INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA LEIGH--THE
ALLEGATION THAT SHE "CONFESSED"--THE PROOF THAT SHE DID NOTHING OF THE
KIND
First as to the inherent probabilities:
The accusation, as elaborated by Lord Lovelace, is, it must be observed,
that Byron had yielded to an unnatural passion for his sister at a period
anterior to his marriage--the period covered by the Journal from which we
have quoted, and by those mysteriously morbid and gloomy poems of which
"The Bride of Abydos" and "Lara" are the most remarkable. This passion,
according to Lord Lovelace, was the cause of the spiritual "crisis"
through which poems and Journal alike prove him to have passed. When Byron
writes that "The Bride" was "written to drive my thoughts from the
recollection of * * *," Lord Lovelace interprets him to mean that it was
written to drive his thoughts from the recollection of Mrs. Leigh. Hers,
he invites us to believe, was the "dear sacred name" which was to "rest
ever unrevealed."
That theory is not only nonsense, but arrant nonsense--obviously so to
readers who are familiar with Byron's letters, and demonstrably so to
those who are not. All that can be said in favour of the view is that
some of the passages in some of the poems are so obscure that they can be
tortured into accord with the most preposterous hypothesis. On the other
hand, while there is no direct evidence on the subject at all, there is
conclusive circumstantial evidence which effectually disposes of Lord
Lovelace's calumnious assertion--evidence, happily, so simple that one
almost can sum it up in a sentence.
Throughout the whole of the "crisis" in question Byron was in
correspondence with Mrs. Leigh; and a great deal of the correspondence has
been published. The letters are letters in which Byron takes his sister
into his confidence. We find him writing to her, first about his "affairs"
with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and then about his desolating
passion for another lady whom we have seen reason to identify with Mary
Chaworth. Nor does it matter, for the purposes of the present argument,
whether that identification is correct or not. The solid fact, in any
case, remains that, at the very time when Lord Lovelace represents Byron
as engaged in an intrigue with Augusta Leigh, he was, in fact, writing to
her to apologise for his "long silence," and attributing that silence to
trouble in connection with another lady: "It is not Lady Caroline, nor
Lady Oxford; _but perhaps you may guess_, and, if you do, do not tell."
There are other letters to the same effect, but that letter should
suffice. No sane man will believe Byron to have been devoured by a guilty
passion for the woman to whom he confided secrets of that sort; and, if
there were any disposition to entertain the belief were still harboured,
it could hardly fail to be expelled by an examination of the letters which
passed between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and between Mrs. Leigh and
Francis Hodgson.
Mrs. Leigh had been with Lady Byron during her confinement. There had been
no quarrel between them, and no suspicion or suggestion of a quarrel. When
Lady Byron left Piccadilly Terrace for Kirkby Mallory, Mrs. Leigh
continued, with her knowledge, and without any hint of an objection, to
stay in her brother's house. Even when Lady Byron communicated her
decision not to return to her husband, she expressed neither surprise at
Mrs. Leigh's remaining there, nor desire for her departure. On the
contrary, at the very time when she was insisting upon separation, and
hinting at charges too awful to be preferred unless the particulars were
dragged from her, she was corresponding with Mrs. Leigh, not merely on
terms of ordinary politeness, but on terms of confidential intimacy and
cordial affection--addressing her as "My dearest A.," "My dearest Sis,"
"My dearest Gus," &c., &c.
A long series of these letters is printed in Mr. Murray's latest edition
of Byron's Works. Readers who desire full particulars must be referred to
them. A few sentences only need be given here, as an indication of their
tone:
"If all the world had told me you were doing me an injury, I _ought
not_ to have believed it. My chief feeling, therefore, in relation to
you and myself must be that I _have_ wronged you, and that you have
never wronged me!"
"I know you feel for me as I do for you--and perhaps I am better
understood than I think. You have been ever since I knew you my best
comforter, and will so remain, unless you grow tired of the office,
which may well be."
"The present sufferings of all _may_ yet be repaid in blessings. Don't
despair absolutely, dearest; and leave me but enough of your interest
to afford you any consolation by partaking that sorrow which I am most
unhappy to cause you thus unintentionally.... Heaven knows you have
considered me more than one in a thousand would have done."
"I am anxious to acquit you of all misrepresentation, and myself of
having supposed that you had misrepresented.... I cannot give you pain
without feeling yet more myself."
"My dearest A., it is my great comfort that you are in Piccadilly."
Some of these letters were written at a time when Lady Byron believed her
husband to be mad. All of them were written at a time when she was
accusing him of improper relations with her correspondent--as is
established beyond dispute by her signed statement, published in
"Astarte." The excerpt printed last was written at the time when she
professed to entertain both beliefs. It amounts, when analysed, to an
expression of gratification that her sister-in-law, to whom she claims to
be deeply attached, is in a position to continue incestuous and adulterous
intercourse with a raving maniac. It is incredible, of course, that she
can either have felt, or intended to express, any such gratification at
any such state of things. The letter is explicable on one hypothesis, and
one only: that Lady Byron herself did not really believe the story which
she had told to her advisers.
We have already seen--from the wording of Lady Byron's statement and from
her correspondence with Colonel Doyle--that she had no proofs of her
story. We have also seen that, when Byron's friends tried to pin her to
the story, she disavowed it. The conclusion that she did not even believe
it at the time when she told it comes as a fitting climax; and it needs
but little conjecture or imagination to divine her motives and give
coherence to the narrative of her proceedings.
She had come to hate her husband, and had resolved to separate from him at
all costs. Such hatreds are sometimes conceived by women without adequate
cause, just before and just after pregnancy. One suspects that
pathological explanation, though one does not know enough of the facts to
insist upon it. The hatred, at any rate, was there, impelling Lady Byron
to seek a separation, and she proceeded to take advice. Probably she was
advised that her case was too weak to be taken into Court with
confidence; and she certainly was advised that reconciliation was
preferable to separation. The only way of securing the firm support of her
own friends was to lay fresh facts before them.
That is the stage of the proceedings at which we are told that fresh facts
came to her knowledge. But the alleged facts were only treated as facts
for the purposes of argument. They were scandals--the scandals implicating
Mrs. Leigh, and launched, as is believed, by Lady Caroline Lamb, who
subsequently disavowed them as explicitly as Lady Byron herself. In order
to make sure of her separation Lady Byron adopted those scandals and laid
them before Lushington. Lushington may or may not have believed them. So
long, however, as he remained in charge of the case he was bound to behave
as if he did; and the nature of the charges was such that, even if he only
believed them in the sense in which a barrister is required to believe the
contents of his brief, he was obviously bound to take the line that they
precluded all idea of a reconciliation.
He did take that line; and Lady Byron got her separation. She was so eager
to get it that she first made abominable charges against her husband in
order to win the sympathy of her own friends, and then withdrew them in
order to disarm Byron's friends. All this without informing Mrs. Leigh
that her name was being mixed up in the matter, and without withdrawing
from Mrs. Leigh's society. Ultimately, no doubt, she did come to believe
the story which she had first circulated and then disavowed. It is hardly
to be questioned that she believed it at the time when she told it to Mrs.
Beecher Stowe. But she clearly did not believe it at the time when she
made use of it; and one can only attribute her final belief in it to a
kind of auto-suggestion, induced by dwelling on her grievances, and akin
to the process by which George IV. persuaded himself that he had taken
part in the Battle of Waterloo.
That is the most plausible supposition as to the motives inspiring Lady
Byron's conduct; and there is nothing except the motives themselves which
stands in need of explanation. From Lushington's action no inference
whatever is to be drawn, for it was the only action which the rules of
professional etiquette left open to him; and the Byron question is not: On
what evidence did Lady Byron act as she did? It is merely: Why did Lady
Byron act as she did without any evidence at all? It is so small a
question that, having offered a tentative solution, we may fairly leave it
and glance at Mrs. Leigh's correspondence with Hodgson.
Hodgson, as has already been mentioned was brought in by Mrs. Leigh as a
peacemaker. The letters which she wrote to him before, during, and after
the quarrel appear in the Life of Hodgson by his son, published in 1878.
They are too long to be given at length; but their bearing on the issue,
which no one who takes the trouble to read them will dispute, must be
briefly stated.
In the first place they, most obviously, are not the letters of a guilty
woman, or of a woman who feels herself in any way personally implicated in
the dispute which she seeks to compose. Every line in them demonstrates,
not merely that the writer is conscious of rectitude, but also that the
writer is ignorant that she herself is, or can be, the object of sinister
suspicion. They are just the flurried letters of a simple body who feels
that circumstances have laid upon her shoulders a heavier load of
responsibility than they can bear, but would rather be helped to bear the
burden than run away from it; and it is a fair summary of them to say that
they exonerate Byron by exonerating the alleged accomplice in his crime.
In the second place the letters show Mrs. Leigh, ignorant, indeed, of the
specific enormities with which Byron is charged, but well aware of certain
circumstances which had made Byron's marriage a dubious experiment. In the
earlier letters, indeed those circumstances are only hinted at obscurely,
but in the later letters the meaning of the hints is made quite clear. For
instance:
"I assure you I don't conclude hastily on this subject, and will own
to you, what I would not scarcely to any other person that I HAD _many
fears_ and much anxiety founded upon many causes and circumstances of
which I cannot _write_. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to
be realised."
That was written during the honeymoon. In letters written shortly after
the honeymoon there are similar vague expressions of anxiety. It is not
until we come to the letters written after the separation that we begin to
get sight of the particulars; but then we light upon this significant
passage:
"I am afraid to open my lips, though all I say to _you_ I know is
secure from misinterpretation. On the opinions expressed by Mr. M. I
am _not surprised_. I have seen letters written _to him_ which could
not but give rise to such, or confirm them. If I may give you _mine_,
it is that _in his own mind_ there _were_ and _are_ recollections,
fatal to his peace, and which would have prevented his being happy
with any woman whose excellence equalled or approached that of Lady
B., from the consciousness of being unworthy of it. Nothing could or
can remedy this fatal cause but the consolations to be derived from
religion, of which, alas! dear Mr. H., our beloved B. is, I fear,
destitute."
The idea that the fatal recollections here deplored are recollections of
guilty acts in which the writer of the letter was a partner would be too
preposterous to be treated with respect even if we did not know what the
nature of those recollections was; but, as a matter of fact, a later
passage in the same letter supplies the information:
"I am glad you were rather agreeably surprised in the poems.... Of
course _you_ know to whom the 'Dream' alludes, Mrs. C----."
And there, of course, the truth is out. Mrs. C---- is, and can be no one
else than, Mary Chaworth. The "causes too simple to be found out" had to
do with Byron's imperishable passion for the lady whom we have seen his
wife calling a "cat." Byron could not live happily with Lady Byron because
he could not forget Mary Chaworth--and Lady Byron knew it. Consequently
she set her heart upon obtaining a separation, and, in order to make sure
of that separation, "put up" the story, suggested by Lady Caroline Lamb's
poisonous tongue. The whole business is as simple as all that; and the
subject might properly be dropped at that point if it were not for Lord
Lovelace's assertion that papers in his hands demonstrated that Mrs. Leigh
had "confessed."
But the so-called confession of Augusta Leigh is like the so-called
confession of Captain Dreyfus. We are told that it exists; and when our
curiosity has been thus aroused we are told that it is not worth while to
produce it. Augusta, says Lord Lovelace, "admitted everything in her
letters of June, July, and August, 1816"; and then he goes on to say: "It
is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and
made clear by the correspondence of 1819 in another chapter." But when we
turn to the correspondence of 1819, we find that no confession is
contained in them. The most that one can say is that, the language of the
letters being sometimes enigmatic, and the subjects to which they relate
being uncertain, one or two passages in them might conceivably be read as
referring to a confession, if one knew that a confession had been made.
Even on that hypothesis, however, they might just as easily be read as
referring to something else; and the real clue to their meaning may,
almost certainly, be found in a letter which Lord Lovelace prints in the
chapter entitled "Some Correspondence of Augusta Byron."
The letter[9] in question is a love letter. It begins "My dearest Love"
and ends "Ever Dearest." Lord Lovelace prints it as addressed by Lord
Byron to Mrs. Leigh in May 1819. It is a letter, however, in which both
the signature and the address are erased; but though there is no great
reason for doubting that Byron was the writer, there is no reason whatever
for believing that Mrs. Leigh was the recipient. Indeed, one has only to
place it side by side with the letters which we actually know Byron to
have written to Mrs. Leigh a little before May 1819, and a little
afterwards, in order to be positive that she was not; and one has only to
remember that Byron still sometimes wrote to Mary Chaworth, and that his
correspondence passed through his sister's hands, in order to satisfy
oneself whose letter it was that Lord Lovelace found among Lord Byron's
papers. So that our conclusion must be:
1. That Lord Lovelace's most substantial piece of evidence against
Mrs. Leigh is a letter[9] which though it passed through her hands,
was really written to Mary Chaworth.
2. That the alleged confession does not exist--for if it did exist,
Lord Lovelace would have printed it.
And we may go further, and say, with confidence, not only that the alleged
confession does not exist at the present time, but that it never did
exist; for even that conclusion follows irresistibly from the known
circumstances of the final meeting between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, at
Reigate, in the presence of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, in 1851.
They had remained friends until 1830, and had then quarrelled, not about
Byron, but about the appointment of a new trustee under a settlement.
After that, they had ceased to see each other; and the Reigate interview,
of which Robertson drew up a memorandum, was avowedly and admittedly
arranged because Lady Byron desired, and expected, to receive a confession
before a witness of unimpeachable integrity. Nothing is more obvious than
that Lady Byron would have had no need to solicit a verbal confession in
1851 if she had succeeded in extracting a written confession in 1816; and
it is common ground that, in 1851, Mrs. Leigh not only confessed nothing,
but denied that she had anything to confess.
The whole story of the confession, therefore, vanishes like smoke; and one
is free, at last, to quit this painful part of the subject. It was
necessary to dwell on it carefully and at length on account of the
sophistical cobwebs spun round it by Lord Lovelace's awkward hands and
because, while justice injoined the vindication of Lord Byron, his
biographer could not let any prudish scruples or false delicacy withhold
him from the task of definitely clearing the memory of Byron's sister from
the shameful aspersions cast upon it, by Byron's grandson. But one,
nevertheless, gets away from it with relief, and returns with a sense of
recovered freedom to the facts of Byron's career at the time when the
storm broke about his head and drove him from the country.