Mrs Jameson was also aiming a shaft at the child’s absent mother. Ada, until her early thirties, remained singularly detached from her offspring. Back in 1839, she had cared enough to insist – in keeping with her Unitarian beliefs – that little Ralph must not be formally christened. By 1845, she was happy to yield the 6-year-old boy’s upbringing entirely to her mother, while leaving Lovelace to oversee conscientious Miss Cooper, the governess to their older two children.
Ada’s withdrawal from the conventional maternal role meant that the earl, while always able to draw upon the Hen for calm advice, was obliged to take an active interest in his children. A stickler for discipline, he tried to control everything, from the hour at which the children rode out upon their ponies to the hour at which Miss Cooper began her schoolroom duties. A clock stood within sight of the earl’s bed and his door was always wedged open. Miss Cooper habitually commenced her duties fifteen minutes late. The impulse to provoke such a time-conscious employer must have been irresistible.
Lord Lovelace’s children never learned to love their father in the way that they did the small, upright figure of whom little Ralph once sweetly observed that ‘Granma’ reminded him of a cow licking her newborn calf, while Lady Annabella relished the occasional treat of being allowed to unpin and brush her grandmother’s waterfall of light-brown hair.* Their grandmother had a gentler manner, but the earl, in his own gruff way, did his best. Taken out of context, Lovelace’s actions can sound harsh. But it was not so unkind for a father to ask a 9-year-old Victorian boy to write his granny a short letter in Latin about the tearing of his riding cape on a bramble bush. While it was thoughtless to threaten a habitually inattentive pupil (Byron Ockham again, on 19 August 1845) with putting him in the blinkers of ‘a nasty, dirty horse’ if he did not sit up and listen, a threat is not equivalent to a deed and Ockham was a very reluctant pupil.
It was the remembered tedium of sharing his dinner table with William Carpenter (together with the tutor’s wife and their starchy visitors) that caused Lovelace to reject his mother-in-law’s prompt offer to engage a replacement tutor. (Annabella ended by hiring the phrenologically impeccable Mr Herford herself, as a special tutor to young Ralph.) Meanwhile, advised by an anxious mother-in-law that Ada was far too ill to assist him, Lord Lovelace resolved to educate the children on his own.
Writing to her esteemed son-in-law from Kirkby Mallory on 21 August, Annabella bleakly described Ada’s health as ‘of a very unfavourable character’. She herself planned to remain in Brighton in order to assist in any way that her daughter might require. Ada also admitted that she was indeed in a bad way. ‘You poor dear patient thing – my own bird – the news you give me of the abcess tears my heart,’ Lovelace wrote to Ada in Brighton on 30 August. On 12 October, he despatched one of his most tender notes, hoping that his dear Bird might soon again ‘spread her brilliant wings in the sight of the admiring crow & her young’. Two days later, he confessed to Ada his terror that she might become too ill to perform the work, both in science and music, that she so loved (‘one of the saddest of my many sad reflections about you’).
It’s impossible to doubt that William Lovelace, although often selfish and increasingly obsessed by his social position in the world, remained deeply attached to his fragile, clever wife. Meanwhile, his new paternal responsibilities turned the earl’s thoughts to religion.
Lovelace never came closer to his mother-in-law than in their discussions about God. What, speaking as one convinced Unitarian to another, should he tell the grandchildren? Naturally, Lovelace wished to acquaint his eldest son and daughter with the New Testament: how could he do it without warning them that the Bible was ‘mistaken’ and the text ‘interpolated with fables’? Should he confess that he did not believe in the Immaculate Conception? Ada had suggested bringing young Annabella to Brighton, where she could be educated by the earnestly religious wife of Dr King, their old family friend. But what should they do when Mrs King’s beliefs contradicted their own Unitarian tenets? Was it right to force such young children to choose whom they should trust?
These questions, for people like the Lovelaces and Lady Byron – they believed that Jesus was a good man, but not the son of God – were difficult to address without causing gossip. John Cam Hobhouse was genuinely shocked when Ada (after seating her father’s oldest friend next to herself at a London dinner party in June 1846) confessed that she did not believe in immortality.
John Hobhouse was not a warm man, but he had grown fond of Byron’s unconventional daughter. In 1845, she visited his home expressly to see the curly-haired and broad-shouldered bust of her father that Hobhouse had commissioned in Rome, in 1817, from the admired Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen. A month earlier, Ada had expressed her distaste for Thorwaldsen’s full-length statue of the poet, a grand memorial for which Hobhouse had vainly struggled to secure a place in Westminster Abbey.* Confronted by this smaller and more lifelike bust of the father she had never known, Ada came visibly close to tears. Her host was touched.
Discussing Ada’s lack of religious faith at dinner in the summer of 1846, Hobhouse was alarmed to see how ill his young hostess looked. While noting in his diary for 3 June 1846 that the Lovelaces seemed ‘much attached’ to
