Six years later, in 1868, a persevering Harriet Martineau returned to her idea of writing a life of Lady Byron. On this second occasion, it was Ralph who turned the project down. ‘I told her kindly that Miss Carr still wishes to prevent publication,’ Ralph told his sister on 2 February 1868. Disappointed but probably unsurprised, Martineau simply republished her earlier article as part of her newest production: Biographical Sketches (1852–1868). No objections were made. In 1868, it was still permissible for Lady Byron to be extravagantly admired.
Aged respectively thirty-one and twenty-nine at the beginning of 1868, neither of Ada Lovelace’s surviving children had yet married. Ralph remained locked in fierce dispute with his father over his right to the Wentworth estates. (Cash-rich but land-poor since his grandmother’s death, Ralph eventually bought out Lord Lovelace’s lifetime interest in the inheritance, acting on the advice of his now friendly uncle, Locke King.) Anne, returning to England in the summer of 1867 after an extended stay in Italy, yielded to the pleadings of Jane Crawford Jenkins, the kind-hearted and well-meaning widow who had been married to Lord Lovelace since 1865. Reluctantly, Anne agreed to visit Horsley Towers, both to meet a baby half-brother, Lionel Fortescue King, and to hear her father’s own account of his terrible falling-out, back in 1851, with Lady Byron.
Writing on 19 June 1867 to Agnes Greig (Mary Somerville’s delightful Scottish daughter-in-law had become close as a second mother to Anne since Ada’s death), Anne confessed that the encounter with her father had unsettled her. She had disliked hearing how harshly the earl spoke about her grandmother – ‘& yet it would seem she [Lady Byron] must have been much mistaken towards my Father, then as to my Mother, I must believe all that my father tells me.’ Things were not, perhaps, quite so clear-cut as Anne and Ralph had been led to suppose.
On one issue, however, the siblings were united in unbreakable agreement. They both wanted access to the papers that would reveal to them the hidden mysteries of the short-lived Byron marriage. Fate was to play into their hands in the autumn of 1868, when an embarrassed Frances Carr admitted that her fellow trustees had not been able to prevent her from destroying various incriminating letters within the archive. She was anxious to compensate. By 17 October 1868 (eleven years before the official release of his grandmother’s papers), a triumphant Ralph was busily sending batches of newly acquired letters and relevant documents across London to his more organised sister, for sorting and proper arrangement. Ralph described this process as a preliminary to ‘the completion of the whole work’.
In the autumn of 1868, then, armed with some – but far from all – of the key papers, Ralph was planning to produce an authoritative account of his grandparents’ marriage.
Unforeseen events were about to capsize this sensitive project.
Comfortably settled in Paris since 1846 with her devoted second husband, the Marquis de Boissy (a man who liked – to his wife’s annoyance – to introduce her as ‘l’ancienne mâitresse de Byron’), Teresa Guiccioli never forgot that Byron himself had spoken of her as his last passion. An admired French poet and former politician had placed Teresa alongside Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura as a woman ‘immortalised by love’. But Alphonse Lamartine’s tribute, published in Le Constitutionnel in 1865, had attracted fewer readers than a mocking attack upon the lovely marquise’s fidelity that Alexandre Dumas had launched with far more spirit in his own loquacious memoirs. ‘O madame! madame! why have you been so faithless to the memory of the poet?’ Dumas had ungallantly enquired. ‘Wasn’t it good enough for you, to have been Byron’s mistress?’
When Monsieur de Boissy died in 1866, Teresa was still feeling incensed that Dumas, a writer of mere historical potboilers (however successful), should have dared to question her profound love for the chivalrous poet who had recently taken to sending her personal reassurances (over the spirit waves) of his yearning for that moment when his sweet Teresa (but not Augusta Leigh, and most certainly, not his wife) would rejoin him in celestial bliss.
Announced in 1867, Lord Byron jugé par les témoins de sa vie was published anonymously by a Parisian publisher (Amyot) in 1868. The English translation, made by Hubert Jernyngham, a courtly admirer whom Teresa bullied mercilessly, was published the following year in both Britain and the United States.*
Few of Lord Byron’s former drinking cronies would have recognised their old friend in Madame de Boissy’s 900-page homage to a literary angel. (The nearest equivalent to Teresa’s desexed Byron was the newly sanctified Shelley with whom – as Madame’s talkative spirit guide was always keen to convey – Lord Byron was now enjoying an eternity of ennobling exchanges.)
Madame de Boissy’s Byron was – to be frank – a bit of a bore. He had led a life of inviolate purity (except when impertinent hussies like Lady Caroline Lamb threw themselves into his arms). He drank only water. His years of devotion to that sweet child-bride, the Contessa Guiccioli (Teresa was just ten years younger than Byron), had been supervised at all times by her sternly proper family, the Gambas. The lovers had never slept together. Byron’s desire to marry the beautiful contessa had been blocked by the mere, inconvenient fact that she already had a husband,
