CHAPTER XVII

INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER

A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron’s life alike as an engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether friendly or hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to the heap. Almost all the stories are coloured by prejudice. Even when they seem to be derived from the same source, they are often mutually contradictory; so that it is, as a rule, a hopeless task to try to distinguish between fact and fiction, or do more than disengage a general impression of discordant temperaments progressing from incompatibility to open war.

Even the period of the engagement is reported not to have been of unclouded happiness. A son of Sir Ralph Milbanke’s Steward at Seaham has furnished recollections to that effect. “While Byron was at Seaham,” says this witness, “he spent most of his time pistol-shooting in the plantation”—a strangely moody occupation for an affianced man; and he adds that, on the wedding morning, when all was prepared for the ceremony, “Byron had to be sought for in the grounds where he was walking in his usual surly mood.” Mrs. Beecher Stowe tells us that Miss Milbanke, observing that her lover did not rejoice sufficiently in his good fortune, offered to release him from his promise—whereupon he “fainted entirely away,” and so convinced her, for the moment, of the sincerity of his affection.

Similar stories, equally well attested and equally unconvincing, cluster round the departure of the married couple for Halnaby where they spent their honeymoon. Lady Byron told Lady Anne Barnard that the carriage had no sooner driven away from the door of the mansion than her husband turned upon her with “a malignant sneer” and derided her for cherishing the “wild hope” of “reforming him,” saying: “Many are the tears you will have to shed ere that plan is accomplished. It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to hate you.” The Steward’s son, giving an alternative version of the story, declares that “insulting words” were spoken before leaving the park—“after which he appeared to sit in moody silence, reading a book for the rest of the journey.” Byron’s own account of the incident, as given to Medwin, was as follows:

“I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out of humour to find a lady’s maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks.”

These three stories, it is clear, cannot all be true; and none of them can either be proved or disproved, though the last was contradicted by Hobhouse who said that he had inspected the carriage and found no maid in it. Similarly with the stories which follow. According to the Steward’s son, Sir Ralph Milbanke’s tenants assembled to cheer Byron on his arrival at Halnaby—but “of these he took not the slightest notice, but jumped out of the carriage and walked away, leaving his bride to alight by herself.” There is also a story told by another authority, who cannot, however, have been an eye-witness, to the effect that Byron, awaking from his slumbers on his nuptial night, exclaimed, in his surprise at his strange surroundings, that he supposed he was in Hell.

All these stories, of course, are exceedingly shocking, if true; but there are no means of ascertaining whether they are true. Nothing can be positively affirmed except that the beginnings were inauspicious, and must have seemed the more inauspicious to Lady Byron because of that fond belief of hers, that her rejection of Byron in 1812 had caused him two years’ mental agony, now at last to be happily removed by her condescending tenderness. A vast amount of tact—a vast amount of give-and-take—would have been needed to make a success of a marriage concluded under that misapprehension; and Lord and Lady Byron were both of an age at which tact is, as a rule, a virtue only known by name.

Of Byron’s tact we have an example in the famous dialogue: “Do I interrupt you, Byron?”... “Damnably.” Of Lady Byron’s tact we shall discover an instance at the crisis of her married life. In the meantime we must note that they made up their first quarrel—which may very well have been less serious at the time than it appeared to be in retrospect—and, at any rate, kept up appearances sufficiently well to deceive their closest friends. From Halnaby they returned to Seaham, where nothing happened except that Byron discovered his father-in-law to be a bore, addicted to dreary political monologuising over wine and walnuts. They next visited Mrs. Leigh at Six Mile Bottom, and then they proceeded to 13 Piccadilly Terrace—that unluckily numbered house, hired from the Duchess of Devonshire, in which many catastrophes were to occur, and a distress was presently to be levied for non-payment of the rent.

Mrs. Leigh, it will be observed, was pleasantly surprised to observe that the marriage seemed to be turning out well. She had the more reason to be surprised because she shared none of Lady Byron’s illusions as to the part which she had played, for the past two years, in Byron’s emotional and imaginative life. She was in her brother’s confidence, and knew all about Lady Caroline Lamb, all about Lady Oxford, and—more particularly—all about Mary Chaworth. Consequently she had had her apprehensions, which she confided to Byron’s friend Hodgson. A few extracts from her letters to Hodgson will bring this point out, and show us how the marriage looked from her point of view. On February 15, 1815, she wrote: