In 1920, the widowed Mary Lovelace made her own contribution to the reclamation of Lady Byron. To a second and expanded edition of Astarte, Mary now added the letters which Ralph himself had been criticised for excluding. (The fault was not altogether his: Lady Dorchester had refused to permit the inclusion of Byron’s most revealing letters to Lady Melbourne, while the discreetly manipulative Leslie Stephen had dissuaded Ralph from publishing several self-incriminating letters written by Mrs Leigh.) Writing an affectionate memoir of her husband during that same post-war period, Ralph’s widow quietly emphasised the burden that the issue of his grandmother’s reputation had become for him, and how hard an honourable man had always striven to do what he believed to be right.
Forty years of experience of dealing both with Lady Byron’s papers and a sensation-loving press had taught the second Lady Lovelace the value of discretion. Writing about Ralph’s sister in 1920, three years after Anne’s death, Mary glided placidly over the details of the Blunts’ bizarre and frequently wretched marriage. (It had ended in 1906, the year of Ralph’s death.) Instead, she dwelt upon Anne’s exceptional courage, resilience, vigour (she could still vault on to a horse at the age of seventy-seven) and high intelligence. Blessed (in her sister-in-law’s admiring words) with the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child and the soul of a saint, Anne had spent her last ten years living in Egypt. She died as Baroness Wentworth in 1917, having outlived her niece, Molly King-Noel (the title’s previous bearer since Ralph Lovelace’s death), by just six months.
Judith, Anne’s only child, was divorced from her artistic husband, Neville Lytton, in 1923. The couple had been married for twenty-four years. Like her mother, and like Ada, Lady Lytton (also known as Baroness Wentworth) had an uncommon affinity with animals, and above all, with horses. When she died in 1957, the Crabbet Stud still comprised seventy-five of the world’s most beautiful horses, colourful murals of which adorned the ceilings of Crabbet Park, the graceful house designed by Judith’s mother. The stud was later sold – and subsequently dismantled – by one of Judith’s two daughters, Lady Winifrid Tryon. The house, happily, survives.
Houses, as much as their owners, have stories to be told. Seaham is now a spa. Halnaby has gone. Newstead Abbey’s future is currently far from secure.
Horsley Towers was sold by Ralph’s widow, Mary Lovelace, in 1920 to the great aircraft designer Sir Thomas Sopwith. Now a hotel, it retains the exterior and many of the internal features of William Lovelace’s extravagant creation, including the chapel, Ada’s tower and the mausoleum in which William and his second wife were buried. In 2018, a magnificent self-portrait of Sir Hubert Herkomer still hangs in Horsley’s entrance hall, signalling its architectural influence upon Lululaund, the Bavarian polymath’s own spectacular fantasy home (long since destroyed) at Bushey, in Hertfordshire.
Woburn Park has gone. At nearby Brooklands, Hugh Locke King created England’s first motor-racing track in 1907. (The house, built by Lady Hester King for her favourite son, is now a college.) The Lovelaces’ house at Ashley Combe has been demolished. So has Kirkby Mallory, better known today as Mallory Park, a motorbike track. The church and graveyard survive, as does Ada’s unkempt shrine.
Fire destroyed the main house at Ockham Park in 1948, seven years after Mary Lovelace’s death. The family papers escaped the blaze, having been stored in the separate stable block (which survives). In 1957, they were moved to Crabbet, to be divided between Judith Lytton’s two daughters and her son, grandfather of the present Lord Lytton.
POSTSCRIPT
Lady Byron’s fate, following her mauling at the hands of the gentlemen of the Victorian press, was to continue to be perceived as they had described her. Ralph’s two books, reaching a tiny, well-informed audience, caused no shift in the public’s perception of her as a coldly vindictive woman. Neither, in 1929, did Ethel Colburn Mayne’s redemptive account of a maligned philanthropist. Visitors to Kensal Rise need sharp eyes to discover Lady Byron’s name on the 1885 Reformers’ Memorial. (She is listed alongside Barbara Bodichon, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Butler and Robert Dale Owen.)
Thirty years after the publication of Mrs Mayne’s book, access to the Lovelace Papers was independently granted to Malcolm Elwin (working on the papers held at New Buildings, a house on the Crabbet Estate, by the Earl of Lytton) and to that ardent Byronophile, Doris Langley Moore (working on the papers held at Crabbet by Lord Lytton’s sisters).* It was unfortunate for Lady Byron, already in the doghouse, that neither Elwin nor Moore liked her. Malcolm Elwin’s books (the second of which was completed by another hand and published after his death in 1973) confirmed the grim portrait of Lady Byron given in works by Mrs Moore, books which reached a far wider audience.
A respected authority upon Lord Byron, Langley Moore’s enduring prejudice against his wife has exerted an unfortunately baleful influence. The origin of her somewhat excessive devotion to the poet and his works, as her unpublished memoir makes clear, was touchingly romantic. Growing up in Johannesburg, where her father was the editor of the Sunday Times, Doris Langley-Levy became addicted to Byron’s works at an early age. Her father gave her a copy of Childe Harold in 1917, when she was just fifteen years old; when she arrived in England six years later, Langley-Levy was carrying the book and had set her heart on entering the world of Byronic studies. Warmly supported by John Murray VI (‘Jock’), she went on to write several magnificent books about the poet. The strength of her attachment to him is apparent in the fact that she was
