Lord Lovelace, perhaps because (in characteristic fashion) he was off busily building himself a vast new home – his fourth – near Lake Torridon in north-west Scotland, was unavailable for comment.
In 1893, the old earl died. Lionel, who had been left Horsley Towers and the Scottish estate, while Ashley Combe and Ockham Park went to his older brother, touched Ralph’s heart by instantly offering to send him the family portraits that still adorned Horsley’s Great Hall: the Margaret Carpenter painting of Ada, in the year of her marriage; the Albanian portrait of Lord Byron; Hoppner’s representation of little Annabella Milbanke in a high-waisted white dress. Brought back to Wentworth House,* these striking images were on show by 5 February 1895, when Henry James, accompanied by his London neighbour, Mary De Morgan, was invited over to view the most incriminatingly incestuous letters that were by now in Ralph’s possession. (Loaned the Byron–Melbourne correspondence by Hobhouse’s daughter, Lady Dorchester, Ralph prudently made copies.)
Returning to his own home later that night, Henry James recorded in his notebook that he had already been considering a brother–sister drama when he was shown the letters. James went a little further, stating for his own peace of mind that nothing so ‘nefarious’ as the Lovelace letters had even crossed his mind.
So Henry James said and doubtless he believed what he wrote down. But when he went on to write The Turn of the Screw (1897), was the novelist’s perception of the strange, hidden relationship between the two children of Bly – Miles and Flora – and their ghostly alter egos, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, affected by what he had read and heard two years earlier at Wentworth House? Might Byron’s letters to Lady Melbourne, and to Augusta, have contributed to the sense of something lubricious and elusive, never quite visible, that makes James’s self-styled ‘potboiler’ feel so troubling to its readers? Had Ralph talked about his grandmother’s strange insistence that young Byron Ockham should be kept away from his sister at all times? Impossible to prove, the disturbing influence of the letters that Henry James was shown by Ralph Lovelace, upon his own story of two intensely close siblings and their ambiguous interpreter, merits, perhaps, a consideration that it has not, as yet, received.
The final stage in Ralph’s long battle to reclaim the high ground for his grandmother was triggered by a disagreement arising from John Murray’s end-of-the-century edition of Byron’s letters. Handsomely bound in gold and sea-blue cloth, the volumes were annotated and edited by Rowland Prothero. Ralph withdrew from his role in the project as editor-in-chief after reading The Times review of Volume 3, in which the anonymous reviewer asserted (once again), that it was now clear that Lady Byron had no reason to leave her husband. To Ralph, it seemed that Prothero and Murray had combined to strengthen the case against his grandmother, and to vindicate Mrs Leigh. Determined to proclaim the truth, once and for all, the 2nd Lord Lovelace now embarked upon the immense project that would absorb him almost until his death in 1906. (Mary, his widow, recalled that her often sad and distrait husband had never appeared so calm and at ease as when he was at work upon this final endeavour.)
Huge, unwieldy and cumbersomely written, Astarte, or A Fragment of the Truth (Ralph’s title alluded to the female figure in Byron’s Manfred) remains a cobwebbed treasure trove for Byron scholars. But it is not the hagiography one might expect. Ralph spoke candidly about what he now recalled as a miserable upbringing and an unsatisfactory education. He deplored some of his grandmother’s ‘despotic’ ways.* Astarte nevertheless offered the clearest account that had yet been provided of the Byron marriage, together with the clearest justification for Annabella’s departure from it. Privately, however, Ralph blamed his grandmother’s parents for their excessive influence upon a conscientiously dutiful daughter. Leaving Byron, so Ralph Lovelace had come to believe, was the source of all his grandmother’s sorrows. Like Henry Crabb Robinson, Ralph never forgot the wistfulness with which Lady Byron talked about her husband during her own last years, as if entombed within a prison of her own regrets.
Ralph died peacefully while standing on the terrace at Ockham one warm early evening in August 1906. Eight months earlier, he had received a courteous tribute to Astarte from Henry James (who gently expressed the wish that its author had been just a little less reticent).† It may have been as well that Lord Lovelace died just before the publication of a book (Lord Byron and his Detractors deliberately echoed ‘Lord Byron and his Calumniators’, the title of John Paget’s scurrilous essay for Blackwood’s in January, 1870) in which John Murray IV and Rowland Prothero stubbornly asserted that no substantial proof had yet been provided of Mrs Leigh’s guilt. Without the admission that Lady Byron had failed to obtain from an evasive Augusta Leigh at their ill-fated Reigate encounter, so Lord Byron’s staunchest defenders asserted, Ralph Lovelace’s charge of incest remained unproven.
In 1907 (in a book commissioned by John Murray IV), Richard Edgcumbe entered the lists with Byron: The Last Phase. The truth, so Edgcumbe laboriously explained to credulous readers, was that the bearer of Byron’s secret child had been his first love, Mary Chaworth. Augusta had gallantly faked a pregnancy in order to save from social disgrace a married woman to whom Mrs Leigh, like her brother, remained deeply attached. Every incriminating verse that Byron had addressed to his beloved sister had in fact been written to Mary Chaworth. Entertaining to read, Edgcumbe’s book is best treated as an extravagant fiction.
How much did Rowland Prothero and John Murray IV know of the true story? The awkward answer peeps through Marie Belloc Lowndes’s record
