‘the moment I sunk into your friend . . . you never did – never for an instant – trifle with me’: Byron to AIM, 12 February 1814, BL&J, vol. 4.
‘six hundred in heart and in head & pursuits about six’: Byron to AIM, 19 February 1814, ibid.
‘My doubt then is – and I ask a solution – whether you are in any danger of that attachment to me’: AIM to Lord Byron, 6 August 1814, NLS.
‘Not, believe me, that I depreciate your capacity for the domestic virtues . . .’: AIM to Lord Byron, 13 August 1814, NLS.
‘It never rains but it pours’: Narrative Q, 1816, one of the many documents in which Annabella revisited the circumstances of the engagement and the marriage (Dep. Lovelace Byron 130, item 4). The lettered labelling (‘Q’ etc.) was later added by Annabella’s grandson, the 2nd Earl of Lovelace. (See notes to Ch. 6).
‘I stood on the opposite side of the fireplace’: Malcolm Elwin, quoting one of Annabella’s several later re-statings of the courtship and her marriage, in Lord Byron’s Wife (Macdonald, 1962), pp. 227–8.
‘if there is a break – it shall be her doing not mine’: Byron to Lady Melbourne, 13 November 1814, BL&J, vol. 4.
‘everything is in your power’: Lady Melbourne to Lord Byron, 18 November 1814, in Jonathan David Gross (ed.), Byron’s ‘Corbeau Blanc’: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice University Press, 1997), pp. 187–8.
‘Ma Mignonne’: Byron to AIM, 16, 20 and 28 November 1814, BL&J, vol. 4.
that a visitor ‘has found out a likeness to your picture in Mignonne’: AL to Byron, 15 December 1814, NLS. Annabella, when finally in possession of all Augusta’s correspondence relating to her own situation, sent the letter on to Mrs Leigh’s intimate friend, Theresa Villiers, as evidence of what double-dealing had been in play. Copies of the Augusta–Annabella letters are in WP, Add MS 31037.
‘I do not see any good purpose to which questions of this kind are to lead’: Byron to AIM, 22 December 1814, BL&J, vol. 4.
Chapter Six: A Sojourn in Hell (January to March 1815)
‘gazing with delight on his bold and animated face’: Hobhouse’s Diary, transcript by Ralph, 2nd Earl of Lovelace, from the original in NYPL. But see also p. 487 for the much more accessible Cochran online edition of Hobhouse’s Diary.
‘is very engaging in his manners . . . Papa says he could never be tired of listening to him’: Mary Noel (daughter of the Revd Thomas), writing from Kirkby Mallory, to Henrietta Jervis, in Bath, 10 January 1815, Dep. Lovelace Byron 21, fol. 126.
advice that Noel decided to ignore: AIB to her lawyer, Stephen Lushington, 19 February 1816, quoting a letter from the Revd Thomas Noel, Dep. Lovelace Byron 88, fols. 14–16 and 25–6. Eight days earlier, she told Stephen Lushington that it was John Hobhouse who, following his return to London in the summer of 1815, ‘had instigated, more than anyone else, the behaviour that has disunited us’.
and a request to wear it in remembrance of the donor: see note to p. 69, ‘is very engaging in his manners . . .’.
Jane Minns . . . was herself looking back over a gap of fifty-four years: Interview with Jane Minns, AIB’s former maid, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, (1869).
‘You would think . . . that we had been married these fifty years’: Byron to Lady Melbourne, 3 January 1815, BL&J, vol. 5.
the personality which Walter Scott privately described as ‘irritable to the point of mental disease’: Sir Walter Scott to Lady Anne Barnard (1824–5, n.d.), Charles Mackay (ed.), Medora Leigh, A History and Autobiography (R. Bentley, 1869), p. 84; Byron to AIB, 17 November 1821, BL&J, vol. 9.
‘It is so like him to try and persuade people that he is disagreeable’: Augusta Leigh’s letters, except where otherwise indicated, exist in original and transcript form in the Lovelace Byron Papers. A set of copies is also at HRC (Byron Papers, Misc III) and at the British Library Manuscripts, Add MS 31037. Annabella’s account comes from Narrative Q, July 1816 (see Ch. 5, note to p. 58, ‘It never rains but it pours’). The letter identification of AIB’s statements and narratives follows that chosen by the 2nd Earl of Lovelace, the first person to read his grandmother’s copious records in full. I have relied upon the meticulous (although often in shorthand) copies made from the originals, when held at Crabbet, by DLM.
‘bereaved of reason during his paroxysms with his wife’: Hobhouse’s Diary, 12 March 1816, from a part of Lord Lovelace’s transcript (see note to p. 68, above, ‘gazing with delight’).
‘well, and as happy as youth and love can make them . . .’: JM to Sir James Bland Burges, 27 January 1815, Burges Papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford).
Annabella had left Seaham for Halnaby looking like ‘a flower’: Mrs Clermont to Lady Gosford’s new son-in-law, Dr Henry Bence-Jones, 11 October 1846. Bence-Jones had been recruited by Annabella to care for her family’s old and mentally enfeebled friend. It was at this time that Bence-Jones himself began to research some of the story around the separation and first interviewed Jane Minns (see, note to p. 72 above, ‘Jane Minns . . .’).
Lady Melbourne, busily urging her protégé to put himself under his wife’s affectionate direction: Lady Melbourne to Byron, 31 January 1815, in Jonathan David Gross (ed.), Byron’s ‘Corbeau Blanc’: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice University Press, 1997), pp. 279–81; Byron to Lady Melbourne, 2 February 1815, BL&J, vol. 4.
Lady Byron resolved to omit such scenes: AL to AIB, n.d., Tuesday, 1815, has evidently taken the phrase ‘ramble-scramble’ from Annabella’s previous letter to her. Dep. Lovelace Byron 79, fol. 67.
Byron . . . had ‘vastly’ enjoyed his stay at Seaham Hall: Byron to Tom Moore, 8 March 1815, BL&J, vol. 4. Annabella’s expectations of pregnancy were confirmed by the end of that month.
It made up for the coldness and the ‘sort of unrelenting pity’: Annabella set her memories of the visit down in Statements R, Q (R being an expansion of Q, written in late 1816 or early 1817) and G (1816), to which she added extensive passages late in
