Was there any truth in the suspicion? It is striking that Augusta instantly guessed the content of this new rumour. Reporting on it to Hodgson on 14 March, Mrs Leigh referred to a notorious case in which Lord Ferrers had been hanged for murdering a servant. Was it possible, she wondered, that her brother, while deranged, could once have committed ‘some act which he would not avow even to his dearest friend – scarcely to his own soul’? Byron’s present state of terror certainly pointed to some such horror. Ironically – remembering Annabella’s theory of her husband’s insanity – Byron himself now told Augusta that (if accused) he would plead madness as his defence.
This frightening moment was the one at which Byron reconciled himself to legal surrender and exile. On Sunday 17 March, a relieved Annabella told her mother that her husband had finally signed his name to the beginning of procedures. It was time for Judith to relax – ‘for I really think it all finished in the best possible manner’.
As often before, Lady Byron’s faith in the word of her unpredictable husband proved premature. On 20 March 1816, a poem arrived in Annabella’s post. It carried the harrowing title: ‘Fare Thee Well.’ Filled with wrenching images (the broken-hearted husband – the remorseless wife – the fatherless child), the poem was swiftly published in a limited edition of fifty copies. Reading of the poet’s blighted future, Byron’s royal admirer, young Princess Charlotte, declared that she had wept ‘like a fool’. Annabella herself was sufficiently affected to share her softened feelings with her mother.
From saccharine sentiment, Byron swung back to savage fury.
Mrs Fletcher’s March deposition to John Hanson had convinced Byron that the true enemy of his marriage – worse even than the Noels – was Mrs Clermont. On 25 March, while accusing Annabella of helping to blacken his name (‘as if it were branded on my forehead’), he circulated fifty copies of ‘A Sketch from Private Life’, a vicious skit which spared nothing but her name to the woman he called ‘this hag of hatred’. Passing along Mrs Clermont’s indignant request to her accuser for any proofs of his slanderous allegations, Annabella received in response a rant even more violent than the poem.
The curse of my Soul light upon her & hers forever! – may my Spirit be deep upon her in her life – & in her death – may her thirst be unquenchable – & her wretchedness irrevocable – may she see herself only & eternally – may she dwell in the darkness of her own heart & shudder – now & for existence. Her last food will be the bread of her enemies – I have said it. –To you dearest Bell – I am as ever, very truly BYRON
Annabella declined to comment upon this remarkable document. She returned it to her husband only after having copied it in her own clear hand.
Annabella’s feelings towards both her husband and his sister had begun to harden. On 25 March, Mrs Leigh offended Lady Byron by publicly refusing, at a supper given by the Wilmots, to shake Selina Doyle by the hand. Two days later, meeting Caroline Lamb by arrangement at the house of Caroline’s sister-in-law and namesake, Annabella’s suspicions of Byron’s incest were finally converted – as she wrote to Lushington that night – into ‘absolute certainty’. Lady Caroline had arrived armed to the teeth with proofs. Among her bulky sheaf of documents were extracts from Lady Melbourne’s exchanges with Byron about the birth of Augusta’s fourth child, Elizabeth Medora Leigh.
Medora’s paternity was never mentioned by Lady Byron to Dr Lushington, but the little girl was pointedly singled out in a later journal entry of Annabella’s in which, having just seen the Leigh children, she described her own ‘most tender affection for — . What is the reason?’ That coy query, together with the omitted name, leaves scant room to doubt that Annabella, by 1820, believed little Miss Leigh, then aged six, to be her husband’s child.
Heaping his fury upon the hapless head of Mrs Clermont offered little solace to Byron for the experience of becoming a social outcast. On 8 April 1816 (following the distressing and long-deferred sale by legal order of personal chattels that included his beloved books), the poet attended an evening hosted by Lady Jersey, one of London’s most respected hostesses. His companion was the heavily pregnant Augusta Leigh. Byron expected to be cold-shouldered. What hurt him more was to see Augusta being ignored and snubbed by everybody other than their hostess and Miss Mercer Elphinstone, a sweet-natured heiress to whom Byron had once considered proposing. ‘Stanzas to Augusta’, written the following day, was Byron’s tender tribute to his sister’s unfaltering devotion.
The three-month separation battle had reached its end. On 14 April, Henry Brougham, an ardent supporter of Annabella, mischievously arranged for Byron’s sentimental ‘Farewell’ to be published alongside his excoriation of Mrs Clermont in The Champion newspaper. (Annabella sent the ‘Farewell’ to her mother the following day, together with a gratefully punning tribute to Brougham as ‘my warmest champion throughout’.)
On the day that The Champion poems appeared, Byron addressed his wife once more. From Augusta – with whom he had just parted for the last time – he had asked only
