Back in 1821, Byron had laughingly described the Contessa Guiccioli to Augusta Leigh as his wife’s most ardent defender. Nearly fifty years later, Teresa reserved fifty-six pages of her book (forming Chapter Twenty-two, in its entirety) for the subject of Lord Byron’s marriage to a most unsuitable woman. Suddenly, here, nine years after her death, Annabella was characterised by her rival and survivor as critical, cold and, above all, spoiled. (It is Teresa we have to thank for attaching to Lady Byron those epithets that have ever since stuck to Annabella like viscous slime, when she used this chapter to condemn her as ‘a spoilt child, a slave to rule, to habits and ideas as unchanging and inflexible as the figures she loved to study’.) Lord Byron’s own married fidelity had been impeccable, the marquise wished her exhausted readers to understand. But the poet’s tender relationship with his sister had aroused the jealousy of the chilly-hearted wife who had deserted him, refusing his heartfelt entreaties for a public explanation. Byron was forced into exile and the fault was his wife’s, for
the most atrocious part of this affair, and doubtless the most wounding to him, was precisely Lady Byron’s conduct; and in this conduct the worst was her cruel silence! This silence it is which will ever be her crime, for by it she poisoned the life of her husband.
That ‘cruel silence’, Teresa continued, had also been employed by Lady Byron to slander the immaculate name of Augusta Leigh. Silence, when so cunningly deployed, had in fact proved to be a weapon ‘crueller than Clytemnestra’s poniard’. So much for Lady Byron’s love! (And so much as well for the reputation of a woman whom Teresa Guiccioli herself had never once met.)
It’s unclear whether Ralph Wentworth ever noticed the modest Recollections of 1868 in which his grandmother’s loyal friend at court, Amelia Murray, had paid tribute to Lady Byron as a woman who had been ‘traduced and misunderstood’, but who was ‘worshipped’ by those few who had known her well. On 6 February 1869, however, Ralph sent to his sister the first – and quite reassuring – English response to Madame de Boissy’s tome. Writing under The Times’s habitual cloak of anonymity, Caroline Norton had expressed astonished indignation at Madame de Boissy’s tone of ‘persistent rancour’ towards the late Lady Byron. On that same day, Richard Monckton Milnes, Florence Nightingale’s former suitor, commended Mrs Norton’s defence of Byron’s widow to the House of Lords. The House, a little ominously, had offered no response.
Early in 1869, Ralph had other matters on his mind than the poison-tipped darts being hurled at his dead grandmother by a faded Italian beauty with time on her hands (and an obliging spirit guide to advise her on how best to fill it). On 17 March, he informed his sister that the son of the late Mrs Villiers had given him a batch of letters from 1852–3 in which his mother and Lady Byron had exhanged thoughts on the indelicate subject of incest and the late Augusta Leigh. The letters, so Ralph reported with subdued excitement, contained ‘precise and complete information as to everything’.
The following day, 18 March 1869, Ralph took lunch with Alexander Ross, the Byron-loving vicar of St Philip’s in Stepney. The two men chatted about the possibility of their co-editing a series of letters which would reveal in Lady Byron’s own words – not theirs – her reasons for leaving her husband. Also present at the lunch, and acting as consultants on the project, were Edward Noel and the Reverend Augustus Byron (the 7th Lord’s affable younger brother, recently installed by Ralph as the incumbent at Kirkby Mallory). De Boissy’s book was discussed by the four diners, but only in the context of a contemplated response to it by Sophia De Morgan, one which Ralph – an increasingly protective guardian of his grandmother’s reputation – intended to dissuade her from writing.*
On 1 June 1869, however, a thoughtfully judicious response to Teresa’s book appeared. It was the first of five anonymously authored articles that John Fox wrote upon aspects of Lord Byron’s private life for the widely read Temple Bar magazine. (In 1871, Fox’s articles were collected and expanded for a book that carried what had by then become the significant title: Vindication of Lady Byron.)
Fox’s first essay reminded his 30,000 readers of the fact that Lord Byron, despite Madame de Boissy’s harsh characterisation of his wife, had frequently blamed himself for the couple’s separation, while pronouncing his wife to have been irreproachable. Fox also made the first direct allusion to Byron’s incest yet to have appeared in print. (Madame de Boissy had ventured only a coy reference to Lord Byron’s ‘deep fraternal feeling’ and an ‘almost too passionate expression’ of brotherly love.)
An otherwise cautiously expressed critique of the Témoins, a book that Fox plainly despised, was swept away in the furore that commenced the following month when John Paget, writing for the July 1869 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, offered his resounding approval for Madame de Boissy’s publication.
John Paget was the son-in-law of Elizabeth Rathbone, one of Lady Byron’s warmest admirers back in the mid-century world that had revolved around abolitionism and social reform. Lady Byron had at one point placed certain financial trusts into the care of Mr Paget, a barrister at the Middle Temple. Evidently, there had been a disagreement. By 1869, John Paget was fiercely hostile to the late Lady Byron. He did not need to plough through the 900 pages of the Témoins to dig up a story against her that would sell. All that was required was to convey the gist of Teresa’s own view, while adding the thunder-and-flash effect of his own more exuberant style.
The result was electrifying. Gleefully, Paget presented the gentle Contessa Guiccioli to Blackwood’s readers as he imagined her in the first flush of her radiant youth, married off to
