In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  Ada gave no thought to what the impact of such a bold declaration on her mother was likely to be. For herself, thoughts of Newstead – and indeed, her mother – were swept aside a couple of weeks later when her hosts at Aske Hall, the Zetlands, invited Lady Lovelace to accompany them to Doncaster, to see how their Derby-winning colt would fare in two of the last big events of the flat-racing season. William, off to investigate new agricultural methods in Lincolnshire, agreed to rejoin the party on the third day.

  Doncaster Races took place, as they still do, on a pear-shaped track. Unlike today, there were then no stands and no barriers. No rules of etiquette kept separate classes of racegoers apart. The sense of communion on a mud-spattered field was close to that of an old-fashioned point-to-point: informal, boisterous and electrically intimate. As at Epsom, crowds of the Zetlands’ employees and tenants had come along to bet and cheer their ‘Volti’ on to triumph in the St Leger, before collecting the prize money (no horse appeared to compete against him) in the Scarborough Handicap.

  Lord Lovelace arrived at Doncaster in time to see their friends’ athletic colt beat his greatest rival of the age, Lord Eglinton’s The Flying Dutchman, in a hair-raising tie-breaker for the Doncaster Gold Cup. (The two horses were the only runners and Eglinton’s jockey had been drinking hard before the race.) Writing to his mother-in-law, Lovelace observed that his clever wife was being admired by all for her skill in picking out the best points of a horse, while he – poor chap – had succeeded only in having a few pounds picked from his pockets. Ada’s maid had apparently turned a little profit on her bets, but their silly coachman had lost 18 shillings – not enough to stop him from trying his luck again. As for Ada:

  I am threatened with proofs by an eager ardent avis, that this

  business is profitable – much more so than the training them . . .

  Nobody knows what conversations and encounters had taken place at Doncaster prior to William’s arrival, but it was here that Ada took the fateful decision to retrieve the Lovelace fortunes by making a new kind of book.

  Arriving back at Aske in time to share the celebrations, Ada collapsed and had to take to her bed, where (so she assured an alarmed mother on 26 September) she was miraculously restored to health by the Zetlands’ wonderful physician. His name was Dr Malcolm and – as Ada prudently failed to add – he took a keen interest in his captivating patient’s explanations of how she could use her mathematical skills to outwit experienced bookmakers on the turf. Ada’s problem was that she – as Byron’s somewhat notorious daughter – could never allow her own name to be used for placing bets. But if Lady Lovelace could find a few obliging friends to help, friends who might like to make a little money themselves by the use of her computations . . .

  Dr Malcolm encouraged her. Working for the Zetlands, the doctor had plenty of contacts in the bookmaking world. Why should Lady Lovelace not rally up a circle of discreet enthusiasts like himself and form her own private ring? He had the names. She had the brains. How could she – how could they – lose?

  Writing to her mother at this momentous time, Ada demurely reported how much she liked the Zetland’s prizewinning colt. Voltigeur was both quiet and amiable: ‘a most earnest, conscientious sort of horse’. She could as well have been talking of Tam o’Shanter and Zigzag, the horses on which she loved to ride out across Exmoor. About her thoughts for a racing future, there was not a word.

  Evidence that Ada’s enterprising mind had alighted upon a new interest continued to surface through the rest of the autumn. A puzzled but dutiful daughter, back from her educational tour of Germany, and visiting her grandmother, was asked to hurry over to Horsley and despatch to Ada the doubling dice that she would find there, lodged within a backgammon board. Meanwhile, Charles Babbage received a message on 1 November about the usefulness of ‘Erasmus Wilson’ in helping her mistress to a new cure and of Ada’s urgent need to meet Babbage’s ‘medical friend’ as soon as she herself returned to London from her hill-climbing exploits in the Lake District. (‘Some very thorough remedial measures must be pursued,’ Ada warned him, ‘– or all power of getting any livelihood in any way whatever, will be at an end.’)

  It sounded almost like a threat. Since Ada was simultaneously boasting to her mother and Agnes Greig that her northern physician (Dr Malcolm) was responsible for an astonishing improvement in her health, ‘Erasmus Wilson’ was surely a code for Mary, the servant who had once worked for Babbage and who was now placing discreet bets on her mistress’s behalf. It’s reasonable to surmise that the curiously underlined ‘medical friend’ was in fact a potential recruit for Ada’s ring of investors.*

  By Christmas 1850, while paying a visit to her mother at Esher, Ada was studying the new season’s printed programme for steeplechases. All the best bets had been clearly marked up for her by one of Dr Malcolm’s tipsters. In a word, Lady Lovelace was hooked.

  At any other moment in her cautious life, the prudent Lady Byron might have been thoroughly alarmed by Lovelace’s allusion to Ada’s fancy for becoming a breeder of horses. (William himself seems to have been largely unconscious of Ada’s enthusiasm for placing bets until the following spring.) But Annabella had been sidetracked by her daughter’s altered view of Newstead, and the bold admiration with which she now extolled her father and his gambling forebears. Of what use was the careful version of past events that she herself had recently revised and polished and submitted to an admiring Frederick Robertson for his approbation, if Ada were to embrace her unredeemed papa? What could Lady Byron herself do to regain ascendancy over her wilful daughter?

  Initially, Annabella resorted to threats. If this was how Lord Byron was to be viewed, then she would play no further part in the upbringing of her grandchildren. They would never see her again! Somewhat, but not entirely, soothed by pleading letters of reassurance that her version – and only her version – of the past would prevail, Lady Byron came up with a new proposal. If Ada loved Newstead so much, then she should have it. William could appraise its value. The money could be raised by selling some of the Wentworth estates around Birmingham. The idea, once Annabella began to consider it (the feelings of the poor Wildmans were entirely disregarded), proved curiously appealing. The house would be her gift to Ada, but the person who owned Newstead – just as she still owned everything to do with the Wentworth estates – would be herself. Annabella, not Ada, would become the presiding angel of Byron’s ancient home.

  The Lovelaces were not averse to the Hen’s proposal. ‘Will you sometime write me a letter about a possible exchange of Newstead,’ Ada wrote to her mother on 24 December. She added that Lovelace thought that a deal might indeed be done without too much impact on the Wentworth property. The possibility of acquiring the abbey intrigued them both.

  And then, with no explanation, the whole fantastic plan was dropped. By January 1851, Ada (while up to the neck in her plans to set up a racing ring) was making pleasant arrangements for the Wildmans to come and stay at Horsley with Captain Byron and his wife.* Annabella, meanwhile, her mind aswirl with the turbulent emotions that talk of Newstead had brought rushing to the surface, was diverted by another connection to the past.

  Augusta Leigh’s raffish old husband had died at the age of seventy-nine in May 1850, the month of Voltigeur’s first triumph at Epsom. By the end of the year, largely on account of her late husband’s outstanding debts, Augusta was destitute. She still had her rooms at St James’s Palace. What she lacked, as ever, was ready cash. She knew that Lady Byron had recently reconciled herself with Mrs Villiers. Was this not the ideal moment to remind Byron’s wealthy little widow that there still existed a sister for whom she had, at one time, felt the most tender sentiments of affection?

  The moment was indeed timely. Annabella’s lengthy conversations with the attentive Frederick Robertson had recently included a pious wish that she might meet with Augusta Leigh for one last occasion. On New Year’s Day 1851, she told the impressionable clergyman that – as for herself – she �
��loved her still. I cannot help it.’ On 8 January, Lady Byron dropped a hint about the tales she might tell Mr Robertson – if she wished – about the true nature of Byron’s relationship with his older half-sister.

  This was awkward. Anybody living in Lady Byron’s circle would have had to be exceptionally ill-informed not to have heard, by 1850, at least a whisper about Byron’s scandalous relationship with Augusta Leigh. Nervous of causing offence, Robertson expressed careful surprise – and even horror. Could it be that Byron and Mrs Leigh . . .? Was his ‘dreadful fancy’ based upon fact? It was. Expanding graciously, Lady Byron offered the receptive cleric that version of the past to which she herself was now entirely wedded.

  Byron had always loved her. Even after his wife left him, he had written those very words. ‘I was his best friend,’ Annabella had recently reminded her daughter (17 September 1850), before quoting Byron’s passionate declaration (‘I did – do – and ever shall – love you.’) But he was not allowed to love her. Another, more wicked influence had prevailed. Augusta Leigh, jealous of a young wife’s spiritual power over the husband she had left, had twisted the evidence. Acting (admittedly under Annabella’s own instructions) as the marital go-between during the last eight years of Byron’s life abroad, Mrs Leigh had fuelled her brother’s hatred of his wife. She had manipulated the truth. This gospel testimony of Lady Byron – ever since Medora had produced in the winter of 1840–1 her own imaginative version of past events – had become plain fact. All that was lacking, as Annabella explained to her fascinated listener, was the oral proof, the confession that only Augusta Leigh herself could provide.

  A wiser clergyman might have smiled. Robertson, while widely admired in Brighton as a magnificent speaker – and a very handsome man – was both naive and an unconscionable prig. The actress Fanny Kemble, visiting Brighton in the late autumn of 1850, had been appalled to discover that Lady Byron, urged on by Robertson, was planning to write a cautionary preface to the readers of a new cheap edition of Byron’s works. Fanny, who had always opposed the public view of Byron’s widow as a cold-hearted prude, believed the enterprise would do great harm to her old friend. ‘I had always admired the reticent dignity of her silence,’ Kemble wrote in her entertaining Records of Girlhood. And besides, ‘what could Byron do to the young men of 1850?’ But Annabella was not to be dissuaded.

  ‘Nobody’ she [Lady Byron] said, ‘knew him as I did . . . nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the injury he might do to others, in some of his writings.’

  The clinching argument for this ludicrous project (it never saw the light) had come from Frederick Robertson. It was he, so Mrs Kemble learned, who had solemnly advised Lady Byron of the dangers of her husband’s poetry ‘to a class peculiarly interesting to him . . . and of course his [Robertson’s] opinion was more than an overweight for mine’.

  With such an ally at her side, Lady Byron was ready for action. Her opportunity came in February 1851, when word reached her from Admiral Lord Byron (George’s father) that Miss Emily Leigh had been in touch regarding her mother. A response was promptly issued. A week later, Augusta herself wrote to accept Lady Byron’s proposal for a meeting. It might, Augusta hopefully wrote, do both of them good to have a free and frank discussion after so long a silence. She welcomed this opportunity to clear the air.

  Annabella does not appear to advantage during the elaborate negotiations over which, counselled by Robertson at every step, she presided during the next few weeks. Augusta, who had never been on a train in her life, was instructed to make her way alone to Reigate station. There, at a convenient but obscure destination midway between Brighton and London, an inconspicuously dressed servant (meaning, he would wear no livery buttons on his coat) would meet and conduct Mrs Leigh to a nearby – and flawlessly sedate – coaching inn called The White Hart. Following her brief introduction to a neutral witness, the two women would be left alone. Augusta’s feeble protests about this sudden inclusion of a stranger at such an intimate occasion were crushed by Annabella’s representation of Robertson as ‘the Genius of the Soul’s World’. One might as well (so Lady Byron haughtily implied) deny a birthplace to the Christchild as exclude the Reverend Frederick Robertson of Brighton from the Reigate inn.

  The interview took place in a back room at The White Hart on 8 April. No records were made. Later, however, Annabella recalled her dismay at realising that Mrs Leigh, an inveterate chatterbox, meant to produce nothing more confessional than a babble of pleasantries. ‘Is that all?’ Lady Byron had burst out. ‘I felt utterly hopeless, and asked to be left alone to compose myself.’ Rejoining Robertson and their bewildered guest after this moment of solitude, Annabella moved into attack mode. Armed with assertions of which a list had been prepared (‘you kept up hatred; you put things in a false light’), she tried to coerce a response. Eager to please, and thus to get some financial recompense for her journey, Augusta agreed that her brother had often uttered ‘dreadful things’. She refused to say that she had encouraged him. Pressed harder, Mrs Leigh grew annoyed. Lady Byron had been allowed to bring Mr Robertson along as her supporter. Well, she had one, too: Sir John Hobhouse. Augusta was ready to state that Hobhouse had once actually warned her not to be so unflinchingly loyal to Annabella – unless she herself actually wished to lose her brother’s affection.

  This declaration was the modest boast that tipped the balance of Annabella’s fiercely governed mind. ‘At such a testimony I started up,’ Lady Byron admitted afterwards. ‘I was afraid of myself . . . the strongest desire to be out of her presence took possession of me, lest I should be tempted beyond my strength’. Some answer was tearfully jerked out, some phrase about a kind blessing that she now felt herself unable to confer – and the meeting was over.

  Annabella had once described Byron’s sister as having been born in a state of moral idiocy. The validity of that brusque observation was never more pathetically apparent than in Augusta’s readiness to view the Reigate meeting as a success. Writing to thank Annabella for her ‘exertions’, she ‘could not resist’ signing herself as ‘Yours affectionately’. A furious Annabella responded that the required confession had been entirely inadequate. Adding not one word of reciprocal affection, Lady Byron signed her answer: ‘Farewell’. Growing apprehensive, Augusta wrote again, this time to offer Frederick Robertson proofs of her innocence. Impossible, the clergyman bleakly responded on 21 May. Such proofs could only be produced in the presence of Lady Byron and the word ‘farewell’ was surely clear enough? There would be no further meetings. Mrs Leigh could console herself with the thought of clearing her conscience at another encounter, one ‘which must be heard very, very soon, when you meet God face to face’.

  And that was that.

  While the Reigate meeting and its aftermath do not reflect well upon either Lady Byron or her advisor, it is worth noting that Augusta’s half-sister, the widowed Countess of Chichester, wrote some years later expressing a friendly desire to meet with Annabella at Brighton. Apparently, Lady Chichester wanted to express the deep gratitude ‘I have ever entertained of yr kindness to my Sister & several members of her unfortunate family’.

  There’s no doubting the sincerity of Lady Chichester’s words. Clearly, she was recalling the unpleasant drama of Medora. It’s likely that she was also remembering how promptly Annabella had paid the bills and offered to cover the cost of all that was required for comfort when Augusta, just six months after the Reigate meeting, lay at death’s door. Possibly, Lady Chichester had also learned from Emily Leigh of Lady Byron’s final moment of humanity, a written wish that Emily might whisper to her mother ‘from me the words Dearest Augusta – I can’t think they could hurt her’.

  On 5 October 1851, Emily reported that she had done as requested. Her mother seemed much pleased and affected. She had made a lengthy response. Only – alas for a hungry Annabella, st
ill yearning for that unreceived confession – Mrs Leigh had lost her voice. ‘I could not hear distinctly,’ Emily wrote. ‘– I dare say she will mention the subject again.’

  She never did. On 12 October 1851, Augusta Leigh died in faded dignity, attended by her daughter and a physician, in the rooms at St James’s Palace that she had inhabited for thirty-three years. On 16 October, Annabella, who had been lingering at a London hotel in the vain hope of a last-minute summons, wrote on black-edged paper to ask if she might be allowed to visit her god-daughter, to hear a private confidence that would never be shared. That Emily had none to offer was, perhaps, as well. Augusta’s secrets, if indeed she had any to disclose, would assuredly not have gone untold.

  None of Byron’s family attended Mrs Leigh’s interment at Kensal Rise. On 2 July 1852, however, Annabella wrote to inform Emily that, despite appearances, she had always been her mother’s truest friend. ‘Mine is not a nature in which affection can pass away,’ Lady Byron announced: ‘nearly forty years have shown this in regard to her’.

  There is no doubt that Annabella herself believed this remarkable statement to be no less than the truth.

  The Lovelace children once again spent the Christmas of 1850 in separate places. Lord Ockham remained in Chile under the supervision of the Greigs’ friend, Captain Fanshawe. Annabella had been shifted from Lady Byron’s home, to the Greigs, and on to Ockham, where old Stephen Lushington treated her as a cherished grandchild of his own. (A glimpse of their affectionate relationship peeps through accounts of afternoon games of billiards and the lawyer’s teasing comments about Annabella’s salamander-like love of a blazing fire.) Meanwhile, Ada’s younger son, Ralph, remained in fog-drenched London with his mother, where Ada herself – between paying snugly wrapped visits with Babbage to the semi-completed and ice-cold ‘Glass House’ in Hyde Park – scolded the boy for his sulks about the absence of Ockham’s promised tales of his nautical adventures. (If any such letters did arrive, we might suspect that Lord Lovelace saw fit to confiscate them.)