Byron in Love (7 page)

From 1812 to 1814, at the peak of his fame, Byron's heart, as he said, was always alighting on the nearest perch and there were many perches at his disposal.

The fugue of women involved with him included Lady Melbourne, his
tactique
confidante and co-conspirator; Lady Caroline Lamb, her daughter-in-law; Lady Oxford, his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Lady Frances Webster and Annabella Milbanke. To Lady Melbourne he wrote three and four times a day, enclosing copies of all the love letters he was receiving, flattering her, adding that if she were younger she would turn his head as she had indeed turned his heart; and to Annabella Milbanke, her niece and his future wife, he would in one of his treacherous boasts, claim of having had ‘criminal connections with the old Lady', at her instigation, though she being old, he hardly knew how to set about it. But in 1812 at the zenith of his fame, he was her ‘creature'. Lady Melbourne was not a woman of great virtue, but she knew how to conduct an affair in those gladiatorial circles. She had been married at sixteen to Sir Peniston Lamb, who presently took a mistress, inculcating in her a withering cynicism. With her friend Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, she had sat for Daniel Gardner's portrait
Macbeth, Witches round the Cauldron
. She did not languish in marital doldrums, became a ‘favourite' of the Prince of Wales and mistress of Lord Egremont, to whom she bore two children. Her son William Lamb, whom she was grooming for a political career, was having an affair with Caroline's mother, Lady Bessborough, when he sighted her, at the age of thirteen, deciding that she was by far the most ravishing and covetable of the Devonshire set.

Byron's affair with ‘Caro, the little volcano', lasted under five months, incurring a disproportionate amount of attention at the time and subsequently the subject of biographies, novels including
Glenarvon
, penned by the aggrieved lady herself, in which Byron the anti-hero is accredited with every crime from murder to incest to infanticide, but as he said he had not sat long enough for the portrait.

Lady Caroline and he seemed destined for each other, both aristocratic, preening and disdainful. Wildly unconventional, Caro often dressed in the scarlet and sepia livery of her pages and in her commonplace book, gave herself the nicknames of Sprite, Ariel, Titania and Little Fairy Queen. As with every other young woman, she was agog to meet the author of
Childe Harold
, since author and fictional hero were interchangeable. Samuel Rogers, a banker and poet whose poems were, according to Byron, ‘all sugar and sago', had given her a copy of
Childe Harold
, which so enthralled her that she resolved she must meet him, even if he was as ugly as Aesop.

She dispatched an anonymous letter to Byron, suggested they meet at Hookham's Bookshop and maybe indulge in a ‘drop', while also implying that she was married and a woman of consequence. On first seeing him at Lady Westmorland's, surrounded by so many beautiful and designing women, Caro turned on her heel and declined to be presented, leaving him somewhat piqued. A few days later, returning from a gallop in Hyde Park, all ‘filthy' and ‘heated', as she sat with Tom Moore and Rogers, Byron was announced. She flew out of the room to change her habit and returned in a beautiful diaphanous gown, the sort of dress she wore at the waltzing parties in Melbourne House and Almack's Club, where heiresses went in search of husbands and married women in search of dalliances to avenge their ever-faithless husbands. The imperial waltz, imported from the Rhine, was all the rage, Byron however detesting it, since he could not himself dance, and in a scathing verse rebuked the wanton willing limbs and the grotesque figure of the Prince of Wales, who ‘with his princely paunch' was regarded as an expert waltzer.

However, he was captivated by Caro, her boyish good looks, her pale gold bobbed hair, her bewitching voice and intermittent lisp. She claimed not to know where bread and butter came from, ate only off silver and believed that England was comprised of marquises, earls and beggars. She and her husband William Lamb lived under the same roof as the scrutinous Lady Melbourne, a strategy which both mother-in-law and husband resolved upon, to curb some of Caro's wilder sallies. At her wedding to William she had a hysterical fit, tore her wedding gown and collapsed at the altar. She would later, in a scalding letter, tell her mother-in-law that William was a flagellist, that he had schooled her in the most unusual sexual deviations and sabotaged the few virtues that she had possessed.

Before the evening ended Byron asked if he could meet her alone and next day she ordered that a rope handrail be fitted to the three flights of stone stairs to serve as an impromptu banister. The first roses and carnations which he sent her carried a note alluding to the fact that ‘Her Ladyship' liked everything that was new and rare. These flowers, dried and preserved, were found in a book in her room in Melbourne House after her death in 1828. Byron's visits were tolerated by husband and mother-in-law because they believed, as with all her cravings, her passions would subside. She already had had an affair with Sir Godfrey Webster, who gave her a farewell gift of a dog, which bit her six-year-old son Augustus. Byron would arrive at eleven in the morning and sit with her in the tiny bedroom that overlooked St James's Park, where she was to be found opening her letters, choosing her dresses for the day or playing ball with little Augustus, whose sickness was believed to be a consequence of hereditary syphilis. She had cancelled her waltzing mornings.

To his male friends Byron was penning jaunty bulletins of the progress he was making, but his letters to her allow for no doubt of his having fallen in love–

Her heart and all else did not only meet his, but flew before it and never would she forget when he first kissed her in the carriage and drew her to him ‘like a magnet'. At its zenith, he decided they should elope, a proposal she thrilled to, proving herself to be surprisingly practical, even arranging to sell her jewels to go to the ends of the earth with him, but Byron was already hesitating. She had grown supine, the very haughtiness, the disdain, the unpredictability that had intrigued him were no more. A clinging Caro, she was ‘the unworthy sunflower basking in the light of the unclouded Sun God'. He had misread his little
enfant terrible
. In a chastened letter he wrote to say ‘the dream and delirium must pass away, the veil of illusion must be lifted from [their] eyes, a month's absence and [they] would become rational'.

She would have none of it. She did foolish, precipitous and humiliating things. No longer Ariel or Titania, she was ‘poor Caro William' whom hostesses were ridiculing in their smug exchanges between one another. She laid siege to Byron. She made friends with Fletcher so as to gain admittance to Byron's rooms in St James's Street, to rifle through his letters and journals for evidence of betrayal, she would plead to be asked to suppers where he had been asked and if refused she would wait in the garden or talk to the coachmen, believing that her status set her above ridicule, except that it didn't. Dallas describes a page in scarlet Hussar jacket and pantaloons, appearing in Byron's rooms, the light hair curling about the face and a fancy hat in the hand, who turned out not to be a page but Caroline herself in disguise. Byron sat mutely, because he disliked scenes, but he was also fascinated by Caro's androgyny and powerless to tear himself completely away from her mischiefs and her declared transgressions with her pages, male and female. Hobhouse describes another incursion, thunderous raps on the door, Caroline climbing the garret stairs in a man's heavy overcoat with a page's attire underneath, shouting that there would be blood spilt, if Byron tried to escape from her. She still believed she could win him back and Hobhouse, knowing Byron's vacillating temperament, also feared such an outcome.

Byron himself shilly-shallied, saying at one point that there was no alternative but for him and Caroline to go away together. Hobhouse, with the help of the shopkeeper downstairs, escorted her out of there into a series of carriages and eventually she was brought back to her distraught mother and her incensed mother-in-law. Next day, Byron received a cutting of her auburn pubic hair tinged with blood, asking that he send the same in return, his wild antelope adding, ‘I asked you not to send blood but yet do–because if it means love I like to have it.' Her capriciousness knew no bounds, she would be missing, she would be found hiding in a chemist's in Pall Mall or selling her opal ring to take a stagecoach to Portsmouth, refusing Lady Bessborough's plea that they go to Ireland, then claiming that she was pregnant and that with a long journey there she might miscarry. The Prince of Wales, hearing of these lunacies, as indeed everyone had, claimed that Byron had bewitched the whole Melbourne household, mothers, mothers-in-law and daughters all, making fools of them. Lady Bessborough finally made her decision and so mother, daughter and Sir William set out for one of the Bessborough estates in County Waterford in Ireland.

Byron shed tears of agitation at their parting and his farewell letter to her, which she kept to the end of her days, confirms him as one of the most ardent lovers on the page–‘Do you think now I am cold and stern and artful?…“Promise not to love you!” Ah, Caroline, it is past promising…You know I would with pleasure give up all here and all beyond the grave for you…'

Caroline was devastated, a cousin who met them en route described her as ‘worn to the bone, pale as death, her eyes staring out of her head', while William laughed away and ate like a trooper.

With the rolling seas between them, Byron could afford to be gallant, though Lady Melbourne is advocating ruthlessness, better as she put it a little present pain to avoid future ruin. To Caro he dispatched ‘absurdities' to keep her gay, his equilibrium somewhat rattled when she reminded him that only eight guineas and the mail boat lay between them or when her letters became more threatening. She also began a correspondence with her detested mother-in-law Lady Melbourne, wishing it known and therefore relayed to Byron that she had kept his letters, brimming as they did with passion. Byron quaked at the thought that a volley of intemperate and by now hollow declarations would be exposed to the world. Marriage, he decided, was the only way to escape from her, and marriage within three weeks at that. Fletcher, his valet since his youth, who had travelled with him to the Levant, proposed a Dutch widow who had moved to London, ‘a woman of great riches and rotundity', her little maid Abigail a possible catch for Fletcher himself.

Byron had set his sights elsewhere.

At one of the waltz parties in Melbourne House, Caroline in full plumage, Byron had noticed another young woman, unattached, a little plump and decidedly reserved. This was Annabella Milbanke, Lady Melbourne's philosophically minded niece. In her diary that same evening, Annabella did not dilate on his being her fate, instead she described a mouth that betrayed an acrimonious spirit, a man full of disdain which he did not always try to conceal. In a letter to her mother she said that she had made no overtures at the shrine of
Childe Harold
, while conceding that she would not refuse the offer of his acquaintance. Byron noted her apparent modesty, her fresh complexion, her round pink cheeks which were in contrast to the artificiality of most of the ladies present; however, he mistook her for a lady's companion rather than an heiress in her own right. It was Tom Moore who apprised him of her fortune and said, ‘Marry her and repair Newstead.'

‘I was, am and shall be I fear attached to another, one to whom I have never said much', so he announced to Lady Melbourne. Surprised at it being her gauche niece, her crisp retort was that poor Annabella's looks might improve if she should be in love with him. Nevertheless and despite her possessiveness of him, she thought marriage might free him from Caroline, whose spell he had not fully thrown off, and also she was flattered at his declared delight at the pleasure of being able to call her ‘aunt'. It was she, on Byron's behalf, who dispatched the formal proposal and it was to her the disappointing reply came–‘Believing that he will never be the object of that strong affection which could make me happy in domestic life I should wrong him by any measure that might even indirectly confirm his present impressions.' Byron could, Annabella added, excite affection perhaps in her, but she was uncertain if he could inspire esteem. However, to her friend Lady Gosford, she confessed to being in a state of high excitement and felt the necessity to alter the channel of her feelings.

Byron took the refusal blithely, said she would have been a cold collation, whereas he preferred hot suppers. Lady Melbourne, at her own initiative, decided to pursue matters, asking Annabella what qualities she would require in a husband. Annabella followed with a list that included duty, strong and generous feelings, reason, economy, manners rather than beauty, adding that she would not ‘enter into a family where there is a strong tendency to Insanity'. Lady Melbourne replied, saying it was doubtful that Annabella would ever find a person worthy to be her husband while she remained on her stilts, reminding her that marriage was a sort of lottery.