Blacket, who died at the age of twenty-three in August 1810, was not alone in admiring Annabella’s first poems. Sarah Siddons, the great Shakespearean actress, was a close friend of Judith Milbanke. Shown one of Annabella’s verses during a visit to Halnaby, Mrs Siddons declared it to be ‘the most extraordinary production, in any point of view, that ever came under my observation’.
Mrs Siddons was besotted by Miss Milbanke, declaring that she perceived something ‘nearly resembling the heavenly, in the divine illumination of that countenance of hers’. The villagers of Seaham, while less garrulous in the expression of their feelings, tended to agree. Annabella, in her mid-teens, struck them as both sweet and kind, a friendly visitor to their homes whose ‘natural simplicity and modest retirement’ was accompanied by ‘a. . . charming manner’.
Aged seventeen, Annabella had become a pretty, slightly built young woman with an unusually high forehead, blue eyes, fair curling hair and an open, friendly face that lit up (the ‘divine illumination’ that Mrs Siddons raved about) whenever her interest was caught. Gentle, clever, good-hearted and eager to be of service in the world (the word ‘benevolence’ appears with uncommon frequency in her early correspondence), the flaws for which this paragon would later be viciously condemned were also beginning to appear. Among them was a disturbing zeal for passing judgement upon people she scarcely knew.
Escorted to London by Judith in February 1810 for her first taste of a London season, Miss Milbanke was eager to demonstrate how skilfully she, like Mrs Siddons, could interpret character from a person’s appearance. Dining out on 3 March at the home of Lord Ellenborough, the lord chief justice, she studied one of the guests across the table – Lord Grey – and discovered him to be self-important. Back at home again, Annabella opened the journal in which she proudly recorded her impressions: ‘His seems to me the politeness of a gentleman, not the politeness resulting from a principle of benevolence.’ Another new acquaintance was condemned, despite a brilliant naval record, for lacking the manners of a true gentleman. The Persian ambassador might think himself lucky for having escaped with a briskly noted commendation for his fine black beard and splendid teeth.
Whisked from the noisy gatherings of celebrity guests who were always on show at Lady Cork’s home in New Burlington Street to the primmer parties held by the formerly rather wicked Lady Elizabeth Foster (newly recast as the decorous widow of her long-term lover, the Duke of Devonshire), Annabella’s favourite evenings were those that she spent with the kindly old Ellenboroughs. Ample space was made for a rapturous note in her journal of the latest such occasion (10 July), and not only because Mrs Bates (a former factory-worker) had sung Handel arias in a way ‘that made me forget all but Heaven . . .’
The real point of the ‘happifying’ summer evening of songs from Mrs Bates was that Annabella had discovered her ideal in Anne Ellenborough. Not only did the great judge’s wife appear incapable of unkindness, but she was motivated by the wish to do nothing but good. ‘She appears constantly actuated by a principle of disinterested universal benevolence. She says ill of none . . .’
What Annabella did not care to admit to the self-conscious little journal that she kept during her first season in London was that she had immensely enjoyed her transformation from the virtuous ‘Northern Light’ (a nickname that acknowledged Miss Milbanke’s growing reputation for doing good works) into becoming, largely thanks to the great fortune that she was in line to inherit from her uncle, one of the most courted young women of the year.
CHAPTER THREE
T
HE
S
IEGE OF
A
NNABELLA
(1810–12)
‘How disgusting he is!’ Annabella noted after being ogled at a London party by a portly bride-hunting Duke of Clarence (the future William IV). Her private comment upon one happily oblivious London hostess, naughty old Lady Cork, was even harsher: ‘she is to be shunned by all who do not honour iniquity’.
Annabella’s outrage (prudently restricted to the pages of her journal) was understandable in a high-minded young woman of provincial background. The London she entered early in 1810 offered a startling contrast to life in remote northern England. Living at Seaham through the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, she had witnessed and admired her parents’ generous response to the evident hardships of their employees and tenants. In London, by contrast, the occupants of the various grand houses into which she was invited seemed (with the exception of kindly Lady Ellenborough) indifferent to everything but politics, gossip and the scent of the money for which, beneath the sheen of compliments and smiles, everybody was on the hunt. Up in County Durham, an evening’s entertainment occasionally rose to a cheerful ‘hop’ at the Bakers’ or the Milners’, with a carpet rolled back for the twirl, thump and rush of a dance in which young and old, servants and masters, jogged merrily together. In London, chaperoned into the candlelit, red-walled opulence of such popular assembly halls as the Argyll Rooms, the sense of being thrust into the marriage market, exposed to a cool appraisal of precisely which unmarried maiden carried the largest cargo of disposable wealth, was inescapable.
Stern though Annabella’s private opinions often were, her journal also provides clear evidence that Miss Milbanke relished her introduction to high society, displaying a newfound pleasure in having fun that came as a relief to her anxious parents.
The Milbankes were determined that their clever daughter – rosily open-faced and (for a young lady who devoured
