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

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СКАЧАТЬ girl, Elizabeth Lamb, is pregnant, although it is impossible to tell from the painting. At her side, her father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, his expression serious, leans against the carriage; in the centre, holding the reins of a dappled grey that matches her carriage pony, stands her brother, John; on the right, slightly apart, elegant in profile on a superb bay, is her husband of a year, Peniston Lamb, the future first Lord Melbourne.

      There is a sense of calm to the piece, a reserve and unforced serenity that can only come of an unconscious collaboration of artist and sitters. In the distance a rocky outcrop looms over a stretch of water with some vague suggestion of domesticated wildness, but Stubbs’s figures need no background, confidently filling their social and pictorial space, sufficient to themselves under the enveloping protection of a darkly spreading oak.

      The oak and the girl, the past and the future, both linked in an unbroken chain to which the figures bear silent, unruffled witness. There is no conversation in this ‘conversation piece’, no interaction almost, just a shared strength that needs no articulating. From the side Peniston Lamb looks across – as well he might – to his formidable young wife, but the gaze is unreturned. Even the horses seem entirely self-contained, blinkered or cropping the grass, indifferent to each other, their owners, or the two dogs that, like a pair of attendant saints, stare up, in that eternal gesture of English portraiture, with unnoticed devotion at their masters.

      There is none of the golden glow of other Stubbs paintings here, none of the bucolic ease of his Haymakers, but a cool silvery light warmed only by the pink of Elizabeth’s dress and the answering tinge of the clouds. On a nearby wall an elderly couple also painted by Stubbs aboard their phaeton might be Jane Austen’s Admiral and Mrs Croft, but this group is not about affection or fulfilment but hierarchy and power, about dynastic and cultural certainties, and about what David Piper memorably called that ‘obscure but potent directive of fate’ that gives Stubbs sitters their air of unchallenged and unchallengeable authority.

      According to tradition, the Milbanke family traces itself back to a cup-bearer at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, who fled the country after a duel, settling in the north of England. Whatever the maverick promise of these origins, however, the next two hundred years saw a blameless decline into respectability, all taint of romance erased, in a family progress that took the Milbankes from Scottish exile by way of aldermanic and mayoral office in Newcastle to a baronetcy and a safe seat in Parliament.

      It was Charles II who granted the title to the first Sir Mark Milbanke in 1661, and over the next century the Milbankes’ influence was consolidated in the network of alliances and marriages that inevitably underpinned eighteenth-century political life. In generation after generation of Sir Marks or Sir Ralphs the same pattern emerged, as the Milbankes of Halnaby Hall married into other northern families, extending their land and connections across the north-east of England, augmenting agricultural interests in one marriage or mineral interests in another before, in the middle of the eighteenth century, forging the key alliance with the powerful Holderness family that gave Stubbs’s 5th Baronet a place in the Commons.

      There is something so reassuringly dull about the Milbankes’ political careers, so entirely lacking in individuality, that one feels instinctively with them that one is in touch with the solid bedrock of Sir Lewis Namier’s England. Sir Ralph had first entered parliament as one of two unopposed members for Scarborough in 1754, and at the first election of the new reign stood in the Holderness interest for Richmond, loyally and uncritically supporting successive administrations, before retiring in 1768 without having spoken a single word in fourteen years an MP.

      Over twenty years were to pass before another Milbanke sat in Parliament, but through the 1770s and 80s Sir Ralph’s son, another Ralph, continued the same process of family consolidation, hitching his political fortunes first to Lord Rockingham and then, on his death, to Charles James Fox. In 1790 after a ruinous campaign that is reckoned to have cost the family £15,000, he was finally returned in second place for Durham Co, and for the next twenty-two years remained its MP, a genial and ineffectual ‘Uncle Toby’ whose fidelity to the Whig cause, in his daughter’s succinct phrase, was ‘as little valued as doubted’.²⁴

      It was into this family and this world, on 17 May 1792, that Anne Isabella Milbanke was born. The future Lady Byron has always seemed to belong so completely to the nineteenth century that it is easy to forget that this is where her roots lie, that her moral and social being was shaped by the inherited virtues and limitations implicit in Stubbs’s painting or her family’s dilettante public service.

      But if the young Annabella was brought up in a political milieu, behind the web of alliances and obligations that supported two generations in parliament lay realities of landed life that had a far more profound effect on her vision. From the middle of the seventeenth century the principal seat of the Milbankes had been Halnaby Hall, a red-bricked Jacobean manor house, now gone, that lay just off the Great North Road outside the village of Croft in Yorkshire. In the village church of St Peter’s a wonderfully grandiose tomb and pew still evoke the dynastic ambitions of the early Milbankes, but Annabella’s affections remained all her life with the modest estate at Seaham on the north-east coast where she grew up. ‘If in a small village’, she recalled many years later, in a passage that might have come from George Eliot,

      you cannot go out of the gates without seeing the children of a few Families playing on the Green, till they become ‘familiar faces’, you need not be taught to care for their well-being. A heart must be hard indeed that could be indifferent to little Jenny’s having the Scarlet Fever, or to Johnny’s having lost his mother … I did not think property could be possessed by any other tenure than that of being at the service of those in need.²⁵

      The Milbankes and Seaham may have given Annabella a sense of the rooted interdependency of country life, but through her mother she could lay claim to a more exotic strain of English history. Judith Noel was born in 1751, the eldest daughter of Sir Edward Noel of Kirkby Mallory, first Viscount Wentworth and heir through the contorted female line to the sixteenth century Wentworth barony. It would be dangerous to describe any title that has survived with the tenacity of the Wentworths as ‘doomed’, but when a family branch can provide a Lancastrian standard-bearer at St Albans, a Governor of Calais under Mary Tudor, and the devoted mistress to the Duke of Monmouth, it is at least guilty of the kind of ill-luck that might pave the way to a marriage with Byron.

      For someone so outwardly prosaic as Annabella, there was, too, a curiously vivid streak of romanticism that fed directly off her sense of history. In a self-portrait written as a woman of thirty-nine, she looked back on her childhood self, on a miniature Dorothea Brooke pulled backwards and forwards between the claims of the imagination and the stern imperatives of a protestant conscience. ‘Impressed from earliest childhood with a sense of duty, and sympathising with the great and noble in human character’, she wrote,

      my aspirations went beyond the ordinary occasions of life – I wasted virtuous energy on a visionary scene, and conscience was in danger of becoming detached from that before me. Few of my pleasures were connected with realities – riding was the only one I can remember. When I climbed the rocks, or bounded over the sands with apparent delight, I was not myself. Perhaps I was shipwrecked or was trying to rescue other sufferers – some of my hours were spent in the Pass of Thermopylae, others with the Bishop of Marseilles in the midst of Pestilence, or with Howard in the cheerless dungeon …

      About the age of 13… I began to throw my imagination into a home-sphere of action – to constrain myself, from religious principle, to attend to what was irksome, and to submit to what was irritating. I had great difficulties to surmount from the impetuosity and sensitiveness of my character … It was this stage of my character which prepared me to sympathise unboundedly with the morbidly susceptible – with those who felt themselves unknown …²⁶ СКАЧАТЬ