Not one word of eulogy or indictment appears upon the tablet that bears only Lady Byron’s name. Lord Lovelace’s tribute to the woman he had venerated, trusted and finally lost speaks for the depth of his bitterness by the absolute blankness of its face.
The joyous old days when the Hen and the Crow fondly conspired about how best to protect and cherish their elusive and enchanting charge, the Bird, were gone, never to return. On 9 February 1853, Annabella icily reminded her son-in-law that she held his own imprudent behaviour responsible for what she now vaguely referred to as her daughter’s ‘aberrations’. Greig meanwhile advised his sympathetic colleague, Stephen Lushington, that the hapless Lord Lovelace had just discovered ‘an additional act of treachery’ on the part of his late wife.
Prior to the final stages of her illness, Lady Lovelace had been persuaded by some of her racing acquaintances to insure her life for £600. In January 1853, Mr Fleming, Dr Malcolm and John Crosse lined up to submit their rival claims to that sum. Fleming had already persuaded the dying countess to assign him sole rights for a paltry ten shillings. Dr Malcolm, to whom Ada had earlier persuaded her husband to loan £1,800 (only £200 had been repaid at the time of her death), stated that he also deserved the insurance money, in lieu of his personal discharge of Ada’s liabilities. (The fact that the Zetlands’ physician had actually won £2,000 from Ada’s tips went unmentioned.) John Crosse’s claim took the nastier form of blackmail. He already held a cache of Ada’s letters. By 9 February 1853, Lovelace knew that his wife had also given her lover the letter in which the earl had incriminated himself by personally authorising her betting activities. Crosse now threatened to publish it.
By 26 February, an exhausted Woronzow Greig was able to report to Lovelace that, while he himself had ‘fairly broken down under the part which I have taken in these matters’, control of this nightmarish situation had been regained. Scurrilous though they were, Dr Malcolm and Mr Fleming were men who cared intensely about their social status. Artfully, Greig indicated that the only hope for each of retaining his modest perch in society was instantly to drop their spurious claims against a dead woman whose name was catnip to a hungry press. He capped this by producing a document that proved Ada had always paid – perhaps with Padwick’s loans – her own racing losses. As to Ada’s alleged ‘gift’ of the insurance policy to Mr Fleming, her signature had not been witnessed. Fleming took fright when Greig threatened him with the possibility that the insurance company might well come after him for felonious behaviour.
Greig was tough, but John Crosse was wily. By early February, Greig knew that Crosse had no interest in behaving like a gentleman. He owned 108 letters from the late countess. Many of these could further damage her already spotty reputation. By April, however, Crosse had agreed to take £600 in exchange for the eighteen incriminating letters in which Ada spoke of her love for him, together with the betting authorisation from Lord Lovelace that she had voluntarily placed in John Crosse’s hands.
All seemed to be proceeding smoothly. Crosse’s attorney consented to the burning of the returned nineteen documents in the presence of Henry Karslake, Lord Lovelace’s Surrey solicitor. Crosse’s attorney had approved the final arrangement. It was at this delicate moment of imminent exchange that Lady Byron, whom Greig and Lushington had taken care to exclude from their negotiations, discovered what was being planned.
Annabella, with some sense, opposed buying off Crosse. If he could get such a generous sum for a few letters, what more might such a man be encouraged to demand for his silence? ‘Can she desire to force us into Court? What else can be her object?’ a despairing Greig asked Dr Lushington on 2 April. On this crucial occasion, Lady Byron’s wishes were overruled. The letters were handed over to Karslake. John Crosse’s further demand (he wanted a written exoneration of his part in the betting clique) was rejected. Mr Crosse, so a disgusted Woronzow Greig informed William Lovelace on 14 April, was no better than a felon: a man entirely ‘destitute of honour and principle’.
So John Crosse appeared to them all in the way that he sought to exploit, even in death, the woman whose trust he had abused during her life. Nevertheless, the fact that Ada had written Crosse ninety letters which contained nothing compromising attests that there had been another, unsexual side to this relationship, as does the further and intriguing fact that Greig was in no hurry to destroy the four packets of Crosse’s letters which were still in Ada’s possession when she died. (They were spoken of as being in existence months after Mrs Clark’s bonfire at Great Cumberland Place.) Even the innocuous gifts which the countess strove to bequeath to Crosse (by using Charles Babbage as her unofficial executor) could argue that an intense friendship, rather than a romantic passion, had prevailed.
This was not how Ada’s bequest to Crosse was perceived by Lushington and Greig. To their legal minds, it seemed pure madness to place the late countess’s ‘unreformed’ writing box, just as Ada had left it, in the possession of such an unscrupulous man. Neither did they trust Crosse to make an appropriate selection when it came to carrying away twelve ‘WORKS (not vols)’ of his own choice from Ada’s personal library. They did not even care to allow him the coroneted and monogrammed gold pencil case she bestowed as a souvenir of the literary interests they had shared.
The concerted attempt to make John Crosse vanish from Ada Lovelace’s history proved remarkably effective. Publicly, Ada featured in the memoir later written by Andrew Crosse’s second wife only as a frequent visitor and occasional witness to scientific experiments carried out at Fyne Court. Privately, John Crosse’s
