Byron in Love (12 page)

Annabella herself was soon installed in Mivart's Hotel, having brought her commodious memoranda to show to Stephen Lushington. When she told him of her suspicion of an incestuous relationship between Byron and Augusta, Lushington was at first too shocked to believe it, but mindful of her undeviating rectitude, he then did believe it but said it could not be raised in the separation wrangle, because she as a wife was barred from giving evidence and the charge could not be proved. He advised that they should stay narrowly within the bounds and cite ‘brutally indecent conduct and language'.

But the ‘great gulph' was widening and Byron began to falter. He begged her to see him and when she refused, Augusta went as his advocate to Mivart's Hotel, finding ‘a woman pale as ashes, her voice quite altered, yet manifesting a deathlike calm'. She also saw that Annabella was resolute and would not be swayed. Byron's friends were alarmed by the rumours that began to circulate, escalating day by day and garlanded with both salacious and criminal accusations. When Kinnaird told Hobhouse of the homosexual charges, Hobhouse quaked at the very word and in his diary denoted it with a dash.

So it was a round of letters, pleadings, rancour, gossip, betrayals, accusations, Byron hitting on the bizarre idea that he could sue those who were estranging him from his wife and when that failed, following with a childlike plea: ‘Dearest Pip, I wish you would make it up, for I am dreadfully sick of all this', except that Dearest Pip was on her crusade of retribution. Caroline Lamb, the ‘villainous intriguante', asked for a meeting with Annabella, saying she had secrets to tell, that if Byron were merely menaced with them, he would tremble and capitulate. They met at night and Annabella took minutes of the conversation in which she was told that her wicked husband had admitted to corrupting his page, Robert Rushton, and that he had perverted three young boys at Harrow. Worse, Caro produced copies of intimate letters that Augusta had written to Byron and that he had treacherously passed on to her. Annabella brought this new incriminating evidence to Lushington, who congratulated her on her lucky escape from the contamination of Byron.

The tide had indeed turned, vials of wrath poured upon him from high and low, Lady Melbourne's letter brief but merciless: ‘I cannot see you at home' was followed with a perfunctory note to Hobhouse requesting that all her correspondence to Byron be burnt. Mary Godfrey, writing to Tom Moore, said ‘The world are loud against him and vote him a worthless profligate' and so it was. In the Tory newspapers he was likened to Henry VIII, George III, Nero, Caligula and Epicurus. Byron teetered between outrage and self-aggrandisement, his name, which had been a knightly and noble one since his forefathers had helped to conquer England for William the Norman, was being ‘tainted'. Stephen Lushington, ever assiduous, had learnt that Susan Boyce was dismissed from Drury Lane Theatre because of having contracted syphilis from him, and another actress, Mrs Mardyn, who barely knew him, was dismissed because a cartoon had depicted them cavorting. Byron was advised by Hobhouse not to go to the theatre lest he be hissed at, nor to Parliament, yet Byron paid a visit which he knew would be regarded as abhorrent.

It was to a glittering gathering of Lady Jersey's, the reigning beauty and hostess of the period, that Byron went in April, bringing Augusta, eight months pregnant, with him. Disbelief at his audacity was soon followed by the scurrying feet, the shocked enamelled faces of the ladies frozen in indignation and the men refusing to shake the hand of this ‘second Caligula'. The black and blighting calumnies were no longer mere speculation, all London knew of the dawn flight of his wife of one year with her infant daughter, of the diabolical fact of his relationship with his half-sister, affirmed by Byron's own imprudent boasting of it and worst, the repugnant crime which could not be spoken, which could scarcely be whispered, the sodomising of his wife, a sin that could not be mentioned among Christians. Only Lady Jersey and a skittish young heiress, Miss Mercer Elphinstone, spoke to Byron, Miss Elphinstone chiding him for not having married her. Byron leant upon the chimneypiece and stared back at the room, silent, adjudicating and contemptuous. Why they went remains a mystery, considering that Byron had described Lady Jersey as ‘the veriest tyrant that ever governed Fashion's fools', but why they stayed is at once a testament to his pride and the lonely leave-taking of the world he longed to be accepted in.

As the wrangling and menaces between the lawyers continued, Byron knew that worst crime with which he could be charged and even likened himself to the sodomite Jacopo Rusticucci in Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell who, because of his shrewish wife, succumbed to the errors of sodomy; but he also knew that his own shrewish wife and her team of jackals, terrified of lurid public opinion, would not dare bring the charge to an open court and that for all their threats, the only expedient would be a private separation. Hobhouse, still, though somewhat comically, mindful of Byron's reputation, advised that he get a disclaimer from Lady Byron, disavowing cruelty, systematic unremitting neglect, gross and repeated infidelities, incest and so on. Annabella did send the memorandum, but what she disavowed was her accusation of those dire deeds and not the acts themselves. As Byron waited for the separation papers to be signed, Augusta paid her last visit on Easter Sunday morning, bringing as a gift a Bible, which Byron would keep until his death. She was going home to Six Mile Bottom to give birth to her fifth child and guessing that they would not meet again, Byron wept uncontrollably and when she had gone wrote his bitterest letter ever to Annabella: ‘I have just parted from Augusta–almost the last being you had left me to part with–& the only unshattered tie of my existence–wherever I may go–and I am going far–you and I can never meet again in this world–nor in the next…if any accident occurs to me–be kind to
her
.'

On 21 April the separation papers were finally signed, the carriage that had been their wedding coach he bequeathed to his wife, wishing her a more propitious journey in it, and the wedding ring, though of no lapidary value, containing the hair of a king and ancestor, he wished preserved for Ada, whom he referred to as Miss Byron. In the muddy matter of finances, he was the loser, having to agree to arbitration on Kirkby Mallory upon the death of Lady Milbanke, something he did not see as being very imminent.

Piccadilly Terrace was like a sacked house, his library and furniture having been sold, only a few faithful servants and his animals. Nightly visits from Hobhouse and Kinnaird sometimes ended in drunken brawls, Byron challenging his friends to a duel. It is astonishing that in such frenzied circumstances, Byron should have found another perch for his heart to alight upon. He began to be besieged with letters from a young lady who signed herself Jane, Clara, Clare and eventually Claire Clairmont and whose command of English contrasted greatly with the stilted and obfuscating language of the law. How refreshing for him to be asked: ‘If a woman whose reputation has yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control her she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she had borne you for many years…could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?' Byron did not answer at first, but when she begged to be admitted alone to meet him and in the utmost privacy, so as to gain advice on a theatrical career, he relented. Aged seventeen, somewhat buxom, she did not have the antelope looks that he was drawn towards, yet he was intrigued by her flashing intelligence and the fact that her stepsister Mary Godwin lived with Shelley, who was one of his avowed admirers. What he did not know then was that Shelley was also open to Claire's electrical charms and had christened her his ‘little comet'.

Her next letter to him had some of Caroline Lamb's audacity. She suggested that they go out of town, some twelve miles or so, by stage or mail, to a quiet place where they were not known, she offering that which had been the passionate wish of her heart to give him. Whether they went out of town or met in London, ten minutes of happy passion, as she put it, would discompose the rest of her life.

In his book
The Love Affairs of Lord Byron
, Francis Gribble paints a scenario of Byron hounded, ‘his household Gods shivering around him and the world training its hose of virtuous indignation upon him'. Byron put it more bluntly–‘I was unfit for England…England was unfit for me.'

Though financially mired, he prepared for exile like a nobleman. He appropriated the name Noel from the Milbanke family, following the death of Annabella's uncle, so that the carriage made by a Mr Baxter bore the initials NB and the coach itself was copied from one the Emperor Napoleon had seized at Cenappe. His retinue included a Swiss named Berger, Fletcher, the loyal but truculent valet, Robert Rushton, no longer his lover, now relegated to cleaning his armoury, and a private physician, Dr Polidori (‘Polly Dolly'), a putative author, who before leaving England had secured from John Murray the sum of £500, to write a diary of the forthcoming eventful journey.

Hardly had they left Piccadilly Terrace when the bailiffs arrived, finding nothing to seize except the servants' fripperies, some squawking birds and a scabby monkey.

At the Ship Inn in Dover where the party, which included Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, had taken lodgings, great quantities of French wine were consumed, while they suffered a reading of an atrocious play by Polly Dolly and local ladies disguised as chambermaids came to gape at the notorious Lord. Earlier in the evening he had gone to visit the grave of a satirist, Charles Churchill, and in some funerary symbolism had lain down on it and later paid the verger a crown to have it returfed.

Early next morning, as the vessel set out on a rough sea with a hard wind, Byron stood on deck and raised his cap in farewell to Hobhouse, who ran to the end of the pier showering blessings on the friend of such gallant and kind spirit. He would never see England again.

In the sixteen-hour journey crossing the Channel, while his companions yielded to seasickness, Byron resolved to seize the themes that had been occupying him in those last frightful weeks. He began Canto Three of
Childe Harold
, of which Sir Walter Scott would say that it mirrored the genius of a powerful and ruined mind, like a shattered castle with its sorcerers and wild demons.

When the steamer arrived at Ostend at midnight, the restraints and detractions of England behind him, a great surge of creativity upon him, he felt such an exhilaration that when they arrived at the Coeur Impérial Hotel, much to Polidori's dismay, Byron fell ‘upon the chambermaid like a thunderbolt'.

‘I breathe lead' he said, at last recognising that by losing Augusta, his sweet sis, the only selfless love he had known, the rock of his hopes and of his life had foundered. In the lyric ‘The Castled Crag of Drachenfels', which he sent her along with some lilies of the valley, the poet celebrates the earthly paradise that he had lived with her, lamenting its loss and imploring her soul to come to his:

Later on, as he crossed the Alps on horseback and mules, the scenery beautiful as a dream, glistening peaks, crevices, storms, crashing avalanches, he enjoined her to love him, as she was beloved by him. He did have to confess to the ‘interlude' with Claire Clairmont, asking her not to scold him, saying a foolish girl had come after him and he was fain to take a little love by way of novelty. What he did not tell her was that Claire was pregnant and had gone home to England ‘in order to people that most desolate isle'.

Since leaving England, he had been adding verses on scraps of paper for Canto Three of
Childe Harold
; as he wrote to Tom Moore, he was ‘half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love inextinguishable, thoughts unutterable and the nightmare of [his] own delinquencies'. But his grief was no longer merely subjective, it was assimilated into the greater and irreparable tragedy of war. In May 1816, derouted to Brussels on account of the stately carriage breaking down, Byron paid a visit to the fields of Waterloo, with Polidori and an acquaintance from childhood, Major Pryse Lockhart Gordon.

That fluke when a writer chances on a situation, whereby the sluice gates of the unconscious are thrown open, is seismic. Waterloo was for Byron what the madeleine was for Proust. Ploughed fields, unmarked graves, importune boys selling swords, helmets, buttons and cockades, and yet standing there and in the next days returning to gallop over it was an apotheosis. In a note to Hobhouse he wrote how he ‘detest[ed] the cause and the victors' and yet Waterloo wrung from him his greatest poem, contrasting the gaiety of the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels with the cannons' opening roar and the eight-hour battle in which fifty thousand lives would be lost–‘Rider and horse,–friend, foe,–in one red burial blent!' It shows Byron at his most profound, signalling the horror of war, the pity of war and above all, the madness of war. In this he was akin to Goya, who at that very same time was painting his greatest, most searing and indignant canvases, depicting the battlefields where the Spanish militia and Napoleon's soldiers had inflicted such barbarities on each other.

But while Byron was brought face to face with the gravity of history, Augusta stood on less hallowed turf at home. Children with colds and chilblains, Augusta Charlotte showing signs of retardedness, Georgina having fidgets and Medora still in the nursery, Colonel Leigh bilious and with a belated suspicion of her intimacy with Byron. Their debts were so exorbitant that they were endeavouring, but without success, to sell Six Mile Bottom to one Reverend William Pugh, only to find that though they owned the house, they did not own the paddocks in front of it. Her reputation almost in shreds, Augusta knew that her post as Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen and the small stipend that came with it, were in jeopardy.

Byron did love her, was haunted by memories of her, that summoned trees and brooks and flowers, but he could also summon the Promethean strength that propelled him into poetry, whereas Augusta could not. Aeneas loved Dido and he trembled when her shade reached him far out at sea, yet he went on to great conquests, whereas Dido impaled herself on the sword that she had taken from him. Augusta did not impale herself, but what she did was to throw herself on the mercy of Annabella, who had joined an evangelical sect and whose prime motive now, with the collusion of Theresa Villiers, was to establish Augusta's criminality. She wanted from Augusta an admission of the irreparable damage she had done to Byron, a confession to the crime of incest. ‘Do not suppose that I wish to exact any confession,' Annabella wrote, but that was exactly what she resolved to do. However, Augusta did not utterly crumble under these interrogations and in a hasty scrawl she protested her innocence: ‘Dearest A, I have not wronged you, I have not abused your generosity…intentionally I have never injured you.' Annabella, now assigned as ‘Guardian Angel', went on to tell her that she must relinquish the pernicious hope of ever seeing Byron again or of being his friend. How quashed Augusta must have been to learn that Byron had betrayed her by showing the babbling letters she had written him to two of her greatest enemies, Caroline Lamb and Lady Melbourne. Her pyrrhic victory was to send Annabella copies of the letters she was receiving from Byron, leaving the outraged wife to declare to Mrs Villiers, ‘They are absolute love letters.'

Unaware of these conspirings, Byron continued to send Augusta gifts, crystals, jewellery, toys for her children and for Ada, along with humorous vignettes of his adventures: the imperial calèche breaking down again and again, the deroute to Brussels, the visit to the fields of Waterloo, pastured rich with the blood of the dead; music and waltzing in Brientz, Flanders a place of pavements, Cologne with a repository containing the bones of eleven thousand virgins and Verona housing the supposed tomb of Juliet. In Milan he was fêted as successor to Petrarch, where he also met the shy young Stendhal and was enraptured at being able to read the love letters and verses between Lucrezia Borgia and her uncle Cardinal Bembo, in the Ambrosian library. ‘And beauty draws us with a single hair' he wrote, because of their shared affinity for Pope, promising to bribe the curator to let him take a strand of Lucrezia's hair to send to her.

He had written for Augusta a journal of the Alps, the ‘
Jungfrau
with all her glaciers; then the Dent d'Argent, shining like truth; then the Little Giant (the
Kleine Eigher
), and the Great Giant (the
Grosse Eigher
); and last, not least, the Wetterhorn', yet reminding her that neither these, the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor glacier nor cloud lifted the weight upon his heart. In ‘Stanzas to Augusta' she is referred to as the ‘solitary star', the ‘gentle flame' by which he is buffeted against total destruction. But it is
Manfred
, a three-act drama, begun in Switzerland and completed in Italy, that is the most naked admission of his love of her.

‘A very wild, metaphysical and inexplicable thing' as he said, inspired by the vastness of the Alps, Goethe's
Faustus
, and fuelled with the lava of his rage, regret and vengeance. Astarte, named after a pagan goddess, is the sister whom Manfred loved but his embraces were fatal to her. Alone in his Gothic castle in the high Alps, he summons the magical deities to grant him obliteration. Instead, Astarte appears but is numb to his agonised pleadings and vanishes as he endeavours to embrace her, at which he swoons. His battles continue on those cold heights, his suicide thwarted by a chamois hunter who gives him the wine of life, the spirits and the Witch of the Alps mocking him as a creature convulsed with passions and seeking things beyond mortality. With Promethean determination he wrestles with these supernatural forces, including the Giant Steed Death, vowing that ‘his torture be tributary to his will', and in death he speaks defiantly to an abbot–‘Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.'

Goethe might praise
Manfred
's ‘heavenly hue of words', but in England the repercussions were vicious and once more the gossip regarding his incestuous relationship circulated. When it appeared in 1817, it was savaged.
The Day
and
New Times
reported that ‘Manfred has exiled himself from society…he has committed incest…Lord Byron has coloured
Manfred
with his own personal features.' Mrs Villiers, in a letter to Annabella, claimed never to have been so disgusted, so horrified, and that by its publication Byron must surely be damned in the eyes of the world. The indictment of Annabella herself, who appears as the ‘other woman', with ‘cold breast and serpent smile', could hardly have escaped her. Yet to Augusta Annabella wrote imperiously, telling her how she must reply to Byron regarding this pernicious work–‘You can only speak of
Manfred
with the most decided expression of your disapprobation. He practically gives you away and implies you were guilty
after
marriage.' Augusta did write to Byron, but true to what Annabella would call her ‘glissant' character, the disapprobation was muffled.

Augusta's replies to Byron's letters became more and more evasive, ‘full of megrims and mysteries', so infuriating him that he asked her to rise above ‘commonplace people and topics', except that she was the prisoner of commonplace people and topics.

 

From Venice, in 1819, he wrote Augusta a letter that must stand as the deepest testament of his feelings–

She sent it to Annabella with a categoric request: ‘Burn it.' Annabella did not burn it, she copied it for the lifelong ‘Histoire' of the man she had spent thirteen months with and returned it to Augusta with a semblance of grace that had long deserted her.