and her voice of kindness extinguished it – yet if I ever should go mad perhaps those remembrances would be prevailing ideas, & to a principle of Forgiveness I feel indebted for the possession of my intellects under circumstances that made my brain burn.
By the autumn of 1816, when Annabella recorded this memory, she had no doubt that there had been a pre-marital relationship between brother and sister, and that Byron had always been eager to resume it. Back in the summer of 1815, uncertainty was overruled by a grateful consciousness that Augusta, during the two summer months that Mrs Leigh resided at Piccadilly Terrace, was doing everything to help that lay within her power.
It is tempting to dismiss Annabella’s elaborate retrospective statements about her marriage as jealous fantasies, but Lady Byron was not a fanciful woman. The upstairs room in which she paced was clearly identified by her as having ‘then’ been the library, thus indicating a subsequent change of use. The dagger that she had longed to plunge into Augusta’s heart was identified as having always been kept in Byron’s adjacent bedroom. These are concrete details, and convincing ones. Likewise, when Annabella recalled how Byron had tried to frighten her with Harriet Lee’s The German’s Tale (1801) by associating himself with its protagonist (a son who murders to obtain a legacy), the accuracy of the memory is confirmed by Lady Byron’s recollection that her husband began writing a play based upon Lee’s tale. Passages were read out to her, but ‘I believe he burnt it afterwards.’
Annabella was correct. Byron did write an early draft of Werner (1822), a play based on Lee’s tale and also, perhaps, upon a dramatic version written by Elizabeth Devonshire’s friend and predecessor, Georgiana.* But was Annabella right to see personal menace in her husband’s presentation of himself as another such murderer? Byron’s hints at having committed a homicide haunted her. It seems more likely that a sometimes unkind husband stored up trouble for himself by his spoofing of a credulous and increasingly terrified bride.
‘My Night Mare is my own personalty [sic],’ Byron confessed to his close friend Douglas Kinnaird in 1817. Throughout their courtship, Annabella had presented herself as eager to play what we would today see as the therapist’s role to a troubled man of whose essential goodness she remained convinced. Byron encouraged her to assume the part, urging her to act as his friend and guide. ‘I meant to marry a woman who would be my friend – I want you to be my friend,’ Annabella remembered him insisting. So, were Byron’s declarations and hints intended to wound and alarm, or was he simply treating his wife as the understanding mentor and mother confessor that she had promised to become? Who was failing whom?
Some light on Byron’s increasingly erratic behaviour is cast by his frustrated knowledge that Annabella’s well-meant endeavours could do nothing to alter the circumstances in which he found himself trapped.
The year 1815 was when Byron’s personal crises reached a head. His financial problems seemed insoluble. Laudanum and calomel (a powerful mercury-based medication) were failing to ease the continual irritation caused by a diseased liver. His feelings about Augusta remained both strong and ambivalent (he was damned by having slept with her; it was intolerable that she should be under the same roof and yet resist him). Gentle reason – Annabella’s mild panacea for all his troubles – drove him mad.
Back in November 1813, while attempting to identify the source of his own quicksilver emotional transitions in the journal that he had just begun to write, Byron believed that he had brought an ungovernable temper almost under control. One unfailing goad to fury remained: ‘unless there is a woman (and not any or every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy’. Annabella was precisely that stubborn woman who, by standing in the way, brought out the worst in her husband. Faced by his wife’s implacable, maddening tranquillity, Byron set out to shatter it. He did so with all the considerable verbal and imaginative power at his disposal. Later, Annabella would recall every last wild word, claim and threat that had been used to provoke a reaction from her heroically imperturbable self. Unfortunately for Lord Byron, she took his taunts and violent dramatics very seriously indeed.
Five months into the Byrons’ marriage, Annabella had good reason to feel both unhappy and isolated. Apart from Augusta, she had nowhere to turn for help. Mrs Clermont, who had stayed elsewhere in London throughout the summer, was apparently in receipt of daily confidential letters, as – to a lesser degree – was Selina Doyle. Neither woman could offer more than sympathy. The Noels (the Milbankes legally changed their name in May, a month after Lord Wentworth’s death) were kept at arms’ length by a husband who had no wish to dance attendance either on a woman he disliked or her garrulous old husband. The fact that Sir Ralph, an ardent Whig, shared both Byron’s elation at Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the poet’s disgust at the outcome of Waterloo, provided a route through which Annabella struggled to promote a friendship between the two men in her life. ‘B has just found out an Etymology for Blücher’s name which is quite in your way,’ she wrote to her father, before carefully spelling out his pun upon the name of Wellington’s ally on the battlefield: ‘ “There goes the Blue Cur”.’ On another occasion, Byron had noticed the word ‘Dad’ scrawled on a Piccadilly wall: ‘B said it was a memento left us by our honoured parent.’
Such well-meant efforts proved useless. Byron rejected all
