Lord Lovelace, himself confined to wearing a uniform that had never seen a battlefield (he donned it for official appearances as Surrey’s long-serving lord lieutenant), was keen for his oldest son to see live combat. By the late summer of 1853, however, Byron Ockham’s commander had resolved to send the intractable young aristocrat home, following his persistent defiance of various orders from his superiors. Byron’s infractions had included going AWOL, sneaking liquor into his berth and – worst of all – falsely accusing Captain Lushington’s personal protégé, a young Mr Dundas, of stealing his own (illegally acquired) gin. Asked to apologise to the youth – a member of the Zetland family – Lord Ockham had flatly refused.
What was to be done? A plea from Charles Noel to allow the youth to join his own family’s new home at Leamington Spa was brusquely rejected by Lady Byron. Annabella had formed a more romantic plan. She herself still owned large tracts of Euboea in Greece, although much of this extensive estate had been transferred to the widowed Edward Noel. What could be more appropriate than that a second Byron should take up residence in Greece? This was the proposal that Annabella asked Charles Noel to put to Lord Lovelace (all direct communication between herself and her son-in-law having been severed) on 28 August 1853.
It was not to be. Ockham, having abruptly left Lushington’s ship without leave – after failing to secure his father’s permission for an official release – vanished from public view. Back in England, during the autumn of 1853, a court martial was discussed. Out in the Dardanelles, the young sailor found a job on the Inflexible, a coal ship carrying fuel to the fleet. In 1854, he made an ill-fated attempt to start a new life in America. By the spring of 1855, after working his way back to England from New York, Byron was reluctant to undertake any more foreign adventures. For the time being, appalled by her grandson’s wretched appearance and evident ill health, Lady Byron arranged for him to live under her roof at Brighton, while taking tuition from Lieutenant Arnold, a son of Rugby’s celebrated schoolmaster.
Byron Ockham was not yet nineteen. Ever hopeful, a doting grandmother had faith that Ada’s favourite son might yet make a success of his life.
The brusqueness of Annabella’s response to Charles Noel’s kindly offer to care for her rebellious grandson at Leamington owed much to the fact that it was penned on 15 August 1853, the day that Frederick Robertson died. Robertson was only thirty-seven. Overworked and depressed, he died of ‘inflammation of the brain’, a form of stroke. Local newspapers reported that Lady Byron had joined the mourners who followed the young clergyman’s coffin on foot in one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Brighton. (In fact, Annabella – always averse to any form of self-publicity – had watched the shuffling crowds from a discreet distance.)
The loss was devastating. Robertson had been her advisor, her confidant and friend. Rumours of a love affair between the pair were groundless, but an athletic build and exceptional good looks had added to the charismatic charm for the susceptible Lady Byron of a young preacher whose vivid and erudite weekly sermons at Holy Trinity, Brighton, were regularly attended by congregations larger than the church could hold.* (It was not uncommon for London worshippers to travel down simply for the benefit of listening to a man widely regarded as the finest preacher in the country.)
Privately, Annabella later admitted to her younger grandson that her chief regret about philanthropy was the obligation to deal with so many plain-faced men. None of them – certainly not kind, loyal, worthy Dr King, still living in Brighton and supporting Annabella in the world of good works – ever came near to replacing Robertson in her affections. The subsequent discovery that the admired cleric, married, and with two young children, had been dallying with one of Lady Byron’s own social circle, the respectably married Lady Augusta Fitzpatrick, was brushed off by his fondest admirer as a mere irrelevance.
Initially, Lady Byron had wanted Robertson to present her record of an ill-fated marriage to the public. The roles were now reversed. In September 1853, after providing funds to educate Robertson’s fatherless children, Lady Byron started to interview various people who might contribute to a biography of her brilliant friend. It would be modelled, so she told one of Robertson’s greatest admirers, Henry Crabb Robinson, upon the hugely successful recent life and letters of Margaret Fuller that she had (somewhat insensitively) presented to her daughter shortly before Ada’s death. Annabella’s failure to carry this ambitious project through owed more to her increasingly poor health than to any lack of commitment. Instead, Lady Byron became an assiduous circulator of the first published version of Robertson’s celebrated sermons. It’s highly probable that she also commissioned the death mask of Robertson which was taken by Robert Noel (now owned by University College, London).
Crabb Robinson, who had first met Annabella in that summer of 1853 at a party for the literary phenomenon of the year, Harriet Beecher Stowe, left their discussion filled with respect for this quietly dressed and unassuming woman. ‘I was much pleased with Lady Byron’, the savvy old gentleman noted that night. ‘I consider her one of the best women of the day.’ Such words were high praise from a man who had met almost every great figure of the age, including Wordsworth and Goethe. Annabella might lack the wit that had charmed Henry Crabb Robinson when he met Madame de Staël, but he was impressed by her rare combination of intelligence and integrity. Later, he would describe Lady Byron as the noblest woman he had ever known.
Thomas Noel – the illegitimately born relative who had presided over Annabella’s wedding to
