In Byron's Wake Read online

  In memory of Peter Cochran, who was so kind to all those of us who benefited from his work in the world of Byronic studies. And to the future of Talia and Shira, two of Ada Lovelace’s youngest and most loyal admirers.

  CONTENTS

  Significant Places in the North East

  The Noels, Milbankes, Byrons and Kings

  PART ONE: Annabella

  1 Anticipation (1761–92)

  2 A Very Fine Child (1792–1810)

  3 The Siege of Annabella (1810–12)

  4 Entering the Lists (1812–13)

  5 An Epistolary Courtship (1813–14)

  6 A Sojourn in Hell (January to March 1815)

  7 Unlucky for Some: 13 Piccadilly Terrace (1815–16)

  8 The Separation (1816)

  9 In the Public Eye (1816–24)

  PART TWO: Ada

  10 In Search of a Father

  11 A Rainbow’s Arc (1829–35)

  12 Mathematical Friendships (1834–5)

  13 Ada’s Marriage (1835–40)

  14 An Unconventional Wife (1836–40)

  15 Ambitions and Delusions (1840–1)

  16 A Cuckoo in the Nest (1841–3)

  17 My Fair Interpretress (1843–4)

  PART THREE: Visions

  18 The Enchantress (1843–4)

  19 The Lady from Porlock (1844–9)

  20 Vanity Fair (1847–50)

  21 The Hand of the Past (1850–1)

  22 Rainbow’s End (1851–2)

  23 Life after Ada (1852–3)

  PART FOUR: The Making and Breaking of a Reputation

  24 Enshrinement (1853–60)

  25 Outcast

  List of Illustrations

  Timeline of Events

  Note on Ada’s Health

  Acknowledgements

  Significant Places in the South West

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Picture Credits

  Index

  PART ONE

  Annabella

  CHAPTER ONE

  ANTICIPATION

  (1761–92)

  The year is 1799, almost the dawn of a new century, but this is presently of less interest than the fact that she, Miss Annabella Milbanke, is posing for her portrait to John Hoppner, one of England’s most celebrated artists.

  It was her own decision to wear the white dancing dress, bound high above the waist with a blue satin sash, short-sleeved to show how elegantly she holds her arms. Annabella dances extremely well. Her mother declares that her minuet steps are perfection and Mr Watts, the dancing master, declares that he has never seen such strength in a child’s ankles. He is quite right; that is why Annabella finds it so easy to hold her pose on the dais, stepping forward as if to greet the world.

  It was also her own idea that Mr Hoppner should paint rocks behind her, and the sea, as if she were skipping along the beach below their country home in the faraway north of England. But mostly, when she is alone on the beach at Seaham, it is not dancing that preoccupies Annabella. She likes to make up stories: it is so interesting to picture herself as a brave soldier in the pass at Thermopylae, or comforting a prisoner in his lonely dungeon . . .

  ‘Head up, my angel,’ her mother instructs from the stiff gilt chair where she sits in watchful attendance. ‘Think of your pas grave in the minuet. Hold your body straight as a little queen.’

  She feels like a little queen, the centre of attention as Mr Hoppner bobs out from behind his easel to praise her for her patience. He has a long pale face with no hint of a smile. She can’t decide whether he is interesting enough to become a chosen friend.

  ‘Shall we visit Great Aunt Mary later?’ asks Annabella. ‘I want to read her one of my new poems.’

  Her mother darts a look at Mr Hoppner. ‘She’s such a clever little creature.’

  ‘Indeed!’ says Mr Hoppner. ‘A most remarkable infant.’

  ‘I’m not an infant! I’m seven years of age!’ The smile undoes the pompous phrasing, bringing such dimples into the round and rosy cheeks that the adoring old lady (she must be nearing fifty) jumps up and runs forward to embrace her proud-backed, blue-eyed daughter. It’s a charming scene, reflects Hoppner. Perhaps mother and child would have formed a better subject. But time is pressing on and the artist is growing weary of Lady Milbanke’s chatter.

  Discreetly, Mr Hoppner rattles the oily brushes in his jar. Sighing, Judith Milbanke resumes her seat.

  ‘She is so very coaxing,’ she murmurs by way of apology.

  ‘Indeed.’ He hesitates. ‘And you have others like her, madam?’

  ‘We did!’ the child interrupts. ‘But Sophy’s leaving to get married. And now I must remember to write to her as Lady Tamworth. I shall write to her every week!’

  But Lady Milbanke has folded her hands across her stomach, almost as if to ward off a blow.

  ‘Sophy Curzon is her cousin. My poor late sister’s daughter has always lived with us. But Annabella – Anne Isabella, I should say, since she bears the names both of a royal lady and our dear friend, Mrs Baker of Elemore Hall – is our only child. And born on Ascension Day! Her father and I are much blessed.’

  ‘And so,’ the child sweetly adds, ‘am I.’

  Completed and framed, Hoppner’s portrait of Miss Milbanke was despatched to Seaham Hall, perched high on the cliffs of County Durham, above the German Ocean. Here, the new painting was hung alongside the 1778 portrait by Joshua Reynolds (one of his best) of Annabella’s newly married father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, dark-browed and kind-eyed, all ready to burst out with one of those silly jokes for which a loving daughter could never find the heart to tease him. Flanking it was the sharp-nosed profile of Annabella’s mother, Judith Noel, posed in the fiercely fashionable convention of the time (the portrait was painted in 1784, six years after Judith’s marriage), hair powdered and plucked up into a pyramid of ruffles and bows, a black waist ribbon stressing the anguish of her childless frame.

  Looking at the three family members together, an entire generation might seem to have been skipped. And so it has been. Awaited for fifteen long years, it is no wonder that Annabella, born at last on 17 May 1792, can do as she pleases with her adoring parents. The result is already peeping through in Hoppner’s portrait. Everything about this child – her steadfast stare; the poised way she stands; the tilt of a determined chin – speaks of a formidable and, so far, well-founded confidence. The world, little Miss Milbanke seems to assume, lies at her feet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A VERY FINE CHILD

  (1792–1810)

  From 1792 on, Judith Milbanke’s letters to her family and friends dwelt upon a single theme: the wonder that was her daughter, Annabella. Never in the history of mankind had a mother been blessed with such a flawless little creature! Happy someday would be the winner of such a bride! Visiting grand neighbours with Sophy and Annabella (when Miss Milbanke was still only fifteen months old), Judith took less interest in a park newly landscaped by Humphry Repton than in the fact that the Earl and Countess of Fitzwilliam’s son ‘quite doated [sic] on Annabella’. Lord Milton, aged just seven, seemed a most eligible candidate for her hand. Having seen ‘Miss naked,’ Judith raunchily joked to her broadminded aunt, Mary Noel, ‘therefore he can tell whether he will like her or no.’

  Travelling on to stay with other old friends from earlier, Yorkshire days, before the Milbankes moved east to Seaham, Judith complacently reported how the county folk flocked in to see their Annabella ‘as if she had been something miraculous’. On 20 April 1794, as little Miss neared her second birthday, the proud mother was happy to credit her offspring as ‘Governess in Chief of Papa, Mama & the whole Family’.

  The word was out. Pleasing Judith Milbanke depended upon how many bouquets a frie
nd was willing to throw in the direction of her daughter. Judith, while priding herself on her forgiving nature, was better known for her hot temper. Annabella, therefore, was warmly praised: ‘one of the finest girls of her age I ever beheld,’ Mrs Baker of Elemore gushed in a tactful postscript to one of Judith’s letters from Seaham to Mary Noel.

  Admirers were rewarded with more information than they might have wished to receive. Aged two, Annabella could already identify twenty flowers (and weeds) by name. Annabella always performed her ‘Do Do’ as soon as she got up. Annabella had bathed in the sea and, rising from the waves, looked ‘like a little Venus’. The princesses (George III’s daughters) had personally requested news of Annabella, having heard report – the words were seldom off the lips of a besotted mother – that ‘she was a very fine Child’.

  Few dared suggest the likely result of all this adulation. In 1794, Sophy Curzon masked her own anxiety behind a neighbour’s comment. Apparently, Lady Liddell of Ravensworth Castle thought Judith far too indulgent: ‘she does not ever deny that if it is possible to spoil a very fine Girl, Annabella’s Mama is determined to do it.’ The words were Lady Liddell’s; the emphatic underlining was Sophy’s own.

  Warnings – rarely offered – were a waste of breath. Events conspired to strengthen Judith’s belief that Miss Milbanke was destined for great things. Her brother, Viscount Wentworth of Kirkby Mallory, had always made it clear that the handsome estate over which he presided in the Midlands would not be passed down to his own illegitimate son. Thomas Noel, following his marriage to Kitty Smith in 1796, was understandably disgruntled about receiving only a modest sum of money and the living of the church at Kirkby Mallory (to which he became a notoriously absentee rector, employing a curate as his substitute). The following year, Lord Wentworth made arrangements to leave his considerable property, together with his title, to his sister Judith, and after her, to his niece. A conscientious brother, he now began the task of setting his affairs in order by paying off a substantial number of gambling debts. (Both Wentworth and Mary Ligonier, the wealthy little wife he married after the death of his live-in mistress, Catherine Vanloo, were addicted to the tables; Judith and Ralph preferred betting on horses.)

  In January 1798, Ralph Milbanke’s father died. It was years since either Judith or her husband had visited Halnaby Hall, the north country mansion at which the long-widowed baronet had consoled himself with various lady-friends. Now, Halnaby and the annual rents from a second grand house (Moulton Hall) passed into the new baronet’s hands, together with an agreement that the 5-year-old Annabella, when she married, would receive a dowry of £16,000 (worth approximately £800,000 nowadays). In due course, the whole of this estate would pass down to her as well.

  The new Lady Milbanke had no difficulty in adjusting to her improved circumstances. In London, a splendid new house on Lower Berkeley Street, near Manchester Square, was rented at £300 per year. Plans were swiftly made to entertain the Wentworths at Halnaby; Annabella, now grown too grand for a mere nurse, was allotted a personal maid of her own.

  Mary Anne Clermont had arrived nine years earlier to help care for the orphaned Sophy Curzon. Self-taught and possessed of modest independent means, this timid, plain but capable young woman had already established her worth as a housekeeper and tactful smoother of Judith’s volatile temper when she was promoted to the role of Annabella’s admiring attendant.

  Judith felt a twinge of apprehension about her brother’s first visit to Halnaby. The house, elegantly furnished in the French style, was sure to impress, but what opinion would Thomas and his fashionable wife form of their nieces? Sophy, at nineteen, was going through a plain phase (‘very journalière’) and Annabella, while an undeniably appealing child with her deep blue eyes, flushed cheeks and high pale forehead, was a law unto herself. ‘She is excessively talkative and entertaining if she likes people & very coaxing to her favourites’ Judith confided to Aunt Mary Noel, ‘but she will judge for herself & cannot be made to like any body.’

  Annabella’s thoughts about her uncle are unknown, but she did not take long to reach an opinion of Halnaby. Certainly, the big red-brick house (supposedly designed by Inigo Jones) was very splendid, symmetrical and ornate; certainly, it was pleasant to march along stone terraces as broad as a small town square, or to dash through high, quiet rooms that unfolded each into the next as neatly as a set of perfect equations. She liked the panelled library. She enjoyed being taken on carriage rides through the deer park, or to try her skill at fishing in Halnaby’s ornamental lake. But Halnaby was not Seaham and, as Sophy Curzon reported to Aunt Mary during the family’s first winter visit to this landlocked palace, ‘the Angel . . . regrets the Sea and the Sands’.

  All through her life, Annabella would be drawn back to the sea, and Seaham Hall, completed in the year of her birth, was the home that she never ceased to love. The hall’s long windows and terraced gardens faced the sea. Sealight glinted off the windowpanes. The smell of salt sharpened the northern air. From the house, a sandy descent led down beyond the garden to the beach, where a wilful Annabella liked to pull off her big cotton bonnet and scamper into the waves. ‘She . . . is sadly tanned, which I know would annoy you,’ Judith told Aunt Mary, ‘. . . I believe it is the bathing makes the sun & air catch her skin so much.’

  Ancient tunnels wound down from the hamlet above into the deep caves once used by smugglers; off in the hazy distance, the deceptively named Featherbed Rocks obscured the long line of coast curving south, down to distant Whitby and Scarborough.

  The village, although largely rebuilt during the transformation of old Seaham Manor into the smart new hall, remained a feudal community. Eliza Grant, visiting Seaham as a child in 1808, remembered seeing only a dozen or so cottages, all occupied by Milbanke employees. Staying at the village inn with her mother and sisters, Eliza noticed the graceful manners and wistful face of the innkeeper’s daughter. Young Bessy, she learned, had been summoned up to the hall as that summer’s chosen companion for Lady Milbanke’s daughter. Restored to the inn, Bessy hankered after the privileged world into which she had briefly stepped.

  Quick-tempered and bossy though Judith Milbanke was, she shared with her husband a warm sense of social duty that was imparted to her daughter. In politics (Sir Ralph was a Whig MP), Judith inclined to the left. A fierce opponent of the hangings that took place after the Gordon Riots, she had expressed outrage in 1797 at the English government’s persecution of ‘the poor oppressed Irish’. Rebuilding Seaham village along with the hall, the Milbankes had replaced a row of ‘miserable Cottages’ with sturdy, habitable homes. It was customary, whenever one of the community fell ill, for Sir Ralph to send in the family’s own Dr Fenwick, while adding the comfort of a bottle or two of his own best claret. Annabella, nostalgically recording these details some forty years later, stressed the fact that – while her father gave the orders concerning his workers’ welfare – it was Judith who enforced them. ‘She did not leave it to Servants. She saw that the execution was as good as the Intention.’

  Sentimentality was at play in a middle-aged lady’s recollections of her long-dead parents. Nevertheless, it was these early experiences that helped to make a committed philanthropist of Annabella. Equally enduring was the influence of her parents’ own Unitarian faith in a forgiving God, one who preferred active benevolence to the slavish following of Christian doctrine that Annabella later mocked as ‘Pye-house’. Relations between the owners of Seaham Hall and their rector, Richard Wallis, were cordial, but never so close as with their tenant workforce in the village.

  Annabella’s education, like that of most girls of her time, was a haphazard affair. A governess, passed on by the Bakers of Elemore Hall, was dismissed for neglectful behaviour before her charge had reached the age of five. Miss Walker had no successor. Mary Anne Clermont taught Annabella the clear handwriting that caused Lord Wentworth jovially to request his niece to take over the role of family correspondent. (Nobody except his own wife could decipher Si
r Ralph’s crabbed penmanship.) A skilled sketcher, Annabella learned her attractive technique when William Mulready was touring great houses of the north as a drawing-master. She left a strong impression upon the young man; many years later, Mulready recalled that Miss Milbanke, while not quite so handsome as her parents thought her, was an exceptionally kind and friendly child: ‘very gentle and good’.

  Drawing, together with dancing (for which Annabella evinced both aptitude and relish), formed an essential part of a young Georgian lady’s education. Music, despite the fact that her parents enjoyed duetting on the violin and harpsichord, interested her less than learning to make her own petticoats. Greek was a struggle – demonstrated by the awkwardly shaped letters in the Greek list of friends’ names that Annabella drew up during her teens. (William Mulready was among them.) Reading tastes were dictated by Sir Ralph’s affection for the plays of Dryden, Otway and Shakespeare and by her early and surprised delight in poetry. By the age of fourteen, Annabella was swooning over Edward Young’s fashionably gloomy Night Thoughts. Young, as she started to try her hand at scanning verses, became her model.

  Poetry became the private vehicle through which Annabella voiced the passions – a reaction against her mother’s noisy impulsiveness – that she concealed from public view. Letters were her downfall. Aged eleven, anxious to praise her mother for giving (it was most unusual at that time) a political speech in public, Annabella could not manage it without condescension:

  You never forgot one word of your speech nor was any fear discernable in your speech, addressing a very numerous & in part a very respectable audience you never once forgot the proper action (for action is a very essential part in a good speaker . . .)

  Have I praised or have I flatter’d? let those who heard them judge – as it is I remain an impartial Tory.