My doubt then is – and I ask a solution – whether you are in any danger of that attachment to me which might interfere with your peace of mind . . . Next, on the supposition of a reply unfavourable to my wishes, I would ask you to consider by what course the danger may be avoided . . .
On 10 August, briefly back at his Albany rooms, Byron replied with something that came thrillingly close to a declaration. ‘I will answer your question as openly as I can,’ he wrote. ‘I did, do, and always shall love you –’ From here, however, he perversely proceeded to remind her that she had already turned him down once and – given the chance – would doubtless do so again. Since she had tendered no offer of affection, he did not intend to sue for pity.
At this point, Annabella lost her temper. Enraged by Byron’s obdurate failure to understand her, she now announced (on 13 August) that her own feelings about him were and always had been limited by the knowledge that she and he were thoroughly incompatible. ‘Not, believe me, that I depreciate your capacity for the domestic virtues . . . Nevertheless you do not appear to be the person whom I ought to select as my guide, my support, my example upon earth . . .’
The: So there! was almost audible. Two formidable personalities had clashed with as much spirit as Petruchio and his shrew; unexpectedly, Byron took his hit on the chin. ‘Very well – now we can talk of something else,’ he responded nonchalantly on the 16th. A short and extremely proper exchange of letters about literature followed on, with Byron’s cancellation of his promised visit softened by his sending (at Annabella’s meek request) his list of recommendations for her reading course. He suggested Sismondi, Hume and Gibbon with the promised loan of his own dual-language Tacitus. Climbing down from her stilts, the scholarly Annabella graciously agreed to give Gibbon a second chance.
At the end of August, Byron and Augusta travelled to Newstead, following the final withdrawal of the Abbey’s dilatory purchaser, Thomas Claughton. There, having learned that the beguiling Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower had rejected the proposal made by Augusta on her brother’s behalf, the couple fell back on their original plan. Terrified by the prospect of a scandal which would jeopardise her social position (Mrs Villiers was helping to smooth the way to a place at court and free lodgings for life), Augusta was desperate to see her brother respectably married. Wealthy, affectionate and seemingly unaware of the scandalous tales that were beginning to be whispered in London, Miss Milbanke eminently fitted the bill.
On 9 September, in a letter which he hesitated a full day before finally despatching, Annabella’s laggardly suitor referred to the petulant August epistle in which Annabella announced that she would never be his because their characters were ‘ill adapted to each other’. Now, Byron humbly asked if that meant all was lost. ‘Are the “objections” – to which you alluded – insuperable?’ And if so, ‘is there any line or change of conduct which could possibly remove them?’ In short, he was finally ready to propose marriage.
On 18 September, Byron was dining alone at Newstead with Augusta and the local apothecary (liver problems had plagued the young poet since his return to England in 1811) when a gardener brought in the late Mrs Byron’s wedding ring. Mysteriously disinterred from a Newstead flower bed just before Miss Milbanke’s prompt consent (she wrote back on the very day that his proposal arrived), ring and letter together were laid upon the breakfast table. It may have been the odd coincidence that caused the intensely superstitious Byron to turn ashen white. Later, and with extraordinary spite, Augusta would add another detail for Annabella’s benefit. Byron’s only response to the news of her acceptance, so she said, had been to comment: ‘It never rains but it pours.’
Lady Melbourne was the first to hear the news, in a letter which once again announced her protégé’s intention of reforming ‘most thoroughly’ (by which, he meant her to understand, his ceasing to sleep with Augusta) in preparation for an altered way of life for which he requested her auntly blessing. Answering Annabella on that same day (18 September), Byron declared that her response, while ‘unexpected’, had given him ‘a new existence’: he was truly moved by her earnest wish to make him happy. ‘It is in your power to render me happy – you have made me so already.’
On the following day, Byron and Augusta walked together into a part of the estate grimly known as Devil’s Wood and carved their names – like the lovers they doubtless still were – into the bark of an old tree. Back in the abbey, Byron wrote to appoint Annabella as his guide, philosopher and friend: ‘my whole heart is yours’. To Thomas Moore, a favourite confidant about financial matters, he announced on that same day that his bride-to-be was both virtuous (a later letter to Moore admiringly described Annabella as ‘a pattern of the north’) and rich.
Annabella’s great expectations formed a regular feature of Byron’s letters to Moore. Confirmation of her status as an heiress had come to him via Lady Melbourne. Apparently, there would be a house, together with a fine second residence and a ‘very considerable’ inheritance. Judith Milbanke had herself informed an attentive sister-in-law of these valuable particulars on 25 September before collapsing into bed, exhausted by the emotional travails of Annabella’s snail-paced journey to the altar with a man – her mother now proudly declared – whom she herself had always known to be The One: ‘and I was right . . .’
Not everybody was so ecstatic. As she opened her letters – from Emily Milner, Selina Doyle and Joanna Baillie – Annabella found
