‘She [Mary Chaworth] was the beau-idéal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her—I say created, for I found her, like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’
It is difficult to see how Byron could have arrived at so unflattering an estimate of a woman whom he had only once seen since her marriage—at a dinner-party, when, as he has told us, he was overcome by shyness and a feeling of awkwardness! But let that pass. Byron wished the world to believe (1) that Mary Chaworth, after the separation from her husband in 1813, proposed a meeting with Byron; (2) that he declined to meet her; (3) that, after his unfortunate marriage, Mary became insane; and (4) that he found her, ‘like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’
It is quite possible, of course, that Byron may have at first refused to meet the only woman on earth whom he sincerely loved, and more than likely that Mrs. Leigh did her utmost to dissuade him from so rash a proceeding. But it is on record that Byron incautiously admitted to Medwin that he did meet Mary Chaworth after his return from Greece.[37] It will be remembered that he returned from Greece in 1811. Their intimacy had long before been broken off by Mr. John Musters; and, as we have seen, Mary, faithful to a promise which she had made to her husband, kept away from Annesley during the period (1811) when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written. It is doubtful whether they would ever again have met if her husband had shown any consideration for her feelings. But he showed her none. When, nearly forty years ago, the present writer visited Annesley, there were several people living who remembered both Mary Chaworth and her husband. These people stated that their married life, so full of grief and bitterness, was a constant source of comment both at Annesley and Newstead. The trouble was attributed to the harsh and capricious conduct, and the well-known infidelities, of one to whose kindness and affection Mary had a sacred claim. She seems to have been left for long periods at Annesley with only one companion, Miss Anne Radford, who had been brought up with her from childhood. This state of things eventually broke down, and when, in the early part of 1813, Mary could stand the strain no longer, a separation took place by mutual consent.
In the summer of that year Byron and this unhappy woman were thrown together by the merest accident, and, unfortunately for both, renewed their dangerous friendship.
Byron’s friend and biographer, Thomas Moore, took great pains to suppress every allusion to Mary Chaworth in Byron’s memoranda and letters. He faithfully kept the secret. There is nothing in Byron’s letters or journals, as revised by Moore, to show that they ever met after 1808, and yet they undoubtedly did meet in 1813, after Mary’s estrangement from her husband. That they were in constant correspondence in November of that year may be gathered from Byron’s journal, where Mary’s name is veiled by asterisks.
On November 24 he writes:
‘I am tremendously in arrear with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me: my words never compass them.’
‘I have been pondering,’ he writes on the 26th, ‘on the miseries of separation, that—oh! how seldom we see those we love! Yet we live ages in moments when met.’
Then follows, on the 27th, a clue:
‘I believe, with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood,