Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861




Anne Isabella Noel Milbanke (that was her maiden name) was an only
child. Her father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, was the sixth baronet of that
name. Her mother was a Noel, daughter of Viscount and Baron Wentworth,
and remotely descended from royalty,--that is, from the youngest son of
Edward I. After the death of Lady Milbanke's father and brother, the
Barony of Wentworth was in abeyance between the daughter of Lady
Milbanke and the son of her sister till 1856, when, by the death of that
cousin, Lord Scarsdale, Lady Byron became possessed of the inheritance
and title. During her childhood and youth, however, her parents were not
wealthy; and it was understood that Miss Milbanke would have no fortune
till the death of her parents, though her expectations were great.
Though this want of immediate fortune did not prove true, the report of
it was probably advantageous to the young girl, who was sought for other
things than her fortune. When Lord Byron thought of proposing, the
friend who had brought him to the point of submitting to marriage
objected to Miss Milbanke on two grounds,--that she had no fortune, and
that she was a learned lady. The gentleman was as wrong in his facts
as mischievous in his advice to the poet to many. Miss Milbanke had
fortune, and she was not a learned lady. Such men as the two who held
a consultation on the points, whether a man entangled in intrigues and
overwhelmed with debts should release himself by involving a trusting
girl in his difficulties, and whether the girl should be Miss Milbanke
or another, were not likely to distinguish between the cultivated
ability of a sensible girl and the pedantry of a blue-stocking; and
hence, because Miss Milbanke was neither ignorant nor silly, she was
called a learned lady by Lord Byron's associates. He bore testimony, in
due time, to her agreeable qualities as a companion,--her brightness,
her genial nature, her quiet good sense; and we heard no more of her
"learning" and "mathematics," till it suited her enemies to get up a
theory of incompatibility of temper between her and her husband. The
fact was, she was well-educated, as education was then, and had the
acquirements which are common in every house among the educated classes
of English society.

She was born in 1792, and passed her early years chiefly on her father's
estates of Halnaby, near Darlington, Yorkshire, and Seaham, in Durham.
She retained a happy recollection of her childhood and youth, if one may
judge by her attachment to the old homes, when she had lost the power of
attaching herself, in later life, to any permanent home. When an offer
of service was made to her, some years since, by a person residing on
the Northumberland coast, the service she asked was that a pebble might
be sent her from the beach at Seaham, to be made into a brooch, and worn
for love of the old place.

Her father, as a Yorkshire baronet, spent his money freely. A good deal
of it went in election-expenses, and the hospitality of the house was
great. It was too orderly and sober and old-fashioned for Lord Byron's
taste, and he quizzed it accordingly; but he admitted the kindliness of
it, and the amiability which made guests glad to go there and sorry to
come away. His special records of Miss Milbanke's good-humor, spirit,
and pleasantness indicate the source of subsequent misrepresentations of
her. Till he saw it, he could not conceive that order and dutifulness
could coexist with liveliness and great charms of mind and manners; and
when the fact was out of sight, he went back to his old notion, that
affectionate parents and dutiful daughters must be dull, prudish, and
tiresome.

"Bell" was beloved as only daughters are, but so unspoiled as to be
sought in marriage as eagerly as if she had been a merry member of a
merry tribe. Lord Byron himself offered early, and was refused, like
many other suitors. Her feelings were not the same, however, to him as
to others. It is no wonder that a girl not out of her teens should be
captivated by the young poet whom the world was beginning to worship for
his genius as very few men are worshipped in their prime, and who could
captivate young and old, man, woman, and child, when he chose to try.
As yet, his habits of life and mind had not told upon his manners,
conversation, and countenance as they did afterwards. The beauty of his
face, the reserved and hesitating grace of his manner, and the pith and
strength of such conversation as he was tempted into might well win
the heart of a girl who was certainly far more fond of poetry than of
mathematics. Yet she refused him. Perhaps she did not know him enough.
Perhaps she did not know her own feelings at the moment. She afterwards
found that she had always loved him. His renewed offers at the close
of two years made her very happy. She was drawing near the end of her
portion of life's happiness; and she seems to have had no suspicion of
the baselessness of her natural and innocent bliss. It is probable that
nobody about her knew, any more than herself, how and why Lord Byron
offered to her a second time, till Moore published the facts in his
"Life" of the poet. The thrill of disgust which ran through every good
heart, on reading the story, made all sympathizers ask how she
could bear to learn how she had been treated in the confidences of
profligates. Perhaps she had known it long before, as her husband had
repeatedly tried his powers of terrifying and depressing her; but, at
all events, she could bear anything,--not only with courage and in
silence, but with calmness and inexhaustible mercy. According to Moore's
account, a friend of Byron's urged him to marry, as a remedy for the
melancholy restlessness and disorder of his life; "and, after much
discussion, he consented." The next proceedings were in character with
this "consent." Byron named Miss Milbanke: the friend objected, on the
grounds of her possession of learning and supposed want of fortune; and
Byron actually commissioned his adviser to propose for him to the lady
he did not prefer. She refused him; and then future proceedings were
determined by his friend's admiration of the letter he had got ready for
Miss Milbanke. It was such a pretty letter, it would be a pity not to
send it. So it was sent.

If she could have known, as she hung over that letter, what eyes had
read lines that should have been her own secret property, and as what
kind of alternative the letter had been prepared, what a different life
might hers have been! But she could not dream of being laid hold of as a
speculation in that style, and she was happy,--as women are for once in
their lives, and as she deserved to be. There was another alternative,
besides that of two ladies to be weighed in the balance. Byron was
longing to go abroad again, and he would have preferred that to
marrying; but the importunity of his friends decided him for marriage.
In a short time, and for a short time, Miss Milbanke's influence was too
strong for his wayward nature and his pernicious friends to resist. His
heart was touched, his mind was soothed, and he thought better of women,
and perhaps of the whole human race, than he had ever done before. He
wrote to Moore, who owned he had "never liked her," and who boded evil
things from the marriage, that she was so good that he wished he was
better,--that he had been quite mistaken in supposing her of "a very
cold disposition." These gentlemen had heard of her being regarded as "a
pattern lady in the North"; and they had made up an image of a prude and
a blue in their own minds, which Byron presently set himself to work to
pull down. He wrote against Moore's notion of her as "strait-laced," in
a spirit of justice awakened by his new satisfactions and hopes: but
there are in the narrative no signs of love on his part,--nothing more
than an amiable complacency in the discovery of her attachment to him.

The engagement took place in September, 1814, and the marriage in the
next January. Moore saw him in the interval, and had no remaining hope,
from that time, that Byron could ever make or find happiness in
married life. He was satisfied that love was, in Byron's case, only an
imagination; and he pointed to a declaration of Byron's, that, when in
the society of the woman he loved, even at the happiest period of his
attachment, he found himself secretly longing to be alone. Secretly
during the courtship, but not secretly after marriage.

"Tell me, Byron," said his wife, one day, not long after they were
married, and he was moodily staring into the fire,--"am I in your way?"

"Damnably," was the answer.

It will be remembered by all readers that the reason he assigned for the
good terms on which he remained with his half-sister, Mrs. Leigh, was
that they seldom or never saw each other.

When Moore saw him in London, he was in a troubled state of mind about
his affairs. His embarrassments were so pressing that he meditated
breaking off the match; but it was within a month of the wedding-day,
and he said he had gone too far to retract.--How it was that Sir Ralph
Milbanke did not make it his business to ascertain all the conditions
of a union with a man of Byron's reputation it is difficult to imagine.
Every movement of the idolized poet was watched, anecdotes of his life
and ways were in all mouths; and a prudent father, if encouraging his
addresses at all, should naturally have ascertained the chances of his
daughter having an honorable and happy home. Sir Ralph probably thought
so, when there were ten executions in the house in the first few months
after the marriage. Those difficulties, however, did not affect the
happiness of the marriage unfavorably. The wife was not the less of the
heroic temperament for being "a pattern young lady." She was one whose
spirit was sure to rise under pressure, and who was always most cheerful
when trouble called forth her energies on behalf of others. Liberal with
her own property, making light of privation, full of clear and practical
resource in emergency, she won her husband's admiration in the midst of
the difficulties into which he had plunged her. For a time he was not
ashamed of that admiration; and his avowals of it are happily on record.

They were married on the second of January. The wedding-day was
miserable. Byron awoke in one of his melancholy moods, and wandered
alone in the grounds till called to be married. His wayward mind was
full of all the associations that were least congenial with the day.
His thoughts were full of Mary Chaworth, and of old scenes in his life,
which he fancied he loved because he was now leaving them behind.
He declared that his poem of "The Dream" was a true picture of his
wedding-morning; and there are circumstances, not told in his "Life,"
which render this probable. After the ceremony and breakfast, the young
couple left Seaham for Sir Ralph's seat at Halnaby. Towards dusk of that
winter-day, the carriage drove up to the door, where the old butler
stood ready to receive his young lady and her bridegroom. The moment the
carriage-door was opened, the bridegroom jumped out and walked away.
When his bride alighted, the old servant was aghast. She came up
the steps with the listless gait of despair. Her face and movements
expressed such utter horror and desolation, that the old butler longed
to offer his arm to the lonely young creature, as an assurance of
sympathy and protection. Various stories got abroad as to the cause of
this horror, one probably as false as another; and, for his own part,
Byron met them by a false story of Miss Milbanke's lady's-maid having
been stuck in, bodkin-wise, between them. As Lady Byron certainly soon
got over the shock, the probability is that she satisfied herself that
he had been suffering under one of the dark moods to which he was
subject, both constitutionally and as the poet of moods.

It is scarcely possible at our time of day to make sufficient allowance
for such a woman having entered upon such a marriage, in spite of the
notoriety of the risks. Byron was then the idol of much more than the
literary world. His poetry was known by heart by multitudes of men and
women who read very little else; and one meets, at this day, elderly
men, who live quite outside of the regions of literature, who believe
that there never could have been such a poet before, and would say, if
they dared, that there will never be such another again. He appeared at
the moment when society was restless and miserable, and discontented
with the Fates and the universe and all that it contained. The general
sensibility had not for long found any expression in poetry. Literature
seemed something quite apart from experience, and with which none but
a particular class had any concern. At such a time, when Europe
lay desolate under the ravage and incessant menace of the French
Empire,--when England had an insane King, a profligate Regent, an
atrocious Ministry, and a corrupt Parliament,--when the war drained the
kingdom of its youth, and every class of its resources,--when there was
chronic discontent in the manufacturing districts, and hunger among the
rural population, with a perpetual extension of pauperism, swallowing
up the working and even the middle classes,--when everybody was full of
anxiety, dread, or a reactionary recklessness,--there suddenly appeared
a new strain of poetry which seemed to express every man's mood. Every
man took up the song. Byron's musical woe resounded through the land.
People who had not known exactly what was the matter with them now found
that life was what Byron said it was, and that they were sick of it. I
can well remember the enthusiasm,--the better, perhaps, for never having
shared it. At first I was too young, and afterwards I found too much of
moods and too little of matter to create any lasting attachment to
his poetry. But the music of it rang in all ears, and the rush of its
popularity could not be resisted by any but downright churlish persons.
I remember how ladies, in morning calls, recited passages of Byron to
each other,--and how gentlemen, in water-parties, whispered his short
poems to their next neighbor. If a man was seen walking with his head
down and his lips moving, he was revolving Byron's last romance; and
children who began, to keep albums wrote, in double lines on the first
page, some stanza which caught them by its sound, if they were not up to
its sense. On some pane in every inn-window there was a scrap of Byron;
and in young ladies' portfolios there were portraits of the poet,
recognizable, through all bad drawing and distortion, by the cast of the
beautiful features and the Corsair style. Where a popularity like this
sprang up, there must be sufficient reason for it to cause it to involve
more or less all orders of minds; and the wisest and most experienced
men, and the most thoroughly trained scholars, fell into the general
admiration, and keenly enjoyed so melodious an expression of a general
state of feeling, without asking too pertinaciously for higher views and
deeper meanings. Old Quakers were troubled at detecting hidden copies
and secret studies of Byron among young men and maidens who were to be
preserved from all stimulants to the passions; and they were yet more
troubled, when, looking to see what the charm was which so wrought upon
the youth of their sect, they found themselves carried away by it,
beyond all power to forget what they had read. The idolatry of the poet,
which marked that time, was an inevitable consequence of the singular
aptness of his utterance. His dress, manners, and likings were adopted,
so far as they could be ascertained, by hundreds of thousands of youths
who were at once sated with life and ambitious of fame, or at least of a
reputation for fastidious discontent; young ladies declared that Byron
was everything that was great and good; and even our best literature of
criticism shows how respectful and admiring the hardest reviewers grew,
after the poet had become the pet and the idol of all England. At such a
time, how should "Bell" Milbanke resist the intoxication,--even before
the poet addressed himself particularly to her? A great reader in the
quietness of her home, where all her tastes were indulged,--a lover of
poetry, and so genial and sympathizing as to be always sure to be filled
with the spirit of her time,--how could she fail to idolize Byron as
others did? And what must have been her exaltation, when he told her
that the welfare of his whole life depended upon her! Between her
exaltation, her love, her sympathy, and her admiration, she might well
make allowance for his eccentricities first, and for worse afterwards.
Thus, probably, it was that she got over the shock of that
wedding-drive, and was again the bright, affectionate, trusting and
winning woman whom he had described before and was to describe again to
his skeptical friend Moore.

Before six weeks were over, he wrote to Moore (after some previous
hankerings) that he should go abroad soon, "and alone, too." He did not
go then. In April the death of Lord Wentworth occurred, causing Sir
Ralph and Lady Milbanke to take the name of Noel, according to Lord
Wentworth's will, and assuring the prospect of ultimate accession of
wealth. Meantime, the new expenses of his married life, entered upon
without any extrication from old debts, caused such embarrassment, that,
after many other humiliations had been undergone, he offered his
books for sale. As Lady Byron maintained a lifelong silence about the
sufferings of her married life, little is known of that miserable year
beyond what all the world saw: executions in the house; increasing gloom
and recklessness in the husband; a bright patience and resoluteness in
the wife; and an immense pity felt by the poet's adorers for his trials
by a persecuting Fate. During the summer and autumn, his mention of his
wife to his correspondents became less frequent and more formal. His
tone about his approaching "papaship" tells nothing. He was not likely
to show to such men any good or natural feelings on the occasion. In
December, his daughter, Augusta Ada, was born; and early in January, he
wrote to Moore so melancholy a "Heigho!" on occasion of his having been
married a year, as to incite that critical observer to write him an
inquiry about the state of his domestic spirits. The end was near, and
the world was about to see its idol and his wife tested in moral action
of a very stringent kind.

By means of the only publication ever made or authorized by Lady Byron
on the subject of her domestic life, her vindication of her parents,
contained in the Appendix of Moore's "Life" of the poet, we know, that,
during her confinement, Lord Byron's nearest relatives were alarmed by
tokens of eccentricity so marked, that they informed her, as soon as she
was recovered, that they believed him insane. His confidential servant
bore the same testimony; and she naturally believed it, when she resumed
her place in the household, and saw how he was going on. On the sixth of
January, the day after he wrote the "Heigho!" to Moore, he desired his
wife, in writing, to go to her parents on the first day that it was
possible for her to travel. Her physicians would not let her go earlier
than the fifteenth; and on that day she went. She never saw her husband
again.

She had, in agreement with his family, consulted Dr. Baillie on her
husband's behalf; and he, supposing the insanity to be real, advised,
before seeing Lord Byron, that she should obey his wish about absenting
herself, as an experiment,--and that, in the interval, she should
converse only on light and cheerful topics. She observed these
directions, and, in the spirit of them, wrote two letters, on the
journey, which bore no marks of the trouble which existed between them.
These letters were afterwards used, even circulated, to create a belief
that Lady Byron had been suddenly persuaded to desert her husband,
though he at least was well aware that the fact was not so. It soon
appeared that he was not insane. Such was the decision of physicians,
relatives, and presently of Lady Byron herself. While there was any
room for supposing disease to be the cause of his conduct, she and
her parents were anxious to use all tenderness with him, and devote
themselves to his welfare; but when it became necessary to consider him
sane, his wife declared that she could not return to him.

It is not necessary to dwell on the imputations Lord Byron spread abroad
at the time, and his biographer afterwards, against the parents of his
wife, and everybody belonging to them who could be supposed to have
the slightest influence over Lady Byron's views or feelings. Those
allegations were publicly shown by her to be false, nearly thirty years
ago. I refer to them now solely because they were the occasion of the
only public disclosure Lady Byron ever voluntarily made on any part of
the subject of her married life. It is needless to exhibit how different
in this respect was the conduct of her husband and his friends.

It became known by that statement, after some years, that, when Lady
Noel went to London, to see what could and ought to be done, she
obtained good legal opinions on the case, so far as she knew it. Those
opinions declared Lady Byron fully justified in refusing to rejoin her
husband. The parents, however, never knew the whole; and it was on yet
more substantial grounds that Lady Byron formed her resolution. The
facts were submitted, as the world has since known, as an A.B. case, to
Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly; and those able lawyers and good
men peremptorily decided, that the wife, whoever she might be, must
never see her husband again. When they learned whose case it was, they
not only gave their full sanction to her refusal to return, but
declared that they would never countenance in any way a change in that
resolution. Dr. Lushington's statement to this effect appears in the
Appendix to Moore's "Life," as a part of Lady Byron's vindication of her
parents.

It was very hard on her to be compelled to speak at all. For six years
she had kept silence utterly, bearing all imputations without reply. But
when it was brought to her notice that her parents were charged with the
gravest offences by her husband's biographer, after the death of both,
and when no other near relative was in existence, she had no choice. She
must exonerate them. The testimony was, as she said, "extorted" from
her. The respect which had been felt for her during the first years of
silence was not impaired by this disclosure; but it was by one which
occurred a few years later. A statement on her domestic affairs was
published, in her name, in a magazine of large circulation.[A] It
did not really explain anything, while it seemed to break through a
dignified reserve which had won a high degree of general esteem. It
was believed that feminine weakness had prevailed at last; and her
reputation suffered accordingly with many who had till then regarded her
with favor and even reverence.

[Footnote A: _New Monthly Magazine_, 1836.]

This was the climax of the hardship of her case. She had no concern
whatever with this act of publication. It was one of poor Campbell's
disastrous pranks. He could not conceive how he could have done such a
thing, and was desperately sorry; but there was little good in that. The
mischief was done which could never be thoroughly repaired. She once
more suffered in silence; for she was not weak enough to complain of
irremediable evils. Nine years afterwards she wrote to a friend, who had
been no less unjustifiably betrayed,--"I am grieved for you, as regards
the actual position; but it will come right. I was myself made to
_appear_ responsible for a publication by Campbell, most unfairly, some
years ago; so that, if I had not imagination enough to enter into your
case, experience would have taught me to do so."

Those who are old enough to remember the year 1816 will easily recall
the fluctuations of opinion which took place as to the merits of the
husband and the wife, whose separation was as interesting to ten
thousand households as any family event of their own. Then, and for a
few years after, was Lady Byron the world's talk,--innocently, most
reluctantly, and unavoidably.

At first, while her influence left its impression on his mind, Lord
Byron did her some sort of justice,--fitful and partial, but very
precious to her then, no doubt,--and almost as precious now to the
friends who understood her. It was not till he was convinced that she
would never return, not till he began to quail under the world's ill
opinion, and especially, not till he felt secure that he might rely on
his wife's fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, that he
changed his tone to one of aspersion and contempt, and his mode of
attack to that of charming, amusing, or inflaming the public with verses
against her and her friends. We have his own testimony to her domestic
merits in the interval between the parting and his lapse into a state of
malignant feeling. In March, 1816, within two months after her leaving
him, Byron wrote thus to Moore:--

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.