The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons. David Crane

It is clear from his own comments that he knew that he would never make a parliamentary orator, and yet it is hard to believe that success could any more have reconciled the creator of Childe Harold – still less the ‘Titan battling with religion and virtue’⁵⁰ that Nietzsche admired in Byron – to the limitations of English public life and a career in politics.

      If it seems inevitable that the young Nietzsche should be drawn to Byron – and in particular to the creator of the defiant Manfred – the quality that he most admired in him was the courage to follow his instincts that Lawrence also saw as the defining characteristic of the ‘aristocrat’. In his Hardy essay Lawrence wrote that ‘the final aim of every living thing … is the full achievement of itself’⁵¹, but as Byron’s affair with Lady Oxford guttered towards its untidy end, it was precisely that goal of self-realisation – the supreme ambition of the Romantic imagination – that he recognised with an ever increasing clarity he could never achieve in England.

      In an age that is as ready to recognise the tyranny of sex as ours is, it is possibly enough to point out that for a man of Byron’s sexual ambivalence a country that still sent homosexuals to the gallows was no place to be. From the publication of the spurious ‘Don Leon’ poems in the mid-nineteenth century, Byron has always been an icon and spokesman for homosexual freedom, and yet the vital thing in this context is not so much the question of his sexual identity per se – who now cares? – but the wider issues of creative fulfilment or frustration with which it was inevitably and intimately bound.

      For Byron, as for Lawrence, the test of ‘being’ was ‘doing’, and as the year dragged on he was conscious of how little he had achieved as a poet. For all his aristocratic disdain for the business of versifying he was keenly aware that he had ‘something within that “passeth show”’⁵², and yet for a man whose lameness, childhood and sexual ambiguities all supremely equipped him to challenge political, moral, or physical injustice in every form he found it, he had precious little to show. The adolescent anger of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which he had long since repudiated? The stagey and harmless posturing of Childe Harold? A clutch of cautiously disguised tributes to the dead Cambridge chorister, Edleston? ‘At five-and-twenty, when the better part of life is over’, he wrote in his journal,

      one should be something; – and what am I? nothing but five-and-twenty – and the odd months.⁵³

      But if, in these early months of 1813, Byron still lacked what Lawrence called the ‘courage to let go the security, and to be⁵⁴’, this sense of self-dissatisfaction and estrangement was gradually pushing him towards a crisis. As early as May he was writing to Lady Melbourne of the need to escape a world that was stifling him, and at the end of June he returned with increased irritation to the same theme. ‘I am doing all I can to be ready to go with your Russian’ [Prince Koslovsky, a visiting Russian diplomat], he told her,

      depend upon it I shall be either out of the country or nothing – very soon – all I like is now gone – & all I abhor (with some few exceptions ) remains – viz – the R[egent] – his government – & most of his subjects – what a fool I was to come back – I shall be wiser next time.⁵⁵

      It is a curious, if somehow irrelevant, thought that Byron might have gone abroad in the summer of 1813, either with the Oxfords to Sicily as was planned at one time, or farther east to the Levant. Byron himself had such a strong sense of his own destiny that even with the benefit of hindsight it is hard to see his life in any other shape than that which it finally took, and if this ignores those elements of chance and sloth that right up to his death might have disposed of him in a dozen different ways, one only has to picture him for a moment harmlessly cruising the Mediterranean to recognise the inherent implausibility of the vision.

      Because if Byron was to grow as a man or a poet, he did not need simply to escape England, but to smash with a complete and final violence everything that held him to it. In his relationship with Caroline Lamb during the previous year he had come dangerously close to doing this, and while he had pulled back from the edge then it was only a matter of time before he recognised that the conformist elements in his nature could never be squared with the vocation for opposition he claimed as the Byron birthright.

      ‘I have no choice’ – Byron put the words in Manfred’s mouth – and it is this sense of necessity that attracted both Lawrence and Nietzsche to the dramatic parabola of Byron’s life and career. There is of course a world of difference between the Lawrentian ‘aristocrat’ and the iibermensch that Nietzsche hailed in the figure of Manfred. Yet if Lawrence’s ultimate concern was with fulfilment in the deepest and most human sense of the word, he never shirked the fact that for an outsider of Byron’s stamp that inevitably meant war. ‘This is the tragedy’, Lawrence wrote,

      … that the convention of the community is a prison to his natural, individual desire, a desire that compels him, whether he feels justified or not, to break the bounds of the community, lands him outside the pale, there to stand alone, and say: ‘I was right, my desire was real and inevitable; if I was to be myself I must fulfil it, convention or no convention …’⁵⁶

      It is this sense of inevitability that gives the air of a ‘phoney war’ to the period of Byron’s affair with Lady Oxford. When at the end of June she left England with her husband he confessed that he felt more ‘Carolinish’⁵⁷ about it than he had expected, despite the fact that for all her attractions she could no more satisfy him than Caroline Lamb herself had done before her.

      Still less could one of the great regnantes of Whig society answer his need for a rupture with everything that held him to England. It did not, though, matter. By the time that Lady Oxford finally sailed, on 28 June, the one woman had re-appeared in his life who could fill both roles: a woman who by her birth and temperament was not only uniquely placed to define the full nature of Byronic rebellion but also to meet with a peculiar psychological and emotional fitness what Lawrence called ‘the deepest desire’ of life,

      a desire for consummation … a desire for completeness, that completeness of being which will give completeness of satisfaction and completeness of utterance.⁵⁸

      The woman in question was the Hon. Mrs Augusta Leigh, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of Byron’s father by his first, scandalous, marriage to Amelia Darcy, Baroness Conyers in her own right and the wife of the heir to the Duke of Leeds, the Marquess of Carmarthen.

      The son of that famous sailor and womaniser, ‘Foulweather Jack’, ‘Mad Jack’ Byron seemed ‘born for his own ruin, and that of the other sex.’⁵⁹ Six years before Augusta’s birth, the dazzling and wealthy Marchioness had met and fallen for him, picnicked with him one day and abandoned her husband for him the next, living defiantly with him in a ‘vortex of dissipation’⁶⁰ until a well-publicised divorce left her free to marry him and move to France.

      Whatever fondness his son might retain for his memory, ‘Mad Jack’ was as callous a rake as eighteenth-century gossip portrayed him, with all the Byron charm and none of its generosity. For five years he lived off his wife’s fortune in either Chantilly or Paris, but when shortly after Augusta’s birth he lost wife and income together, Jack Byron abandoned the child to the first in a long succession of guardians and relatives, and set off on the predatory hunt for another heiress that finally led to Bath and Catherine Gordon.

      For a few months, as a four-year-old, Augusta lived with her father and his pregnant new wife at Chantilly, but from the moment she was handed over to her grandmother, Lady Holderness,