No tears were shed in Ealing that Lord Byron’s last mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, attempting to gatecrash the wedding of the great man’s daughter, had turned up instead at a smart London church where, thanks to her choice of a coyly revealing veil, the countess was recognised and publicly mocked for making a fool of herself. Writing her voluminous homage to Byron some thirty years later, Teresa repaid his widow for that painful hour of humiliation with an acid portrait, one of such peculiar venom that it would help to destroy Annabella’s hard-won status as one of the secular saints of Victorian England.
Before the marriage came the settlements. The documents were intimidating and vast: the History Centre in Woking, Surrey still holds the bullhide on which – despite the gifting to Locke King, via Lady Hester, of at least an equal part of the family estates – over 200 King properties were recorded under William’s name, bringing in an annual income of £8,000 (around £396,000 in modern terms). What catches the eye, however, is not the handsome flourishes which adorn the names of Ada, of the 7th Lord Byron and – he was the well-meaning peacemaker in the conflicted King family – of Lady Hester’s brother, Lord Ebrington. Two names dominate all the others: those of Lord King and his formidably wealthy future mother-in-law, Lady Byron.
Writing to Robert Noel in Dresden on 28 July (Robert happened also to be getting married, to the well-born and charming Louisa von Henniken), Lady Byron described Lord King’s fortune as ‘sufficient, though not ample’. An immediate gift of £30,000 from Lady Byron helped to remedy matters. Given his mother-in-law’s notoriously fragile health, William naturally assumed that he might soon receive a good deal more. Ada, meanwhile – although her mother was keen to point out that the cost of her trousseau alone equalled the expense of educating eighty poor children – was to receive precisely the same figure that her mother had herself been granted as a wife back in 1815. The modest sum of £300 a year (around £13,500 in modern terms) was expected to cover the cost of all Lady King’s personal expenses, including her books, travel, pets, a maid and even her best clothes.
The amount, for a bride of Ada’s status, was startlingly meagre. (Tom, the oldest of the four Noel brothers, was given £500 a year by Annabella during that same period; Annabella presented Robert Noel with £100 at the same time, merely as Ada’s personal wedding gift for Louisa and himself.) ‘Dear little Canary Bird, may the new “cage” be gladdened by your notes,’ Annabella wrote to her daughter on 9 July, the day after Ada’s wedding. The allusion to a cage, however playful, suggests that Annabella still regarded Ada as in need of supervision.* Her recollection of Byron’s own extravagance had not dimmed. Confining her daughter to a tiny budget was Lady Byron’s way of protecting an impetuous and financially naive young woman from running amok.
* Greig’s name was given in honour of his Russian godmother, Countess Woronzow (pronounced Voronzoff), daughter of Russia’s ambassador to Britain. She married Lord Pembroke.
* Ada’s husband and mother were still describing – to each other – her marital home as a ‘cage’ in 1844.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A
N
U
NCONVENTIONAL
W
IFE
(1836–40)
Ada’s marriage marked the beginning of a halcyon five years both for the newly-weds and for the mother whom they now fondly called ‘the Hen’. (William was quickly nicknamed ‘the Crow’ for his glossy dark hair and slender legs, while flighty, elusive Ada became ‘the Bird’.) A disappointingly pompous George Ticknor, calling in at Fordhook to inspect Lady Byron’s Ealing school just a few days after the wedding, carried away the impression of an earnest little widow, whose gravity was appropriate to her ‘peculiar’ position in the world. To nearer friends, Annabella seemed almost giddy with joy. Witnessing Ada’s happiness had at last secured her own, she confided to Robert Noel, while thanking him for introducing her to a wonderful new friend, Mrs Anna Jameson, the art historian. Writing to Harriet Siddons on 22 July, Lady Byron admitted that ‘for the first time in my life – I may say that I feel without a care on earth . . .’
Settled into a modest seaside cottage at Southampton for the autumn, Annabella remained almost girlishly merry. Chugging along the Solent on one of the popular steam packets that marked the advent of public tourism, she gloried in a spectacular sunrise and wondered that her fellow passengers appeared to be so oblivious. Snug in her newly rented home, she stitched herself a working-woman’s hemp frock (both Annabella and her daughter were deft needlewomen) and got the giggles when young William, her only manservant, dropped a plate of chicken fricassee – there was nothing else in the larder that night – on the floor. William was a sweet boy, but hopelessly clumsy, she wrote to Harriet Siddons’s daughter, Lizzie: perhaps her giggles gave off the wrong message? ‘These catastrophes are very frequent in my house, I think I will act being in a rage next time . . .’ Signing off her letter to this cherished correspondent, Lady Byron cheerfully referred to herself as ‘The Old Pup’ – she was forty-three – ‘[who] sometimes frets to think you will scarce know it again with its unwearied degree of tabbyism’.
Lizzie Siddons’s mother, Harriet, came down to Southampton from Edinburgh that September, eager to discuss the philanthropic ambitions that the two women shared. Annabella had finally reached the day when she felt able to step back from the Ealing school, where a new headmaster had replaced an annoying Mr Craig who, despite being trained in the Fellenberg system, had proved both ineffectual and sullen. (‘Did not this answer for his truthfulness and humility!’ Annabella burst out to Mrs Siddons, after hearing the Heep-like
