The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

“You only know me truly in thinking that without the highest moral esteem I could never have yielded to, if I had been weak enough to form, an attachment. It is not in the great world that Lord Byron’s true character must be sought; but ask of those nearest to him—of the unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has blessed, of the dependants to whom he is the best of masters. For his despondency I fear I am but too answerable for the last two years.”

“The last two years” included, as we have seen, the period during which Byron was bombarding Hanson with perpetual and imperious demands for the ready money without which he could not go abroad with Lady Oxford—the period at which he told Moore that he was ready to “incorporate with any decent woman”—and the period at which he wrote “The Bride of Abydos” in order to “distract my thoughts from * * *” Miss Milbanke, that is to say, exaggerated both her importance to Byron and her influence over him, flattering herself that there would have been no “Byronism” but for her coldness, and that the warmth of her affection, so long withheld, was the one thing wanting to make glorious summer of the winter of Byron’s discontent.

It was not an unnatural hallucination. Young women of romantic disposition are easily flattered into such beliefs, especially if the gates are thronged with suitors. Having read of such situations in many novels, and dreamed of them in many dreams, they live in expectation of the day when life will be true to fiction and their dreams will be fulfilled. And sometimes, of course, the dreams are fulfilled—sometimes, but not very often, and hardly ever in the case of heroines who are, as Miss Milbanke was, commonplace in spite of their intelligence, cold, obstinate, unyielding, critical, vain, and inexperienced, quick to perceive slights, and slow to forgive them.

At all events they were not, in her case, destined to be fulfilled; and the initial improbability of their fulfilment may be inferred from a confession which Hobhouse reports.

“Lord Byron,” Hobhouse writes, “frankly confessed to his companion that he was not in love with his intended bride; but at the same time he said that he felt for her that regard which he believed was the surest guarantee of matrimonial felicity.”

No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse assures us, from “a love of change, and curiosity and a feeling of a sort of necessity of doing such a thing once.” So that the engagement may be said to have been entered upon with a clash of conflicting expectations; and though tact might have saved the adventurers from shipwreck, tact was precisely the quality in which they were both most conspicuously deficient.

It was on the last day of September, 1814, that Hobhouse heard of the engagement. On the first day of October he wrote his congratulations, and on October 19, he was invited to act as groomsman. Some time in the same month Byron paid his first visit to the Milbankes at Seaham. Thence he went to Cambridge to vote in favour of the candidature of his friend Dr. Clarke’s candidature for the Professorship of Anatomy, and was applauded by the undergraduates in the Senate House. “This distinction,” Hobhouse says, “to a literary character had never before been paid except in the instance of Archdeacon Paley”—a curious partner in the poet’s glory. A month later Byron and Hobhouse set out together again for Seaham on what Hobhouse calls “his matrimonial scheme.”

This was the occasion on which Byron confided to Hobhouse that he was not in love. A note in Hobhouse’s Diary to the effect that “never was lover in less haste” affords contemporary corroboration of the fact; and the Diary continues to be picturesque, giving us Hobhouse’s critical, but not altogether unfavourable, impression of Miss Milbanke and her family:

“Miss Milbanke is rather dowdy-looking, and wears a long and high dress, though she has excellent feet and ankles.... The lower part of her face is bad, the upper, expressive but not handsome, yet she gains by inspection.

“She heard Byron coming out of his room, ran to meet him, threw her arms round his neck, and burst into tears. She did this not before us.... Lady Milbanke was so much agitated that she had gone to her room ... our delay the cause.... Indeed I looked foolish in finding out an excuse for our want of expedition....