The appointment of Miss Wächter as Annabella’s new home governess proved an unqualified success. Lovelace liked the young woman, Annabella adored her, and Lady Byron offered no opposition. In October 1848, Ada rather tactlessly informed her mother that Annabella had improved under the new governess’s care. ‘She is not like the same girl,’ the proud mother announced from Ashley Combe on 10 October; five days later, while extolling her daughter’s exceptional love for natural history and animals, she declared the delightful Miss Wächter to be all that a mother could desire. As a result, Annabella had grown ‘remarkably well, & wonderfully happy’.
Ada’s growing affection was reciprocated. In an undated December letter from the following year, a wistful young Annabella wrote a poignant letter from Horsley, to tell her ailing mother how much they all – herself, Papa, Miss Wächter and the dogs – were missing her and longing for her return.
Ada’s older children, Byron and Annabella, had been deliberately – and somewhat peculiarly – named by their grandmother, as a homage, as if to mirror a marriage of which her memory was retrospectively creating an increasingly distorted view. By 1849, all the blame for that marriage’s failure had been placed – within Lady Byron’s own mind – upon the unconscious shoulders of Augusta Leigh: the same woman whom Annabella had once held as dear to her as a sister. Augusta’s name had scarcely been mentioned since Medora’s wine-and-fantasy-based disclosures of 1841. Eight years on, Medora was dead – at the pathetically youthful age of thirty-five – and the very thought of Mrs Leigh prompted anxious questions in Lady Byron’s mind. What would future generations think of her for having left her famous husband? How would she be judged by her own descendants?
It was during 1849, after one of many lengthy sojourns with Stephen Lushington’s family at Ockham, that Annabella decided to consign a large number of her private papers to his sister-in-law. Frances (always known as ‘Fanny’) Carr was impressed with the importance of protecting these precious documents – their owner stipulated a minimum of thirty years – from the eyes of curious outsiders. Doubtless, Miss Carr was also provided with a slanted version of the past; by 1849, Annabella’s fondness for confiding secrets had become dangerously allied to her eagerness to remember what she wished had happened, as opposed to what had actually occurred.
It was also at the beginning of 1849 that Lady Byron acquired a new and pleasingly responsive friend, one who seemed ideally suited to become her future champion. Frederick Robertson, a personable and intelligent young man, had long been – unknown to Annabella herself – her ardent admirer. While staying at Cheltenham three years earlier, he had defended Lady Byron’s name from idle gossip with the enigmatic phrase: ‘I have reasons.’ In the autumn of 1848, while taking a holiday health break in Bohemia, Robertson met Robert Noel who, discovering that the handsome clergyman was working at Brighton, promptly supplied an introduction to his own revered relation.
Ada, who was visiting with her mother in Brighton early in 1849, while preparing to charm the elderly and stone-deaf Duke of Wellington, disliked Frederick Robertson from her first glimpse of his curly brown hair and sapphire-blue eyes. But Lady Byron was bewitched, charmed by the obliging Robertson’s willingness to see her as she now viewed herself: the woman who (had she only been allowed) could have redeemed her adored husband from the hell into which a wanton elder sister had led him. By 1849, William Lovelace was proving to be a less biddable adoptive son than in the past. Here was the ideal substitute: an intelligent, thoughtful and principled young man who never questioned Lady Byron’s veracity and never doubted the accuracy of her recollections. Robertson should be her recorder; from him, her grandchildren would learn Lady Byron’s own indisputable account of the past.
Frederick Robertson arrived in Lady Byron’s life at the moment when her oldest grandchild’s fate had been temporarily settled by booking little Lord Ockham on to a ship bound for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). It was, so Lovelace and Ada had unhappily agreed in February 1848, the best that could be done for their recalcitrant eldest son. But this was to be no ordinary voyage. Byron Ockham left Plymouth aboard the Swift in June 1849. He was just thirteen years old. It would be over three years before – as a young man of sixteen – he would return to England.
Of Lord Byron’s three grandchildren, his namesake was the one he would most readily have identified as a chip off the old block. Ockham was only five when Annabella scolded his parents for allowing the Lovelace heir to grow up as a backstairs boy, ‘the servants’ plaything’. Nothing changed. Spending most of his early life down at remote Ashley Combe, Ockham grew fond of the roughly spoken Porlock labourers and builders who taught him jokes and practical skills. Aged ten, he was teaching his siblings how to swear. Aged twelve, while being educated in Brighton by the eminently worthy Dr William King and teaching tricks to a pet puppy, Frisk, Ockham was writing letters to Ralph – aged nine at the time – which (so Lovelace, having intercepted one such private missive, opined) were infected by a ‘free and easy tone’ that leaned towards ‘downright impertinence’.*
A new line was taken in 1848. Sending Ockham and his new personal tutor to reside with Charles Noel’s family at Peckleton House in Leicestershire was part of a plan to prepare a small and stubborn viscount for his future duties as a great landowner and peer of the realm. Charles Noel would instruct him about land management; Mr Pennington was
