Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

and the campaign effectively brought to a conclusion. By that time, however, Trelawny’s role in the victory was over. Sometime before the final assault, his gun party had been surprised on the approach to Cornelis, and in the skirmish which followed he received a sabre slash across the face and a musket ball which remained in his leg for over thirty years until it was removed without anaesthetic by an Italian surgeon under the impressed gaze of Robert Browning.

      Java was Trelawny’s first experience of warfare on any major scale with the navy, and his last. Taken back to the Akbar, he soon went down with the cholera that swept through the invasion force, killing more than two hundred sailors. He was lucky to survive, but it marked the end of his career. By the August of 1812 he was back in England, and three years later finally discharged from the navy without a commission, a midshipman sans prospects, education or even the halfpay of a lieutenant, one more ‘useless Dick Musgrove’ left high and dry by the coming of peace.

      When Trelawny came to write about his career in the navy, he was again to invest his adolescent anger with all the political and revolutionary radicalism that coloured his schoolday memories. At the age of twenty-three, however, there can have seemed nothing glamorous to him in failure. The knowledge we have of him in these years after he returned from the east is admittedly of a fragmentary and rather special kind, yet the few clues that do survive suggest a far more conventional and vulnerable personality than the man who finally emerged from obscurity to stake his claim as one of the century’s most defiant rebels.

      The first of these is no more than a footnote, but it is nevertheless interesting that, in these first years of peace, he seems to have gone out of his way to assert his naval credentials. In the confident pomp of his later Adventures he might denounce the service as an instrument of arbitrary despotism, and yet, far from rejecting it at the time, he masqueraded in civilian life under the name of ‘Lieutenant’ Trelawny, a rank to which he had no claim and one the mature Trelawny would have despised.

      For a young man of his temperament and background, coming to terms with the blank mediocrity of his prospects, this discreet and venial piece of self-promotion is neither very unusual nor important, but the same years throw up another clue to his personality which is best recorded in his own words.

      The fatal noose was cast around my neck, my proud crest humbled to the dust, the bloody bit thrust into my mouth, my shaggy mane trimmed, my hitherto untrammeled back bent with a weight I could neither endure nor shake off, my light and springy action changed into a painful amble – in short, I was married.¹²

      It is as much a truism of biography as it is of fiction that domestic happiness leaves little trace of its presence, and so it is perhaps not surprising that we know what we do of Trelawny’s marriage only because and when it failed. His bride, Caroline Addison, was the eighteen-year-old daughter of an East India merchant, a girl of a family ‘fully the equal of his own’¹³ as he defensively told his uncle John Hawkins, attractive, ‘accomplished’ and, from the slim evidence of her surviving letters, in love with the tall, handsome midshipman that the ungainly lout of a boy had become.

      In spite of the conventional claims he made for his wife’s pedigree, the marriage marked another step in Trelawny’s alienation from his parents. ‘My father was never partial to me,’ he later wrote to John Hawkins, touchingly but unsuccessfully eager to preserve some contact with at least part of his family,

      & from the moment of my mariage discarded for ever me, and my hopes, nor has he since either pardoned or even allowed my name to be mentioned in his presence.¹⁴

      The Addison family were clearly as opposed to the union as Trelawny’s because with the single exception of the bride’s uncle there was nobody from either side at the wedding that followed their brief courtship. They were married on 17 May 1813 in St Mary’s Paddington and, after an initial period living in Denham and London, moved first to lodgings in College Street, Bristol, in January 1816, and then in the July of the same year to board with a Captain White and his family at Vue Cottage near Bath.

      It was from this house on 31 December 1816, just three and a half years and two daughters after their marriage, that Caroline Trelawny eloped to Southampton with a Thomas Coleman, a Captain in the 98th of Foot. In the immediate shock of betrayal Trelawny spoke and wrote wildly of a duel, but as with everything else in his early life reality lagged dully behind and in the summer of 1817 he began instead a long and public haul through the civil and ecclesiastical courts that only ended with the royal assent to an Act of Parliament permitting his divorce and remarriage in May 1819.

      There is something in the very nature of divorce testimony which exposes a side of life that history scarcely notices, and through the evidence of the landladies and servants during these trials we have a squalid picture of a life that must have been the opposite of everything the young Trelawny craved. Even the geography of his betrayal has a sadly ignoble feel to it. His wife’s affair with Coleman had begun at their lodgings in Bristol, where the Trelawnys had the first floor, consisting of a drawing room and adjoining bedroom. At the end of March 1816, Captain Coleman, a much older man, arrived, renting a parlour and bedroom on the ground floor beneath. At the hearing in the Consistory Court, the Trelawnys’ landlady, Sarah Prout, described her own discovery of what was going on in the house.

      Shortly after Captain Coleman came to lodge in her House, Mrs Trelawny formed an Acquaintance with him unknown to her Husband. Captain Coleman occasionally lent the Deponent (Sarah Prout) Books, but she, having but little time for reading, lent them to Mrs Trelawny, who, as the Deponent afterwards discovered, used to send Margaret Bidder the Servant to Captain Coleman’s Apartments to return or change the Books, and sometimes went herself for that purpose; and it was by these means, as the Deponent believed, that the Acquaintance between them first commenced. The Deponent further saith that by reason of what she will hereafter depose, she verily believes that the Acquaintance between Mrs Trelawny and Captain Coleman led to a criminal Intimacy between them, and that they were guilty of many improper Familiarities with each other … One evening … the Deponent went out to take a walk, and returned about eight o’clock in the Evening: Candles were usually brought and the Window Shutters closed in Captain Coleman’s Parlour before this time, and they were so upon the present Ocasion, but as the Deponent was waiting for the Street Door to be opened she observed the Shutters to be not quite closed, and the Blinds within to be not quite drawn down; and on then looking through the opening the Deponent by the light of the Candle saw Mrs Trelawny reclining on the Sofa on the left Arm of Captain Coleman, whilst his right Hand was thrust into her Bosom and he was kissing her. The Deponent, on the street door being opened, went up Stairs, and almost immediately afterwards heard Mrs Trelawny go up Stairs from the passage as if she had just entered the House, and go into her Bed Room as if to take off her Bonnet after a Walk, Mr Trelawny being, as the Deponent at that time observed, reading in his own Room … ¹⁵

      For all the conventionality of its phrasing, Sarah Prout’s testimony provides a sadly absorbing insight into a world poised between a Rowlandsonesque coarseness and an encroaching moral censoriousness. It is not clear from the evidence how much Trelawny himself suspected, but shortly after Coleman’s arrival there had been a row over a handkerchief which uncannily echoes the casus belli in Trelawny’s favourite Othello. Another incident followed soon after when Caroline Trelawny was forced to hide in Coleman’s bedroom on the arrival of some of his fellow officers. Then, one evening at the beginning of June, Trelawny tried to persuade his wife and landlady to join him at the theatre, one of his favourite activities. Caroline refused and he went on alone. Once he had left the house, Caroline suggested to Mrs Prout that the two of them should go instead to the Circus, ‘another place of Theatrical Amusement at Bristol’:

      The Deponent endeavoured to dissuade her very much from going, and represented the Impropriety of it, in her, Mrs Trelawny’s then state of Pregnancy, but she persisted in going, and the Deponent in Consequence agreed to accompany her. They accordingly left home, but had not proceeded far before Mrs Trelawny complained of being very poorly, and requested the Deponent to get someone