In Byron's Wake Page 2

  AI

  Letter-writing was a medium in which Annabella was never at ease. Whether offering advice, making jokes or presenting a criticism, the tone invariably went wrong. It was a failing of which she was painfully aware and for which – from time to time – she offered touchingly gauche apologies. The didactic tone of Annabella’s written voice led – it still does today – to misinterpretation of her personality. Often, to her mortification, it resulted in a broken friendship.

  Versifying provided a welcome outlet for the feelings that she imperfectly expressed in prose. Mathematics, taught to Annabella by William Frend from Euclid, the standard children’s textbook at that time, provided a reliable refuge from emotion; here was a world of numbers over which, with diligent application, she could exert control.

  It was Frend’s politics rather than his mathematics (or his avid interest in astronomy) that first captured the interest and sympathy of the Milbankes. A hard-working priest with a living just outside Cambridge, Frend had to relinquish his position when he became a Unitarian (and thus unable to accept the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles). Six years later, in 1793 – the year that England declared war on France – Frend caused a stir among his colleagues at Cambridge by publishing a pamphlet that favoured peace. A trial was held, with fervent support for Frend from his students, including the young Samuel Coleridge. Formally banished from his post at Jesus College (while retaining all the perks, excepting residence, of a bachelor don), this unlikely rebel became part of the hotbed of London radicals that surrounded the philosopher William Godwin, author of the inflammatory An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

  The Milbankes liked what they heard about Frend’s views. Peace remained the favoured option in their own northerly part of England: the letters that Judith wrote during Annabella’s childhood dwelt on the local consequences of economic hardship almost as insistently as the latest achievements of her little daughter. ‘I wish any thing to put an End to the War for my part,’ she told Mary Noel in 1794. One year later, she sadly described ‘a state of almost general Bankruptcy, no Trade, no Credit, no Money – People breaking every day . . . A peace would set all afloat again.’

  Annabella first met William Frend while visiting London with her mother in 1806. Aged fourteen and hungry for knowledge, she began a mathematical correspondence. By the end of the year, Frend was complimenting his pupil’s progress with Euclid and explaining how she should use his new arithmetical toy, a sophisticated abacus which enabled numbers to be computed up to 16,665. References to algebra, verse-scanning, Latin, and Roman history (‘I think it may be time for you to begin Livy’) show that Frend became Annabella’s personal teacher, a role he would also perform for her daughter, Ada. (Frend was the father-in-law of Ada’s more famous tutor, Augustus De Morgan.)

  A middle-aged academic was no substitute for a confidante and ally of her own age. Annabella had felt bereft when Sophy Curzon, whom she would always look upon as a beloved older sister, left Seaham in 1800. Judith, too, described herself as wandering around like a lost soul during the months after Sophy’s wedding to Lord Tamworth. Sir Ralph had done his best, when not preoccupied by the considerable costs of maintaining his political career, to keep his daughter diverted with play-reading and backgammon. But a real consolation was finally in sight, one that would help provide an enduring substitute for Sophy’s absence.

  Judith’s closest friend, Millicent Gosford, became a widow in 1807, the year in which Millicent’s son married Mary Sparrow, an heiress from Worlingham in Suffolk. Deprived of their main home in Ireland after Gosford burned down in 1805, the younger Gosfords moved to England, bringing with them two orphaned Irish cousins, Hugh and Mary Millicent Montgomery.

  The junior Lady Gosford was just thirteen years older than Annabella. It was exactly the gap that had separated her from Sophy. Mary Montgomery was herself already twenty-two when she met the fifteen-year-old Miss Milbanke for the first time. Frequently represented in family letters simply as ‘MG’ and ‘MM’, these two agreeable women became the closest of all Annabella’s friends.

  Annabella was not short of female company up in her northern eyrie. The Bakers of Elemore had a daughter, a second Isabella; Louisa and Elizabeth Chaloner lived close by; Emily Milner’s beautiful sister Diana had married Francis (Frank) Doyle, the older brother of another Irish friend, Selina Doyle. All of these young northerners were and remained devoted to Annabella; nevertheless, during those early days, they had lives and preoccupations of their own. Mary Montgomery proved different. Clever, musical and highly social, but hindered by a cruelly persistent spinal complaint, she welcomed the affectionate care that Annabella was eager to lavish. Seaham, offering comfort, healthful sea air and the company of an admiring younger friend, provided a pleasant escape from the brooding atmosphere in Mary Gosford’s London house. (Lord Gosford, when present, which was rare, was a notoriously unkind husband.)

  Poetry loomed large among the interests shared by Annabella and her new friend. Walter Scott was the most celebrated poet of the moment and Mary Montgomery could boast of having almost met him through a mutual friendship with the renowned Scottish-born dramatist Joanna Baillie. But Annabella had a little trump card of her own. Visiting Seaham in 1808, ‘MM’ was introduced to Joseph Blacket, Miss Milbanke’s very own poet-in-residence.

  A handsome young consumptive with a motherless child, Blacket was a professional cobbler whose historical plays and romantic poems (‘Now awful night, array’d in sable gloom, / Draws her dark curtain round one half the globe’) had caught the interest of a few northern patrons, including the Duchess of Leeds and Judith Milbanke. Learning that Blacket was temporarily homeless, Judith urged her husband to provide a Seaham cottage, together with fuel, food and – in those hard times, it was a generous gift – the sum of twenty pounds.

  Perhaps Joseph Blacket fell in love with Annabella; perhaps, he simply knew on which side his bread was buttered. When Miss Milbanke and her friend set up a competition to see who could best inspire their pet poet, he found himself quite unable to set the musical Miss Montgomery’s airs to verse. But Annabella’s awkward notion – she requested an ode to the tree which had provided a muse to one of her Whig heroes, Charles Fox – bore instant fruit. Writing to thank Lady Milbanke for all her kindnesses on 23 November 1809, Blacket lavished praises on her daughter’s own gift for verse. (‘In Miss Milbanke’s lines I find sublimity . . . Her Ideas are wove in the finest Loom of Imagination . . .’)

  Blacket, who died at the age of twenty-three in August 1810, was not alone in admiring Annabella’s first poems. Sarah Siddons, the great Shakespearean actress, was a close friend of Judith Milbanke. Shown one of Annabella’s verses during a visit to Halnaby, Mrs Siddons declared it to be ‘the most extraordinary production, in any point of view, that ever came under my observation’.

  Mrs Siddons was besotted by Miss Milbanke, declaring that she perceived something ‘nearly resembling the heavenly, in the divine illumination of that countenance of hers’. The villagers of Seaham, while less garrulous in the expression of their feelings, tended to agree. Annabella, in her mid-teens, struck them as both sweet and kind, a friendly visitor to their homes whose ‘natural simplicity and modest retirement’ was accompanied by ‘a. . . charming manner’.

  Aged seventeen, Annabella had become a pretty, slightly built young woman with an unusually high forehead, blue eyes, fair curling hair and an open, friendly face that lit up (the ‘divine illumination’ that Mrs Siddons raved about) whenever her interest was caught. Gentle, clever, good-hearted and eager to be of service in the world (the word ‘benevolence’ appears with uncommon frequency in her early correspondence), the flaws for which this paragon would later be viciously condemned were also beginning to appear. Among them was a disturbing zeal for passing judgement upon people she scarcely knew.

  Escorted to London by Judith in February 1810 for her first taste of a London season, Miss Milbanke was eager to demonstrate how skilfully she, lik
e Mrs Siddons, could interpret character from a person’s appearance. Dining out on 3 March at the home of Lord Ellenborough, the lord chief justice, she studied one of the guests across the table – Lord Grey – and discovered him to be self-important. Back at home again, Annabella opened the journal in which she proudly recorded her impressions: ‘His seems to me the politeness of a gentleman, not the politeness resulting from a principle of benevolence.’ Another new acquaintance was condemned, despite a brilliant naval record, for lacking the manners of a true gentleman. The Persian ambassador might think himself lucky for having escaped with a briskly noted commendation for his fine black beard and splendid teeth.

  Whisked from the noisy gatherings of celebrity guests who were always on show at Lady Cork’s home in New Burlington Street to the primmer parties held by the formerly rather wicked Lady Elizabeth Foster (newly recast as the decorous widow of her long-term lover, the Duke of Devonshire), Annabella’s favourite evenings were those that she spent with the kindly old Ellenboroughs. Ample space was made for a rapturous note in her journal of the latest such occasion (10 July), and not only because Mrs Bates (a former factory-worker) had sung Handel arias in a way ‘that made me forget all but Heaven . . .’

  The real point of the ‘happifying’ summer evening of songs from Mrs Bates was that Annabella had discovered her ideal in Anne Ellenborough. Not only did the great judge’s wife appear incapable of unkindness, but she was motivated by the wish to do nothing but good. ‘She appears constantly actuated by a principle of disinterested universal benevolence. She says ill of none . . .’

  What Annabella did not care to admit to the self-conscious little journal that she kept during her first season in London was that she had immensely enjoyed her transformation from the virtuous ‘Northern Light’ (a nickname that acknowledged Miss Milbanke’s growing reputation for doing good works) into becoming, largely thanks to the great fortune that she was in line to inherit from her uncle, one of the most courted young women of the year.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SIEGE OF ANNABELLA

  (1810–12)

  ‘How disgusting he is!’ Annabella noted after being ogled at a London party by a portly bride-hunting Duke of Clarence (the future William IV). Her private comment upon one happily oblivious London hostess, naughty old Lady Cork, was even harsher: ‘she is to be shunned by all who do not honour iniquity’.

  Annabella’s outrage (prudently restricted to the pages of her journal) was understandable in a high-minded young woman of provincial background. The London she entered early in 1810 offered a startling contrast to life in remote northern England. Living at Seaham through the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, she had witnessed and admired her parents’ generous response to the evident hardships of their employees and tenants. In London, by contrast, the occupants of the various grand houses into which she was invited seemed (with the exception of kindly Lady Ellenborough) indifferent to everything but politics, gossip and the scent of the money for which, beneath the sheen of compliments and smiles, everybody was on the hunt. Up in County Durham, an evening’s entertainment occasionally rose to a cheerful ‘hop’ at the Bakers’ or the Milners’, with a carpet rolled back for the twirl, thump and rush of a dance in which young and old, servants and masters, jogged merrily together. In London, chaperoned into the candlelit, red-walled opulence of such popular assembly halls as the Argyll Rooms, the sense of being thrust into the marriage market, exposed to a cool appraisal of precisely which unmarried maiden carried the largest cargo of disposable wealth, was inescapable.

  Stern though Annabella’s private opinions often were, her journal also provides clear evidence that Miss Milbanke relished her introduction to high society, displaying a newfound pleasure in having fun that came as a relief to her anxious parents.

  The Milbankes were determined that their clever daughter – rosily open-faced and (for a young lady who devoured her beloved mutton chops as eagerly as a soldier on the march) remarkably slender – should make a good impression in the world. A handsome house had been rented for just that purpose in Portland Place, a favourite street among the country-loving northern gentry, who appreciated its proximity to the good air and fine walking on the broad open pastures (already earmarked for urbanisation as part of the Regent’s Park) to be found just north of the Euston Road.

  A house was merely the starting point in the campaign required to launch the Milbankes’ cherished child. Judith, while not over-fond of her husband’s formidably well-connected sister, Elizabeth, had hastened to announce Annabella’s arrival in London to Lady Melbourne, and to express a candid hope that this most artful of hostesses might smooth the social progress of her niece. (It was while dining at her aunt’s palatial home in Whitehall that Annabella formed her first – and poor – opinion of Lady Melbourne’s giddy little daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, as ‘clever in everything that is not within the province of commonsense’.)

  Judith Milbanke was growing too old for the role of chaperone through evenings that often extended into the dawn, but Mary Gosford was delighted to help out with the task. Staying in the Gosfords’ fine house in Great Cumberland Place, or at Mary Montgomery’s snug abode in nearby Seymour Street, Annabella deepened her already settled friendship with the two Marys into an abiding love. Meanwhile, Miss Montgomery discreetly encouraged her beloved older brother, Hugh, to believe that Annabella might be prepared to consider a match. It was a notion which Annabella’s teasingly friendly manner towards tall, cheerful Hugh did nothing to discourage.

  Confined to her bed for lengthy periods, Mary Montgomery read all that was current and received all who amused her (many failed the test), while fixing an attentive eye on the world beyond her window. For Mary Gosford, as for Annabella, leading as adventurous a cultured life as possible was an act of positive kindness to their abidingly inquisitive invalid friend. Chaperoned by Lady Gosford and often joined by Mrs George Lamb (Lady Melbourne’s clever and level-headed second daughter-in-law), Annabella performed her duty with a vengeance. Musical evenings; gazing upon painted panoramas that were cranked past the viewers (just as backdrops would later be on early cinema screens); attending high-minded lectures upon poetry and plays; visiting exhibitions of curious objects (Annabella was fascinated to see a meteorite that fell on Yorkshire earth in 1795 and was now on display in the London home of James Sowerby, the great fossil-collector of the day): being benevolent to a sick friend had never been more enjoyable.

  But marriage, not culture, was the true purpose of Annabella’s three seasons in London. Candid, pretty, virtuous and clever, her prospects as an heiress made her – as she was calmly aware – the object of considerable interest. One catch existed. It was widely reported that Miss Milbanke’s wealthy uncle, Lord Wentworth, planned to make her his eventual beneficiary, in lieu of his own illegitimate son. (Nobody was informed that the fortune was to pass to Annabella only after her mother’s death.) But Viscount Wentworth remained in robust health, while the Milbankes were becoming steadily impoverished both by Sir Ralph’s political expenses and by the rapidly shrinking revenue from his north-country mines. The bailiffs were not yet knocking on the door, but Halnaby, by 1810, was proving impossibly expensive to maintain. The future of Seaham itself had grown uncertain. It was for this reason that Annabella’s three years on the London marriage market were frequently interrupted by the Milbankes’ retreat to a cheaply rented house in Richmond-upon-Thames, while Portland Place discreetly closed its doors. Without the hospitality of Lady Gosford and the precious connection to her Aunt Melbourne – lodged at the very heart of London society in her great house on Whitehall – it is not entirely clear how Miss Milbanke would have survived.

  Money was needed. It was up to Annabella – there was no other way, bar the selling of land or interminably waiting for Uncle Wentworth to die – to secure her parents’ future comfort. A match must be made, and a good one.

  COURTSHIPS

  The first prospective alliance was to a m
an to whom Annabella’s friends believed she was ideally suited.

  George Eden (his father had been elevated to the peerage as Lord Auckland), was the nephew of Sir John Eden, a former MP and close neighbour to the Milbankes in the north. In January 1810, the Edens had been devastated by a suicide: the body of George’s older brother, William, had been found floating in the Thames. Comfort lay in the knowledge that George himself was built of sterner stuff. Admired by his family, respected by his peers, George had always seemed more capable than poor, conflicted William of running the family’s handsome estate at Eden Farm, lying a few miles east of London.

  Grave and high-principled, George Eden was so eager and assiduous a suitor that the Milbankes must have been ready to tear their hair out with frustration at Annabella’s steady refusal (it was the first of many such displays of obstinacy) to commit herself to anything deeper than a fond friendship. Her respect and affection for Mr Eden was beyond doubt. The most regular of her dancing partners, George was praised in Annabella’s journal as both just and wise. Lady Auckland, desperate to see George married to such a suitable young woman, assured Miss Milbanke (this was during Annabella’s second London season) that Mr Eden’s sisters thrived upon her ‘cheerful & improving society’, while expressing her heartfelt admiration for ‘a character so far beyond what any of your years possess’.

  All was in vain.

  George Eden’s misfortune was to be too perfect. Where, with such a paragon of virtue, lay the chance to exercise that redemptive benevolence which 18-year-old Annabella longed to bestow? How could Miss Milbanke foresee what an excellent wife she might one day make to the future governor-general of India? At the time of George’s proposal, back in the late summer of 1811, Annabella knew only that this particular alliance was not to her taste.

  Friendship was a different matter. Rejecting Mr Eden’s offer, Miss Milbanke promised her absolute discretion. Nobody should know that he had been turned down; her affection for him would continue undiminished. A kindly consolation, instantly accepted (‘Be a friend still to my Mother and to my sisters,’ poor George humbly entreated), Annabella’s readily bestowed friendship did nothing to speed her progress to the altar. Seeing them continually in each other’s company; noting the regularity of the Milbanke family’s visits to Eden Farm; remarking the closeness that had grown up between Annabella and one of George’s eight sisters, Mary Dulcibella: how could society be blamed for assuming that the future of this evidently well-suited couple was a foregone conclusion?