Byron in Love (8 page)

Byron, buoyed somewhat by the supposed sale of Newstead, believed that he was about to receive £25,000 from the deposit paid by Mr Claughton, a Lancashire lawyer; he decided to go to Cheltenham to take the spa waters, resume his rigorous fasting for his various maladies and avail himself of the society ladies, all of whom went there in September, sated from the summer revels. Mr Claughton however only paid £5,000, a sum which Byron after a lapse of years, felt obligated to repay to Scrope Davies, but he set out for Cheltenham anyhow. His first female consolation was an Italian songstress with dark eyes and a poetical voice, who spoke no English, which for Byron was a blessing. Their dalliance was marred only by her huge appetite, consuming chicken wings, sweetbreads, custards, peaches and port wine, an affront to the 24-year-old poet who had told Lady Melbourne that ladies should only partake of lobster salad and champagne.

But Caro had not fallen silent or been locked away, as Byron might have hoped. Express letters flowed from her, castigation, abject pleadings or boasts of the men who did love her, the Duke's mob and all the Waterford swains. Byron was advising her to curb her vanity, which was ridiculous, and to exert her caprices on some new conquest, he himself having gained the attentions of a most egalitarian lady.

Lady Oxford, formerly Lady Jane Elizabeth Scott, a rector's daughter, beautiful, enlightened and unconventional, had, as she would tell Byron, been forced into marriage at the age of twenty-two, to the fifth Earl of Oxford, an out-and-out dullard. She had given her favours to other men quite soon after marriage and her children were sired by five different men. Her husband, with an estimable complacency, was said to have forgiven her, being so struck by her candour and frank confession. Lady Oxford considered herself an intellectual, was a stalwart of the Whig Party and a member of the Hampden Club, where gentlemen radicals and blackguards mingled in the wan hope of reforming one another. She professed to live her life according to the tenets of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and so she would become Byron's enchantress and ‘titular genius'. She urged him to be more politicised, something to which he was not tractable, seldom seen in the House of Lords, where he made only three speeches, one on behalf of the Nottingham weavers and the second on behalf of five million Irish Catholics whose condition he said was worse than that of black slaves. He had gone there reluctantly from a dinner party and by his wit and invective, kept the House in roars of laughter through the night, his presence however providing that majority of one for the motion to be passed.

Lady Oxford was thirty-eight when she and Byron met, her ripe charms suggesting to him a Claude Lorrain painting at sunset, its last dying beams having a singular radiance. He was invited to spend two months at their country mansion, Eywood, in Herefordshire, and soon unwisely relays to Lady Melbourne that he is in the ‘bowers of Armida'. Sensing her chagrin he wrote again to reassure her that
her
spells for him retained their full force. The countryside is wild and beautiful, Byron plays blind man's buff with Lady Oxford's children, they go sightseeing, days and nights are passed in unparalleled quiet and contentment and he has not yawned once, which is a phenomenon for him. How gratifying it would be for us to have a picture of those drawing rooms, those galleries and staircases where servants came and went, privy to so many indiscretions, to know what Lady Oxford, the ‘enchantress', wore for dinner or how draughty it might have been in the big dining room when Lord Oxford's elderly aunts, who lived upstairs in retirement, were allowed down. But Byron does not tell us, having no time for domestic minutiae, since his tastes were for the more grandiose.

There were days when he felt that perhaps he should be setting out for London, but then the roads were flooded and anyhow his male friends in the capital were preoccupied with politics and debt and gout. He had cast himself as Rinaldo in Tasso's
Gerusalemme
, whose amours kept him from his duties as a crusader.

He had been pleading with Lady Melbourne, his ‘dear Machiavel', to manage Caro and since it proved fruitless, he decided on harsher measures, resolving to become ‘as treacherous as Talleyrand'. Caroline had asked for a lock of his hair and instead he had sent one of Lady Oxford's, along with her seal, which bore her initials. Recognising it, Caroline was aghast. Lady Oxford had been her dear friend. Had they not conducted a literary correspondence, cogitating on whether Greek purified or inflamed the passions, and now that selfsame friend, her mentor, her Aspasia, had deceived her. She dashes off a letter, a ‘German tirade' as he called it, to Lady Oxford, to force the truth, to know what is between them. Lady Oxford does not condescend to reply, but when the threats become more urgent, when couriers arrive with twenty-page letters, when Caro threatens to inform Lord Oxford himself and worse to call on them, Byron is told by his balmy mistress to sever the connection. He does so in a manner that could only succeed in unhinging Caro even more–‘Our affections are not in our power,' he wrote. ‘My opinion of you is entirely altered…I love another.'

Within a week the postmark is from Holyhead, signalling that Caro and family are returning. En route, she has collapsed and has had to be bled and leeched at ‘the filthy Dolphin Inn' in Cornwall. Once installed at Brocket Hall, the Melbourne country estate, she insists that they should meet but is refused. She is asking for a ring and trinkets that she gave him to be returned. Byron no longer has them as, unwisely, he has given them to Lady Charlotte, Lady Oxford's eleven-year-old daughter, for whom he had formed an unhealthy passion, something her mother summarily put a stop to.

Caro was insatiate. She gave herself the name of Phryne, Horace's vengeful Roman courtesan. She was seen riding wildly on the turnpikes of Hertfordshire, near Brocket Hall, had
Ne Crede B
–in contradiction of his family motto
Crede Byron
–inscribed on the buttons of her servants' livery and wheedled a miniature of Byron, which was meant for Lady Oxford, from his publisher John Murray. She staged an auto-da-fé in the gardens at Brocket Hall, whereby an effigy of Byron met the same fate as that of Guy Fawkes. Young girls from the nearby village of Welwyn were recruited, dressed in white and put to dance around a fire onto which an exulting Caro, half Ophelia, half Lady Macbeth, threw copies of Byron's letters, along with rings, flowers and trinkets, while her pages recited the verse she had composed–

The brutal letter in which he had said ‘Our affections are not in our power–mine are engaged. I love another' would be embodied in her sensational novel,
Glenarvon
, written in a feverish month and published in 1816, much to the chagrin of London society, whom she also pilloried. Hobhouse noted that the novel ‘rendered the vicious little author more odious if possible than ever'. The Melbournes had her declared insane and persuaded William to divorce her, except that on the morning he was to sign the necessary papers, Caroline was seen sitting on his lap feeding him bread and butter. When Byron read it in Geneva, after his exile, he merely said, ‘I read
Glenarvon
too…God Damn.'

While Caroline's vengeance was in full spate, in 1812 and 1813, Lady Melbourne was still urging her son William to seek a divorce, except that he hesitated. He cannot have been too displeased at seeing Byron, a man he hated, mauled and humiliated by his wife. Years later, when he became Prime Minister, he told Queen Victoria that Byron ‘was treacherous beyond conception…he dazzled everybody and deceived them'.

Byron and Lady Oxford would both say that for those seven or eight months they lived like ‘the gods of Lucretius', their harmony shattered only by a slight distress when Lady Oxford thought she was pregnant, jolting Lord Oxford from his pusillanimous and admirable tolerance. It turned out to be a false alarm, but a certain dimming of the passions ensued and in that mysterious way in which marriages can be redeemed, Lord and Lady Oxford, by then heavily in debt, sailed for the Continent, leaving a somewhat peeved Lord Byron behind, who confessed to Lady Melbourne that he was more ‘Carolinish' than he could have imagined.

 

A new sensation he might call it, an emotional hurricane would be more precise. Augusta Leigh, Byron's half-sister and five years his senior, has been variously depicted as scatterbrained, a moral idiot and a schemer, her childhood as fractured and peripatetic as Byron's own. Her mother Amelia fell in love with the charismatic Mad Jack, Byron's father, and when she told her husband, Lord Carmarthen, that she was leaving him and their three children, he is said ‘to have fainted away three times'. Soon after Augusta was born, Amelia, still infatuated with the errant Mad Jack, rose too soon from her confinement to follow him on a hunt. She caught a lingering disease and died on Augusta's first birthday and her child was raised by her aristocratic relatives. Byron and Augusta had met only occasionally down the years and at Cambridge he had enlisted her in his vendettas against the woman he was ‘ashamed to call mother'. However, he felt an affinity for her and believed that between them there existed a mystical thread.

Now, at the zenith of his fame, Augusta is asking for his help. Her husband, Colonel George Leigh, former equerry of the Prince of Wales, a man of the turf, an habitué of the gaming tables, charming to women and overbearing to subordinates, is mired in debt. Arriving in London in April 1813, she had to leave her house at Six Mile Bottom near Newmarket in Cambridgeshire to escape the bailiffs, her three children elsewhere and her husband on an extended visit to his racing friends.

Byron, though still smarting from Lady Oxford's defection, is pleased at the announcement of her arrival and has asked Lady Melbourne to get him a ‘she-voucher' for Almack's Dancing Palace in King Street, a hundred-foot assembly room to which only the privileged were admitted. Augusta is in his rooms in Bennett Street, his books and his sabres along the walls, rooms where women were rarely admitted, tired from the coach journey, somewhat dowdy, given to blushing and shy as a hare, like Byron himself. She is to stay with her cousin, the Hon. Theresa Villiers, in nearby Berkeley Street and already Byron is promising to watch over her as if she were an unmarried woman. Her presence is soon a delight, that softening influence that he always sought in women, Augusta making the short journey each day to be with him, chatty, pliant and silly with her large grey eyes and her baby talk, she seems to understand him as no woman previously had. It's crinkum and crankum and laughter, pulling him out of his grumps, and the lame foot that he had so determinedly hidden from all others, not hidden from her and christened by them ‘the little foot'. And so it is Guss and Goose and Baby Byron and foolery and giggles, Augusta wearing the new dresses and silk shawls he has bought for her, the thrill of showing her off to the acerbic hostesses, home in his carriage at five or six in the morning, gabbling, mimicking the hoi polloi and somehow it happened, the transition from affection to something untoward. Never, he said, ‘was seduction so easy'. They are besotted, they are in love, they are confused, travelling from London to Six Mile Bottom, then back to London again, making irrational plans to go abroad. Soon there are hints to his friends, Lady Melbourne informed of the Gordian knot tied too close to his heart, and to Tom Moore he writes, ‘I am, at this moment, in a far more serious and entirely new scrape than any of the last twelvemonths, and that is saying a great deal.'

To himself he admits that this love is a mixture of good and diabolical as all passions are. He gives Colonel Leigh £1,000, cancels a passage that he was to make alone on a ship and prepares to elope with Augusta, possibly to Sicily. Augusta wishes to bring one of her daughters with her, but Byron detests children and says anyhow a child can be conceived on the spot. Confiding in her few friends, Augusta is told to recall her mother's madness at leaving a husband for Mad Jack and precipitating her own death. Lady Melbourne, her suspicions founded, tells him, ‘If you do not retreat, you are lost forever, it is a crime for which there is no forgiveness in this world or in the next.' The plans to travel begin to falter. There is a plague across Europe, there is their mounting trepidation and the condemnation of the world waiting to fall upon them. He resolves to go away anyhow, to cut himself off from her, a passage in any ship, Cadiz, St Petersburg, Italy, anywhere. Deeply in debt, horrified at casting up his moral accounts, he nevertheless prepares for this flight by ordering swords, guns, mahogany dressing boxes, writing desks, uniforms, umpteen pairs of nankeen trousers, scarlet officers' coats, gold epaulettes, snuff boxes, telescopes and precious gifts for Mussulman nobles.

Lady Melbourne warns him never to return to Six Mile Bottom, he does anyhow, leaves after twenty-four hours, he and Scrope Davies that night consuming six bottles of claret and burgundy in Cambridge. He returned to London a distraught man. Bizarrely, he resumes a correspondence with Annabella Milbanke, saying that on the score of friendship he cannot trust himself as he could not help but love her. His doctor, unsurprisingly, diagnoses an awryness of mind and body, emotions out of compass, which he ascribes to a life of prodigal excesses. To vanquish his ‘demon', which is to say the conquering of his love for Augusta, he accepts an invitation from his Cambridge friend, ‘that fool of fools', Sir Wedderburn Webster.