Such a future was not the one that any loving mother would wish upon her child. It was then with real pride, if not relief, that Mary Somerville identified a man who seemed (at least, in the opinion of her own son) to be the ideal candidate for Ada’s hand. His name was Lord King. He had for some time lived abroad, remote from spiteful gossip about Ada’s misdemeanour. Better still, Lord King was utterly captivated by the legendary figure of Lord Byron.
Woronzow Greig, Mary’s son, had become acquainted with the reclusive and intelligent William King in the mid-1820s, when both young men were being tutored by William Whewell at Trinity, the former college of Byron himself. Stories of the poet’s wild exploits, his brilliance and his eccentricity still abounded at Trinity in 1824, the year of Byron’s tragically premature death. It was not by chance that Lord King, after leaving Cambridge, took up an invitation to work as secretary to his cousin and fellow-Byronist, Lord Nugent, High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands that Byron had visited during his doomed journey to Greece. There, living on Corfu while he saturated himself in Byron’s poetry, William commissioned a portrait of himself in full Byronic mode.
A brocaded Ionian costume and fez cap failed to bestow quite such an aura of panache upon William King as had the dashing Albanian turban donned by Byron for Thomas Phillips’s famous portrait (the one that had officially been hidden from view behind its own green curtain throughout Ada’s youth). But William King’s intense sense of identification would never wane. One of his first actions after returning to England in 1833 had been to rename the fields of his newly inherited Surrey estate after his hero’s poems. The map still exists on which the new names are carefully penned in: Lara’s Field, Corsair’s Field, Ali’s Field, Harold’s Meadow, Chillon. All that was missing from this exoticised landscape was the ultimate connection to Lord Byron himself: the intimate link that only Ada Byron herself could provide.
William King had grown up in the expectation of becoming a grand landowner. The King family possessed large estates in Surrey and North Somerset, to which his mother, Lady Hester Fortescue, had added her own West Country domains and considerable personal wealth. It’s unlikely that William’s father had meant to cause difficulties for his heir when he made his wife the interim beneficiary of his will. William certainly foresaw no trouble when he wrote home from Corfu on 29 June 1833 that – following the news of his father’s untimely death, aged fifty-seven – he intended Lady Hester and his four siblings to lack for nothing in the future. William was aware that his mother preferred her second son, Locke. (Peter Locke King’s middle name honoured John Locke, the most famous of the family’s ancestors.) Nevertheless, so William assured Lady Hester, ‘nothing shall be wanting on my part to you and for you . . . to meet all your wishes will always be my first duty’s pleasure’.
William was in for a shock. Reaching home two weeks later, he discovered that Lady Hester was making full use of her new powers. Locke had already been granted an extensive portion of the King estate in Surrey. In the West Country, while William was permitted to retain the steep and wooded hillside enclosing his father’s hunting lodge above Porlock, Locke had been given the giant’s share. William had scarcely set his foot within Ockham Park, the King family’s principal home near Guildford, when Lady Hester had it gutted. The furniture, as she barely troubled to explain, would be divided between 38 Dover Street, the Kings’ London residence (it was now to become her personal domain) and Woburn Park, the new Surrey mansion in which Locke King, together with two of his three young sisters, Hester and Charlotte, were to live as their mother’s companions. (A third and mentally impaired daughter, Emily, was packed off to London to act as a companion to ‘Aunt Lucy’, an elderly relative who was eking out an existence in Charlotte Street and to whom, when Lady Hester deigned to remember, she would grudgingly send money for coals and rent.)
It’s an awful story and there’s little room for doubt that Lady Hester was an awful woman. Every year, with tenacious glee, she once more wrote out a new will in which she once again bestowed the generous sum of just ten pounds upon her eldest son. (Seeking to justify her abominable treatment of William, his mother once drafted a letter in which she said that he intimidated her by asking difficult questions and that she would fear being alone in the presence of her firstborn.) Locke salved his own conscience by offering his older brother £3,000 raised from personal investments.
Locke’s position was in fact as unenviable as was William’s. Chained to a tyrant mother, he dwelt with his sisters in what was effectively Lady Hester’s private prison at Woburn Park. Designed by William Kent, Woburn stood ostentatiously close to Ockham, which it dwarfed. Nominally under Locke’s control, it was ruled by the iron fist of his mother, who ran it as her own fiefdom. The son whose obligations included writing his mother an annual letter of obsequious homage (while apologising every time he went away for more than a day) was in effect a mere dependant.
Lady Hester’s callous behaviour had not only robbed William King of the major portion of his inheritance, but it aimed to separate him from the young sisters who adored him. No communication was permitted between the two estates. When Hester and Charlotte King visited Ockham, they did so clandestinely, rather than risk the scourge of their mother’s displeasure.
It is unclear how much Mrs Somerville herself knew of this ugly history, but it is likely that William King, who had few friends, shared most of it with Woronzow Greig, his lifelong confidante and loyal supporter.*
Encountering William in 1835, for the first time in several years, Greig saw a handsome
