Lady Byron Vindicated

‘If early habits,—those strong links that bindAt times the loftiest to the meanest mind,Have given her power too deeply to instilThe angry essence of her deadly will;If like a snake she steal within your walls,Till the black slime betray her as she crawls;If like a viper to the heart she wind,And leaves the venom there she did not find,—What marvel that this hag of hatred worksEternal evil latent as she lurks.’

The noble lord then proceeds to abuse this woman of inferior rank in the language of the upper circles.  He thus describes her person and manner:—

‘Skilled by a touch to deepen scandal’s tintsWith all the kind mendacity of hints,While mingling truth with falsehood, sneers with smiles,A thread of candour with a web of wiles;A plain blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming,To hide her bloodless heart’s soul-harden’d scheming;A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal,And without feeling mock at all who feel;With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown,—A cheek of parchment and an eye of stone.Mark how the channels of her yellow bloodOoze to her skin and stagnate there to mud,Cased like the centipede in saffron mail,Or darker greenness of the scorpion’s scale,—(For drawn from reptiles only may we traceCongenial colours in that soul or face,)Look on her features! and behold her mindAs in a mirror of itself defined:Look on the picture! deem it not o’erchargedThere is no trait which might not be enlarged.’

The poem thus ends:—

‘May the strong curse of crushed affections lightBack on thy bosom with reflected blight,And make thee in thy leprosy of mindAs loathsome to thyself as to mankind!Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate,Black—as thy will for others would create;Till thy hard heart be calcined into dust,And thy soul welter in its hideous crust.O, may thy grave be sleepless as the bed,The widowed couch of fire, that thou hast spreadThen when thou fain wouldst weary Heaven with prayer,Look on thy earthly victims—and despair!Down to the dust! and as thou rott’st away,Even worms shall perish on thy poisonous clay.But for the love I bore and still must bearTo her thy malice from all ties would tear,Thy name,—thy human name,—to every eyeThe climax of all scorn, should hang on high,Exalted o’er thy less abhorred compeers,And festering in the infamy of years.’March 16, 1816.

Now, on the 29th of March 1816, this was Lord Byron’s story.  He states that his wife had a truthfulness even from early girlhood that the most artful and unscrupulous governess could not pollute,—that she always panted for truth,—that flattery could not fool nor baseness blind her,—that though she was a genius and master of science, she was yet gentle and tolerant, and one whom no envy could ruffle to retaliate pain.

In September of the same year she is a monster of unscrupulous deceit and vindictive cruelty.  Now, what had happened in the five months between the dates of these poems to produce such a change of opinion?  Simply this:—

1st.  The negotiation between him and his wife’s lawyers had ended in his signing a deed of separation in preference to standing a suit for divorce.

2nd.  Madame de Staël, moved by his tears of anguish and professions of repentance, had offered to negotiate with Lady Byron on his behalf, and had failed.

The failure of this application is the only apology given by Moore and Murray for this poem, which gentle Thomas Moore admits was not in quite as generous a strain as the ‘Fare thee well.’

But Lord Byron knew perfectly well, when he suffered that application to be made, that Lady Byron had been entirely convinced that her marriage relations with him could never be renewed, and that duty both to man and God required her to separate from him.  The allowing the negotiation was, therefore, an artifice to place his wife before the public in the attitude of a hard-hearted, inflexible woman; her refusal was what he knew beforehand must inevitably be the result, and merely gave him capital in the sympathy of his friends, by which they should be brought to tolerate and accept the bitter accusations of this poem.

We have recently heard it asserted that this last-named piece of poetry was the sudden offspring of a fit of ill-temper, and was never intended to be published at all.  There were certainly excellent reasons why his friends should have advised him not to publish it at that time.  But that it was read with sympathy by the circle of his intimate friends, and believed by them, is evident from the frequency with which allusions to it occur in his confidential letters to them.5

About three months after, under date March 10, 1817, he writes to Moore: ‘I suppose now I shall never be able to shake off my sables in public imagination, more particularly since my moral – clove down my fame.’  Again to Murray in 1819, three years after, he says: ‘I never hear anything of Ada, the little Electra of Mycenae.’

Electra was the daughter of Clytemnestra, in the Greek poem, who lived to condemn her wicked mother, and to call on her brother to avenge the father.  There was in this mention of Electra more than meets the ear.  Many passages in Lord Byron’s poetry show that he intended to make this daughter a future partisan against her mother, and explain the awful words he is stated in Lady Anne Barnard’s diary to have used when first he looked on his little girl,—‘What an instrument of torture I have gained in you!’

In a letter to Lord Blessington, April 6, 1823, he says, speaking of Dr. Parr:—6

‘He did me the honour once to be a patron of mine, though a great friend of the other branch of the house of Atreus, and the Greek teacher, I believe, of my moral Clytemnestra.  I say moral because it is true, and is so useful to the virtuous, that it enables them to do anything without the aid of an Ægistheus.’

If Lord Byron wrote this poem merely in a momentary fit of spleen, why were there so many persons evidently quite familiar with his allusions to it? and why was it preserved in Murray’s hands? and why published after his death?  That Byron was in the habit of reposing documents in the hands of Murray, to be used as occasion offered, is evident from a part of a note written by him to Murray respecting some verses so intrusted: ‘Pray let not these versiculi go forth with my name except to the initiated.’7

Murray, in publishing this attack on his wife after Lord Byron’s death, showed that he believed in it, and, so believing, deemed Lady Byron a woman whose widowed state deserved neither sympathy nor delicacy of treatment.  At a time when every sentiment in the heart of the most deeply wronged woman would forbid her appearing to justify herself from such cruel slander of a dead husband, an honest, kind-hearted, worthy Englishman actually thought it right and proper to give these lines to her eyes and the eyes of all the reading world.  Nothing can show more plainly what this poem was written for, and how thoroughly it did its work!  Considering Byron as a wronged man, Murray thought he was contributing his mite towards doing him justice.  His editor prefaced the whole set of ‘Domestic Pieces’ with the following statements:—

‘They all refer to the unhappy separation, of which the precise causes are still a mystery, and which he declared to the last were never disclosed to himself.  He admitted that pecuniary embarrassments, disordered health, and dislike to family restraints had aggravated his naturally violent temper, and driven him to excesses.  He suspected that his mother-in-law had fomented the discord,—which Lady Byron denies,—and that more was due to the malignant offices of a female dependant, who is the subject of the bitterly satirical sketch.

*          *          *          *

‘To these general statements can only be added the still vaguer allegations of Lady Byron, that she conceived his conduct to be the result of insanity,—that, the physician pronouncing him responsible for his actions, she could submit to them no longer, and that Dr. Lushington, her legal adviser, agreed that a reconciliation was neither proper nor possible.  No weight can be attached to the opinions of an opposing counsel upon accusations made by one party behind the back of the other, who urgently demanded and was pertinaciously refused the least opportunity of denial or defence.  He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors’ Commons.’8

Neither John Murray nor any of Byron’s partisans seem to have pondered the admission in these last words.

Here, as appears, was a woman, driven to the last despair, standing with her child in her arms, asking from English laws protection for herself and child against her husband.

She had appealed to the first counsel in England, and was acting under their direction.

Two of the greatest lawyers in England have pronounced that there has been such a cause of offence on his part that a return to him is neither proper nor possible, and that no alternative remains to her but separation or divorce.

He asks her to state her charges against him.  She, making answer under advice of her counsel, says, ‘That if he insists on the specifications, he must receive them in open court in a suit for divorce.’

What, now, ought to have been the conduct of any brave, honest man, who believed that his wife was taking advantage of her reputation for virtue to turn every one against him, who saw that she had turned on her side even the lawyer he sought to retain on his;9 that she was an unscrupulous woman, who acquiesced in every and any thing to gain her ends, while he stood before the public, as he says, ‘accused of every monstrous vice, by public rumour or private rancour’?  When she, under advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal separation or open investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?

HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.

Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England,—let any lawyer who knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington, ask whether they were the men to take a case into court for a woman that had no evidence but her own statements and impressions?  Were they men to go to trial without proofs?  Did they not know that there were artful, hysterical women in the world, and would they, of all people, be the men to take a woman’s story on her own side, and advise her in the last issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of the strongest kind?  Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this statement of Byron’s—that he was condemned unheard, and had no chance of knowing whereof he was accused—never appeared in public.

It, however, was most actively circulated in private.  That Byron was in the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various kinds to be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have already shown.  We have recently come upon another instance of this kind.  In the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new document has turned up, of which Mr. Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after Byron’s death, he published in the preface to his ‘Domestic Pieces’ the sentence: ‘He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors’ Commons.’  It appears that, up to 1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who now fills his place, had taken any notice of this newly found document, which we are now informed was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817, while Mr. Hobhouse was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice, given to Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, for circulation among friends in England, found in Mr. Lewis’s papers after his death, and now in the possession of Mr. Murray.’  Here it is:—

‘It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared “their lips to be sealed up” on the cause of the separation between her and myself.  If their lips are sealed up, they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them.  From the first hour in which I was apprised of the intentions of the Noel family to the last communication between Lady Byron and myself in the character of wife and husband (a period of some months), I called repeatedly and in vain for a statement of their or her charges, and it was chiefly in consequence of Lady Byron’s claiming (in a letter still existing) a promise on my part to consent to a separation, if such was really her wish, that I consented at all; this claim, and the exasperating and inexpiable manner in which their object was pursued, which rendered it next to an impossibility that two persons so divided could ever be reunited, induced me reluctantly then, and repentantly still, to sign the deed, which I shall be happy—most happy—to cancel, and go before any tribunal which may discuss the business in the most public manner.

‘Mr. Hobhouse made this proposition on my part, viz. to abrogate all prior intentions—and go into court—the very day before the separation was signed, and it was declined by the other party, as also the publication of the correspondence during the previous discussion.  Those propositions I beg here to repeat, and to call upon her and hers to say their worst, pledging myself to meet their allegations,—whatever they may be,—and only too happy to be informed at last of their real nature.

‘BYRON.’‘August 9, 1817.

‘P.S.—I have been, and am now, utterly ignorant of what description her allegations, charges, or whatever name they may have assumed, are; and am as little aware for what purpose they have been kept back,—unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence.

‘BYRON.’‘La Mira, near Venice.’

It appears the circulation of this document must have been very private, since Moore, not over-delicate towards Lady Byron, did not think fit to print it; since John Murray neglected it, and since it has come out at this late hour for the first time.

If Lord Byron really desired Lady Byron and her legal counsel to understand the facts herein stated, and was willing at all hazards to bring on an open examination, why was this privately circulated?  Why not issued as a card in the London papers?  Is it likely that Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, and a chosen band of friends acting as a committee, requested an audience with Lady Byron, Sir Samuel Romilly, and Dr. Lushington, and formally presented this cartel of defiance?

We incline to think not.  We incline to think that this small serpent, in company with many others of like kind, crawled secretly and privately around, and when it found a good chance, bit an honest Briton, whose blood was thenceforth poisoned by an undetected falsehood.

The reader now may turn to the letters that Mr. Moore has thought fit to give us of this stay at La Mira, beginning with Letter 286, dated July 1, 1817,10 where he says: ‘I have been working up my impressions into a Fourth Canto of Childe Harold,’ and also ‘Mr. Lewis is in Venice.  I am going up to stay a week with him there.’

Next, under date La Mira, Venice, July 10,11 he says, ‘Monk Lewis is here; how pleasant!’

Next, under date July 20, 1817, to Mr. Murray: ‘I write to give you notice that I have completed the fourth and ultimate canto of Childe Harold. . . .  It is yet to be copied and polished, and the notes are to come.’

Under date of La Mira, August 7, 1817, he records that the new canto is one hundred and thirty stanzas in length, and talks about the price for it.  He is now ready to launch it on the world; and, as now appears, on August 9, 1817, two days after, he wrote the document above cited, and put it into the hands of Mr. Lewis, as we are informed, ‘for circulation among friends in England.’

The reason of this may now be evident.  Having prepared a suitable number of those whom he calls in his notes to Murray ‘the initiated,’ by private documents and statements, he is now prepared to publish his accusations against his wife, and the story of his wrongs, in a great immortal poem, which shall have a band of initiated interpreters, shall be read through the civilised world, and stand to accuse her after his death.

In the Fourth Canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ with all his own overwhelming power of language, he sets forth his cause as against the silent woman who all this time had been making no party, and telling no story, and whom the world would therefore conclude to be silent because she had no answer to make.  I remember well the time when this poetry, so resounding in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled my heart with a vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of indignation at the cold insensibility that had maddened him.  Thousands have felt the power of this great poem, which stands, and must stand to all time, a monument of what sacred and solemn powers God gave to this wicked man, and how vilely he abused this power as a weapon to slay the innocent.

It is among the ruins of ancient Rome that his voice breaks forth in solemn imprecation:—

‘O Time, thou beautifier of the dead,Adorner of the ruin, comforter,And only healer when the heart hath bled!—Time, the corrector when our judgments err,The test of truth, love,—sole philosopher,For all besides are sophists,—from thy shriftThat never loses, though it doth defer!—Time, the avenger! unto thee I liftMy hands and heart and eyes, and claim of thee a gift.*          *          *          *‘If thou hast ever seen me too elate,Hear me not; but if calmly I have borneGood, and reserved my pride against the hateWhich shall not whelm me, let me not have wornThis iron in my soul in vain, shall THEY not mourn?And thou who never yet of human wrongLeft the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis,Here where the ancients paid their worship long,Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,And round Orestes bid them howl and hissFor that unnatural retribution,—justHad it but come from hands less near,—in thisThy former realm I call thee from the dust.Dost thou not hear, my heart? awake thou shalt and must!It is not that I may not have incurredFor my ancestral faults and mine, the woundWherewith I bleed withal, and had it been conferredWith a just weapon it had flowed unbound,But now my blood shall not sink in the ground.*          *          *          *‘But in this page a record will I seek;Not in the air shall these my words disperse,Though I be ashes,—a far hour shall wreakThe deep prophetic fulness of this verse,And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.That curse shall be forgiveness.  Have I not,—Hear me, my Mother Earth! behold it, Heaven,—Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven,Hopes sapped, name blighted, life’s life lied away,And only not to desperation driven,Because not altogether of such clayAs rots into the soul of those whom I survey?-–‘From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy,Have I not seen what human things could do,—From the loud roar of foaming calumny,To the small whispers of the paltry few,And subtler venom of the reptile crew,The Janus glance of whose significant eye,Learning to lie with silence, would seem true,And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh,Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy?’12

The reader will please notice that the lines in italics are almost, word for word, a repetition of the lines in italics in the former poem on his wife, where he speaks of a significant eye that has learned to lie in silence, and were evidently meant to apply to Lady Byron and her small circle of confidential friends.

Before this, in the Third Canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ he had claimed the sympathy of the world, as a loving father, deprived by a severe fate of the solace and society of his only child:—

‘My daughter,—with this name my song began,—My daughter,—with this name my song shall end,—I see thee not and hear thee not, but noneCan be so wrapped in thee; thou art the friendTo whom the shadows of far years extend.*          *          *          *‘To aid thy mind’s developments, to watchThe dawn of little joys, to sit and seeAlmost thy very growth, to view thee catchKnowledge of objects,—wonders yet to thee,—And print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss;—This it should seem was not reserved for me.Yet this was in my nature,—as it is,I know not what there is, yet something like to this.-–‘Yet though dull hate as duty should be taught,I know that thou wilt love me; though my nameShould be shut out from thee as spell still fraughtWith desolation and a broken claim,Though the grave close between us,—’t were the sameI know that thou wilt love me, though to drainMy blood from out thy being were an aimAnd an attainment,—all will be in vain.’

To all these charges against her, sent all over the world in verses as eloquent as the English language is capable of, the wife replied nothing.

‘Assailed by slander and the tongue of strife,Her only answer was,—a blameless life.’

She had a few friends, a very few, with whom she sought solace and sympathy.  One letter from her, written at this time, preserved by accident, is the only authentic record of how the matter stood with her.

We regret to say that the publication of this document was not brought forth to clear Lady Byron’s name from her husband’s slanders, but to shield him from the worst accusation against him, by showing that this crime was not included in the few private confidential revelations that friendship wrung from the young wife at this period.

Lady Anne Barnard, authoress of ‘Auld Robin Grey,’ a friend whose age and experience made her a proper confidante, sent for the broken-hearted, perplexed wife, and offered her a woman’s sympathy.

To her Lady Byron wrote many letters, under seal of confidence, and Lady Anne says: ‘I will give you a few paragraphs transcribed from one of Lady Byron’s own letters to me.  It is sorrowful to think that in a very little time this young and amiable creature, wise, patient, and feeling, will have her character mistaken by every one who reads Byron’s works.  To rescue her from this I preserved her letters, and when she afterwards expressed a fear that anything of her writing should ever fall into hands to injure him (I suppose she meant by publication), I safely assured her that it never should.  But here this letter shall be placed, a sacred record in her favour, unknown to herself.

‘I am a very incompetent judge of the impression which the last Canto of “Childe Harold” may produce on the minds of indifferent readers.

‘It contains the usual trace of a conscience restlessly awake, though his object has been too long to aggravate its burden, as if it could thus be oppressed into eternal stupor.  I will hope, as you do, that it survives for his ultimate good.

‘It was the acuteness of his remorse, impenitent in its character, which so long seemed to demand from my compassion to spare every semblance of reproach, every look of grief, which might have said to his conscience, “You have made me wretched.”

‘I am decidedly of opinion that he is responsible.  He has wished to be thought partially deranged, or on the brink of it, to perplex observers and prevent them from tracing effects to their real causes through all the intricacies of his conduct.  I was, as I told you, at one time the dupe of his acted insanity, and clung to the former delusions in regard to the motives that concerned me personally, till the whole system was laid bare.

‘He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them, as Bonaparte did lives, for conquest, without more regard to their intrinsic value, considering them only as ciphers, which must derive all their import from the situation in which he places them, and the ends to which he adapts them, with such consummate skill.

‘Why, then, you will say, does he not employ them to give a better colour to his own character?  Because he is too good an actor to over-act, or to assume a moral garb, which it would be easy to strip off.

‘In regard to his poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable except to a very few; and his constant desire of creating a sensation makes him not averse to be the object of wonder and curiosity, even though accompanied by some dark and vague suspicions.