in all future time, when popular education, and the power of women to bless society with all gentle and quiet blessings, engage the attention of lovers of their kind.
In 1860, this extravagant paean of adulation attracted not a single word of criticism.
Had hostile detractors been loitering in the shadows, they might have been expected to reveal themselves in 1861, when Britain’s covert support of the slave-owning, cotton-producing Southern states in the American Civil War was matched by a waning of enthusiasm for abolitionists, alive or dead. In 1862, Annabella’s eldest grandson died of a ruptured blood vessel.
Lord Wentworth (a title which Byron Ockham reluctantly accepted, following the death of his grandmother,* but himself never used) had succeeded in his modest plan to save enough from his earnings at the shipyard to purchase (together with an unnamed friend) a small yacht. Ockham was sailing this little craft in the Solent during the summer of 1862 when he collapsed and was taken to convalesce at Wimbledon, a village on the outskirts of south London. A puzzling location – the first cottage hospital was built there in 1869 – suggests that the descendant of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, had stepped in to offer help. (John Murray III had built himself a splendid home at Wimbledon. In honour of his most lucrative client, he named it Newstead.*)
Ralph, to whom the Wentworth barony now passed, was mountaineering on the Continent in the summer of 1862. Anne, the only one of the family who maintained regular contact with her older brother after Lady Byron’s death, became a regular visitor to Wimbledon. She was holding her brother in her arms, when, aged only twenty-six, Byron King-Noel, 12th Baron Wentworth, died on 1 September 1862. In America, the New York Times published a colourfully anecdotal account of the young man’s life at sea and in the shipyard. English newspapers were more tactfully brief, mentioning little beyond the fact of Lord Wentworth’s untimely death. Of Byron’s possessions, nothing survives except for the (privately owned) logbooks of his first years at sea. Reports that a tablet was erected to his memory at the Byron church of Hucknall prove to be false. The place of burial is unrecorded for a young man who had always preferred to disappear.
Six years later, in 1868, a persevering Harriet Martineau returned to her idea of writing a life of Lady Byron. On this second occasion, it was Ralph who turned the project down. ‘I told her kindly that Miss Carr still wishes to prevent publication,’ Ralph told his sister on 2 February 1868. Disappointed but probably unsurprised, Martineau simply republished her earlier article as part of her newest production: Biographical Sketches (1852–1868). No objections were made. In 1868, it was still permissible for Lady Byron to be extravagantly admired.
Aged respectively thirty-one and twenty-nine at the beginning of 1868, neither of Ada Lovelace’s surviving children had yet married. Ralph remained locked in fierce dispute with his father over his right to the Wentworth estates. (Cash-rich but land-poor since his grandmother’s death, Ralph eventually bought out Lord Lovelace’s lifetime interest in the inheritance, acting on the advice of his now friendly uncle, Locke King.) Anne, returning to England in the summer of 1867 after an extended stay in Italy, yielded to the pleadings of Jane Crawford Jenkins, the kind-hearted and well-meaning widow who had been married to Lord Lovelace since 1865. Reluctantly, Anne agreed to visit Horsley Towers, both to meet a baby half-brother, Lionel Fortescue King, and to hear her father’s own account of his terrible falling-out, back in 1851, with Lady Byron.
Writing on 19 June 1867 to Agnes Greig (Mary Somerville’s delightful Scottish daughter-in-law had become close as a second mother to Anne since Ada’s death), Anne confessed that the encounter with her father had unsettled her. She had disliked hearing how harshly the earl spoke about her grandmother – ‘& yet it would seem she [Lady Byron] must have been much mistaken towards my Father, then as to my Mother, I must believe all that my father tells me.’ Things were not, perhaps, quite so clear-cut as Anne and Ralph had been led to suppose.
On one issue, however, the siblings were united in unbreakable agreement. They both wanted access to the papers that would reveal to them the hidden mysteries of the short-lived Byron marriage. Fate was to play into their hands in the autumn of 1868, when an embarrassed Frances Carr admitted that her fellow trustees had not been able to prevent her from destroying various incriminating letters within the archive. She was anxious to compensate. By 17 October 1868 (eleven years before the official release of his grandmother’s papers), a triumphant Ralph was busily sending batches of newly acquired letters and relevant documents across London to his more organised sister, for sorting and proper arrangement. Ralph described this process as a preliminary to ‘the completion of the whole work’.
In the autumn of 1868, then, armed with some – but far from all – of the key papers, Ralph was planning to produce an authoritative account of his grandparents’ marriage.
Unforeseen events were about to capsize this sensitive project.
Comfortably settled in Paris since 1846 with her devoted second husband, the Marquis de Boissy (a man who liked – to his wife’s annoyance – to introduce her as ‘l’ancienne mâitresse de Byron’), Teresa Guiccioli never forgot that Byron himself had spoken of her as his last passion. An admired French poet and former politician had placed Teresa alongside Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura as a woman ‘immortalised by love’. But Alphonse Lamartine’s tribute, published in Le Constitutionnel in 1865, had attracted fewer readers than a mocking attack upon the lovely marquise’s fidelity that Alexandre Dumas had launched with far more spirit in his own loquacious memoirs. ‘O madame! madame! why have you been so faithless to the memory of the poet?’ Dumas had ungallantly enquired. ‘Wasn’t it good enough for you, to have been Byron’s mistress?’
When Monsieur de Boissy died in 1866, Teresa was still feeling incensed that Dumas, a writer of mere historical potboilers (however successful), should have dared to question her profound love for the chivalrous poet who had recently taken to sending her personal reassurances (over the spirit waves) of his yearning for that moment when his sweet Teresa (but not Augusta Leigh, and most certainly, not his wife) would rejoin him in celestial bliss.
Announced in 1867, Lord Byron jugé par les témoins de sa vie was published anonymously by a Parisian publisher (Amyot) in 1868. The English translation, made by Hubert Jernyngham, a courtly admirer whom Teresa bullied mercilessly, was published the following year in both Britain and the United States.*
Few of Lord Byron’s former drinking cronies would have recognised their old friend in Madame de Boissy’s 900-page homage to a literary angel. (The nearest equivalent to Teresa’s desexed Byron was the newly sanctified Shelley with whom – as Madame’s talkative spirit guide was always keen to convey – Lord Byron was now enjoying an eternity of ennobling exchanges.)
Madame de Boissy’s Byron was – to be frank – a bit of a bore. He had led a life of inviolate purity (except when impertinent hussies like Lady Caroline Lamb threw themselves into his arms). He drank only water. His years of devotion to that sweet child-bride, the Contessa Guiccioli (Teresa was just ten years younger than Byron), had been supervised at all times by her sternly proper family, the Gambas. The lovers had never slept together. Byron’s desire to marry the beautiful contessa had been blocked by the mere, inconvenient fact that she already had a husband, one under whose hospitable roof her cavalier often resided, it was true, but always under conditions of flawless respectability.
Back in 1821, Byron had laughingly described the Contessa Guiccioli to Augusta Leigh as his wife’s most ardent defender. Nearly fifty years later, Teresa reserved fifty-six pages of her book (forming Chapter Twenty-two, in its entirety) for the subject of Lord Byron’s marriage to a most unsuitable woman. Suddenly, here, nine years after her death, Annabella was characterised by her rival and survivor as critical, cold and, above all, spoiled. (It is Teresa we have to thank for attaching to Lady Byron those epithets that have ever since stuck to Annabella like viscous slime, when she used this c
hapter to condemn her as ‘a spoilt child, a slave to rule, to habits and ideas as unchanging and inflexible as the figures she loved to study’.) Lord Byron’s own married fidelity had been impeccable, the marquise wished her exhausted readers to understand. But the poet’s tender relationship with his sister had aroused the jealousy of the chilly-hearted wife who had deserted him, refusing his heartfelt entreaties for a public explanation. Byron was forced into exile and the fault was his wife’s, for
the most atrocious part of this affair, and doubtless the most wounding to him, was precisely Lady Byron’s conduct; and in this conduct the worst was her cruel silence! This silence it is which will ever be her crime, for by it she poisoned the life of her husband.
That ‘cruel silence’, Teresa continued, had also been employed by Lady Byron to slander the immaculate name of Augusta Leigh. Silence, when so cunningly deployed, had in fact proved to be a weapon ‘crueller than Clytemnestra’s poniard’. So much for Lady Byron’s love! (And so much as well for the reputation of a woman whom Teresa Guiccioli herself had never once met.)
It’s unclear whether Ralph Wentworth ever noticed the modest Recollections of 1868 in which his grandmother’s loyal friend at court, Amelia Murray, had paid tribute to Lady Byron as a woman who had been ‘traduced and misunderstood’, but who was ‘worshipped’ by those few who had known her well. On 6 February 1869, however, Ralph sent to his sister the first – and quite reassuring – English response to Madame de Boissy’s tome. Writing under The Times’s habitual cloak of anonymity, Caroline Norton had expressed astonished indignation at Madame de Boissy’s tone of ‘persistent rancour’ towards the late Lady Byron. On that same day, Richard Monckton Milnes, Florence Nightingale’s former suitor, commended Mrs Norton’s defence of Byron’s widow to the House of Lords. The House, a little ominously, had offered no response.
Early in 1869, Ralph had other matters on his mind than the poison-tipped darts being hurled at his dead grandmother by a faded Italian beauty with time on her hands (and an obliging spirit guide to advise her on how best to fill it). On 17 March, he informed his sister that the son of the late Mrs Villiers had given him a batch of letters from 1852–3 in which his mother and Lady Byron had exhanged thoughts on the indelicate subject of incest and the late Augusta Leigh. The letters, so Ralph reported with subdued excitement, contained ‘precise and complete information as to everything’.
The following day, 18 March 1869, Ralph took lunch with Alexander Ross, the Byron-loving vicar of St Philip’s in Stepney. The two men chatted about the possibility of their co-editing a series of letters which would reveal in Lady Byron’s own words – not theirs – her reasons for leaving her husband. Also present at the lunch, and acting as consultants on the project, were Edward Noel and the Reverend Augustus Byron (the 7th Lord’s affable younger brother, recently installed by Ralph as the incumbent at Kirkby Mallory). De Boissy’s book was discussed by the four diners, but only in the context of a contemplated response to it by Sophia De Morgan, one which Ralph – an increasingly protective guardian of his grandmother’s reputation – intended to dissuade her from writing.*
On 1 June 1869, however, a thoughtfully judicious response to Teresa’s book appeared. It was the first of five anonymously authored articles that John Fox wrote upon aspects of Lord Byron’s private life for the widely read Temple Bar magazine. (In 1871, Fox’s articles were collected and expanded for a book that carried what had by then become the significant title: Vindication of Lady Byron.)
Fox’s first essay reminded his 30,000 readers of the fact that Lord Byron, despite Madame de Boissy’s harsh characterisation of his wife, had frequently blamed himself for the couple’s separation, while pronouncing his wife to have been irreproachable. Fox also made the first direct allusion to Byron’s incest yet to have appeared in print. (Madame de Boissy had ventured only a coy reference to Lord Byron’s ‘deep fraternal feeling’ and an ‘almost too passionate expression’ of brotherly love.)
An otherwise cautiously expressed critique of the Témoins, a book that Fox plainly despised, was swept away in the furore that commenced the following month when John Paget, writing for the July 1869 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, offered his resounding approval for Madame de Boissy’s publication.
John Paget was the son-in-law of Elizabeth Rathbone, one of Lady Byron’s warmest admirers back in the mid-century world that had revolved around abolitionism and social reform. Lady Byron had at one point placed certain financial trusts into the care of Mr Paget, a barrister at the Middle Temple. Evidently, there had been a disagreement. By 1869, John Paget was fiercely hostile to the late Lady Byron. He did not need to plough through the 900 pages of the Témoins to dig up a story against her that would sell. All that was required was to convey the gist of Teresa’s own view, while adding the thunder-and-flash effect of his own more exuberant style.
The result was electrifying. Gleefully, Paget presented the gentle Contessa Guiccioli to Blackwood’s readers as he imagined her in the first flush of her radiant youth, married off to an evil lecher (‘A fouler prostitution never profaned the name of marriage’), while arguing that Lord Byron’s role as live-in cavalier to a married woman was in perfect compliance with Italian tradition. And how touching it was (John Paget remarked), to observe this sweet old lady still keeping faith with the one man she had truly loved. How right Madame de Boissy was to reproach Lady Byron for maintaining the silence by which that vile woman had knowingly, wickedly, damned her husband’s noble name.
Lord Byron, following the separation from Annabella, had memorably referred to his wife – among a great many other epithets – as ‘the moral Clytemnestra of her lord’. John Paget (inspired by Teresa’s description of her dead rival’s poisonous ways) went one better. In Blackwood’s, that July, the august Lady Byron was compared to Madame de Brinvilliers, a seventeenth-century murderess who was beheaded and then burned at the stake for poisoning her father and two brothers. Silence (John Paget announced) had been Lady Byron’s preferred form of venom: ‘a poisonous miasma in which she [Lady Byron] enveloped the character of her husband – raised by her breath, and which only her breath could have dispersed’.
And now she had taken her silence to the grave! Bringing his long tirade to a finely frothing climax, Paget invited a pious – if misquoted – nod of approval from Shakespeare (Henry VI, Part Two) for his views: ‘She dies and makes no sign – O God, forgive her.’
Annabella’s family were understandably distressed by the article in Blackwood’s (Lord Lovelace privately wrote of it to Robert Noel as ‘villainous’), but they chose not to respond to it in print. Ralph had other matters on his mind. In June 1869 he lost his sister and cherished confidante to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a Byronically attractive, fortune-hunting and blushlessly amoral man whom an adoring Anne frequently addressed as ‘My Tyrant’. (Blunt responded by calling his wealthy wife ‘Stumpie’, ‘Little Ugly’ – Anne was rather beautiful – or ‘Dick’.) Just two months later, having long since recovered from an ill-fated romance with a young Icelandic girl, Ralph himself married Fannie Heriot, the giddily pretty daughter of a Newcastle clergyman. Fanny, fiercely chaperoned by a voluble Irish aunt throughout their engagement, was not yet seventeen.
On 27 August, a dapper Lord Wentworth set off (unchaperoned) with his bride to enjoy a fashionable seaside honeymoon in Boulogne. The couple had only reached Dover when an extremely worried lawyer caught up with his client and presented Ralph with a slim package containing the equivalent of a ticking bomb.
Within Gerard Ford’s folder was an advance copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opening – and entirely unsolicited – salvo in defence of the injured Lady Byron. Due for publication in America on 1 September in The Atlantic Monthly, ‘The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life’ comprised a twenty-nine-page essay which was due to appear simultaneously in England (in a paraphrased and annotated version) in MacMillan’s Magazine.
Mrs Stowe’s publicly declared motive for rushing into print was t
he outrage she had felt both at reading John Paget’s article for Blackwood’s (the British magazine was immensely popular with American readers) and at the silence with which its vicious allegations had been greeted. To Ralph Wentworth and Gerard Ford, the American novelist’s indignation felt manufactured. Officially, Paget’s anonymously authored article had been published in July, but nineteenth-century magazines were notoriously late in issuing their final copy. Gerard Ford believed – and Ralph shared the lawyer’s scepticism – that Mrs Stowe had already been preparing an animated response to de Boissy’s book when John Paget wrote his piece. Blackwood’s simply offered a conveniently topical peg upon which to hang her own sensational tale. It was one that could be relied upon to raise the profile of an author whose sales were not what they had been back in the 1850s, before the outcome of a hideous civil war robbed abolitionism of its market value. Ford was especially angry that the advance copy of Mrs Stowe’s article had reached his legal office only – and, he believed, quite deliberately – when it was too late for steps to be taken to prevent its publication.
John Paget’s assault upon Lady Byron’s reputation had caused little more than an unpleasant flutter of gossip. It was Stowe’s ‘True Story’ that raised the storm from which Lady Byron’s name has suffered enduring damage.
Much of the fault was due to Mrs Stowe’s own careless haste. By the late summer of 1869, she had heard much – but far from all – of the complicated history of the Byron marriage and separation. Assistance had come from her friend Eliza Follen, one of Lady Byron’s chief confidantes.* (It was from Mrs Follen that Mrs Stowe had first heard about Byron’s incest.) But Mrs Stowe had personally seen no documents, other than Harriet Martineau’s laudatory essay and a handful of prudently reticent letters from Lady Byron herself.
In Byron's Wake Page 47