Annabella Milbanke was thinking only of how to renew a friendship that she valued and feared she had forever lost – Byron was reported to be departing for the Continent, perhaps never to return – when she wrote once again to Lady Melbourne from Seaham on 18 July. A newspaper had reported that day on Lord Byron’s purported use of legal trickery to enforce the sale of Newstead. Annabella begged her aunt to pass along the fact that she herself knew Lord Byron to be incapable of such base behaviour. Her more ardent message followed.
As I shall not have an opportunity of seeing him again I should be glad if you would tell him that however long his absence may be, I shall always have pleasure in hearing that he is happy, and if my esteem can afford him any satisfaction, he may rely on my not adopting the opinions of those who wrong him.
The newspaper had got its facts wrong. Byron had indeed agreed to sell his crumbling family estate in Nottinghamshire for £140,000 (close to £5 million in today’s terms), back in 1812. Over a year later, he had still received only £5,000. The prospective buyer, a lawyer called Thomas Claughton, was now belatedly questioning the originally agreed price. Responding on 18 July to Lady Melbourne’s letter with an explanation (Byron himself had already seen the article and angrily ordered John Hanson to take corrective action), Byron saved Annabella for his postscript. Miss Milbanke could be told – whatever it pleased her aunt to say: ‘I have not the skill – you are an adept – you may defend me if it amuses you.’ (Lady Melbourne’s envoy to her niece, if she ever wrote one, has not survived.)
The Milbankes had little personal knowledge of Lord Byron – Sir Ralph had met him only once – but they were growing anxious about Annabella.
Evidence of parental concern, rather than of any cunning strategy for their daughter’s future, showed up in their prompt support for Annabella’s decision, on 22 August, to write directly, for the first time in her life, to Lord Byron. Informing him of her parents’ approval, she imposed only one condition upon the epistolary friendship that she wished to initiate: ‘In particular I would not have it known to Ly Melbourne . . . she is perhaps too much accustomed to look for design, to understand the plainness of my intentions . . .’
* Byron’s second speech, given on 21 April 1812, objected to Britain’s ongoing discrimination against Catholics.
CHAPTER FIVE
A
N
E
PISTOLARY
C
OURTSHIP
(1813–14)
Not tell Lady Melbourne! How little Annabella knew Byron, or indeed, her aunt. How could she have guessed that – within a fortnight of her own resolutely secret suit to Byron – Lady Melbourne would be sending him (although for what mischievous purpose, it is hard to conjecture) the private list of husbandly requirements that she herself had persuaded Annabella to draw up a year earlier?
Returning that curious document to his favourite correspondent on 5 September 1813, Byron expressed concern that Miss Milbanke’s faith in her own infallibility ‘may lead her into some egregious blunder’. The blunder that he evidently had in mind lay in soliciting the friendship of himself, a rejected suitor. So far, however, Lady Melbourne knew only that he had embarked upon a sentimental correspondence with somebody referred to as ‘X.Y.Z.’. By 7 September, however, Annabella’s aunt had been enlightened. Doubtless, she hoped that this high-minded friendship with her niece might steer a young man she adored away from a far more dangerous relationship: his newly discovered passion for Augusta Leigh.
Byron had entered the month of August 1813 with the intention of running away to Europe accompanied by the latest object of his desire. (Mrs Leigh, he told a horrified Lady Melbourne on 5 August, was even keener than himself on the elopement plan.) By the end of the month, he was having second thoughts. Augusta, for her part, had returned to the ramshackle, debt-ridden house at Six Mile Bottom that she shared with her husband and their three young children. Byron, while dropping enticing hints to his friend Tom Moore on 22 August about having landed himself in a ‘far more serious – and entirely new – scrape’, was by now pondering how best to dig himself out.
On that same day (22 August), Annabella had posted off from Seaham her laboriously prolix request to become Lord Byron’s special penfriend. Love formed no part of her suit: fearful of raising false expectations or – which seems more likely – anxious to save her face, she alluded to another secret and unrequited passion. ‘I signified the existence of an attachment in my mind,’ she would admit to Mary Gosford on 3 December, mournfully adding that she had been betrayed into this uncharacteristic act of deception by her own imprudent enthusiasm.
Annabella’s intentions were sincere; her indication of unavailability acted like catnip upon a man accustomed to reducing ladies to a state of prostrate compliance. But here, incredibly, was one – the only one who had dared to refuse him – calmly announcing that she preferred another man. When Byron wrote back (25 August) to say that he himself ‘still’ preferred her to all others and that friendship was impossible (‘I doubt whether I could help loving you’), Annabella scored another point by retreating. If friendship was not on offer, she announced, ‘I will trouble you no more . . . God bless you.’
Unavailable still? Such coolness was irresistible! On 31 August, an increasingly intrigued Byron wrote back to announce that –
