A wiser clergyman might have smiled. Robertson, while widely admired in Brighton as a magnificent speaker – and a very handsome man – was both naive and an unconscionable prig. The actress Fanny Kemble, visiting Brighton in the late autumn of 1850, had been appalled to discover that Lady Byron, urged on by Robertson, was planning to write a cautionary preface to the readers of a new cheap edition of Byron’s works. Fanny, who had always opposed the public view of Byron’s widow as a cold-hearted prude, believed the enterprise would do great harm to her old friend. ‘I had always admired the reticent dignity of her silence,’ Kemble wrote in her entertaining Records of Girlhood. And besides, ‘what could Byron do to the young men of 1850?’ But Annabella was not to be dissuaded.
‘Nobody’ she [Lady Byron] said, ‘knew him as I did . . . nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the injury he might do to others, in some of his writings.’
The clinching argument for this ludicrous project (it never saw the light) had come from Frederick Robertson. It was he, so Mrs Kemble learned, who had solemnly advised Lady Byron of the dangers of her husband’s poetry ‘to a class peculiarly interesting to him . . . and of course his [Robertson’s] opinion was more than an overweight for mine’.
With such an ally at her side, Lady Byron was ready for action. Her opportunity came in February 1851, when word reached her from Admiral Lord Byron (George’s father) that Miss Emily Leigh had been in touch regarding her mother. A response was promptly issued. A week later, Augusta herself wrote to accept Lady Byron’s proposal for a meeting. It might, Augusta hopefully wrote, do both of them good to have a free and frank discussion after so long a silence. She welcomed this opportunity to clear the air.
Annabella does not appear to advantage during the elaborate negotiations over which, counselled by Robertson at every step, she presided during the next few weeks. Augusta, who had never been on a train in her life, was instructed to make her way alone to Reigate station. There, at a convenient but obscure destination midway between Brighton and London, an inconspicuously dressed servant (meaning, he would wear no livery buttons on his coat) would meet and conduct Mrs Leigh to a nearby – and flawlessly sedate – coaching inn called The White Hart. Following her brief introduction to a neutral witness, the two women would be left alone. Augusta’s feeble protests about this sudden inclusion of a stranger at such an intimate occasion were crushed by Annabella’s representation of Robertson as ‘the Genius of the Soul’s World’. One might as well (so Lady Byron haughtily implied) deny a birthplace to the Christchild as exclude the Reverend Frederick Robertson of Brighton from the Reigate inn.
The interview took place in a back room at The White Hart on 8 April. No records were made. Later, however, Annabella recalled her dismay at realising that Mrs Leigh, an inveterate chatterbox, meant to produce nothing more confessional than a babble of pleasantries. ‘Is that all?’ Lady Byron had burst out. ‘I felt utterly hopeless, and asked to be left alone to compose myself.’ Rejoining Robertson and their bewildered guest after this moment of solitude, Annabella moved into attack mode. Armed with assertions of which a list had been prepared (‘you kept up hatred; you put things in a false light’), she tried to coerce a response. Eager to please, and thus to get some financial recompense for her journey, Augusta agreed that her brother had often uttered ‘dreadful things’. She refused to say that she had encouraged him. Pressed harder, Mrs Leigh grew annoyed. Lady Byron had been allowed to bring Mr Robertson along as her supporter. Well, she had one, too: Sir John Hobhouse. Augusta was ready to state that Hobhouse had once actually warned her not to be so unflinchingly loyal to Annabella – unless she herself actually wished to lose her brother’s affection.
This declaration was the modest boast that tipped the balance of Annabella’s fiercely governed mind. ‘At such a testimony I started up,’ Lady Byron admitted afterwards. ‘I was afraid of myself . . . the strongest desire to be out of her presence took possession of me, lest I should be tempted beyond my strength’. Some answer was tearfully jerked out, some phrase about a kind blessing that she now felt herself unable to confer – and the meeting was over.
Annabella had once described Byron’s sister as having been born in a state of moral idiocy. The validity of that brusque observation was never more pathetically apparent than in Augusta’s readiness to view the Reigate meeting as a success. Writing to thank Annabella for her ‘exertions’, she ‘could not resist’ signing herself as ‘Yours affectionately’. A furious Annabella responded that the required confession had been entirely inadequate. Adding not one word of reciprocal affection, Lady Byron signed her answer: ‘Farewell’. Growing apprehensive, Augusta wrote again, this time to offer Frederick Robertson proofs of her innocence. Impossible, the clergyman bleakly responded on 21 May. Such proofs could only be produced in the presence of Lady Byron and the word ‘farewell’ was surely clear enough? There would be no further meetings. Mrs Leigh could console herself with the thought of clearing her conscience at another encounter, one ‘which must be heard very, very soon, when you meet God face to face’.
And that was that.
While the Reigate meeting and its aftermath do not reflect well upon either Lady Byron or her advisor, it is worth noting that Augusta’s half-sister, the widowed Countess of Chichester, wrote some years later expressing a friendly desire to meet with
