Ever thy most loving
Pippin . . . Pip—ip
Certainly, these letters succeeded in their immediate purpose. Whatever Byron’s own intentions may have been during January 1816 with regard to going abroad or staying with his wife (and Byron during this period changed his mind from hour to hour), even he probably never imagined, while reading these cheery bulletins from an unshakably rational spouse, that he would never again set eyes either upon his wife or his child.
* Still standing, 13 Piccadilly Terrace has been renumbered as 139.
* Since 13 Piccadilly Terrace was the home of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, it is reasonable to imagine that a copy of her close friend Georgiana’s play would have been in its library.
* Byron had half-remembered a cluster of lines from Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ that an admiring Walter Scott had recited to him earlier that summer.
* The stories in circulation about what might have been said and done by Byron during his marriage have gained much in colour from their retelling. It is not necessary to assume that his question about the baby’s being dead or alive was put (to Augusta) in a vindictive spirit: Byron displayed a keen interest in the production of an heir. Annabella herself stated to a sympathetic Lady Anne Barnard only that Byron looked ready to use the baby as a perfect instrument of torture. The more credible version of his remark about Lady Noel (who was indeed seriously ill, worn out by money worries and taking over the running of a new estate) was that her condition had become critical.
CHAPTER EIGHT
T
HE
S
EPARATION
(1816)
‘Where there is blame, it belongs to myself, and if I cannot redeem, I must bear it.’
BYRON TO THOMAS MOORE, MARCH 1816
Forty-three years later, in 1869, the letters which Annabella Byron wrote to her husband on 15 and 17 January 1816 were published as evidence of her duplicity. How could a woman who was intending either to leave her husband or else presently to put him under private restraint have written to him in such an apparently loving way? What might also have been asked, however, was why Byron himself saw nothing unusual in the playfulness of her tone, perplexed only by her teasing suggestion that he should give up his ‘abominable habit of versifying’*? Evidently, although Annabella preserved scant evidence of any such trait in her archives, she was capable of being as light-hearted in her relationship with her husband as she was with her father. (Annabella’s letters to Sir Ralph were full of saucy puns and jokes.) Sensing nothing odd about his wife’s two letters, and evidently untroubled by her recent departure, Byron did not even feel the need to answer them. It was almost three weeks before he did, and he did so then for a very particular reason.
Annabella was conscious of Dr Le Mann’s advice to adopt a reassuring tone, but her letters offer no evidence of hypocrisy. At the time that she despatched them, Lady Byron was confidently anticipating medical confirmation that her husband had become temporarily insane (and thus, crucially, not responsible for his many recent acts of cruelty towards her). If such proved to be the case, she planned to begin by nursing Byron back to health. Such was her strategy.
The Noels were expecting Byron to join them when Annabella left London. On 13 January 1816, two days before her departure, Sir Ralph had innocently asked his daughter when his hopes of ‘seeing you all here in a moment’ were to be gratified. On the 16th, the day of Annabella’s own arrival at Kirkby Mallory, she confirmed to Augusta that the expectation of Byron’s imminent arrival remained firmly in place.
By 17 January, Annabella had shared with her parents the news of Byron’s volatile state and secured their support for her plan. Lady Noel despatched a friendly assurance to Piccadilly Terrace that her son-in-law would be granted as much rest and privacy as he could wish for at their new home in the Midlands. Annabella followed up with a letter to Captain Byron, urging him to press her husband (referred to as ‘the Patient’) to join her at her parents’ house. ‘I deem the change of scene of greatest consequence – and this place particularly eligible,’ Annabella wrote on 18 January. Mention had previously been made that the Noels’ family house contained a magnificent library. Probably, Lady Byron remembered how much her husband had been delighted by the library at Halnaby.
But Byron remained oddly silent. On 16 January, Augusta had reported that she saw good signs of ‘ye possibility of his following you’. Next day, John Hobhouse (regarded as a thoroughly bad influence on his friend by everybody but Byron himself) appeared at Piccadilly Terrace. The effect of Hobhouse’s visit was disastrous. Writing the occasion up in his diary, Hobhouse cheerfully recorded that Byron and he had stayed up drinking brandy on 17 January till two in the morning and that his friend had grown decisive: ‘Lady Byron into the country – Byron won’t go!’
The following day, while Captain Byron crossed London to propose marriage to the soberly pretty Elizabeth Chandos-Pole (she accepted), Augusta tried to persuade Annabella that Byron’s new decision was in fact an act of prudence. He looked ill and swollen-faced after his drinking exploits; Hanson, Mrs Clermont and Le Mann all agreed that it would be dangerous at the moment to put pressure on him to leave.*
It’s unlikely that Augusta was being devious. Life in Piccadilly Terrace during this period was exceptionally difficult. Every day, and sometimes every hour, Byron changed his mind. At one moment, he was calling for Le Mann and calomel pills for his liver; at the next, he demanded brandy, the theatre and diversion. (Miss Boyce had been traded in for one of her colleagues, a Miss Cooke.) On the night of
