Byron in Love Read online

  But the Count had a more insidious card to play, which was to appeal to Byron’s sense of honour. The gossip and calumnies regarding the couple had reached Teresa’s father, Count Ruggero Gamba, who requested that Byron should not return to Ravenna. Such a move, as Count Guiccioli pointed out, would not only create enmity between two noble scions, but it would bring shame on Teresa’s five innocent sisters and ruin their prospects of marriage. Naturally, Teresa was not to be apprised of this tête-à-tête. Byron capitulated. Teresa rebelled, the Count cried on Byron’s shoulder and the outcome was an unhappy couple returning to Ravenna and Byron sagely asking ‘Could Love for ever/Run like a river…’ The answer was no.

  Since he could not be with her, he must leave Italy altogether. His friend Alexander Scott advised against it, quoting Machiavelli, saying that ‘a prudent prince does not keep his word when to keep it is against his interests’. But leave he must. He prepared to vacate the palace, to dispose of its contents, had his horses and his gondola sold, intending to spend just a few weeks in England before moving on to South America. In London, he intended to fight a duel with the journalist Henry Brougham, who had savaged his Hours of Idleness, and naturally to discuss his ever complex finances with Mr Hanson and Douglas Kinnaird, including the investments from the Noel estate, which he shared jointly with Annabella. Little Allegra was to travel with him.

  This news of his pending arrival almost gave Augusta a stroke. Upon hearing that he was shortly to be in Calais, she wrote for Annabella’s advice and the reply was swift and categoric. Augusta must not see him, she being the principal object of his coming to England, in order to renew his ‘criminal desires’.

  Teresa, a captive in her husband’s palazzo, was in the throes of grief and despair, believing that she was being deceived and that in fact Byron had ditched her. Fanny Silvestrini wrote reams to dissuade her of this, stressing Mylord’s agony as he prepared to cross mountains and seas in a bitter season, all to spare her the torture of waiting and wondering if he would come to Ravenna. Puzzlingly, she added that should Teresa desire him ever to return from England, he would do so expressly for her sake. Byron, she reported, was a lonely man, refusing an invitation to the Benzonis’ or any place of amusement. Teresa would have letters from Calais, from London, from wherever his lonely wandering took him.

  With what Byron would call her ‘usual sublimity’, Fanny painted a picture of the fateful day–

  Byron was already dressed for the journey, his gloves and cap on, even his little cane in his hand. Nothing was now waited for but his coming downstairs–his boxes being already on board the gondola. At this moment Mylord, by way of pretext, declares that if it would strike one o’clock before everything was in order (his arms being the only thing not yet quite ready) he would not go that day. The hour strikes and he remains. Evidently he had not the heart to go.

  Meanwhile, Teresa had suffered a serious relapse and was pleading with her distraught father to invite Byron to come and winter in Ravenna. So, with her father’s goodwill and her husband’s ‘acquiescence’, Byron was invited to return. Love had won.

  TWENTY

  With the daring of a ‘Triton come ashore’ is how Byron described himself on his second pilgrimage to Ravenna. Leaving Allegra in Venice he set out with his servants, not sure if it would be for a week or a lifetime. En route at Bologna he did something that can hardly be thought insignificant. After a haircut he had ‘all his long hair’ posted to Augusta as a keepsake. When he arrived at Albergo Imperiale in Ravenna on Christmas Eve 1819, in deep snow, he was given a rapturous welcome and before long would be recognised by papal legates, vice-legates and society as Teresa’s ‘serventissimo’.

  When news of his domestic situation reached England, Augusta thought it ‘an insanity’ and Hobhouse, conferring with Murray, deemed it ‘bad news’.

  It was carnival time in Ravenna, as it had once been in Venice, masks, disguises, flirtations, and in his excess of joy he claimed never to have seen such youth, such beauty, and more diamonds than were seen ‘these fifty years in Sea-Sodom’.

  Ravenna suited him, the citizens not so debauched as the Venetians, old Italian manners and customs everywhere in evidence, Dante’s tomb, the little cupola more neat than solemn, a spur to future poetry. With his lady on his arm, Byon attended the morning and evening rituals, tried his hand at mastering how to double a shawl and was occasionally rebuked by Teresa for a deficiency in the virility of his soul. He was happy to be in a remote part of Italy where ‘no Englishman resided before’ and he certainly took up a challenge that no Englishman in his right mind would have accepted. The Count invited him to rent the second floor of the Palazzo Guiccioli and so in February he sent for Allegra, left the Albergo Imperiale bringing all his furniture and his menagerie, which included cats, dogs, a monkey, a tame hawk and a guinea hen, placing himself under the Count’s ‘untiring espionage’.

  For this, the Count had enlisted eighteen servants, an accountant, several maids, a carpenter and a locksmith, but as Byron blithely thought, ‘love laughs at locksmiths’. Two blackamoors in embroidered costumes with daggers in their belts acted as rival go-betweens, one from New Guinea loyal to the Count and Luigi Morelli from East Africa loyal to Teresa.

  There were lovers’ quarrels, gossiping servants and impassioned letters between Byron and Teresa passed along the single staircase each hour, Teresa often complaining that he did not love her as intensely as before and Byron outraged at how she responded to her husband’s doting words and glances, observing that as he sat by the fire reading, he could not be blind to the intimacies between them, she vilely complacent, as he put it, in her conjugal duties. Teresa conducted both amours with the deftness of a Borgia. She went secretly to Byron’s rooms during the two hours after dinner when the Count rested, Morelli guarding the door. She enlisted a blacksmith to remove the lock to Byron’s apartments because her husband had a second key, and discovering this treachery, the Count had the new lock removed and replaced with another. It is surprising that, in the thick of all these intrigues and machinations, this 21-year-old woman kept her head and apparently her charms.

  For twelve months the Count colluded in what Teresa would later call ‘a tortuous game’. But all three were playing a game, Teresa flaunting Byron as her amante, while assuring her father Count Ruggero and her brother Count Pietro Gamba that the relationship with Byron was without stain, the Count venting his reptilian temper on her, yet greeting Byron with an enigmatic courtesy. Then one evening, returning prematurely from one of his estates, the Count surprised the lovers in what Byron called ‘quasi in the fact’. Unlike Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, protesting her innocence to a husband who had just discovered her in the arms of Lord Steyne, Teresa remained imperturbable. She was poised to succeed in her most unshaken endeavour, which was to make Byron commit to her and allow her to break with the scheming, sordid, avaricious and obstinate Count. Alone with him that night, the threats and intimidation were such that she wrote to her father the following morning asking to be allowed home and begging him to plead with the Pope to grant her a separation. True to her plucky nature, she asked why she should be the only woman in Ravenna not to be allowed a cavaliere servente. Her father, who had opposed the liaison with Byron, had his mind so drastically changed by Teresa’s admission of the brutality she had had to endure, that he challenged Count Guiccioli to a duel.

  Even the townspeople, who knew of the misdemeanours in the Palazzo Guiccioli, took Teresa’s side, their rationale being that the Count had known all along of the relationship and had accepted it. Moreover, the fact that the Count had borrowed money from Byron and had even tried to use Teresa as his advocate to borrow several more thousands of His Lordship’s guineas, not only tainted him but proved him to be somewhat of a pimp. The fact that he insisted on sleeping with his wife after her admission of faithlessness did not elevate him in people’s eyes. All Ravenna seemed implicated in these cloak-and-dagger happenings, along with priests, cardinals and sp
ying servants.

  The Count was determined that a separation decree should not be granted. He did not want to lose Teresa or seem inferior in the eyes of his noble relatives and most of all, he did not want to pay back her dowry or give her the obligatory allowance of one hundred scudi a month. He tried several strategies, enlisted the papal legates at Ravenna, marshalled more spies, setting them on Byron not only as adulterer, but as a dangerous and subversive agent, who was an enemy of the Vatican.

  After two months of suspense, in July 1820 Count Gamba received the Pope’s decree, stating that it was ‘no longer possible for her to live in peace and safety with her husband’. He sent it to Teresa, along with an edifying letter from Antonio Rusconi, Cardinal Legate of Ravenna.

  Most illustrious lady! [the Cardinal wrote] His Holiness having been informed that your Ladyship has found herself in circumstances in which she can no longer live in peace and safety with her Husband, Cav. Alessandro Guiccioli, His Holiness has benignly condescended to authorise me to permit you to leave your Husband’s House and to return to the House of your Father, Count Ruggero Gamba; so that you may live there in such laudable manner as befits a respectable and noble Lady separated from her Husband. Further, the Holy Father, in order that Your Ladyship may not be deprived of the necessary provisions and all that is requisite for the noble and decorous state of a Lady, condescends to assign you one hundred scudi a month, which shall be paid by the Husband in such manner and means as the integrity and providence of the Holy Father directs and shall be conveyed to you in future by the Cardinal Legate, the present writer, in fulfilment of the Sovereign Command. Furthermore, it is the considered and express wish of the Holy Father that Your Ladyship, in leaving your Husband’s house, shall take with her such linen, clothing and other objects as appertain to the decent adornment of a married Lady, as well as all that may be required for bed and board, following an inventory of these objects, to be signed by both parties, excepting valuables which your Ladyship did not bring with her to her Husband’s House, and which she received as gifts on the occasion of her Wedding. The Cardinal Legate, in communicating these Sovereign decrees, consigns them with the truest and most distinguished esteem.

  Teresa thanked Cardinal Rusconi, wishing for the honour to kiss his ‘Holy Purple’. The Count was apprised of the letter by one of his spies and ordered that none of the horses be taken out of the stables that day. Bizarrely, at dinner, husband and wife maintained the customary etiquette, the Count serving her, talking pleasantries of this and that, when two hours later Morelli had succeeded in hiring a coach and with the help of Byron’s cook, Teresa and her maid were whisked out of the house, and somewhere on that fifteen-mile stretch to Filetto, her father was waiting for her.

  The separation, with the Pope’s permitting it, was the first of its kind in Ravenna for two hundred years and constituted both a triumph and, for Byron, a liability. He well knew that in that society a woman separated from her husband on account of her lover was in a precarious position, the lover compelled by honour to marry her, except that for Lord Byron marriage was ‘the graveyard of love’.

  But he was and would be for three years ‘dreadfully in love with her’ and as he wrote on the index page of her copy of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne, Teresa ‘comprised [his] existence then and hereafter’. For her part, she would claim that he wrote better in her presence, that he needed her voice and her chatter, being totally at one with her. The Gamba family, father, brother and younger sisters, were also to fall under Byron’s spell, he making the fifteen-mile journey each evening on horseback to Casa Filetto, a seventeenth-century house set amongst olive groves, woodcock and partridges in the pine forests beyond, a setting for ‘pastime and prodigality’.

  It was there too that Byron’s political fervour was reinvigorated, what with young Count Pietro talking ‘wild about liberty’ and Count Ruggero, a prominent member of an insurgent group committed to the liberation of the Romagna region from papal and Austrian rule, marshalling Byron to their cause. Theirs was a secret organisation known as the Carbonari, or charcoal burners, and had drawn recruits from patricians, liberals and malcontents who chafed at having to be subservient to the Austrians under Metternich.

  In 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon, Italy was carved into several principalities and Ravenna fell under papal rule. Byron had always advocated his love of freedom, and what could be more inciting than an underground movement, intent on overthrowing papal authority, restoring Italy to the great and glorious reigns of Augustus and Julius Caesar? There were meetings in the Gamba house or out in the woods, warlike speeches, the odd assassination, slogans on walls, ‘Long live the Republic’ and ‘Down with the Pope’, Byron offering lavish sums of money along with his services as a volunteer. To his friends in England he wrote of a most interesting spectacle, the Italians, a race that he admired more than any on earth, determined to send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens. Requesting swords and ammunition, he claimed that the rebels were going to fight the Huns and do savage work as Italian anger was on the boil. ‘The very poetry of politics’, as he put it.

  Italy was to become a field of battle. Decisions were imminent and many a finger itching for the trigger. Americans had enrolled with the Carbonari and were ‘on tiptoe to march’. He was made captain of a group called La Turba, or the mob, and though their numbers were a few hundred, he wrote to John Murray of them being in their thousands. He had ordered harnesses and portmanteaux for the horses. A fray had already begun at Russi, a town not far from Ravenna, assassinations at Cesena and in all, forty assassinations in the Romagna. While agog with all these happenings, he was dashing off notes to Murray concerning the controversy in England over Bowles and Pope, attending subversive dinners in the forest, drinking Imola wine and arranging a weekly pension for a 94-year-old woman, a wood gatherer, who rewarded him for his generosity with a bunch of wood violets.

  The uprising was planned to take place in February 1820, but intelligence had reached the Austrians, who advanced a week earlier, crushing the Neapolitan Carbonari on the plain of Rieta.

  The Ravenna contingent, learning of this massive defeat, lost the incentive to rise and moreover, were intimidated by an encyclical issued from the Vatican, saying that they risked excommunication by belonging to such a subversive sect. The uprising petered out, the Carbonari lost heart and as Byron ironically put it, some even went hunting. Teresa wept by her harpsichord, said Italians would once more have to return to opera, Byron adding that it and macaroni were their fate. The aftermath for him was even more ludicrous. Two nights later, Count Pietro left a bag of bayonets, muskets and some hundreds of cartridges, turning his rooms in Casa Guiccioli into a ‘depot’ and but for Lega, a loyal servant, taking them in, Byron would have been in a ‘scrape’, as other servants would have betrayed him.

  The flame of revolution quenched, Byron was once more driven from his public self to his private self and into that crater of melancholy that he dreaded. Teresa was to see the other Byron, the werewolf–‘As to my sadness–you know that it is in my character–particularly in certain seasons. It is truly a temperamental illness–which sometimes makes me fear the approach of madness–and for this reason, and at these times I keep away from everyone.’

  Often in bad spirits, the weather dull and drooping, Byron ‘scribbled and scribbled’. Teresa had rescinded her veto on Don Juan, so further cantos, ‘with a proper mixture of siege, battle and adventure’, were despatched to England to give Mr Murray jitters and Englishmen and women another dose of revulsion. Friction between him and Mr Murray had been mounting, Murray excoriated as ‘an unnatural publisher’ and ‘a paper cannibal’. In Byron’s eyes Murray would become ‘stepmother’ to the work, ashamed, afraid, negligent, even deciding not to put the publisher’s name on the index page, Byron reminding him that it would be a long time before he would ‘publish a better poem’.

  His decision not to take money for his work was long since gone. He now wished
to be paid, and handsomely so, and when money matters seemed to drive a deeper wedge between them, Byron wrote saying ‘mercantile matters’ were ‘better dealt with by [his] banker Douglas Kinnaird’, adding that angry letters would hardly adorn ‘their mutual archive’. As the pernicious effect of his work was felt in England, Byron quite sensibly exploded and asked, ‘Who was ever altered by a poem?’

  Along with Don Juan, he wrote verse dramas, drawing on ancient worlds, ranging from the picaresque to the plangent and the blasphemous. The first was Marino Faliero (1821), the story of a fourteenth-century Venetian Doge, who fought against corrupt rulers and had his head cut off for it, the only immortalising of him in the Doge gallery being a strip of black cloth in which he was deemed a criminal. Byron did not want it performed, yet despite Murray’s efforts to get an injunction from the Lord Chamberlain, a cut version of the play was performed at Drury Lane Theatre in London. There followed in December 1821 Sardanapalus, a tragedy about the last King of Assyria, which was influenced by his re-reading of Seneca; and then Cain, in which Byron’s unclean and subversive spirit once again scandalised England. Murray had advised against the satanic sentiments in it, a criticism which Byron chafed at, asking Murray did he wish Lucifer to sound like the Bishop of Lincoln? When Murray himself was in danger of prosecution for merely publishing it, gallantry was briefly restored, Byron swearing that such a disgraceful eventuality would bring him hurrying to England.

  But bad temper kept resurfacing because of the many spiteful reactions to his works. An accusation of plagiarism in a critique of Canto Two of Don Juan appeared in The Monthly Review, Byron charged with having stolen the shipwreck scene from Sir J. G. Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, published in 1812. Though he claimed that it had made him laugh, he was incandescent with rage. His shipwreck scene had been inspired not by one single shipwreck but from all the actual accounts of them, including a journal by one of his ancestors, and he wished Murray and England to know that no writer had ever borrowed less from predecessors.