The British public had always preferred to follow the lead of its press. Encouraged by Francis Jeffrey and his literary colleagues, public disapproval of Byron began to wane after the appearance in the winter of 1816 of ‘Canto IV’ with its sorrowing Childe. Outrage would flare to new heights again in the summer of 1819, with the appearance of the first jaunty canto of Don Juan. Blackwood’s, a magazine that was partly run by Walter Scott’s future son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, was first to leap into the fray. How could the seemingly chastened author of Childe Harold’s final canto stoop to producing such impious filth? For Lord Byron to offend his wife was wrong – and to desert her was frankly ungentlemanly – ‘but to injure, and then to desert, and then to turn back and wound her widow’d privacy with unhallow’d strains of cold-blooded mockery was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean’. Only an insensate brute would dare ‘to pour the pitiful chalice of his contumely on the surrendered devotion of a virgin’s breast, and the holy hopes of the mother of his child’. And so on.*
This was harrowing stuff and Annabella won further support by expressing only quiet amusement at Byron’s mocking portrait of herself as Juan’s sedate mamma. It’s unlikely that she knew of the far crueller skit in which, writing to Tom Moore on 10 December 1820, Byron lampooned his wife as ‘The Witch’. The spur, on this occasion, was a newspaper cutting that announced Lady Byron’s role as patroness of a town hall charity dance. To Byron, at his most irrational, a Leicestershire soirée glittered with all the brilliance of the humiliating Almack’s Assembly at which he and Augusta had been so stonily received.
And yet, Byron’s feelings about his wife still veered like a weathercock in a storm. Despatching to Moore a snappy epigram upon marriage a month earlier, Byron had identified Annabella both as Medea and Penelope. Which was she: demon or angel? Until the end, her husband never could decide.
And neither, even thirty years after his death, could his widow make up her mind about her husband. Byron had something of the angel in him, the ageing Annabella would murmur to her confidantes, including an avidly attentive Harriet Beecher Stowe. None of these intimates dared to enquire why she had abandoned such a paragon.
Back during Byron’s lifetime, a sensation-loving press faced no such quandaries. ‘I was thought a devil, because Lady Byron was allowed to be an angel,’ the poet sighed to a sympathetic Lady Blessington at Genoa in 1823.
One year later, Byron’s unexpected death, aged thirty-six, while risking himself in the cause of rescuing Greece from her Turkish oppressors, triggered the beginning of the poet’s slow redemption. Writing in Blackwood’s (August 1825), John Gibson Lockhart invited his readers to admire the heroic spectacle ‘of youth, and rank, and genius, meeting with calm resignation the approach of death, under circumstances of the most cheerless description . . .’
‘Let people think as they please – it matters little now,’ Augusta Leigh had entreated Annabella back on 28 February 1822. But Lady Byron would never cease to care what people thought. Justifying the role that she had played in her husband’s life, while blaming others – and blaming, above all, Augusta for contributing to the destruction of a marriage increasingly gilded by memory’s broad and idealising brush – would become the occupation and obsession of a lifetime. It was an obsession that would shape the way that an earnest and well-meaning mother would seek to govern and protect the one precious gift left by her celebrated husband: their brilliant, wayward child.
* The phrase ‘spoilt child’ [sic] was frequently applied to Lady Byron, but never to her late husband, during the posthumous attacks upon her reputation that were to be published in 1869–70.
* It is especially strange that they went unmentioned by Macaulay, given that the ‘Remarks’ were subsequently bound in with Moore’s 1831 edition, at Annabella’s request.
* Byron’s former master at Harrow, Dr Drury, arranged for Allegra’s burial close to the church door. A plaque was finally erected in 1980.
* Byron used this startling epithet on several occasions: it appears in BL&J (5) on pp. 144, 186, 191, and in BL&J (10) on p. 142.
* Late publication was a regular occurrence with journals of that time.
* The author of the Blackwood’s review was John Wilson.
PART TWO
Ada
‘I really believe that you hatched me simply for the entertainment of your old age’
AUGUSTA ADA BYRON TO HER MOTHER,
10 OCTOBER 1844
CHAPTER TEN
I
N
S
EARCH OF A
F
ATHER
‘The little boy [Hugo, an orphaned nephew of Mary Montgomery] is a very nice child on the whole he speaks nothing but Italian and Spanish which I now perfectly understand.’
ADA BYRON AGED EIGHT, TO HER MOTHER,
7 DECEMBER 1824
Lord Byron was exceptionally angry to discover, early in 1817, that Annabella, advised by his own former legal counsel, Sir Samuel Romilly, had made their daughter a Ward of Chancery.* (Formally, Ada remained in Chancery until 1825, a year after her father’s death.) Nevertheless, he never doubted that his estranged wife would make an excellent and conscientious parent to little Ada. ‘A girl is in all cases better with the mother,’ Byron informed Augusta Leigh (by then the mother of seven) on 21 December 1820, ‘unless there is some moral objection.’
Claire Clairmont, having courageously decided to bring up Clara Allegra, her illegitimate child by Byron, as part of Percy Shelley’s bohemian household, was granted less respect. Byron liked Shelley and admired the poet’s wife, Mary, but the couple’s proclaimed aversion to monogamy presented the ‘moral objection’ of which he disapproved (in anyone other than himself). While Annabella was threatened with a lawsuit if she dared to expose young Ada to the dangers of continental travel,
