Augusta Leigh had a vested interest in supporting a marriage that would help to divert growing public attention from Byron’s illicit affection for herself. John Hobhouse, accompanying Byron on the bachelor’s last and far from hasty stage of his carriage journey towards matrimony, held a different view. Byron had alarmed Hobhouse in the summer of 1814 by hinting about lurid secrets in his private life. Six months later, those unnamed secrets had been forgotten and Hobhouse was conscious only of the fact that he was about to lose his cherished friend and fellow rake to a dowdy little North Country bride. Hobhouse’s Diary, our main guide to the wedding visit, is richly peppered with qualifications and barbs. In tone and content, it denigrated pretty much everything except his own friendship with Byron.
The Milbanke family’s continuing fears of a last-minute matrimonial cancellation were apparent from the moment that Byron’s carriage drew up at Seaham. It was eight in the evening. Supper had been eaten, the shutters long since closed. A distraught Lady Milbanke had retired to her room. Annabella, intercepting Byron as he limped upstairs to his former bedroom, flung her arms around his neck and burst into tears. (‘She did this not before us,’ Hobhouse noted with queasy relief.) Subsequently, meeting the bride-to-be by candlelight in the Seaham library, the rakish young man noted a frank manner, expressive eyes and good ankles. Miss Milbanke’s dresses, as Byron had previously warned him, were unfashionably long and high-necked, affording little chance for an intimate assessment of the young lady’s assets. To her credit (in the diarist’s opinion), their hostess showed no affectation either in the way she greeted her guest or in the way she behaved with Byron, ‘gazing with delight on his bold and animated face – this regulated however with the most entire decorum. Byron loves her personally when present,’ Hobhouse noted, before adding a snide qualification of his own: ‘as it is easy for those used to such indications to observe.’
A night’s rest helped to thaw Hobhouse’s reservations. Marriage settlement documents were signed first thing next morning in the presence of William Hoar, the Milbankes’ lawyer, who had come up weeks earlier from London for that specific purpose, and who departed the following day. Celebratory entertainments provided by the Seaham villagers included a colliers’ sword dance that culminated in a sinister little ritual, the beheading of the fool. At the hall, a mock wedding ceremony was rehearsed, with Hobhouse playing an improbable bride to Mr Hoar’s stately groom. Annabella, having gained Hobhouse’s respect during the morning’s discussions with Hoar about Byron’s financial position, was now declared to be ‘most attractive’, while her father’s stories (since Hobhouse was hearing them for the first time) seemed pleasantly entertaining. Only Byron, after a muted family supper, appeared wistful. (‘Well H, this is our last night – tomorrow I shall be Annabella’s – absit omen!!’) That Byron might have been joking about his desire for a last-minute reprieve was beyond the imagining of his fond but humourless companion.
Mr Hobhouse’s temper had been improved by the acquisition of an unexpected admirer. Thomas Noel, Lord Wentworth’s illegitimate son and the absentee Rector of Kirkby Mallory, was invited to preside at his cousin Annabella’s wedding as a special honour; alluring promises had been made (Noel was always short of money) of a handsome gift from the groom. Having already cooled his heels among the anxious family for three long weeks while the wedding plans went on hold, Thomas Noel was hungry for entertainment; Hobhouse and Byron offered all that a lively and most unclerically minded rector could have wished for.
The groom, so Noel informed Kitty and their family of six on his return home,* was not in the least surly and aloof. Far from it. The melodious-voiced Lord Byron (as young Mary Noel was happy to pass along to her favourite female correspondent of the time, ‘is very engaging in his manners, exceedingly good-humoured, and has great spirits’. Mr Hobhouse, who spoke of Lord Byron’s goodness, nobility and generosity in the highest of terms, had proved equally delightful, telling stories of his travels ‘in such pleasing language that Papa says he could never be tired of listening to him’.
What Thomas Noel did not tell his children was that Mr Hobhouse had privately urged him to do everything in his power to stop the marriage going ahead, advice that Noel decided to ignore.
On 2 January 1815, the long-awaited ceremony took place with the couple kneeling upon on two hard little cushions (Byron later remarked that he thought they were stuffed with peach stones) in Seaham’s airy first-floor drawing room. Hobhouse, while omitting to record his friend’s oddly informal wedding attire (a black coat instead of the customary blue, and loose trousers instead of the wedding breeches that would draw attention to the thinner calf above his deformed foot), noted that Annabella was simply dressed in white muslin (‘very plain indeed’), and that she spoke her responses clearly (‘firm as a rock’). Following the bride’s quick change into a warmer dress and fur-trimmed grey travelling pelisse, the couple had both sat quietly in the room. Tellingly, Hobhouse observed that he felt ‘as if I had buried a friend’.
Byron’s devoted comrade provided a final glimpse of his own feelings as the honeymooners set off on their thirty-mile carriage journey inland to Halnaby, near Darlington. Annabella, to whom Hobhouse had condescendingly presented a yellow morocco-bound set of her husband’s works (as if she did not already have copies of her own!), confided that any future absence of happiness would be entirely her own fault. Innocently stated, the remark would be stored up by the resentful Hobhouse as a declaration of
