LADY OXFORD--BYRON'S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER
Byron's separation from Lady Caroline Lamb, though suggested by Lady
Melbourne, appears to have been negotiated by Hobhouse at the instance of
Lady Bessborough. "Received a note from Lady Bessborough. Went to Byron,
who agrees to go out of town," is the entry in his Diary which reveals the
part he played. A further entry relating that Lady Caroline found him and
Lady Bessborough together, and charged them with looking like
conspirators, adds all the confirmation needed. Byron went out of town as
he had promised, stayed at Cheltenham, and presently wrote the letter in
which he told Lady Caroline that he had ceased to love her. He added
insult to injury, as Lady Caroline felt, by writing on notepaper bearing
the arms of the Countess of Oxford.
She and Lady Oxford knew each other rather well, and had been friends.
"Lady Oxford and Caroline William Lamb," we read in one of the letters of
Harriet Lady Granville, "have been engaged in a correspondence, the
subject whether learning Greek purifies or inflames the passions." The
right answer to the conundrum is, perhaps, that it depends upon the
learner--or else that it depends upon the teacher. Lady Oxford's
passions, at any rate, were, like Lady Caroline's, inflammable. She was
forty--the romantic age in the view of the philosophers; and she was
unhappily married. Byron spoke of her to Medwin as "sacrificed, almost
before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally
contemptible." A less prejudiced witness, Uvedale Price, wrote to Rogers,
at the time of her death: "There could not, in all respects, be a more
ill-matched pair than herself and Lord Oxford, or a stronger instance of
the cruel sports of Venus or, rather, of Hymen."
Byron was in love with her, or thought so--he was not quite clear which
when he poured his confidences on the subject into Medwin's ear. Lady
Caroline's suspicions, to that extent, were justified. The "autumnal
charms"--it is he who calls them so--fascinated him for about eight
months. "The autumn of a beauty like hers," he said, "is preferable to the
spring in others." He added that he "had great difficulty in breaking with
her," and "once was on the point of going abroad with her, and narrowly
escaped this folly." How he escaped it--or why he avoided it--he does not
say; but perhaps we may find a reason.
Of his intentions, at any rate, there is no room for doubt. We have no
need to depend on Medwin's evidence for the full proof is in Byron's own
letters. It is mixed up with a good deal of extraneous matter, but it is
there; and a series of very brief citations will present the romance,
such as it was, in outline:
To William Bankes on September 12, 1812: "The only persons I know are
the Rawdons and Oxfords, with some later acquaintances of less
brilliant descent. But I do not trouble them much."
To Hanson on October 22, 1812: "I am going to Lord Oxford's, Eywood,
Presteigne, Hereford."
Letters are dated from Presteigne on October 31, November 8, and November
16. A letter of November 22 begins, "On my return here (Cheltenham) from
Lord Oxford's." A January letter shows Byron once again at Lord Oxford's;
and then the references to the contemplated foreign tour--letters of which
there is no mistaking the significance--begin:
To Hanson on February, 27, 1813: "It is my determination, on account
of a malady to which I am subject, and for other weighty reasons, to
go abroad again almost immediately. To this you will object; but, as
my intention cannot be altered, I have only to request that you will
assist me as far as in your power to make the necessary arrangements."
To Hanson on March 1, 1813: "Your objections I anticipated and can
only repeat that I cannot act otherwise; so pray hasten some
arrangement--for with, or without, I must go."
To Hanson on March 6, 1813: "I must be ready in April at whatever
risk--at whatever loss."
To Charles Hanson on March 24, 1813: "Pray tell your father to get the
money on Rochdale, or I must sell it directly. I must be ready by the
last week in _May_, and am consequently pressed for time. I go first
to Cagliari in Sardinia, and then on to the Levant."
To Mrs. Leigh on March 26, 1813: "I am going abroad again in June, but
should wish to see you before my departure.... On Sunday, I set off
for a fortnight for Eywood, near Presteigne, in Herefordshire--with
the _Oxfords_. I see you put on a _demure_ look at the name, which is
very becoming and matronly in you; but you won't be sorry to hear that
I am quite out of a more serious scrape with another singular
personage, which threatened me last year."
To Hanson on April 15, 1813: "I shall only be able to see you a few
days in town, as I shall sail before the 20th of May."
To Hanson on April 17, 1813: "I wish, if possible, the arrangement
with Hoare to be made immediately, as I must set off forthwith."
To John Murray on April 21, 1813: "Send in my account to Bennet
Street, as I wish to settle it before sailing."
To Hanson on June 3, 1813; "I am as determined as I have been for the
last six months.... Everything is ordered and ready now. Do not trifle
with me, for I am in very solid serious earnest.... I have made my
choice, and go I will."
To Hodgson on June 8, 1813: "I shall manage to see you somewhere
before I sail, which will be next month."
To John Murray on June 12, 1813: "Recollect that my lacquey returns in
the Evening, and that I set out for Portsmouth to-morrow."
To William Gifford on June 18, 1813: "As I do not sail quite so soon
as Murray may have led you to expect (not till July), I trust I may
have some chance of taking you by the hand before my departure."
To Mrs. Leigh, in the same month: "If you knew _whom_ I had put off
besides my journey, you would think me grown strangely fraternal."
To Moore on July 8, 1813: "The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight,
and my sister is in town, which is a great comfort."
That is the skeleton of the romance. Such clothes as it is felt to need
the imagination must provide. Byron's position seems to have been
perilously near that of a "tame cat," though he might have preferred to
call himself, then, as on a later occasion, a _cavaliere servente_. His
excuse is that he was only twenty-five, and that a fascinating woman of
forty can be very fascinating indeed, and very clever at getting her own
way. Her attempt to annex Byron, though she was fifteen years his senior,
may be viewed as her gambler's throw for happiness. She threw and
lost--but she lost quietly. She resembled Lady Caroline in being romantic,
but she differed from her in not being "obstreperous." There was no
scandal for society to take note of, and the welkin never rang with her
complaints, though she did walk about Rome displaying Byron's portrait at
her girdle.
Nor did it ring with Byron's, who, indeed, had nothing to complain of. The
few allusions to the affair which Hobhouse contributes throw very little
light upon it. He notes, in one place, that Lady Oxford was "most uncommon
in her talk and licentious." He adds, on another page, the memorandum:
"Got a picture of Lady Oxford from Mrs. Mee. Lord B.'s money for it." That
is all; and there are no hints to be derived from "occasional" verses.
However much Lady Oxford may have pleased Byron, she did not inspire him.
The period of his intimacy with her was, from the literary point of view,
a singularly barren period; and the allusions cited from the letters--they
are all the allusions that can be cited--are chiefly instructive because
of the difference between their tone and the tone of certain other letters
written very soon afterwards.
There is no suggestion in them of deep sentiment. What they do suggest
is--first, a young man desperately determined to go through with a
desperate adventure, and very much afraid of being warned of the
consequences of his folly--then a young man who, having a haunting doubt
of his own sincerity, shouts to keep up his courage--finally a young man
who is grateful to the circumstances, whatever they may have been, which
have deflected him from a rash course, and saved him from himself. One
turns a few pages, and finds Byron writing in a very different strain:
"I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at
this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any
of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is
unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women."
"I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour
to-morrow--that is, I would a month ago, but at present...."
"Some day or other, when we are _veterans_, I may tell you a tale of
present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I
do not tell you now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart;
but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about
me, though in no very good repair, and also that it has a habit of
attaching itself to _one_, whether I will or no."
These passages are from letters to Moore. A few days before writing the
last of them Byron had written to Miss Milbanke, whom he was shortly to
marry:
"I am at present a little feverish--I mean mentally--and, as usual, on
the brink of something or other, which will probably crush me at last,
and cut our correspondence short, with everything else."
No names are mentioned here; but certain inferences not only can, but
inevitably must, be drawn. At some time towards the end of the summer of
1813, there was a crisis of Byron's life. It did not come to a head until
after Lady Oxford's departure, and Lady Oxford had nothing whatever to do
with it. The latter point not only follows from the sudden disappearance
of Lady Oxford from Byron's sphere of interest, but is specifically made
in a letter (dated November 8, 1813) from Byron to his sister:
"MY DEAREST AUGUSTA,
"I have only time to say that my long silence has been occasioned by a
thousand things (with which _you_ are not concerned). It is not Lady
Caroline, nor Lady Oxford; _but perhaps you may guess_, and if you do,
do not tell. You do not know what mischief your being with me might
have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow: in the meantime
don't be alarmed. I am in _no immediate_ peril."
Those are the most significant of the letters, though there are others.
Even if they stood alone, one would feel sure that there was a story
behind them; but they do not stand alone. We have the poems to set beside
them, and we have also the journal which Byron kept from November 14, 1813
till April 19, 1814. Letters, poems, and journal, read in conjunction,
furnish a clue which it is impossible to mistrust. The distinction of
having first so read them with sufficient care to find the clue belongs to
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe.
Possibly Mr. Edgcumbe has proved just a little too much--that question
will have to be faced when we come to it; but our immediate task must be
to track the story along the lines which he has indicated, and see how all
the mysteries connected with Byron can be solved, and all the emotional
inconsistencies of his life unified, by the recollection that, of all the
many passions of his life, there was only one which really mattered to
him.
Many women were welcome to love him if they liked--he was a man very ready
to let himself be loved; but only one woman had the power to make him
suffer--and that woman was Mary Chaworth. The motto "Cherchez la femme"
may, in short, in his case, be particularised. Whenever his conduct and
his utterances seem, on the face of it, inexplicable, we have to look for
Mary Chaworth and see her re-asserting a power which has been allowed to
lapse; and we will turn to look for her now.