And so it all began.
Byron’s letters to Annabella during that autumn, when read alongside the opinions that he was simultaneously expressing to her aunt, might cause an impartial reader to gasp at such insouciant betrayal of a friendship. But Byron’s left hand was seldom aware of what his right was doing. Inconsistency was as instinctive to him as wit. ‘If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to anyone else),’ he would admit to his journal on 6 November, ‘every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.’
Writing to his self-appointed friend (so conveniently remote in her northern fastness), Byron became earnest, sincere and gratifyingly deferential. He told her (when asked) about his childhood introduction by a Scottish nurse to the grim doctrine of Calvinism and a vengeful God, a deity far removed from Annabella’s own forgiving Maker. He chastised her view of his solemnity. (‘Nobody laughs more . . .’) He acquainted her with his notion of the purpose of life (‘The great object of life is Sensation – to feel that we exist even though in pain – it is this “craving void” which drives us to Gaming – to Battle – to Travel . . .’), but expressed warm approval when Miss Milbanke disagreed. He teased her about rumours of a newly rejected lover (Stratford Canning, a cousin of the Whig politician)* and asked her to be kind to his little cousin Eliza Byron, about to go away to school up in the remote north of England. He informed Miss Milbanke that she herself wrote ‘remarkably well’, sulked when Annabella did not respond at once to his own letters, wondered when she next would be in town, and (on 26 September, a month after their correspondence began) humbly sought permission to address her as ‘My dear friend’.
So far, so promising. Writing to Annabella in that same late September letter, Byron asked her (in a tone that sounded agreeably filial) to convey his ‘invariable’ respects to Miss Milbanke’s parents. Of Augusta Leigh, of the always-returning Caroline Lamb and of his new love interest, a certain Lady Frances (the flirtatious wife of his friend, Sir Godfrey Wedderburn Webster), Lord Byron mentioned not one word.* Annabella was to be his mentor, not his confidante. The most that he would allow her to know – driven by a pride that matched her own – was that he did not languish uncomforted.
Writing simultaneously to Lady Melbourne throughout that same autumn of 1813, Byron used an entirely different tone. On 28 September, just two days after requesting the honour of addressing Annabella as his own dear friend, he groaned to her aunt about the persevering epistles of ‘your mathematician’ and mocked the earnestness of such a prim little virgin – ‘the strictest of St Ursula’s 11000 what do you call ’ems’ – who, nevertheless, chose to write letters to a rake. Annabella was unchivalrously categorised behind her back as the kind of young woman who
enters into a clandestine correspondence with a personage generally presumed a great Roué – & drags her aged parents into this secret treaty – it is I believe not usual for single ladies to risk such brilliant adventures – but this comes of infallibility . . .
Ominously, Byron added his opinion that Annabella was doing ‘a foolish thing’ by corresponding with him at all.
Byron’s bravado may have been more of a pose than he himself knew. Ten days later, he failed to disguise his discomfiture when Lady Melbourne revealed that Annabella, while writing to him with all the considerable gravity that she could muster, was meanwhile displaying the gayest of spirits in the letters she despatched to Melbourne House. Was she indeed? – ‘the little demure Nonjuror!’ Byron burst out on 8 October.
He had revealed too much, and it seems that he knew it. Before the end of the month, Lady Melbourne was being untruthfully informed (by Byron himself) that his correspondence with her niece was at an end.
By the close of 1813, so far as her aunt knew, Annabella Milbanke had passed out of her former suitor’s thoughts. On 6 February 1814, Byron mischievously reminded Lady Melbourne of the doomed proposal (‘that brilliant negociation with the Princess of Parallellograms’) he had once persuaded her to make on his behalf. Now, back in London from a long and secluded Christmas at Newstead with the pregnant Augusta and her children, Byron asked his favourite mentor to find him some docile, trouble-free consort: ‘What I want is a companion – a friend rather than a sentimentalist.’
Lady Melbourne knew better than to trust Byron’s shimmering impulses. Annabella was more easily deceived. Bewitched by her correspondence with the most dangerously seductive letter-writer of the age, it took just three months for austere vows of friendship to change into ardent hopes of a requited love. On 26 November 1813, she confessed to Mary Gosford her secret dream of becoming Byron’s wife: ‘a thought too dear to be indulged’. The following day, Annabella set out to charm Byron with a letter in which, shyly angling for a romantic response, she asked whether their closer acquaintanceship might have caused him to like her – less?
The tactic almost worked. Responding on 29 November, Byron sounded both serious and tender. Annabella wronged herself, he told her, both in fearing that ‘the charm’ had been broken by correspondence and in imagining that she had overstepped a mark through her question. ‘No one can assume or presume less than you do,’ he reassured her. As for love, none could supplant her. It was simply the case – she had told him so herself – that ‘the only woman to whom I ever seriously
