but the couple’s proclaimed aversion to monogamy presented the ‘moral objection’ of which he disapproved (in anyone other than himself). While Annabella was threatened with a lawsuit if she dared to expose young Ada to the dangers of continental travel, the Shelleys, in 1818, were commanded to arrange for little Allegra’s transportation from England to Italy, where Claire was tearfully compelled to surrender her maternal rights.
Byron’s caution about continental travel was well-founded. The Shelleys’ own baby daughter (another Clara) died of dysentery at Venice in September 1818. Their son William died of malaria in Rome the following summer. Clara Allegra – a child whose extraordinary resemblance to (of all people) Annabella was immediately noticed both by Byron and his valet, Fletcher – died of malaria or typhus in an Italian convent in 1822.* She was five years old.
Byron, from afar, expressed an erratic but fatherly interest in his legitimate child. His parting gift to Ada had been one of his talismanic rings. Further small gifts were despatched while off upon his alpine travels in the summer of 1816, followed in due course by a locket, inscribed, in Italian: ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ He asked for his daughter to be taught music (in which neither parent had any skill) and Italian (a language for which Annabella shared her husband’s deep love).
A taste for poetry, however, was to be discouraged in the child of the greatest poet of the age. Arriving in Greece in the autumn of 1823, and about to embark upon what would prove to be his last adventure, Byron made his feelings clear in a letter that entreated his wife (via Augusta) to provide him with a full report of their daughter, now almost seven years old.
Is the Girl imaginative? . . . Is she social or solitary – taciturn or talkative – fond of reading or otherwise? and what is her tic? I mean her foible – is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made her anything save poetical – it is enough to have one such fool in a family.
Annabella delayed her response, possibly because Ada at the time was experiencing her first serious illness and her mother did not want to raise alarm. On 1 December, six weeks after her husband’s enquiry, Lady Byron sent him a miniature (the artist prided herself on having captured a perfect likeness of Ada’s profile), together with the details he required.
Her prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness and good-temper. Observation. Not devoid of imagination, but it is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity – the manufacture of ships and boats etc. Prefers prose to verse . . . Not very persevering. Draws well. Tall and robust.
Annabella was never to receive Byron’s grateful response for a letter he described as her first kind action since the seemingly tender address to ‘dearest Duck’ that she had written even as she left him, back in 1816. The letter in which he expressed his gratitude – while fondly noting the similarities to his own boyish self in his wife’s account of little Ada – was still lying, unsent, on the poet’s desk at Missolonghi at the time that he died.
Possibly, Lord Byron’s very last thoughts were of his unseen daughter. William Fletcher, conveying the news of his master’s death to John Murray on 21 April 1824, was anxious to stress that Byron’s ‘pertickeler wish’ had been that his valet should carry a message to his wife and child. Lady Byron, so Fletcher later noted, had broken down in sobs during that harrowing visit, weeping until her whole body shook as she begged him – vainly – to recall what her h
usband’s final message to her had been. By the end of her own life, Annabella had convinced herself that some ‘unuttered’ tender words had been thought, even if they had not been spoken.
The cheerful docility mentioned by Annabella in 1823 marked the emergence of an endearing trait in Ada’s nature. Squabbles lay ahead, especially with a mother whose authority she often opposed, but Ada, throughout her life, would win affection by her good humour, her kindness and – unlike either of her parents – her quickness to forgive.
Ada had not always been so equable. Back in November 1821, when Lord Byron was renting a palace in Pisa, he heard that his 6-year-old daughter was thought to be ‘a fine child’, but one who possessed ‘a violent temper’. The news troubled him less than it did a mother who had witnessed her husband’s own ungovernable rages. What Byron began to fret about in Pisa was Ada’s isolation. Listing the members of her family who lacked siblings, he reached a disconcerting result. There were his own mother, Augusta’s mother, Augusta, he himself, Annabella and now young Ada: ‘Such a complication of only children . . . looks like fatality almost’, he brooded in his journal. Pride returned to comfort him. After all, ‘the fiercest Animals have the rarest number in their litters – as Lions – tigers – and even Elephants,’ Byron could not help adding, ‘which are mild in comparison.’
Initially, once Ada was weaned, she served only to remind her unhappy mother of the final weeks of a disastrous marriage. ‘My Child! Forgive the seeming wrong / The heart with-held from thee’, Annabella wrote in a private poem dated 16 December 1819 and guiltily entitled ‘The Unnatural Mother’. A month earlier, Annabella confessed that the first real evidence of Ada’s affection had come as a huge relief: ‘I had a strange prepossession that she would never be fond of me.’
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