Back in England, Ada pined in vain for letters from her habitually uncommunicative son. In September 1849, she had been informed that the Swift was on course and that her boy was in good spirits. Then, nothing. Fears grew. In December, Lady Byron lowered Ada’s spirits by mentioning a dreadful incident in which a young boy had been kidnapped by a Portugese slaveship and drowned. Not until February 1850 did a navy-stamped package arrive to relieve the anxious mother. Lovelace, for his part, was delighted by the improvement he perceived in Ockham’s attitude towards his parents. By May that year, the complacent earl was calling at Moore Place to boast to its new inhabitant, the exiled Duchesse d’Orléans, a lady with whom he was eager to curry a friendship, that there was nothing to beat the British Navy for teaching a boy discipline.*
On 7 June 1850, the proud father received a brisk comeuppance. Ockham’s long-awaited first letter from Chile had arrived. It was addressed, not to his father – but to his 10-year-old brother, Ralph. Sharing his displeasure with a sympathetic Hen, Lovelace complained that his seafaring heir’s epistle (as ever, the inquisitive father had been unable to resist opening it) was filled with low and vulgar jokes. Was it for this that they had expended so much careful planning?
Lovelace grumbled; Ada, longing for the safe return of her favourite child, continued to believe that Ockham would astonish them all. Writing to Charles Babbage, back in November 1848, Ada had claimed that her oldest boy would prove to be the tortoise who beat the hares, only ‘by & bye’.
Byron Ockham would do so still. Ada was sure of it.
* * *
* This seems to be the earliest indication of a connection between Lady Byron and her future defender, Dr Beecher’s daughter, Harriet. It was cemented by the friendship that she formed in 1849 with Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be listed on the UK medical register. The English-born Blackwell had become close to Lyman Beecher and his wife during the early 1840s, when she lived in Cincinnati. (In England, Annabella helpfully introduced her to the young Florence Nightingale, whose own vocation for nursing Lady Byron was discreetly supporting.)
* The Nightingales’ connection to Ada’s family dated back to the friendship between her own Milbanke grandparents and Florence’s grandfather, William Smith, an abolitionist and early convert to unitarianism. Florence’s aunt, Julia Smith, was one of Lady Byron’s chief confidantes.
* Young Annabella was becoming a voracious reader. When aged thirteen, she read both Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Dickens’s Christmas Stories. While partial to travel books, she also read that year a French course in maths, Brewster’s Martyrs of Science, a study of ozone, Lalande’s Logorhythms and Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (Wentworth Papers, British Library, BL 53817 and 54091).
* Reading Ockham’s immature but jolly letters to his brother, it’s hard to see what the fuss was about.
* Following the arrival of the deposed French king Louis Philippe and his family at Claremont House in 1849, William Lovelace had persuaded his reluctant mother-in-law (Annabella had rejoiced at the royal family’s fall) to loan the second of her two houses at Esher to Victoria’s elderly cousin, the duchesse. Possibly, the earl expected this to lead to some sort of royal favour. It didn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE HAND OF THE PAST
(1850–1)
In 1850, Ada found herself enjoying an unusually protracted spell of robust good health. Making the most of this unfamiliar sense of well-being during an autumn visit to the Lake District, the 34-year-old Lady Lovelace managed both to climb up to the 900-metre-high plateau that crowns Helvellyn and to attempt the marginally lower ridge of Skiddaw, where only bad weather forced her to halt. ‘The mountain air & mountain life does wonders,’ Ada exulted to her mother, before adding her intention of returning for further and bolder ascents.
The trip to Cumbria formed the climax to a tour that (ironically, as it turned out) was planned as a diversion from the Lovelaces’ ongoing worries about money. No investors had shown an interest in supporting the building of Charles Babbage’s pioneering but expensive machine. The plans for marketing a games-playing automaton that were discussed in Ada and Babbage’s shared ‘book’ had come to nothing. Providing Annabella with a home education was a continuing expense for which Ada had undertaken personal responsibility. A more problematic expenditure, since she could discuss it with nobody (Ada herself knew only a carefully edited version of the truth), was John Crosse’s ongoing need to provide for his secret family.
Early in December 1849, Lady Byron had made her son-in-law a welcome loan of £4,500 to assist with the purchase of 6 Great Cumberland Place. A further £1,500 was offered later that month. The loan was generous, but it was insufficient for the requirements and aspirations of a very ambitious earl. (Having been thwarted in his desire to become secretary of state, Lovelace now had his eye fixed on obtaining a post at the Admiralty.) At the beginning of 1850, however, the Lovelaces secured a secret benefactor.
In 1846, Anna Jameson and her niece Gerardine [sic] had formed part of the elopement party that accompanied the newly-wed and fled Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning from Paris to Pisa. Living abroad, Mrs Jameson relied upon Lady Byron to invest the substantial income she was accruing back in England, the fruits of her successful career both as art historian and travel writer. Annabella’s financial acumen was becoming legendary. Anna Jameson’s investments grew. Her letters of gratitude were heartfelt.
Seeking financial aid at a time when she did not dare ask her mother to produce more than a meagre £50 travel fund for her autumn tour, Ada bethought herself of the indebted and always friendly Mrs Jameson. On 9 February 1850, Anna was summoned for a visit to Horsley Towers. Ada’s note was imperious. She herself was just off to see little Ralph at Southampton, where Lady Byron was supervising her younger grandson’s schooling at Drew’s Academy. Mrs Jameson was instructed to send her response to William, who ‘is anxious to know as soon as possible. He hopes you will not say us Nay . . .’
Sitting in Horsley Towers’ newly furnished Great Hall beneath Phillips’s celebrated portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress (the poet stood between Mrs Carpenter’s painting of Ada as a bride and Hoppner’s painting of his wife as a child), Mrs Jameson might have wondered why the owners of such a splendid home and such fine possessions were short of money. Nevertheless, perhaps at this initial point – and certainly later on – Anna agreed to help out with a loan, while promising to say nothing to her appointed soulmate, Lady Byron. That recklessly given assurance of secrecy was to have devastating consequences for a treasured friendship.
Money continued to leak away. In May 1850, Ada evinced her first flicker of real interest in a sport that offered the possibility of raising a fortune by the use of her mathematical skills. Lady Byron, meanwhile, had just paid a visit to Horsley with the objective of meeting one particular fellow guest. Lord Clare, now stoutly middle-aged, had been Lord Byron’s first great love. Sadly, no record survives of what thoughts were shared, perhaps because of an anxious grandmother’s greater concern about young Annabella, who had just had her first period. It was at precisely this stage and at the same age (thirteen) that Ada had been struck down by the paralysis that crippled her for almost three years. Writing to reassure a worried Lady Byron on 30 May, Ada promised that every care would be taken of her granddaughter’s health. Only the quietest forms of exertion would be permitted; nothing reckless. These comforting words were an afterthought, tacked on to the end of a letter that was largely devoted to Ada’s latest interest.
Voltigeur was a three-year-old Yorkshire-bred colt belonging to Thomas Dundas, 2nd Earl of Zetland. The Zetlands had been friends of the Milbanke family since Annabella’s childhood at Seaham. Paying a March visit to Aske Hall, the Zetlands’ Yorkshire home, Lovelace heard little beyond his host’s high expectations for their exceptional horse.
Lord Zetland’s hopes had been confirmed on 29 May, when his colt won the Derby, the world’s greatest flat horse race, his
torically held on the downs at Epsom. Merrily, Ada’s letter of the following day warned her mother to look out for reports of Lord Lovelace’s imminent destitution, due to the reckless gambling of his wife. To write in this way to a mother who loathed all forms of speculation – Lady Byron had even distributed anti-gaming posters in the casino-rich town of Wiesbaden, back in 1838 – was typical provocation by a saucy daughter who loved to tease her mother. Lady Byron was not amused to hear that her giddy darling was ‘in danger of becoming a sporting character’. Her silence had its usual effect. The subject was dropped.
The year 1850 was one of vigorous social activity for the Lovelaces. In March, the earl had visited both Aske and Floors Castle, the Duke of Roxburghe’s enormous Scottish residence. Early in May, plans were hatched to welcome an eminent American historian to their own new London home. (Ada was a keen admirer of William Prescott’s 1843 masterpiece, The History of the Conquest of Mexico.) Robert Noel, paying a rare visit to England from Dresden, was invited to join a gathering of scientific luminaries at Great Cumberland Place at the end of that month. At the opera, William and Ada weighed the merits of ‘the Swedish nightingale’ Jenny Lind against her rival, Henriette Sontag, and found in favour of the sweettoned German soprano. Dutifully attending two royal balls, Lady Lovelace was still angling for the post of unofficial scientific advisor to the queen’s husband. Instead, to her annoyance, she learned from Woronzow Greig that her name had once again become the subject of scandalous gossip. A certain gentleman had been identified – but Greig refused to divulge his name.
The haughty tone of Ada’s response contrasted oddly with the fervency of her denials. Such stories were pitifully out of date, she wrote. Did Greig (Ada wrote to him, as she did to Babbage and Wheatstone, man to man, using his surname alone) not know that the mere fact that she was Byron’s daughter meant that she was saddled with a new lover every three years – and would be until she was too old for such silly tales to carry conviction? No need for Greig to mention the gossip to her mother, who was well used to hearing such foolish gossip. Lovelace, however, must be informed. The name of this mystery lover had better be supplied to her at once.
Ada’s tone was both defensive and aggressive. Was she afraid that John Crosse had been identified by a sharp-eyed friend? It’s hard to tell. Sophia De Morgan was mentioned as a prime culprit in the spreading of injurious tales. But Ada expressed no guilt. She acknowledged nothing. As before, Greig was reminded of a line beyond which it was unwise for him to step. Lady Lovelace might choose to confide in him; she would never accept interrogation or criticism.
It was, nevertheless, important for Ada not to offend the Greigs in the summer of 1850. Woronzow had played a large part in arranging for Byron Ockham’s transfer to the Daphne, captained by his own friend Edward Fanshawe, and now safely anchored at Valparaíso. Meanwhile, Agnes, Greig’s gentle Scottish wife, had just volunteered to chaperone young Annabella around Europe, an expedition of the same kind that Ada herself had enjoyed as a young girl. The project suited Mrs Greig, who had been seriously ill during the previous year. It also freed the Lovelaces to pursue their plan for a round of northern visits.
Money worries were still preying on Ada’s mind as she prepared for the autumn tour. Writing to her daughter out in Germany on 25 August, she confessed to her horse-loving child that economy had compelled the sale of several of their favourites from the stud. As a further saving, only the Wilson siblings, Stephen and Mary (the Babbage family’s former servants), would accompany the Lovelaces down to Ashley at the end of the year: ‘rents are half paid, we are in some difficulty . . .’
One of the greatest treasures to which Ada possessed unfettered access was the Lovelace diamonds. This magnificent set of jewels, given to his wife at her marriage, formed a regular feature of William’s letters to Lady Byron as he questioned – always a little anxiously – how they were being cared for. The idea of raising money on the jewels first lodged itself in Ada’s mind in July 1850, when she asked Charles Babbage to arrange for a private inspection of ‘the diamonds’ at the ‘Exhibition d’Industrie’, adding that this ‘would help me’. Since Ada cared nothing for diamonds, it’s hard to see why she would have thought such an experience useful, if not to assess the sale value of Lord Lovelace’s most prized heirloom.*
Ada’s worries were not alleviated by the insistence of Lady Byron that her daughter should be constantly available to provide companionship to herself as and when a widowed mother might require it. On the brink of the Lovelaces’ northern tour, Annabella stepped up the pressure. Their departure date was set for the last week in August; on 19 August, two piteous requests for a last little glimpse of Lady Byron’s only child reached Great Cumberland Place. Accusations followed. How could Ada have neglected to visit Moore Place the previous week, when she was staying at Horsley Towers, a mere half-hour’s drive away?
Annabella knew how to tweak her daughter’s conscience. Truly, they had believed the Hen still to be at Brighton, responded Ada within an hour. Of course, she would try to rectify such an oversight. Indeed, she would take the London train down to Esher that afternoon and then return to the city on that same night. But the Hen must promise not to become ‘frightened or astonished or otherwise affected’ if she failed in the attempt. The Bird was going to do her best.
Ada was always vulnerable to Lady Byron’s reproaches, but she had become wearily familiar with her mother’s methods. Further complaints from Moore Place were forestalled by posting a precise itinerary. Referring to their money difficulties with artful indirectness, Ada experimented with using a bit of emotional blackmail. A lack of funds, she hinted, might well oblige the Lovelaces to linger on at Ashley Combe after the trip ‘by way of economy’. Ashley was the one place from which Lady Byron could not reasonably demand daily companionship. It was too remote, and Ada knew it. The implication was clear; if Annabella wanted her daughter to nurse and humour her, very well. But she must pay for the privilege.
The response was predictable. Perhaps from meanness, but more probably from habitual obstinacy, Lady Byron refused to be drawn. If extravagance forced her profligate children into seclusion, so be it. They and she must endure the consequences.
The autumn tour began with a long-promised visit to Knebworth, a Hertfordshire mansion which Edward Bulwer-Lytton had richly Gothicised in the style most admired by William Lovelace.* From there, the travellers proceeded to William and Fanny Nightingale’s Derbyshire home, Lea Hurst, and on to Thrumpton Hall, a recently ‘improved’ Jacobean mansion in Nottinghamshire inhabited by Captain George Byron and his young wife, Lucy Wescomb, who owned the house.
George had been Ada’s childhood friend, but no record survives of whether the cousins discussed Newstead Abbey, the nearby house at which the Lovelaces planned to pass a few days. George Byron’s father had spent many happy months roaming through the Newstead woods in search of rabbits and pheasants to shoot, while his more brilliant cousin was off being lionised in London. Probably, Ada admired the young garden oak being grown at Thrumpton, an offshoot from one that Byron, as a boy, had planted at Newstead. The sturdy sapling was a gift from Newstead’s new owners, the Wildmans, of whom both George and Lucy Byron spoke with great affection. (Wildman had apparently just turned down an offer from Barnum to purchase the celebrated scrap of bark on which Byron and Augusta had carved their initials.) Ada’s own feelings about Newstead remained ambivalent. She was half-dreading the visit.
On 7 September, the Lovelaces arrived at the house which was now Thomas Wildman’s home. Ada’s mother, who had paid just one covert, inquisitive visit to Newstead shortly after her separation from Byron in 1816, had seen the old house at its lowest ebb, grown almost as derelict as the gaping, glassless window (a relic of the ancient abbey) that soared above it. Since then, under Colonel Wildman’s energetic ownership, a transformation had taken place. A fortune had been lavished upon the rescue mission which, at the time of Ada’s visit, was virtually complete. Showing off his achie
vement with forgivable pride, the kind-hearted colonel – he had spent days swotting up on scientific subjects in advance – was baffled by Ada’s reticence. Surely, it must give dear Lady Lovelace pleasure to see how faithfully he had followed the old designs? Why did she look so sad? He could not understand it. It was not until the third day of Ada’s visit that Colonel Wildman dared directly to ask her for the reason. Talking to her sympathetic host about her growing regrets that the abbey was no longer a Byron house, Ada seemed transformed, a different woman.*
Her correspondence reflected the change that had taken place. Arriving at Newstead, Ada had confided to her mother on 8 September a feeling of overpowering sadness. (‘All is like death around one; & I seem to be in the Mausoleum of my race.’) William, meanwhile, sent the Hen dismissive accounts of a dreary village filled with poachers and stocking-makers. Newstead itself was nothing compared to Horsley Towers. Wildman’s interiors were overdone. As for the miserable little church at nearby Hucknall Torkard, where Byron was buried: ‘The tablet I need not describe.’
It’s evident that William Lovelace had not yet registered the shift in his wife’s feelings. (Before she left Newstead, Ada told Wildman that she wished to be buried there, and to lie at her father’s side.) On 15 September, while snugly lodged at Radbourne Hall, the elegant Derbyshire family home of Captain Byron’s mother, Ada informed her own mother about her change of heart. If visiting Newstead had begun as a descent into the grave, a resurrection had taken place. ‘I do love the venerable old place & all my wicked forefathers,’ Ada declared. An ancient prophecy was mentioned, predicting that the Byrons would leave the house at the very time that her father sold it, and ‘that it is to come back [two heavy underlinings] in the present generation’.
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