Lady Byron died quietly in her bed at St George’s Terrace on 16 May 1860, on the eve of what would have been her sixty-eighth birthday. (Anna Jameson, still unforgiven, had gone to her grave just two months earlier.) Sending the news to Stephen Lushington at 5am, Annabella sadly wrote that ‘my darling’ had died an hour earlier, after undergoing great suffering with patient resignation. The cause of death was identified as cancer of the breast.
Lord Lovelace had never given up hope of a reconciliation. All through these final weeks, he had hovered close by, waiting for any summons from the dying woman which he might receive. It never came. On 18 May, an embarrassed and disapproving Stephen Lushington was forced to tell the unhappy earl (who was, after all, his landlord at Ockham Park) that all three of his children opposed his plan to attend the funeral. If he came, they would not. Given no option, Lovelace stayed away.
Dr Lushington himself was of course present on 20 May 1860, to see his old friend’s coffin lowered into place at Kensal Rise. The grave was discreet: the plain granite slab carried only Annabella’s (misspelt) name, a pair of dates and her county of birth. The burial plot lay close to those of several Lushingtons. The lawyer’s family had become almost an extension of Lady Byron’s own.*
Travelling back from the funeral within a closed carriage together with Lady Byron’s lawyer, Gerard Ford, the 7th Lord Byron made a startling disclosure. It had been made known to him – and apparently to nobody else – by the late Lady Byron that her son-in-law had visited her house and robbed her of a box of the precious letters that she had always protected from public view. Challenged by his younger son in later years, Lovelace flatly denied any such theft. It seems clear now, however, that those abstracted papers – they included letters that had passed between Annabella and Augusta Leigh in 1816–17 – were later loaned or copied for use by hostile critics at the height of the posthumous onslaught on Lady Byron’s reputation. Ralph King, while convinced of his father’s transgression, identified the culprit in Astarte (1905) only as ‘a deceased relative’.†
Lady Byron’s will was – as we might expect – meticulously planned. Ralph, the principal heir of all that it was within his grandmother’s power to bestow (that is to say, the enormous Wentworth estates), was instructed to add Noel and Milbanke to his surname. (Lady Byron had also taken care – while never using it herself – to claim and retain the Wentworth barony for her descendants.) Annabella (who now changed her name to Lady Anne King Noel) received, in addition to investments that provided an annual income of £3,000, all of her grandmother’s jewels, trinkets and ornaments. Mary Carpenter, a trustee, was given Red Lodge, the Bristol property that Lady Byron had purchased to house and rehabilitate young women in difficulties. Edward Noel received £1,000, while £100 went to Charles Noel’s son and namesake. Louisa Noel was given £500. The same sum was bestowed upon the mysterious but memorably named Thomas Horlock Bastard, a Dorset phrenologist.*
Most significant, however, was a clause in the will that concerned Lady Byron’s personal papers. In 1853, the late Thomas Davison, a close friend from Annabella’s early years, had been replaced as one of her three trustees by Henry Bathurst, a lawyer living at Doctor’s Commons. (Henry’s mother, Lady Caroline, was a close friend to Lady Byron.) Instructions were given to Mr Bathurst, together with Mary Carpenter and Frances Carr (Lushington’s unmarried sister-in-law) that all of Lady Byron’s papers should be immediately sealed and deposited at a bank. Lady Byron’s final instruction rang crystal clear. ‘I direct that no one else however closely connected with me shall on any plea whatsoever be allowed to have access.’
Near to death, Annabella believed that she was asking the trustees to act in the best interests of her family when she specified that they were to act with special thought to the welfare of her grandchildren. The intention was good. The result was to prove disastrous, both for the future defence of Lady Byron’s reputation and for the peace of mind of those same beloved grandchildren whom she was so anxious to protect.
* John Wilson, writing in the voice of ‘The Shepherd’ in Blackwood’s popular Noctes Ambrosianae, in May 1830, had attacked Lady Byron, declaring that a spouse’s first loyalty always lay to her husband, not her parents, however brutal the facts might be.
* Listing Lady Byron’s philanthropic activities would take up an interminable chapter. Here are just two examples. In 1853, possibly moved by her grandson’s accounts, she strongly advocated the need to improve conditions in far-flung penal colonies such as Van Diemen’s Land, while setting up two new schools at home. In 1854, she was the sole funder both of the new Five Points Mission in New York, and of Red Lodge, a refuge and school for young girls set up by Harriet Martineau’s cousin, Mary Carpenter, in Bristol. Numerous other missions, schools, asylums and hospitals received both financial support and the benefit of Lady Byron’s formidable administrative mind.
* The estates included Kirkby Mallory, Knowle in Warwickshire (now a ward of the thriving Birmingham extension town of Solihull), part of Leamington and substantial tracts of land near Darlington in Co. Durham (where her estate was still referred to in the local press in 1834 as belonging to ‘the unfortunate Lady Byron’).
* The Albion is also puzzlingly referred to in letters as the Allum. These would appear to be one and the same ship.
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