How much did Annabella already know about the young man whose small, proud head and aloof manner she studied with such eager interest on 25 March?
Reading the Edinburgh Review’s advance puff of Childe Harold and its author in February 1812, Annabella had learned from Francis Jeffrey’s unsigned and influential review that the poem’s author could stand comparison with Dryden and (he was one of Annabella’s particular favourites) George Crabbe. Thrillingly, she learned that there was an evident and powerful connection between the young poet and his poem’s eponymous Childe, a ‘sated epicure . . . his heart burdened by a long course of sensual indulgence’, who wanders through Europe’s loveliest scenery with the restless displeasure of Milton’s Lucifer, ‘hating and despising himself most of all for beholding it with so little emotion’.
Since everybody in London society was talking about Childe Harold’s author by the time that Annabella met him, it’s probable that she also knew that he, like herself, was an only child. (His half-sister Augusta was the daughter of Captain Byron’s first marriage to Lady Conyers, the once wealthy and – so shockingly – divorced wife of the Marquis of Camarthen.) She may not have known that young Byron and his own once wealthy Scottish mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, had been subsequently abandoned by his philandering, financially reckless, and finally debt-ridden father. She would certainly have learned that he had returned from his two-year tour of Europe in the summer of 1811, just before the sudden death of his mother at Newstead Abbey, an appealingly derelict family mansion of precisely the kind that a romantic young poet ought to own. (Byron spent little time at Newstead, leaving it under the sporadic supervision of a cheerful young sailor cousin, his namesake and – at the present time – his heir.)
This was mere background detail. Annabella was more interested to discover that Lord Byron’s scornful expression concealed a generous heart and a strong social conscience, clear evidence of which had already emerged in his first – and widely discussed – public speech.
Byron was paying one of his occasional visits to Newstead in December 1811, when the tranquil surface of country life in Nottinghamshire was ruffled by an outbreak of rioting. The introduction of new mechanical looms threatened the livelihood of stocking-makers at a time when weaving provided the sole source of income for many poor families. A few bold rebels smashed the new frames that were intended to put them out of work. The punishment, at a time of vicious repression, was transportation and fourteen years of exile to a penal colony in Australia. In February 1812, a bill was introduced to change that penalty from deportation to death.
The government’s brutal response to Nottinghamshire’s angry frame-breakers was the subject that Byron picked for his maiden speech in the House of Lords.* Parliamentary speeches during that period tended to be stupefyingly dull. Byron’s, delivered on 27 February, was inflammatory: ‘Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows?’ he demanded of a largely admiring House. A week later, his angry poem on ‘Framers of the Frame Bill’ (‘Who, when asked for a remedy, sent down a rope’) was printed in the Morning Chronicle. The poem appeared anonymously, but Byron’s distinctive voice was easily identified.
Scores of the young ladies who panted after Byron in 1812 were attracted by the mad, bad and dangerous aspect of his volatile personality. Annabella saw a man who – like herself – sought to be of service to the world. Had he not proved it, during their very first conversations, by the concern he evinced for the orphan of her former protégé, Joseph Blacket? (Annabella was unaware that Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, written before his departure for the Continent, had poked fun at the former cobbler for his high-flown poetry.)
Besieged by admirers during that happy spring of 1812 as she had never been before, Annabella’s letters home dwelt increasingly upon one subject. Lord Byron was ‘without exception of young or old more agreeable in conversation than any person I know . . . a very bad, very good man,’ she informed her mother on 16 April. Byron, so Sir Ralph learned on the following day, was ‘deeply repentant’ for his youthful sins; by 26 April, Annabella was ready to proclaim it as her ‘Christian duty’ to offer him spiritual guidance. Was this really a mission to redeem Lord Byron’s soul, her nervous mother wondered, or had Annabella fallen in love with a hardened reprobate? Writing to Lady Melbourne, never her favourite member of the Milbanke family, Judith confessed her fears and solicited – for the first time in her life – that worldly lady’s personal intervention.
Judith’s appeal fell into outstretched hands. ‘My cousins cannot live without me,’ Annabella had innocently boasted to her parents on 15 April, during a month in which she spent almost as much time at Melbourne House as under Mary Gosford’s roof. Flattered by the smooth courtesies of Lady Melbourne and her daughter, Emily (Lady Cowper), Annabella remained blissfully unconscious of her value as a pawn in their scheme to sabotage Byron’s increasingly public relationship with Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law, the lovesick, married and scandal-prone Caroline Lamb.
Judith’s information was swiftly put to use. Hints of Byron’s growing interest in William Lamb’s starchy little cousin were intended to discourage Lady Caroline; instead, they spurred a jealous mistress into action. Towards the end of April, Annabella was persuaded – without much difficulty – to hand over a selection of her own poems, in order – so Caroline sweetly declared – that she might obtain Lord Byron’s sincere opinion of their merit.
Lord Byron did not, as Caroline must have hoped, jeer at Annabella’s high-minded verses: if
