LADY CAROLINE LAMB
The record of Byron’s social triumphs may be outlined in a few sentences.
Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be regarded as distinct, though there were points at which they touched each other. Among men of letters his chief friends were Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, then a man verging on fifty, whose superlative dinner we have seen him refusing to eat, and Thomas Moore, who had made his acquaintance by demanding satisfaction for an alleged affront in “English Bards,” which Byron had explained away. At the same time he “got on very well,” as he tells us, with Beau Brummell and the other dandies, being one of the three men of letters who were admitted to Watiers, and was lionised in the society which we should nowadays describe as “smart.”
It has been written that the roadway opposite to his apartments was blocked by liveried footmen conveying perfumed notes. That, we may take it, is a picturesque exaggeration; but, no doubt, he received more invitations than the laws of time and space allowed him to accept—most of them, though by no means all of them, to the great Whig houses. Lady Westmorland, Lady Jersey, Lady Holland, and Lady Melbourne were the most fashionable of the hostesses who competed for the privilege of his company; and Lady Melbourne had a daughter-in-law—Lady Caroline Lamb. She also had a niece—Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke; but it is of Lady Caroline Lamb that we must speak first.
Lady Caroline was three years older than Byron. She was the daughter of the third Earl of Bessborough, and the wife of William Lamb, who, as Lord Melbourne, afterwards became Prime Minister of England. It was a matter of opinion whether she was beautiful; it was also a matter of opinion whether she was sane—doctors consulted on that branch of the subject had returned doubtful, non-committal answers. She was not exactly mad, they said, but she was of a temperament allied to madness. She must not be pressed to study, but must be allowed to run wild and do as she liked.
She had run wild, for years, reading the works of Burns, which are not written for the young, and galloping about parks on bare-backed steeds, imagining the world about her instead of realising it, and, of course, imagining it wrong. It is on record that she believed that bread-and-butter was a natural product and that horses were fed on beef; also that she divided the community into two classes—dukes and beggars—and supposed that the former would always, by some law of nature, remain wealthy, whatever they did with their money. Her charm—and she could be very charming when she liked—was that of a high-spirited, irresponsible, wilful, wayward child. She was, in short, the kind of girl whom those who loved her best would describe, in the vernacular, as “a handful.”
Lady Caroline Lamb.
“Of all the Devonshire House girls,” William Lamb had said, “that is the one for me.” That was when she was thirteen; and six years later he was still of the same opinion. He was confirmed in it when she refused his offer of marriage, proposing instead to run away with him in boy’s clothes and act as his secretary. He accepted neither his dismissal nor her alternative suggestion, but persevered in his suit until he was accepted. The next thing that happened was that Lady Caroline broke into railing accusations against the bishop who performed the marriage rites, tore her wedding dress to tatters, and had to be carried to her carriage in a fainting fit. It was not a very auspicious commencement of married life, but one which prepares us for the general reflections on marriage found in her husband’s common-place book, recently edited by Mr. Lloyd Sanders:
“The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that no man can be free or independent....”