The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons. David Crane

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ with Caroline, he found Lady Melbourne a subtle and determined ally. To a woman who had charmed and slept her way to the top of Whig society, her daughter-in-law’s morals were of no great concern, but the one crime the lax Regency world would not forgive was indiscretion and as Caroline’s antics began to threaten the dynastic ambitions ‘the spider’ held for her family, Lady Melbourne moved to neutralise her.

      In spite of all her cynicism, though, it can no more have occurred to Lady Melbourne than it had to Byron that the solution to their mutual problem lay in her cool, self-contained country niece. For their different reasons both Caroline Lamb and her sister-in-law ‘Caro George’ had done their best to convince him that Annabella was already engaged, but he had hardly needed their warnings to keep a wary distance from a woman he instinctively recognised as his opposite. ‘My dear Lady Caroline’, he had written as early as 1 May, after reading some verses of Annabella’s,

      I have read over the few poems of Miss Milbank with attention. – They display fancy, feeling, & a little practice would very soon induce facility of expression … She certainly is a very extraordinary girl, who would imagine so much strength & variety of thought under that placid countenance? You will say as much of this to Miss M. as you think proper. – I say all this very sincerely, I have no desire to be better acquainted with Miss Milbank, she is too good for a fallen spirit to know or wish to know, & I should like her more if she were less perfect.³⁷

      There is no reason to doubt Byron – Annabella is not mentioned in his letters for more than four months – but the idea of her had taken a dogged hold of his imagination. There was no pretence on his part that he was in love with her, or anyone else, but as over July and August the pressure from both the Lambs and Caroline’s mother to end the affair grew, he was faced with the fundamental need of the outsider to assimilate or face destruction. ‘I see nothing but marriage & a speedy one can save me’, he wrote to Lady Melbourne on 28 September,

      if your niece is attainable I should prefer her – if not – the very first woman who does not look as if she would spit in my face.³⁸

      ‘You ask “if I am sure of myself”’ he had already written to Lady Melbourne ten days earlier, after first hesitantly broaching the idea of Annabella to her in a letter from Cheltenham on the 13th,

      I answer – no – but you are, which I take to be a much better thing. Miss M. I admire because she is a clever woman, an amiable woman & of high blood, for I still have a few Norman & Scotch inherited prejudices on the last score, were I to marry. As to Love, that is done in a week (provided the Lady has a reasonable share) besides marriage goes on better with esteem & confidence than romance, & she is quite pretty enough to be loved by her husband, without being so glaringly beautiful as to attract too many rivals.³⁹

      At the beginning of October Lady Melbourne approached her niece on his behalf, and on the 12th received Annabella’s refusal from Richmond, complete with a ‘Character’ of Byron explaining her decision. ‘The passions have been his guide from childhood,’ she wrote, up on her ‘high stilts’ as her aunt described her,

      and have exercised a tyrannical power over his very superior intellect. Yet among his dispositions are many which deserve to be associated with Christian principles – his love of goodness in its chastest form, and his abhorrence of all that degrades human nature, prove the uncorrupted purity of his moral sense.

      There is a chivalrous generosity in his ideas of love and friendship, and selfishness is totally absent from his character. In secret he is the zealous friend of all human feelings; but from the strangest perversion that pride ever created, he endeavours to disguise the best points of his character. When indignation takes possession of his mind – and it is easily excited – his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt; but as soon as he has indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity which he had lost – from the immediate impulse of provocation – and repents deeply.⁴⁰

      It is difficult to be sure of Byron’s real feelings at this rejection, or even whether he knew himself, but whatever they were he would never have dropped the tone of cool worldliness with Lady Melbourne that had become their common language. ‘Cut her! My dear Ly. M. marry – Mahomet forbid!’ – he wrote to her on receiving the news, anxious to allay any suspicion of resentment,

      I am sure we will be better friends than before & if I am not embarrassed by all this I cannot see for the soul of me why she should – assure her con tutto rispetto that The subject shall never be renewed in any shape whatever, & assure yourself my carissima (not Zia what then shall it be? Chuse your own name) that were it not for this embarras with C I would much rather remain as I am. – I have had so very little intercourse with the fair Philosopher that if when we meet I should endeavour to improve our acquaintance she must not mistake me, & assure her I never shall mistake her … She is perfectly right in every point of view, & during the slight suspense I felt something very like remorse for sundry reasons not at all connected with C nor with any occurrence since I knew you or her or hers; finding I must marry however on that score, I should have preferred a woman of birth & talents, but such a woman was not at all to blame for not preferring me; my heart never had an opportunity of being much interested in the business, further than that I should have very much liked to be your relation. – And now to conclude like Ld. Foppington, “I have lost a thousand women in my time but never had the ill manners to quarrel with them for such a trifle.”⁴¹

      The address on this letter – Cheltenham again – suggests, though, that Byron’s good humour was not simply feigned for Lady Melbourne’s benefit. He had gone to the fashionable spa town for the waters earlier in the summer, but long after it had been abandoned by most of London society he was still there, held by a growing fascination with that other ‘Aspasia’ of Regency England that he would have been reluctant to admit to Lady Melbourne, the beautiful, serially faithless forty-year-old Countess of Oxford, Jane Harley.

      There is as much pseudo-psychological nonsense talked of Byron’s predilection for older women – as if everyone over the age of thirty were somehow identical – as there is over his fastidious distaste at the sight of a woman eating.^* In the wake of Childe Harold it was inevitable that he should gravitate towards the great hostesses who dominated Whig society, but among even that disparate group it would be hard to imagine two women with less in common than Lady Melbourne and Lady Oxford, the one all caution, cynicism, and dynastic ambition, the other generous, impulsive, radical and careless of the proprieties she had so successfully defied from the first loveless years of marriage.

      The daughter of a clergyman, Jane Scott had been born in Inchin, and at the age of twenty-two ‘sacrificed’, as Byron later told Medwin, ‘to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible in the scale of creation’⁴³. If Lord Oxford had never been much of a match for his dazzling and ambitious wife, however, he was no gaoler either, and by the time that she began her affair with Byron the ‘grande horizontale’ of Whig political radicalism was already the mother of five children by as many fathers, ‘a tarnished siren of uncertain age’, as Lord David Cecil described her with patrician distaste,

      who pursued a life of promiscuous amours on the fringe of society, in an atmosphere of tawdry eroticism and tawdrier culture. Reclining on a sofa, with ringlets disposed about her neck in seductive disarray, she would rhapsodise to her lovers on the beauties of Pindar and the hypocrisy of the world.⁴⁴

СКАЧАТЬ