The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

REVIVAL OF THE BYRON SCANDAL BY MRS. BEECHER STOWE AND THE LATE LORD LOVELACE

The Byron scandal slowly fell asleep, and was allowed to slumber for about half a century. Even the publication of Moore’s Life did not awaken it. People took sides, indeed, as they always do, some throwing the blame on the husband, and others on the wife; but the view that, whoever was to blame, the causes of the separation were “too simple to be easily found out” prevailed.

Forces, however, making for the revival of the scandal were nevertheless at work. Byron smarted under social ostracism and resented it. Though Lady Byron had never made any formal charge to which he could reply, but had, on the contrary, formally retracted all “gross” charges, he continued to be embittered by suggestions of mysterious iniquities, and his anger found expression alike in his letters and in his poems. To a certain extent he defended himself by taking the offensive. He caused notes on his case to be privately distributed. He wrote “at” Lady Byron, in the Fourth Canto of “Childe Harold,” in “Don Juan,” and elsewhere. A good deal of his correspondence, printed by Moore, expressed his opinion of her in terms very far from flattering.

Under these combined influences public opinion veered round—the more readily because Byron was held to have made ample atonement for his faults, whatever they might have been, by sacrificing his life in the cause of Greek independence. Lady Byron was now thought, not indeed to have erred in any technical sense, but to have made an undue fuss about very little, and to have been most unwomanly in her frigid consciousness of rectitude. The world, in short, was more certain now that she had been “heartless” than that she had been “always in the right.”

Naturally, her temptation to “answer back” was strong. She could not very well answer back by preferring any monstrous indictment in public. That course was not only to be avoided in her daughter’s interest, but might also have involved her in an action for defamation of character on the part of Mrs. Leigh—an action which she could not have met with any adequate defence. Of that risk, indeed, she had been warned by her friend Colonel Doyle, in a letter printed in “Astarte” to which it will presently be necessary to return—a letter in which she had been urgently recommended to “act as if a time might possibly arise when it might be necessary for you to justify yourself.” But if she could not answer back in public, at least she could answer back in private.

She did so. That is to say, she talked—mostly to sympathetic women who were more or less discreet, but also, in her later years to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who did not so much as know what discretion was. The story of which Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had already received hints from the women whose discretion was comparative was ultimately told to her, whose indiscretion was absolute, by Lady Byron herself. She remained as discreet as the rest—that is to say, more or less discreet—during Lady Byron’s life, and for some time afterwards. But when the Countess Guiccioli wrote a book about Byron in which Lady Byron was disparaged, she could restrain herself no longer. In support of Lady Byron’s story she had no evidence except Lady Byron’s word. She did not know—and she did not trouble to inquire—what evidence against it might exist. She did not pause to ask herself whether her own recollection might not be at fault concerning a story which she had heard thirteen years before. It was enough for her, apparently, that Lady Byron was a religious woman, and that Byron, on his own showing, had lived “a man’s life.” That sufficed, in her view, wherever there was a conflict of statements, to demonstrate that Byron was a liar, and that Lady Byron spoke the truth. So she plunged into the fray, and, with a great flourish of trumpets, published Lady Byron’s story in “Macmillan’s Magazine.” When the “Quarterly Review” had, in so far as it is ever possible to prove a negative, disproved the story, she repeated it with embellishments in a book entitled: “Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy from its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time.”

The essence of Mrs. Stowe’s story is contained in this report of Lady Byron’s conversation:

“There was something awful to me in the intensity of repressed emotion which she showed as she proceeded. The great fact upon which all turned was stated in words that were unmistakable:

“‘He was guilty of incest with his sister.’”

There is the charge. Turning over the pages in quest of the evidence in support of it, we find this: