Evidence survives that the enigmatic Mr Crosse did retain affectionate feelings for Ada Lovelace. He never parted with the precious relics which offer the ultimate proof of Ada’s attachment to him. In 1880, John’s son and namesake would inherit from his father a gold ring that Lord Byron had bestowed upon his infant daughter, together with a miniature copy of the romantic poem ‘Maid of Athens’, and a precious lock of Byron’s hair. The fact that John Crosse chose to preserve those items as family heirlooms, suggests – at the least – that he shared Ada Lovelace’s reverence for her father.*
At Brown’s Hotel, the owners went out of their way to comfort an honoured guest during a period in which Lady Byron came, for the first time since the separation from Byron in 1816, close to breaking point. When the lawyers, early in 1853, discreetly spoke to the distraught Lord Lovelace about Lady Byron’s ‘very peculiar’ views, while urging him to comply with whatever his mother-in-law might request him to say, the subtext was that Lushington and Greig were dealing with an unknown quantity.
For Annabella, even more than for her son-in-law, the discovery of the near-criminal world in which her daughter had become mired was devastating. By 5 February 1853, Lady Byron felt wretched enough to tell a new confidante, the American poet and abolitionist Eliza Cabot Follen, that Ada’s death had been ‘necessary’, and that she herself had become towards the end ‘unequal to the task’ of supporting her poor daughter. By the following month, the search for a culprit on whom to lay the blame for Ada’s destruction had switched away from her broken son-in-law to Charles Babbage.
The extent of Babbage’s role in Ada’s clandestine life among tipsters and semi-criminals remains extremely unclear. The mass of Lady Lovelace’s letters to Babbage that are lodged at the British Library contains (as one would expect) no hint of a link between the inventor and the horse-racing world. Yet the perseverance of his loyalty to, and defence of, Mary Wilson is hard to ignore. If Babbage had been entirely innocent, would he not have come to share Lady Byron’s view of Miss Wilson, rather than vigorously opposing it?
On 12 August 1852, Ada had secretly attempted to appoint Babbage as her executor. Through this most indiscreet of men, Lady Lovelace hoped to settle all the financial problems that beset her, to make provision for Mary Wilson, and to arrange for John Crosse to receive her private legacy. She also invited Babbage to make himself a present of any twelve ‘works’ (possibly meaning sets, rather than single books of the kind she had tried to bestow upon John Crosse) that he might wish to take from her library after her death. Babbage carried a substantial selection of the countess’s papers away with him that day. Ada had authorised him to destroy or to preserve what he thought fit. Here, once again, the evidence points towards Babbage’s intimate knowledge of her private affairs. While he may never have participated in Ada’s gambling activities, he most certainly knew what was going on.
Ada had not inherited her mother’s legal skills. Without a witness to a will, its executor’s delegated powers are redundant. This is something that Babbage was slow to realise. On 13 December, just over two weeks after Ada’s death, Lady Byron issued a formal request for the return of her daughter’s papers, claiming that this had been her daughter’s final wish. Babbage refused. Defending himself to Stephen Lushington later that month, the inventor volunteered to provide – should Lady Byron so wish it – an account of the invaluable support that Mary Wilson had offered to Ada. It was, he believed, appropriate that both Mary and her brother, Stephen, should be rewarded. Mary herself was willing to confirm that, back on 18 August 1852, Lady Lovelace had promised to repay her handsomely for unspecified good services.
On 5 January 1853, while considering Babbage’s request, Lady Byron learned from Mrs Jameson that the inventor was holding discussions with John Murray about his wish to publish a ‘memoir’ of Ada. The following day, Annabella offered to pay Mary Wilson £100. Anxious to avoid any suggestion of a bribe to a woman whose chief services had been to Ada’s racing ring, Lady Byron demanded written confirmation that this sum was given in lieu of any financial loss Miss Wilson had personally suffered by taking up service with Lady Lovelace. Ill-advised by the choleric Charles Babbage, Mary refused. On 25 February, Annabella decided to cut her losses and withdraw the offer, salting the wound with the observation that ‘I think it well she [Mary] has not received the £100.’*
The impulse towards self-justification had always been strong in Lady Byron. On 9 March, Annabella wrote to Woronzow Greig and, at much greater length, to his mother. The subject of these two documents of record (Mary Somerville was instructed not to burn her letter) was Charles Babbage, and what incensed Lady Byron most now was that he had dared to speak ill of the dead. To Greig, she reported upon a letter from Babbage, just received, ‘full of much bitter vituperation, and containing a reflection upon her so malignant that I cannot describe it’. Somewhat alarmingly, given Babbage’s
