Your reiterated expression of forgiveness, in fact to many accusations, might need Forgiveness, if I were not, in so many respects, and in spite of yourself, always so truly, Your friend,
AINB
Faced by such steely and conditional friendship, there was no more to be done. In October 1854, Mrs Jameson wrote to sever her long connection with Robert Noel, the man who had first introduced her to Annabella and to Ada. While urging him to remain ‘all you can and ought to be’ in his own profound friendship with his respected older cousin, Anna identified Lady Byron’s coldness towards her as the reason that she herself could no longer bear to see ‘any friend who reminds me of her’. Interestingly, Robert Noel made no attempt to argue with Mrs Jameson’s decision. He remained devoted to Lady Byron, fondly described in one letter to her as his oldest and dearest friend. Most likely, he had already heard his cousin’s version of the quarrel and of its origins.*
So far as is known, the friendship with Anna Jameson was never renewed. Requested to thank Lady Byron in 1859 for her suggestion that a fund should be organised to pay John Gibson (a well-known neo-classical sculptor) to model Mrs Jameson’s head in marble, Annabella’s granddaughter responded (to Mrs Jameson’s niece, Gerardine) that Lady Byron denied all knowledge of the project. Nevertheless, the letter-writer was permitted to state that her grandmother would contribute £50 (a handsome sum in 1859) towards the fund.
Lady Byron had added just one condition: the name of the donor must never be revealed.
* Annabella’s kindness to James Brown was part of an ongoing commitment to act upon what she imagined to have been her late husband’s wishes. ‘I know she secretly fulfils her husband’s claims and honours his drafts upon posterity,’ an admiring Florence Nightingale wrote in an undated letter to Parthenope, her sister.
* Mrs Clark spent the end of that bleak year at Horsley Towers. Annabella, writing to her grandmother, reported that she was a ‘wonderful person’ who made the schoolroom cheerful, while cooking them ‘very good dinners’ and ‘nice biscuits’ (Wentworth Papers, 54090).
* John (Crosse) Hamilton’s widow outlived her husband and remained at Fyne Court until a major fire in 1894 rendered the house uninhabitable. The music room and romantically arcadian gardens survive under the management of the National Trust. Brian Wright, in Andrew Crosse and the Mite that Shocked the World (Matador, 2015), gives the most detailed account of the younger Crosses.
* When Charles Babbage died, he left a bequest of £3 per month to Mary Wilson, to be paid to her for the rest of her life. Since no bequest was made by him to any other employee, it may have been his way of compensating for Lady Byron’s stinginess.
* On 8 April 1856, Lady Byron sent to Robert Noel’s German-born wife, Louisa, of whom she was extremely fond, a list of Ada’s closest friends. Henry Drummond of Albury, the Zetlands, the Molesworths and Agnes Greig were identified. Also mentioned, without comment, was Anna Jameson.
PART FOUR
The Making and Breaking of a Reputation
‘She [Lady Byron] was the one person involved in that tragic story who was innocent of wrong, true in word and deed, generous, resourceful, courageous amidst crushing difficulties, and so she consistently remained for the rest of her life.’
RALPH GORDON MILBANKE,
2ND EARL OF LOVELACE, Astarte, 1905
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
E
NSHRINEMENT
(1853–60)
‘[W]hat might have been, had there been one person less among the living when she married . . . Then her life would not have been the concealment of a Truth, while her conduct was in harmony with it (no wonder if she was misunderstood).’
FRAGMENT OF A THIRD-PERSON MEMOIR,
BEGUN BY LADY BYRON,
BRIGHTON, 1851
Having done all she could to protect her dead daughter’s name from being mired in a public scandal, Lady Byron’s thoughts turned again to the question of her own future reputation.
Two years earlier, she had sketched out the beginnings of a memoir, in the hope of encouraging Frederick Robertson to publish her history. A mass of private papers had been placed in his safe-keeping for just that purpose. By the beginning of 1853, however, the ill and overworked Brighton cleric (now married and responsible for two young children) was unable to contemplate such a taxing commission. Instead, he read Annabella’s fragment and offered an honest opinion. What was needed, Robertson advised, was for Lady Byron to write the book herself, but in language that was more comprehensible and far less veiled. Why not just state Augusta’s name when she wrote of her wish that there had been ‘one person less living’ when she married Lord Byron? And why not give her husband’s dreadful sin a name instead of hinting at some unspeakably mysterious ‘Truth’? Annabella could and did speak about these sensitive issues in private, among her chosen friends. Why then, once she picked up her pen, must Lady Byron become so wilfully obscure?
Lady Byron had no answer to that cogent query, except to say that the one occasion when she had come before the public to defend her parents (in the ‘Remarks’ printed as an inserted appendix to Moore’s Life and Letters of Lord Byron), her words had proved of little service either to them or to herself.*
The trouble was that Annabella wanted the truth to be told and yet not to break her promise to Byron that she would protect his sister and her family. Lady Byron had never doubted that Medora was her husband’s child. She believed that Byron’s fear of scandal about Augusta had driven him – with her wicked Aunt Melbourne’s active encouragement – into marrying herself, Annabella Milbanke, a woman he no longer loved. He might even (although this was a point upon which Annabella often contradicted herself, perhaps from genuine uncertainty) have continued sleeping with his sister during intervals
