Byron in Love (10 page)

‘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, the 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–

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 fainted 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.

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'.

Byron had applied to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a special licence, so as to be married anywhere, anytime and without fuss. Bridegroom and his best man Hobhouse set out on Christmas Eve, Hobhouse dispatched to Cambridge while Byron made a detour to Six Mile Bottom, for his last rending hours with Augusta, thwarted somewhat at finding that Colonel Leigh was actually at home. On Christmas Day, with the thermometer way below freezing, he writes to Annabella wishing her ‘much merriment and mince pye'. It was Augusta who had to persuade him to set out on Boxing Day, Hobhouse noting that never was lover in less haste.

When the two men arrive at Seaham late on 30 December the mood is one of gloom and disquiet. Lady Judith has taken to her bed and Annabella, as Hobhouse saw, ‘so doatingly fond' of Byron, she threw her arms around him and burst into tears. He also noted that she was dowdy-looking in her long high dress, but that ‘her feet and ankles [were] excellent'. Next day the papers were signed, a mock marriage was performed, with Hobhouse standing in for Annabella, to familiarise the clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Noel, Lord Wentworth's illegitimate son, with the proper procedure. The evening dinner was conducted with a strained merriment.

On the morning of 2 January 1815, Byron in full dress paced the garden, the Reverend Noel, clerically clothed, sat silent at the breakfast table, Lady Judith so jittery she could not pour tea. Kneelers borrowed from the church were set down in the alcove of the bay window in the first-floor drawing room as the 22-year-old bride was being dressed by Mrs Clermont. Just before eleven o'clock, Annabella descended the stairs on her father's arm, wearing a white muslin gown trimmed with lace and a muslin jacket. Reciting the wedding vows, Annabella seemed to Hobhouse to be firm as a rock, Byron, as he later claimed, ‘saw nothing, heard nothing' and while saying the vows, albeit stumblingly, a mist seemed to float before his eyes and he recalled his first sweetheart Mary Chaworth and their parting in a room at Annesley.

Afterwards, Lady Judith gave her son-in-law a tepid kiss, then to his annoyance there was a rowdy carillon of bells from the nearby Saxon church, muskets were fired and local miners in pantaloons enacted a version of a sword dance in which the fool figure was beheaded. Hobhouse presented Annabella with a set of Byron's poems bound in Moroccan leather, wishing her many years of happiness. With a naïveté, she said if she were not happy it would be her own fault. Then of his friend Byron, Hobhouse took ‘a melancholy leave'.

Melancholy and worse characterised the forty-mile journey to Halnaby, another of the Milbanke houses, in Yorkshire, which Sir Ralph had loaned them for their honeymoon. Snow and rain outside and inside the carriage an eruption. Bare of all reason and even sanity, Byron embarked on a singing spree, then turned on her, saying he was a devil and that he would prove it, that he had committed crimes which she, for all her catechising, could not redeem him of and that she would pay for the insult of having refused him two years earlier. Moreover, her dowry was a pittance. At Durham, as joy bells rang out to honour their passing, the execration grew worse, presaging the three bizarre, unhinging weeks that in his blither moments he referred to as ‘the treacle moon'.

Their arrival has the suspense and thrall of gothic fiction–a sprawling mansion, a fall of snow, servants holding lit tapers, noting that the bride looked listless and frightened and that her husband did not help her down from the carriage. And so began the most public marriage of any poet, so infamous in its time that it was lampooned in
John Bull
magazine and the subject of endless scrutiny, helped by the confessions of Byron himself in his Memoirs, as Tom Moore recalled it, and by Lady Byron's numerous and increasingly incriminating testaments to her lawyers and afterwards for her own ‘Histoire'. Though professing to Moore a reluctance to ‘profane the chaste mysteries of the Hymen', Byron, according to Moore, ‘had Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner'.

His tenets regarding the sleeping arrangements were categoric. Enquiring if she meant to sleep with him, he claimed to have an aversion to sleeping with any woman, but that she could if she wished, one animal being the same as the next, provided it was young. She who in her charter for a suitable husband had recoiled from insanity was to have her fill of it. Their wedding night has its literary correlation in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a crimson curtain catching fire, a hallucinating bridegroom believing he was in hell, then pacing the long ghostly gallery with his loaded pistols.

By morning Annabella would say that ‘the deadliest chill' had fallen upon her heart. By morning also she was to conceive of her first suspicion of Augusta, ‘transient as lightning, but no less blasting'. Meeting her in the library, Byron waved a letter from Augusta in which she had addressed him as ‘Dearest first and best of all human beings'. Augusta described being clairvoyantly at one with his agitation at the precise moment that the marriage vows were exchanged in Seaham, likening it to a sea trembling when the earth quakes. The letter, as Annabella noted, affected him strangely and sent him ‘into a kind of fierce and exulting transport'. Augusta's spectre stalked Halnaby and breaking down in front of her maid Mrs Minns, Annabella said that she feared something dreadful had formerly happened between brother and sister. There would be many portents, such as a chance remark of hers on Dryden's
Don Sebastian
, the story of a sinning brother and sister, sending him into a violent rage as he took up his dagger, which was on the table next to his loaded pistols, and disappearing to the gallery that adjoined his bedroom. In those black moods he hinted at unspeakable crimes that preyed upon him, saying he already had fathered two natural children and that they were fools to have married. He then set about her re-education, telling her that right and wrong were merely conventional phrases. Morality was one thing in Constantinople and quite another in Durham or London. Yet his letters to the outside world were filled with his customary banter; to Lady Melbourne, not ‘waxing confidential' any more, he said that Bell and he got on extremely well and so far she had not bored him.

His moods would run the whole gamut from taunts to savagery, to hallucination and even to momentary contriteness when he said she should have a softer pillow than his heart to rest on, and she retaliating by asking whose heart would break first, his or hers. She describes the tears that would suffuse his eyes, then freezing there and giving the appearance of icy hardness. Soon she is writing to Augusta, her one solace, craven letters, asking that this sister-in-law be ‘her only friend' and the crooked reply, ‘Oh yes I will indeed be your only friend.' Augusta's letters to her ‘dearest sis' are masterpieces of ambivalence. Annabella is deemed the most sagacious person to have discovered the art of bringing B back to good humour and giggles and when Annabella, in glaring contradiction to her reserved nature, admits to her tireless enthusiasm for sex, even when menstruating, Augusta retaliates with a rapier thrust–‘I'm glad B's spirit does not decrease with the moon. I rather suspect he rejoices at the discovery of your ruling passion for mischiefs in private.' Smarting at receiving no ‘scribbles' from Byron himself, she justifies it by listing his many occupations, walking, dining and playing at drafts etc., while warning Annabella to keep him away from the brandy bottle, an injunction that was in vain.

Before returning to London, Byron decided
he
would visit Six Mile Bottom, encouraging Bell to stay with her parents or go on to London, something she bridled at, what with her suspicions aroused.

When she crossed the threshold of that ‘most inconvenient dwelling', she was to step into a sexual labyrinth. Augusta came from upstairs, her ringlets carefully coiled, and while in her letters sisterly sentiment had brimmed over, she shook Annabella's hand ‘in a manner sedate and guarded', then embraced Byron, who was in great perturbation. With Colonel Leigh being absent, the couple were bequeathed the marital bedroom!

‘We can amuse ourselves without you, my charmer' Annabella was told after supper, as Byron dispatched her to bed and so initiated the hideous game in which she would lie awake each night listening to their laughter in the room below and then hours later, his ‘terrible step' as he arrived to bed drunk, swearing at Fletcher, who had the job of undressing him, then taunting her, ‘Now I have
her
, you will find I can do without you as well in all ways.'

The fifteen days that followed were enough to send any young woman, let alone a bride who had scarcely left the cocoon of her family, into the throes of hysteria, but Annabella kept her composure, this self-command driving Byron to worse furies. In the evenings, flush with brandy, he conducted his cruel pantomimes, his ‘facon de Parler' as Augusta preferred to call them. She would be ordered to read aloud copies of the letters he had sent her, charting his courtship of Annabella, hollow and treacherous epistles, as they now proved to be. Yet Guss complied because Goose must not be driven to a tantrum or worse, a silent rage in which he might even stab himself. Lying on the sofa he insisted that both women embrace him so that he could then, in the grossest language, compare their ardour. He wrote to Hobhouse that he was ‘working both women well', his own perfidy not dilated upon, except to add that it was tumblers of brandy at night and magnesia in the morning.

There were no confrontations, no showdowns, each playing her or his part in this macabre ritual. Just as Byron had lied to himself during the courtship, a lie that he was now exacting vengeance for, Annabella would construct her own edifice of lies. She was present, as she would later testify in Beeby's shorthand to her father's lawyers, when Byron rose at dawn and went across to Augusta's room, she was made barbarously aware of Augusta refusing him during her menstruation, and Byron alluding to it with ‘So you wouldn't, Guss' and returning to make gross professions of desire to her. Yet she never questioned. She saw that brother and sister brazenly wore identical gold brooches with locks of their hair and crosses that signified consummation, but she rationalised, equivocated, convinced herself that Augusta was a victim just as she herself was, that both were instruments of his brutishness. She even told herself that although Augusta submitted to his affections, ‘she never appeared gratified by them'. On their walks together Augusta, however, gave her no encouragement, Byron perhaps did not love her, but with perseverance and habit, to which he was susceptible, she might win over his affections.

The presence of children did not seem to intrude at all on the various and infernal parlour games, but according to Ethel Mayne, Annabella's biographer, Byron did once point to Medora and say ‘You know that is my child', then went on to calculate the time of Colonel Leigh's absence from the family home, proving that it could not be the husband's.

It was Augusta, ultimately, who instigated their departure, Byron reluctant to leave and as his wife noted, waving his handkerchief passionately, straining for a last glimpse; then sinking down beside her, he asked her what she thought of the other A.

To Tom Moore he was proud to announce that Bell was showing ‘gestatery symptoms' but for her part, Annabella in her commonplace book wrote, ‘My heart is withered away, so that I forget my bread.'