Mad, bad and an utter BRUTE of a husband
A womaniser who referred to his sexual encounters as ‘hot luncheons’, Byron married for money. His adultery, incest and drunken rages made him . . .
IN BYRON’S WAKE by Miranda Seymour (Simon & Schuster £25)
WHeRe else would the pretty 20-yearold Annabella Milbanke meet her future husband, the poet Lord Byron, than at Lady Caroline Lamb’s morning waltzing party?
That was the kind of entertainment laid on for this provincial heiress, one of the most courted girls in London, during her third London Season in 1812.
In her first two Seasons, Annabella had rejected several nice, eligible suitors. As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biography, ‘her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake’. (As I read that, I heard my mother’s warning: ‘Darling, never marry someone in the hope that you can change them for the better.’)
Annabella fell head over heels in love with mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron. He intrigued her with his air of ‘quiet contempt’. The whole of upper- class London, it seemed, was infatuated with this fine-boned, pallid, promiscuous and sexually deviant poet with a limp. elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, remarked: ‘He is really the only topic of almost every conversation — the men jealous of him, the women of each other.’
Double-biography? well, yes: this book does tell the life stories of two women: Annabella, and her only child by Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, who grew up to be a mathematical brainbox with the imagination to foresee the birth of the computer.
But see how I’m already mainly talking about another person in this review? The shadow of Byron is everpresent: his powerful, warped character pervaded everything in these women’s lives, even from well beyond his early grave.
His marriage to Annabella lasted only a year and it was a miserable fiasco from day one.
Byron, a serial womaniser who referred to sexual encounters as ‘hot luncheons’, married Annabella only so he could (a) get his hands on the fortune she was due to inherit, and (b) use the respectable marriage to camouflage his ongoing incestuous relationship with his half- sister, Augusta Leigh (with whom he had secretly fathered a daughter, Medora).
Naive Annabella had no idea and just thought of Augusta as a kind sister-in-law. Byron’s regime of coercive control makes Rob in The Archers look positively sweet by comparison. ‘A woman has no right to complain,’ he told Annabella, ‘if her husband does not beat or confine her. I have neither beaten nor confined you.’
‘ Yes, but . . .’ I wanted to scream at him, as I read of his drunken rages and the way he used to send his wife upstairs to bed early so that he could canoodle downstairs with Augusta (who came to live with them in their rented mansion in Piccadilly).
while Annabella was heavily pregnant, Byron sent up a message to her in the bedroom, telling her to stop pacing the creaky floorboards because the noise was getting on his and Augusta’s nerves.
TERRIFIED
that her husband was actually going to murder her, Annabella ran away to her parents, taking one-year-old Ada with her. Neither of them ever set eyes on Byron again.
A mysterious allegation surfaced that Byron had once, in a paroxysm of madness, actually committed murder.
This charge frightened him out of his wits. That, combined with his fear of being convicted for sodomy and incest, forced him to sail away to exile in Italy. He died of a fever eight years (and about five thousand ‘hot luncheons’) later, aged 36.
At this juncture, Seymour’s book shifts gear and becomes a story of two remarkably forward-looking women who needed to be strong to fight off the taint of association with a man whose rumoured incest was an undying source of gossip. Nowadays, reputations
are wrecked by accusations of sexual misconduct; in those days, the reputations of the allegedly wronged women were also wrecked. For years, Lady Byron shrank from placing herself anywhere she might be noticed.
The moment she inherited her vast fortune, Annabella devoted herself to reputation-restoring good works.
Seymour gives us this jaw-dropping statistic: in 1840, the British Government spent £30,000 on education, and £70,000 on improving the kennels and stabling at Windsor Castle.
To do her bit to correct this absurd situation, Lady Byron founded schools all over the country, to educate children of all creeds and none. She was also a dedicated abolitionist: two of the first members of staff she employed at her schools in Surrey were freed black American slaves Ellen and William Craft.
Generous and canny, she kept her eye firmly on all financial accounts. If she had been born a century-and-ahalf later, Seymour suggests, she may well have been the CEO of a bank.
After she died, aged 67 in 1860, Lady Byron’s reputation as a good-hearted and progressive social reformer was torn to shreds by malicious articles suggesting that she had been a complicit, knowing witness to her husband’s incest.
Byron, meanwhile, was posthumously elevated to the status of misunderstood hero and national treasure. Carrying in her own blood her mother’s intelligence, and her father’s imagination and volatility, there was scant hope that little Ada would grow up to be a selfeffacing 19th-century housewife.
She was a precocious child who, at the age of 11, was determined to learn to fly and converted a tackroom into a ‘flying room’, hung with ropes. She was both an intellectual and a fantasist.
For three years during her teens, she suffered from debilitating paralysis. It was in those years that her insatiable thirst for mathematics took hold.
SHE
had the Byronic (that man again) power to enchant and captivate clever people and harness their brilliance. In all her sayings from now on, she comes across as half-poet and half-maths don.
When her mentor, mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, came up with his proposed Analytical Engine, a calculating machine the size of a large shed, made of thousands of cylinders going round and round against each other, Ada’s brilliance came to the fore.
As her hero, mathematician Augustus De Morgan, wrote: ‘The moving force of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.’ Ada had this in spades. Writing published ‘ notes’ on the Engine, in the hope of getting funding for it, Ada saw the possibility of programming a single piece of hardware to do any form of computation.
She saw how such a machine could be used not only for numbers, but to compose music as well. She drew up what today looks like the first computer program.
The Analytical Engine never received the funding to be built. As Seymour writes: ‘A young Victorian woman glimpsed the Engine’s significance for a world that was not yet ready for it or for her’.
If it had been built, would Silicon Valley now be in Surrey?
With Ada, you never knew what was coming next. She now became obsessed with gambling on horses and ran a gambling ring, which lost her lots of money.
She was an inattentive and rather hopeless mother.
The one strict rule for her three children was that they should never be left alone with each other: the family feared Byron’s incestuous tendency should manifest itself in the next generation. The poor siblings were separated through their childhood, so pervasive was the shadow of That Man.