The older generation were falling away. The closest bond holding together that intense little triangle of the Hen, the Bird and the Crow throughout the 1840s was that of a second threesome: the children.
Mr Herford, the tutor selected by Annabella after William Carpenter’s belated exit, arrived at Ashley Combe in November 1846, bringing with him a reticent and distinctly undernourished 7-year-old Ralph. Lady Byron’s attitude to meals was notoriously vague (on one occasion, she entirely forgot to provide lunch for her guests); nevertheless, both Ada and Lovelace respected Annabella’s grandmotherly skills and her evident enjoyment of the role.
On 28 January 1847, Lady Byron notified the childless Robert Noel that she would shortly be taking over the supervision of both Ralph and his 9-year-old sister, her namesake. She herself would be dividing her time between a new house at Southampton and her customary home at Esher. The children, living at Moore Place, would have the company of little Hugh Montgomery and the Bence-Joneses. (Lady Gosford’s eldest daughter, Millicent, was occupying the second of Annabella’s two Esher houses, together with her Irish husband and three small children. It suited Annabella’s needs to have a doctor on call; Henry Bence-Jones was an experienced physician.)
All began well. The Irish-born Miss Lamont, Ada’s own first attendant, was recruited to take care of young Annabella and to instil what Ada (remembering the Pearces’ account of her daughter’s insolence) described as the manners ‘peculiarly appropriate to this young lady’. Visiting her beloved friend in the early summer of 1847, Anna Jameson congratulated Lady Byron upon a marked improvement in her granddaughter’s behaviour: ‘excellent stuff in that child’.
Ada did not question her mother’s decision to take Ralph off on his own to the seaside for a while (Ralph was the most sickly of the three children). Neither did she protest when – possibly for the same reason – Ralph and his tutor were despatched to Hofwyl in 1848. Republican Switzerland remained a safe haven amid the revolutionary storms. Although Ralph pined for the company of his sister during a lonely sojourn in the second Mr Fellenberg’s house, away from the other boys, it was nevertheless this first short foreign adventure that engendered his lifelong passion for mountaineering and grandly isolated landscapes.
Annabella King began her lifelong habit of diary-keeping in 1847. It seems to have been a comfort during the long periods of Ralph’s absence. Comically prosaic at times (‘the morning went, the afternoon came’), the diary also reveals how close the relationship was between the two namesakes, old and young. Lady Byron was at her best in this relationship, fondly recording the child’s first jokes and puns and making sure – thanks to the Bence-Jones family next door – that she was not too lonely. Besides long foraging expeditions for mushrooms and blackberries in the nearby Ockham woods, there were picnics at Claremont (accompanied by a flock of tin cows and goats), rides (the little girl was given her own small mount, a pony called Seagull) and many presents. One that especially excited a child whose future would be spent as an intrepid traveller in the Middle East was a book called Travels in Persia. The two Annabellas read it together at Lady Byron’s Southampton house.* Nevertheless, Annabella missed her mother and beautiful Ashley Combe. It was beyond her understanding that Mamma could not look after her because she had no governess to provide.
One of Ada’s motives for borrowing money from Henry Currie had been that she wanted to assume personal responsibility for her daughter’s education. By 1848, she was in a position to do so. The governess she had found, Miss Wächter, was recommended to her by Robert and Louisa Noel at a time when many clever young German women were forced into exile by political events on the Continent.
First, however, Annabella had to be extricated from Moore Place, where she was happily assisting Miss Lamont to ‘make things’ intended to raise money for the suffering Irish. Ada’s excuse was that Miss Lamont had been behaving in an unseemly fashion.
Like her father, Ada, who could be so progressive and even revolutionary in her ideas, could also be breathtakingly conventional. Back in 1835, she had been outraged by the portrait-painter Margaret Carpenter’s habit of stretching herself out, in full view of their guests, upon the drawing-room carpet at Ockham. Poor Miss Lamont’s crime was merely to have introduced her young pupil to friends of her own, met by chance while strolling through Esher.
Ada was outraged. It was not to be tolerated, she stormed to her astonished mother; Charlotte Stamp, that paragon among governesses, would have been horrified! Such behaviour was absolutely unacceptable in ‘families of my circle’. Five days later, a command was delivered for the sacking of Miss Lamont and the immediate restoration of Lady Annabella to her parents.
Ada’s bizarre outburst came in April 1848, when she had just received the news of Hester’s death, while agreeing to the painful decision that her oldest and favourite child – Byron Ockham was not yet twelve – should
