Byron in Love (9 page)

Sir Wedderburn, that ‘glorious object for cuckoldom', recently married to Lady Frances, daughter of the Earl of Mountnorris, invited Byron to visit them at Aston Hall, near Rotherham in Yorkshire. Augusta, at Byron's request, has also been invited, but she declines, now finding herself pregnant and therefore queasy and also guessing that she might be a wallflower in that company. Accepting, Byron requests that he be excused from going to the races at Doncaster and also from dining with them, as he does not dine at all.

The ensuing farcical goings-on, what with misplaced passion and clandestine glances, could easily have been penned by the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whom Byron greatly admired.

Lady Frances proves to be pretty and pleasing, but in delicate health and according to Byron, ‘close to decline'. Webster, ‘jealous to jaundice', gives orations on his wife's beauty, kisses her hand several times at table, overtures which she receives with a noticeable lifelessness. The other guests are frightful, facetious and frivolous. Byron, despite his earlier demur, does attend dinners, Webster droning on about his wife's virtues and high principles, comparing her morals to Christ, at which Byron, fortified with claret, laughs so exceedingly that his host is outraged and harmony only restored because as Byron said the devil himself thought it proper to do so. Daily missives are dispatched to Lady Melbourne and for secrecy's sake the denomination of ‘Ph' is given to Lady Frances, whose virtue must be preserved.

Webster warns Byron that ‘femme' must not see Byron's copies of Dante or Alfieri, which would do her infinite damage. Yet ‘femme' is beginning to show a certain interest in Byron, evidenced by her eyes, her change of colour, a trembling hand and a devotional attitude. Meanwhile, Webster, the Othello monopolist, who in his leisure time writes pamphlets, expounds at table on what he would do to any man who gazed too long at his wife or sought to compromise her–he would exterminate such a brute. Byron concludes to Lady Melbourne that his throat might soon be cut, but vows to retaliate with a ‘roughing' and with shaming Webster by citing the country wenches that he has been pursuing.

Augusta's frantic letters go unanswered, as Byron has found another perch.

The topography of the house however is not ideal for the putative but by now more manifest lovers. In the billiards room, ‘amidst the clashing of billiard balls and the barking Nettle', a poodle which the Websters have given Byron as a present, a declaration is made. Ph asks Byron how a woman who liked a man could inform him of it. Imprudently, as he tells Lady Melbourne and ‘in tender and tolerably turned prose', he risks all by writing a letter. He hands it to Ph in the billiards room, when, to their consternation, ‘Marito', whom Byron wished at the bottom of the Red Sea, enters, but the Lady with great presence of mind deposits the letter inside her gown and close to her heart. So begins another amatory correspondence under Webster's roof, Byron also writing to Annabella Milbanke, addressing her as ‘My dear friend'. For Byron, Ph's letters, which he leaves on the desk in his bedroom, reek too much of virtue and the soul, but then again she is a woman who takes prayers morning and night and as he tells Lady Melbourne, ‘is measured for a Bible every quarter'. Yet he can report that they have, in a sense, ‘made love' and that Platonism is in peril. All that is needed is the privacy to consummate it. Apart from Sir Wedderburn's vigilance, which is manic, Byron also suspects one of the other male guests of having cast himself in the Iago mode, and her sister Lady Catherine, recently jilted, seems to cling over-duly to Ph.

It is decided that the house party will repair to Newstead, the ‘melancholy mansion' of Byron's forebears and where he hopes the residing genii will foster his intentions. During dinner Ph announces to her husband that her sister shall share her room at Newstead, whereupon Webster thunders about his rights and maintains that none but a husband has any legal claim to divide the spouse's pillow. Lady Frances, in a rare moment of spiritedness, whispers to Byron–‘N'importe, this is all nothing', a remark which perplexes him greatly. At Newstead he has one of the mounted skulls filled with claret, which he downs in one go, incurring a fit which bars him from being with the ladies, convulsions followed by such motionlessness that Fletcher believes that his master is dead. But his master revives in order to resume the courtship.

The opportunity at last presents itself. It is two in the morning at Newstead and they are alone, Ph's words so sincere, so serious, she is in a perplexity of love, she owns up to a helplessness, saying she will give herself to him but fears that she will ‘not survive the fall'. Byron is flabbergasted, he is used to women saying no while meaning yes, and this sincerity, this artlessness, this ingenuousness is too much altogether so that he wavers and in a burst of chivalry that he would come to regret, he feels he cannot take advantage of her. Each and every nuance is relayed to the scrutinous Lady Melbourne, who of course is impatient to know if he is willing to go away with Ph. The answer is Yes. To the ends of the earth if necessary, because he loves her, adding that if he had not loved her he would have been more selfish when she yielded.

When the party return to Aston Hall, the entire household is thrown into bile and ill temper, Sir Wedderburn prating at servants in front of the guests, sermonising his wife and her sister in front of the guests, and a general feeling that something catastrophic is about to occur.

What transpires is that Byron is due to leave, Frances's heart, though broken, is cemented to his as she gives him the gift of a seal, asks that he be faithful to her and vow that they meet in the spring.

On the eve of departure, Sir Wedderburn plays a caddish card, tells his wife that Byron confessed to him that he had only come and stayed to seek the hand of Lady Catherine, the drooping sister. Ph is devastated. Byron has deceived her. There is weeping and gnashing at their last secret rendezvous in the garden. Then Webster borrows £1,000 from his befuddled houseguest. The following morning as Byron prepares to step into his carriage, Webster confounds matters by professing such a friendship that he will accompany Byron to London. On the wearisome journey, Webster assures him that he and his wife are totally in love and marriage the happiest of all possible estates.

Meanwhile, Lady Frances has begun her copious correspondence, penning letters that extend to eighteen pages, dilating on Byron's beauty and her ‘bursting heart'. Borne out in a poem, ‘Concealed Griefs', Lady Melbourne, who is privy to this dotage, does not doubt Ph's sincerity, but pronounces her ‘childish and tiresome'.

Byron had not, as he believed, exorcised the love of Augusta and with his mind in such ‘a state of fermentation' he was obliged to discharge it in rhyme. A first draft of
The Bride of Abydos
was completed in four days, the ‘lines strung as fast as minutes'. It recounts the passion and doomed love of Princess Zuleika and her brother Selim, Zuleika lamenting her solitary plight as she is banished to a tower. Fear of detection, as he wrote to Dr E.D. Clarke at that time, and his recent intrigue in the north, induced him to alter the consanguinity of the lovers and confine them to cousinship.

‘Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed' Byron wrote, borrowing from, though misquoting, Pope's poem
Eloisa to Abelard
. Though the names and the narrative were ascribed to the East, the emotional turmoil certainly belonged in Bennett Street, with traces of Augusta everywhere and his inability to break with her. Publish it he must, suggesting to John Murray that it might steal quietly into the world with
The Giaour
, which featured a Venetian noble, intent on the rescue of a slave girl, Leila, from the harem of her vicious pasha. Deferring to the mores of the time, while realising that it would weaken its inner voltage, Byron agreed to make a change in
The Bride
, so as to remove the frightful taboo of incest. Brother and sister were altered to being first cousins. Though not a poet, Augusta felt compelled to respond to it in verse and by not being a poet her reply is all the more moving. Writing in French and with a haunting poignancy, she wished to share all his feelings, to see through his eyes, to live only for him, he being the only destiny that could make her happy. In the sheet of paper she had also enclosed a curl of her chestnut hair, tied with white silk. Byron kept it all his life and on the folded paper wrote ‘La Chevelure of the one I most
loved
'. Her signature ended with the branches of a cross, the mathematical symbol confirming the secret of their love, and Byron had two seals made for a brooch that they would wear.

Within three months the love for Lady Frances had waned and hearing that he was with his sister, she envied that ‘happy happy woman' and hoped that Augusta would not despise her. In vain and on bended knees she asked for her letters to be returned, but the request was ignored. He had tired of her, her constancy and her naiveté. Her tedious use of
aimer
merely confirmed for him the blindness of nature.

In January 1814 the River Trent was frozen, the Great North Road heaped with snowdrifts as Byron's carriage wended its perilous way north, to Newstead Abbey. Augusta, ‘big with bairn', was with him and it would be her first visit to their ancestral home. The four weeks they would spend there constituted a honeymoon for them both, Byron saying, ‘We never yawn or disagree, and laugh more than is suitable to so solid a mansion.' The snow swirled outside, the footpaths and oak trees were thick with it, the oak trees weighed down and Joe Murray kept fires crackling in rooms, corridors and bedrooms. The coal, as Byron reported, was excellent, the wine cellar was full and his head emptied of all his London cares.

In his bulletins to Lady Melbourne, which were half swagger and half confession, he admitted that the kind of feeling which had lately absorbed him had ‘a mixture of the terrible which renders all passion insipid to a degree'. He was speaking, or rather intimating, his love for his sister, ‘the one soft breast he knew'. It was one part innocence because of their missed companionship in childhood, but it was also damnation. Any error Augusta might have committed was his fault entirely, Augusta was not aware of her peril until it was too late.

Those weeks in which Augusta was wife and sister to him were the happiest of his life. She sympathised with his black moods and the violent arc of his feelings, saw the loaded pistols kept beside his bed and witnessed the nightmares in which he cried out, sometimes beset by a ghost. She ministered to him, loved him and put a napkin between his teeth because he ground them so in his sleep. In short, she was not afraid of him.

The Corsair
, which Mr Murray had just published, was an immediate success and Byron once again seen as a celebrity. It was a Turkish tale ‘scribbled' during his disquietude while he believed himself to be in love with both Lady Frances and Augusta. Byron used a motto from Tasso to describe Conrad the Pirate–‘Within him his thoughts cannot sleep.' A man of mystery and loneliness, he is espoused to Medora, the fair Penelope waiting in her tower, and Gulnare, the dark bewitching Circe, imprisoned in a harem by Pacha Seyd. Conrad manages to rescue Gulnare, whereupon she falls madly in love with him and murders her Pacha. He cannot escape the fact that lovers become murderers, something true for both men and women, he causing Medora to die of a broken heart, and Gulnare in her love-frenzy, the murderer of Seyd. The scenario of two women fighting for the love of a man would be re-enacted in Byron's life, between Augusta and Annabella Milbanke, Byron himself pitched into a similar hideous ‘sepulchre' as Conrad was, doomed to a wandering life.

The predictable indignation from the Tory press was ‘vehement and unceasing loud', Conrad, the alter ego of Byron, called an infidel and a devil was likened to Richard III, wringing from him the crisp rejoinder that ‘lame animals cover best'. But these cavils and calumnies were mitigated by a rapturous letter from John Murray: ‘I believe I have now sold 13,000 Copies, a thing perfectly unprecedented & the more grateful to me too as every buyer returns with looks of satisfaction & expressions of delight.' Princess Charlotte, he added, had devoured it twice in the course of the day, but its fame spread beyond royal circles and there was not a man in the street ‘who [had] not read or heard-read
The Corsair
'. Some passages, as Murray noted, were ‘written in gold', a gold that Robert Dallas was still the lucky recipient of.

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.