Versifying provided a welcome outlet for the feelings that she imperfectly expressed in prose. Mathematics, taught to Annabella by William Frend from Euclid, the standard children’s textbook at that time, provided a reliable refuge from emotion; here was a world of numbers over which, with diligent application, she could exert control.
It was Frend’s politics rather than his mathematics (or his avid interest in astronomy) that first captured the interest and sympathy of the Milbankes. A hard-working priest with a living just outside Cambridge, Frend had to relinquish his position when he became a Unitarian (and thus unable to accept the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles). Six years later, in 1793 – the year that England declared war on France – Frend caused a stir among his colleagues at Cambridge by publishing a pamphlet that favoured peace. A trial was held, with fervent support for Frend from his students, including the young Samuel Coleridge. Formally banished from his post at Jesus College (while retaining all the perks, excepting residence, of a bachelor don), this unlikely rebel became part of the hotbed of London radicals that surrounded the philosopher William Godwin, author of the inflammatory An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.
The Milbankes liked what they heard about Frend’s views. Peace remained the favoured option in their own northerly part of England: the letters that Judith wrote during Annabella’s childhood dwelt on the local consequences of economic hardship almost as insistently as the latest achievements of her little daughter. ‘I wish any thing to put an End to the War for my part,’ she told Mary Noel in 1794. One year later, she sadly described ‘a state of almost general Bankruptcy, no Trade, no Credit, no Money – People breaking every day . . . A peace would set all afloat again.’
Annabella first met William Frend while visiting London with her mother in 1806. Aged fourteen and hungry for knowledge, she began a mathematical correspondence. By the end of the year, Frend was complimenting his pupil’s progress with Euclid and explaining how she should use his new arithmetical toy, a sophisticated abacus which enabled numbers to be computed up to 16,665. References to algebra, verse-scanning, Latin, and Roman history (‘I think it may be time for you to begin Livy’) show that Frend became Annabella’s personal teacher, a role he would also perform for her daughter, Ada. (Frend was the father-in-law of Ada’s more famous tutor, Augustus De Morgan.)
A middle-aged academic was no substitute for a confidante and ally of her own age. Annabella had felt bereft when Sophy Curzon, whom she would always look upon as a beloved older sister, left Seaham in 1800. Judith, too, described herself as wandering around like a lost soul during the months after Sophy’s wedding to Lord Tamworth. Sir Ralph had done his best, when not preoccupied by the considerable costs of maintaining his political career, to keep his daughter diverted with play-reading and backgammon. But a real consolation was finally in sight, one that would help provide an enduring substitute for Sophy’s absence.
Judith’s closest friend, Millicent Gosford, became a widow in 1807, the year in which Millicent’s son married Mary Sparrow, an heiress from Worlingham in Suffolk. Deprived of their main home in Ireland after Gosford burned down in 1805, the younger Gosfords moved to England, bringing with them two orphaned Irish cousins, Hugh and Mary Millicent Montgomery.
The junior Lady Gosford was just thirteen years older than Annabella. It was exactly the gap that had separated her from Sophy. Mary Montgomery was herself already twenty-two when she met the fifteen-year-old Miss Milbanke for the first time. Frequently represented in family letters simply as ‘MG’ and ‘MM’, these two agreeable women became the closest of all Annabella’s friends.
Annabella was not short of female company up in her northern eyrie. The Bakers of Elemore had a daughter, a second Isabella; Louisa and Elizabeth Chaloner lived close by; Emily Milner’s beautiful sister Diana had married Francis (Frank) Doyle, the older brother of another Irish friend, Selina Doyle. All of these young northerners were and remained devoted to Annabella; nevertheless, during those early days, they had lives and preoccupations of their own. Mary Montgomery proved different. Clever, musical and highly social, but hindered by a cruelly persistent spinal complaint, she welcomed the affectionate care that Annabella was eager to lavish. Seaham, offering comfort, healthful sea air and the company of an admiring younger friend, provided a pleasant escape from the brooding atmosphere in Mary Gosford’s London house. (Lord Gosford, when present, which was rare, was a notoriously unkind husband.)
Poetry loomed large among the interests shared by Annabella and her new friend. Walter Scott was the most celebrated poet of the moment and Mary Montgomery could boast of having almost met him through a mutual friendship with the renowned Scottish-born dramatist Joanna Baillie. But Annabella had a little trump card of her own. Visiting Seaham in 1808, ‘MM’ was introduced to Joseph Blacket, Miss Milbanke’s very own poet-in-residence.
A handsome young consumptive with a motherless child, Blacket was a professional cobbler whose historical plays and romantic poems (‘Now awful night, array’d in sable gloom, / Draws her dark curtain round one half the globe’) had caught the interest of a few northern patrons, including the Duchess of Leeds and Judith Milbanke. Learning that Blacket was temporarily homeless, Judith urged her husband to provide a Seaham cottage, together with fuel, food and – in those hard times, it was a generous gift – the sum of twenty pounds.
Perhaps Joseph Blacket fell in love with Annabella; perhaps, he simply knew on which side his bread was buttered. When Miss Milbanke and her friend set up a competition to see who could best inspire their pet poet, he found himself quite unable to set
