The report was true and her behaviour was part of a conscious choice. Annabella Byron and her little daughter each now carried around her neck the millstone of a name that instantly connected them to a man who had become as notorious for his lifestyle as for the ferociously witty poetry in which, with increasing contempt for the cant of a newly prudish England, he exposed his country’s hypocrisy. If Lady Byron wished to keep her name free from the scandal in which her husband appeared to revel, her only option was to undertake good works, live in quiet places and keep company solely with reformers who at their best were thoughtful, intelligent and kind, while others proved to be sanctimonious bores of the Obadian variety. It was circumstance, allied to a passionate desire to be of service to society, that led Annabella into her long, productive career as an enlightened educational reformer, a passionate opponent to slavery and earnest advocate of a kinder penal system. Her achievements would eventually earn her an honoured place on the Reformers’ Memorial at Kensal Rise. Sadly, she did not live to know it.
Concern for her own reputation caused Annabella to reassess some of her closest friendships. When Mary Montgomery returned to England in 1818, Annabella felt nervous. Miss Montgomery had lived in Venice. She had been on visiting terms with Byron at a time when the scandalous poet boasted of having at least two mistresses on the go, both equipped with husbands. An old and deep friendship was renewed and lovingly maintained, but only after Selina Doyle had been delegated to evaluate the moral status of a dangerously well-travelled lady.
Mrs Clermont was less gently dealt with. Although often at loggerheads with each other, Lady Noel and her daughter both agreed that Clermont’s role in the separation, followed by the glare of public interest that Byron’s satire had attracted, made any continued intimacy impossible. Revisiting Seaham at a time when the house was being rented by her old friends the Bakers of Elemore Hall, Annabella received a request from Mrs Clermont, who was by then living nearby, to pay a visit. The risk of gossip just when Annabella was arranging to set up a new school for Seaham was too great. She turned the appeal down.
Ill health would plague Annabella for the rest of her life. Sending a report to John Hobhouse (evidently at Byron’s request) soon after seeing her niece in October 1816, Lady Melbourne remarked that Lady Byron’s face was ‘sad and strained’. Her nerves were plainly ‘shatter’d’, Annabella’s aunt continued, adding that ‘although she might have conducted herself better, yet she is much to be pitied as her sufferings must be great’. (The letter, evidently designed to be seen by Byron, ascribed much of the blame for those sufferings upon the young woman’s interfering parents.) Percy Shelley, meanwhile, brought news to Lake Geneva that Lord Byron’s estranged wife had undergone a miraculous recovery. Douglas Kinnaird had pronounced her to be ‘in perfect health’. What was more, Kinnaird knew for a certainty ‘that she was living with your sister’. And thus, Shelley happily told Byron, an end could be put to all that nasty gossip about incest: ‘the only important calumny that ever was advanced against you’.
Kinnaird’s own gossip contained a kernel of truth. In the spring of 1816, Mrs Leigh had briefly experienced the pain of becoming a social outcast. When Annabella invited a resumption of friendship, following Byron’s departure, Augusta accepted with alacrity. The two women met frequently and exchanged many affectionate letters during the late summer of 1816. They would remain – so long as a subdued Augusta addressed Lady Byron as her ‘guardian angel’ and obeyed her commands – upon careful but cordial terms for a further fourteen years.
Financially, socially and morally, Annabella held almost every card in the altered relationship with her once-beloved sister-in-law. To retain any contact with Byron, however, she remained unwillingly dependent upon Augusta’s aid. Annabella, plainly, could not continue to write to her husband herself, nor seek to receive letters from him. The agreement initiated by her, and reluctantly accepted by Mrs Leigh, was that Augusta would – without ever allowing her brother to know it – share all of their own private correspondence with Byron’s wife.
The most intriguing feature about this remarkable arrangement was the readiness with which Augusta complied. Perhaps, she embraced the sense of power that it placed in her hands. Lady Byron could force her to grovel. She could – and did – withdraw all access to little Ada. (Lady Noel replaced Augusta in the promised role of godmother at a private autumn christening to which neither Colonel Leigh nor his wife were invited.) But Augusta could still inflict pain. She could read Byron’s letters and transmit as many of them (or as few) as she chose. She could relish the hurt that Annabella must surely have felt to see how lovingly her husband wrote to his half-sister and how savagely he wrote about his wife.
The cruellest of Byron’s letters were withheld by Augusta until 1834, by which time the relationship between the two women was beyond repair. Enough had already been shown to inflict a pain that Annabella struggled hard to conceal.
Had Augusta swiftly revealed the letter-passing arrangement to her self-exiled brother? That possibility would help to explain the consistent malice with which Byron wrote to Augusta about his wife. On 9 September 1816, he compared Annabella to an elephant who had clumsily trodden on his heart, before going on to announce
