There is something so reassuringly dull about the Milbankes’ political careers, so entirely lacking in individuality, that one feels instinctively with them that one is in touch with the solid bedrock of Sir Lewis Namier’s England. Sir Ralph had first entered parliament as one of two unopposed members for Scarborough in 1754, and at the first election of the new reign stood in the Holderness interest for Richmond, loyally and uncritically supporting successive administrations, before retiring in 1768 without having spoken a single word in fourteen years an MP.
Over twenty years were to pass before another Milbanke sat in Parliament, but through the 1770s and 80s Sir Ralph’s son, another Ralph, continued the same process of family consolidation, hitching his political fortunes first to Lord Rockingham and then, on his death, to Charles James Fox. In 1790 after a ruinous campaign that is reckoned to have cost the family £15,000, he was finally returned in second place for Durham Co, and for the next twenty-two years remained its MP, a genial and ineffectual ‘Uncle Toby’ whose fidelity to the Whig cause, in his daughter’s succinct phrase, was ‘as little valued as doubted’.24
It was into this family and this world, on 17 May 1792, that Anne Isabella Milbanke was born. The future Lady Byron has always seemed to belong so completely to the nineteenth century that it is easy to forget that this is where her roots lie, that her moral and social being was shaped by the inherited virtues and limitations implicit in Stubbs’s painting or her family’s dilettante public service.
But if the young Annabella was brought up in a political milieu, behind the web of alliances and obligations that supported two generations in parliament lay realities of landed life that had a far more profound effect on her vision. From the middle of the seventeenth century the principal seat of the Milbankes had been Halnaby Hall, a red-bricked Jacobean manor house, now gone, that lay just off the Great North Road outside the village of Croft in Yorkshire. In the village church of St Peter’s a wonderfully grandiose tomb and pew still evoke the dynastic ambitions of the early Milbankes, but Annabella’s affections remained all her life with the modest estate at Seaham on the north-east coast where she grew up. ‘If in a small village’, she recalled many years later, in a passage that might have come from George Eliot,
you cannot go out of the gates without seeing the children of a few Families playing on the Green, till they become ‘familiar faces’, you need not be taught to care for their well-being. A heart must be hard indeed that could be indifferent to little Jenny’s having the Scarlet Fever, or to Johnny’s having lost his mother … I did not think property could be possessed by any other tenure than that of being at the service of those in need.25
The Milbankes and Seaham may have given Annabella a sense of the rooted interdependency of country life, but through her mother she could lay claim to a more exotic strain of English history. Judith Noel was born in 1751, the eldest daughter of Sir Edward Noel of Kirkby Mallory, first Viscount Wentworth and heir through the contorted female line to the sixteenth century Wentworth barony. It would be dangerous to describe any title that has survived with the tenacity of the Wentworths as ‘doomed’, but when a family branch can provide a Lancastrian standard-bearer at St Albans, a Governor of Calais under Mary Tudor, and the devoted mistress to the Duke of Monmouth, it is at least guilty of the kind of ill-luck that might pave the way to a marriage with Byron.
For someone so outwardly prosaic as Annabella, there was, too, a curiously vivid streak of romanticism that fed directly off her sense of history. In a self-portrait written as a woman of thirty-nine, she looked back on her childhood self, on a miniature Dorothea Brooke pulled backwards and forwards between the claims of the imagination and the stern imperatives of a protestant conscience. ‘Impressed from earliest childhood with a sense of duty, and sympathising with the great and noble in human character’, she wrote,
my aspirations went beyond the ordinary occasions of life – I wasted virtuous energy on a visionary scene, and conscience was in danger of becoming detached from that before me. Few of my pleasures were connected with realities – riding was the only one I can remember. When I climbed the rocks, or bounded over the sands with apparent delight, I was not myself. Perhaps I was shipwrecked or was trying to rescue other sufferers – some of my hours were spent in the Pass of Thermopylae, others with the Bishop of Marseilles in the midst of Pestilence, or with Howard in the cheerless dungeon …
About the age of 13… I began to throw my imagination into a home-sphere of action – to constrain myself, from religious principle, to attend to what was irksome, and to submit to what was irritating. I had great difficulties to surmount from the impetuosity and sensitiveness of my character … It was this stage of my character which prepared me to sympathise unboundedly with the morbidly susceptible – with those who felt themselves unknown …26
It would clearly be absurd to try to define her exclusively in terms of ancestry, but there is a sense in which the solidity of the Milbankes and the romanticism of the Wentworth inheritance combined to produce in Annabella something distinctly new, a kind of fierce ordinariness, a strident centrality that raised the commonplace to the realms of genius, orthodoxy to the stuff of crusade.
Along with this dual inheritance, the circumstances of her own contented upbringing can only have sharpened the feeling of singularity with which she coloured the most ordinary imaginative experiences of childhood. In the same Auto-Description she lamented a ‘want of comparison’ in her Seaham life that blinded her to the advantages of birth, and yet of greater importance than the inevitable isolation of a small Durham village was the simple fact that she was the only child of parents who had waited fifteen years for an heir.
Ralph Milbanke and Judith Noel had married in 1777, and although they had brought up a niece as if she was their own child, there is no mistaking the ferocious joy that greeted Anna-bella’s birth. It is often admiringly noted that she was encouraged in her opinions from her earliest days, but if her childhood self can be back derived from her adult character, hers was the kind of independence that might have flourished more safely in the face of opposition than indulgence, her character one that would have fared better outside the warmth and admiration of a family that placed her firmly and uncritically at its centre. ‘It was indeed Calantha’s misfortune to meet with too much kindness,’ her cousin Caroline Lamb wrote of herself in a passage in Glenarvon that throws an unexpected light on this – a passage that sufficiently stung Annabella when she read the novel to have her mark and angrily refute its psychology in a criticism that survives still among her papers,
or rather too much indulgence from all who surrounded her. The Duke, attentive solely to her health, watched her with the fondest solicitude, and the wildest wishes her fancy could invent, were heard with the most scrupulous attention, and gratified with the most unbounded compliance.27
This regime of indulgence was made more dangerous in Anna-bella’s case by an intelligence that in and outside the home had little to challenge it. Even as a child she was conscious of being cleverer than most of those around her, but it was a cleverness dangerously at the service of unchallengeable moral certitudes, an intelligence that seems never to have broadened with reading or turned on itself in any genuine spirit of criticism. From the evidence of her letters and journals there was certainly a kind of scrupulousness about her, and yet even here her scruples and self-doubts were, like her shyness, the self-referential workings of an imagination that ultimately appealed to no other judgement but its own.
If Annabella Milbanke had simply married as Milbankes had traditionally married, none of this might have much mattered, and it is likely that she would have done no more than add one more name to history’s forgotten