A letter was delivered to Byron while the honeymooners consumed their first post-nuptial breakfast. Augusta, never diplomatic, had seized the occasion to hail her younger brother as the ‘Dearest, best & first of human beings’ before informing him that she herself had trembled like the sea in an earthquake during his wedding ceremony. Byron read the letter aloud to Bell and asked for her thoughts. She told him (Annabella’s calmness in the face of provocation always infuriated her husband) that the letter was very agreeable. ‘My answers on all such occasions appeared to convince him of my unsuspecting goodwill towards her [Augusta],’ she would tell her lawyer the following year.
It is unlikely that the newly married Annabella felt anything other than ‘unsuspecting goodwill’ towards the unknown sister-in-law with whom she swiftly began to share her concerns about Byron’s odd behaviour. While Byron cheerfully informed Lady Melbourne that Halnaby was ‘just the spot’ for a honeymoon and that he now entertained ‘great hopes this match will turn out well’ (7 January 1815), Augusta tried to reassure his anxious wife. ‘At Halnaby he did several times declare that he was guilty of some heinous crime,’ Annabella later recalled. But Augusta asserted that such tales were all a sham. ‘It is so like him to try and persuade people that he is disagreeable and all that Oh dear!’, she lamented to Annabella on 9 January 1815. Nine days later, she countered news of Byron’s ‘fit of grumps’ and ‘malicious insinuations’ with praises for the way that Annabella had taken control:
I think and with joy that you are the most sagacious person and have in one fortnight made yourself as completely Mistress of the ‘art of making B happy’ as some others would in 20 years.
Strangely, given Annabella’s lawyerly habit of making copies of everything she wrote, no trace remains of her own side of the copious correspondence with Augusta during those first months of 1815. But Augusta’s eulogy suggests that the stay at Halnaby was less resolutely black than Annabella’s memory later painted it. Expeditions were rendered impossible by heavy snow. Music offered no diversion for a couple who neither played instruments nor – apart from Byron’s occasional wild Albanian chantings – sang. In certain other respects, they were well matched. Insistently though Annabella would later dwell upon Byron’s belief in a vengeful God, he was intrigued by her own more forgiving creed. At Halnaby, she read a discussion of miracles, at his request, and argued the case against atheism. Byron was listening to his hardheaded wife when he briskly instructed John Hanson, on 19 January 1815, to start raising money from his encumbered estates in Nottinghamshire and Lancashire.
Money worries would haunt Byron throughout his marriage, leading to times (so he later told Hobhouse) when he was ‘bereaved of reason during his paroxysms with his wife’.* Money was preying on his mind following the couple’s return to Seaham Hall for the second part of their honeymoon. On 26 January, five days after their arrival back at the Milbankes’ home, Byron glumly told Hobhouse that his debts were in excess of £30,000 (just under £2.5 million in today’s money). Unmentioned was the £30,000 he was due to receive in three annual payments, a reward for supporting John Hanson’s underhand marriage of his daughter to the wealthy – and mad – Earl of Portsmouth.
Privately, Byron was uneasy. Publicly, the handsome young husband was all smiles. Lady Milbanke complacently reported to her remarried brother-in-law, Sir James Bland Burges, that the newly-weds were ‘well, and as happy as youth and love can make them . . . neither of them seems in any haste to visit London’. In 1846, Mrs Clermont would declare that Annabella had left Seaham for Halnaby looking like ‘a flower’ and returned looking ‘as if she cared for nothing’, but that ardent supporter’s memory may have been corrupted by subsequent events and the passage of over thirty years.
In 1818, Annabella would return to Seaham for the express purpose of reliving her joyful memories of this visit to her family home as a honeymooning bride. Down in Cambridgeshire, Augusta heard about jolly games of charades, in which a frisky Byron had pulled off Lady Milbanke’s wig while Annabella donned his greatcoat and yachting cap, together with false whiskers and a moustache. What a pity that ‘certain people whom I know & many others whom I don’t know could not peep through the door’, Augusta giggled on 28 January. And how splendid that Byron was in such spirits! ‘I rather suspect he rejoices at the discovery of your “ruling passion” for making mischief in private,’ she added, leaving her sexual innuendo almost as naked as the guilelessness of an artless Annabella’s confidence.*
Less reassuring were the Bouts-Rimés that were forwarded to Augusta from Seaham the following day. The game had been to write alternate lines of rhymed verse; the result was a tease with a troublingly barbed edge. Annabella (or so she later recalled) had annoyed her husband by innocently suggesting that each line-maker should mark their contribution with an ‘X’, not knowing that this was the code symbol for sex used by Byron in his relationship with Augusta. Two lines run as follows:
BELL: The lord defend us from a honeymoon.
BYRON: Our cares commence – our comforts end so soon.
The sour tone of the jangling rhymes (of which there were many more) was echoed in the letters which Byron fired off from Seaham during the following days. So, ‘the treaclemoon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married,’ he wrote to Tom Moore on 2 February, adding that he missed their friend Douglas Kinnaird’s brandy and was bored of dancing to the jangle of the Milbankes’ tea bell (‘damn tea’). Lady Melbourne, busily urging her protégé to put himself under his wife’s affectionate direction, received a similar signal (‘the Moon is over’), together with a reminder of Byron’s persisting passion for Augusta, although ‘I have quite enough at home to
