In Ralph Earl of Lovelace: a
Memoir (1920) the Countess of Lovelace recalls an evening in the winter of
1899-1900: “My husband was walking up and down the room trying to ease the
fever of his soul by talking out the everlasting dilemma, how to hide the faults of
one ancestor without doing black injustice to another, how to suppress truth
without adding to a mountain of lies. I was listening for the hundredth time with
indescribable weariness, and in secret revolt as the sacrifice of his life,
at the constant waste of talents and energy in the effort to solve an insoluble
problem and at the hateful atmosphere of the miserable story which he was compelled
to have constantly in his thoughts. He wound up his complaints with ‘Oh! if I
could have peace!’” pp. 142-43.
Ralph Milbanke, second earl of
Lovelace (1839-1906) found peace by writing Astarte, the labor of his old
age, published in 1905 in an edition of 200 copies. Lovelace was the grandson of
Lord Byron and was raised by Lady Byron after the early death of his mother, Ada
Byron King, in 1852. His grandmother’s ideas about education were peculiar,
but he respected the willful old lady and upon her death in 1860 determined to
vindicate her reputation from the injuries it had received from friends and foes
alike. To that end, it was necessary for him to discover the truth about relations
between Byron, Lady Byron, and Augusta Leigh that had been the subject of rumor and
speculation for as long as he could remember. More than three decades of research
went into the writing of Astarte.
Expecting a custody battle over
Ada, Lady Byron early began gathering letters and documents to demonstrate the real
grounds of her separation from her husband even as she remained studiously silent
about the affair in public. She made common cause with Augusta Leigh, who was in an
equally ticklish situation, depending on a legacy from the poet to support her
improvident and impoverished family even as she depended on Lady Byron’s
silence to protect her reputation and position at court. The possibility that a
copy of Byron’s suppressed memoir might yet surface would have given both
women cause for concern and reason to retain documents in their possession: it was
important to Augusta Byron that she be perceived as being on good terms with Lady
Byron, and important to Lady Byron, if called upon, to be able to demonstrate her
husband’s unfitness as a father. Letters that would otherwise have been
destroyed were thus carefully laid up, Lady Byron’s in a metal box placed
under the guardianship of three trustees.
The incestuous relationship
between Lord Byron and Augusta Leigh was something of an open secret: Lady Caroline
Lamb had revealed it at the time, and of course Byron had alluded to it in his
poetry. The charge of incest was first made in print by John Fox in an essay
published in the Temple Bar in June 1869, followed almost immediately by the
revelations of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Medora Leigh whose autobiography was
posthumously published in 1869. Yet in the absence of documentary evidence people
refused to accept the unthinkable. The Murray publishing house, which had a large
financial stake in keeping Byron’s memory green, responded to Stowe’s
article and book by publishing selections from Augusta Leigh’s correspondence
in the Quarterly Review in a pair of articles by Abraham Hayward that cast
Lady Byron in a bad light. Ralph Milbanke, then Lord Wentworth, who believed in the
story of incest but despised Stowe’s betrayal of trust, redoubled his efforts
to get at the family papers in order to demonstrate that his grandmother had been
slandered by Byron’s defenders.
There began the real-life
equivalent of the story that Henry James would fictionalize in the Aspern
Papers (1888). The box was technically the property of Wentworth’s
estranged father, but access was only to be had through the quarreling trustees,
who denied it to all and sundry. Blocked in that direction, Wentworth obtained
access to other Byron material, including Byron’s correspondence with Lady
Melbourne owned by the daughter of John Cam Hobhouse, Lady Dorchester. There was a
very real possibility that documents would be destroyed or mutilated, so he made
careful copies, even copies of copies for greater security. In 1887 he summarized
what he then knew in an unpublished book, Lady Noel Byron and the Leighs.
Only after the deaths of the first earl of Lovelace and the last of the trustees in
December 1893 did Wentworth obtain possession of the long-sought-after papers. But
what to do with them?
In 1896, Lord Lovelace (as he had
since become) agreed to become editor-in-chief of the Coleridge-Prothero edition of
Byron’s works to be published by Murray, and almost immediately found himself
crosswise with the publisher: John Murray IV sought to enhance Byron’s
reputation; Lovelace, strictly concerned with family honor, sought to redeem Lady
Byron’s. Murray was willing to suppress some Byron materials to gain access
to others, but Lovelace’s ideas about control extended even to preventing
republication of Byron letters that had been printed by Thomas Moore. He was
appalled to discover copies he had lent to Murray for inspection set up in proof
and in 1899 he resigned his position as editor. Things then reverted to where they
had stood before; Murray and Prothero could and did publish the letters in their
possession, but those did not include material directly bearing on the incest
question.
This arrangement was not
satisfactory to Lovelace, who unlike Murray wanted the incest matter proven beyond
doubt. Hence his decision to compose Astarte, written to address the
“the everlasting dilemma, [of] how to hide the faults of one ancestor without
doing black injustice to another.” Astarte is a difficult, contorted
book, as much about the Earl of Lovelace as it is about his ancestors whose actions
and motives were, goodness knows, complicated enough. It was not written for public
consumption and assumes a knowledge of nineteenth century discussions of “The
Byron Mystery” that modern readers are unlikely to possess; indeed it was
written with a sovereign contempt for the broader public Murray was trying to
reach.
Lovelace devotes much of
Astarte to wreaking revenge on persons he regarded as hostile to Lady
Byron, a group that included the House of Murray and all who were ever associated
with it; not only Augusta Leigh, but Thomas Moore and Byron’s coterie of
friends and defenders. But neither does he represent Lady Byron as the saintly
victim her defenders had been wont to invoke. He knew her well and had studied her
carefully, and above all else wished to clarify the rational motives behind her
actions. To that end he goes into minute detail about what she knew, and when, and
how. On other matters he was less than forthcoming, publishing only a bare minimum
of the copious material at his disposal. Private matters ought not to be shared
with booksellers and their clientell:
Upon his [Byron’s] death, faithless and thankless informers turned to the
letters they had of his, or their notes of his conversation, for the money that
might be in them. A batch of books thus began to be shot into circulation, and to
infect a certain public with morbid curiosity. The earliest in the field made
little pretence of disinterestedness. Others lay low for a time, watching for some
more or less decent pretext. The parasites on Lord Byron who brought out books
worked upon imperfect information with little accuracy. Their insight was small;
they were wanting in good faith. The “Conversation with Lady
Blessington” was the only comparatively creditable book—but she was not
a parasite. Astarte (1921) 127-28.
Lovelace refers to R. C. Dallas,
Thomas Medwin, and Thomas Moore (who “laid low” until 1830). He
elsewhere rips into the pecuniary motivations of William Gifford, John Murray II,
and even Sir Walter Scott. Leigh Hunt, the ultimate parasite, is, oddly enough,
given a pass. The exemption extended to Lady Blessington appears to be pure
snobbery, the tacit assumption being that it took an aristocrat to understand an
aristocrat.
As intended, Astarte did
not create a great stir in the world. The incest story was, after all,
old news. Lovelace, who despised the Byron industry and commercial publishing,
promotes the idea that Byron was more aristocrat than poet in a book written in a
manner that presents formidable obstacles to semi-educated readers. His extensive
critical remarks about Byron and his associates retain a kind of interest since
Lovelace knew people who knew the Byrons and had conversed with the descendants of
others in his quest for documents. Astarte was well received by the select
few who had access to the it, among them Henry James, who had previously been given
access to the forbidden documents. James wrote a letter worthy of the occasion,
commenting:
On the one hand the miscellany is extraordinarily rich and entertaining—and
I can but admire and envy you the magnificence of your Fund, on which you so
royally draw—I mean your fund of reading and historic saturation. Likewise
it’s interesting to encounter so many vivid and dauntless personal opinions,
and so competent a defence of them. I nevertheless think I should have ventured to
contend with you on the literary connection, into which, in some places, you
expand, and am not sure, in short, that I wouldn’t rather have argued for
your bundle of precious relics wrapped in a plain white napkin—instead of in
your cloth of gold. Ralph Earl of Lovelace: a Memoir (1920) 152
It is, after all, the precious
letters and not the commentary that draws readers to Astarte. Lady Lovelace,
fifteen years after her husband’s death, generously published a second
edition (1921—the text given here) that supplies carefully transcribed copies
of over a hundred letters written by Byron, Augusta Leigh, Lady Byron, and Theresa
Villiers. (The correspondence between Byron and Lady Melville read by the Lovelaces
was still under ban.) She also reorganized the sequence of chapters, presenting
them in a more chronological sequence, and appended notes and appendices supplying
context necessary for making sense of Lovelace’s remarks. Yet the second
edition remains a challenging book; readers might find it useful to consult Lady
Lovelace’s 1920 memoir and 1921 appendices before proceeding to the book
proper—the back-story of Astarte is nearly as compelling as the
scandal it chronicles.
Apart from establishing facts in
the case, Astarte did little to resolve the controversies that first erupted
in the Spring of 1816. The letters written by the principals in the Byron
separation are often opaque, elusive, or misleading, the writers’ ostensible
motives compromised by urgent self-interest. It is thus not surprising that pro-
and anti-Isabella factions have left matters pretty much where they began. For
example, in Lord Byron’s Wife (1963) Malcolm Elwin drew upon the very
material so carefully catalogued and transcribed by Lord Lovelace to present a
damning portrait of Annabella Milbanke as the cold, manipulative woman familiar
from Byron’s satires. To that view of the matter, Astarte continues to
provide a useful qualification.
David Hill Radcliffe
