Poor Ada. She might as well have held her tongue. Nothing would ever have the power to shake William King’s vindictive mother from her invincible pinnacle of self-righteousness.
Ada’s closeness to Hester King the younger is apparent from her sister-in-law’s inclusion in the grand plans being hatched in 1838 for Ada’s two new schools at Ockham. Here, thanks to lavish injections of money from Annabella, the Ealing model was being replicated, but on an expanded scale. Carpentry shops and a printing press had been introduced; a gym and a specially designed music room were next on the agenda. ‘Our school is doing so well, that I am very anxious it should do better,’ an elated Ada proclaimed to the approving Hen. All that they lacked in 1838 were suitable teaching manuals, a deficiency which Ada intended to enlist her sister-in-law’s assistance to remedy.
Naturally, Ada had it all planned out in a trice. Charles Knight, the biggest name in educational books, would be the publisher. William Frend’s daughter, Sophia, recently married to Augustus De Morgan, one of the leading logicians of the time, would write on mathematics. Harriet Martineau, the mother of sociology (and respected translator of Auguste Comte), would add a book on rules for a modern education. Ada – besides writing ‘a good and amusing book about geography’ and a children’s version of George Combe’s Constitution – was going to collaborate with Hester on a practical guide to thrift. ‘I think the history of boiling a pot or making a mess of oatmeal porridge might be just as entertaining as the history of anything else,’ a hopeful Ada informed her mother.
Lady Byron approved. Composing a glowing tribute to her clever daughter in her notebooks, Annabella praised her enthusiasm and skill. ‘Ada teaches so that one cannot help learning,’ an admiring friend had exclaimed. Lady Byron herself was especially impressed by the gift for communicating difficult ideas in simple language that Ada had learned from Mary Somerville.
It was not for lack of encouragement that Ada’s schoolbook project collapsed, but because a rescue plan for the King sisters had emerged from Lady Byron’s organising mind, robbing Ada of her chief collaborator. Hester and Charlotte, subsidised by their sympathetic sponsor, were to spend a year in Europe.
In April 1838, Ada and William wistfully put Lord King’s excited sisters on to a boat bound for Antwerp. Charlotte travelled on to Weimar, where she was looked after by Lady Byron’s new friend, Anna Jameson. Hester settled at Dresden as the cherished guest of kindly Robert Noel (just beginning to make his name as one of Germany’s leading phrenologists) and his wife, Louisa von Henniken. That crucial visit to Germany – young Hester’s first journey out of England – would lay the foundations for an enduring friendship. By the following summer, Hester trusted Robert Noel well enough to let him take a ‘living mask’, a process that required her head to be covered by a sheet and smothered with wet plaster. The experience was one that Hester thought equivalent to Ada’s greatest terror; the notion of being buried alive . . .
Years later, Robert Noel took down Hester’s cast from one of his laboratory shelves and wrote up his notes about the sitter. Fond personal recollections played a larger part than phrenological diagnosis when Robert described Miss King as a sweet and touchingly maternal young woman, always cheerful and kind, with a strong sense of the ridiculous (a quality that had always endeared Hester to Ada).
It was on Hester’s dislike of ostentation that Robert Noel would lay particular emphasis in his affectionate word portrait. Returned from Germany in the summer of 1839 and newly established with Charlotte in modest lodgings near Charing Cross (safely out of reach of Woburn Park), Hester was disconcerted to find dolled-up portraits of Ada smiling at her out of all the fashionable printshop windows. The brand-new Lady Lovelace was enjoying a great success at 7s 6d a sale, Hester wrote to Louisa Noel in Germany. Her letter, although spiky, stopped just short of a sneer.
Hester was being unjust. Ada herself had never asked to be made a countess. It was largely to please her mother that she had granted Alfred Chalon’s request to create a marketable image of the young peeress. Chalon was the new queen’s favourite watercolourist and it would have seemed ungracious to refuse, but it’s hard to imagine that Ada relished seeing herself represented as the ringletted heroine of a velvet-covered ladies’ annual, any more than she enjoyed the mandatory court visit to receive Queen Victoria’s formal approval of her elevation to the rank of a countess.
Hester’s greater concern was about Ada’s capriciousness as a mother. Little Byron, described by Hester to Robert Noel’s wife as ‘an exceedingly odd boy’, had already become – and would always remain – his mother’s darling, capable of doing no wrong. If sturdy Byron knocked his tiny sister down, Ada laughed. If he answered his mother back, she laughed again and passed along his commands as jokes (‘Now Ma may go . . . Now Ma can go downstairs’) together with her response (‘No, my dear, I’m not going, so you need not talk about it’). Wee Annabella, meanwhile, was declared to be ‘doggedly naughty’ and ‘to scream like a pig’. When Lady Byron volunteered to take charge of her small granddaughter for a week, Ada wondered how her mother found the patience to suffer so much tiresome ‘chatteration’; she even asked Lady Byron frankly how she ‘could endure her [the child] so much alone with you?’ With ease, it seems. Hester King described Lady Byron to the Noels as a besotted granny, and one who took a keen interest in
