Annabella’s grandchildren were very dear to her and she took great pride in them. She had always stood up for Ockham, arguing to Ada back on 30 November 1844 that while the boy had suffered ‘great disadvantages’ from his Somerset upbringing, there was ‘much good in him’. Ralph, then aged seven, was praised in that same letter for being both grown up and ‘full of fun’, while Annabella’s gift for phrase-making was fondly quoted. (‘I am so happy this evening that I wish it could be pulled out like a telescope,’ the child had just announced.) Now, they were growing up and their future perception of her (a topic frequently mentioned to her circle of confidantes) offered cause for legitimate concern. She was clear about how they should regard their famous grandfather: her birthday gift to 15-year-old Ralph of Childe Harold was inscribed with an injunction to admire Lord Byron’s poems, but to distrust the great poet’s personality. How could she make them understand why she had left such a remarkable man, without revealing the scandal about Byron’s sexual involvement with a carelessly amoral sister, that shadowy figure about whom Annabella’s own feelings remained tormentingly conflicted?
Meanwhile, Lady Byron followed Ada’s last wishes where her children were concerned. Annabella King – to the considerable regret of a clever, artistic girl who adored her high-minded but gently humorous grandmother – was largely confined to the ever more fancifully embellished Surrey home that she mischievously renamed Glum Castle. Lovelace, to do him justice, oversaw an educational programme that included languages, music (Charles Hallé himself gave Annabella nine piano lessons), and even – when Ruskin came for a solitary Christmas in 1854 – drawing advice from the great man himself. But life at Horsley, enlivened only by an annual visit to Europe with Mrs Greig, was dominated by the earl’s obsession with his arches and tunnels. The visits paid by Annabella to her grandmother’s airy Brighton home each spring appeared to a lonely girl like scenes from a beautiful dream, one in which the happiest moments were connected to the annual reunion with her younger brother. The brevity of these cherished interludes served to increase their charm.
The plan to separate the children was maintained. Ralph – the grandson upon whom Lady Byron’s hopes for the preservation of the enormous Wentworth estates were now fixed* – was compelled to remain, by Ada’s wish and with Lord Lovelace’s formal agreement, under his grandmother’s roof for all but a short period of every year. From 1852, until 1859, when the 20-year-old youth was despatched to lodge under his tutor’s roof at University College, Oxford, Ralph was educated at home in Brighton and Southampton. His resentment about this cloistered life among elderly, controlling figures emerged in a plaintive letter which his grandmother passed along to Harriet Siddons’s son-in-law in 1857. Ralph’s strong objections to ‘the restraint of a tutor’ created persistent problems, Lady Byron confided to Arthur Mair. Earlier, while seeking to lodge the travel-hungry boy (then eighteen) at the Mairs’ northern home en route to his proposed lone footslog around Scotland, Annabella admitted her fears. She never minded Ralph going out to Hofwyl, where he was under supervision. She could not trust a naive and troublingly irresponsible youth to travel unaccompanied. ‘To this I cannot consent.’
Lady Byron was not inflexible. It was arranged that Ralph should hike around the Highlands together with one of the Mairs’ sons. He returned home radiant. Such adventures (when carefully controlled) always did the poor boy good, his relieved grandmother observed.
While Ralph’s growing passion for travel became powerful enough for his grandmother eventually to stipulate in her will that he must reside in England for at least a part of every future year, she wanted her granddaughter to see more of the Continent. In 1855, Annabella visited Mary Somerville in Florence and travelled on to Germany with her Noel cousins. In 1856, while Lovelace consented to host a debutante daughter’s ball at Horsley, the trouble of arranging Annabella’s presentation at court fell to her grandmother.
The search for an appropriate chaperone enabled Lady Byron to make cautious overtures of friendship to those members of William Lovelace’s family with whom the earl’s own relationship remained glacial. In 1855, Lady Hester King had expressed an interest in Ralph’s academic progress; now, Lady Byron enquired whether Lady Hester’s niece, Viscountess Ebrington, might wish to undertake the task.
A hand of friendship had been offered, and was accepted. By the late 1850s, both Annabella and the younger grandchildren were paying regular visits to their King relatives at Woburn Park and Dover Street. The ground was laid at this time for Ralph (whose relationship with his own father would never become cordial) to find a future substitute in Peter Locke King, Lord Lovelace’s detested younger brother. Lady Hester must have been delighted.
The question of what was to become of Byron Ockham was one which independently troubled both Lord Lovelace and his mother-in-law. Neither knew what best to do for this handsome and increasingly wayward youth. Established by the early summer of 1853 at the Malta station on the Albion,* a ship under the command of one of Stephen Lushington’s naval relations, Viscount Ockham (or J. Aker, as Byron often now signed himself to a sister he urged to stand up for her rights) was well-placed to earn the promotion that his father craved. Malta stood at the centre of Britain’s strategy to intervene in Russia’s escalating war against Turkey. By the summer of 1853, well-informed Londoners were already siding with Turkey
