Lord Byron, following the separation from Annabella, had memorably referred to his wife – among a great many other epithets – as ‘the moral Clytemnestra of her lord’. John Paget (inspired by Teresa’s description of her dead rival’s poisonous ways) went one better. In Blackwood’s, that July, the august Lady Byron was compared to Madame de Brinvilliers, a seventeenth-century murderess who was beheaded and then burned at the stake for poisoning her father and two brothers. Silence (John Paget announced) had been Lady Byron’s preferred form of venom: ‘a poisonous miasma in which she [Lady Byron] enveloped the character of her husband – raised by her breath, and which only her breath could have dispersed’.
And now she had taken her silence to the grave! Bringing his long tirade to a finely frothing climax, Paget invited a pious – if misquoted – nod of approval from Shakespeare (Henry VI, Part Two) for his views: ‘She dies and makes no sign – O God, forgive her.’
Annabella’s family were understandably distressed by the article in Blackwood’s (Lord Lovelace privately wrote of it to Robert Noel as ‘villainous’), but they chose not to respond to it in print. Ralph had other matters on his mind. In June 1869 he lost his sister and cherished confidante to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a Byronically attractive, fortune-hunting and blushlessly amoral man whom an adoring Anne frequently addressed as ‘My Tyrant’. (Blunt responded by calling his wealthy wife ‘Stumpie’, ‘Little Ugly’ – Anne was rather beautiful – or ‘Dick’.) Just two months later, having long since recovered from an ill-fated romance with a young Icelandic girl, Ralph himself married Fannie Heriot, the giddily pretty daughter of a Newcastle clergyman. Fanny, fiercely chaperoned by a voluble Irish aunt throughout their engagement, was not yet seventeen.
On 27 August, a dapper Lord Wentworth set off (unchaperoned) with his bride to enjoy a fashionable seaside honeymoon in Boulogne. The couple had only reached Dover when an extremely worried lawyer caught up with his client and presented Ralph with a slim package containing the equivalent of a ticking bomb.
Within Gerard Ford’s folder was an advance copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opening – and entirely unsolicited – salvo in defence of the injured Lady Byron. Due for publication in America on 1 September in The Atlantic Monthly, ‘The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life’ comprised a twenty-nine-page essay which was due to appear simultaneously in England (in a paraphrased and annotated version) in MacMillan’s Magazine.
Mrs Stowe’s publicly declared motive for rushing into print was the outrage she had felt both at reading John Paget’s article for Blackwood’s (the British magazine was immensely popular with American readers) and at the silence with which its vicious allegations had been greeted. To Ralph Wentworth and Gerard Ford, the American novelist’s indignation felt manufactured. Officially, Paget’s anonymously authored article had been published in July, but nineteenth-century magazines were notoriously late in issuing their final copy. Gerard Ford believed – and Ralph shared the lawyer’s scepticism – that Mrs Stowe had already been preparing an animated response to de Boissy’s book when John Paget wrote his piece. Blackwood’s simply offered a conveniently topical peg upon which to hang her own sensational tale. It was one that could be relied upon to raise the profile of an author whose sales were not what they had been back in the 1850s, before the outcome of a hideous civil war robbed abolitionism of its market value. Ford was especially angry that the advance copy of Mrs Stowe’s article had reached his legal office only – and, he believed, quite deliberately – when it was too late for steps to be taken to prevent its publication.
John Paget’s assault upon Lady Byron’s reputation had caused little more than an unpleasant flutter of gossip. It was Stowe’s ‘True Story’ that raised the storm from which Lady Byron’s name has suffered enduring damage.
Much of the fault was due to Mrs Stowe’s own careless haste. By the late summer of 1869, she had heard much – but far from all – of the complicated history of the Byron marriage and separation. Assistance had come from her friend Eliza Follen, one of Lady Byron’s chief confidantes.* (It was from Mrs Follen that Mrs Stowe had first heard about Byron’s incest.) But Mrs Stowe had personally seen no documents, other than Harriet Martineau’s laudatory essay and a handful of prudently reticent letters from Lady Byron herself.
Such a lack of precise information would prove singularly unfortunate, both for Lady Byron and her daughter. Unburdened by the facts, Mrs Stowe believed that the Byrons – at the time Annabella left her husband – had been married for two years, not one. The error was grave. It placed Lady Byron in the position of a complicit, knowing witness to the incest which had resulted in Medora’s birth in the summer of 1814. Of Ada Lovelace, Harriet Beecher Stowe evidently knew almost nothing. William was dismissively set aside in the article as a mere ‘man of fashion’. The absence of reference to Ada encouraged Victorian readers to assume that Lord Byron’s daughter, his rare, extraordinary child, had been cut from the same cloth as her patently trivial spouse.
The response to Mrs Stowe’s initial publication was dramatic. In America, 15,000 readers of The Atlantic Monthly promptly cancelled their subscriptions, nearly causing James T. Fields’s revered magazine to go out of business. Privately, Oliver Wendell Holmes enquired whether dear Harriet was quite certain of the dreadful fact (the incest) that she
