In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  The commencement of Lady Byron’s relationship with her daughter was not made easier by the first of many breakdowns in Annabella’s health. Back in 1816, following the tremendous strain imposed by her marital separation, she became nervous, unhappy and ill. It was a relief, then, after taking Ada off to Lowestoft to meet up with Mary Gosford and her own little girls during that summer, to bequeath her daughter to the care of Nurse Grimes and Lady Noel at Kirkby. Meanwhile, Annabella went to London to seek an independent abode in Hampstead, close to the sympathetic Baillie sisters and the intelligent, motherless daughters of their neighbour, a prosperous and pious Mr Carr. In the summer of 1817, Annabella made just one brief halt at Kirkby Mallory before setting off on a tour of the Lake District with Miss Sarah Carr.*

  In September, following another hasty visit from her daughter, Judith Noel decided it was time to tweak her maternal conscience. Ada was declared to be missing her mamma. ‘She looked round the Bed and on the Bed, and then into the Closet – seemed disappointed and said “gone-gone”!’

  The prod worked. Annabella returned home, to be rewarded with a scolding. Lady Noel possessed a notoriously sharp tongue, and it was one that Judith had not restrained on this occasion. Where would her daughter have been without Lady Noel’s support in her time of need? Did she ever pause to consider the pain her separation had caused, or the social embarrassment which had compelled Judith to remove from public view Phillips’s magnificently showy portrait of Lord Byron in order to nail it up in a box designated for the attic?† Her mother’s reproaches struck home. Filled with remorse, Annabella vowed to change her ways. It had become, so she guiltily wrote to Sarah Siddons’s widowed daughter-in-law, Harriet, her ‘dearest wish to prove a better child than she [Lady Noel] has yet found me’.

  Most biographers and historians have adopted a stern view of Annabella’s behaviour during the first years after her separation from Byron. A fondness for mutton (‘divine mutton!’) has been cited by Doris Langley Moore as evidence, not only of her gluttony, but of her heartless greed. Her ever-increasing dependence on doctors – often while visiting agreeable spas – has been ascribed to self-indulgent hypochondria. More seriously, Lady Byron stands reproached, not simply of being an absent mother, but also of being a neglectful and ungrateful daughter.

  The indictments are unjust. Through 1818 until Lady Noel’s death in 1822, Annabella spent at least a third of every year living with her parents at the isolated Leicestershire estate where Ada, spoiled by adoring grandparents and an indulgent household of servants, enjoyed a cherished country childhood. For Annabella, however, imprisoned at Kirkby, the life of a dutiful daughter offered little solace beyond the admiring company of the vicar’s daughter (rudely referred to by Lady Noel as ‘the Anna’).

  Anna Jones offered a sympathetic audience to a frustrated young woman who was eager to be of use in the world beyond Kirkby’s confining walls. Escaping briefly to Seaham in the summer of 1818, and enjoying the company of Harriet Siddons’s young daughter, Lizzie, as her guest, Annabella rushed through her pet project for a much-needed local school, modelled after one that Harriet had successfully established in Edinburgh.* Back at Kirkby, and at her mother’s mercy, she was powerless. Driving out in her carriage with Miss Jones, an ardent young social reformer, she noticed evidence everywhere of the need for enlightened philanthropy. Several of the villages on the Wentworth estate were entirely dependent upon weaving for a living. The weavers were the people for whom Byron had spoken out in his first political speech, and now they were starving, put out of work by the thriving new mills of Derbyshire and of the North. Here, surely, was a way to bury her sadness through offering help to others while – it was always important to Annabella – undertaking something of which Byron would approve. But the estate belonged to Judith, and Lady Noel had grown too old and self-absorbed to concern herself with good works. Lady Byron, like her father, was Lady Noel’s dependent. Until her mother’s death, Annabella’s hands were tied.

  Only an infrequent departure by Judith for an occasional health cure at Leamington Spa or Tunbridge Wells could open up a rare window of freedom. In January 1820, Annabella briefly joined the friendly Carrs and Baillies in Hampstead and, while there, found herself a future home: Branch Lodge. In May, she took Ada to Hastings, where the now intensely religious Mary Gosford was spending a quiet summer by the sea. ‘Hastings will be good for me,’ Annabella wrote to Harriet Siddons, before wistfully revealing her reason. ‘The place will be retired.’ Brighton, not Hastings, was where smart society spent its summer months. Four years after the separation, Lady Byron still shrank from placing herself anywhere that she might be noticed.

  Towards the end of that year, Judith gradually declined into senility. Physically, however, she remained strong. By May 1821, Annabella had resigned herself to what threatened to become a lifetime of duty as a nurse-companion. But it was the news that her beloved Seaham was to be sold that seemed to break her heart. Writing to the always sympathetic Harriet Siddons, Annabella sounded near to tears. No more visits to help keep her little school in order; no more nostalgic strolls along that beloved beach; no more connection to the only place in which she and Byron had been, however briefly, alone and happy together. Contemplating the dreary years ahead of enacting ‘a calm performance of duty’ towards a decrepit parent, Annabella preserved just enough humour to smile at the doleful image she had conjured up of herself. While resolved to turn herself into a model of ‘sober-minded’ devotion, she feared it was too late for ‘a probability of complete success’.

  Diversion offered itself in the form of Ada’s education. In the summer of 1821, Annabella’s daughter was five years old. Up in the Kirkby nursery, she was now cared for by a kindly and outspoken nanny named Eliza Briggs, who took a pleasing interest in Ada’s newest acquisition, a Persian kitten called Puff. Puff was a gift from her mother and – to judge from Ada’s adoring tales of Mistress Puff’s exploits and fairylike beauty – a much beloved one. Miss Lamont – fresh from Ireland and equipped with excellent references from an impressive young educationalist called Arabella Lawrence – was viewed with excitement by her pupil as a link to the larger world beyond her nursery’s iron-barred windows. Perhaps – who could tell? – Miss Lamont might even become a friend.

  Arriving at a large country house in May 1821 for what seems to have been her first proper job, the governess immediately found herself trapped between the conflicting desires of two formidable personalities. Lady Byron clearly held the upper hand, but Ada, endeavouring to blossom into an autonomous being, was fighting her corner with a combination of charm, determination and active intelligence that inspired her novice tutor with a secret desire to cheer. Instantly in love with the child but terrified of annoying Lady Byron, her employer, Miss Lamont found herself walking a tightrope that offered no safety net.

  Annabella’s own intentions for her daughter had already been made clear in the thank-you note ‘Ada’ addressed to her grandmother on New Year’s Day 1821. Written in Annabella’s own clear hand (Ada’s sole contribution was a wobbly ‘ADA’), the letter informed Lady Noel that the sky above Hastings was grey, while the sea below was yellow and white. Expressing gratitude for the useful Christmas gift of a knife and fork, Ada sounded as though she had sprung straight from a pedant’s manual on childcare. Consciously or not, Lady Byron seemed intent upon moulding her daughter into an extremely dull little girl.

  Miss Lamont’s Kirkby journal, begun on 14 May of that same year, revealed a very different child. Ada had hailed her arrival with delight. She expressed a wish to start learning at once, and about everything possible. ‘She is brim full of life, spirit and animation,’ Miss Lamont remarked with pleased relief, ‘and is most completely happy.’

  Pleasure was put at a premium under the rigorous schedule upon which Ada’s mother insisted. Each lesson must last precisely fifteen minutes. Good behaviour – demonstrated by obedience, application or simply sitting still – would be rewarded by a ticket.
The emphasis upon sitting still was deliberate: Ada could no more stay still than a sudden streak of sunlight. (Miss Lamont was oddly reminded of a reindeer by the way her small charge dashed about; later, up in Hampstead, the old Baillie sisters would similarly fall under the spell of the lively, rosy-cheeked child they so loved to watch racing across the garden of Branch Lodge.)

  It did not take long for the governess to realise how torn Ada was between bold defiance and the sincere desire to please a mother whom she evidently revered. Challenged by Annabella over her bold claim to sing far better than Mamma, the little girl refused to recant, but she wept when Lady Byron punished her impertinence with silence. Her sobs redoubled when Mamma further showed her disapproval by departing on a promised visit to Hinckley (Ada was enchanted by the local market town) with not a word of farewell.

  Two weeks into Miss Lamont’s stay at Kirkby, the young governess had failed to establish ascendancy over her pupil. Short spells of solitary confinement completely failed to bring Ada to heel. Annabella, writing to Miss Lawrence in Liverpool on 30 May, expressed frustration. What was the use of a governess, when she herself was so often obliged to take her employee’s place – ‘as if I were the teacher’? Miss Lamont had failed to instil the desired attitude in her small charge: ‘a sense of duty, combined with the hope of approbation from those she loves’. Her period of trial would not be extended.

  It seems that Arabella Lawrence – for whom Lady Byron felt respect – defended her protégée. Miss Lamont was permitted to remain at Kirkby – although only until 7 July – as an increasingly uneasy witness to the ongoing battle between a forceful mother and an increasingly assertive child. Ada was stepping up her demands for independence. On 11 June, Annabella compelled her to express regret for saying that she did not want to learn about figures. (‘I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.’) Four days later, the little rebel declared that she cared less about arithmetic than in being told ‘every every thing’ about the cruel practice of beating donkeys. Out of Annabella’s sight, Ada built cities of coloured bricks and turned geography lessons into flights of fantasy. (Could the waves in Norway really surge higher than her own tall house?) Ada, not her mother, had gained control when her governess was persuaded to skip dull lessons to play to her upon the piano, to come and admire how she could gallop like a horse, and to hear how heartily she could bray to entertain her old grandfather: (‘à merveille!’ exclaimed an admiring Miss Lamont).

  Signs of Ada’s rebelliousness appeared in the governess’s journal as regularly as Lady Byron’s instructions for their suppression. When a housemaid was summoned to imprison Ada’s fidgety fingers within black cotton bags, the young woman was greeted with a fierce nip. Despatched to a distant corner in disgrace, Ada sank her teeth into the dado rail. Released after tea, she was allowed into the drawing room, where a forgiving Lady Byron calmed the stormy little girl with soothing poetry. (It was a few months after this scene that Byron first heard about his daughter’s violent temper.)

  Exhausting though Miss Lamont’s experience of teaching Ada had been, the governess departed from Kirkby Mallory in a state of bewitchment. ‘No person can be more rational, companiable [sic] and endearing than this rare child,’ she rhapsodised, before adding that Ada would do almost anything in order to win her mother’s praise.

  Lady Noel died in 1822. The following year, Ada, together with her ageing grandfather, Nurse Briggs and Mistress Puff (the Persian cat), exchanged the grandeur of Kirkby Mallory for Annabella’s rented home in Hampstead. A portrait of Sir Ralph was left behind at Kirkby; instead, Annabella carried away the portrait of Lord Byron posing as an Albanian chief. Removed from its box, the famous painting was now hung, discreetly screened by a green velvet curtain behind which Ada – as it is frankly impossible not to suppose – occasionally granted herself a daring peep.

  On 19 April 1824, Ada’s father died in Greece of fever, exacerbated by bloodletting. Death – he was only thirty-six – in the romantic cause of restoring Greece to independence transformed Byron’s reputation overnight. Later, Lord Tennyson remembered how, as a 16-year-old boy, he had solemnly chiselled the words ‘Byron is dead’ in a rock as a record of his own sombre emotions on hearing the news. At English country houses, Byron’s death was announced to guests with the solemnity due to a fallen hero.

  Brought back to London from Missolonghi on the Florida, the poet’s body was laid out for a week in the room that a grief-stricken John Hobhouse had hired in order that final respects could be paid to his lost friend. The crowds who gathered in Westminster on the final two days, when public tickets were sold, were immense. They gathered again on 12 July, when the funeral cortège left Westminster, and they were present at every staging post along the poet’s three-day journey to rejoin his ancestors in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire. At Newstead, the artist Cornelius Varley added a note to his new sketch of the abbey’s ruined arch that it had been executed during the year of Lord Byron’s death.

  Annabella, informed of her husband’s death on 12 May by the new Lord Byron, reserved any visible signs of distress for the occasion of William Fletcher’s later visit, bringing no final tender message from her late husband. Byron had apparently spoken of Ada, but it was evidently on Annabella’s instructions that as little as possible was said about her father’s death to the little girl. Taken to inspect the Florida, Ada wrote about ‘Papa’s ship’ in a way that suggests she conceived him to have been the ship’s brave captain. Confusion was understandable, especially in a year when her mother’s good friend, who now held the Byron title, sailed for the Sandwich Islands in command of HMS Blonde.

  At Hampstead, where she was taken into a church for the first time, Ada was more disturbed by the sense of imprisonment that she felt within a high-walled box pew than by regrets for a father she had never known. She yawned throughout the sermons and sighed for her lack of playmates. Other than the sedate Misses Carr and the ageing Baillie sisters, the most regular visitors to Branch Lodge were the briskly intelligent group of women who had been acquainted with Annabella since her youth. True, Ada had young Flora Davison (‘ma chère Flore’) upon whom to practise her epistolary skills, but Flora lived outside London. True, Miss Montgomery brought along a nice little nephew, Hugo, who had a nurse of his own, and whose shiny brown hair matched the fur trim of his Russian-style tunic. But what Ada wanted was a proper brother of her own. She lit upon the perfect candidate in the new Lord Byron’s son. Her own mysteriously absent father was now dead, while George Byron’s was sailing across some faraway ocean. George, too, must need an ally, a sister to comfort him. Besides, didn’t the two of them even share a name?

  Young George had little chance to argue once his forceful cousin had determined upon him as her choice. On 9 September 1824, Ada offered her undying affection and sincere consolation to ‘my sweet George’ for his father’s absence, while reaffirming her own loyal devotion: ‘but no more about this at present for should your death take you from me though I do not feel it much now I should when it happened’. Undeterred by her cousin’s resounding silence, she tried again. Perhaps George would like to know her thoughts about love? (George was six; Ada almost eight.) Ada was eager to share her ideas. ‘I think the greatest happiness is in loving and being loved I dare say my love you will feel that.’

  Ada was already displaying signs of having inherited her late father’s mesmerising volatility. After broaching (9 September) the subject of her sturdy little cousin’s possibly imminent death, she moved along without a blink on that same day to telling her mother about her recent enjoyment of a tasty meal of ‘fryed fish’, before again switching to the latest hunting exploits of the adventurous Mistress Puff. Ada had also invented a new word to describe her own passion for intensive reading: ‘gobblebook’.

  ‘Gobblebook’ signalled a marked change in Ada. She had become not only an eager reader, but a voracious learner. Although unequipped with
a formal governess during her three years at Branch Lodge, it’s likely that Ada was being informally tutored by the clever ladies whose visits filled her letters at the time. If so, they did well by her. Ada started to ask probing questions about arithmetic, while trying her hand at writing in French. A letter addressed to Cousin George’s mother, now also known as Lady Byron, proudly announced her near perfect command of Spanish and Italian. Emotionally, too, Ada was making progress. She could understand her mother’s enduring affection for gentle Sophy Tamworth (‘Lady Tam’) well enough to connect it to her own sisterly devotion to little George.

  The Baillie sisters would later remember Ada as a cheerful, energetic little girl, full of life and affection. Neither they nor her mother were surprised when she announced her plan to raise money (by making plaster casts of gems) to finance the painting of a portrait of her grandfather. The project was still in progress in the summer of 1825, when Sir Ralph died. Having dozed his last months placidly away at Branch Lodge, he was buried beside Judith in the windswept churchyard of their lost, but beloved, Seaham estate.

  Sir Ralph’s death marked the last stage in his daughter’s transformation into Lady Noel Byron, a woman of thirty-three who was determined to make good use of the immense wealth and vast estates that she now possessed through Uncle Wentworth’s legacy.

  A great injustice had occurred, however. It was one that Annabella acted swiftly to redress. In 1825, Lord Wentworth’s six grandchildren were left virtually destitute, thanks to the fact that he had refused to leave his fortune to their father, his own (fiercely resentful) illegitimate son. The children’s mother, Kitty Smith, was a sweet but ineffectual woman, long since abandoned by the absentee rector of Kirkby Mallory. While Annabella delegated the two young Noel girls to care for their somewhat helpless mother, her primary concern was for their brothers.