Byron had first come across Caro Lamb, the twenty-seven-year-old, fragile, androgynous-looking child wife of William Lamb, when she had written to him under a thin veil of anonymity after the triumph of Childe Harold in February 1812. Even before she had set eyes on him she had declared that she would know its author if he was ‘as ugly as Aesop’34, and within weeks of meeting she had made sure their affair was public property, played out with a kind of arriviste relish on his part and on hers with a reckless exhibitionism hovering on the edge of insanity.
There is not a moment of an affair that defined and caricatured the Romantic passion in all its delinquent intensity that has not been raked over a hundred times, but in the context of his relationship with Annabella it still has its place here. In later years Byron came to hate Caroline with a passion that only Claire Clairmont could otherwise inspire, but in its first weeks at least what attracted him to the maddest of all the Spencers was precisely the wayward and uncontrollable element in her that he eventually came to loathe.
There was a wonderfully sane and balanced side to Byron that would always in the end tire of romantic excess, and yet after the initial excitement had passed something more than boredom turned him against Caroline Lamb. An illicit element to some of his earlier, male relationships had sometimes unnerved him, but as he tried to distance himself from Caroline he found himself contending with a woman ready to call the Childe’s bluff, to live out the implications of his Romanticism with a patrician contempt for convention that in his first year of success he had neither the courage nor the confidence of ‘belonging’ to match.
Even with the contrast of Caroline Lamb to concentrate his mind, it is unlikely that his interest in Annabella would ever have quickened into anything more important had it not been for the intervention of her aunt (Caroline Lamb’s mother-in-law), Lady Melbourne. By the time that Annabella made her London debut, the girl in Stubbs’s portrait had reigned as the‘spider queen’ of Whig society for over a generation, ‘a sort of modern Aspasia’ with the brain and morals to match, tolerant, attractive, intelligent, cynical, corrupt and – to Byron at least – ‘the best, the kindest, and ablest female I have ever known, old or young’. ‘She was a charming person’, he later told Lady Blessington,
uniting the energy of a man’s mind with the delicacy and tenderness of a woman’s. She had all of philosophy, save its moroseness, and all of nature, save its defects and general faiblesse … I have often thought, that, with a little more youth Lady M. might have turned my head, at all events she often turned my heart, by bringing me back to mild feelings, when the demon passion was strong within me. Her mind and heart were as fresh as if only sixteen summers had flown over her, instead of four times that number – and the mind and heart always leave external marks of their state of health. Goodness is the best cosmetic that has yet been discovered … She was a captivating creature, malgre her eleven or twelve lustres, and I shall always love her.35
Even in her early sixties, the ‘spider’ or the ‘thorn’ still retained the power, desire and intelligence that had once made her the mistress of Lord Egremont and the Prince of Wales. As a young bride she had been forced to stand and watch her husband’s ludicrous pursuit of the actress Sophia Baddeley, but with the ambition and purpose Stubbs caught so well, disappointment had simply deflected her energies into the ruthless pursuit of family influence that was to consume the rest of her life. ‘The charms of her person and the endowments of her mind were worthy of a better fate than that she was preparing for herself’, Caroline Lamb wrote savagely of her in Glenarvon, the roman à clef with which she took her revenge not just on Byron but on the Whig world that had turned its back on her,
But, under the semblance of youthful gaiety, she concealed a dark intriguing spirit, which could neither remain at rest, nor satisfy itself in the pursuit of great and noble objects. She had been hurried on by the evil activity of her own mind, until the habit of crime had overcome every scruple, and rendered her insensible to repentance, and almost to remorse. In this career she had improved to such a degree her natural talent of dissimulation, that, under its impenetrable veil, she was able to carry on securely her darkest machinations; and her understanding had so adapted itself to her passion, that it was in her power to give, in her own eyes, a character of grandeur, to the vice and malignity, which afforded an inexplicable delight to her depraved imagination.36
With daughter and mother-in-law both living in Melbourne House, a delicate balancing act was required, but from the moment Byron tried to extricate himself from the affair with Caroline, he found Lady Melbourne a subtle and determined ally. To a woman who had charmed and slept her way to the top of Whig society, her daughter-in-law’s morals were of no great concern, but the one crime the lax Regency world would not forgive was indiscretion and as Caroline’s antics began to threaten the dynastic ambitions ‘the spider’ held for her family, Lady Melbourne moved to neutralise her.
In spite of all her cynicism, though, it can no more have occurred to Lady Melbourne than it had to Byron that the solution to their mutual problem lay in her cool, self-contained country niece. For their different reasons both Caroline Lamb and her sister-in-law ‘Caro George’ had done their best to convince him that Annabella was already engaged, but he had hardly needed their warnings to keep a wary distance from a woman he instinctively recognised as his opposite. ‘My dear Lady Caroline’, he had written as early as 1 May, after reading some verses of Annabella’s,
I have read over the few poems of Miss Milbank with attention. – They display fancy, feeling, & a little practice would very soon induce facility of expression … She certainly is a very extraordinary girl, who would imagine so much strength & variety of thought under that placid countenance? You will say as much of this to Miss M. as you think proper. – I say all this very sincerely, I have no desire to be better acquainted with Miss Milbank, she is too good for a fallen spirit to know or wish to know, & I should like her more if she were less perfect.37
There is no reason to doubt Byron – Annabella is not mentioned in his letters for more than four months – but the idea of her had taken a dogged hold of his imagination. There was no pretence on his part that he was in love with her, or anyone else, but as over July and August the pressure from both the Lambs and Caroline’s mother to end the affair grew, he was faced with the fundamental need of the outsider to assimilate or face destruction. ‘I see nothing but marriage & a speedy one can save me’, he wrote to Lady Melbourne on 28 September,
if your niece is attainable I should prefer her – if not – the very first woman who does not look as if she would spit in my face.38
‘You ask “if I am sure of myself”’ he had already written to Lady Melbourne ten days earlier, after first hesitantly broaching the idea of Annabella to her in a letter from Cheltenham on the 13th,
I answer – no – but you are, which I take to be a much better thing. Miss M. I admire because she is a clever woman, an amiable woman & of high blood, for I still have a few Norman & Scotch inherited prejudices on the last score, were I to marry. As to Love, that is done in a week (provided the Lady has a reasonable share) besides marriage goes on better with esteem & confidence than romance, & she is quite pretty enough to be loved by her husband, without being so glaringly beautiful as to attract too many rivals.39
At the beginning of October Lady Melbourne approached her niece on his behalf, and on the 12th received Annabella’s refusal from Richmond, complete with a ‘Character’ of Byron explaining her decision. ‘The passions have been his guide from childhood,’ she wrote, up on her ‘high stilts’ as her aunt described her,
and have exercised a tyrannical power over his very superior intellect. Yet among his dispositions are