LADY CAROLINE LAMB
The record of Byron's social triumphs may be outlined in a few sentences.
Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he
moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be
regarded as distinct, though there were points at which they touched each
other. Among men of letters his chief friends were Samuel Rogers, the
banker poet, then a man verging on fifty, whose superlative dinner we have
seen him refusing to eat, and Thomas Moore, who had made his acquaintance
by demanding satisfaction for an alleged affront in "English Bards," which
Byron had explained away. At the same time he "got on very well," as he
tells us, with Beau Brummell and the other dandies, being one of the three
men of letters who were admitted to Watiers, and was lionised in the
society which we should nowadays describe as "smart."
It has been written that the roadway opposite to his apartments was
blocked by liveried footmen conveying perfumed notes. That, we may take
it, is a picturesque exaggeration; but, no doubt, he received more
invitations than the laws of time and space allowed him to accept--most
of them, though by no means all of them, to the great Whig houses. Lady
Westmorland, Lady Jersey, Lady Holland, and Lady Melbourne were the most
fashionable of the hostesses who competed for the privilege of his
company; and Lady Melbourne had a daughter-in-law--Lady Caroline Lamb. She
also had a niece--Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke; but it is of Lady Caroline
Lamb that we must speak first.
Lady Caroline was three years older than Byron. She was the daughter of
the third Earl of Bessborough, and the wife of William Lamb, who, as Lord
Melbourne, afterwards became Prime Minister of England. It was a matter of
opinion whether she was beautiful; it was also a matter of opinion whether
she was sane--doctors consulted on that branch of the subject had returned
doubtful, non-committal answers. She was not exactly mad, they said, but
she was of a temperament allied to madness. She must not be pressed to
study, but must be allowed to run wild and do as she liked.
She had run wild, for years, reading the works of Burns, which are not
written for the young, and galloping about parks on bare-backed steeds,
imagining the world about her instead of realising it, and, of course,
imagining it wrong. It is on record that she believed that
bread-and-butter was a natural product and that horses were fed on beef;
also that she divided the community into two classes--dukes and
beggars--and supposed that the former would always, by some law of
nature, remain wealthy, whatever they did with their money. Her charm--and
she could be very charming when she liked--was that of a high-spirited,
irresponsible, wilful, wayward child. She was, in short, the kind of girl
whom those who loved her best would describe, in the vernacular, as "a
handful."
[Illustration: _Lady Caroline Lamb._]
"Of all the Devonshire House girls," William Lamb had said, "that is the
one for me." That was when she was thirteen; and six years later he was
still of the same opinion. He was confirmed in it when she refused his
offer of marriage, proposing instead to run away with him in boy's clothes
and act as his secretary. He accepted neither his dismissal nor her
alternative suggestion, but persevered in his suit until he was accepted.
The next thing that happened was that Lady Caroline broke into railing
accusations against the bishop who performed the marriage rites, tore her
wedding dress to tatters, and had to be carried to her carriage in a
fainting fit. It was not a very auspicious commencement of married life,
but one which prepares us for the general reflections on marriage found in
her husband's common-place book, recently edited by Mr. Lloyd Sanders:
"The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however
congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the
other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that
no man can be free or independent...."
"... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the
offensive in society...."
"Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control
than any public affairs on which he may be engaged...."
William Lamb's experience of married life was to be, as it were, an object
lesson on those texts. At one moment Lady Caroline was to overwhelm him
with doting affection; at the next to make him ridiculous. Sometimes the
two moods followed each other as quickly as the thunder follows the
lightning, as in the case of a scene of which the Kembles were involuntary
witnesses when staying in the same hotel with the Lambs in Paris.
Husband and wife had quarrelled in their presence, and had then withdrawn
to their apartment which faced the rooms which the Kembles occupied. The
lamps were lighted, and the blinds were not drawn, so that the Kembles
looked across the courtyard and saw what happened. William Lamb was in his
arm-chair. Lady Caroline first sat on his knee, and then slid to his feet,
looking up into his face with great humility. This for a few moments. Then
something that William Lamb said once more disturbed Lady Caroline's
equanimity. In an instant she was on her feet, running round the room,
pursued by her husband, sweeping mirrors, candlesticks, and crockery on to
the floor, in a veritable whirlwind of passion; whereupon William Lamb
drew the blind and the Kembles saw no more.
That story may serve as a symbolic epitome of William Lamb's married life.
We shall come to many stories of the same kind as we proceed. Lady
Caroline was a creature of impulse, and there was nearly always a man in
the case. She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her
was in love with her--both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom
she boasted--and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested.
Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked to
_afficher_ herself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to
declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent
emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set
forth on the hoardings.
Whether she deliberately sought notoriety, or merely did what she chose to
do without fear of it, remains, to this hour, an open question. All that
is certain is that she did, in fact, make herself very notorious indeed,
and that there was more scandal than subtlety in her attempts to
monopolise Byron, to whose heart she laid siege, with all the audacity of
a stage adventuress, in the presence of a large, amused, and interested
audience.
It was Lady Westmorland who introduced them. She did not introduce Byron
to Lady Caroline, but Lady Caroline to Byron. Already, only a few days
after the appearance of "Childe Harold," he was on his pedestal, and was
not expected to descend from it, even to show deference to ladies. "He
has a club-foot and bites his nails," Rogers had told her. "If he is as
ugly as Æsop I must know him," she had answered. But now that she was
brought to him, she shrank from him, whether because she was afraid, or
because she wished to provoke and pique him. "I looked earnestly at him,"
she told Lady Morgan, "and turned on my heel"; and she went home and wrote
in her diary the impression that Byron was "mad, bad, and dangerous to
know."
That was the first scene in the comedy. The second took place at Holland
House, and the third at Melbourne House. Lady Caroline's recollections of
them were recorded in Lady Morgan's reminiscences:
"I was sitting with Lord and Lady Holland when he was announced. Lady
Holland said, 'I must present Lord Byron to you.' Lord Byron said,
'That offer was made to you before; may I ask why you rejected it?' He
begged permission to come and see me. He did so the next day. Rogers
and Moore were standing by me: I had just come in from riding. I was
filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced, I flew out of the
room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said, 'Lord Byron, you
are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here in all her dirt
with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself.'
Lord Byron wished to come and see me at eight o'clock, when I was
alone. I said he might."
He did; and "from that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at
Melbourne House." The rest, in Lady Caroline's opinion--at all events in
one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter--was all William Lamb's
fault.
"He cared nothing for my morals," she remarks. "I might flirt and go
about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord
Byron and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to
everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness
and suffering he deserts me."
That protest, however, is wholly unjust, and only partly true. A married
woman who has no sooner met a man than she arranges to dine _tête-à-tête_
with him is hardly entitled to ascribe her flirtation to her husband's
contributory negligence. Lady Caroline not only did that, but also, in her
wilful way, plunged at once into a compromising correspondence. Her very
first letter to Byron, according to Rogers, "assured him that, if he was
in any want of money, all her jewels were at his disposal." In another
letter of approximately the same date we find her writing: "The rose Lord
Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save
it; probably from regret at its fallen fortunes."
Evidently Lady Caroline had thrown herself at Byron's head before William
Lamb guessed what was happening. Afterwards, no doubt, he knew what the
rest of the world knew. But he also knew--what the rest of the world did
not know, and what Lady Caroline herself only imperfectly realised--how
froward and changeable were his wife's moods, how great was the risk of
hysterical explosions if those moods were crossed, what a "handful" she
was, in short, and how very difficult it was to handle her, and so he left
things alone.
Leaving things alone, indeed, was William Lamb's regular formula for the
solution of the problems alike of public and of private life. He believed
that problems left alone tended to solve themselves, just as letters left
unanswered tend to answer themselves. On the whole the principle had
worked, if not ideally, yet well enough for the practical purposes of
domestic life. Things had happened before, and, being left alone, had
ceased to happen. In his desk lay a letter relating to some previous
ebullition the particulars of which are wrapped in mystery. "I think
lately, my dearest William," Lady Caroline had written, three years
before, "we have been very troublesome to each other." It was true, and it
had not mattered. The fire, if there had been a fire, had burnt itself
out. The hysterics--it is not to be doubted that there were hysterics--had
subsided with the passing of the occasion which had called them forth. The
clouds had been dispersed, and the sun had shone again. Why should not
this chapter in his domestic history repeat itself? He was very fond of
his wife; he hated rows; he wished to take no risks. The best way of
avoiding risks was to humour her.
So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her
wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental
balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at
intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady
Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on
one side.
"You need not fear me," was his reply. "I do not pursue pleasure like
other men; I labour under an incurable disease and a blighted heart.
Believe me she is safe with me."
No one knows whether she was, in the narrow sense of the word, "safe" with
him or not. Rogers thought that she was, but admitted that he did not
really know. In any case she was not safe from herself, or from the tongue
of scandal. She was really in love--her devotion was no passing fancy--and
she did not care who knew it. Indeed she behaved as if she thought that
the more people who knew it, the better. The woman who, at a ball, called
upon Byron's friend Harness--that very serious young Cantab just about to
take orders--to bear witness that she was wearing no fewer than six pairs
of stockings, was not likely to hide the light of a grand passion under a
bushel. She did not so hide it, but proceeded, as has been said, to
_afficher_ herself as if she were inviting the attention of the world to
a great spectacular entertainment. She had not known Byron a couple of
months before people were beginning to talk.
"Your little friend Caro William," wrote the Duchess of Devonshire on
May 4, 1812, "as usual is doing all sorts of imprudent things with
him.... The ladies, I hear spoil him, and the gentlemen are jealous of
him. He is going back to Naxos, and then the husbands may sleep in
peace. I should not be surprised if Caro William were to go with him,
she is so wild and imprudent."
Rogers, in his "Table Talk," is still more picturesque. He tells us how,
when Byron and Lady Caroline quarrelled, she used to plant herself in his
(Rogers') garden, waiting to catch him on his return home and beg him to
effect a reconciliation; and he continues:
"When she met Byron at a party, she would always, if possible, return
home from it in _his_ carriage, and accompanied by _him_: I recollect
particularly their returning to town together from Holland House. But
such was the insanity of her passion for Byron that sometimes, when
not invited to a party where he was to be, she would wait for him in
the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at
Devonshire House, to which Lady Caroline had not been invited, I saw
her--yes, saw her--talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into
the carriage which he had just entered."
In the midst of, and in consequence of, these spectacles, Lady Melbourne
decided to take Lady Caroline to Ireland. She cherished, it seems, the
double design of getting her daughter-in-law out of Byron's way and
marrying Byron to her niece. Of the success of the latter scheme there
will be a good deal to be said in subsequent chapters. Much was to happen,
however, both to Byron and to Lady Caroline before it succeeded. They
continued to correspond during Lady Caroline's absence; and the
correspondence soon reached an acute phase which resulted in a series of
violent scenes.