‘Lady Byron into the country – Byron won’t go!’: Hobhouse’s Diary, 17 January 1816 (see note on p. 487).
‘a fine affair in their imagination your absence – & my story!’: AL to AIB, 19 January 1816, Coleridge and Prothero, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 320.
had a ‘too confiding disposition’: Sir Francis Doyle to AIB, 18 July 1816, Dep. Lovelace Byron 68, fols. 18–19.
she broke down, on certain occasions, in hysterical fits of sobbing: Statement by Mrs Fletcher to John Hanson, n.d., NLS.
‘She will break my heart if she takes up the thing in bitterness against him’: AIB to Mrs Clermont, 22 January 1816, Dep. Lovelace Byron 66, fol. 5.
‘I would not but have seen Lushington for the World’: JN to AIB, 25 January 1816, Dep. Lovelace Byron 36, fols. 12–14.
the lawyer had privately ‘deemed a reconciliation with Lord Byron practicable’: SL to AIB, 31 January 1830. Lushington’s letter was published by AIB with his consent in her privately circulated ‘Remarks’ in Moore’s 1830 biography of Byron.
‘It is worth the sadness if it brings anything good to him’: AIB Memorandum, 27 January 1816, in Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (Macdonald, 1962), p. 379.
‘Kate! I will buckler thee against a million!’: Byron to AIB, 3 February 1816, BL&J, vol. 5.
In an afterthought addressed to Mrs Clermont, the carrier of her letter to Lushington’s home: Byron to AIB, 8 February 1816, BL&J, vol. 5; AIB’s ‘Remarks’ on this letter were sent to Mrs Clermont on 13 February 1816, for transmission to Lushington.
Lady Melbourne asked her brother Ralph why he had instructed friends ‘to give the event every possible publicity’: Lady Melbourne to RN, 12 February 1816, in Jonathan David Gross (ed.), Byron’s ‘Corbeau Blanc’: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice University Press, 1997), p. 314.
marvelling at ‘the unexampled gentleness, goodness, and wise forbearances’: Ethel Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel Byron (Charles Scribner, 1929), p. 259.
‘he had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely’: Thomas Macaulay, ‘Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his Life, by Thomas Moore’, Edinburgh Review, June 1831.
Byron’s boasts to Annabella ‘of his adulteries and indecencies’: S. M. Waddams, Law, Politics and the Church of England: The Career of Stephen Lushington 1782–1873 (CUP, 1992), p. 114.
Lushington confirmed that ‘when I was informed by you of facts utterly unknown . . . my opinion was entirely changed’: SL to AIB, 31 January 1830, ibid., see note to p. 114 above, ‘the lawyer had privately “deemed . . .’.
‘I am in boundless respect of her,’ Lushington would write years later: SL to Frances Carr, his sister-in-law, n.d. 1852, quoted in Joan Pierson, The Real Lady Byron (Robert Hale, 1992), p. 32.
‘Oh– Bell– to see you thus stifling and destroying all feeling, all affections – all duties’: Byron to AIB, 4 March 1816, BL&J, vol. 5; AIB, ‘Reasons for my return urged by Mrs Leigh’, 5 March 1816, DLM transcript.
Reshaped by the super-cautious Stephen Lushington, it became a nebulous web of conditionals: Lushington’s Statement is given in full in Ralph Milbanke, Earl of Lovelace, Astarte: A Fragment of Truth Concerning George Gordon Byron, Sixth Lord Byron (Christophers, 1905 and 1921), pp. 46–8; see also Elwin, Malcolm, Lord Byron’s Wife (Macdonald, 1962), p. 441.
her brother, while deranged, could once have committed ‘some act which he would not avow’: AL to Francis Hodgson, 14 March 1816, Dep. Lovelace Byron 84, fols. 220–6.
Byron’s royal admirer, young Princess Charlotte, declared that she had wept ‘like a fool’: HRH Princess Charlotte to Miss Mercer Elphinstone, April 1816, Lady Charlotte Bury, The Diary of A Lady-in-Waiting, edited by Francis Steuart, 2 vols. (J. Lane, 1908), vol. 1, p. 399.
she described her own ‘most tender affection for — . What is the reason?’: AIB, journal fragment, 16 September 1820, Dep. Lovelace Byron 117, fol. 4. Punctuation has been altered here to make the original author’s meaning clearer. Annabella’s original gives the blank for the omitted name followed without a break by ‘—what is the reason?’
From Augusta – with whom he had just parted for the last time – he had asked only that she should keep him informed: Byron to AL, in a brief postscript, 15 April 1816, BL&J, vol. 5.
Chapter Nine: In the Public Eye (1816–24)
if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s memory of her impressions as a 5-year-old were to be trusted: Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life’, Atlantic Monthly, September 1869.
‘I think my noble friend is something like my old peacock’: Walter Scott to J. B. S. Morritt, 16 May 1816, in John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Robert Cadell, 1845), p. 332.
‘True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him’: Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his Life, by Thomas Moore’, Edinburgh Review, June 1831.
the privately printed and widely distributed ‘Remarks’ of 1830 in which Annabella defended her dead parents: AINB, ‘Remarks’ (on Moore’s Life of Lord Byron) were privately printed and widely distributed in March 1830, following the publication in January 1830 of Moore’s first of two volumes. In 1831, the ‘Remarks’ were bound into a new edition of Moore’s book, at Annabella’s request.
‘people at Ely and Peterborough Stared at us very much, and Mama said we were Lionesses – pray what does that mean?’: AIB (writing, as she frequently did, as Ada) to JN, 11 June 1816, Dep. Lovelace Byron 30.
Initially, Byron refused to believe it: Byron to John Murray, 21 December 1822, BL&J, vol. 10.
Lady Melbourne remarked that Lady Byron’s face was ‘sad and strained’: Lady Melbourne to Hobhouse, 18 October 1816, in Jonathan David Gross (ed.), Byron’s ‘Corbeau Blanc’: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice University Press, 1997), pp. 331–3. (This long letter offers a perfect example of how Lady Melbourne operated behind the scenes in her protégé’s life.)
‘the only important calumny that ever was advanced against you’: P. B. Shelley to Byron, 29 September 1816, in Frederick
