Friendship was a different matter. Rejecting Mr Eden’s offer, Miss Milbanke promised her absolute discretion. Nobody should know that he had been turned down; her affection for him would continue undiminished. A kindly consolation, instantly accepted (‘Be a friend still to my Mother and to my sisters,’ poor George humbly entreated), Annabella’s readily bestowed friendship did nothing to speed her progress to the altar. Seeing them continually in each other’s company; noting the regularity of the Milbanke family’s visits to Eden Farm; remarking the closeness that had grown up between Annabella and one of George’s eight sisters, Mary Dulcibella: how could society be blamed for assuming that the future of this evidently well-suited couple was a foregone conclusion?
Lady Melbourne may have been at work behind the scenes to promote an alternative match for her uppish little niece. In this new instance, however, the courtship was kept well out of view. The first public reference to Sir Augustus Foster’s wistful pursuit of Annabella Milbanke was not made until almost eighty years later, when Foster’s third son, Vere, published a family correspondence that included many of his father’s personal letters.
Tall, florid and – to judge from the official portrait of him painted in diplomatic attire – justly proud of his shapely legs, Sir Augustus was still holding down his post at the British embassy in Sweden when Annabella first arrived in London. Banished from Stockholm by Napoleon, Foster reached London in May 1810 and rapidly – he was notoriously susceptible – fell in love with the latest novelty on the marriage market: a girl possessed of rare intelligence and fiercely independent mind.
The Milbankes, eager for what sounded a most suitable match, expressed cautious enthusiasm. Annabella kept her distance. Foster’s mother, Lady Elizabeth, newly married to the Duke of Devonshire after twenty-four years of living with him and his wife in London’s most notorious ménage à trois, did not disguise her impatience with an obsession that she regarded as a waste of time. The duchess was on excellent terms with the Prince of Wales; discreet arrangements were made to scupper Augustus’s plans. When a lovesick Augustus actually declined to exchange Stockholm for a royal appointment to Washington, on the other side of the Atlantic, his mother lost her temper. Was he mad? Would he refuse the opportunity of a lifetime in order to engage upon – the angry duchess could not even bring herself to identify Miss Milbanke by name – ‘an unfounded pursuit of other objects?’
Augustus gave in, but he did not give up. In the spring of 1812, the now widowed duchess was still being entreated to soften her view. ‘I see you don’t like Annabella much,’ the disconsolate diplomat wrote from Washington on 26 May. Wistfully, Foster defended his chosen one (‘she has good eyes, is fair, has right ideas, and sense, and mildness’) while bewailing his misfortune in being so far away: ‘No Minister ever had such temptation to break up a negotiation and come home. I would give the world to go back for six months . . .’
Either the spectacle of such devotion softened his steely mother’s heart or a shrewd woman had realised that Annabella would never be won. Throughout the summer of Annabella’s third season in London, the dowager duchess made a dutiful effort to promote her son’s cause. Augustus was informed that his mother now liked Annabella’s countenance and manners and that she was getting to know her much better. On 4 July, shortly before dining at Portland Place with Lady Milbanke and ‘Old twaddle Ralph’, the duchess passed on a further crumb of comfort to her son. Judith (‘la madre’) had enquired after Augustus ‘most kindly’. Perhaps Annabella’s strange indifference was a mask. ‘I shall live in hope for you,’ the duchess wrote with a conspicuous effort at goodwill.
It was always the sisters who benefited most from their brother’s courtship of Annabella; close female confidantes were of intense importance to this only child of an ageing couple. By the springtime of 1812, a strong mutual friendship had already sprung up between Miss Milbanke and Augustus Foster’s clever sister, Caroline. (Mrs George Lamb, like Mary Gosford, belonged to the same age group as Annabella’s adored cousin, Sophy Tamworth.)
In April 1812, following a brief visit to George Eden’s agreeable home near Beckenham in Kent, Annabella spent three days with the Lambs at Brocket Hall, Lord and Lady Melbourne’s house in Hertfordshire. On 9 April, she finally told a disappointed Sir Ralph that Caro George (as Mrs George Lamb was often named to distinguish her from that other, wilder Caroline Lamb, her sister-in-law) had promised to transmit her refusal to Lord Augustus. But nothing was said. Possibly, Caro George feared, as she confided to Annabella, that a despairing Augustus would plunge into marriage with – unimaginable horror! – an American. Possibly, she hoped that Miss Milbanke (for whom she was developing a great affection) might yet change her mind. Exiled to Washington, out of sight of Annabella during the most flirtatious summer of her young life, Augustus continued to take hope from his mother’s softening view and words of reassurance.
On 31 August, Caro George finally delivered her report to Augustus of the discussion she had held with Annabella at Brocket in April. Asked directly about her intentions, Miss Milbanke had fidgeted, reddened and done all she could to change the subject. Clearly, it was one that was not to her taste: ‘she was much embarrassed’, Mrs Lamb wrote; worse, she ‘has never mentioned you since’.
And that was that. Back in Sweden by 1816 and married to a congenial Danish bride, Augustus would read about the sensational break-up of Miss Milbanke’s short-lived marriage and feel smugly consoled. The problem had been that he, like the admirable George Eden, was just too good for a young lady whose heart – from the moment she placed one pretty foot in a
