Such a lack of precise information would prove singularly unfortunate, both for Lady Byron and her daughter. Unburdened by the facts, Mrs Stowe believed that the Byrons – at the time Annabella left her husband – had been married for two years, not one. The error was grave. It placed Lady Byron in the position of a complicit, knowing witness to the incest which had resulted in Medora’s birth in the summer of 1814. Of Ada Lovelace, Harriet Beecher Stowe evidently knew almost nothing. William was dismissively set aside in the article as a mere ‘man of fashion’. The absence of reference to Ada encouraged Victorian readers to assume that Lord Byron’s daughter, his rare, extraordinary child, had been cut from the same cloth as her patently trivial spouse.
The response to Mrs Stowe’s initial publication was dramatic. In America, 15,000 readers of The Atlantic Monthly promptly cancelled their subscriptions, nearly causing James T. Fields’s revered magazine to go out of business. Privately, Oliver Wendell Holmes enquired whether dear Harriet was quite certain of the dreadful fact (the incest) that she had so boldly asserted in print. Writing from England on 10 December 1869, George Eliot rebuked Stowe for her thoughtlessness in unveiling what was a private family scandal.
In January 1870, an undaunted Mrs Stowe returned to the fray. Lady Byron Vindicated disclosed by its title alone that this book was to be no mere hagiography. John Stuart Mill had pointed the way forward. His The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, was admired by Stowe for its emphasis upon the slavery of women, a topic which fitted well with the subject upon which she had justly established her reputation. But the use of the word ‘vindicated’ in her title connected Stowe’s new book more directly to Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist polemic of 1792 (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). Eight decades later, women’s rights were back on the agenda in America. Lady Byron Vindicated was written with that large audience of disenfranchised voters well to the fore in the mind of Mrs Stowe.
Paget’s article for Blackwood’s had followed Madame de Boissy’s lead in criticising Lady Byron for a silence (about the reason for leaving her husband) which, when writing her earlier article, Mrs Stowe had been at pains to defend. It was, she had stated with admiration in ‘True Story’, a ‘perfect silence’. Lady Byron Vindicated marked a change of stance. Ill-treated by a brutal husband, Lady Byron had not said enough. She had neglected a public duty by failing to broadcast the ghastly details (the incest) of a disgraceful tale. Wealthy, philanthropic, strong-willed and formidably intelligent, who could have been better placed than Lady Byron to light the way forward, to offer enslaved wives a more lofty position from which to seek equality and escape humiliation?
Warming to her theme, Mrs Stowe berated one old-fashioned Blackwood’s reviewer who had praised a certain widow (not Lady Byron) for concealing the brutal way in which her husband had treated her. Reverting to her finest declamatory style, Mrs Stowe set up a caricature of what she conceived such men as this widow’s admirer to want:
helpless, cowering, broken-hearted, abject women given over to the animal love which they share alike with the dog – the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love and sorrow . . .
While such passages as this made for sumptuous reading at the breakfast table, they bore no relation – as even Lady Byron’s worst enemies conceded – to the behaviour of Byron’s wife. (Nobody had ever accused Lady Byron of acting like a whipped dog.) But it was not Mrs Stowe’s impassioned defence of the right of abused wives to speak out that caused the real, persisting disquiet. It was the fact that a respected author, first in an article and then in the book that followed it, had set down in flaunting, naked print the fact of an incestuous relationship which she believed to have continued, with his wife’s knowledge, throughout the entire period of Lord Byron’s marriage.
Lady Byron Vindicated fanned the flames, but it was ‘The True Story’ that had ignited the fire in which Annabella’s hard-won reputation as a good-hearted and progressive social reformer was to be incinerated. The Tablet, slyly remarking that Mrs Stowe’s article was a godsend to the British press in a September that was short of news, noted that, in Newcastle alone, three versions of ‘The True Story’ had been published by the end of the month. Tickets for Mr Charles Larkin’s Newcastle lecture upon ‘The Byron Scandal’ were said to be selling out fast. William Howitt had meanwhile rushed his own unkind recollections of a generous patron into print on 4 September, in the Daily News. Three days later, the Pall Mall Gazette published a dignified letter in which Ralph truthfully stated that his grandmother’s written account of the marriage and separation (in a letter which she had despatched to Mrs Stowe at her request, and which Harriet had duly returned) contained no mention of incest. On 11 September, The Athenaeum, rising to the defence of the ‘retired, gentle, pure and modest life’ of Augusta Leigh, slyly enquired whether Mrs Stowe had sullied her soul by taking payment for her hideous diatribe. (She had, and of course they knew it.) Elsewhere, the Edinburgh Review found it impossible to review even such a harmless work as the late Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries in October 1869 without alluding to the scandalous talk about Lady Byron.
Privately, Ralph said of the onslaught by the press upon his late grandmother’s reputation that both he and his sister felt as though they had been driven out into a storm, stark naked. Publicly, ordered by their father to hold their tongues, the siblings maintained an unhappy silence. It can’t have been easy. In October 1869, and again in January 1870, helpfully supplied with papers by the Leigh family, by John Murray, by Hobhouse’s daughter, Lady Dorchester* – and even by Lord Lovelace himself – the lawyer Abraham Hayward started a new and long-running hare in the Quarterly Review. Lord Byron, so Hayward now declared, would never have slept with Mrs Leigh, she having been a mother figure, ‘being so much older’, and ‘not at all an attractive person’. William Lovelace, meanwhile, was advised by a helpful relative on 8 November 1869 that busy Mrs Stowe had sent over to London a batch of various proofs. One, edited by a certain Charles Mackay, appeared to contain a memoir by the late Medora Leigh. With luck, Mackay’s book would prove too bad to appear in print. Still, perhaps Lord Lovelace might wish to intervene? Lovelace, writing back to his informant (Lord Chichester was Augusta Leigh’s nephew), explained that his hands were tied both by a personal horror of publicity and by the unfortunate fact that Lady Byron and he had not even been on speaking terms when she died. Publicly, at least, Lord Lovelace declined to intervene.
Nothing by now was too bad to be served up to a gossip-hungry public, whipped into a raging fever by journalists who wrote about Lady Byron as if they were prosecuting an indicted criminal (with a shrewd eye on the gallery of enthralled spectators). Charles Mackay, the editor of Medora’s alcohol-fuelled ravings, appealed for a redeemed Lord Byron to be acquitted in ‘that Great Court of Conscience’. Lady Byron’s employment of the two escaped slaves at Ockham School was touched upon only so that Mackay might shockingly denounce their patron as a ‘n****r-worshipper’ (although he himself did not use asterisks). John Fox, while praising Annabella’s work as a progressive reformer in Temple Bar (October, 1870), added fuel to the flames by suggesting that it was not incest, but sodomy – a crime that under English law was punishable by death – that had caused Lady Byron to leave her husband. Buggery (Fox strongly implied) would justify Lady Byron’s public silence: how could any wife speak out upon such a subject?
Appeals were frequently – and vainly – made for the elderly Stephen Lushington to speak out about the past. Privately, however, in January 1870, Lushington confided to Lady Byron’s only male trustee, Henry Bathurst, that his client had been spurred into leaving her husband by Byron’s disgraceful boast of having recently lain between two naked prostitutes, fondling both, while pondering which of them he should bring home to dwell alongside his wife. Incest was not – it had never been – the reason for Lady Byron’s departure. So a still shocked Stephen Lushington recalled, and Bathurst took the estee
med lawyer at his word. In public, Lushington continued to maintain silence regarding the private life of a client whom he continued to revere until his death, at Ockham, in 1873.
January 1870 was the month in which the attacks reached their climax. John Paget had already compared the late Lady Byron to a murderess. Now, Blackwood’s rhetoric-intoxicated maestro urged all self-respecting women to save their own souls by abhorring and condemning her, every woman, that is, ‘who had not sunk into a state of degradation lower than that of the lowest prostitute that ever haunted the night-houses of the Haymarket’. There, within those depths into which no respectable female would ever venture to peep, Miss Martineau’s model of virtue glared shamelessly up from her own iniquitous pit. As for the household over which this deplorable hypocrite had presided at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, such an establishment would excite disgust even in ‘the wretched and vicious neighbourhoods’ in which (Mr Paget could only coyly imagine) such dreadful places might actually exist.
So much for Lady Byron. Mr Paget was nevertheless eager to grant her noble husband a clean bill of health. He quoted (in this same January article) the indignant words of a Mr Delmé-Radcliffe, who had recently informed readers of the Telegraph that the rumour of Byron’s incest was ‘a lie – an odious damned lie, upon my soul, a lie – a wicked lie’. The late Sir John Cam Hobhouse (long since transformed from one of Byron’s rowdiest drinking cronies into Lord Broughton, a portly pillar of Victorian society) was also invoked for for his stirring defence during the 1840s of Lord Byron’s entitlement to a monument in Westminster Abbey.* And why not? demanded Paget. Byron had been an eminent poet. More than that, as Lord Broughton himself had been proud to declare, ‘he was, in the best sense of the word, a gentleman!’
Perhaps the most discomforting aspect of the savage attack upon Lady Byron that a reckless Mrs Stowe had inadvertently unleashed is the evidence that only John Fox and Eliza Lynn Linton (anonymously publishing a series of calm, fair-minded pieces in the Saturday Review) gave any thought at all to Lady Byron’s descendants. Mrs Stowe herself had expressed unconvincing amazement that any living members of the family might yet survive with whom she could have consulted. (Had she really never heard of Ralph, who was living at his grandmother’s house during Mrs Stowe’s three visits to England, or of Anne, the intelligent, artistic granddaughter in whom Lady Byron took such pride?) The truth would seem to be that Mrs Stowe launched her grand defence without ever attempting to make contact with a family who were certain (as Mrs Follen had surely advised her) to obstruct such an indiscreetly assertive attempt at an apologia.
Equally hypocritical, however, were the widespread professions of shocked disbelief at the tale of Byron’s incest. That story (as the journalists admitted in their colourful comparisons to loathsome reptiles and ancient denizens of the sewers) had been slithering around private dinner tables and publishers’ backrooms ever since the year of the Byrons’ separation. Shock suited the framing of a new heroine, one who was ripe for their sugar-stuffed Victorian audience. Alongside their pleasing image of the virginal Teresa Guiccioli, the journalists now placed an even more ludicrous caricature of Augusta Leigh: a quiet angel of the hearth at whose knee, each night, her innocent children knelt to lisp their prayers.† Presented with the uplifting portrait of such a saintlike sister (it was one which the gentlemen of the press continued to embellish for their readers’ delectation until well past the end of the century), the public’s consciousness of Lord Byron’s incest dwindled to the status of a hideous mirage, the deluded fantasy of his jealous and consummately deceitful wife.
In England, Mrs Stowe herself was pardoned for what was perceived as a blunderingly inaccurate, but well-intended enterprise. In France, where Harriet’s defence of Lady Byron had incurred the unyielding hostility of Madame de Boissy, Teresa was still consoling herself in 1870 with the thought that readers of Mrs Stowe’s hateful book seemed now to believe that Lady Byron had, at best, been mad enough to merit permanent confinement in an asylum.*
In 1871, Ralph Wentworth’s young wife gave birth to a girl, Ada Mary (always known as Molly), at their London home. Lord Wentworth’s happiness was short-lived. On 7 July of the following year, a crestfallen Ralph wrote to tell his sister that it was ‘physically impossible’ he could have been responsible for Fannie’s second pregnancy. The father-to-be was a certain James Blyth, a military man who owned a home near Reading. This second child of Fannie’s died in infancy. Ralph had already left the country, after bestowing Molly (whose paternity he now also had cause to doubt) upon the Blunts, a well-intended solace for their recent loss of newborn twins. Judith, the Blunts’ only surviving child, was born in February 1873.
Humiliated and considerably impoverished by his fickle wife’s fondness for jewels and gambling, Ralph remained abroad through the mid-1870s. Following Fannie’s death in 1878 (and an ill-considered, swiftly terminated engagement to an American author, Julia Fletcher), he returned home. In 1880, Lord Wentworth embarked upon a happy second marriage, one that had been actively encouraged – in an unconscious echo of the role played by Annabella in matchmaking Ada to William Lovelace – by the bride’s mother. Mary Stuart-Wortley proved to be both a loving wife to Ralph and a talented successor to his architect father. Working in collaboration with Charles Voysey, Mary continued William Lovelace’s exuberantly imaginative redevelopment of the villages of Ockham and East Horsley. Ralph and Mary never had – and seemingly did not regret the absence of – children of their own.
By 1880, having returned from years of travelling in the Middle East, the Blunts had settled at Wilfrid’s family home, Crabbet Park in Sussex. Here, a handsome house newly designed by the multi-talented Lady Anne Blunt was surrounded by the park in which the couple managed their celebrated stud of Arabian horses. Ralph and his second wife had meanwhile moved into an immense new home on Swan Walk, Chelsea, a corner house which had been built to Ralph’s specific requirements during his years abroad.* (Fannie’s gambling debts and jewel purchases were evidently not on quite the prodigious scale that her distraught husband’s letters had once suggested.)
It was Wentworth House that became, from 1880, the headquarters for discussions about the family papers with which Ralph had grown understandably obsessed. Just along the road in Cheyne Row, and always ready to sympathise with his difficulties, Sophia De Morgan shared a house with her agreeable and very social daughter, Mary. Nearby, slowly gathering together various anecdotes and fragments of literary history for fictional use in The Aspern Papers (1888), lived that most anglicised of American writers, Henry James.
The acknowledged and most direct source for his story about the ethics of literary collection was the tale related to James about a hopeful Bostonian’s courtship of the ageing Claire Clairmont. (Edward Silsbee, from 1872–5, was an attentive lodger in the Florentine house where Miss Clairmont and her niece then presided over a treasure trove of letters from the time when she had given birth to a daughter, Allegra, accepted by Lord Byron as his own.) By 1887, when the London-based writer began work on his wonderful novella, Henry James was also intrigued by Lord Wentworth’s tireless pursuit of any papers that could throw light upon the historic scandal of the Byron marriage. It is fair to assume that the trials of an obsessive collector stirred the imagination of a writer whose attentiveness to ‘données’ (inspiring ideas) was second to none.
Ralph’s lifelong endeavour to restore honour to his grandmother’s besmirched name resulted in numerous battles. He made no public response in 1883, when The Athenaeum published a series of fifty-year old Byron and Leigh letters intended to demonstrate that the talk of incest had been a malicious fabrication. In 1886, however, the eminent Leslie Stephen added a lengthy essay on Lord Byron to his heroic and home-produced Dictionary of National Biography. In these august pages, the father of Virginia Woolf (a man whose own daughter not long after this would be molested by an older half-brother) loftily dismissed the allegations against Augusta Leigh as ‘absolutely incredible’, the
jealous ramblings of a scorned wife whose reasons for leaving her husband had never been established. Stephen also (much to the delight of the Leigh family) suggested that Mary Chaworth, rather than Augusta, had been the enduring object of Byron’s secret love. Another step had been laid on the stairs ascending to a purified Mrs Leigh – and leading down to the already grubby realm inhabited by a desanctified Lady Byron.
Challenged by an infuriated Ralph about his allegations, an unphased Leslie Stephen requested evidence to the contrary. In 1887, while conceding that the letters produced by Lord Wentworth had indeed entirely undermined his own assertions, the ageing author-editor proved too enfeebled to undertake his promised revisions, or even a modest errata note. The DNB entry on Lord Byron, somewhat shockingly, remained unaltered. Instead, Sir Leslie volunteered his services as a consultant as to which letters should be included in Ralph’s own first discreet submission to the historic controversy.*
The redemptive intentions of Ralph’s book, Lady Noel Byron and the Leighs, were apparent from the fact that he completed it on his grandmother’s birthday (17 May) and dedicated it to his parents. Quoting a line from Carlyle’s French Revolution as his inspiration (‘Where thou findest a lie that is oppressing thee, extinguish it’), Ralph focused his attack upon the reviewers of 1869–71 who had first set out to make a monster of Lady Byron and a martyr of Mrs Leigh. Augusta, so Ralph now stated, had been neither pure nor upright, nor even conveniently plain. She had never been slandered by Lady Byron. In fact, Augusta’s own family had thanked Ralph’s grandmother for her generosity. (As evidence, Ralph cited the 1856 letter in which Augusta’s widowed half-sister, Mary Chichester, had requested a meeting with Lady Byron, in order to convey her own heartfelt gratitude on behalf of the ‘unfortunate’ family of Mrs Leigh.)
In Byron's Wake Page 48