And yet, writing directly to Annabella, as he had promised not to do, Byron was all tenderness. One letter pleaded that he was miserable without her, pining only for her love. Another (1 November 1816) assured her that ‘if there were a means of becoming reunited to you I would embrace it’. As always, Byron seems to have been guided by the impulse of the moment. Writing to Augusta, he cursed the implacable wretch who had separated him from the woman he loved best. Writing to Annabella, he rued the bitterness of banishment, and regretted the loss of his admired wife.
John Murray’s decision not to print one of Byron’s most direct attacks upon his wife was an act of caution, but also of affectionate respect. Following the separation, Lady Byron signalled (27 March 1816) her wish to maintain a friendly relationship with the publisher. Murray, a regular visitor to Branch Hill Lodge, an eighteenth-century mansion amply decorated with gloomy stained-glass windows by a previous owner, in which Annabella intermittently dwelt upon the airy heights of Hampstead from 1817 until 1825. He was meticulous in supplying her with early copies of all his publications. Naturally, these included Byron’s works. In the autumn of 1816, when the ranting ‘Lines, on Hearing Lady Byron was Ill’ arrived from Italy, the separation scandal was still vivid in the public’s mind. Murray’s decision not to publish a poem that referred to Annabella as ‘The Moral Clytemnestra of Thy Lord’ was motivated by concern for Lady Byron as much as for the damage it might inflict upon the sales of a lucrative author. Byron’s poem was filed away, to remain unpublished until 1832, when Moore’s affectionate life of the poet had helped usher in a more forgiving attitude towards his misdeeds.
Externally, Lady Byron appeared relaxed about her husband’s satiric use of her. Writing to Theresa Villiers on 15 July 1819 about her appearance as Donna Inez, the hero’s prim mother, in Don Juan, Annabella remarked that Byron’s satire was ‘so good as to make me smile at myself – therefore others are heartily welcome to laugh’.
Given such a good-natured approach, Murray felt no qualms, in February 1817, about informing Lady Byron that her husband’s latest work was selling well, although ‘not quite up to the mark of former times’. The news disturbed Annabella less than Murray’s gift of the very first copy of the Autumn 1816 Quarterly Review.* The journal, as its publisher proudly pointed out, carried ‘an article on a great Poet . . . written in a tone calculated to do some good’.
It did none for Annabella. Walter Scott’s long essay, ostensibly a review of Canto III of Childe Harold, was both lavish in its generosity and unintentionally comical in the earnest way that it dwelt upon Byron’s noble antecedents. What angered Annabella was the great Scottish writer’s determination to present her husband as a victim.
Annabella was staying with Scott’s close friends, Agnes and Joanna Baillie, at their own Hampstead home when Murray’s gift was delivered. Letters from her mother and from the Wilmots (Byron’s cousins) declared Scott to be outrageously prejudiced: action must be taken! But Annabella recognised the danger of antagonising one of Britain’s most admired authors. Instead, she adopted a course which would soon become familiar to those who had angered or distressed her. She did not write to Scott herself. Instead, the Baillie sisters were asked to convey their house guest’s detection of a criticism of herself which – as even Annabella had to admit – Scott had ‘not expressed, but I think directly implied’.
The technique worked. Scott, under pressure, apologised. Visiting one of her literary heroes at Abbotsford by her own request, late in the summer of 1817, Annabella’s graceful acceptance of her sad situation, one ‘which must have pressed on her thoughts’, caused a penitent Scott to describe his guest to Joanna Baillie as one of the most interesting women he had yet encountered. They walked together along riverbanks. Annabella admired the landscape. No reference was made to Scott’s article in the Quarterly.
It was by such circuitous routes – hiding behind the testimony of friends, citing trusted supporters, and quoting copiously from Byron’s past correspondence (of which she made and preserved meticulous copies) – that Annabella increasingly chose to defend her reputation. Insistent, elaborate and always self-righteous, Lady Byron’s tactics would unfortunately contribute to her posthumous reputation as a hypocritical tamperer with the truth.
And yet, initially, there was no need for such paranoia. Byron’s name, not his wife’s, had been severely damaged by the scandal surrounding the couple’s separation. In ‘Canto IV’ of Childe Harold, he offered what appeared to be a profession of remorse, causing one of his more loyal supporters, Francis Jeffrey, in the December 1816 Edinburgh Review, to bestow upon the author the famous epithet of a ‘ruined archangel’. But Childe Harold’s remorse was not a confession of his creator’s guilt. That admission never came. Byron’s one passionate document of self-defence, written on 9 August 1817 at La Mira, a villa near Venice, was circulated to friends and journalists on the express understanding
