The Reverend Thomas Noel’s feelings were less tender. Something ‘substantial’ had been promised for his time and efforts. His recompense consisted of a mere ring pulled by the poet off his own white finger (rings, frequently conferred, were an item of which Byron always possessed a superabundance) and a request to wear it in remembrance of the donor.
Mr Wallis, the Seaham vicar who was also in attendance, got nothing at all.
Until now, Annabella had spent little time alone with her spouse. If her frequently revised later accounts are to be trusted, solitude brought a sharp awakening. Journeying to Halnaby with his new bride in a closed private carriage, Byron began by singing, fell into silence and then informed Bell (the pet name he bestowed upon his bride from this point on) that she should have married George Eden. When this produced no results, he announced, firstly, that she would learn to regret not having accepted his own first proposal; secondly, that she should not have married him at all; and finally, that he shared the dislike which Lady Melbourne had told him she felt for Annabella’s mother.
Byron was as capricious in his moods as the wind. He was also suffering from a filthy cold, one that lasted throughout the entire first week of the honeymoon. Ill health did not improve his spirits. It is entirely possible that he did indeed say all these attributed unpleasantries, and mean them. It is also well within the bounds of belief that Byron announced, shortly after their first dinner as a married couple, a strong preference for sleeping alone, and that he greeted Annabella’s arrival in the Halnaby library the following morning with the announcement that she had married into a family rich only in insanity. Apparently, he added that he had damned himself by marrying her.
So Lady Byron recorded later and – prone though Annabella became to dressing her marital recollections in the plumage of a bad gothic novel – there is no reason to doubt that their essential basis was factual. Byron, referring to his estranged wife as ‘Truth herself’, meant to convey that Annabella did not lie. What she may have done instead was to focus an obliging memory upon those truths that would most help to make her legal case for separation. Those truths – and no others – were what Lady Byron presented in her formal depositions. That purposeful testimony tells part of the story, but not the whole.
Annabella was not alone in creating the myths in which the three-week January honeymoon at Halnaby has been enshrouded as thoroughly as by the snow which marooned the handsome, bleak old house, blanketing its long stone terraces and holding the world outside at bay. Jane Minns, reporting that her young mistress had been all smiles on her arrival at Halnaby (Mrs Minns had travelled ahead to prepare the household), was herself looking back over a gap of fifty-four years. Tom Moore’s frequently repeated tale of Byron ravishing his wife on a Halnaby sofa within minutes of their arrival is not verified elsewhere. Moore claimed to have come across the scene in Byron’s unpublished memoirs, but no other reader – and there were many – alluded to any such memorable occasion. A rape scene is hard to square with Byron’s only extant mention of a sofa encounter at Halnaby, when he informed Lady Melbourne that he and his Bell were snugly sharing a couch even as he wrote (she being curled up fast asleep in its far corner). ‘You would think,’ he complacently reported on this first day of wedlock, ‘that we had been married these fifty years.’
It was perhaps inevitable that the honeymoon of such a notorious literary figure would invite embellishment. Samuel Rogers also cited the conveniently unverifiable Byron ‘Memoirs’ (they were burned in John Murray’s Albemarle Street drawing room in 1824) as his source for a story of the poet waking his wife from slumber during their first night at Halnaby with a shriek of terror. Firelight, flickering behind the closed red damask curtains of the couple’s four-poster bed, had caused a guilty spirit to picture himself in Hell.
Again, this was a case of fanciful thinking. The anecdote was first published in 1856 by Rogers’ personal Boswell, Alexander Dyce, as an example of his hero’s lively table talk. Rogers was evidently conflating the Byrons’ imagined wedding night with a subsequent event at Seaham Hall, when Annabella rescued her sleeping spouse from being suffocated by the noxious fumes of sea coal. (An intoxicated Byron had imprudently doused the smoking fire in his dressing room with a bucket of water.) That incident was widely reported, especially since Byron took great pride in his wife’s resourcefulness. ‘This has been a trial of Bell’s presence of Mind, & adroitness which I am delighted to hear she possesses,’ Lady Melbourne complimented her protégé on 11 February, six days after his account of the event.
What do we know for certain about the week during which Byron laid aside his charming surface (Annabella later wistfully referred to it as his ‘company kindness’), allowing her to see the personality which Walter Scott privately described as ‘irritable to the point of mental disease’ (and which Byron himself would later plead made him ‘violent’, but ‘not malignant’)?
We know that, early on the first morning of their marriage, a misadventure occurred. Finding her fingers too slender for the wedding ring that had belonged to Byron’s chubbier mother, the new Lady Byron hung it around her neck on a black ribbon. For Byron, that innocent act was bad enough; a black ribbon signified misfortune to his superstitious mind. Worse followed when the ring fell into the fireplace; here was sure evidence
