The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

In the second place the letters show Mrs. Leigh, ignorant, indeed, of the specific enormities with which Byron is charged, but well aware of certain circumstances which had made Byron’s marriage a dubious experiment. In the earlier letters, indeed those circumstances are only hinted at obscurely, but in the later letters the meaning of the hints is made quite clear. For instance:

“I assure you I don’t conclude hastily on this subject, and will own to you, what I would not scarcely to any other person that I HAD many fears and much anxiety founded upon many causes and circumstances of which I cannot write. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to be realised.”

That was written during the honeymoon. In letters written shortly after the honeymoon there are similar vague expressions of anxiety. It is not until we come to the letters written after the separation that we begin to get sight of the particulars; but then we light upon this significant passage:

“I am afraid to open my lips, though all I say to you I know is secure from misinterpretation. On the opinions expressed by Mr. M. I am not surprised. I have seen letters written to him which could not but give rise to such, or confirm them. If I may give you mine, it is that in his own mind there were and are recollections, fatal to his peace, and which would have prevented his being happy with any woman whose excellence equalled or approached that of Lady B., from the consciousness of being unworthy of it. Nothing could or can remedy this fatal cause but the consolations to be derived from religion, of which, alas! dear Mr. H., our beloved B. is, I fear, destitute.”

The idea that the fatal recollections here deplored are recollections of guilty acts in which the writer of the letter was a partner would be too preposterous to be treated with respect even if we did not know what the nature of those recollections was; but, as a matter of fact, a later passage in the same letter supplies the information:

“I am glad you were rather agreeably surprised in the poems.... Of course you know to whom the ‘Dream’ alludes, Mrs. C——.”

And there, of course, the truth is out. Mrs. C—— is, and can be no one else than, Mary Chaworth. The “causes too simple to be found out” had to do with Byron’s imperishable passion for the lady whom we have seen his wife calling a “cat.” Byron could not live happily with Lady Byron because he could not forget Mary Chaworth—and Lady Byron knew it. Consequently she set her heart upon obtaining a separation, and, in order to make sure of that separation, “put up” the story, suggested by Lady Caroline Lamb’s poisonous tongue. The whole business is as simple as all that; and the subject might properly be dropped at that point if it were not for Lord Lovelace’s assertion that papers in his hands demonstrated that Mrs. Leigh had “confessed.”

But the so-called confession of Augusta Leigh is like the so-called confession of Captain Dreyfus. We are told that it exists; and when our curiosity has been thus aroused we are told that it is not worth while to produce it. Augusta, says Lord Lovelace, “admitted everything in her letters of June, July, and August, 1816”; and then he goes on to say: “It is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and made clear by the correspondence of 1819 in another chapter.” But when we turn to the correspondence of 1819, we find that no confession is contained in them. The most that one can say is that, the language of the letters being sometimes enigmatic, and the subjects to which they relate being uncertain, one or two passages in them might conceivably be read as referring to a confession, if one knew that a confession had been made. Even on that hypothesis, however, they might just as easily be read as referring to something else; and the real clue to their meaning may, almost certainly, be found in a letter which Lord Lovelace prints in the chapter entitled “Some Correspondence of Augusta Byron.”

The letter[9] in question is a love letter. It begins “My dearest Love” and ends “Ever Dearest.” Lord Lovelace prints it as addressed by Lord Byron to Mrs. Leigh in May 1819. It is a letter, however, in which both the signature and the address are erased; but though there is no great reason for doubting that Byron was the writer, there is no reason whatever for believing that Mrs. Leigh was the recipient. Indeed, one has only to place it side by side with the letters which we actually know Byron to have written to Mrs. Leigh a little before May 1819, and a little afterwards, in order to be positive that she was not; and one has only to remember that Byron still sometimes wrote to Mary Chaworth, and that his correspondence passed through his sister’s hands, in order to satisfy oneself whose letter it was that Lord Lovelace found among Lord Byron’s papers. So that our conclusion must be:

1. That Lord Lovelace’s most substantial piece of evidence against Mrs. Leigh is a letter[9] which though it passed through her hands, was really written to Mary Chaworth.