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

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СКАЧАТЬ would clearly be absurd to try to define her exclusively in terms of ancestry, but there is a sense in which the solidity of the Milbankes and the romanticism of the Wentworth inheritance combined to produce in Annabella something distinctly new, a kind of fierce ordinariness, a strident centrality that raised the commonplace to the realms of genius, orthodoxy to the stuff of crusade.

      Along with this dual inheritance, the circumstances of her own contented upbringing can only have sharpened the feeling of singularity with which she coloured the most ordinary imaginative experiences of childhood. In the same Auto-Description she lamented a ‘want of comparison’ in her Seaham life that blinded her to the advantages of birth, and yet of greater importance than the inevitable isolation of a small Durham village was the simple fact that she was the only child of parents who had waited fifteen years for an heir.

      Ralph Milbanke and Judith Noel had married in 1777, and although they had brought up a niece as if she was their own child, there is no mistaking the ferocious joy that greeted Anna-bella’s birth. It is often admiringly noted that she was encouraged in her opinions from her earliest days, but if her childhood self can be back derived from her adult character, hers was the kind of independence that might have flourished more safely in the face of opposition than indulgence, her character one that would have fared better outside the warmth and admiration of a family that placed her firmly and uncritically at its centre. ‘It was indeed Calantha’s misfortune to meet with too much kindness,’ her cousin Caroline Lamb wrote of herself in a passage in Glenarvon that throws an unexpected light on this – a passage that sufficiently stung Annabella when she read the novel to have her mark and angrily refute its psychology in a criticism that survives still among her papers,

      or rather too much indulgence from all who surrounded her. The Duke, attentive solely to her health, watched her with the fondest solicitude, and the wildest wishes her fancy could invent, were heard with the most scrupulous attention, and gratified with the most unbounded compliance.²⁷

      This regime of indulgence was made more dangerous in Anna-bella’s case by an intelligence that in and outside the home had little to challenge it. Even as a child she was conscious of being cleverer than most of those around her, but it was a cleverness dangerously at the service of unchallengeable moral certitudes, an intelligence that seems never to have broadened with reading or turned on itself in any genuine spirit of criticism. From the evidence of her letters and journals there was certainly a kind of scrupulousness about her, and yet even here her scruples and self-doubts were, like her shyness, the self-referential workings of an imagination that ultimately appealed to no other judgement but its own.

      If Annabella Milbanke had simply married as Milbankes had traditionally married, none of this might have much mattered, and it is likely that she would have done no more than add one more name to history’s forgotten roll of mute, inglorious husbands. From the earliest family descriptions one can glimpse the formidable chatelaine she should have been, but substitute the name Byron for that of George Eden or any of her earlier suitors, see that ten-year-old girl with the determined pout Hoppner painted as the future Lady Byron, and the warmth, the love, the privilege and security of her sheltered upbringing suddenly seem the laboratory conditions for breeding the disaster of the most notorious marriage in literary history.

      It is the inevitable condition of biography to shape a life with the benefits of hindsight in this way, and yet it is only hindsight that casts a shadow over the prelapsarian happiness of Annabella’s childhood. In her own eyes the memories of Seaham would always have the poignancy of blighted innocence, but the horror is that it could have ever equipped anyone so essentially limited in experience or culture to imagine that she could understand or tame a Byron.

      It is often forgotten, in the feeding frenzy that invariably accompanies her name, how vulnerably young she was when she first met him in 1812, and yet nothing suggests that another summer or two would have made the difference. She had come up to London for her first season in the previous year, and although there were suitors enough to satisfy anyone’s vanity, not even a future governor-general of India or Wellington’s adjutant general in the Peninsula had been sufficient to jolt her out of the complacent certainties of her Seaham world. ‘I met with one or two who, like myself, did not appear absorbed in the present scene’, she later wrote of this period,

      and who interested me in a degree. I had a wish to find among men the character I had often imagined – but I found only parts of it. One gave proofs of worth, but had no sympathy for high aspirations – another seemed full of affection towards his family, and yet he valued the world. I was clear sighted in these cases – but I was to become blind.²⁸

      It was a misfortune, too, for a woman who could think like this to see her future husband for the first time in his annus mirabilis, because if there were far more interesting ‘Byrons’ than the triumphant author of Childe Harold, there was none more likely to appeal to a romantic moralist of Annabella’s stamp. ‘Lavater’s [the phrenologist] system never asserted its truth more forcibly than in Byron’s countenance’, the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence wrote at the height of Byron’s fame, wonderfully capturing the mix of glamour and threat in the figure that seduced London’s ‘golden parallelogram’ in the spring and summer of 1812,

      in which you see all the character: its ken and rapid genius, its pale intelligence, its profligacy, and its bitterness; its original symmetry distorted by the passions, his laugh of mingled merriment and scorn; the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent, the eyes bright and dissimilar, the nose finely cut, and the nostril acutely formed; the mouth well made but wide and contemptuous even in its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful expression heightened by the massive firmness of the chin, which springs at once from the centre of the full under-lip; the hair dark and curling but irregular in its growth; all this presents to you the poet and the man; and the general effect is heightened by a thin spare form, and, as you may have heard, by a deformity of limb.’²⁹

      Byron was just twenty-four when, after more than two years’ travel across Europe and the east, the sudden and unprecedented success of Childe Harold changed his life and the course of Romantic literature. He had already produced some feeble juvenilia and a long and scabrous satire he had since come to regret, but nothing in his literary or private life, nothing in the intense and homoerotic friendships of his Harrow and Cambridge days or the bisexual philandering in the Levant had prepared him emotionally for the loneliness of fame that swamped him on his return, a poet without conviction, an aristocrat without a sense of belonging, a liberal without the stamina or will for political life, an icon with a morbid sensitivity to his lameness.

      It would have been odd in fact if Annabella alone had not felt drawn to Byron that summer, and yet even in the privacy of her diary and letters she felt she owed her intelligence some more refined expression of her feelings than the general excitement that gripped Regency society. She had first seen him at a morning waltzing party given by Caroline Lamb on 25 March, and after filling her journal that night with her impressions, the next day reported back to her mother in Seaham. ‘My curiosity was much gratified by seeing Lord Byron, the object at present of universal attention’, she wrote,

      Lady Caroline has of course seized on him, notwithstanding the reluctance he manifests to be shackled by her … It is said that he is an infidel, and I think it probable from the general character of his mind. His poem sufficiently proves that he can feel nobly, but he has discouraged his own goodness. His features are well formed – his upper lip is drawn towards the nose with an expression of impatient disgust. His eye is restlessly thoughtful. He talks much, and I heard some of his conversation, which is very able, and sounds like the true sentiments of the Speaker.

      I did not seek an introduction myself, for all the women were absurdly СКАЧАТЬ