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

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      Because if Byron was to grow as a man or a poet, he did not need simply to escape England, but to smash with a complete and final violence everything that held him to it. In his relationship with Caroline Lamb during the previous year he had come dangerously close to doing this, and while he had pulled back from the edge then it was only a matter of time before he recognised that the conformist elements in his nature could never be squared with the vocation for opposition he claimed as the Byron birthright.

      ‘I have no choice’ – Byron put the words in Manfred’s mouth – and it is this sense of necessity that attracted both Lawrence and Nietzsche to the dramatic parabola of Byron’s life and career. There is of course a world of difference between the Lawrentian ‘aristocrat’ and the iibermensch that Nietzsche hailed in the figure of Manfred. Yet if Lawrence’s ultimate concern was with fulfilment in the deepest and most human sense of the word, he never shirked the fact that for an outsider of Byron’s stamp that inevitably meant war. ‘This is the tragedy’, Lawrence wrote,

      … that the convention of the community is a prison to his natural, individual desire, a desire that compels him, whether he feels justified or not, to break the bounds of the community, lands him outside the pale, there to stand alone, and say: ‘I was right, my desire was real and inevitable; if I was to be myself I must fulfil it, convention or no convention …’⁵⁶

      It is this sense of inevitability that gives the air of a ‘phoney war’ to the period of Byron’s affair with Lady Oxford. When at the end of June she left England with her husband he confessed that he felt more ‘Carolinish’⁵⁷ about it than he had expected, despite the fact that for all her attractions she could no more satisfy him than Caroline Lamb herself had done before her.

      Still less could one of the great regnantes of Whig society answer his need for a rupture with everything that held him to England. It did not, though, matter. By the time that Lady Oxford finally sailed, on 28 June, the one woman had re-appeared in his life who could fill both roles: a woman who by her birth and temperament was not only uniquely placed to define the full nature of Byronic rebellion but also to meet with a peculiar psychological and emotional fitness what Lawrence called ‘the deepest desire’ of life,

      a desire for consummation … a desire for completeness, that completeness of being which will give completeness of satisfaction and completeness of utterance.⁵⁸

      The woman in question was the Hon. Mrs Augusta Leigh, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of Byron’s father by his first, scandalous, marriage to Amelia Darcy, Baroness Conyers in her own right and the wife of the heir to the Duke of Leeds, the Marquess of Carmarthen.

      The son of that famous sailor and womaniser, ‘Foulweather Jack’, ‘Mad Jack’ Byron seemed ‘born for his own ruin, and that of the other sex.’⁵⁹ Six years before Augusta’s birth, the dazzling and wealthy Marchioness had met and fallen for him, picnicked with him one day and abandoned her husband for him the next, living defiantly with him in a ‘vortex of dissipation’⁶⁰ until a well-publicised divorce left her free to marry him and move to France.

      Whatever fondness his son might retain for his memory, ‘Mad Jack’ was as callous a rake as eighteenth-century gossip portrayed him, with all the Byron charm and none of its generosity. For five years he lived off his wife’s fortune in either Chantilly or Paris, but when shortly after Augusta’s birth he lost wife and income together, Jack Byron abandoned the child to the first in a long succession of guardians and relatives, and set off on the predatory hunt for another heiress that finally led to Bath and Catherine Gordon.

      For a few months, as a four-year-old, Augusta lived with her father and his pregnant new wife at Chantilly, but from the moment she was handed over to her grandmother, Lady Holderness, she left behind the depravation and uncertainty that was Jack Byron’s only obvious legacy to his children. During the crucial years when Catherine Gordon and her son were struggling under the indignities of poverty and isolation, the orphaned Augusta was growing up among a clutch of aristocratic relations into a tall and graceful girl, ‘light as a feather’, with a long, slender neck and heavy mass of light brown hair, a fine complexion, large mouth, retroussé nose, beautiful eyes, gentle manner, and a pathological shyness that eclipsed even that of her unknown Byron half-brother.⁶¹

      If these formative years among her Howard cousins and the half-brothers and sisters of her mother’s first marriage gave Augusta an uncritical, aristocratic ease that Byron never matched, as a grounding in emotional subservience they had more corrosive consequences. There was a fundamental docility to her character that probably ran deeper than any social conditioning, but for a girl of such natural reticence and limited prospects, a childhood of gilded dependence in the great houses of her relations can only have compounded the instinct for self-surrender that was to mark her adult life.

      It was an instinct confirmed, too, when after a six-year courtship she finally married her feckless cousin, George Leigh, and sank into a life of straitened domesticity from which she never escaped. Colonel George Leigh has always had one of those roles in the Byron story that never quite swells even to a walk-on part, but for his wife at least he was real enough, an irascible and incapable husband and father in equal measure, a cavalry officer whose career ended in financial scandal and a gambler whose sharpness, even in the world of Newmarket and the circles of the Prince of Wales, placed him on the wrong side of social acceptability.

      It can seem at times as though Augusta only existed in and through other people, so it is little wonder that a woman with such a genius for self-effacement has always proved hard to pin down. From the first day that her character was dragged into the public domain it has been open season on her, but after a hundred and fifty years of legal and biographical prodding she remains as elusive and unknowable as ever, leaving behind only a kind of erotic charge that is as close as we can get to her, an impression of femininity so endlessly and placidly accommodating as to obliterate all individuality.

      A ‘fieldsman’, Thomas Hardy wrote in Tess, is never anything more than a man in a field but a woman is continuous with the natural world, and something of that universality clings to the finest surviving image we have of Augusta Leigh. There is little contemporary evidence to suggest she ever looked like Hayter’s lovely drawing of her, but in the languor and passivity of that face, the tilt of the head and the long curve of the neck, he has surely left us the essential Augusta – the ‘sleepy Venus’ of Byron’s Don Juan, the Zuleika of The Bride of Abydos, the mother of seven children by a husband she hardly ever saw – the woman whose idle and easy sexuality could disturb and attract both men and women every bit as much as her half-brother’s flagrant aggression.

      Augusta had first met Byron when she was a girl of seventeen and he an awkward and overweight schoolboy of thirteen. From their first exchanges of letters the two were natural allies in his endless battles with his mother, but in spite of a protective – and on his side almost seigneurial – affection they saw very little of each other as children. At the age of seventeen Augusta was already infatuated with her Leigh cousin, and as Byron himself moved from Harrow to Cambridge and then on to his travels in the east she inevitably became more of an idea than a reality to him.

      In the long run there could have been nothing more dangerous than this legacy of intimacy and distance, and no more vulnerable time for Augusta to re-enter his life than the summer of 1813, when his affair with Lady Oxford was petering out and Caroline Lamb was taking her last melodramatic revenge. The correspondence between Byron and Augusta for the preceding months is missing, but it seems almost certainly СКАЧАТЬ