Byron in Love Read online

  The idyll in the snows could not last. The pain of their parting was unbearable for them both. For him she was a being ‘wined around his heart in every possible manner, dearest and deepest in hope and in memory’. For her she said that if she could live and die there and be buried with him within Newstead’s ruins, they would both have been happy. But Colonel Leigh, her ‘lord and president’, required her home and moreover, she had to prepare for the birth of the child that was due in April.

  Back in his cheerless rooms in Bennett Street, many things conspired to add to his despondency. Rumours of his affair with Augusta were rife and boys at Eton asked her nephew if Augusta was the heroine Zuleika in The Bride of Abydos. Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird exchanged ‘frightful suspicions of it’ and at gatherings in Holland House Byron himself spoke rashly of a woman he was in love with and who was with child, saying that the child would be called Medora.

  But above and beyond all the given reproaches, there was his tormented state of mind or, as he put it in a letter to Lady Melbourne–‘All these externals are nothing to that within.’

  The correspondence with Annabella Milbanke had been staggering on, Byron telling himself that he wanted a companion and a friend because he had had enough of love. Despite her moral rectitude, she wrote to say how much she admired The Giaour, which Byron had called ‘a snake of a poem’, because of the way it extended its rattles. Her admiration for it may have stemmed from the fact that the hero, whom she associated with Byron himself, was haunted by ill deeds–‘So writhes the mind remorse hath riven.’ In The Giaour the hero is haunted by the image of the drowned girl Leila, and the severed arm of Hassan, whom he had had to kill, just as Byron himself was haunted by the crime of incest, which though Shelley may have described ‘as a very poetical circumstance’, Byron was teetering. Resolving now to vanquish his ‘demon’ and break with Augusta, he planned a trip to Holland, the ‘bluff burghers’ having defeated the French and declared a republic.

  ‘…Love will find its way/Through paths where wolves would fear to prey’ he had written in The Giaour, and in bleak and misty Seaham in the county of Durham, Annabella was indeed in love with him and wretched at being so wanting in wisdom as to have pretended that she had disposed of her heart elsewhere. This deception led to her breakdown, which brought their correspondence to an abrupt halt.

  ‘I mark this day!’ Byron wrote on 11 April 1814, as the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte unconditionally surrendered to the combined British, Prussian and Austrian forces, having been defeated the previous year at the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, then in March 1814 at the Battle of Laon. Now he would be exiled from Paris to the island of Elba.

  Byron, as Hobhouse said, had always held ‘an irrational admiration’ for Napoleon, identifying with him as a mythic hero and an invincible general, high above ‘the straw monarchs of England’. But his God had become a pagod. ‘This imperial diamond hath a flaw in it.’ He raged at his downfall, saying no man, no fiend, had fallen so far, even wishing that Napoleon had committed suicide in the noble Roman tradition. In an ‘Ode to Napoleon’, written in despondence and anger, he vented his muddled feelings, regretting only that the poem would give pleasure to his Tory enemies. His anger was further inflamed by the various celebrations in London, the monarchs of Europe, the Czar of Russia, King of Prussia, Prince Metternich and Marshal von Blücher, all welcomed for royal jubilations by the Prince Regent.

  The paring-away of a giant to gradual insignificance was a jest of the gods and a fate that might befall himself. In a letter once to Annabella Milbanke, he had said he preferred the talent of action, of war, or the Senate or even science, to all the speculations of those mere dreamers of another existence, by which he meant poets. It was as if being a poet was not heroic enough for him, succumbing as poets did ‘to the gloomy vanity of drawing from self’.

  On 15 April Augusta gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Elizabeth Medora, after the heroine in The Corsair. With a triumphalism, he wrote to Lady Melbourne that it was worthwhile and the child had not been born an ape, a reference to the superstition that pertained towards the progeny of incestuous lovers. He went on to add that Augusta’s love was what he had been seeking all his life. Yet he would not single out the child for special affection, preferring the elder sister Georgina, but Medora would in time come to believe that she was his daughter, the inheritor of his raging genius, just as she would curse her mother and describe her as a hyena who deserved to lick the dust.

  Vanitas vanitatum. The old emptiness the old despair. The soirées at this or that house began to pall, were a deplorable waste of time, nothing imparted, nothing acquired, just tosh. Hobhouse predicted that Byron was becoming ‘a loup garou’, his correspondence of that time giving ample indication of a man in torment and possibly a poet in doubt with regard to his own gifts. How else can we reconcile his estimate of Edmund Kean in Richard III showing ‘life–nature–truth without exaggeration or diminution’ with his demolishing of Shakespeare, whom he had formerly lauded as that ‘most extraordinary of writers’. To Mr James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, who had written to ask for a poem to be included in a volume of poems by contemporaries, Byron wrote scaldingly–‘Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but that was all.’

  To Lady Melbourne he is promising that he and Augusta will grow good, he buys a parrot and a macaw for company, announces to John Murray that he will stop writing, rescinds his decision, receives Caroline Lamb in his rooms, where she speaks of a resumed tenderness, his lips pressed to hers as he revealed his horrible secret. He is restless, agitated, either living on seltzer water and biscuits or getting drunk with Scrope Davies, sparring with Gentleman Jackson ‘to attenuate and keep up the ethereal part of me’. Throughout, he pined for Augusta, wishing that like St Francis, he could be given a wife made of snow to dampen his passion.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘Hanging and marriage…go by Destiny’ George Farquhar wrote. Byron’s correspondence with Annabella Milbanke, the ‘fair philosopher’, had been renewed, letters in which Christianity, Horace, Tacitus and all such edifying topics were discussed, though not yet the question of marriage. Their ‘epistolatory courtship’ is a marvel of eloquence, verisimilitude and staggering deception. He is apologising if he is intruding too much on her time, to say nothing of her patience, he is extolling her virtues, her mind, her morals, while pleading to obtain her good opinion of him. For her part, she is melting. His poetry, even The Bride of Abydos, has given her more pleasure than the QEDs of Euclid. His dozy firelighter Mrs Mule could have warned him of his precipitousness, but Byron had talked himself into believing that he was in love with Annabella and she for her part, though she had sought to suppress it, had fallen in love with him at first sight, as did, almost, every woman he met. Her first circumlocutory refusal, the pretence of another ‘attachment’, her breakdown upon hearing that he was going abroad, all indicative of her secret torment.

  He is having to listen to the ‘felicitations’ of newly married men, though in his view they simply have had their tails cut off. He meets the various other candidates Augusta has proposed, thinking that whoever she loved he could not help but like. One, Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower, has ‘soul’, blushes easily and is soon christened the antelope, but she proves skittish and is somewhat afraid of Byron. To Augusta’s dismay she vanishes when a former suitor, Henry Charles Howard, reappears and asks for her hand. More in a spirit of ennui than ardour, when they are at Newstead, Byron sends Annabella a somewhat succinct letter–‘Are the objections to which you alluded insuperable, or is there any line or change of conduct which could possibly remove them?’ Augusta thought it ‘a pretty letter, th
e prettiest letter ever’, which it wasn’t. According to her, Byron sat on the steps in an agitation, waiting for the post that would bring Annabella’s reply.

  Earlier the gardener had burst into the room in a state of excitement, having just dug up Catherine Byron’s wedding ring, which had been missing for years, Byron remarking that if Annabella consented, she would be married with that ring, hardly an apposite heirloom, considering Catherine’s brief and unhappy marriage. Byron, according to Augusta, ‘almost fainted away with agitation’ upon reading the letter of acceptance. Annabella admitted to a joy that she had despaired of and pledged herself to make his happiness her first object in life. Byron felt no such joy. His reply next day cursory, dispensing with love talk, noting that their pursuits were not unalike, since neither had a great passion for the world and hence relied on their intellectual natures, and that although ‘sinning’, he had also been sinned against and had long stood alone in life.

  Even the most idle observer might question why the carriage was not waiting, why it took Byron almost two months to set out on the north road and make the three-hundred-mile journey to Seaham to meet with Annabella and the parents, Lady Judith and Sir Ralph, those whom he hoped to call his own. Seaham was a God-forsaken hamlet with a sprinkling of cottages and Seaham Manor, the seat of the Milbankes, propped on cliffs overlooking the choppy North Sea. She was counting the days. Mama and Papa were counting the days, Mama in one of her ‘fusses’ and Sir Ralph choosing the wines for the august visit. Yet ‘petty casualties and melancholy accidents’ got in Byron’s way. So many things got in the way, the least of them being poetry. There was the matter of the marriage settlement, which had to be left ‘to the men of parchment’, his solicitor Mr Hanson and her father’s solicitor Mr Hoar having much to discuss, except that Mr Hanson and Mr Hoar are in disparate parts of England and finding it impossible to meet since both have indispensable business, taking them elsewhere. There is so much to be thrashed out, properties, annuities, bequests, the rents from her father’s collieries and his own, though he is discreet enough not to mention the fact that he is in debt for £30,000, and the sale of Newstead once again in jeopardy because of Mr Claughton’s defection.

  His delays to her are becoming ‘too like a dream’ and she compares him to the procrastinating Hamlet. Still there are his letters to sustain her. He recalls his first sighting of her in the morning room at Lady Melbourne’s, singling her out, her beauty, her deportment, her innocence, she ‘no common being’ but a luminary in that world of giddy and affected waltzers. Yes, she is to be ‘the wife of his bosom’, his whole heart will be hers, she his guide, his philosopher, his friend. She rides to the blacksmith’s cottage to receive his letters and read them away from the prying eyes of her mother and the doting solicitude of her father. In the blacksmith’s cottage she finds comfort in the fact that country people, as penetrating as any craniologist, have remarked that ‘Miss’ looks as if she has been a wife these twenty years, inferring a high ideal of conjugal felicity. A woman whom she did not know asked who might be ‘the bonnie lad who [was] to tak awa the canny hinny’.

  Except that the ‘bonnie lad’ was still in the Albany alone as he said with his menagerie of birds; his morning routine a bout of sparring with his boxing master, then posing in Albanian costume for Thomas Philips, the portrait painter, his only female companion being Mrs Mule. He omitted to mention the visits of Miss Eliza Francis, another putative author who believed that an audience with Byron would inspire her. She herself left a record of these trysts, all was sunshine, except for rats scurrying about, Byron starting from his chair, holding out both hands to her, as she ventured to ascertain the colour of his eyes. Then she reeled in shock, almost fainting because Byron had to put his arm around her waist, lifted some little curls that had escaped from under her cap, kissed her and clenched her to his bosom with an ardour which terrified her.

  The engagement to Annabella had engendered piquant interest, was announced in the Durham paper, then contradicted in the Morning Chronicle, a petty malice that Byron believed to be the work of Caro, who had vowed that if Byron should marry, she would buy a pistol and shoot herself in front of the happy couple. She did however send him a letter laden with blessings, while telling John Murray that Byron would not ‘pull’ with a woman who went to church regularly and had a bad figure. Annabella it seems consumed large quantities of mutton chops and scones faithfully made for her by her father, but Byron was ignorant of any gluttony, having only met her twice. Colonel Leigh, who cannot have been blind to his wife’s adoration of her half-brother, tolerated it because of Byron bailing them out again and again. Leigh opened a book at Newmarket, taking bets as to whether the marriage would or would not take place. Secretly he was opposed to it since it would mean that Augusta would be the loser in Byron’s fortune.

  Patience at Seaham was being sorely tried. Lord Wentworth, Annabella’s uncle and whose presumptive heir she was, had travelled especially from Leicestershire to meet the illustrious groom, only to be disappointed and leaving in a huff. Augusta was enlisted by Byron to write to Annabella, to ‘soothe’ her for his being provokingly detained in London. Annabella, so liking the countenance of this letter, persuaded her parents to invite Augusta also, in the hope that it would bestir Byron to set out. Augusta declined with a great semblance of regret. She was nurse to baby Medora, governess to her eldest girl and something of both to the two intermediate babes. She wrote most cloyingly to this person she hoped soon to call ‘sister’ and already loved as such.

  Annabella’s desperation was increasingly evident in her letters and her craven plea as she relayed Lady Judith’s directions for Byron’s epic journey north–‘After you come to Boroughbridge, the nearest way hither is by the following stages, Thirsk, Tontine Inn, Stockton, Castle Eden, Seaham’, imagining, as she said, that he was already there.

  The nerves of their first meeting were preying upon her, yet she was certain they would prove to be admirable philosophers, remaining coolest in manner, though not cool within. Byron, also ‘tremblingly alive’ to that meeting, announced that he would be bringing Fletcher, his valet, but spare her the nuisance of a servant. From Six Mile Bottom, which he had made his ‘inn’, his feelings took a radical downward swerve and writing to Lady Melbourne, he said ‘I am proceeding very slowly…I shall not stay above a week…I am in very ill humour.’ He spent the next night at an inn in Wansford near Peterborough, arriving at dusk on 2 November, two days later than the fractious parents and his flustered ‘intended’ had expected him.

  Annabella preserved the moment for posterity–

  I was sitting in my room when I heard the carriage, I put out the candles and deliberated what should be done. We met alone. He was in the drawing room standing by the chimneypiece. He did not move forward as I approached him, but took my extended hand and kissed it. After a while, he said in a low voice, ‘It is a long time since we met.’

  Feeling overpowered she left the room to call her parents. Yet he rallied at dinner, listened to Sir Ralph’s stockpile of jokes, familially known as ‘pothooks’, jokes about fleas and frogs and electioneering and a shoulder of mutton. Lady Judith noted his excessive vanity, fiddling with his gold watch as he expounded on theatre matters, and she was appalled at his not having brought a gift or the customary diamond loop engagement ring.

  That night, Mrs Clermont, Annabella’s lady’s maid and Byron’s future nemesis, said that Her Ladyship was in tears as she undressed her. Byron told Lady Melbourne his fiancée was overrun with feelings, nothing but fine feelings and scruples and to crown it all, was taken ill every three days. He had grave doubts if marriage would come of it at all, as there was very little laughter and this boded ill for a man whose motto was ‘giggle and make giggle’. But the die, as he said, was cast, the lawyers had met, the marriage settlement was afoot and neither party could now secede.

  Annabella, to his alarm, made a scene, not very different from one of Caro’s, at which he turned green and fain
ted away. He had been hinting at some mysterious shadow in his past and cited the wrong she had done him by rejecting his earlier proposal, something he would wreak revenge for. She decided to call off the engagement, sensing some awful impediment, and it was at that moment he fainted and she knelt in remorse at his feet. Some forty years later, she described the incident to Harriet Beecher Stowe, for though her whole life in narratives, letters and disquisitions was spent in self-vindication, she wished the world to know that Byron had loved her. She would conceal from the world her humiliation at his having so easily seduced her.

  At her bidding Byron left sooner than intended, because being under the same roof and not married proved a strain on her nerves. At Boroughbridge, we find him once again in gallant mode. ‘My Heart,’ he wrote, ‘we are thus far separated, but after all one mile is as bad as a thousand’, fuelling the fiction that once they were married, their differences would evaporate.

  FIFTEEN

  Wedding plans and wedding bells were, by his reckoning, in ‘a pestilent fuss’. The cake had been made at Seaham and he hoped that it would not go mouldy. Sir Ralph had penned an epithalamium, one verse so farcical, as Annabella said, she had to rewrite it. Her letters to Byron have become craven–‘mine mine…ever thine…I hope for a line from you today…I cannot enjoy anything without you…those long black days’.