Although it is not certain that Annabella came to Charles Noel’s assistance, the likelihood is that she did, especially since the news of Charles’s disinheritance came shortly after an unfortunate incident for which Lady Byron was partly to blame.
Richard Realf had just turned eighteen in 1852, when Annabella first heard about the handsome son of a Sussex blacksmith, an admirer of Lord Byron who was hoping to publish his own poems. Guesses at the Beautiful reads today as dreadfully as its dismal title might suggest. Perhaps Annabella, who was financially responsible for shepherding Realf’s slim volume into print before proudly circulating it among her Brighton friends, was recalling her youthful patronage of Joseph Blacket, the penniless bard of Seaham. Early in 1853, mindful of the fact that poetry alone is no way for any young man without means to support himself, she packed her protégé off to the Midlands, to study agriculture with Charles Noel. Perhaps, too, she sensed an absence in the life of Charles, whose son and namesake had recently left home to work for a firm of silk merchants in London.
By the end of the year, unwelcome news reached Lady Byron’s Brighton home. Richard Realf had fallen in love with the Noels’ 15-year-old daughter. Alice, a quiet girl blessed with large eyes and long, strikingly beautiful blonde hair, was infatuated. Her parents were horrified, not least by the violence of Alice’s passion. (A letter from Charles Noel’s wife, Mary Anne, informed Lady Byron – who promptly passed the news along to Mrs Cabot Follen, her favourite American confidante – that at last the poor child’s eyes had stopped glaring like the headlights of a train.)
Reprehensible though Lady Byron’s indiscretion might seem in spreading family gossip, she was seeking advice. Advised by Mrs Follen, Annabella arranged for Alice’s sweetheart to be despatched to America and given a teaching post at the new Five Points Mission in New York. Realf was accepted without question; Lady Byron had, after all, contributed £6,500 (in excess of £3 million in today’s currency) towards setting up Five Points. By 1858, the young man was out in Kansas, fighting alongside John Brown and writing to bless Lady Byron, herself an ardent abolitionist, as his generous benefactor.
This ill-starred love story had no happy ending. Alice, adopted by her uncle after her parents’ death of smallpox in 1857, became Edward Noel’s eerily intimate companion. Seduced at one point by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – seduction was a rite of passage for female guests at the future marital home of Ada’s daughter – Alice never married. Richard Realf, despite a rackety existence abroad that included a bigamous marriage, never forgot his first love. When he took his own life, aged forty-six, in Oakland, California, one imaginative biographer has claimed that Realf was still wearing a locket that contained a strand of Alice Noel’s bright yellow hair.*
Annabella had struggled against ill health ever since the traumatic marital separation that marked her transformation from an active young woman into a semi-invalid whose condition – a hardening of the arteries – worsened progressively with age. On 2 February 1854, Dr King explained to her new Brighton friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, that, although often confined to working from her sickroom, Lady Byron’s mental state was never impaired. She had been at her most impressive, Dr King considered (and Stephen Lushington agreed), when forced to undergo the daily agony of witnessing her daughter’s slow and painful death.
King was a devotee. William Howitt, a Quaker reformer and author, offered a harsher portrait of his wealthy patron. Howitt would deliver his recollections to the popular Daily News in September 1869, nearly a decade after Lady Byron’s death. Rankling in Howitt’s mind after all those years was the memory of Ephraim Brown, a Nottingham man whose services he had once recommended to Lady Byron as a teacher in one of her Leicestershire schools. Trained up by her at Ealing, Brown had been given a post for which, according to Howitt, Brown sacrificed other opportunities. Lady Byron had then sacked him, casting both the teacher and his penniless family adrift. While it remains unclear in what way Brown had offended his employer, his banishment did not discourage Howitt from submitting further educational projects to the same hard-hearted patron.
It was during one such discussion that Howitt (as he later reported) witnessed the shocking change that ill health could wreak upon Lady Byron. Speaking with him over the dinner table at her home, and in the best of spirits, she had agreed to support and help fund Howitt’s latest school proposal. Coming down to breakfast the following morning, he entered the presence of an altered woman. White as paper and cold to the touch as the North Pole (in Howitt’s striking account), Lady Byron spoke only to whisper a withdrawal of her promise. No explanation was given, no apology made. The subject was closed.*
Untypical though Howitt’s account sounds – Lady Byron was known and widely praised for the exceptional generosity of her philanthropy – it fits with the adamantine side of Annabella’s nature that had been experienced with such pain by William Lovelace and by Anna Jameson. Undeniably, Annabella could be both harsh and unforgiving. Even her devoted granddaughter, finally listening to her father’s side of the story of their terrible quarrel (this conversation took place many years after Lady Byron’s death), began to wonder
