Byron’s answer was freezing.
I do not see any good purpose to which questions of this kind are to lead – nor can they be answered otherwise than by time and events. You can still decide upon your own wishes and conduct before we meet – and apprize me of the result at our interview – only make sure of your own sentiments – mine are yours ever, B.
Next day, 23 December, while sullenly preparing to set out for Seaham (via Augusta’s home in Cambridgeshire), Byron fired off a final salvo in which he reminded his bride-to-be of the unhappy way in which they had last parted.
Dearest A – if we meet let it be to marry – had I remained at S[eaham] it had probably been over by this time – with regard to our being under the same roof and not married – I think past experience has shown us the awkwardness of that situation – I can conceive nothing above purgatory more uncomfortable . . . I shall however set out tomorrow . . . Hobhouse I believe accompanies me – which I rejoice at – for if we don’t marry I should not like a 2nd journey back quite alone – and remaining at S[eaham] might only revive a scene like the former and to that I confess myself unequal –
Arriving at Six Mile Bottom armed with a marriage licence and the drafts of his latest work (a ravishing reworking of various psalms, to be set to the music of Isaac Nathan), Byron tactlessly informed Annabella that his beloved sister was looking as perfect as ever (‘better can’t be in my estimation’), before wishing his bride-to-be as pleasant a time as he was having himself at the Leighs’ home: ‘much merriment and minced pye – it is Christmas Day’.
* Stratford Canning is best known as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War.
* Lady Frances’s charms were heightened by the fact that the Wedderburn Websters had recently moved to Aston Hall in Yorkshire. Aston was, as Byron had learned from Augusta, the very house in which she herself had been conceived.
* Hanson promised Byron a substantial amount of money (£30,000) from Lord Portsmouth’s estate in exchange for acting as best man and for later confirming the bridegroom’s sanity at the time of the marriage. Anecdotal report adds that Byron himself had already slept with the bride. So Byron himself later boasted to his own wife – but Byron did love to shock (Elizabeth Foyster, The Trials of the King of Hampshire (Oneworld Publications: 2016)).
* In other words, until Elizabeth Medora was weaned. Making love to a nursing mother was evidently not to Byron’s taste.
* Darnell, who later became the prebendary of Durham Cathedral and had his sermons published in the Edinburgh Review, was devoted to Annabella. In another undated autumn letter, from the Lovelace Byron Papers, he told her that ‘there is no young person to whom I have been so much in the habit of looking up to as yourself’ and sweetly ended by saying he would be proud to call Lady Byron his friend only ‘because she was Miss Milbanke’.
* On 22 November 1814, Portsmouth’s brother (and heir) formally requested that the earl should be certified as a lunatic and thus retrospectively unfit to have married Miss Hanson. Byron’s marriage preparations came further down John Hanson’s list of concerns than protecting the lucrative aggrandisement of his daughter (see E. Foyster, op. cit. pp. 192–3).
* In 1856, Annabella presented an entirely different portrait of the scene to Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this version, she offered to break the engagement if Byron had some private reason to regret his offer. Collapsing on a sofa, Byron had ‘murmured indistinct words of anger & reproach – “you don’t know what you have done”.’ The subject was never renewed except by hints at ‘fearful mysteries’ in the past. This is less convincing than the rage described by Byron. Only in her late twenties did Annabella learn to suppress her own violent temper. (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated (Sampson Low & Son, 1870), p. 289.)
* Byron had previously told Lady Melbourne that he preferred his suppers ‘hot’: the sexual meaning was plain. Here, he is clearly inviting Annabella to recall more than the ‘hot luncheons’ he had enjoyed under her roof.
* Annabella, now aged twenty-two, had unofficially taken on the role of family lawyer. It was one that equipped her well to face the challenges of an unknowable future.
CHAPTER SIX
A S
OJOURN IN
H
ELL
(JANUARY TO MARCH 1815)
The role of elder sister had been vacant in Miss Milbanke’s home circle ever since Sophy Curzon left Seaham Hall to marry Lord Tamworth in 1800. Annabella was fondly imagining she had found a Sophy substitute (Augusta was nine years older than herself) when she invited Mrs Leigh to join the wedding party and to accompany the couple, as was a regular convention in those days, on their January honeymoon.
Augusta’s explanation for refusing this invitation – Byron enclosed it with his own Christmas letter to Annabella from the Leighs’ Cambridgeshire house – was strikingly lame. The four young children (whom Augusta produced as her sole reason for staying at home) had never yet prevented their mother from going wherever she wished. When the fact that Byron did not once write to his increasingly plaintive sister during the entire first two months of his marriage is added to his almost hysterical opposition to the two women’s initial encounter in March, it becomes clear that it was he, not Augusta, who feared the consequences of such a
