The connection seemed simply to rise up and stare the Somervilles in the face. Here, close to the heart of their own family, stood Miss Byron’s ideal mate. While no correspondence survives through which to trace the trail of discussion, it is clear that Greig’s notion was put to Lady Byron by his mother, and found pleasing. Towards the end of May 1835, Ada was despatched on a visit to Warwickshire. There, William King was due to attend a ball being held at Weston House, the newly Gothicised home of Sir George Philips, founder of the Manchester Guardian. A jovial textile magnate whose strong interest in science had brought him into contact with the Somervilles and Charles Babbage, Sir George had met Annabella and her daughter the previous year during their inspection tour of Midlands factories. A regular visitor that summer both to Fordhook and to the Somervilles’ house at Chelsea, Sir George and his brightly social wife were eager to assist in the plot to further what all parties perceived to be an ideal alliance.
Introduced to each other by their hostess (elegant Lady Philips did not approve of Miss Byron’s evidently home-made frock), the meeting of William and Ada proved an instant success. The couple danced several quadrilles together, during one of which William plucked up the courage to tell Ada that he would love to show her Ockham Park and its pretty little church. ‘I thought to myself how few young men whom one meets at balls would talk with so much feeling about their country church,’ Ada demurely wrote to him, ‘& I admired you very much.’
Admiration had burgeoned into love. A week after the Weston ball, William and Ada rode together along the banks of the Thames. By the time that they returned to the Somervilles’ home at Chelsea, William’s proposal had been accepted. Four days later, on 8 June, Ada was saucily reminding him about a certain ride ‘of which it is possible you may have some recollection’, before teasing him with the news that she was just off on a similar excursion, with jolly Sir George as her escort. Writing from Somerset, where he was busily hewing down trees around what he tenderly referred to as Ada’s very own hermitage, William confessed that he felt as though he were living in a dream. ‘How I envy your chaperon his ride with you.’
Fearful that Lord King might hear about Ada’s past history from the wrong person, Annabella asked Woronzow Greig to deliver a discreet account of the elopement incident. Writing to her fiancé shortly after that difficult disclosure, Ada expressed her gratitude to him for overlooking her imprudence. She promised to reward William’s trust by becoming a model wife, one who would never forget his generous behaviour. ‘Now do not be angry with me, because I have only just spoken the truth – neither more nor less.’ A week later, Ada’s mood had shifted. Did she actually possess ‘the requisite perseverance & self denial’ to make a dutiful spouse? But if William grew apprehensive about his fiancée’s changeability – and it seems likely that he did – he could always take comfort from the evident fact that Lady Byron, so calm, so kind, so splendidly rational, exerted a powerful influence over her skittish daughter.
Lady Byron herself was delighted by the match. Writing to Harriet Siddons, Annabella praised Lord King, not merely as ‘a man of rare worth and superior abilities’, but because ‘he has returned good for evil towards those who have wronged him.’ Her allusion was plainly to the Woburn branch of Lord King’s family. The tale was deplorable, but it enabled an admiring Annabella to highlight William’s magnanimous nature. ‘Schooled in adversity and guided by Christian principles, he has reached the age of 30 without a stain upon his reputation.’ His tastes, so Harriet learned, were reassuringly domestic. Best of all, from a loving mother’s point of view, Ockham Park was only half a day’s carriage drive away from Annabella’s own house at Ealing.
Given Lady Hester’s hostility to her eldest son, it was clear that she would forbid any member of the Woburn-based family to attend the wedding. It was probably in order to suppress public comment upon this scandalous absence that the wedding was celebrated quietly – as Annabella’s own had been – at home. Samuel Gamlen, a kindly and broadminded vicar whom Ada often treated as a substitute father, travelled down to Ealing from his Yorkshire rectory. On 8 July 1835, Gamlen presided over the nuptials at Fordhook. Little Olivia Acheson (Lady Byron’s own special favourite among Mary Gosford’s three daughters, singled out by Ada from a yearning trio of candidates) was the only bridesmaid. The following day, while the newly-weds visited Ockham, en route to a two-month West Country honeymoon at Ashley Combe, Annabella threw a party for both servants and her friends
