Byron enclosed with his letter a gift for his daughter: a ring beneath the sealed lid of which, so Byron believed, a strand of Charles I’s hair lay coiled. On Annabella herself, he bestowed only his old coach, the one that had carried her to Kirkby.
On 23 April, Byron left Piccadilly Terrace for the last time. A thoughtfully alerted crowd had gathered to observe his departure for Dover and to admire the poet’s flamboyant new carriage. (Unpaid for, it was modelled on the one used by another fallen hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, when travelling across Europe.) Minutes later, the bailiffs swooped on Piccadilly Terrace to reclaim the unpaid half-year’s rent in chattels. Among the household goods that they confiscated from the abandoned house were Byron’s pet squirrel and caged parrot.
* Teasing, because Annabella was a lifelong admirer of Byron’s poetry, large tracts of which she committed to memory. One of her last marital duties had been to copy out Parisina and The Siege of Corinth, published on 7 February 1816. When a nervous Murray expressed concern about the incest references in Parisina, Byron reassured him (this was the day before Annabella’s departure in January 1816) that ‘my copyist would write out anything I desired in all the ignorance of innocence’. (BL&J, 5)
* Hobhouse ascribed the peculiarity of Byron’s appearance at this time to liver trouble; he remarked that one eye had shrunk up, giving his poor friend a squint (Hobhouse’s Diary, 12 February 1816).
* On 6 April 1816, Byron sent on to Selina Doyle a packet of letters that Annabella had copied after writing to her friend. Annabella had – deliberately? – left this clear proof of her unhappiness at Piccadilly Terrace lying in an unlocked drawer. The letters have not survived.
* Lushington wanted to avoid any hint that his client had condoned either incest or sodomy by remaining in the marriage. Adultery, menaces and insulting behaviour offered more substantial cause for a legal separation.
CHAPTER NINE
I
N THE
P
UBLIC
E
YE
(1816–24)
Viewed as part of the public relations exercise by a departing husband portraying himself as a martyred hero, Byron’s ‘Fare Thee Well’ was not a complete success. In America (if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s memory of her impressions as a 5-year-old were to be trusted), the poem was set to music and sung, with appropriate sobs, by heartbroken schoolgirls. In England, it invited public mockery. Isaac Cruickshank’s The Separation, or A Sketch from the private Life of Lord Iron, pictured a balding Byron setting off for Europe with his arm wrapped around a buxom actress. George Cruickshank (Isaac’s more famous son) depicted the poet waving a gallant handkerchief to a shorebound mother and child, while reciting ‘Fare Thee Well’ to a boatload of adoring strumpets.
Up in Scotland, a month after Byron’s departure, one of his warmest admirers poked gentle fun at the poet’s double standards. ‘In the meanwhile,’ Walter Scott wrote to his friend J. B. S. Morritt on 16 May 1816:
I think my noble friend is something like my old peacock who chooses to bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window to keep me awake with his screeching lamentations. Only I own he is not equal in melody to Lord Byron, for Fare-thee-Well . . . is a very sweet dirge indeed.
Looking back in the summer of 1831 at the 15-year-old scandal of Lord Byron’s separation, Thomas Macaulay employed his review of Moore’s recent two-volume Life and Letters of Lord Byron to point up the dangers that had arisen from confusing the poet with his heroic persona. How was it possible, Macaulay asked, to equate the lone and brooding Childe, celebrated for the scorn with which he abjured public sympathy, with a man who wanted the entire world to weep over the supposedly private farewell that he had flamboyantly offered to his wife and daughter?
Macaulay cast no aspersions upon Lady Byron for leaving a husband whom he designated a spoiled child (‘not merely the spoiled child of his parents, but the spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society’).* The target of his witty but fair-minded essay in the Edinburgh Review was the great British public which, having begun by idolising a libertine genius, had gleefully sacrificed their hero in one of its ‘periodical fits of morality’. Byron, so Macaulay argued, had probably done nothing more dreadful than a great many other English husbands. His misfortune had been the celebrity which allowed him to be transformed overnight from an unsatisfactory spouse into a universal scapegoat.
True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing anything whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public indignation.
Focussing on the poet and on the ephemeral
