The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

“I am anxious to acquit you of all misrepresentation, and myself of having supposed that you had misrepresented.... I cannot give you pain without feeling yet more myself.”

“My dearest A., it is my great comfort that you are in Piccadilly.”

Some of these letters were written at a time when Lady Byron believed her husband to be mad. All of them were written at a time when she was accusing him of improper relations with her correspondent—as is established beyond dispute by her signed statement, published in “Astarte.” The excerpt printed last was written at the time when she professed to entertain both beliefs. It amounts, when analysed, to an expression of gratification that her sister-in-law, to whom she claims to be deeply attached, is in a position to continue incestuous and adulterous intercourse with a raving maniac. It is incredible, of course, that she can either have felt, or intended to express, any such gratification at any such state of things. The letter is explicable on one hypothesis, and one only: that Lady Byron herself did not really believe the story which she had told to her advisers.

We have already seen—from the wording of Lady Byron’s statement and from her correspondence with Colonel Doyle—that she had no proofs of her story. We have also seen that, when Byron’s friends tried to pin her to the story, she disavowed it. The conclusion that she did not even believe it at the time when she told it comes as a fitting climax; and it needs but little conjecture or imagination to divine her motives and give coherence to the narrative of her proceedings.

She had come to hate her husband, and had resolved to separate from him at all costs. Such hatreds are sometimes conceived by women without adequate cause, just before and just after pregnancy. One suspects that pathological explanation, though one does not know enough of the facts to insist upon it. The hatred, at any rate, was there, impelling Lady Byron to seek a separation, and she proceeded to take advice. Probably she was advised that her case was too weak to be taken into Court with confidence; and she certainly was advised that reconciliation was preferable to separation. The only way of securing the firm support of her own friends was to lay fresh facts before them.

That is the stage of the proceedings at which we are told that fresh facts came to her knowledge. But the alleged facts were only treated as facts for the purposes of argument. They were scandals—the scandals implicating Mrs. Leigh, and launched, as is believed, by Lady Caroline Lamb, who subsequently disavowed them as explicitly as Lady Byron herself. In order to make sure of her separation Lady Byron adopted those scandals and laid them before Lushington. Lushington may or may not have believed them. So long, however, as he remained in charge of the case he was bound to behave as if he did; and the nature of the charges was such that, even if he only believed them in the sense in which a barrister is required to believe the contents of his brief, he was obviously bound to take the line that they precluded all idea of a reconciliation.

He did take that line; and Lady Byron got her separation. She was so eager to get it that she first made abominable charges against her husband in order to win the sympathy of her own friends, and then withdrew them in order to disarm Byron’s friends. All this without informing Mrs. Leigh that her name was being mixed up in the matter, and without withdrawing from Mrs. Leigh’s society. Ultimately, no doubt, she did come to believe the story which she had first circulated and then disavowed. It is hardly to be questioned that she believed it at the time when she told it to Mrs. Beecher Stowe. But she clearly did not believe it at the time when she made use of it; and one can only attribute her final belief in it to a kind of auto-suggestion, induced by dwelling on her grievances, and akin to the process by which George IV. persuaded himself that he had taken part in the Battle of Waterloo.

That is the most plausible supposition as to the motives inspiring Lady Byron’s conduct; and there is nothing except the motives themselves which stands in need of explanation. From Lushington’s action no inference whatever is to be drawn, for it was the only action which the rules of professional etiquette left open to him; and the Byron question is not: On what evidence did Lady Byron act as she did? It is merely: Why did Lady Byron act as she did without any evidence at all? It is so small a question that, having offered a tentative solution, we may fairly leave it and glance at Mrs. Leigh’s correspondence with Hodgson.

Hodgson, as has already been mentioned was brought in by Mrs. Leigh as a peacemaker. The letters which she wrote to him before, during, and after the quarrel appear in the Life of Hodgson by his son, published in 1878. They are too long to be given at length; but their bearing on the issue, which no one who takes the trouble to read them will dispute, must be briefly stated.

In the first place they, most obviously, are not the letters of a guilty woman, or of a woman who feels herself in any way personally implicated in the dispute which she seeks to compose. Every line in them demonstrates, not merely that the writer is conscious of rectitude, but also that the writer is ignorant that she herself is, or can be, the object of sinister suspicion. They are just the flurried letters of a simple body who feels that circumstances have laid upon her shoulders a heavier load of responsibility than they can bear, but would rather be helped to bear the burden than run away from it; and it is a fair summary of them to say that they exonerate Byron by exonerating the alleged accomplice in his crime.