Appeals were frequently – and vainly – made for the elderly Stephen Lushington to speak out about the past. Privately, however, in January 1870, Lushington confided to Lady Byron’s only male trustee, Henry Bathurst, that his client had been spurred into leaving her husband by Byron’s disgraceful boast of having recently lain between two naked prostitutes, fondling both, while pondering which of them he should bring home to dwell alongside his wife. Incest was not – it had never been – the reason for Lady Byron’s departure. So a still shocked Stephen Lushington recalled, and Bathurst took the esteemed lawyer at his word. In public, Lushington continued to maintain silence regarding the private life of a client whom he continued to revere until his death, at Ockham, in 1873.
January 1870 was the month in which the attacks reached their climax. John Paget had already compared the late Lady Byron to a murderess. Now, Blackwood’s rhetoric-intoxicated maestro urged all self-respecting women to save their own souls by abhorring and condemning her, every woman, that is, ‘who had not sunk into a state of degradation lower than that of the lowest prostitute that ever haunted the night-houses of the Haymarket’. There, within those depths into which no respectable female would ever venture to peep, Miss Martineau’s model of virtue glared shamelessly up from her own iniquitous pit. As for the household over which this deplorable hypocrite had presided at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, such an establishment would excite disgust even in ‘the wretched and vicious neighbourhoods’ in which (Mr Paget could only coyly imagine) such dreadful places might actually exist.
So much for Lady Byron. Mr Paget was nevertheless eager to grant her noble husband a clean bill of health. He quoted (in this same January article) the indignant words of a Mr Delmé-Radcliffe, who had recently informed readers of the Telegraph that the rumour of Byron’s incest was ‘a lie – an odious damned lie, upon my soul, a lie – a wicked lie’. The late Sir John Cam Hobhouse (long since transformed from one of Byron’s rowdiest drinking cronies into Lord Broughton, a portly pillar of Victorian society) was also invoked for for his stirring defence during the 1840s of Lord Byron’s entitlement to a monument in Westminster Abbey.* And why not? demanded Paget. Byron had been an eminent poet. More than that, as Lord Broughton himself had been proud to declare, ‘he was, in the best sense of the word, a gentleman!’
Perhaps the most discomforting aspect of the savage attack upon Lady Byron that a reckless Mrs Stowe had inadvertently unleashed is the evidence that only John Fox and Eliza Lynn Linton (anonymously publishing a series of calm, fair-minded pieces in the Saturday Review) gave any thought at all to Lady Byron’s descendants. Mrs Stowe herself had expressed unconvincing amazement that any living members of the family might yet survive with whom she could have consulted. (Had she really never heard of Ralph, who was living at his grandmother’s house during Mrs Stowe’s three visits to England, or of Anne, the intelligent, artistic granddaughter in whom Lady Byron took such pride?) The truth would seem to be that Mrs Stowe launched her grand defence without ever attempting to make contact with a family who were certain (as Mrs Follen had surely advised her) to obstruct such an indiscreetly assertive attempt at an apologia.
Equally hypocritical, however, were the widespread professions of shocked disbelief at the tale of Byron’s incest. That story (as the journalists admitted in their colourful comparisons to loathsome reptiles and ancient denizens of the sewers) had been slithering around private dinner tables and publishers’ backrooms ever since the year of the Byrons’ separation. Shock suited the framing of a new heroine, one who was ripe for their sugar-stuffed Victorian audience. Alongside their pleasing image of the virginal Teresa Guiccioli, the journalists now placed an even more ludicrous caricature of Augusta Leigh: a quiet angel of the hearth at whose knee, each night, her innocent children knelt to lisp their prayers.† Presented with the uplifting portrait of such a saintlike sister (it was one which the gentlemen of the press continued to embellish for their readers’ delectation until well past the end of the century), the public’s consciousness of Lord Byron’s incest dwindled to the status of a hideous mirage, the deluded fantasy of his jealous and consummately deceitful wife.
In England, Mrs Stowe herself was pardoned for what was perceived as a blunderingly inaccurate, but well-intended enterprise. In France, where Harriet’s defence of Lady Byron had incurred the unyielding hostility of Madame de Boissy, Teresa was still consoling herself in 1870 with the thought that readers of Mrs Stowe’s hateful book seemed now to believe that Lady Byron had, at best, been mad enough to merit permanent confinement in an asylum.*
In 1871, Ralph Wentworth’s young wife gave birth to a girl, Ada Mary (always known as Molly), at their London home. Lord Wentworth’s happiness was short-lived. On 7 July of the following year, a crestfallen Ralph wrote to tell his sister that
