“He cared nothing for my morals,” she remarks. “I might flirt and go about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord Byron and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness and suffering he deserts me.”
That protest, however, is wholly unjust, and only partly true. A married woman who has no sooner met a man than she arranges to dine tête-à-tête with him is hardly entitled to ascribe her flirtation to her husband’s contributory negligence. Lady Caroline not only did that, but also, in her wilful way, plunged at once into a compromising correspondence. Her very first letter to Byron, according to Rogers, “assured him that, if he was in any want of money, all her jewels were at his disposal.” In another letter of approximately the same date we find her writing: “The rose Lord Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save it; probably from regret at its fallen fortunes.”
Evidently Lady Caroline had thrown herself at Byron’s head before William Lamb guessed what was happening. Afterwards, no doubt, he knew what the rest of the world knew. But he also knew—what the rest of the world did not know, and what Lady Caroline herself only imperfectly realised—how froward and changeable were his wife’s moods, how great was the risk of hysterical explosions if those moods were crossed, what a “handful” she was, in short, and how very difficult it was to handle her, and so he left things alone.
Leaving things alone, indeed, was William Lamb’s regular formula for the solution of the problems alike of public and of private life. He believed that problems left alone tended to solve themselves, just as letters left unanswered tend to answer themselves. On the whole the principle had worked, if not ideally, yet well enough for the practical purposes of domestic life. Things had happened before, and, being left alone, had ceased to happen. In his desk lay a letter relating to some previous ebullition the particulars of which are wrapped in mystery. “I think lately, my dearest William,” Lady Caroline had written, three years before, “we have been very troublesome to each other.” It was true, and it had not mattered. The fire, if there had been a fire, had burnt itself out. The hysterics—it is not to be doubted that there were hysterics—had subsided with the passing of the occasion which had called them forth. The clouds had been dispersed, and the sun had shone again. Why should not this chapter in his domestic history repeat itself? He was very fond of his wife; he hated rows; he wished to take no risks. The best way of avoiding risks was to humour her.
So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on one side.
“You need not fear me,” was his reply. “I do not pursue pleasure like other men; I labour under an incurable disease and a blighted heart. Believe me she is safe with me.”
No one knows whether she was, in the narrow sense of the word, “safe” with him or not. Rogers thought that she was, but admitted that he did not really know. In any case she was not safe from herself, or from the tongue of scandal. She was really in love—her devotion was no passing fancy—and she did not care who knew it. Indeed she behaved as if she thought that the more people who knew it, the better. The woman who, at a ball, called upon Byron’s friend Harness—that very serious young Cantab just about to take orders—to bear witness that she was wearing no fewer than six pairs of stockings, was not likely to hide the light of a grand passion under a bushel. She did not so hide it, but proceeded, as has been said, to afficher herself as if she were inviting the attention of the world to a great spectacular entertainment. She had not known Byron a couple of months before people were beginning to talk.
“Your little friend Caro William,” wrote the Duchess of Devonshire on May 4, 1812, “as usual is doing all sorts of imprudent things with him.... The ladies, I hear spoil him, and the gentlemen are jealous of him. He is going back to Naxos, and then the husbands may sleep in peace. I should not be surprised if Caro William were to go with him, she is so wild and imprudent.”
Rogers, in his “Table Talk,” is still more picturesque. He tells us how, when Byron and Lady Caroline quarrelled, she used to plant herself in his (Rogers’) garden, waiting to catch him on his return home and beg him to effect a reconciliation; and he continues:
“When she met Byron at a party, she would always, if possible, return home from it in his carriage, and accompanied by him: I recollect particularly their returning to town together from Holland House. But such was the insanity of her passion for Byron that sometimes, when not invited to a party where he was to be, she would wait for him in the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at Devonshire House, to which Lady Caroline had not been invited, I saw her—yes, saw her—talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into the carriage which he had just entered.”