It was Annabella who decided to import Byron’s jolly young cousin into the house as a supportive male presence. George, whose future bride had been brought to London by her Derbyshire family, was delighted by the chance to continue his courtship of Elizabeth Chandos-Pole, and from such a fine address. Lady Melbourne, in a letter that has not survived, meanwhile received a troubling hint from her niece that she was ready to ‘break loose’ and leave. Addressing her aunt again early in the New Year, Annabella credited Augusta’s reassuring company with having prevented her from doing so.
Was Annabella preparing the legal ground for a future case for divorce when she gathered these valuable witnesses around her in the house? Or was an intimidated young woman simply surrounding herself with supportive figures during a period of fear and extreme isolation? One of Lady Byron’s earliest retrospective statements about the marriage suggests that the second reason was uppermost. She was not only afraid, but also lonely.
. . . for a considerable time before my confinement he [Byron] would not see me himself for above an hour – or two – if so much throughout the day & left me therefore alone all the evening till Mrs L[eigh] came, for he had always objected to my having any society at home.
When he did stay at home himself, it was to drink Brandy – & he would then dismiss me to my room in the most unkind manner. He told me he must have either his Brandy or his Mistress.
The comfort of Augusta’s presence at Piccadilly Terrace during the month before Ada’s birth was a subject upon which Annabella never deviated. Mrs Leigh’s former relationship with her brother was difficult to dismiss or deny. Those days were seemingly now in the past. Augusta had become unflinching in her efforts to defend a sister-in-law whom she loved, and for whom she feared.
The benefit of a sisterly presence at Piccadilly Terrace was instantly apparent. Byron, after his chilling initial reaction to Augusta’s arrival at his home, swiftly resumed his familiar and enchanting manner. Towards his sister, he was once again affectionate, teasing and amorous. Towards his wife, his behaviour remained ferocious enough for Mrs Clermont to believe him capable of murder.
The impression . . . made upon my mind was that he was likely to put her to Death at any moment if he could do it privately. I told Mrs Leigh such was my opinion. She replied I will never leave him alone until she is brought to bed, and then you must stay always with her.
Dramatic though Mrs Clermont’s statement sounds, it is supported by her assertion in 1816 that she never saw Lord Byron in a rational state at Piccadilly Terrace except during the first days after his daughter’s birth. Alarm was now rife in the household. Fletcher kept close watch on his master’s pistols. Augusta sat up late in order to ensure that a drunken Byron did not try to break past the nightly guard they had established to protect his wife from harm. Even the usually unobservant John Hobhouse, visiting the house on 25 November, noted that things were going badly there and that Byron had spoken out to him against marriage: ‘talking of going abroad – &c.’
Going abroad was a good deal better than going to a debtors’ prison. Hobhouse saw nothing extraordinary in the notion that Byron might abandon his wife. The London house (for which six months’ rent was still unpaid) had only been leased for a year. A wife could always take shelter beneath her parents’ roof. What neither Hobhouse nor anybody else could have predicted in late November was the particular way in which this anticipated result would actually come to pass.
On 9 December, shortly before the beginning of her labour pains, Annabella managed to summon the strength to leave Piccadilly Terrace for long enough to consult Samuel Heywood, a respected attorney and close friend of the Milbanke family, about the possibility of her making an escape. Augusta’s approval of the project suggests that the contemplated departure was intended to be of a temporary nature. (It was always in the scandal-prone Mrs Leigh’s interests that her brother’s marriage should survive.)
Heywood’s response is unknown, but Byron got wind of the conversation. When Annabella returned and asked for the nurse – labour had already begun – Byron asked her when she meant to leave. Back from the theatre later that night, he sat up in the drawing room, knocking the tops off soda bottles with a poker. (Soda, as Byron would later recall in his Ravenna Journal of 1821, was as necessary to him as brandy during that traumatic autumn of 1815.) The nervous tenor of the household can be gauged from the fact that the racket of flying bottle tops, when heard upstairs, was mistaken for gunshots.
The baby – a healthy girl – was born at one o’clock the following afternoon, 10 December 1815, a Sunday. Annabella’s nurse and her delivering physician, Francis Le Mann, were the sole others in attendance. Strange tales would later emerge. Lord Byron had enquired if the child had been born dead. Inspecting the newborn infant, he had hailed the arrival of a perfect instrument of torture to employ, presumably, against his wife. Annabella was informed by Byron, during labour, that her mother had just died.*
Such obviously anecdotal records, like many of the allegations that later became part of a copiously documented case for legal separation, must be taken with a judicious measure of salt. Mrs Clermont remembered that Byron’s first concern had been to know whether the baby was physically perfect (a reasonable worry for a man born with a deformed foot). Lady Noel, visiting Piccadilly Terrace during the week after her grandchild’s birth (Judith herself was still frail enough to require an invalid couch for her journey up the grand marble staircase
