In Byron's Wake Page 7

  Lady Melbourne was the first to hear the news, in a letter which once again announced her protégé’s intention of reforming ‘most thoroughly’ (by which, he meant her to understand, his ceasing to sleep with Augusta) in preparation for an altered way of life for which he requested her auntly blessing. Answering Annabella on that same day (18 September), Byron declared that her response, while ‘unexpected’, had given him ‘a new existence’: he was truly moved by her earnest wish to make him happy. ‘It is in your power to render me happy – you have made me so already.’

  On the following day, Byron and Augusta walked together into a part of the estate grimly known as Devil’s Wood and carved their names – like the lovers they doubtless still were – into the bark of an old tree. Back in the abbey, Byron wrote to appoint Annabella as his guide, philosopher and friend: ‘my whole heart is yours’. To Thomas Moore, a favourite confidant about financial matters, he announced on that same day that his bride-to-be was both virtuous (a later letter to Moore admiringly described Annabella as ‘a pattern of the north’) and rich.

  Annabella’s great expectations formed a regular feature of Byron’s letters to Moore. Confirmation of her status as an heiress had come to him via Lady Melbourne. Apparently, there would be a house, together with a fine second residence and a ‘very considerable’ inheritance. Judith Milbanke had herself informed an attentive sister-in-law of these valuable particulars on 25 September before collapsing into bed, exhausted by the emotional travails of Annabella’s snail-paced journey to the altar with a man – her mother now proudly declared – whom she herself had always known to be The One: ‘and I was right . . .’

  Not everybody was so ecstatic. As she opened her letters – from Emily Milner, Selina Doyle and Joanna Baillie – Annabella found her female friends, both old and young, united in one chorus of commiseration. William Darnell, her northern suitor, teased her for yielding her fair person ‘without a sigh’ and ‘to the unspeakable regret of her friends’, to ‘that insatiable Lord’ who now chose ‘talent and beauty as his rightful prey’. Delighted by his own eloquence, Darnell sought approval: ‘Very good – Don’t you think?’ And she did, enough to copy it out, while preserving the undated original into her old age.*

  Mary Montgomery, who had always encouraged the match, was still abroad when news of the engagement was given out. Her brother Hugh (yet another of Annabella’s suitors) seems not to have responded to a jaunty proclamation (delivered on 22 September and softened by a sympathetic note from Lady Milbanke) that ‘The Thane is found.’ Mary Gosford, treated on 6–8 October to an artlessly pompous explanation of the care that Annabella had taken to single out Byron as ‘the man most calculated to support me on my journey to Immortality’, was tactfully acquiescent.

  Elation swept Annabella along for a couple of joyous weeks. Caroline Lamb managed, despite Byron’s fears of an outburst, to produce a friendly note of congratulation, together with an engagingly naive drawing of the happy couple. Augusta, writing what would be perceived three years later as ‘ingenious compositions’, smoothly apologised for the delays which still kept her brother lingering in the south. Mrs Leigh, so Byron tactlessly boasted to Annabella on 7 October, was ‘more attached to me than anyone in existence can be’. Writing to Lady Melbourne on the same day, he revealed that Augusta, increasingly terrified that scandalous reports might prevent her coveted court appointment, was ‘especially anxious’ for this marriage to take place.

  Four weeks after her acceptance, and still separated from an absentee fiancé by almost three hundred miles, Annabella started to fret. Everything seemed like a dream, she confessed to Byron on 10 October, and yet doubts were creeping in. ‘God bless you . . . my own . . . my only dearest.’ Promising her three days later that his lawyer was at last setting off for Durham with the necessary papers (hard legal questions about the validity of Hanson’s daughter’s swift and strangely discreet marriage to Lord Portsmouth would preoccupy the wily lawyer until April the following year*), Byron tried to soothe his fiancée’s nerves. Indeed, he did not deserve either such happiness or her anxiously honourable explanation of the phantom lover with whom she had kept him at bay. But ‘I never doubted you –’ Byron wrote on 13 October: ‘I know you to be Truth herself.’ Augusta was urged to reassure the nervous bride-to-be. ‘I can most fully appreciate the motives for your doubts & fears of being able to make my dear Brother happy,’ she wrote to Seaham on 15 October. ‘He writes me word that he hopes very soon to see you . . .’

  Four days later, Byron’s mood had darkened. Writing to Lady Melbourne on 19 October, he blamed Annabella for failing to accept him, back in 1812. Had she done so then (‘if she had even given me a distinct though distant hope’), he now believed that he would have acted upon it and pressed his suit. Augusta (always free of blame in Byron’s eyes) would thus have been spared the unhappiness and guilt for which her brother was now ready to throw all the blame upon a reluctant bride.

  A cruelly unjust view had been formulated. It was one from which Byron would never again deviate.

  Isolated, apprehensive and perfectly unaware of any sexual flavour in Byron’s relationship to his sister, Annabella wrote on 22 October to thank Augusta for all her kindness and to assure her that such generous warmth would not be forgotten. To Byron (his letters now dwelt with ominous repetitiveness upon his need for a wife who would control his wayward passions), she expressed her wistful hope for news of his visit. Her Uncle Wentworth, travelling up to Seaham from Leicestershire especially to meet her fiancé, was forced to return home unsatisfied. The villagers, while complimenting ‘our Miss’ on her glowing appearance, seemed puzzled by her continuing solitude.

  On 29 October, pausing only for an overnight stay at Augusta’s house (it was, so he explained to Annabella, at his sister’s explicit request) and to hurl a final angry instruction at his malingering lawyer to hasten to Durham with the crucial documents, Byron finally set off for Seaham.

  It was Lady Melbourne who, writing to a friend about the engagement back in September, had remarked upon the oddity of a courtship carried on entirely by correspondence. When Annabella entered the drawing room in which Byron awaited her, the couple had not even glimpsed each other for fifteen months. He, so she later remembered, fiddled with a large fob watch that dangled from his fingers. Pale and gaunt after one of his ferocious stints of dieting, he made no effort to move towards her. When she held out her hand, he bent his lips to her fingertips.

  I stood on the opposite side of the fireplace. There was a silence. He broke it. ‘It is a long time since we have met’, – in an undertone. My reply was hardly articulate. I felt overpowered by the situation . . .

  Joined by her parents (at their daughter’s request), Byron grew more conversational, talking about his new hero, Edmund Kean, with an unnatural excitement that Annabella ascribed to nerves. Informed – as the little party picked up their candlesticks at last and climbed Seaham’s airily graceful staircase to their bedrooms – that the family normally rose around ten, Byron kept to his room until midday. Annabella spent a disconsolate two hours in the library before setting off for a solitary stroll. Returning, she found that their guest had also walked out alone.

  It was an unpromising beginning. Two days into his fortnight-long visit, on 4 November, Byron despatched the first of three bulletins to Lady Melbourne. Sir Ralph seemed entirely agreeable; Lady Milbanke was tiresomely businesslike, not at all to his taste. More worryingly, Annabella showed no signs of being able to control him (‘& if she don’t it won’t do at all’). Her silence was unnerving: (‘the most silent woman I ever encountered’). Her degree of affection – unfortunately for a man who wrote that ‘I never could love but that which loves’ – remained impossible to judge.

  Two days on, Byron wrote again. Annabella and he were getting along famously. She had become more talkative. Her parents were kind. He hoped (once again) she would be happy: ‘I am sure she can make & keep me so if she likes.’

  A we
ek later, Byron was at his most mercurial. Perhaps there would be no marriage. Annabella talked interminably about fine feelings, analysed everything he said and retired to bed with an unexplained ailment every third day. Once, to his alarm, she had actually made a scene almost worthy of Caroline Lamb.* Nevertheless, concluding a complaint-filled letter to Lady M with the ungallant recollection of how swiftly a kiss or two could soothe her niece (‘entre nous, it is really amusing’), and how pleasantly ‘caressable’ into good humour she was, Byron decided that Annabella’s temper was not bad, only ‘very self-tormenting – and anxious – and romantic’. Having threatened a rupture, he concluded by declaring after all that ‘if there is a break – it shall be her doing not mine’.

  Lady Melbourne offered worldly advice. She herself had seen Annabella display a furious tantrum that ended in a two-day headache, but – since she always hurried to atone and he was so skilful a seducer – ‘everything is in your power – for though you are dextrous in most things, that is your forte’.

  The advice proved superfluous. By the time Lady Melbourne’s letter reached Seaham, Byron had already made demonstration of his desire, frightened Annabella, angered her mother and stormed out of the house. His spirits, sullen at the northern staging post of Boroughbridge (from where Annabella learned that he felt ‘cold as Charity – Chastity or any other Virtue’), improved at the pliant Augusta’s home (from which his sister gushed forth ‘her hundred loves’). Safely back in London, he hoped that those ‘hot luncheons of salubrious memory’ had helped to brighten Annabella’s own mood.* Signing his saucy letter off in high good humour, Byron wished a tender good morning – as if across the pillow – to ‘Ma Mignonne’.

  The sense of games – dangerously silly games – being played by the amorous siblings is inescapable. ‘Mignonne’ was the pet name Augusta and Byron used for little Elizabeth Medora Leigh. On 15 December 1814 (this letter was one which Annabella would later regard as clear evidence of her husband’s crime), Augusta blithely informed Byron that a visitor ‘has found out a likeness to your picture in Mignonne’ – that is, Medora – ‘who is of course very good-humoured in consequence’. On 30 November, Augusta even dared to tell Annabella that she shared all of her feelings about Byron, causing Annabella to respond – with pitiable innocence – that she expected them to form ‘a very amiable trio’.

  Annabella’s obliviousness to what would later be illuminated by the glare of hindsight invites sympathy. But what is to be made of Augusta, blandly reporting to her brother on one day that racecourse bets were being laid against his marriage to Miss Milbanke, and on another that Annabella’s scholarly habits were said to be ruining her health (meaning, her looks)? Was Mrs Leigh really the goose that her young brother affectionately nicknamed her, or was she a jealous sister deliberately throwing spokes in the wheels of a marriage that, if it proved a happy one, might threaten her own secret supremacy?

  Certainly, that first and long-awaited visit to Seaham by Byron had not been an unqualified success. The letters that flew after his retreating form were imploring. On 16 November (the day of his departure), Annabella entreated Byron to have faith in her love. On 17 November, she recalled the terrible quarrel that had evidently taken place when she begged him not to ‘turn me out of doors in revenge as you threatened’. Two days later, she urged him not to believe in ‘the grave didactic, deplorable person that I have appeared to you’. Hearing by the same post from an anxious Judith Milbanke that his fiancée had recovered her former good spirits, being ‘delighted and happy with her future prospects’, the bridegroom softened. On 20 November, he signed himself ‘most entirely and unalterably your attached B’. Six days later, Annabella wrote with candid passion of her desire for his embraces: ‘I wish for you, want you, Byron mine, every hour . . . Come, come, come – to my heart.’

  ‘Remember – I have done with doubts,’ Annabella wrote to Byron on 24 November. But had he? Unexpectedly sympathetic when she told him on the previous day of having to sack a newish maid (‘a hardened sinner’) and take back her old one, Jane Minns, Byron was incensed to hear that the bells of Sunderland Minster had been rung to proclaim his approaching nuptials. ‘Dearest A,’ he snapped on 12 December, ‘I must needs say – that your Bells are in a pestilent hurry . . . I am very glad however that I was out of their hearing – deuce take them . . .’

  For Annabella, busying herself with wedding arrangements, arranging for a winter honeymoon at Halnaby and overseeing the sale of Milbanke properties (to boost her dowry and save Seaham Hall, the clifftop home that she adored), all the other problems raised by Byron (the challenges faced by his lawyer over Lord Portsmouth’s mental status; the acquiring of a marriage licence; continuing worries about Newstead’s future) appeared surmountable. All was ready, she pleaded. Her own papers were in perfect order.* Nobody objected to Byron’s request for a simple drawing-room ceremony, least of all a Unitarian bride who would take pride throughout her life in never having attended a church service.

  And yet still the bridegroom delayed.

  On 16 December, Annabella spoke out plainly, telling Byron that his absence had become ‘as unwelcome as possible to everybody’. (Her northern friends had already been advised of a deferral, from December to January 1815.) Four days later, she told him not to come at all if he had cause for dissatisfaction. Addressing him more directly still in a postscript, she wrote: ‘Are you less confident than you were in the happiness of our marriage?’

  Byron’s answer was freezing.

  I do not see any good purpose to which questions of this kind are to lead – nor can they be answered otherwise than by time and events. You can still decide upon your own wishes and conduct before we meet – and apprize me of the result at our interview – only make sure of your own sentiments – mine are yours ever, B.

  Next day, 23 December, while sullenly preparing to set out for Seaham (via Augusta’s home in Cambridgeshire), Byron fired off a final salvo in which he reminded his bride-to-be of the unhappy way in which they had last parted.

  Dearest A – if we meet let it be to marry – had I remained at S[eaham] it had probably been over by this time – with regard to our being under the same roof and not married – I think past experience has shown us the awkwardness of that situation – I can conceive nothing above purgatory more uncomfortable . . . I shall however set out tomorrow . . . Hobhouse I believe accompanies me – which I rejoice at – for if we don’t marry I should not like a 2nd journey back quite alone – and remaining at S[eaham] might only revive a scene like the former and to that I confess myself unequal –

  Arriving at Six Mile Bottom armed with a marriage licence and the drafts of his latest work (a ravishing reworking of various psalms, to be set to the music of Isaac Nathan), Byron tactlessly informed Annabella that his beloved sister was looking as perfect as ever (‘better can’t be in my estimation’), before wishing his bride-to-be as pleasant a time as he was having himself at the Leighs’ home: ‘much merriment and minced pye – it is Christmas Day’.

  * * *

  * Stratford Canning is best known as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War.

  * Lady Frances’s charms were heightened by the fact that the Wedderburn Websters had recently moved to Aston Hall in Yorkshire. Aston was, as Byron had learned from Augusta, the very house in which she herself had been conceived.

  * Hanson promised Byron a substantial amount of money (£30,000) from Lord Portsmouth’s estate in exchange for acting as best man and for later confirming the bridegroom’s sanity at the time of the marriage. Anecdotal report adds that Byron himself had already slept with the bride. So Byron himself later boasted to his own wife – but Byron did love to shock (Elizabeth Foyster, The Trials of the King of Hampshire (Oneworld Publications: 2016)).

  * In other words, until Elizabeth Medora was weaned. Making love to a nursing mother was evidently not to Byron’s taste.

  * Darnell, who later became the prebendary of Durham Cathedra
l and had his sermons published in the Edinburgh Review, was devoted to Annabella. In another undated autumn letter, from the Lovelace Byron Papers, he told her that ‘there is no young person to whom I have been so much in the habit of looking up to as yourself’ and sweetly ended by saying he would be proud to call Lady Byron his friend only ‘because she was Miss Milbanke’.

  * On 22 November 1814, Portsmouth’s brother (and heir) formally requested that the earl should be certified as a lunatic and thus retrospectively unfit to have married Miss Hanson. Byron’s marriage preparations came further down John Hanson’s list of concerns than protecting the lucrative aggrandisement of his daughter (see E. Foyster, op. cit. pp. 192–3).

  * In 1856, Annabella presented an entirely different portrait of the scene to Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this version, she offered to break the engagement if Byron had some private reason to regret his offer. Collapsing on a sofa, Byron had ‘murmured indistinct words of anger & reproach – “you don’t know what you have done”.’ The subject was never renewed except by hints at ‘fearful mysteries’ in the past. This is less convincing than the rage described by Byron. Only in her late twenties did Annabella learn to suppress her own violent temper. (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated (Sampson Low & Son, 1870), p. 289.)

  * Byron had previously told Lady Melbourne that he preferred his suppers ‘hot’: the sexual meaning was plain. Here, he is clearly inviting Annabella to recall more than the ‘hot luncheons’ he had enjoyed under her roof.

  * Annabella, now aged twenty-two, had unofficially taken on the role of family lawyer. It was one that equipped her well to face the challenges of an unknowable future.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A SOJOURN IN HELL

  (JANUARY TO MARCH 1815)