Henry Hope Reed took Babbage at his word. Yet it was Babbage himself who, while cumbersomely playful, entirely lacked the imaginative power which had enabled a visionary Ada Lovelace to foresee the possibilities inherent in his machine. Laughingly, Ada had complained to her mother of being plagued by far too vivid a mind. And yet, here stood poor Babbage in 1854, assuring a respectful visitor that the fancies and the games and the wit had all been on his side. Perhaps it was as well that Charles Babbage had never appreciated the gift of joy his own laborious jokes had proven to the dancing, quicksilver mind of his attentive Lady Bird, his glittering Fairy.
The third of Lady Byron’s relationships to be enduringly affected by her daughter’s death was her friendship with Anna Jameson, the loquacious Irish art historian to whom – over a period of ten years – Annabella had become as close as a sister. The reasons for their estrangement were several. It was a painful shock for Annabella to learn that her gambling-obsessed daughter had turned to Mrs Jameson for financial support and that Anna had provided it, all without a word to Annabella herself. Equal pain was inflicted when Mrs Jameson, while desperately endeavouring to restore herself to Lady Byron’s good graces, attacked the character of her dying daughter. Mrs Jameson loved Ada. It’s unlikely that she said anything intentionally cruel. To Annabella, however, during the testing final weeks of her daughter’s excruciatingly extended life, any word of criticism dropped acid upon an open wound.
A meeting between the newly estranged ladies took place during December 1852. According to a loudly distraught Mrs Jameson, the word ‘friendship’ was flung back in her face. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning (a woman who said her flesh crawled at the mere thought of touching Lady Byron’s hand), Jameson later confided (on 18 May 1856) that the shock of being exposed to Annabella’s ‘inexorable’ temper had almost destroyed her. Throughout 1853, nevertheless, Mrs Jameson struggled to mend bridges, while Annabella continued smilingly to deny – it was a technique that Lady Byron had honed to perfection – that her own feelings had ever altered.
On 23 January 1854, having expressed courteous regret at the reported death of Anna’s mother, Mrs Murphy, Annabella rejected the peace offering of a contribution to her own private Kirkby monument to Ada (for which, as she took care to point out, no donations had been solicited or desired). On 13 February, following a further cool exchange, Lady Byron remarked that, while chilled by Mrs Jameson’s ‘persistent attacks’, her own affection remained unchanged. Had she herself not confirmed, towards the end of 1852 (we can be sure that the meticulous Annabella had placed the copied original before her as she wrote), that she was ‘as ever your Friend’?
Anna Jameson’s last and fatal error was to express forgiveness, both towards Ada and to her mother. It was the offer of ‘forgiveness’ to herself that had made Lady Byron want to strike Augusta Leigh during their ill-fated final encounter. Extended by Mrs Jameson, whose assistance to Ada Lady Byron regarded as inexcusably disloyal to herself, forgiveness was an insult. Responding to it in that same icily courteous letter of 13 February, Lady Byron commanded ‘My dearest Mrs Jameson’, please, to leave the issue of who should forgive whom aside – and to allow Ada’s reputation to take care of itself.
You tell me you have ‘shielded the memory of Lady Lovelace from the cruel world.’ If the world is cruel, let it alone – if the ‘Repentance’ which is now by her own direction inscribed on the monument to her at Kirkby Mallory, cannot disarm the Pharisees they must be left to convict themselves.
Your reiterated expression of forgiveness, in fact to many accusations, might need Forgiveness, if I were not, in so many respects, and in spite of yourself, always so truly, Your friend,
AINB
Faced by such steely and conditional friendship, there was no more to be done. In October 1854, Mrs Jameson wrote to sever her long connection with Robert Noel, the man who had first introduced her to Annabella and to Ada. While urging him to remain ‘all you can and ought to be’ in his own profound friendship with his respected older cousin, Anna identified Lady Byron’s coldness towards her as the reason that she herself could no longer bear to see ‘any friend who reminds me of her’. Interestingly, Robert Noel made no attempt to argue with Mrs Jameson’s decision. He remained devoted to Lady Byron, fondly described in one letter to her as his oldest and dearest friend. Most likely, he had already heard his cousin’s version of the quarrel and of its origins.*
So far as is known, the friendship with Anna Jameson was never renewed. Requested to thank Lady Byron in 1859 for her suggestion that a fund should be organised to pay John Gibson (a well-known neo-classical sculptor) to model Mrs Jameson’s head in marble, Annabella’s granddaughter responded (to Mrs Jameson’s niece, Gerardine) that Lady Byron denied all knowledge of the project. Nevertheless, the letter-writer was permitted to state that her grandmother would contribute £50 (a handsome sum in 1859) towards the fund.
Lady Byron had added just one condition: the name of the donor must never be revealed.
* * *
* Annabella’s kindness to James Brown was part of an ongoing commitment to act upon what she imagined to have been her late husband’s wishes. ‘I know she secretly fulfils her husband’s claims and honours his drafts upon posterity,’ an admiring Florence Nightingale wrote in an undated letter to Parthenope, her sister.
* Mrs Clark spent the end of that bleak year at Horsley Towers. Annabella, writing to her grandmother, reported that she was a ‘wonderful person’ who made the schoolroom cheerful, while cooking them ‘very good dinners’ and ‘nice biscuits’ (Wentworth Papers, 54090).
* John (Crosse) Hamilton’s widow outlived her husband and remained at Fyne Court until a major fire in 1894 rendered the house uninhabitable. The music room and romantically arcadian gardens survive under the management of the National Trust. Brian Wright, in Andrew Crosse and the Mite that Shocked the World (Matador, 2015), gives the most detailed account of the younger Crosses.
* When Charles Babbage died, he left a bequest of £3 per month to Mary Wilson, to be paid to her for the rest of her life. Since no bequest was made by him to any other employee, it may have been his way of compensating for Lady Byron’s stinginess.
* On 8 April 1856, Lady Byron sent to Robert Noel’s German-born wife, Louisa, of whom she was extremely fond, a list of Ada’s closest friends. Henry Drummond of Albury, the Zetlands, the Molesworths and Agnes Greig were identified. Also mentioned, without comment, was Anna Jameson.
PART FOUR
The Making and Breaking of a Reputation
‘She [Lady Byron] was the one person involved in that tragic story who was innocent of wrong, true in word and deed, generous, resourceful, courageous amidst crushing difficulties, and so she consistently remained for the rest of her life.’
RALPH GORDON MILBANKE,
2ND EARL OF LOVELACE, Astarte, 1905
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ENSHRINEMENT
(1853–60)
‘[W]hat might have been, had there been one person less among the living when she married . . . Then her life would not have been the concealment of a Truth, while her conduct was in harmony with it (no wonder if she was misunderstood).’
FRAGMENT OF A THIRD-PERSON MEMOIR,
BEGUN BY LADY BYRON,
BRIGHTON, 1851
Having done all she could to protect her dead daughter’s name from being mired in a public scandal, Lady Byron’s thoughts turned again to the question of her own future reputation.
Two years earlier, she had sketched out the beginnings of a memoir, in the hope of encouraging Frederick Robertson to publish her history. A mass of private papers had been placed in his safe-keeping for just that purpose. By the beginning of 1853, however, the ill and overworked Brighton cleric (now married and responsible for two young children) was unable to contemplate such a taxing commission. Instead, he read Annabella’s fragment and offered an honest opinion. What was needed, Robertson advised, was for Lady Byron to write the book herself, but
in language that was more comprehensible and far less veiled. Why not just state Augusta’s name when she wrote of her wish that there had been ‘one person less living’ when she married Lord Byron? And why not give her husband’s dreadful sin a name instead of hinting at some unspeakably mysterious ‘Truth’? Annabella could and did speak about these sensitive issues in private, among her chosen friends. Why then, once she picked up her pen, must Lady Byron become so wilfully obscure?
Lady Byron had no answer to that cogent query, except to say that the one occasion when she had come before the public to defend her parents (in the ‘Remarks’ printed as an inserted appendix to Moore’s Life and Letters of Lord Byron), her words had proved of little service either to them or to herself.*
The trouble was that Annabella wanted the truth to be told and yet not to break her promise to Byron that she would protect his sister and her family. Lady Byron had never doubted that Medora was her husband’s child. She believed that Byron’s fear of scandal about Augusta had driven him – with her wicked Aunt Melbourne’s active encouragement – into marrying herself, Annabella Milbanke, a woman he no longer loved. He might even (although this was a point upon which Annabella often contradicted herself, perhaps from genuine uncertainty) have continued sleeping with his sister during intervals of their marriage, and most especially following Ada’s birth. How could Lady Byron, knowing herself to be regarded as one of England’s most admired philanthropists – a woman whose generous help to the young mothers of illegitimate children was as highly praised as the progressive schools she endowed and the daringly enlightened penal system that she vigorously advocated – how could the illustrious, 62-year-old Lady Byron set down such a shameless history and yet hope to escape everlasting notoriety?*
Annabella’s grandchildren were very dear to her and she took great pride in them. She had always stood up for Ockham, arguing to Ada back on 30 November 1844 that while the boy had suffered ‘great disadvantages’ from his Somerset upbringing, there was ‘much good in him’. Ralph, then aged seven, was praised in that same letter for being both grown up and ‘full of fun’, while Annabella’s gift for phrase-making was fondly quoted. (‘I am so happy this evening that I wish it could be pulled out like a telescope,’ the child had just announced.) Now, they were growing up and their future perception of her (a topic frequently mentioned to her circle of confidantes) offered cause for legitimate concern. She was clear about how they should regard their famous grandfather: her birthday gift to 15-year-old Ralph of Childe Harold was inscribed with an injunction to admire Lord Byron’s poems, but to distrust the great poet’s personality. How could she make them understand why she had left such a remarkable man, without revealing the scandal about Byron’s sexual involvement with a carelessly amoral sister, that shadowy figure about whom Annabella’s own feelings remained tormentingly conflicted?
Meanwhile, Lady Byron followed Ada’s last wishes where her children were concerned. Annabella King – to the considerable regret of a clever, artistic girl who adored her high-minded but gently humorous grandmother – was largely confined to the ever more fancifully embellished Surrey home that she mischievously renamed Glum Castle. Lovelace, to do him justice, oversaw an educational programme that included languages, music (Charles Hallé himself gave Annabella nine piano lessons), and even – when Ruskin came for a solitary Christmas in 1854 – drawing advice from the great man himself. But life at Horsley, enlivened only by an annual visit to Europe with Mrs Greig, was dominated by the earl’s obsession with his arches and tunnels. The visits paid by Annabella to her grandmother’s airy Brighton home each spring appeared to a lonely girl like scenes from a beautiful dream, one in which the happiest moments were connected to the annual reunion with her younger brother. The brevity of these cherished interludes served to increase their charm.
The plan to separate the children was maintained. Ralph – the grandson upon whom Lady Byron’s hopes for the preservation of the enormous Wentworth estates were now fixed* – was compelled to remain, by Ada’s wish and with Lord Lovelace’s formal agreement, under his grandmother’s roof for all but a short period of every year. From 1852, until 1859, when the 20-year-old youth was despatched to lodge under his tutor’s roof at University College, Oxford, Ralph was educated at home in Brighton and Southampton. His resentment about this cloistered life among elderly, controlling figures emerged in a plaintive letter which his grandmother passed along to Harriet Siddons’s son-in-law in 1857. Ralph’s strong objections to ‘the restraint of a tutor’ created persistent problems, Lady Byron confided to Arthur Mair. Earlier, while seeking to lodge the travel-hungry boy (then eighteen) at the Mairs’ northern home en route to his proposed lone footslog around Scotland, Annabella admitted her fears. She never minded Ralph going out to Hofwyl, where he was under supervision. She could not trust a naive and troublingly irresponsible youth to travel unaccompanied. ‘To this I cannot consent.’
Lady Byron was not inflexible. It was arranged that Ralph should hike around the Highlands together with one of the Mairs’ sons. He returned home radiant. Such adventures (when carefully controlled) always did the poor boy good, his relieved grandmother observed.
While Ralph’s growing passion for travel became powerful enough for his grandmother eventually to stipulate in her will that he must reside in England for at least a part of every future year, she wanted her granddaughter to see more of the Continent. In 1855, Annabella visited Mary Somerville in Florence and travelled on to Germany with her Noel cousins. In 1856, while Lovelace consented to host a debutante daughter’s ball at Horsley, the trouble of arranging Annabella’s presentation at court fell to her grandmother.
The search for an appropriate chaperone enabled Lady Byron to make cautious overtures of friendship to those members of William Lovelace’s family with whom the earl’s own relationship remained glacial. In 1855, Lady Hester King had expressed an interest in Ralph’s academic progress; now, Lady Byron enquired whether Lady Hester’s niece, Viscountess Ebrington, might wish to undertake the task.
A hand of friendship had been offered, and was accepted. By the late 1850s, both Annabella and the younger grandchildren were paying regular visits to their King relatives at Woburn Park and Dover Street. The ground was laid at this time for Ralph (whose relationship with his own father would never become cordial) to find a future substitute in Peter Locke King, Lord Lovelace’s detested younger brother. Lady Hester must have been delighted.
The question of what was to become of Byron Ockham was one which independently troubled both Lord Lovelace and his mother-in-law. Neither knew what best to do for this handsome and increasingly wayward youth. Established by the early summer of 1853 at the Malta station on the Albion,* a ship under the command of one of Stephen Lushington’s naval relations, Viscount Ockham (or J. Aker, as Byron often now signed himself to a sister he urged to stand up for her rights) was well-placed to earn the promotion that his father craved. Malta stood at the centre of Britain’s strategy to intervene in Russia’s escalating war against Turkey. By the summer of 1853, well-informed Londoners were already siding with Turkey (‘the sick man of Europe’ was Tsar Nicholas’s notoriously derogatory term for his targeted foe) in what was about to become Britain’s largest wartime engagement since Waterloo.
Lord Lovelace, himself confined to wearing a uniform that had never seen a battlefield (he donned it for official appearances as Surrey’s long-serving lord lieutenant), was keen for his oldest son to see live combat. By the late summer of 1853, however, Byron Ockham’s commander had resolved to send the intractable young aristocrat home, following his persistent defiance of various orders from his superiors. Byron’s infractions had included going AWOL, sneaking liquor into his berth and – worst of all – falsely accusing Captain Lushington’s personal protégé, a young Mr Dundas, of stealing his own (illegally acquired) gin. Asked to apologise to the youth – a member of the Zetland family – Lord Ockham had flatly refused.
What was to be done? A plea
from Charles Noel to allow the youth to join his own family’s new home at Leamington Spa was brusquely rejected by Lady Byron. Annabella had formed a more romantic plan. She herself still owned large tracts of Euboea in Greece, although much of this extensive estate had been transferred to the widowed Edward Noel. What could be more appropriate than that a second Byron should take up residence in Greece? This was the proposal that Annabella asked Charles Noel to put to Lord Lovelace (all direct communication between herself and her son-in-law having been severed) on 28 August 1853.
It was not to be. Ockham, having abruptly left Lushington’s ship without leave – after failing to secure his father’s permission for an official release – vanished from public view. Back in England, during the autumn of 1853, a court martial was discussed. Out in the Dardanelles, the young sailor found a job on the Inflexible, a coal ship carrying fuel to the fleet. In 1854, he made an ill-fated attempt to start a new life in America. By the spring of 1855, after working his way back to England from New York, Byron was reluctant to undertake any more foreign adventures. For the time being, appalled by her grandson’s wretched appearance and evident ill health, Lady Byron arranged for him to live under her roof at Brighton, while taking tuition from Lieutenant Arnold, a son of Rugby’s celebrated schoolmaster.
Byron Ockham was not yet nineteen. Ever hopeful, a doting grandmother had faith that Ada’s favourite son might yet make a success of his life.
In Byron's Wake Page 44