Annabella, in the month when Byron left England, was still living with her parents. She remained extremely apprehensive about her personal reputation. For the present, discretion seemed to be working in her favour. Satirised by the cartoonists, excoriated in the papers, cut in public and denounced from the stage, Lord Byron – as Macaulay would note – had been transformed from the nation’s melancholy hero into a monster capable of any heinous act that could conceivably be attributed to his name. That such a change had been achieved without any visible act of vindictiveness on her own part was remarkable.
The public’s mood could alter in a flash, and Annabella had lived alongside celebrity long enough to know it, better than Stephen Lushington, who advised her to stop worrying about her image; better than pugnacious Lady Noel, who was still itching for a court case and the satisfaction of yet further public revenge. ‘How can you be so inconsiderate for me as to wish that the Cause had come into court?’ Annabella asked her mother on 21 April 1816:
For I should have died of it certainly – and now every object is attained without an exposure which revenge only could have desired, and which would have reflected some of its disgraceful consequences upon myself?
Preserving herself and her child from calumny now became Annabella’s chief objective. It was a goal for which she was prepared to undertake considerable sacrifices. For her estranged husband, lovers would never be in short supply. Shortly before leaving England, he had enjoyed a covert affair with Claire Clairmont, the clever but egregiously pushy step-sister of Mary Shelley. (Mary, Claire and Shelley would soon join Byron beside Lake Geneva for that now legendary summer of 1816 during which Frankenstein would be conceived.) For Annabella, a 24-year-old mother and wife – the Byrons were never to divorce – there could be no such recklessness, no romance, no unconsidered steps. Her only chance of escaping scandal was to behave impeccably, and to choose her friends with scrupulous care. Among the first was Anna Jones, step-daughter of the vicar who altruistically took services at Kirkby Mallory. (The living and its proceeds still belonged to Annabella’s absentee cousin, Thomas Noel.) Anna Jones, safely remote from London society, received many of Annabella’s confidences about her marriage – and seemingly kept them to herself.
The first threat to Lady Byron’s privacy came with the publication on 9 May 1816 of Caroline Lamb’s sensationally revealing novel, Glenarvon. Byron was thinly disguised as the licentious and glamorously heartless Lord Ruthven. Annabella’s fate was merely to seem insipid. Robert Wilmot, writing on 17 May, told her that she appeared in the book as Miss Monmouth, ‘a most delightful person’; Lady Caroline’s sister-in-law, Mrs George Lamb, opined that the portrait was ‘very indulgent’. Miss Monmouth, as Annabella herself eventually discovered, was in fact dull as a dry ditch.
Byron had only been out of the country for a fortnight when Glenarvon returned him to centre stage. In London, so Mrs Lamb said, the book was the talk of the town. Retreating from gossipy Leicestershire to Lowestoft, a quiet seaside town on the remote coast of East Anglia, Annabella stopped to rest along the way at Ely and Peterborough. Writing the first of many imaginary baby letters to ‘Dear GrandMama’ at Kirkby, Annabella recorded in little Ada’s fictive voice that the ‘people at Ely and Peterborough Stared at us very much, and Mama said we were Lionesses – pray what does that mean?’ Lady Byron’s adopted tone was jaunty; the humiliation of being pointed out and stared at by groups of strangers was one that Annabella in her old age could still recall with pain. A private tour of Ely’s majestic cathedral as guest of the dean’s wife offered scant consolation.
Safely arrived at Lowestoft, Annabella took a seafront house next to her old (and herself also now separated) friend, Lady Gosford, returning to her Suffolk roots as little Mary Sparrow, the heiress to Worlingham Hall. Annabella was welcomed as an intermediary and peacemaker, the go-between for Mary and a widowed Irish aunt, Lady Olivia Sparrow, who presided nearby over a sternly evangelical household.
The irony of her new situation was not lost upon Annabella. Invited by Lady Olivia to meet her close friends, the Vicar of Lowestoft and his wife, she found herself being patronised by the very people she had once mocked – and still did within the safety of letters to her parents – as ‘pye-house’ bores. Lady Olivia was condescendingly kind. The Reverend Francis Cunningham, however, proved unexpectedly agreeable. Following a happy September return to George Eden’s family home in Kent, Annabella agreed to visit Mr Cunningham’s brother, William, the Vicar of Harrow. Byron had gone to school at Harrow. Annabella, who would also pay a secret visit to Newstead Abbey in 1818, could not resist the chance to see a place so intimately connected with her husband’s past. Once there, laying aside her Unitarian principles, she even attended the services over which Mr Cunningham (Trollope’s model for the unctuous Obadiah Slope) mellifluously presided.
Times were rapidly changing in England. Six years later, when seeking to erect a burial plaque at Harrow’s church for ‘Little Illegitimate’, his
