THE KINDNESS OF SISTERS

Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons

DAVID CRANE

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

I A Meeting of Opposites

II The Meeting

III A Sense of Failure

Marriage

Sleeping With the Vampire

The Kindness of Sisters

An Instrument of Destruction

The End of the Affair

A Preparation for Invisibilty

Epilogue

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The glory of mankind has been to produce lives, to provide vivid, independent, individual men, not buildings or engineering works or art, not even the public good.

D. H. Lawrence¹

You should not have warred with the World – it will not do – it is too strong always for any individual.

Madame de Stael to Byron²

In the late afternoon of 15 June 1938, a small group of men stood at a gaping hole at the south-west corner of the chancel of St Mary Magdalen, Hucknall. Beneath their feet a short flight of steps led down to a low, cramped vault, and by the glare of a photographer’s lamp they could make out a pile of coffins heaped on top of each other in a mouldering jumble of wood and bone and twisted lead that had lain undisturbed for over fifty years.

They had converged on the church in some secrecy. Earlier in the day a lorry had brought builders’ tools and planks to the north door, and one by one through the afternoon a surveyor, antiquarian and doctor had appeared. Finally a mason and three labourers arrived and began lifting the massive, cracked slab of York stone that now lay beside the open crypt.

It took them two hours to raise the stone, but by six o’clock in the evening it was done. During the course of the work there were other visitors in the church, but once the vault was open most of these, and all the women, were asked to leave.

Even by English standards, those who remained were a curiously prosaic lot to be indulging a taste in literary necrophilia. There was clearly a generous streak of romance in the character of Canon Barber, the Vicar of Hucknall, but if a brace of churchwardens and half the professional classes of the county were not ballast enough to steady the most extravagant imagination, he had also co-opted the Diocesan Surveyor and local MP in a bid for respectability.

A miner’s lamp was swung into the vault to test the air, a ladder lowered to avoid the shallow, awkward steps, and Canon Barber climbed down, followed in turn by the surveyor, photographer and antiquarian. The purpose of the meeting, if the Canon is to be believed, was to establish the existence of a lost medieval crypt, and although it was soon plain that any such hopes were misplaced, measurements were duly taken and recorded, leaving the way clear for the real, if unacknowledged, business of the day.

The labourers were dismissed until the next morning, and the party adjourned to the church hall, only returning at the dead of night. Again, Canon Barber was the first down. Alone in the vault, lit now only by the photographer’s lamps, he had time for a more careful inspection. It was a cramped, rectangular chamber six feet wide, just over seven feet long, and no more than eight feet beneath the floor of the nave. Its walls were of plastered brick, with two sloping slabs of stone making the vaulted roof. In three piles, running north to south rested the more or less intact shells of about half a dozen coffins, with the crushed debris of others beneath them. Round his feet lay the dust and bones of three centuries.

There seemed to be no order to anything. At the foot of the stairs, though, he identified the seventeenth century coffin of a baby, its lead lining buckled and twisted under the weight of a double-cube funerary chest, to which scraps of faded purple velvet still clung. On the lid was a brass plate with the following inscription:

Within the Urnare depositedthe heart and the brainof the deceasedLord Noel Byron

The lid was loose, and inside was a sealed lead case, with a second inscription adding an oddly casual ‘etc’ to the contents of the urn. Beyond the chest, Barber could now distinguish more easily the coffin for which he was searching. It was made of well-preserved oak and ornately decorated. Further shreds of purple material – faded since to crimson – clung to the brass headed coffin nails. On the lid rested the remains of a Baron’s coronet. The velvet and ermine had rotted away, and the pearls had been wrenched from their finials. Only the simple rim survived to identify the rank and probable identity of the dead.

There was no coffin plate to confirm Barber’s guess, but the lid was loose and he could see that the lead casing had already been cut open. ‘Somebody’, he recalled with an endearing disingenuousness, ‘had deliberately opened the coffin.

A horrible thought came over me that souvenirs might have been taken from the coffin. The idea was revolting, but I could not dismiss it. Had the body itself been removed? Terrible thought! From time to time visitors to the church had asserted in my hearing that the body of the Poet was not in the Vault. I wondered now on what ground this assertion could have been made. Had they known of the opening of the coffin, and received some secret information that the body had been removed? The more I thought about it, the more fearful I became of the possibility of the coffin being empty. There was the coffin before me – the lid was loose and easily raised – the leaden case within torn open. Within the case was another coffin of wood – the lid had never been fastened. What was beneath it? If I raised it, what should I discover? Dare I look within? Yes, the world should know the truth – that the body of the great poet was there – or that the coffin was empty. Reverently, very reverently, I raised the lid, and before my eyes there lay the embalmed body of Byron in as perfect a condition as when it was placed in the coffin one hundred and fourteen years ago. His features and hair were easily recognisable from the portraits with which I was so familiar. The serene, almost happy expression on his face made a profound impression upon me. The feet and ankles were uncovered, and I was able to establish the fact that his lameness had been that of the right foot. But enough – I gently lowered the lid of the coffin and as I did so, breathed a prayer for the peace of his soul.³

‘Close thy Byron and open thy Goethe’, that renegade Byronist Thomas Carlyle demanded in Sartor Resartus, but Barber’s vandalism is only the most literal example of England’s refusal to bend to the Sage of Ecclefechan. From the moment in July 1824 when Byron’s black servant struggled for one last view of his master’s coffin as it was lowered into the Hucknall vault, a defiant nation has shared his reluctance to let its most notorious poet go, a complex mix of curiosity and guilt driving it to re-stake its claim in the man it had once forced into exile.

It is as hard to exaggerate the impact of Byron’s death on England as it is that of his life. In the orthodox histories of the nineteenth century the two seminal figures of his age are Coleridge and Bentham, but both men were pre-eminently ‘sires of sires’, their influence disseminated through disciples until it was simply part of the zeitgeist – lived and breathed by men and women who would have been hard pressed to identify the source of their beliefs.

With Byron it is the opposite, and there is in this sense no English writer like him, no one who has stamped his image so firmly on the phenomenon that bears his name, no one who has so completely made his life the measure of his art. It is difficult to imagine that anybody in their right mind has ever allowed a dislike of Wordsworth to stand in the way of his Prelude for instance, but from the first triumph of Childe Harold, Byron and his art have been inseparable, his personality and life validating or threatening the poetry in ways that have no obvious parallel. ‘We shall, like all others who say anything about Lord Byron’, Blackwood’s declared,

begin, sans apologie, with his personal character. This is the great object of attack, the constant theme of open vituperation to one set, and the established mark for all the petty but deadly sneers, shrugs, groans to another … Is there a noble sentiment, a lofty thought, a sublime conception in the book? ‘Ah yes!’ is the answer. ‘But what of that? It is only the roué Byron that speaks!’ Is a kind, a generous action of the man mentioned? ‘Yes, yes!’ comments the sage; ‘but only remember the atrocities of “Don Juan”.’ Salvation is thus shut out at either entrance: the poet damns the man, and the man the poet.⁴

With the solitary exception of Milton, no English writer has so polarised opinion or posthumously stirred such visceral responses as Byron. In the wake of Shelley’s death off the coast at Lerici the Tory press might lash him with a cruel and casual contempt that still has the power to shock, but the entrenched battle lines that formed around Byron’s memory are of another order altogether, scars that define not just a world of coterie politics but the permanent cultural life of a whole nation.

It is notable, in fact, that it is not with other literary reputations that the posthumous cult of Byron can be compared, but with those deaths that seem to reveal some crisis of confidence or national identity. In more recent times the great state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill patently belonged to an order of its own, but if the sombre mood of that week was of an empire mourning its own passing, one only needs to think of other such funerals – Wellington’s, Nelson’s, the torch-lit procession of the old, mad George III – to recognise the context in which Byron’s needs to be seen. ‘We have been stunned from another quarter’, Sir Walter Scott wrote,

by one of those deaths … as from an archangel’s trumpet to awaken the soul of a whole people at once.⁵

‘Hark! forth from the abyss a voice proceeds,’ Byron himself wrote of Princess Caroline – lines doubly prophetic of the mood that would greet his own death and that of another thirty-six year old aristocratic exile whose funeral cortege followed the almost identical journey northwards through the streets of London,

A long low distant murmur of dread sound,

Such as arises when a nation bleeds

With some deep and immedicable wound …

Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou?

Fond hope of many nations art thou dead?

Could not the grave forget thee, and lay low

Some less majestic and less beloved head?⁶

There was something else about Byron’s death, however, something alien and atavistic, that not even the politicised guilt and pseudo-Catholic trappings of Princess Diana’s funeral can quite match. Some years ago there was a documentary film of a Bengali village terrorised by a man-eating tiger, and in the ritual celebrations that greeted its killing, the frenzy of hands that stretched up in a bizarre mixture of fear and reverence to touch the garlanded corpse, we probably come as close as we can to the mood in which England awaited the return of Byron’s body.

For Byron was that tiger (an image he used of himself – for that matter an image his mother-in-law used of him) – Blake’s tiger, a thing of ‘fearful symmetry’, an elemental force, beyond comprehension – too dangerous to be allowed to live and too vital to live without. ‘Alas poor Byron,’ Carlyle wrote in the flush of pentecostal panic that greeted the news from Greece,

The news of his death came down on my heart like a mass of lead; and yet, the thought of it sends a painful twinge thr’ all my being, as if I had lost a brother! O God! That so many souls of mud and clay should fill up their base existence to the utmost bound, and this, the noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course was run!… We shall hear his voice no more: I dreamed of seeing him and knowing him; but the curtain of everlasting night has hid him from our eyes. We shall go to him, he shall not return to us. Adieu my dear Jane. There is a blank in your heart, and a blank in mine, since this man passed away.⁷

With his looks and glamour, his aristocratic pedigree, and the scandals that clung to his name, it is no surprise that Byron excited this attention in life, but the oddity is that death only intensified the cult of personality that surrounded him. For Jane Welsh the blank in creation his death left could have been no greater if the sun or moon had fallen from the skies, and it was as if no one could quite believe the enormity of their loss without the evidence of the body. ‘Don’t look at him, he is dangerous’⁸, a horror-struck Lady Liddell had warned her daughter, covering her eyes when she saw the exiled Byron in Rome, but in death that was just what everyone wanted to do. In Missolonghi the wretched Julius Millingen and the rest of Byron’s doctors had hacked at his corpse in a brutal parody of an autopsy, measuring his skull and weighing his brain, slapping vital organs on their scales as if the mystery of genius and personality was there to be found in his remains. In the same room, only days later, his companion and biographer, Edward Trelawny, pulled back the burial sheet to stare down on Byron’s body with a similar confidence – ‘the great mystery was solved’, he later wrote with a ruthless disregard for truth; ‘Both his feet were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knee – the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr.’⁹

Back in England, it was little different when after almost six weeks at sea the Florida docked with his coffin just below London Bridge. While Byron’s old friend Hobhouse waited on deck for the undertakers to drain the preserving spirit off the corpse, crowds lined the banks and watched from the flotilla of small boats that bobbed around the ship, as eager to glimpse his return as they had been to watch his departure from Dover eight years earlier.

A French officer from Le Havre delivered Hobhouse a request from General Lafayette asking to see the body. Down in the hold, a boy was caught cutting a relic from Byron’s shroud. Over the next days, as the sense of loss sank in, the crowds only grew, men and women queuing in their thousands to pass the coffin as it lay in state in Great George Street, cramming the pavements and windows along the route of the funeral cortege and packing the church at Hucknall so full that there was scarcely room for the coffin.

Nor was this just the morbid excitement of a season, as the Parish Clerk’s Album at Hucknall, placed there by John Bowring more than a year after the funeral, underlines. The church was then a more modest structure than the building which Victorian improvers bequeathed to Canon Barber, but for the mass of visitors who made the pilgrimage, the intimacy of the old St Mary’s ministered to their grief in ways that Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s could never have done. ‘So should it be’, Bowring had written in the front of the album,

let o’er this grave

No monumental banners wave;

Let no word speak – no trophy tell

Aught that may break the charming spell

By which, as on the sacred ground

He kneels, the pilgrim’s heart is bound.

A still, resistless influence,

Unseen, but felt, binds up the sense;

While every whisper seems to breathe

Of the mighty dead who rests beneath.¹⁰

The extravagant grief of the young Tennyson, the maudlin reflections of Mary Shelley as she watched the funeral cortege from her Kentish Town window, the lecture extemporised by Coleridge as it passed up Highgate Hill – all these quite properly belong to literary history, but skimming down the lists of names below Bowring’s poem the most striking thing as ever with Byron is the sheer breadth and cosmopolitanism of his appeal. The two names that head the album, for instance, are those of the royal Duke of Sussex and of Pietro Gamba, brother of Byron’s last Italian mistress, who visited Hucknall before sailing for Greece to die in the cause that Byron had made Europe’s. There are visitors here, too, from New Orleans and Baltimore, representatives from the Spanish Cortes and the American Congress, comedians and Grenadier guardsmen, writers, theatre managers and clergymen, school parties, ships’ crews, and – in 1832 – a John de Bracken, home from Calcutta, where eight years earlier prayers for the repose of Byron’s soul rose from a Greek chapel on the banks of the Hoogly.

After the seismic convulsion of grief that greeted Byron’s death, these quieter after-shocks recorded in the Hucknall Album might come as no surprise, but they still raise teasing questions about his place in English cultural life. Among those hundreds of visitors many might have been hard pressed to say what had brought them, and yet in a curious sense it is the presence of the ‘common man’ – the great battle cry of Diana’s funeral – rather than of Washington Irving or the Duke of Sussex that is the most intriguing aspect of the Byron cult.

For a man of Sussex’s liberal pretensions, the pilgrimage carried clear and deliberate political overtones, but precisely what kind of ‘fane’ did those hundreds of obscure admirers imagine they were visiting at Hucknall? What were parents doing, signing the visitors’ book with their daughters, paying homage at the shrine of a man who had publicly ridiculed every tie of family life? Why were army or naval officers at the tomb of a poet who took such pride in sharing Napoleon Bonaparte’s initials? What did good protestant Englishmen think they were up to, leaving messages that would not look out of place at the foot of the Bambino in Rome’s Aracoeli? What was it that brought so many clergymen to the grave of a writer the Bishop of Calcutta had labelled the ‘systematic poet of seduction, adultery and incest; the contemner of patriotism, the insulter of piety, the raker into every sink of vice and wretchedness to disgust and degrade and harden the hearts of his fellow-creatures’?¹¹ What was nineteenth century England doing longing after ‘a perfected idol … as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb’?¹²

The most exciting answer to these questions is that Byron had come to represent a subversive element in the national character for which the encroaching morality of the nineteenth century allowed less and less expression. In his wonderfully contrary study of the Byrons, A.L. Rowse once went so far as to claim that Byron was scarcely English at all, and if this is a characteristic overstatement, Rowse is right that the values Byron embodied have always prospered on the margins of English life rather than at its centre, a source of equal fascination and fear to a country reluctant to recognise its own complex identity.

‘Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius’, a nervous Brutus asks in Julius Caesar,

That you would have me seek into myself

For that which is not in me?’

and the fear that accompanied Byron to the grave was the fear of what he had shown them in themselves.* ‘Every high thought that was ever kindled in our breast by the muse of Byron’, Blackwood’s protested, expressing the sense of outrage and almost self-disgust that his readers came to feel as the full implications of their ‘idolatry’ were brought home to them,

every pure and lofty feeling … is up in arms against him. We look back with a mixture of wrath and scorn to the delight with which we suffered ourselves to be filled.¹³

It is this that gives the history – and the posthumous history – of Byron its continuing importance because he raised demons that no community could afford to acknowledge or allow to live. In a wonderful sequence near the beginning of Stanley Donen’s Charade George Kennedy opens the west door of a church, strides down the aisle to where an open coffin rests between banks of candles on its bier, stares for a moment at the body, takes a pin out of his raincoat lapel, jabs it into the corpse to make sure it is dead, turns on his heel and strides out again.

There was something of that about Byron’s funeral – the mood along the Tottenham Road seemed to George Borrow like that of an execution – because for all its beauty and fascination the tiger was safer dead. There was nothing feigned in the grief and loss of the young Tennyson or Carlyle, and yet from the notorious day that his closest friends burned his memoirs in John Murray’s offices to the letters George Eliot sent Harriet Beecher Stowe, even Byron’s most passionate admirers needed to deny or suppress the truths that his life embodied. John Cam Hobhouse, that loyal ‘bulldog’, told Tom Moore in a conversation about the memoirs, that he knew more of Byron than anyone else, and much more than he should wish anyone else to know.

‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’¹⁴ wrote a later exile from these shores, and along with the adulation, Byron has always inspired an anxiety that ranges from comic wariness to suspicion, fear and open hatred. Through the novels of the nineteenth century Byronic imitators would continue to stalk the Caucasus or the moors with all the misanthropic glamour of their original, but from Persuasion to Jane Eyre, from Glenarvon to Dracula, from Mary Shelley’s Raymond to Polidori’s Ruthven – the first vampire in English fiction – ‘Byronism’ is a physical threat to be feared, shunned, exiled, immolated, staked through the heart or – that most English of solutions, – blinded, crippled and then, ‘Dear Reader’, married.

It is only too appropriate that Mary Shelley’s name should feature on this list, because no one has so painfully united what D. H. Lawrence called the ‘predilection d’artiste’¹⁵ for the aristocrat with a bourgeois fear of everything he stands for. ‘For there does exist, after all,’ Lawrence wrote in his great essay on Thomas Hardy – an essay characteristically less about Hardy than Lawrence himself –

… the great self-preservation scheme, and in it we must all live … But there is the greater idea of self-preservation, which is formulated in the state, in the whole modelling of the community … In the long run, the State, the Community, the established form of life remained, remained intact and impregnable, the individual, trying to break forth from it, died of fear, or of exhaustion, or of exposure to attacks from all sides, like men who have left the walled city to live outside in the precarious open. This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness, whither they have escaped for free action, after having left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established convention. This is the theme of novel after novel: remain quiet within the convention, and you are good, safe and happy in the long run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your side; or, on the other hand, be passionate, individual, wilful, you will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will escape, and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to bear the isolation and the exposure, or from direct revenge from the community, or from both. This is the tragedy, and only this.¹⁶

This book is the story of that tragedy, because supreme among the Lawrentian outsiders is Byron, an aristocrat in the conventional sense by a convoluted accident of inheritance, an aristocrat in the Lawrentian sense to the core. It has been plausibly argued that Byron was never in fact at ease with the chance that brought an impoverished Aberdeen schoolboy a title, but from that day in 1812 when, as the author of Childe Harold, he ‘woke to find himself famous’ his life became a paradigm of Lawrence’s struggle between the individual and the community – the archetype of all those artists forced into exile, compromise or silence by the hostility of the crowd, of the men and women who have had to pay with their freedom or security for their integrity, the living victims of that same communal, English instinct for self-preservation that pushed Hardy to sacrifice his heroes and heroines on the altar of social convention.

Crippled with a deformity of his right foot, abandoned by his rake of a father, brought up in poverty by his violently possessive mother, alternately abused and terrified by his Calvinist nurse, Byron might have had little choice in the matter, but no psychological pleading can disguise the gusto with which he embraced his fate. In recent years it has become the fashion among biographers to present him as some kind of ‘monster-victim’ of this childhood, but the exhilarating truth about Byron is that he was an outsider by intelligence and will, an enemy by instinct, sensibility, temperament and politics of all that this ‘tight little island’* stands for.

No major English poet – except perhaps his hero, Alexander Pope – has made such creative capital out of a sense of alienation and grievance. It would take most of his life before the combination of exile and technical mastery matured these feelings into the great verse of Don Juan, but from his first callow satire the poet fed ruthlessly off his sense of difference, transmuting all the social and physical insecurities of childhood into the antinomian hauteur of the Byronic hero.

And the key word there is ‘Byronic’, because it was the glee with which Byron seized on the idea of hereditary doom that has made his name synonymous with the rebel outsider. The more unstable elements of his character probably owed as much to his mother’s Gordon blood as the paternal line, but it was exclusively through the history of crime and excess that was ‘Mad Jack’ Byron’s bequest to his son that a perverted Calvinism and the curse of deformity coalesced into a single, liberating myth of predestined damnation and revolt.

From the moment when, as a nine year old child, after the successive deaths of father, cousin, uncle and the ‘Wicked Lord’, he came into the title and first saw the ruins of his ancestral home near Nottingham, the shape of this rebellion was set. Newstead had originally been founded as an Augustinian priory in the reign of Henry II, and for all the changes it was still the great west front of the former church that gave the house its special character, a soaring, pinnacled and traceried façade behind which nothing stood, a piece of history preserved as theatre as wonderfully and spuriously evocative as everything else about the child’s bankrupt inheritance.

If it is impossible to imagine any nine-year old would be impervious to the romance of Newstead, no one but a Byron could have gloried so in its evidence of ancestral ruin. The priory had first come into the family in 1537 at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but the ruthless transforming energies of Henrician England had long disappeared there, leaving house and lands mouldering in the same irreversible decay, the Byron name stained by murder, its deer slaughtered, woods felled, mining rights leased, rooms bare, its ruined east wing open to the skies.

Among the great English Romantics, Byron is unique in an almost complete absence of feel for his native landscape, and the cloistered world of Newstead quite literally set in stone a sense of physical alienation that had begun in his infancy. In his earliest verse there was a certain amount of Ossian-like posturing over the mountains of his childhood, but it was significantly the ruined priory that became what Pope’s Twickenham grotto and garden had been to another crippled outsider – the emotional and physical context of his creative life, the ‘other place’ of the imagination where he could reinvent himself in the successive alter-egos with which he would take on the world. ‘Newstead, fast falling, once resplendent dome’, Byron saluted it in one of his juvenile poems,

Religion’s shrine! Repentant HENRY’S pride!

Of warriors, monks, and dames the cloister’d tomb,

Whose pensive shades around thy ruins glide,

Hail to the pile! More honour’d in the fall

Than modern mansions in their pillar’d state;

Proudly majestic frowns thy vaulted hall,

Scowling defiance on the blasts of fate¹⁷

In his adult life Newstead would be more a financial burden than a retreat, but its blend of history and loss retained a central place in his imagination. As a boy at Harrow and then Cambridge his sense of identity was wrapped up with the Byronic inheritance it embodied, but even after he had been compelled to sell it, the lessons of pride and vulnerability he had learned under its roof always remained with him,

It influenced everything in his life, his strengths and weaknesses, his politics and social manner – the awkward mix of arrogance and uncertainty – and above all the poetry that can often seem an emanation of childhood alienation. In the last great poem of his life he returned to Newstead with a freshness that underlines its importance to him, but if it is impossible to imagine the satirist of Don Juan without acknowledging the role Newstead played in his development it is as hard not to see its influnece in the lack of ‘place’ that is such a glaring weakness of his descriptive verse.

Nothing is ever as simple as that with Byron, of course, but his deliberate, ‘aristocratic’ obtuseness about the business of poetry that clouds the issue here was ultimately no more than a manifestation of the same insecurity. One only has to think of the ease with which Keats can move through an English landscape in darkness and identify every scent and sound to see what is missing from Byron’s verse, but in some adolescent way it would have seemed beneath him to look with that kind of particularity. ‘“Where is the green your friend the Laker talks such fustian about”, Trelawny recalled in an anecdote which – true or not – neatly brings Byron’s hostility to a world with which he was at odds and poetic sensibility into a single focus,

“Who ever”, asked Byron, “saw a green sky?”

Shelley was silent, knowing that if he replied, Byron would give vent to his spleen. So I said, “The sky in England is oftener green than blue.”

“Black, you mean,” rejoined Byron; and this discussion brought us to his door.¹⁸

This insensitivity to his surroundings might seem an odd criticism of a poet whose evocation of the Greek landscape inspired a generation to fight and die for its freedom, but even then it was an idea of landscape rather than landscape itself that quickened his creativity, a sense of decline and loss that was as much imaginative projection as classical association.

It is no coincidence, either, that the one place that could genuinely vie with Greece in Byron’s mind was Venice, and again it was the palpable air of decay that clung to the Serenissima in her dotage that gripped his imagination. There are times in fact when this almost reflex melancholy can strike an oddly adolescent note in a writer of his wit and sophistication, and yet it is precisely this quality of arrested growth that links boy and man, and – critically – man and poet in a sense of alienation that found its first and deepest expression in Newstead.

The greatness of D.H. Lawrence’s novels, as F.R. Leavis remarked, was the proof they give that he lived, and the same could be said with even more validity of Byron’s poetry. In the wonderful satires of his last years he produced some of the finest comic poetry in the English language, and yet for all its brilliance and fun the ultimate fascination of his verse lies in the testament it offers to the courage and defiance with which Byron lived his life.

It was a defiance that darkened everything, from the wounded bitterness with which he responded to rejection, to the reckless and self-destructive exhibitionism with which he greeted success. There are other outsiders for whom success comes as a kind of belated membership card, but it was perhaps the defining hallmark of Byronic rebellion that triumph only propelled him from the defence onto the attack, driving him in an ascending trajectory from Newstead on an inevitable collision course with the community he despised.

This is not another biography of Byron – nor even of the notorious marriage that led to his final rupture with England – but an exploration of this timeless battle between the values he stood for and those of the community. There are any number of English authors around whose lives a similar argument might be built, but the unity of his life and art and the fame which surrounded Byron make him the one writer whose history defines in some permanent way what it means to be English.

At the height of the marriage crisis, it was claimed with a breathtaking simplicity that men and women’s attitudes to him demonstrated whether they were ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and nearly fifty years after his death Harriet Beecher Stowe berated the English nation for any softening in its attitude to him. It seemed to the American novelist that the moral sinews of the nation had been radically weakened by his verse and life, and while she was in some ways a case apart, there was too much agreement on all sides of the political spectrum to dismiss hers as the naïve voice of New England puritanism.

‘England, England!’¹⁹ she lamented, and if she was wrong in her diagnosis, she was right that the threat Byron offered had not died with him. For the dozen years which followed the triumph of Childe Harold, his poetry and personality had sent his contemporaries scuttling for cover behind the city walls, and yet it was only in death that his rebellion was revealed in its full destructiveness, consuming and maiming lives with all the inexorable power of Greek tragedy until it reached its final, savage climax in the ‘High Noon’ of Byronic Romanticism that forms the core of this book.

This was the first and last confrontation in twenty years between the two women who had been brought together by his marriage and fought over his corpse, the sister he had loved and the wife who had brought about his exile. It took place at the White Hart at Reigate, a small town some twenty miles south of London, on 8 April 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, the year Victorian England gloried in its prosperity and moral superiority with a complacency Byron would have loathed.

Byron, though, had been dead for almost twenty-seven years. Of his great contemporaries, Shelley had been gone for twenty-nine, Keats thirty, Coleridge seventeen, even Wordsworth – the ‘Wordswords’ of Don Juan as he had long since become – one.

And thirteen years into Victoria’s reign, it was a different world. Tennyson, who as a schoolboy had carved Byron’s name into a rock on hearing the news from Missolonghi, had just been presented to the Queen as the new Poet Laureate, his tortured frame tightly trussed in the same court dress that Samuel Rogers had once lent his predecessor. Matthew Arnold – that other representative voice of the mid-century – had just become engaged. Trollope was wondering if he would ever make a novelist. Dickens, never one to be seduced by national prosperity, was beginning Bleak House, Mayhew publishing his London Poor. George Eliot was editing at the Westminster Review, Charlotte Bronte squabbling with Thackeray, her sisters Emily and Anne, already dead. Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh, was sixty seven; his widow, Annabella Byron, fifty-eight.

Byron had been dead for almost as long as he had lived, but for the two women who met at the White Hart his memory had all the sharpness of recent bereavement. For the best part of forty years his presence or legacy had alternately enriched and shattered their lives, and this Reigate meeting was the final testament to his dominance, one last dramatic demonstration of the fear and adulation that had convulsed a generation and for which in their polar antagonisms Annabella Byron and Augusta Leigh stand the perfect surrogates.

It is this that gives both the fascination and significance to this meeting, because the battle that climaxed at Reigate is also in miniature the archetypal struggle of the outsider and the community that had raged around Byron ever since the first publication of Childe Harold. The secret histories of these two women have a misery that no repetition can dim, and yet for all the melodrama of the story this book tells, it is the representative quality that gives a kind of Aeschylian grandeur to the history of incest, bastardy, betrayal, love and hate that in Byron’s name and memory bound them together.

If this focus on the Reigate meeting needs no justifying, the form that has been adopted here requires some explanation. In the first and last parts of this book the methods are those of any conventional biography, but if there is a single episode in the whole Byron saga that demands a freer, more speculative approach, it is this last confrontation between Annabella and Augusta at the White Hart.

With that in mind, the form is that of an ‘imaginary dialogue’, and if this is in part because we do not know what was said, it is not necessity that has determined this option. There can be few lives or deaths that have ever been subjected to the same scrutiny as that of Byron’s, and yet as so often with him the most compelling truths of this narrative lie in regions for which the traditional tools of history or biography are simply not enough.

It is not only that scholarship can never deliver the certainties to which it aspires, but that this meeting has less to do with ‘objective truth’ or ascertainable fact than with the kinds of subjective experience that gradually take on an independent and destructive life of their own. Within the restrictions of orthodox biography it would have been possible to chart the chronological path that took Annabella and Augusta from their first meeting to this last, but what biography could never do is dissolve the barriers between past and present or capture the distorting operations of memory, the co-existence of contradictory but equally valid ‘truths’; could never re-open those avenues that, one by one, are closed by life but remain in the mind; could never, most important of all, do full justice to that sense of waste, that consciousness of other possibilities – other ‘selves’, resolutions, aspirations, untapped or thwarted potentialities of human growth – that was Byron’s terrible gift not just to these two women but to his whole generation.

There is, too, another – entirely fortuitous – advantage to a dialogue of this kind, in that the inevitable whiff of Victorian melodrama about it, the sense of characters speaking out of ‘role’, of addressing not each other but the audience beyond, perfectly captures the way in which they spoke. In a letter written just before the meeting at Reigate, Annabella accused Augusta of never saying or writing anything without a third person in mind, and whether or not that is fair to her it certainly is to Annabella herself whose natural mode of address was the statement or deposition made and obsessively recorded with the judgement of posterity in her sights.

And if this reconstructed dialogue is essentially a fiction, it is a fiction that is strictly circumscribed by historical evidence. The old White Hart in Reigate had passed its Regency peak by the time that Annabella chose it and is now long since gone, and the setting here is essentially a theatrical rather than an historical space, its symbolism and props those of a Pre-Raphaelite painting – this after all is the year Ruskin championed the Brotherhood – rather than a Victorian coaching inn doomed by the advent of the train.

There has, too, been a compression of time to contain within the classical unities the final unfolding of these lives, but those are the only liberties taken. There is nothing here, otherwise, that does not have its source in the thousands of letters, statements, depositions, reminiscences and journals that document the relationship of the two women. Much of it, too, is in their own words, spoken, written or reported over a period of more than thirty years. We have the letters that they exchanged before Reigate, and the minutes taken after. We have the notes, written on a slip of paper in a nervous, almost indecipherable hand, that Byron’s widow took with her to the meeting. We have the correspondence that followed. We know their state of health, how they looked, how they dressed, how they sounded, how they stood and walked, their physical responses to pain. Above all, though, in the mere presence of two elderly women – the one frail from chronic ill-health, the other dying – we have the ultimate proof of that obsession with the memory and influence of Byron that makes their story the story of the age itself.

I
A MEETING OF OPPOSITES

On a chill and blustery Tuesday in April 1851, an elderly woman, accompanied by a man in his early thirties, emerged from the entrance at the top of Trafalgar Street in Brighton to take the north-bound railway for Reigate. If anyone in the crowded terminus had noticed either of them it would almost certainly have been the man, a tall and striking figure, whose charismatic preaching at the Holy Trinity had made the names of ‘Brighton’ and ‘Robertson’ synonymous across the English-speaking protestant world.

With her air of genteel invalidism, and discreet, unassuming appearance, it is unlikely that the woman beside him would have attracted a second glance. She had never been more than five foot three in height and in her late fifties seemed scarcely that, a fragile, neat creature with a slight, ‘almost infantine’²⁰ figure, fine delicate hands, deep and striking blue eyes, silver hair, high forehead, and the preternatural pallor of the permanent invalid.

To the circle of her friends, in fact, who watched over her prolonged decline with a complete and willing devotion, it seemed that Annabella Byron hardly belonged to this world at all. There was a calm certainty about her that struck a note of unearthly detachment, an ethereal refinement that seemed to the chosen ‘soulmates’ of these last years to be that of ‘one of the spirits of the just made perfect … hovering on the brink of the eternal world’²¹.

If anyone had taken a closer look at this pair, however, as they made their way under the soaring gothic of Brighton’s new terminus to the first-class carriages of the London train, there would have been little doubt where the balance of power lay. Thirty five years earlier the young Annabella Byron had appeared to her sister-in-law less as a visiting angel than an avenging spectre, and in the remote and concentrated self-possession of her bearing, it was as if all the frailties or pleasures of life had been purged away to leave behind only a pure, indomitable will.

And yet behind this ‘miracle of mingled weakness and strength’²², as Harriet Beecher Stowe called her, there was a nervousness, an emotional and physical excitability, that raged all the fiercer for its ruthless suppression. In a self-portrait she wrote in the last year of her life she spoke of the ‘burning world within’²³ that so few ever saw, and as she took her place beside Robertson, and sat compulsively folding and refolding her scrap of paper with its illegible instructions to herself on it, she knew only too bitterly the cost at which any outward calm had been won.

If she had caught her reflection in the glass before it was swallowed up in the blackness of the Clayton tunnel, she would have been forced to recognise there the evidence of the same grim truth. Forty years earlier, in her second London season, Hayter had painted her with the louche abandon of some Regency Magdalene, but if she had looked now for the face of the young Annabella Milbanke in the reflection that stared back, searching for some trace of all those potentialities and hopes that were frozen when pain and humiliation petrified her strength into the obduracy of a long widowhood, she would have looked in vain.

There would have been something in its unyielding expression, however, in the set of the mouth, in the air of conviction, the concentration, that anyone who had seen her as a child would have had no difficulty recognising. Some years after her death Robertson’s biographer, Frederick Arnold, remarked on the doctrine of ‘personal infallibility’ to which Annabella Byron subscribed in these late years, and if a lifetime of alternating sycophancy and hostility had done their worst to make her what she was, the foundations at least of her old age were laid in the cosseted, self-absorbed childhood of Annabella Milbanke.

To have any real sense of the woman in the train bound for Reigate, or the forces that had shaped her life, it is necessary to go back even further than that, to another generation and world that is best glimpsed in a family portrait by Stubbs that now hangs in the National Gallery in London. On the left of Stubbs’s grouping a young woman of seventeen sits high in the seat of a light carriage, reins and whip competently and prophetically in hand, her face, simultaneously ‘unfinished’ and determined, framed by a white bonnet, her eyes boldly, almost immodestly, engaging with a future that seems in her control.

The girl, Elizabeth Lamb, is pregnant, although it is impossible to tell from the painting. At her side, her father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, his expression serious, leans against the carriage; in the centre, holding the reins of a dappled grey that matches her carriage pony, stands her brother, John; on the right, slightly apart, elegant in profile on a superb bay, is her husband of a year, Peniston Lamb, the future first Lord Melbourne.

There is a sense of calm to the piece, a reserve and unforced serenity that can only come of an unconscious collaboration of artist and sitters. In the distance a rocky outcrop looms over a stretch of water with some vague suggestion of domesticated wildness, but Stubbs’s figures need no background, confidently filling their social and pictorial space, sufficient to themselves under the enveloping protection of a darkly spreading oak.

The oak and the girl, the past and the future, both linked in an unbroken chain to which the figures bear silent, unruffled witness. There is no conversation in this ‘conversation piece’, no interaction almost, just a shared strength that needs no articulating. From the side Peniston Lamb looks across – as well he might – to his formidable young wife, but the gaze is unreturned. Even the horses seem entirely self-contained, blinkered or cropping the grass, indifferent to each other, their owners, or the two dogs that, like a pair of attendant saints, stare up, in that eternal gesture of English portraiture, with unnoticed devotion at their masters.

There is none of the golden glow of other Stubbs paintings here, none of the bucolic ease of his Haymakers, but a cool silvery light warmed only by the pink of Elizabeth’s dress and the answering tinge of the clouds. On a nearby wall an elderly couple also painted by Stubbs aboard their phaeton might be Jane Austen’s Admiral and Mrs Croft, but this group is not about affection or fulfilment but hierarchy and power, about dynastic and cultural certainties, and about what David Piper memorably called that ‘obscure but potent directive of fate’ that gives Stubbs sitters their air of unchallenged and unchallengeable authority.

According to tradition, the Milbanke family traces itself back to a cup-bearer at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, who fled the country after a duel, settling in the north of England. Whatever the maverick promise of these origins, however, the next two hundred years saw a blameless decline into respectability, all taint of romance erased, in a family progress that took the Milbankes from Scottish exile by way of aldermanic and mayoral office in Newcastle to a baronetcy and a safe seat in Parliament.

It was Charles II who granted the title to the first Sir Mark Milbanke in 1661, and over the next century the Milbankes’ influence was consolidated in the network of alliances and marriages that inevitably underpinned eighteenth-century political life. In generation after generation of Sir Marks or Sir Ralphs the same pattern emerged, as the Milbankes of Halnaby Hall married into other northern families, extending their land and connections across the north-east of England, augmenting agricultural interests in one marriage or mineral interests in another before, in the middle of the eighteenth century, forging the key alliance with the powerful Holderness family that gave Stubbs’s 5th Baronet a place in the Commons.

There is something so reassuringly dull about the Milbankes’ political careers, so entirely lacking in individuality, that one feels instinctively with them that one is in touch with the solid bedrock of Sir Lewis Namier’s England. Sir Ralph had first entered parliament as one of two unopposed members for Scarborough in 1754, and at the first election of the new reign stood in the Holderness interest for Richmond, loyally and uncritically supporting successive administrations, before retiring in 1768 without having spoken a single word in fourteen years an MP.

Over twenty years were to pass before another Milbanke sat in Parliament, but through the 1770s and 80s Sir Ralph’s son, another Ralph, continued the same process of family consolidation, hitching his political fortunes first to Lord Rockingham and then, on his death, to Charles James Fox. In 1790 after a ruinous campaign that is reckoned to have cost the family £15,000, he was finally returned in second place for Durham Co, and for the next twenty-two years remained its MP, a genial and ineffectual ‘Uncle Toby’ whose fidelity to the Whig cause, in his daughter’s succinct phrase, was ‘as little valued as doubted’.²⁴

It was into this family and this world, on 17 May 1792, that Anne Isabella Milbanke was born. The future Lady Byron has always seemed to belong so completely to the nineteenth century that it is easy to forget that this is where her roots lie, that her moral and social being was shaped by the inherited virtues and limitations implicit in Stubbs’s painting or her family’s dilettante public service.

But if the young Annabella was brought up in a political milieu, behind the web of alliances and obligations that supported two generations in parliament lay realities of landed life that had a far more profound effect on her vision. From the middle of the seventeenth century the principal seat of the Milbankes had been Halnaby Hall, a red-bricked Jacobean manor house, now gone, that lay just off the Great North Road outside the village of Croft in Yorkshire. In the village church of St Peter’s a wonderfully grandiose tomb and pew still evoke the dynastic ambitions of the early Milbankes, but Annabella’s affections remained all her life with the modest estate at Seaham on the north-east coast where she grew up. ‘If in a small village’, she recalled many years later, in a passage that might have come from George Eliot,

you cannot go out of the gates without seeing the children of a few Families playing on the Green, till they become ‘familiar faces’, you need not be taught to care for their well-being. A heart must be hard indeed that could be indifferent to little Jenny’s having the Scarlet Fever, or to Johnny’s having lost his mother … I did not think property could be possessed by any other tenure than that of being at the service of those in need.²⁵

The Milbankes and Seaham may have given Annabella a sense of the rooted interdependency of country life, but through her mother she could lay claim to a more exotic strain of English history. Judith Noel was born in 1751, the eldest daughter of Sir Edward Noel of Kirkby Mallory, first Viscount Wentworth and heir through the contorted female line to the sixteenth century Wentworth barony. It would be dangerous to describe any title that has survived with the tenacity of the Wentworths as ‘doomed’, but when a family branch can provide a Lancastrian standard-bearer at St Albans, a Governor of Calais under Mary Tudor, and the devoted mistress to the Duke of Monmouth, it is at least guilty of the kind of ill-luck that might pave the way to a marriage with Byron.

For someone so outwardly prosaic as Annabella, there was, too, a curiously vivid streak of romanticism that fed directly off her sense of history. In a self-portrait written as a woman of thirty-nine, she looked back on her childhood self, on a miniature Dorothea Brooke pulled backwards and forwards between the claims of the imagination and the stern imperatives of a protestant conscience. ‘Impressed from earliest childhood with a sense of duty, and sympathising with the great and noble in human character’, she wrote,

my aspirations went beyond the ordinary occasions of life – I wasted virtuous energy on a visionary scene, and conscience was in danger of becoming detached from that before me. Few of my pleasures were connected with realities – riding was the only one I can remember. When I climbed the rocks, or bounded over the sands with apparent delight, I was not myself. Perhaps I was shipwrecked or was trying to rescue other sufferers – some of my hours were spent in the Pass of Thermopylae, others with the Bishop of Marseilles in the midst of Pestilence, or with Howard in the cheerless dungeon …

About the age of 13… I began to throw my imagination into a home-sphere of action – to constrain myself, from religious principle, to attend to what was irksome, and to submit to what was irritating. I had great difficulties to surmount from the impetuosity and sensitiveness of my character … It was this stage of my character which prepared me to sympathise unboundedly with the morbidly susceptible – with those who felt themselves unknown …²⁶

It would clearly be absurd to try to define her exclusively in terms of ancestry, but there is a sense in which the solidity of the Milbankes and the romanticism of the Wentworth inheritance combined to produce in Annabella something distinctly new, a kind of fierce ordinariness, a strident centrality that raised the commonplace to the realms of genius, orthodoxy to the stuff of crusade.

Along with this dual inheritance, the circumstances of her own contented upbringing can only have sharpened the feeling of singularity with which she coloured the most ordinary imaginative experiences of childhood. In the same Auto-Description she lamented a ‘want of comparison’ in her Seaham life that blinded her to the advantages of birth, and yet of greater importance than the inevitable isolation of a small Durham village was the simple fact that she was the only child of parents who had waited fifteen years for an heir.

Ralph Milbanke and Judith Noel had married in 1777, and although they had brought up a niece as if she was their own child, there is no mistaking the ferocious joy that greeted Anna-bella’s birth. It is often admiringly noted that she was encouraged in her opinions from her earliest days, but if her childhood self can be back derived from her adult character, hers was the kind of independence that might have flourished more safely in the face of opposition than indulgence, her character one that would have fared better outside the warmth and admiration of a family that placed her firmly and uncritically at its centre. ‘It was indeed Calantha’s misfortune to meet with too much kindness,’ her cousin Caroline Lamb wrote of herself in a passage in Glenarvon that throws an unexpected light on this – a passage that sufficiently stung Annabella when she read the novel to have her mark and angrily refute its psychology in a criticism that survives still among her papers,

or rather too much indulgence from all who surrounded her. The Duke, attentive solely to her health, watched her with the fondest solicitude, and the wildest wishes her fancy could invent, were heard with the most scrupulous attention, and gratified with the most unbounded compliance.²⁷

This regime of indulgence was made more dangerous in Anna-bella’s case by an intelligence that in and outside the home had little to challenge it. Even as a child she was conscious of being cleverer than most of those around her, but it was a cleverness dangerously at the service of unchallengeable moral certitudes, an intelligence that seems never to have broadened with reading or turned on itself in any genuine spirit of criticism. From the evidence of her letters and journals there was certainly a kind of scrupulousness about her, and yet even here her scruples and self-doubts were, like her shyness, the self-referential workings of an imagination that ultimately appealed to no other judgement but its own.

If Annabella Milbanke had simply married as Milbankes had traditionally married, none of this might have much mattered, and it is likely that she would have done no more than add one more name to history’s forgotten roll of mute, inglorious husbands. From the earliest family descriptions one can glimpse the formidable chatelaine she should have been, but substitute the name Byron for that of George Eden or any of her earlier suitors, see that ten-year-old girl with the determined pout Hoppner painted as the future Lady Byron, and the warmth, the love, the privilege and security of her sheltered upbringing suddenly seem the laboratory conditions for breeding the disaster of the most notorious marriage in literary history.

It is the inevitable condition of biography to shape a life with the benefits of hindsight in this way, and yet it is only hindsight that casts a shadow over the prelapsarian happiness of Annabella’s childhood. In her own eyes the memories of Seaham would always have the poignancy of blighted innocence, but the horror is that it could have ever equipped anyone so essentially limited in experience or culture to imagine that she could understand or tame a Byron.

It is often forgotten, in the feeding frenzy that invariably accompanies her name, how vulnerably young she was when she first met him in 1812, and yet nothing suggests that another summer or two would have made the difference. She had come up to London for her first season in the previous year, and although there were suitors enough to satisfy anyone’s vanity, not even a future governor-general of India or Wellington’s adjutant general in the Peninsula had been sufficient to jolt her out of the complacent certainties of her Seaham world. ‘I met with one or two who, like myself, did not appear absorbed in the present scene’, she later wrote of this period,

and who interested me in a degree. I had a wish to find among men the character I had often imagined – but I found only parts of it. One gave proofs of worth, but had no sympathy for high aspirations – another seemed full of affection towards his family, and yet he valued the world. I was clear sighted in these cases – but I was to become blind.²⁸

It was a misfortune, too, for a woman who could think like this to see her future husband for the first time in his annus mirabilis, because if there were far more interesting ‘Byrons’ than the triumphant author of Childe Harold, there was none more likely to appeal to a romantic moralist of Annabella’s stamp. ‘Lavater’s [the phrenologist] system never asserted its truth more forcibly than in Byron’s countenance’, the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence wrote at the height of Byron’s fame, wonderfully capturing the mix of glamour and threat in the figure that seduced London’s ‘golden parallelogram’ in the spring and summer of 1812,

in which you see all the character: its ken and rapid genius, its pale intelligence, its profligacy, and its bitterness; its original symmetry distorted by the passions, his laugh of mingled merriment and scorn; the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent, the eyes bright and dissimilar, the nose finely cut, and the nostril acutely formed; the mouth well made but wide and contemptuous even in its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful expression heightened by the massive firmness of the chin, which springs at once from the centre of the full under-lip; the hair dark and curling but irregular in its growth; all this presents to you the poet and the man; and the general effect is heightened by a thin spare form, and, as you may have heard, by a deformity of limb.’²⁹

Byron was just twenty-four when, after more than two years’ travel across Europe and the east, the sudden and unprecedented success of Childe Harold changed his life and the course of Romantic literature. He had already produced some feeble juvenilia and a long and scabrous satire he had since come to regret, but nothing in his literary or private life, nothing in the intense and homoerotic friendships of his Harrow and Cambridge days or the bisexual philandering in the Levant had prepared him emotionally for the loneliness of fame that swamped him on his return, a poet without conviction, an aristocrat without a sense of belonging, a liberal without the stamina or will for political life, an icon with a morbid sensitivity to his lameness.

It would have been odd in fact if Annabella alone had not felt drawn to Byron that summer, and yet even in the privacy of her diary and letters she felt she owed her intelligence some more refined expression of her feelings than the general excitement that gripped Regency society. She had first seen him at a morning waltzing party given by Caroline Lamb on 25 March, and after filling her journal that night with her impressions, the next day reported back to her mother in Seaham. ‘My curiosity was much gratified by seeing Lord Byron, the object at present of universal attention’, she wrote,

Lady Caroline has of course seized on him, notwithstanding the reluctance he manifests to be shackled by her … It is said that he is an infidel, and I think it probable from the general character of his mind. His poem sufficiently proves that he can feel nobly, but he has discouraged his own goodness. His features are well formed – his upper lip is drawn towards the nose with an expression of impatient disgust. His eye is restlessly thoughtful. He talks much, and I heard some of his conversation, which is very able, and sounds like the true sentiments of the Speaker.

I did not seek an introduction myself, for all the women were absurdly courting him, and trying to deserve the lash of his satire. I thought that inoffensiveness was the most secure conduct, as I am not desirous of a place in his lays. Besides, I cannot worship talents that are unconnected with the love of man, nor be captivated by that Genius which is barren in blessings – so I made no offering at the shrine of Childe Harold, though I shall not refuse the acquaintance if it comes.³⁰

The acquaintance finally came the next month at a party of Lady Cowper’s, and with it the note of ironic detachment became increasingly hard to sustain. In her letters home to her mother she continued to insist that ‘calm benevolence’³¹ alone could touch her heart, but no amount of dissembling to her parents or herself could disguise the fact that curiosity was rapidly turning into the crusade that would shape her whole life. ‘Do you think there is one person here who dares to look into himself?’, she later recalled the question that had inspired her first mute ‘offering’ at the shrine of Childe Harold,

… I felt that he was the most attractive person; but I was not bound to him by any strong feeling of sympathy till he uttered these words, not to me, but in my hearing – ‘I have not a friend in the world!’ It is said that there is an instinct in the human heart which attaches us to the friendless. I did not pause – there was my error to enquire why he was friendless; but I vowed in secret to be a devoted friend to this lone being.³²

There is something unsettling in the reveries of the young Anna-bella, or at least in her incapacity to see them for what they were. The descriptions of Byron that litter her diary and letters are as banal as those of anyone else that season, but running through them is that old and dangerous sense of election, the conviction of some private and silent understanding that set her apart in a city swept along on the rhythms of the waltz and the voyeuristic thrill of Caroline Lamb’s pursuit of Byron.

If there was nobody to blame for these delusions but Annabella, however, it is clear that she had not just imagined Byron’s interest in her. In the wreck of their marriage she once accused him of only ever wanting what he could not have, but if there is something in that, the more brutal truth is that he simply could not see her for what she was – could not see the provinciality that passed for independence, the rigidity latent in her strength, the narrowness which, with the nostalgia of the jaded sophisticate, he wistfully put down to moral superiority. ‘I set you down as the most puzzling person there’, he later told her of the first time he had seen her, across a room full of morning-visitors at Melbourne House,

For there was a quiet contempt of all around you & the nothings they were saying & doing in your manner that was so much after my own heart. There was a simplicity – an innocence – a beauty in your deportment & appearance which although you hardly spoke – told me I was in company with no common being.³³

As the spring of 1812 wore on, and Byron’s life drifted dangerously and publicly into the chaos of his notorious affair with Caroline Lamb, it was not so much what Annabella was as what she was not that attracted Byron. The kinds of virtues and solidity with which he invested her would always hold a theoretical attraction for him, but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if there had been no Caroline Lamb to escape then there would have been no marriage to her cousin, Annabella.

Byron had first come across Caro Lamb, the twenty-seven-year-old, fragile, androgynous-looking child wife of William Lamb, when she had written to him under a thin veil of anonymity after the triumph of Childe Harold in February 1812. Even before she had set eyes on him she had declared that she would know its author if he was ‘as ugly as Aesop’³⁴, and within weeks of meeting she had made sure their affair was public property, played out with a kind of arriviste relish on his part and on hers with a reckless exhibitionism hovering on the edge of insanity.

There is not a moment of an affair that defined and caricatured the Romantic passion in all its delinquent intensity that has not been raked over a hundred times, but in the context of his relationship with Annabella it still has its place here. In later years Byron came to hate Caroline with a passion that only Claire Clairmont could otherwise inspire, but in its first weeks at least what attracted him to the maddest of all the Spencers was precisely the wayward and uncontrollable element in her that he eventually came to loathe.

There was a wonderfully sane and balanced side to Byron that would always in the end tire of romantic excess, and yet after the initial excitement had passed something more than boredom turned him against Caroline Lamb. An illicit element to some of his earlier, male relationships had sometimes unnerved him, but as he tried to distance himself from Caroline he found himself contending with a woman ready to call the Childe’s bluff, to live out the implications of his Romanticism with a patrician contempt for convention that in his first year of success he had neither the courage nor the confidence of ‘belonging’ to match.

Even with the contrast of Caroline Lamb to concentrate his mind, it is unlikely that his interest in Annabella would ever have quickened into anything more important had it not been for the intervention of her aunt (Caroline Lamb’s mother-in-law), Lady Melbourne. By the time that Annabella made her London debut, the girl in Stubbs’s portrait had reigned as the‘spider queen’ of Whig society for over a generation, ‘a sort of modern Aspasia’ with the brain and morals to match, tolerant, attractive, intelligent, cynical, corrupt and – to Byron at least – ‘the best, the kindest, and ablest female I have ever known, old or young’. ‘She was a charming person’, he later told Lady Blessington,

uniting the energy of a man’s mind with the delicacy and tenderness of a woman’s. She had all of philosophy, save its moroseness, and all of nature, save its defects and general faiblesse … I have often thought, that, with a little more youth Lady M. might have turned my head, at all events she often turned my heart, by bringing me back to mild feelings, when the demon passion was strong within me. Her mind and heart were as fresh as if only sixteen summers had flown over her, instead of four times that number – and the mind and heart always leave external marks of their state of health. Goodness is the best cosmetic that has yet been discovered … She was a captivating creature, malgre her eleven or twelve lustres, and I shall always love her.³⁵

Even in her early sixties, the ‘spider’ or the ‘thorn’ still retained the power, desire and intelligence that had once made her the mistress of Lord Egremont and the Prince of Wales. As a young bride she had been forced to stand and watch her husband’s ludicrous pursuit of the actress Sophia Baddeley, but with the ambition and purpose Stubbs caught so well, disappointment had simply deflected her energies into the ruthless pursuit of family influence that was to consume the rest of her life. ‘The charms of her person and the endowments of her mind were worthy of a better fate than that she was preparing for herself’, Caroline Lamb wrote savagely of her in Glenarvon, the roman à clef with which she took her revenge not just on Byron but on the Whig world that had turned its back on her,

But, under the semblance of youthful gaiety, she concealed a dark intriguing spirit, which could neither remain at rest, nor satisfy itself in the pursuit of great and noble objects. She had been hurried on by the evil activity of her own mind, until the habit of crime had overcome every scruple, and rendered her insensible to repentance, and almost to remorse. In this career she had improved to such a degree her natural talent of dissimulation, that, under its impenetrable veil, she was able to carry on securely her darkest machinations; and her understanding had so adapted itself to her passion, that it was in her power to give, in her own eyes, a character of grandeur, to the vice and malignity, which afforded an inexplicable delight to her depraved imagination.³⁶

With daughter and mother-in-law both living in Melbourne House, a delicate balancing act was required, but from the moment Byron tried to extricate himself from the affair with Caroline, he found Lady Melbourne a subtle and determined ally. To a woman who had charmed and slept her way to the top of Whig society, her daughter-in-law’s morals were of no great concern, but the one crime the lax Regency world would not forgive was indiscretion and as Caroline’s antics began to threaten the dynastic ambitions ‘the spider’ held for her family, Lady Melbourne moved to neutralise her.

In spite of all her cynicism, though, it can no more have occurred to Lady Melbourne than it had to Byron that the solution to their mutual problem lay in her cool, self-contained country niece. For their different reasons both Caroline Lamb and her sister-in-law ‘Caro George’ had done their best to convince him that Annabella was already engaged, but he had hardly needed their warnings to keep a wary distance from a woman he instinctively recognised as his opposite. ‘My dear Lady Caroline’, he had written as early as 1 May, after reading some verses of Annabella’s,

I have read over the few poems of Miss Milbank with attention. – They display fancy, feeling, & a little practice would very soon induce facility of expression … She certainly is a very extraordinary girl, who would imagine so much strength & variety of thought under that placid countenance? You will say as much of this to Miss M. as you think proper. – I say all this very sincerely, I have no desire to be better acquainted with Miss Milbank, she is too good for a fallen spirit to know or wish to know, & I should like her more if she were less perfect.³⁷

There is no reason to doubt Byron – Annabella is not mentioned in his letters for more than four months – but the idea of her had taken a dogged hold of his imagination. There was no pretence on his part that he was in love with her, or anyone else, but as over July and August the pressure from both the Lambs and Caroline’s mother to end the affair grew, he was faced with the fundamental need of the outsider to assimilate or face destruction. ‘I see nothing but marriage & a speedy one can save me’, he wrote to Lady Melbourne on 28 September,

if your niece is attainable I should prefer her – if not – the very first woman who does not look as if she would spit in my face.³⁸

‘You ask “if I am sure of myself”’ he had already written to Lady Melbourne ten days earlier, after first hesitantly broaching the idea of Annabella to her in a letter from Cheltenham on the 13th,

I answer – no – but you are, which I take to be a much better thing. Miss M. I admire because she is a clever woman, an amiable woman & of high blood, for I still have a few Norman & Scotch inherited prejudices on the last score, were I to marry. As to Love, that is done in a week (provided the Lady has a reasonable share) besides marriage goes on better with esteem & confidence than romance, & she is quite pretty enough to be loved by her husband, without being so glaringly beautiful as to attract too many rivals.³⁹

At the beginning of October Lady Melbourne approached her niece on his behalf, and on the 12th received Annabella’s refusal from Richmond, complete with a ‘Character’ of Byron explaining her decision. ‘The passions have been his guide from childhood,’ she wrote, up on her ‘high stilts’ as her aunt described her,

and have exercised a tyrannical power over his very superior intellect. Yet among his dispositions are many which deserve to be associated with Christian principles – his love of goodness in its chastest form, and his abhorrence of all that degrades human nature, prove the uncorrupted purity of his moral sense.

There is a chivalrous generosity in his ideas of love and friendship, and selfishness is totally absent from his character. In secret he is the zealous friend of all human feelings; but from the strangest perversion that pride ever created, he endeavours to disguise the best points of his character. When indignation takes possession of his mind – and it is easily excited – his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt; but as soon as he has indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity which he had lost – from the immediate impulse of provocation – and repents deeply.⁴⁰

It is difficult to be sure of Byron’s real feelings at this rejection, or even whether he knew himself, but whatever they were he would never have dropped the tone of cool worldliness with Lady Melbourne that had become their common language. ‘Cut her! My dear Ly. M. marry – Mahomet forbid!’ – he wrote to her on receiving the news, anxious to allay any suspicion of resentment,

I am sure we will be better friends than before & if I am not embarrassed by all this I cannot see for the soul of me why she should – assure her con tutto rispetto that The subject shall never be renewed in any shape whatever, & assure yourself my carissima (not Zia what then shall it be? Chuse your own name) that were it not for this embarras with C I would much rather remain as I am. – I have had so very little intercourse with the fair Philosopher that if when we meet I should endeavour to improve our acquaintance she must not mistake me, & assure her I never shall mistake her … She is perfectly right in every point of view, & during the slight suspense I felt something very like remorse for sundry reasons not at all connected with C nor with any occurrence since I knew you or her or hers; finding I must marry however on that score, I should have preferred a woman of birth & talents, but such a woman was not at all to blame for not preferring me; my heart never had an opportunity of being much interested in the business, further than that I should have very much liked to be your relation. – And now to conclude like Ld. Foppington, “I have lost a thousand women in my time but never had the ill manners to quarrel with them for such a trifle.”⁴¹

The address on this letter – Cheltenham again – suggests, though, that Byron’s good humour was not simply feigned for Lady Melbourne’s benefit. He had gone to the fashionable spa town for the waters earlier in the summer, but long after it had been abandoned by most of London society he was still there, held by a growing fascination with that other ‘Aspasia’ of Regency England that he would have been reluctant to admit to Lady Melbourne, the beautiful, serially faithless forty-year-old Countess of Oxford, Jane Harley.

There is as much pseudo-psychological nonsense talked of Byron’s predilection for older women – as if everyone over the age of thirty were somehow identical – as there is over his fastidious distaste at the sight of a woman eating.* In the wake of Childe Harold it was inevitable that he should gravitate towards the great hostesses who dominated Whig society, but among even that disparate group it would be hard to imagine two women with less in common than Lady Melbourne and Lady Oxford, the one all caution, cynicism, and dynastic ambition, the other generous, impulsive, radical and careless of the proprieties she had so successfully defied from the first loveless years of marriage.

The daughter of a clergyman, Jane Scott had been born in Inchin, and at the age of twenty-two ‘sacrificed’, as Byron later told Medwin, ‘to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible in the scale of creation’⁴³. If Lord Oxford had never been much of a match for his dazzling and ambitious wife, however, he was no gaoler either, and by the time that she began her affair with Byron the ‘grande horizontale’ of Whig political radicalism was already the mother of five children by as many fathers, ‘a tarnished siren of uncertain age’, as Lord David Cecil described her with patrician distaste,

who pursued a life of promiscuous amours on the fringe of society, in an atmosphere of tawdry eroticism and tawdrier culture. Reclining on a sofa, with ringlets disposed about her neck in seductive disarray, she would rhapsodise to her lovers on the beauties of Pindar and the hypocrisy of the world.⁴⁴

Byron had first met her during the London season, but it was at Cheltenham and then at Eywood, the Oxfords’ country house in Herefordshire, that their friendship developed into the infatuation that absorbed him for the next six months. ‘She resembled a landscape by Claude Lorraine’, Lady Blessington – no ingenue herself – recalled him saying,

‘with a setting sun, her beauties enhanced by the knowledge that they were shedding their last dying beams, which threw a radiance around. A woman (continued Byron) is only grateful for her first and last conquest. The first of poor dear Lady [Oxford’s] was achieved before I entered on this world of care, but the last I do flatter myself was reserved for me, and a bonne bouche it was.’⁴⁵

It is impossible to imagine Byron speaking of Lady Melbourne in this tone, but if Lady Oxford never exerted the same dominance over him as the ‘spider’ had done, in the sensual and intellectual licence of the ‘bowers of Armida’⁴⁶, as he labelled Eywood, he found a retreat from any fleeting disappointment at Annabella’s rejection and the continuing assaults of Caroline Lamb. ‘I mean (entre nous my dear Machiavel)’, he had written to Lady Melbourne,

to play off Ly. O against her, who would have no objection perchance but she dreads her scenes and has asked me not to mention that we have met to C or that I am going to E.⁴⁷

‘I am no longer your lover’, he wrote to Caroline herself, as good as his word, if the letter she reproduced in Glenarvon is the faithful copy of Byron’s that she claimed it to be,

and since you oblige me to confess it, by this truly unfeminine persecution, – learn, that I am attached to another; whose name it would of course be dishonorable to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the predilection you have shewn in my favor. I shall ever continue as your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself; and as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice, correct your vanity, which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and leave me in peace.⁴⁸

In spite of the callousness of this letter – a cruelty that forms the counterpart to Byron’s generosity – his relationship with Caroline had stirred him in ways that Lady Oxford never did. There is no disguising the sense of almost bloated content that runs through many of Byron’s letters from Eywood, and yet at some level both he and Lady Oxford knew that the demons that drove him were not ones that could be contained within Armida’s bowers or the boundaries of Whig politics she had marked out for him.

For all the sexual and intellectual freedom Byron enjoyed at Eywood, the affair with Lady Oxford was too tame ever fully to satisfy him. In all his most important relationships there had been an element of risk and social danger, but there was something almost institutional in the sexual abandon of Lady Oxford, a kind of licensed immorality that paradoxically took Byron closer to one branch of the Whig political establishment than he had ever been before.

And there was never a time, either, when Byron was more dangerous than when made aware of how little he wanted what English society had to offer him. ‘I am going abroad again’, he announced in March 1813, in the middle of his affair with Lady Oxford,

… my parliamentary schemes are not much to my taste – I spoke twice last Session – & was told it was well enough – but I hate the thing altogether – & have no intention to ‘strut another hour’ on that stage.⁴⁹

Byron was being partly disingenuous – for all the kind words that greeted his debut speech it had only had a limited impact – but his suppressed unease of this period was more than a defensive reflex to disappointment. It is clear from his own comments that he knew that he would never make a parliamentary orator, and yet it is hard to believe that success could any more have reconciled the creator of Childe Harold – still less the ‘Titan battling with religion and virtue’⁵⁰ that Nietzsche admired in Byron – to the limitations of English public life and a career in politics.

If it seems inevitable that the young Nietzsche should be drawn to Byron – and in particular to the creator of the defiant Manfred – the quality that he most admired in him was the courage to follow his instincts that Lawrence also saw as the defining characteristic of the ‘aristocrat’. In his Hardy essay Lawrence wrote that ‘the final aim of every living thing … is the full achievement of itself’⁵¹, but as Byron’s affair with Lady Oxford guttered towards its untidy end, it was precisely that goal of self-realisation – the supreme ambition of the Romantic imagination – that he recognised with an ever increasing clarity he could never achieve in England.

In an age that is as ready to recognise the tyranny of sex as ours is, it is possibly enough to point out that for a man of Byron’s sexual ambivalence a country that still sent homosexuals to the gallows was no place to be. From the publication of the spurious ‘Don Leon’ poems in the mid-nineteenth century, Byron has always been an icon and spokesman for homosexual freedom, and yet the vital thing in this context is not so much the question of his sexual identity per se – who now cares? – but the wider issues of creative fulfilment or frustration with which it was inevitably and intimately bound.

For Byron, as for Lawrence, the test of ‘being’ was ‘doing’, and as the year dragged on he was conscious of how little he had achieved as a poet. For all his aristocratic disdain for the business of versifying he was keenly aware that he had ‘something within that “passeth show”’⁵², and yet for a man whose lameness, childhood and sexual ambiguities all supremely equipped him to challenge political, moral, or physical injustice in every form he found it, he had precious little to show. The adolescent anger of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which he had long since repudiated? The stagey and harmless posturing of Childe Harold? A clutch of cautiously disguised tributes to the dead Cambridge chorister, Edleston? ‘At five-and-twenty, when the better part of life is over’, he wrote in his journal,

one should be something; – and what am I? nothing but five-and-twenty – and the odd months.⁵³

But if, in these early months of 1813, Byron still lacked what Lawrence called the ‘courage to let go the security, and to be⁵⁴’, this sense of self-dissatisfaction and estrangement was gradually pushing him towards a crisis. As early as May he was writing to Lady Melbourne of the need to escape a world that was stifling him, and at the end of June he returned with increased irritation to the same theme. ‘I am doing all I can to be ready to go with your Russian’ [Prince Koslovsky, a visiting Russian diplomat], he told her,

depend upon it I shall be either out of the country or nothing – very soon – all I like is now gone – & all I abhor (with some few exceptions ) remains – viz – the R[egent] – his government – & most of his subjects – what a fool I was to come back – I shall be wiser next time.⁵⁵

It is a curious, if somehow irrelevant, thought that Byron might have gone abroad in the summer of 1813, either with the Oxfords to Sicily as was planned at one time, or farther east to the Levant. Byron himself had such a strong sense of his own destiny that even with the benefit of hindsight it is hard to see his life in any other shape than that which it finally took, and if this ignores those elements of chance and sloth that right up to his death might have disposed of him in a dozen different ways, one only has to picture him for a moment harmlessly cruising the Mediterranean to recognise the inherent implausibility of the vision.

Because if Byron was to grow as a man or a poet, he did not need simply to escape England, but to smash with a complete and final violence everything that held him to it. In his relationship with Caroline Lamb during the previous year he had come dangerously close to doing this, and while he had pulled back from the edge then it was only a matter of time before he recognised that the conformist elements in his nature could never be squared with the vocation for opposition he claimed as the Byron birthright.

‘I have no choice’ – Byron put the words in Manfred’s mouth – and it is this sense of necessity that attracted both Lawrence and Nietzsche to the dramatic parabola of Byron’s life and career. There is of course a world of difference between the Lawrentian ‘aristocrat’ and the iibermensch that Nietzsche hailed in the figure of Manfred. Yet if Lawrence’s ultimate concern was with fulfilment in the deepest and most human sense of the word, he never shirked the fact that for an outsider of Byron’s stamp that inevitably meant war. ‘This is the tragedy’, Lawrence wrote,

… that the convention of the community is a prison to his natural, individual desire, a desire that compels him, whether he feels justified or not, to break the bounds of the community, lands him outside the pale, there to stand alone, and say: ‘I was right, my desire was real and inevitable; if I was to be myself I must fulfil it, convention or no convention …’⁵⁶

It is this sense of inevitability that gives the air of a ‘phoney war’ to the period of Byron’s affair with Lady Oxford. When at the end of June she left England with her husband he confessed that he felt more ‘Carolinish’⁵⁷ about it than he had expected, despite the fact that for all her attractions she could no more satisfy him than Caroline Lamb herself had done before her.

Still less could one of the great regnantes of Whig society answer his need for a rupture with everything that held him to England. It did not, though, matter. By the time that Lady Oxford finally sailed, on 28 June, the one woman had re-appeared in his life who could fill both roles: a woman who by her birth and temperament was not only uniquely placed to define the full nature of Byronic rebellion but also to meet with a peculiar psychological and emotional fitness what Lawrence called ‘the deepest desire’ of life,

a desire for consummation … a desire for completeness, that completeness of being which will give completeness of satisfaction and completeness of utterance.⁵⁸

The woman in question was the Hon. Mrs Augusta Leigh, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of Byron’s father by his first, scandalous, marriage to Amelia Darcy, Baroness Conyers in her own right and the wife of the heir to the Duke of Leeds, the Marquess of Carmarthen.

The son of that famous sailor and womaniser, ‘Foulweather Jack’, ‘Mad Jack’ Byron seemed ‘born for his own ruin, and that of the other sex.’⁵⁹ Six years before Augusta’s birth, the dazzling and wealthy Marchioness had met and fallen for him, picnicked with him one day and abandoned her husband for him the next, living defiantly with him in a ‘vortex of dissipation’⁶⁰ until a well-publicised divorce left her free to marry him and move to France.

Whatever fondness his son might retain for his memory, ‘Mad Jack’ was as callous a rake as eighteenth-century gossip portrayed him, with all the Byron charm and none of its generosity. For five years he lived off his wife’s fortune in either Chantilly or Paris, but when shortly after Augusta’s birth he lost wife and income together, Jack Byron abandoned the child to the first in a long succession of guardians and relatives, and set off on the predatory hunt for another heiress that finally led to Bath and Catherine Gordon.

For a few months, as a four-year-old, Augusta lived with her father and his pregnant new wife at Chantilly, but from the moment she was handed over to her grandmother, Lady Holderness, she left behind the depravation and uncertainty that was Jack Byron’s only obvious legacy to his children. During the crucial years when Catherine Gordon and her son were struggling under the indignities of poverty and isolation, the orphaned Augusta was growing up among a clutch of aristocratic relations into a tall and graceful girl, ‘light as a feather’, with a long, slender neck and heavy mass of light brown hair, a fine complexion, large mouth, retroussé nose, beautiful eyes, gentle manner, and a pathological shyness that eclipsed even that of her unknown Byron half-brother.⁶¹

If these formative years among her Howard cousins and the half-brothers and sisters of her mother’s first marriage gave Augusta an uncritical, aristocratic ease that Byron never matched, as a grounding in emotional subservience they had more corrosive consequences. There was a fundamental docility to her character that probably ran deeper than any social conditioning, but for a girl of such natural reticence and limited prospects, a childhood of gilded dependence in the great houses of her relations can only have compounded the instinct for self-surrender that was to mark her adult life.

It was an instinct confirmed, too, when after a six-year courtship she finally married her feckless cousin, George Leigh, and sank into a life of straitened domesticity from which she never escaped. Colonel George Leigh has always had one of those roles in the Byron story that never quite swells even to a walk-on part, but for his wife at least he was real enough, an irascible and incapable husband and father in equal measure, a cavalry officer whose career ended in financial scandal and a gambler whose sharpness, even in the world of Newmarket and the circles of the Prince of Wales, placed him on the wrong side of social acceptability.

It can seem at times as though Augusta only existed in and through other people, so it is little wonder that a woman with such a genius for self-effacement has always proved hard to pin down. From the first day that her character was dragged into the public domain it has been open season on her, but after a hundred and fifty years of legal and biographical prodding she remains as elusive and unknowable as ever, leaving behind only a kind of erotic charge that is as close as we can get to her, an impression of femininity so endlessly and placidly accommodating as to obliterate all individuality.

A ‘fieldsman’, Thomas Hardy wrote in Tess, is never anything more than a man in a field but a woman is continuous with the natural world, and something of that universality clings to the finest surviving image we have of Augusta Leigh. There is little contemporary evidence to suggest she ever looked like Hayter’s lovely drawing of her, but in the languor and passivity of that face, the tilt of the head and the long curve of the neck, he has surely left us the essential Augusta – the ‘sleepy Venus’ of Byron’s Don Juan, the Zuleika of The Bride of Abydos, the mother of seven children by a husband she hardly ever saw – the woman whose idle and easy sexuality could disturb and attract both men and women every bit as much as her half-brother’s flagrant aggression.

Augusta had first met Byron when she was a girl of seventeen and he an awkward and overweight schoolboy of thirteen. From their first exchanges of letters the two were natural allies in his endless battles with his mother, but in spite of a protective – and on his side almost seigneurial – affection they saw very little of each other as children. At the age of seventeen Augusta was already infatuated with her Leigh cousin, and as Byron himself moved from Harrow to Cambridge and then on to his travels in the east she inevitably became more of an idea than a reality to him.

In the long run there could have been nothing more dangerous than this legacy of intimacy and distance, and no more vulnerable time for Augusta to re-enter his life than the summer of 1813, when his affair with Lady Oxford was petering out and Caroline Lamb was taking her last melodramatic revenge. The correspondence between Byron and Augusta for the preceding months is missing, but it seems almost certainly his idea that she should come up to London. She had written to him the previous January in need of money to meet her husband’s gambling debts, and although financial troubles over Newstead left Byron in no position to help, his answer emphasises the sad hollowness she alone would fill. The ‘estate is still on my hands’, he began a long list of complaints, ‘& your brother not less embarrassed …

I have but one relative & her I never see – I have no connections to domesticate with & for marriage I have neither the talent nor the inclination – I cannot fortune-hunt nor afford to marry without a fortune … I am thus wasting the best part of my life daily repenting and never amending … I am very well in health – but not happy nor even comfortable – but I will not bore you with complaints – I am a fool & deserve all the ills I have met or may meet with.⁶²

There was something prophetic in that last line, because almost from the moment she arrived in London, Byron seems to have been bent on disaster. If ‘form’ is anything to go by, he would inevitably have turned to someone on the rebound from Caroline and Lady Oxford, but if anyone might have done, Augusta seemed to offer everything, the excitement of novelty and the comfort of familiarity, the danger of the forbidden with the guarantee of safety implicit in her name.

Because above all she was a Byron, and for someone so self-absorbed and yet utterly lacking in self-love as her brother that was an irresistible attraction. In the years since their childhoods he had formed some of the most intense friendships of his life, but it was only with a more attractive version of himself, as he now saw Augusta, a woman with so many of the same mannerisms and the same shyness, that he found his deepest, almost platonic desire for completion realised. ‘For thee, my own sweet sister’, he addressed her,

in thy heart

I know myself secure, as thou in mine;

We were and are – I am, even as thou art –

Beings who ne’er each other can resign;

It is the same, together or apart,

From life’s commencement to its slow decline

We are entwined – let death come slow or fast,

The tie which bound the first endures the last!⁶³

With her endless good-humour and sense of fun, her charm and talent for nonsense – her ‘damn’d crinkum-crankum’⁶⁴ as he called it – Augusta also represented a simple release from the tensions of London life. Almost immediately she became an integral part of his routines, included in his invitations and plans, the novel half of a double-act that was part spontaneous and part calculation. ‘If you like to go with me to ye. Lady Davy’s tonight’, he wrote in a note that nicely captures the blend of pride and vanity with which he looked on her,

I have an invitation for you – There will be the Stael – some people whom you know – & me whom you do not know & you can talk to which you please – & I will watch over you as if you were unmarried & in danger of always being so … I think our being together before 3d. people will be a new sensation to both.⁶⁵

With anyone except Augusta this might have led nowhere, but with her chronic habit of subservience, it was only a matter of time before affection and familiarity slid into something more perilous. It is impossible to know with any absolute certainty when brother and sister became lovers, but if the malicious gossip of Caroline Lamb – or Byron’s own boast to Tom Moore that her seduction had cost him little trouble – has any substance it was probably only a matter of weeks or even days.

The mere use of the word ‘seduction’ in this context however – Byron at his coarsest – wilfully trivialises and misrepresents a relationship that he would always more honestly recognise as the most important of his life. If these things can ever be judged from the outside, it would seem that sex was always of secondary significance in their affair, on Augusta’s side to a limitless capacity for self-surrender, and on Byron’s to the expression of a kindness and generosity that was at the core of his personality.

And yet when that is said, his letters and verse make it clear that he inspired in the twenty-nine-year-old mother of three a passion that surprised them both with its violence and abandon. In the best known celebrations of their love it is always a platonic ideal of union that Byron is anxious to stress, but in Zuleika’s language in The Bride of Abydos we are almost certainly taken closer to the earthier reality of its early days. ‘To see thee, hear thee, near thee stay,’ Zuleika tells the man she believes to be her brother, in a passage which unconsciously echoes the startled self-discovery of Shakespeare’s Perdita in the great fourth act of A Winter’s Tale

And hate the night I know not why,

Save that we meet not but by day,

With thee to live, with thee to die,

I dare not my hope deny:

Thy cheek, thine eyes, thy lips to kiss,

Like this – and this – no more than this;

For, Allah! Sure thy lips are flame:

What fever in thy veins is flushing?

My own have nearly caught the same,

At least I feel my cheek, too, blushing.⁶⁶

Even when this is recognised, however, the seamless, almost inevitable transition from sister to lover was for Augusta only one stage in a more complete annihilation of self. ‘Partager tous vos sentiments,’ she wrote to him in November 1813, enclosing with the note a lock of her hair: ‘Ne voir que par vos yeux’ – ‘to share in your feelings, to see only with your eyes, to act only on your advice, to live only for you, that is my only desire, my plan, the only destiny that could make me happy.’⁶⁷ ‘To soothe thy sickness,’ Zuleika continues in the same vein in the Bride,

watch thy health,

Partake, but never waste thy wealth,

Or stand with smiles unmurmuring by,

And lighten half thy poverty;

Do all but close thy dying eye,

For that I could not live to try;

For these alone my thoughts aspire:

More can I do, or thou require?⁶⁸

The tragedy for Augusta, however, was that Byron did require more, because for him the affair was more complex and guilt-ridden than her simple devotion could comprehend. In reckless moments he might publicly ridicule the moral parochialism of an incest taboo, but at other times it could disturb him with a fear that stopped him naming Augusta even in the privacy of his journal. ‘Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal’d,’ he quoted from Pope’s Eloisa in his November 1813 journal, adding his own gloss: ‘At least even here, my hand would tremble to write it.’⁶⁹

Somewhere behind this fear lies the legacy of his Calvinist childhood, and yet as his deathbed shows, Byron was too intellectually and morally courageous to be cowed by the demons of the ‘Scotch School’. Throughout his life he habitually dramatised himself in terms of Miltonic defiance, but for all the swagger of Cain or Heaven and Earth, Byron’s sense of sin and exclusion was ultimately bound by this world rather than the next, his instinct for rebellion against man and not against God.

And this is perhaps the key to his behaviour with Augusta, because the fear he had of what they had done was less to do with a theological sense of sin than the growing recognition that he was prepared to push his defiance of convention to any limits. In his affair with Caroline Lamb the previous year, the courage or recklessness had seemed almost exclusively hers, but as he paraded Augusta in London and followed her to Newmarket and talked of exile together, as he trailed the affair in his letters and flaunted their incest in his poetry – as he pitted the Byrons against the world in the most public and symbolic way he could find – he discovered in Augusta not just his ideal refuge but his perfect weapon.

It would take the imaginative sympathy of a novelist to do justice to the complex and contradictory rhythms of Byron’s life as it slid towards open rupture with the society that had embraced him only eighteen months earlier. If one simply believed the evidence of his journal for the winter of 1813–14, the frustrations of the previous year were as acute as ever, but as one turns from that to his verse, the contrasting boldness of the poetry suggests rather an artist and man growing into a defiant sense of his own power and vocation.

In the space of a few days in November 1813 he wrote The Bride of Abydos, and the following month, in another spasm of creative energy, threw off the third of his Eastern tales, The Corsair. In his letters and journals he was as dismissive as one would expect of these achievements, and yet no amount of Byronic self-mockery or defensive irony could deflect the central importance these poems had for him.

The Bride of Abydos, written with Augusta and the theme of incest constantly in mind, had been, in his own words, his first ‘complete’ poem but in its own harsher way The Corsair was every bit as subversive. He had written the Bride in the first place to keep himself sane, but with its violent and antisocial rage The Corsair was in itself a kind of deliberate public madness, brilliantly conceived simultaneously to alienate and seduce his public. ‘Fear’d, shunn’d, belied, ere youth had lost her force,’ Byron described his hero whom he must have known by now his readers would associate with himself.

He hated man too much to feel remorse,

And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,

To pay the injuries of some on all.

He knew himself a villain – but he deem’d

The rest no better than the thing he seem’d;

And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid

Those deeds the bolder spirits plainly did.

He knew himself detested, but he knew

The hearts that loath’d him, crouch’d and dreaded too.

Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt

From all affection and from all contempt:

His name could sadden, and his acts surprise;

But they that fear’d him dared not to despise:

Man spurns the worm, but pauses ere he wake

The slumbering venom of the folded snake:

The first may turn, but not avenge the blow;

The last expires, but leaves no living foe;

Fast to the doom’d offender’s form it clings,

And he may crush – not conquer – still it stings!⁷⁰

‘I have just finished the Corsair – am in the greatest admiration’, Annabella Milbanke, wilting forgotten in the wings since her rejection of Byron’s proposal, wrote to Lady Melbourne,

In knowledge of the human heart & its most secret workings surely he may without exaggeration be compared to Shakespeare. He gives such wonderful life & individuality to character that from that cause, as well as from unjust prepossessions of his own disposition, the idea that he represents himself in his heroes may be partly accounted for. It is difficult to believe that he could have known these beings so thoroughly but from introspection … I am afraid the compliment to his poetry will not repay him for the injury to his character.⁷¹

For a brief period in the autumn of 1813 – probably to placate Lady Melbourne – Byron did his best to draw back from the edge with his pursuit of the young, newly married Lady Frances Webster, but by the end of the year Augusta was pregnant with a child which the dates suggested might well be his. In the middle of the following January, with a crisis mounting, brother and sister drove north to Newstead, ‘through more snows than ever opposed the Emperor’s retreat.’ Once arrived, there was no possibility of leaving. The roads beyond the Abbey were impassable, but their coals were excellent, he told his publisher, John Murray, the fireplaces large, the cellar full, his head empty, his only desire ‘to shut my doors & let my beard grow.’⁷²

For the moment, defiance and refuge were in perfect equilibrium. ‘Never was such weather’, Byron wrote contentedly after ten days, ‘one would imagine Heaven wanted to raise a Powder-tax & had sent the snow to lay it on.’⁷³ Never had his ancestral home seemed so all-sufficient as with Augusta. ‘And what unto them is the world beside,’ Byron later demanded in Parisina, his drama of incest and family doom that echoes the mood of these weeks,

With all its change of time and tide

Its living things, its earth and sky,

Are nothing to their mind and eye.

And heedless as the dead are they

Of aught around, above, beneath;

As if all else had pass’d away

They only for each other breathe …

Of guilt, of peril, do they deem

In that tumultuous dream?⁷⁴

There is something, in fact, of the magic of Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago about Byron’s and Augusta’s illicit exile at Newstead, isolated from criticism and responsibilities by the impenetrable winter landscape, as safe among the ruins of the abbey as Yuri and Lara in the frozen wastes of Varykino. At the edge of Newstead’s cloistered world lurked the wolves, but like Zhivago watching their shadows in the half-light of dusk, Byron could pretend for the moment that they were merely dogs. To be alive, and to live in the present, was enough. All his restless search after sensation was sunk in ‘sluggish’ content. Even the desire or need to write – for Byron the ‘lava of the imagination’⁷⁵ – was gone. Happy, he had neither need nor urge to create. He felt, he told Murray in a revealing metaphor for his poetic life, as he did when recovering from fever in Patras – ‘weak but in health and only afraid of a relapse.’ ‘I shall keep this resolution’, he wrote of his determination to give up scribbling, ‘for since I left London – though shut up – snowbound – thawbound – & tempted with all kinds of paper – the dirtiest of ink – and the bluntest of pens – I have not even been haunted by a wish to put them to their combined uses.’⁷⁶

The wolves, though, were not dogs, and with the Tory press in full voice following the publication of his poetic squib against the Prince of Wales, Caroline Lamb still primed for trouble and his friends increasingly nervous, Byron was never going to be allowed to forget it. Characteristically, just as the previous year Caroline’s antics had frightened him back from the abyss, his moods now swung between defiance and compromise, between talk of the exile he had been threatening for almost a year and a marriage – any marriage – that might yet be his ‘salvation’ from the feelings that he confessed to Lady Melbourne ‘are a mixture of good and diabolical’⁷⁷.

After his first impetuous talk of exile, Augusta too was beginning to look on the idea as the only way of averting catastrophe. There is little doubt that she would have gone abroad with him the previous summer if he had pressed her, but in the nature of things she had more to lose than he did and for a mother as indulgently devoted as Augusta, the thought of abandoning any of her children – Georgiana, her eldest, had been born in the first week of November 1808, Augusta Charlotte, a little over two years later and a son, George, in June the next year – could never have been a bearable option.

George was still only a baby when Byron first proposed exile to Augusta, however, and it was probably her two daughters who most exercised her concern. From an early age Augusta Charlotte had begun to exhibit the symptoms of autism that would eventually lead her to an asylum in Kensal Green, and yet in her different way the oldest, ‘Georgey’ – traditionally Byron’s favourite – was as much of a worry as her sister, constantly ill and as cripplingly and elusively shy as Augusta herself had been as a child.

And even with Augusta’s easy belief in the workings of a benevolent providence – virtually the only legacy from her pious Holderness grandmother – she must have felt that she had used up not just her small stock of courage but her luck when the birth of a third daughter in April passed without any gossip. It is impossible to tell from the few elliptical comments in Byron’s letters how anxious they had been in advance, but whatever his thoughts on the child he was certainly concerned enough for Augusta to journey up from London to the Leighs’ home outside Newmarket in the days before her confinement.

For all the space and time that has been expended on the subject, the only thing that can be said with any certainty of the paternity of Elizabeth Medora Leigh, is that it cannot be known. It would seem likely that Byron and Augusta both initially believed that she was his child, and yet there is not a single scrap of evidence – not a remark or silence – that cannot be equally well interpreted to support either side of the argument. ‘Oh! but it is worth while’, Byron reported to Lady Melbourne – in the one notorious, throw-off paragraph on which a whole speculative industry has been raised,

I can’t tell you why – and it is not an ‘Ape’ [an apparent reference to medieval incest superstitions] and if it is – that must be my fault – however I will positively reform – you must however allow – that it is utterly impossible I can ever be half as well liked elsewhere – and I have been all my life trying to make someone love me – & never got the sort I preferred before. But positively she and I will grow good – and all that – & so we are now and shall be these three weeks & more too.⁷⁸

For all Byron’s resolutions, however, the choice of the name Medora – the heroine of his Corsair – smacks of the kind of brinkmanship that threatened disaster at any moment. It has been argued, with some plausibility, that she was in fact called after the Oaks winning filly of 1813, but even if that is true Augusta – for all her ‘goosiness’ – was astute enough to know that in anything to do with Byron it was the perception rather than the reality of things that mattered.

She had, in fact, her own idea for Byron’s wife, Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower, but since the previous autumn an alarmed Lady Melbourne had been keeping a far more serious candidate waiting in the wings. For a time during his Eywood idyll there had been a slight froideur between her and Byron, but one of the great secrets of Lady Melbourne’s influence was a talent for absorbing slights and from the first threatening appearance of Augusta in Byron’s life she had been as ready to sacrifice her niece for his safety as she had been a year earlier for her own dynastic needs.

There are moments in the relationship of Byron and Annabella Milbanke that tilt the sympathies violently in one direction or another and the intervention of Lady Melbourne is one of these. There is no need to sentimentalise the broadly ‘Austenish’attitudes to marriage of Annabella herself, but the machinations of her aunt over the next fifteen months belong to another league altogether, raising the cynicism of the Regency marriage market to levels for which Glenarvon or Les Liaisons Dangereuses – the constant point of reference among her family for Lady Melbourne – provide no real preparation.

Lady Melbourne’s letters to Byron were always cooler, more discreetly circumspect, than his to her, and so it is difficult to be sure of her motives in this matter. It is clear that she was both genuinely fond of Byron and alarmed for him, but for a woman who only had to see a happy marriage, it was said, to want to destroy it, the appeal of the match must have been as much aesthetic as practical – the pure unalloyed pleasure of uniting two people so symmetrically ill-suited as Annabella and Byron, ‘the spoilt child of seclusion, restraint and parental idolatry’ and ‘the spoilt child of genius, passion, and the world,’⁷⁹ as Mrs Stowe later described them.

Lady Melbourne’s performance was one of dazzling cynicism as she brought them together again, interpreting one to the other, revealing or concealing as needed, playing equally on the weaknesses of Byron and Annabella until each imagined the initiative their own. There was a streak of passivity in Byron’s nature that had always made him putty in Lady Melbourne’s hands, but with her romantic high-mindedness and naivety her niece proved no less easy to manage.

After almost a year in which she had time to reflect on the loneliness of moral superiority and the dullness of domestic life without the frisson of Byron’s attentions, Annabella was ripe for persuasion. ‘I have received from Lady Melbourne an assurance of the satisfaction you feel in being remembered with interest by me,’ her first direct letter to him had begun on cue on 22 August 1813 – midway between the beginning of his affair with Augusta and his half-hearted pursuit of Lady Frances Webster,

Let me fully explain this interest, with the hope that the consciousness of possessing a friend whom neither Time nor Absence can estrange may impart some soothing feeling to your retrospective views.⁸⁰

One of the supreme temptations of the novel, E.M. Forster once confessed, is the desire to give characters the happiness that ‘real life’ denies them, and this first letter of Annabella’s can stir the same kind of emotions. She was so much in the habit of regarding herself in fictional terms that it would be hard not to follow suit anyway, but the cruelty of her fate now was to find herself less the heroine of her own shaping than the dupe of a Leclos plot over which she had no control. ‘You have remarked the serenity of my countenance,’ she went on,

but mine is not the serenity of one who is a stranger to care, nor are the prospects of my future untroubled. It is my nature to feel long, deeply, and secretly, and the strongest affections of my heart are without hope. I disclose to you what I conceal even from those who have most claim to my confidence, because it will be the surest basis of that unreserved friendship which I wish to establish between us … Early in our acquaintance, when I was far from supposing myself preferred by you, I studied your character. I felt for you, and I often felt with you. You were, as I conceived, in a desolate position, surrounded by admirers who could not value you, and by friends to whom you were not dear. You were either flattered or persecuted. How often have I wished that the State of Society would have allowed me to offer you my sentiments without restraint.⁸¹

With its oblique and frustrated demand to be heard this might anticipate the great climax of Persuasion, but Annabella was no more an Anne Elliot than Byron was Captain Wentworth. From her earliest youth she had dramatised herself as the self-sacrificing heroine of her historical daydreams, and the girl who had stood by Howard in her fantasies now abandoned herself to the role of Byron’s redeemer, uniting herself with him in an imaginary communion of souls that transcended time, place or vulgar self-interest. ‘Surely the Heaven-born genius without Heavenly grace must make a Christian clasp the blessing with greater reverence & love, mingled with a sorrow as a Christian that it is not shared’, she wrote to her old confidante Lady Gosford in her most ecstatic vein,

Should it ever happen that he & I ever offer up a heartfelt worship together – I mean in a sacred spot – my worship will then be most worthy of the spirit to whom it ascends. It will glow with all the devout and grateful joy which mortal breast can contain. It is a thought too dear to be indulged – not dear for his sake, but for the sake of man, my brother man, whomever he be – & for any poor, unknown tenant of this earth I believe I should feel the same. It is not the poet – it is the immortal soul lost or saved.⁸²

In one of her ‘Auto-descriptions,’ Annabella confessed this inability to distinguish fiction from fact, but what had been harmless enough in the child was profoundly dangerous in the adult. In the early days of their acquaintance she had self-consciously distanced herself from the ‘Byromania’ of London, but as she realised with something like panic how much she had lost in turning him down, she set about desperately trying to recreate Byron in an image she could square with her conscience, blindly moving with every exchange of letters towards marriage with a man she scarcely knew. ‘I entreat you then to observe the more consistent principles of unwearied benevolence’, she wrote to Byron in the language of a tabloid astrologer,

No longer suffer yourself to be the slave of the moment, nor trust your noble impulses to the chances of Life. Have an object that will permanently occupy your feelings & exercise your reason. Do good. Your powers peculiarly qualify you for performing those duties with success, and may you experience the sacred pleasure of having them dwell in your heart!⁸³

It is clear from Byron’s reply that Annabella’s tone had startled him, but if he had to sacrifice Augusta, it hardly seemed to matter whom he married. ‘To the part of your letter regarding myself’, he wrote back, having first assured her that she was the only person with whom he had ever contemplated marriage,

I could say much – but I must be brief – if you hear ill of me it is probably not untrue though perhaps exaggerated – on any point in which you may honour me with an interest I shall be glad to satisfy you – to confess the truth or refute the calumny. – I must be candid with you on the score of Friendship – it is a feeling towards you with which I cannot trust myself – I doubt whether I could help loving you – ⁸⁴

There was not a scrap of hypocrisy about Byron, but what was almost as hazardous as he renewed his interest in Lady Melbourne’s niece, was the artist’s ability to conjure imagined feeling out of the depths of genuine experience. He would have found it impossible to preserve his illusions about a future with Anna-bella had he seen anything of her, but in the safety of letters he could indulge in an emotional transfer that enabled him to create an idea of her and himself that could sustain him through the travesty of an epistolary courtship.

If it was a serious error of judgement on Annabella’s part to imagine she could reform Byron, it was a more culpable misjudgement on his to think that he would ever allow it. It is unlikely that with Augusta so compulsively in his mind anyone could have filled her place, but as he edged inexorably towards a second proposal, it was Annabella’s fate to be almost diagrammatically the wrong person at the wrong time – a poor woman’s Dorothea Brooke, capable of change but not growth, of ardour but not compassion, sensibility but no real sympathy.

It is possible still that Byron could have forgiven Annabella for what she was, and yet he must have known, as he finally steeled himself to propose, that he could never forgive her for not being Augusta. In the early days of their courtship her virtues had been thrown into relief by the extravagances of Caroline Lamb, but seen now through the distorting prism of his ‘perverse passion’⁸⁵ everything about her would inevitably come to seem different, her goodness primness, her certainties dogmatism, and her learning pedantry – the five foot three incarnation of all the cultural and moral littleness he despised.

Byron’s courtship of Annabella through the late summer of 1814 seems so reckless, so wantonly obtuse in the refusal to recognise the warning signals, that no conventional explanation of his actions seems quite sufficient. In his journals and letters he might describe her as his last hope of salvation, and yet if at some superficial level he managed to convince himself of that, his choice betrays a deeper compulsion to make her the causa belli of a rift with the world she embodied that had been threatening since the first success of Childe Harold.

It is this secret, unconscious, destructive agenda that gives such an air of inescapable misery to the story that unfolds with his second proposal to Annabella. On 9 September, having prevaricated as long as he could, he wrote to her from Newstead, sealing and despatching the letter ‘with the greatest haste’, according to Tom Moore, before he could have second thoughts⁸⁶. On the same day that she received it at Seaham, Annabella wrote back, a letter of touching and honest simplicity. ‘I have your second letter’, she told him,

and am almost too agitated to write – but you will understand. It would be absurd to suppress anything – I am and have long been pledged to myself to make your happiness my first object in life. If I can make you happy, I have no other consideration. I will trust to you for all I should look up to – all I can love. The fear of not realizing your expectations is the only one I now feel. Convince me – it is all I wish – that my affection may supply what is wanting in my character to form your happiness.⁸⁷

As Byron opened the letter, Augusta at his side, he turned so pale that she thought he might faint. It never rains but it pours, was his only comment. Even so, he probably did not understand the forces he had set in motion. Nor did a fraught, uncomfortable week at Seaham at the beginning of November, that left him and Annabella as ignorant as ever of each other’s character, open his eyes.

On 24 December 1814, after further delays over the marriage settlement, he once more set off for the north, accompanied by his old travelling companion, Hobhouse, and stopped near Newmarket to spend a last Christmas with Augusta. On the 26th the two men continued their reluctant journey towards Seaham. ‘Never was lover less in haste’⁸⁸, recorded Hobhouse in his journal, and he was right. As the wedding day approached, the air of foreboding spread. In later life Annabella would speak of the sense of inexplicable dread that seized her. At the Leighs’ house at Six Mile Bottom, near Newmarket, on the morning of 2 January, at the exact time she knew that the marriage service had begun, Augusta later said that she felt as the sea must do when an earthquake moves it. The panic, the fear, the emotional turmoil were justified. She knew, as Byron had told Lady Melbourne, that her own security and reputation were wrapped up with the success or failure of the marriage. It was, though, already too late.

Almost forty years after that journey north, on the same morning that Annabella Byron and Frederick Robertson boarded the Rei-gate train at Brighton station, a woman in her late sixties, dressed in mourning and walking with a slow, shuffling step, made her painful way up the first-class staircase of London Bridge’s new terminus, and onto the narrow platform of the Brighton line.

It is unlikely that anyone who had ever known Augusta as a young girl, or seen the drawing that Sir George Hayter had done of her in her late twenties, would have recognised her. She might never have been in any conventional sense a beauty, but there had been a charm and elasticity about her that had long since gone, the woman Hayter so wonderfully captured worn away to the faded creature for whom every anxious step seemed an act of atonement to the world around her.

There was even something in the way she carried herself, her long, black shawl pulled tight around her as though she might disappear into it, that suggested the same air of surrender. For most of her lifetime she had struggled with whatever resources she could muster to keep a hostile world at bay, but just two months past her sixty-eighth birthday, and with ‘death in her face’⁸⁹, the Hon. Mrs Augusta Leigh had at last nothing more to give or ask than to die in peace.

She had only travelled once before on the railway, but even for someone less nervous and sick, the prospect from her window would have been a bewildering one. As the train swung southwards and left the Greenwich line and the teeming slums of Bermondsey behind, the soaring glass house of the Great Exhibition visible in the distance, it began to cross a city that was changing by the week and almost by the day, spreading and growing with the railways that were transforming it, sprouting new villas and settlements, degrading suburbs into slums and villages into suburbs in a thrusting dialectic of population, railway and building that had left any world Augusta had known far behind.

It was a new age that Augusta instinctively and rightly feared, but as the train gathered speed and finally escaped the tentacular spread of London, moving through a landscape still relatively unchanged from her youth, it was this older world that threatened most danger. For more than twenty years she had looked forward to this journey with all the optimism and placatory desire to accommodate that had characterised her youth, but as the train slowed across the common land and farms near Reigate, coming to a standstill at the heart of what one contemporary guide called England’s ‘forgotten Eden’, this older, less resilient Augusta must have known that for the last representative of a ‘serpent race’⁹⁰ there was little mercy to be expected.

If there had been any doubts about that, the letter she had received, sent from Brighton on 11 February, would have ended them. ‘Since the cessation of our personal intercourse’, she had read in a neat, firm hand she had not seen in two decades,

you have more than once asked me to see you. If you still feel that wish, I will comply with it. We may not long have it in our power, Augusta, to meet again in this life, and to do so might be the means of leaving to both of us a remembrance of deep though sad thankfulness. But this could not be the effect unless every worldly interest were absolutely excluded from our conversation, and there were the most entire and mutual truthfulness. No other expectations must be entertained by you for a moment. On any other terms I cannot see you again, unless summoned to your Death-bed.⁹¹

She had, too, her instructions. A fly would be waiting at the station to take her to the White Hart. When the train stopped she remained sitting where she was, a dowdily dressed figure from a previous age, waiting like some sacrificial victim at the altar of Victorian self-justification and moral rectitude to which she had been brought. After a short while a servant in drab livery carrying a visiting card appeared at her window. On the card was a name: Lady Byron.

II
THE MEETING

Tuesday, 8 April, 1851. The White Hart, Reigate. A large room decorated in an oppressive clutter of different periods and styles, an amalgam of the Georgian coaching age and Victorian, the walls sombre maroon relieved only by the glint of frames, the woodwork dark, the scattered chairs covered in chintzes. A door, ajar, opens into the left wall, against which is a long, black, horse-hair sofa. On the opposite side of the room a wood fire burns low in an open grate. Under a glass dome on the mantel is an elaborate ivory-faced clock, its pendulum swinging with an insistent, audible ticking. Above, a mirror; on either side, open bookcases. In the left foreground a heavy square legged mahogany serving table, with a cut glass vase of dried flowers, papers scattered across it, a small travelling case with its lid open, outdoor bonnet, gloves etc. Back right, a window opens onto the garden beyond, which drops away and rises again to a skyline of still bare beech trees, and a cold, grey sky. Back left a large corner cupboard, and between them a regency pier table, with a gilded, finialled bird cage. Above it, incongruously flanked on either side by sporting prints, hangs a large framed print of Manfred on the Jungfrau, the face of Manfred contorted by suffering, his fist raised in one last gesture of defiance.

In front of the picture, a woman in her late fifties, in a lavender coloured dress stands staring silently up, her arms folded across her chest, the fists clenching and unclenching in a compulsive gesture. She can be no more than a little over five feet in height, with an unusually high forehead, the habitual pallor of her face slightly flushed with agitation, hard blue eyes, sharp features, pursed mouth, silver hair under a widow’s cap of transparent material.

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