Through the desolate winter of 1822–3 Trelawny came closer to Mary than at any time in their long relationship, but it was with another of Shelley’s circle that he formed during this time what is possibly the most enduring, if impenetrable, friendship of his life.
A curious compound of apparent opposites, of selfishness and generosity, common sense and fatuous silliness, of shrewd judgement and uncontrollable passion, of clinging dependence and brave and dogged self-sufficiency, Claire Clairmont is at once the most touching and exasperating member of Shelley’s and Byron’s world. She had been born in the spring of 1798 as the illegitimate child of a woman who went under the name of ‘Mrs Clairmont’, and at the age of three was taken with her brother Charles to Somers Town in London, where in the same year their mother met and married the widower of Mary Wollstonecraft, the great radical and political philosopher, William Godwin.
From the earliest age, Claire thus found herself in one of the most free-thinking and politically conscious households in England, the step-daughter of a famous writer and step-sister to another in the future Mary Shelley. As a child, too, she was raised and educated with the same care that was expended on the boys of the family, and she grew up with all the principles and beliefs that lay at the core of the Godwin ménage, as exuberantly and unapologetically a child of the revolutionary age as if she had indeed been Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s natural daughter.
When Claire was fourteen her half-sister, Mary, fell in love with the young poet and disciple of Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley was already a married man when he first met Mary, but two years later the couple eloped to France and took Claire with them, walking, riding and slumming their way across the French countryside until poverty and Mary’s pregnancy brought them back to England and reality.
It is hard to imagine what the sixteen-year-old girl thought she was doing with Mary and Shelley in France at this time, but if her teasing and subversive presence in their lives is still one of the unresolved mysteries of biography, there was odder yet to come. Within two years of their triangular elopement and still only seventeen, she eclipsed Mary’s conquest of Shelley with a married poet of her own, throwing herself at Lord Byron with a reckless and infatuated passion that his indolent and self-indulgent nature was unable to resist. ‘An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,’ she wrote to him above the assumed name of E. Trefusis.
It may seem a strange assertion, but it is none the less true that I place my happiness in your hands … If a woman, whose reputation as yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control, she should throw herself on your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years … could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?18
If a whole life can ever be said to hinge on a single action or judgement, then Claire Clairmont’s unprovoked assault on Byron in the March of 1816 is it. In the wake of the scandalous collapse of his marriage Byron was certainly ready for a brief and loveless affair, but to Claire it was the most important moment of her life, a moment at once of complete fulfilment and self-destructive folly which she was to regret for sixty bitter years.
Had the affair ended there and then, however, Claire Clairmont’s history might well have been very different, but in that same summer of 1816, a mixture of her persistence and Byron’s weakness saw it revived on the shores of Lake Leman and in January 1817 she gave birth to his daughter. The following March the baby was christened Clara Allegra Byron, but other than giving the child his name the father was unmoved. Boredom with Claire had long turned to an uncharacteristically implacable dislike of what he called her ‘Bedlam behaviour’, and even when the following year he agreed to assume responsibility for his daughter, it was an arrangement from which the mother was ruthlessly excluded.
It was this unstable, passionate and generous woman, with a past and pedigree to match – the step-daughter of Godwin, the sister-in-law of Shelley and the ex-mistress of Byron – with whom Trelawny now fell violently in love. Claire was still only twenty-three when they first met at the house of the Williamses in February 1822, a gifted linguist and musician, dark haired, clever and attractive enough – whatever the evidence of Amelia Curran’s Rome portrait – to have inspired at least one brilliantly shallow lyric of homage from Byron.
In her journal Claire recorded this first meeting without comment, and yet even had she felt any reciprocal interest at this time, the sudden death from typhoid of her daughter Allegra in the convent where Byron had placed her was soon to eclipse all else. In the immediate aftermath of the news Claire seems to have behaved with a dignity and calm that surprised everyone, but the silence of her journal over the next five months is an eloquent measure of a grief which only grew with the years.
It was a grief, too, which no one around could ignore, an event about which no one could remain neutral, and Allegra’s death marks the first major split in the Pisan Circle that had gathered around Byron and Shelley, the first bitter issue over which those battle lines were drawn that were to hold their partisan shape way beyond the deaths of the main protagonists.
At a time of such drama and tension it is difficult to see Trelawny remaining indifferent, but there is no clue to the way his relationship with Claire developed until in a sense it was all over. In the wake of Allegra’s and Shelley’s deaths his kindness must have brought her closer in the same way it did Mary and Jane, and yet as Claire prepared over the summer of 1822 to leave Italy there is nothing in any surviving correspondence that could possibly suggest a crisis in their friendship, and still less the torrent of passionate letters from Trelawny that followed her into her long exile as a governess.
That crisis is cryptically marked in her journal. The last prosaic entry had been for 13 April, just six days before Allegra’s death. It resumes again on Friday 6 September 1822, with a simple note of the date and nothing else. Three years later, however, while Claire was living on the country estate of her employers at Islavsk, outside Moscow, another entry gives some hint of what that date had meant to her. ‘Tuesday August 25th. Septr. 6th.’ she recorded, using both calendars
Lovely weather. I think a great deal of past times to-day and above all of this day three years, but the sentiments of that time are most likely long ago, vanished into air. This is life. So five to nothing but toil and trouble – all its sweets are like the day whose anniversary this is – more transitory than a shade – yet it had been otherwise if Inwalert had been different and I might have been as happy as I am now wretched.19
In Trelawny’s letters over the autumn and winter of 1822–3, however, the crackling fallout of that day in September has left a less ambiguous trace. It is impossible to say with any certainty what happened when they met for the last time on the banks of the Arno, but the bond that it established and its devastating impact on Trelawny are beyond question. Over the next months he sent letter after letter to Claire in Vienna, violent and tender, demanding and conciliatory, histrionic and emotionally truthful by turn. ‘A gnarled tree may bear good fruit,’ he gnomically declared from the back of his horse in one undated letter soon after, ‘and a harsh nature may find good council …’
let us be firm and staunch friends we both want friends – you have lost in Shelley one worthy to be called so – I cannot fill his place – as who can – but you will not find me altogether unworthy the office. Linked thus together we may defy the fate that separates us for a time – with united hearts – what can separate us … In solitude silence or absence I think of your words – and can even make sacrifices to reason … 20
The last six lines of