In 1848, revolution swept through Europe. Its force petered out in England, where the great Chartist march ended with the people’s leaders being shepherded across the Thames from Kennington, in three small, metered public carriages, on a rainy April afternoon. Universal suffrage and democratic reform would have to wait.
A generous contributor to the relief of famine in Ireland, Lady Byron viewed atrocious social conditions at home as a call to arms. As with her earlier purchase of land in Greece to honour Byron’s crusade, she took inspiration from her late husband’s youthful challenge to a heartless government.
Back in 1816, Byron had stood up for the weavers and their rights. In 1843, the beleaguered frame-workers rose again. When 25,000 signatories petitioned for the right to work, the government averted its eyes. Annabella took action. Throughout the Hungry Forties and on into the next decade, Lady Byron lavished money on new schools, churches and hospitals upon her huge Midlands estates. Charles Noel was once again instructed to care for the poor, rather than their patron. Greeting an embarrassed Lady Byron in 1851 by doffing their caps in gratitude for the ‘many sums of money’ that had come their way, the Leicestershire villagers and farm folk were rewarded with a brisk reminder of the 10 per cent bonus gift awaiting anyone prepared to entrust Lady Byron with their savings for future investment.
Annabella Byron, had she been born a century later, might have become the model director of a bank. Ruthlessly stingy to any employees whom she believed had wronged her, she was a meticulous keeper of records and fulfiller of legal commitments. Distributing funds wherever she felt they might best serve society, she never for a second lost sight of what was being done with her money.
A clear example of Annabella’s combination of financial acumen with a stern social conscience surfaces in a remarkable letter written in January 1846 to Elizabeth Rathbone, a Quaker friend in Liverpool. Lady Byron’s topic was the misappropriation by a certain Mr Johns of the funds of a philanthropic trust that Annabella had set up. Those funds, as she had just discovered, were being used, without her permission, for Mr Johns’s other and less noble projects. A reprimand had been followed by their swift recall for investment by Mrs Rathbone’s more biddable son-in-law, John Paget, a barrister at the Middle Temple. ‘I have written to Mr J. Paget,’ Annabella informed Mrs Rathbone in her best regal style (tenants often commented upon Lady Byron’s similarity to Queen Victoria), ‘from whom I shall hope to obtain more details than it is Mr Johns’ habit to give.’
The letter to Mrs Rathbone offers useful insights into the enlightened nature of Annabella’s social views. Alluding to Cardinal Newman’s recent denunciation of Mrs Rathbone’s old friend Joseph Blanco White as insane (White had questioned both the authority of the Gospels and the divinity of Christ), Lady Byron grew indignant and then passionate. Was it not disgraceful that such a ‘superior’ thinker as Mr White should be treated as a lunatic, while criminals ‘of the low & ferocious classes’ – people who might more justifiably be considered mad than he – were sent to the gallows instead of to St Luke’s Asylum, where ‘humanising experiments’ might reform their behaviour? Had Mrs Rathbone read the excellent new pamphlet against capital punishment? ‘But this being a subject I have so much at heart, is apt to lead me on . . . A heated head bids me stop.’ Calming herself, Annabella asked for news of the Rathbones’ good friend Dr Beecher, a member of the American group of abolitionists and reformers among whom Lady Byron also moved.*
Given his mother-in-law’s rare combination of altruism with financial acumen, it is unsurprising that William Lovelace chose, in the mid-1840s, to cede administration of the two Ockham schools to Lady Byron and the widowed Stephen Lushington’s sisters-in-law, now snugly settled into the old King home. The Ockham schools had been going downhill. One of Annabella’s first actions was to sack a matron who was taking older girls out for evening jollities at the local pub and entertaining young men in her rooms until 2am. Slowly, the schools began to recover their reputations.
As Annabella’s philanthropic zeal waxed, William Lovelace’s waned. Depressing proof of this fact emerged in 1848 when, two weeks after the doomed Chartist march, Lovelace told his 12-year-old heir that ‘the poor’ had thankfully become ‘too poor to cause trouble’. Further evidence of how far Lovelace was removed from social reality surfaced in a request for Ada to send along his article on ‘Nobility’ to her new friend, Charles Dickens. Had Lovelace ever bothered to read Dickens’s novels, he would have known how maliciously the aristocracy were pilloried in that author’s works.
At home, Lovelace continued to pour money that he could ill afford into the enlargement and enhancement of his country estates. While the handsome house in St James’s Square was reluctantly exchanged in 1846 (at the close of a ten-year lease paid for by Annabella) for smaller lodgings in Belgravia, on Grosvenor Place, William continued to pursue a buying spree of his own. In 1847, he was eyeing up a former King home, the majestic Dunsborough Park, as a real bargain at £4,000. (Annabella’s always-eloquent silence quelled that particular folly.) At Ashley Combe, the new boathouse, grotto and cliffside garden terraces now grandly ascended to a balustraded ‘Philosopher’s Walk’ that Lovelace and Ada had playfully named for Charles Babbage, one of their most frequent visitors. At Horsley Towers, only Ada’s modest request to be provided with a cold ‘plunge bath’ (to improve her sluggish circulation) was rejected by her husband as an unnecessary extravagance.
Ada would always adore Ashley Combe. At Horsley Towers,
