The story of Byron’s love affairs between 1812 and 1817 has been so often related that any presentation of the details here is unnecessary, especially since in only one case did his amours lead him to satire. According to Medwin, Lady Caroline Lamb, the fickle and incorrigible lady who so violently sought Byron for a lover, called one day at the poet’s apartments, and finding him away, wrote in a volume of Vathek the words “Remember me.” When Byron discovered the warning, he added to it two stanzas of burning invective, concluding,
“Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee;
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!”
Several theories have been advanced to explain the causes and results of Byron’s unfortunate marriage, but the main facts seem to be simple enough. In 1813 he proposed to Miss Milbanke, a cousin of Lady Caroline Lamb’s by marriage, and was refused. The intimacy of the two continued, however, and a second offer, made in 1814, was accepted. The wedding, which took place on January 2, 1815, was accompanied by some inauspicious omens, but the honeymoon, spent at Halnaby, was apparently happy. Byron’s financial circumstances were straitened, and, on his return to London, he was pursued by creditors. He himself was irritable, unsuited for a quiet domestic life, and Lady Byron was probably over-puritanical. At any rate, whoever may have been the more at fault, his wife, soon after the opening of 1816, left him, took steps to have his mental condition examined, and later demanded a separation. In this crisis of his life, public opinion sided with Lady Byron, and the poet became a social outcast.[169] The deed of separation was signed on April 22, 1816, and on the 25th of the same month, Byron left England forever.
During the arrangements for the separation Byron showed no resentment towards his wife. Indeed he wrote Moore on March 8, 1816:—“I do not believe—that there ever was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and agreeable being than Lady Byron.”[170] His wrath fell heavily, however, on Mrs. Clermont, Lady Byron’s old governess, who had come to stay with her mistress when the trouble began. On her Byron laid the responsibility for the events which followed. He thought her a spy on his actions, accused her of having broken open his desk in order to read his private papers, and considered her an impudent meddler. As he signed the deed of separation, he muttered, “This is Mrs. Clermont’s work.” His full rage against her burst out in A Sketch, finished March 29, 1816, and published, through some one’s indiscretion, in the Tory Champion for April 14th. Fifty copies of this satire were printed for private circulation, with Byron’s poem Fare Thee Well, addressed to his wife. The appearance of these verses in the newspapers started a violent controversy in the daily press, carried out on party lines.
A Sketch, containing 104 lines in heroic couplets, is a coarse and scurrilous attack on Mrs. Clermont, beginning with a short account of her life,
“Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred,
Promoted thence to deck her mistress’ head,”