Annabella understood her husband better than he did her. On 7 February, she coolly reminded Byron of ‘the misery that I have experienced almost without an interval from the day of marriage’. So now he missed her? How predictable! ‘It is unhappily your disposition to consider what you have as worthless – what you have lost as invaluable. But remember that you believed yourself most miserable when I was yours.’
These were brave words and ones which commanded Byron’s grudging respect. A third and far more passionate epistle from her husband (‘did I deem you so – did I ever so express to you – or of you – to others?’) almost undid her: almost, but not quite. Collecting her thoughts for the benefit of Dr Lushington, Annabella acknowledged that her own ‘softness’ was making resistance difficult: ‘one tender remembrance sweeps away accumulated injuries. I have a good Memory – but it is sad to employ it in recollecting wrongs’. In an afterthought addressed to Mrs Clermont, the carrier of her letter to Lushington’s home in Great George Street, Lady Byron added that the baby girl had now been ‘necessarily’ weaned. The necessity was due to the fact that Annabella, usually blessed with a fine appetite, had nearly ceased to eat.
In London, news of the separation was beginning to spread. On 12 February, Lady Melbourne asked her brother Ralph why he had instructed friends ‘to give the event every possible publicity’. Had he not considered the consequences for his daughter, who had now become ‘the subject of conversation for every gossiping Man & Woman in town without knowing what to contradict or assert’?
Visiting Kirkby in February, the ageing Sarah Siddons grieved over Annabella’s sufferings, while marvelling at ‘the unexampled gentleness, goodness, and wise forbearances of the perfectest of human beings imaginable.’ Mrs Siddons had caught the mood of the times. It was Byron, not his wife, of whom nothing quite bad enough could now be proclaimed. As young Thomas Macaulay would remark in 1831, when reviewing Moore’s Life and Letters of Lord Byron, the handsome poet who had been society’s darling had grown ripe for his comeuppance: ‘he had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; he had been over-praised’.
The source of some of the most vicious anti-Byron gossip was Lady Caroline Lamb. Annabella’s marriage had compelled an unforgiving Caroline to hold her tongue about the lover who had once rejected her so publicly. Now, having ransacked Lady Melbourne’s papers and revisited her own copious records of a tumultuous affair, Caroline was ready to let rip. Hobhouse, on 9 February 1816, noted that Lady Caroline had accused Byron of ‘[-----]’, by which he almost certainly meant sodomy. On 13 February, Mrs Clermont informed Annabella that ‘very scandalous tales’ had reached Dr Lushington from Brocket, the Lamb family’s Hertfordshire home. On 17 February, an agonised Augusta (she was now doing everything in her power to persuade Lady Byron to return to her husband and forgive him) told Annabella that the latest stories were ‘of a nature too horrible to repeat . . . Every other sinks into nothing before this most horrid one.’ Byron himself had apparently declared that for a man to have such a thing said of him ‘is utter destruction & ruin to a man from which he can never recover’. When Annabella coolly answered (19 February) that she would certainly speak out against anything she personally knew to be untrue, Augusta panicked. How much exactly did Annabella know? What might she not dare to declare in public?
On 20 January, Augusta wrote once more to Annabella, this time in a tone that combined shameless cajoling (‘I do think in my heart dearest A, that your return might be the saving & reclaiming of him’) with threats (‘Most likely you are aware you will have to depose against him yrself, & that without witnesses yr depositions will go for nothing’).
Augusta’s letter was ill-timed. It reached Kirkby Mallory on the day that Annabella, accompanied by her father, returned to London, where they stayed at Mivart’s Hotel. On the evening of 22 January, Annabella paid her first visit to Dr Lushington’s home in Great George Street.
Slight, pale, calm and exceptionally articulate, Annabella created a very different impression from that made upon Lushington by the intemperate Judith Noel. It is not certain that Annabella mentioned incest, but it is striking that Lushington instantly requested (Annabella would disobey) a severance of all communication with Augusta. The following day, 23 January, Annabella asked her mother to follow Dr Lushington’s wishes by maintaining only a cautiously friendly tone to Mrs Leigh, ‘as being essential to my justification, whatever she may turn out’. (The emphasis was Annabella’s own.) The lawyer’s third request was that Lady Byron’s maid should immediately be released from duty to rejoin her husband (Byron’s valet) in London, even if this event should later lead to an unhelpful deposition – as indeed it did.
Fifty-five years later, Sir John Fox, a Master of Chancery who was friendly with Stephen Lushington, published part of a private letter in which the great lawyer, following Lady Byron’s death, had revealed some of the details that had so shocked him back in 1816. Fox himself was too prim to include Lushington’s report of Byron’s boasts to Annabella ‘of his adulteries and indecencies with loose women, toying with more than one at the same time naked’.
Incest; sodomy; unseemly revelations; acts of violence: whatever it was that Annabella revealed on that chilly March evening at Lushington’s home, it shook the lawyer to the core. Writing to Lady Byron (she would become his family’s lifelong friend) in 1830, Lushington confirmed that ‘when I was informed by you of facts utterly unknown, as I have no doubt, to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel . . . my opinion
