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WELCOME TO
Byronmania
Volume one number two
continuing
the exploration of
Byron’s most “perverse passion”
The crisis of the heart in 1813 and 1814
as expressed in the letters, journals and poetry
of
The
Right Honourable
George Gordon Lord Byron
the real,
original,
Regency Romantic hero
in boots, pantaloons and many caped coat,
revolutionary,
philosopher,
athlete,
poet
born deformed,
victim of child abuse,
advocate of paederasty,
source of the Vampyre,
Old English Baron
rake,
debtor,
hounded by the press,
ostracised because of rumours of
sexual deviations and
irreligion,
abandoned by his wife,
legendary bi-sexual lover
and freedom fighter
.
Byronmania
Volume one, Number two
April19, 1998
Welcome to Byronmania’s first guest contributor, John W. Leys, author of the article
“Unacknowledged Legislators”.
John is the
leader of the Byron-maniacs who prowl the web, author of the series of sites
dedicated to the Romantic poets and friends; the Percy Bysshe Shelley Web Page,
the Lord Byron Web Page, the Unacknowledged Legislators Poetry Web Board the
Unacknowledged Legislators Chat Page and the Lord Byron Web Ring.
The Lord Byron
Web Ring can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8916/webring.html
Welcome, also, to
all Byron-maniacs.
Please submit
articles on your personal obsessions, puzzles, speculations and discoveries
about the “adorable Lord Byron” (as he was addressed by the famous courtesan
Harriette Wilson) by e-mail to anne@byronmania.com
And please feel
free to link this site if you are interested.
“ That
Perverse Passion”
In the late
summer of 1813, Lord Byron had fallen into some kind of awkward and unwelcome
love. He referred to it as “that
perverse passion” in a letter to Lady Melbourne on November 24th
1813.
He was trying to
extricate himself from this affair by the dubious technique of falling in love
with someone else.
He had almost
managed to do this at a country house party in early October. The lady of the house, Frances Webster, had
tried her best to seduce him.
A few weeks
later, the moment of truth arrived.
They were alone together at two in the morning, in his home, she lost
her nerve, dissolved in tears called on God and he “spared” her.
He was,
therefore, in the awkward position of being in an embarrassing but
unconsummated involvement with the wife of his good friend, Wedderburn Webster.
He believed he
would probably have to fight a duel with him, but he contemplated it with
resignation. He intended to hold his
fire and realized he might be killed.
He was also considering having to elope with Frances, a woman that he
described as being “measured for a new Bible once a quarter” – not exactly his
type.
This situation
was considered to be an improvement over the “scrape” of the summer which must
have been truly “perverse”.
Byron’s poems
“The Giaour” “The Bride of Abydos” and
“The Corsair” (his most popular and successful works at the time) were
all written under the influence of this emotional stress, which makes it of
literary as well as of biographical interest.
Most scholars
accept that this inappropriate
relationship was with his half-sister, Augusta Byron Leigh. She was married to their cousin, George
Leigh, whose mother, Frances Byron Leigh, had been the sister of their father
“Mad Jack” Byron. Byron and Augusta had
not been close as children, having been raised in different parts of the
country. Even though Byron was a Lord
he was not as socially prominent as his sister, because her mother had been a
countess and she had been raised by her grandmother, Lady Holderness. She was close to the Royal family, which
Byron and all other fashionably republican young men detested as “tyrants”.
There are,
however, other possible candidates for the identity of Byron’s perverse passion
of the summer of 1813.
This edition of Byronmania
will present other
women, inappropriate in various ways and possible “perverse” as passions, who
were in Byron’s life in the late summer of 1813.
They were all named ‘Charlotte’.
Anne Ridsdale Mott
April 19, 1998
Byron by Sanders about 1813
“ Byron’s Charlottes”
Augusta Leigh
attempted, in the
summer of 1814, to arrange her brother’s marriage to her friend, Lady Charlotte
Leveson Gower. [i]
In a letter to
Augusta written on June 18, describing having finally met her, Byron refers to Rogers introducing him to Lady
Charlotte “up comes Rogers with your Ch.e[Charlotte]”
Your Charlotte? Who was Byron’s Charlotte?
In her notes
explaining why she left him in 1816, Byron’s wife Annabella recorded that Byron
had told her that one day his former
mistress, Lady Oxford, had surprised him making love with her daughter, Charlotte Harley.[ii]
Byron had been
living as a guest of the family at their country estate at Eywood. His three months there, making love,
reading, discussing politics and playing with the children were among the
happiest in his life. Charlotte was very pretty and engaging — and eleven years old.
Byron mentions
her in his letters to Lady Melbourne
from Eywood, on April 5, 1813, “ Charlotte
Harley... I shall probably marry when she is old enough and bad enough to be
made into a modern wife” and
two weeks later, “I am very busy
educating my future wife”[iii]
If Byron had been “educating” her in the ways of
love, he would certainly have
not been welcome on the family trip to
Sicily in June. This might have been
the impetus for the
family’s removal from England without him.
A bitter jealousy it would have been for Lady Oxford, at the age of forty to share her lover with
her child.
To Annabella
Byron’s satisfaction and justification, this added pedophilia to the list of
Byron’s deviations, enhancing his reputation as a monster and providing more
evidence to reinforce her carefully crafted image as a saint delivered from
corruption.
But, in 1813,
there was probably another Charlotte in Byron’s life, a very mysterious relationship, and inappropriate in its’ own
way.
In a letter to
her confidante and only intimate
friend, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, on October 28, 1812, Princess Charlotte, Heiress Presumptive, daughter of the Prince Regent,
had remarked, “ I have seen a great deal of Lord Byron lately”. [iv]
Even though Margaret Mercer Elphinstone was
one of his friends, in the voluminous
collection of writings by and
about Byron there is
never any mention of his having met Princess Charlotte. Now, how could this be?
Princess
Charlotte is the forgotten princess of British history. Her grandfather, George III, was insane. Her father George, the Prince Regent, who ruled in his father’s name, was not much more mentally stable. He had married, in 1785, an eminently respectable Catholic widow, Mrs. Fitzherbert, in a
religious ceremony, as she had refused to become his mistress, and because he loved her to
distraction. This was not considered a
legal marriage, however, and ten years later, he was formally married to Princess Caroline
of Brunswick. They detested each other.
After the birth
of their daughter, Charlotte, in January 1796, they separated and the Prince
went back to his morganatic wife. There
were no more legitimate children.
Charlotte, like
most children of broken homes, was torn in her loyalties. Her mother was liberal and supported Whig
policies. Like all young and fashionable people, so did Charlotte. The Whigs,
the opposition in parliament, returned the favour and supported the Princesses
in their struggles with the rest of the Royal
family.
The Prince of
Wales had, himself, been a Whig,
but, in February, 1812, he repudiated the party in order to get Tory government
support for his becoming
Regent with Unrestricted Powers.
At a party on
February 13th, 1812, the Princess
Charlotte had burst into tears at hearing about her father’s change of
politics. On Saturday March 7, an anonymous and scandalous poem
about it appeared in the Morning Chronicle newspaper entitled “Sympathetic Address to a Young
Lady”. [v]
In the autumn of
1812, Byron was living at Cheltenham, taking
the waters and recovering from ‘a smart attack of the stone’ in the
kidney. In the second week of October, Byron spent time at Middleton, the
country home of Lady Jersey, a close friend of his and of Princess Charlotte. This week was
frequently referred to later, in a joking
way, by Byron in his letters to Lady Melbourne, as she had been there also, as
a very “proper” time.
the
week of immaculate memory last autumn at Middleton ... (where the beauties
certainly did not belong to the landscape ) …[vi]
although the recollection of my visit there
will always retain it’s “proper” preeminence nor can I possibly pronounce where
all was “proper” who was the “properest” but I am sure no one can regret the
general propriety half so much as I do[vii]
This semms to
indicate that there was someone at Middleton in October 1812, that Byron was
attracted to, but with whom he had to behave in a “proper” manner. This “proper” and “immaculate” behaviour was
evidently sufficiently frustrating that it became a private joke with Lady
Melbourne. On November 6th
1812, Byron wrote a parenthesis in a letter to Lady Melbourne
At
M[iddleton]- & before - my memory really fails me - I never laughed at P -
(by the bye this is an initial which might puzzle posterity when our
correspondence bursts forth in the 20th century) [viii]
Well, it
certainly puzzles me!
It was a common practice to use initials in correspondence to
obscure the identity of people being discussed because letters were frequently
opened and read by servants, and Byron and Lady Melbourne knew that Caroline
Lamb had paid servants to spy on Byron and open his letters. Why would a “P” puzzle posterity unless it
had some historical meaning? This quote
also makes it clear that Byron expected his correspondence to be read in the 20th
century and, as he wrote, was editing it with that in mind.
On December 27th,
1812, Byron wrote to Lady Melbourne
I know
very little of the P’s party and less of her publication (if it be hers) &
am not at all in ye. secret, but I am
aware that the advice given her by the most judicious of her “ little Senate”
has been to remain quiet & leave all to the P[rincessl C[harlotte] - I have
heard nothing of the thing you mention except in ye papers… I by no means
consider myself as attached to her or any party, though I certainly should
support her interest... [ix]
It would seem
from the context here that “P” is the Princess of Wales. The “publication” referred to was a release
to the press of the Princesses’s side of the family squabbles, several of which appeared during these
years. This is unusual, as the accepted
abbreviation for “Princess” was “Pss”.
Charlotte was
allowed to visit her mother at Montague House, Blackheath, once every two weeks on weekends, and socialize
with her friends at dinners and soirees.
When Byron was in his relationship
with Lady Oxford, as she was a close friend of the Princess of Wales, he would have been there. The Princess of Wales, of enthusiastic sexuality herself,
encouraged her daughter in romantic escapades. She had shut her up in a bedroom with a Lieutenant
of dragoons when she was sixteen, telling
the young people to enjoy themselves.
Not surprisingly, the little Princess was not trusted by her father. She was watched by spying
Ladies in Waiting and her letters were opened.
On December 8th, 1812, from her “prison” at
Windsor, Princess Charlotte asked Margaret Mercer Elphinstone to put ‘a
little cross in the corner
‘ of the wrapper of her letters as a secret sign to help her recognize
which letters were from her. [x]
Crosses seem to have been very popular
secret signs, as Byron began to use them extensively in his correspondence in
1813 and 1814.
Princess
Charlotte did something in the summer of 1813 that enraged her father. He removed her from London, refused to allow
her to see Margaret Mercer and more or less imprisoned her at Windsor
Castle. In a letter to Margaret, Charlotte
refers to the fact that part of her father’s anger was caused by her too frequent visits to the portraitist,
Sanders, and the presence of Lady Jersey in his studio.
There are at least two portraits of Byron by
Sanders. One is the full size one owned
by the Queen, of Byron and his servant Robert Rushton landing from a boat,
painted in 1810, before he went to Greece, and the other is a beautiful
miniature painted in 1812 or 1813.
In this
miniature, Byron is wearing a heavy fur trimmed overcoat called a “pelisse” one
of the three that he had bought at great expense in 1812.[xi]
So Byron may also have been at Sander’s studios in London when Charlotte was
there.
It would be a
convenient place for a carefully chaperoned Princess to meet “friends” her
father did not consider socially appropriate. Of course, Lady Jersey was one of
Byron’s closest friends.
A letter written
by Charlotte’s mother, the Princess of Wales, refers to having had to comfort
Lady Oxford one evening after an emotional scene at one of the parties. She reported that poor Lady Oxford was in
tears and very upset with Lord Byron who was treating her badly.
Perhaps Annabella
misunderstood. Byron may have been paying court to another Charlotte when Lady
Oxford caught him.
The Princess wrote to her friend, Margaret on
Wednesday, December 1,
1813.
I have
got Lord Byron’s Bride of Abydos & have already read it through twice I am quite captivated by it & think
it quite equal to his Giaour. It is
not a fragment, which. makes
it more interesting I think. Pray get
it or let me send it you, & tell me if you do not admire the lines, the story and the poetry.
. . You will think me a little frantic perhaps, but this is
just now my rage. [xii]
The ”Bride of
Abydos” was not released until Thursday, December 2, 1813, so she must have received an advance copy. On November 22, Byron sent John Murray a
list of people who were to receive advance copies – Charlotte’s name was not on
the list.
The poem is the
story of a lovely young princess, about to be married off by her tyrant father,
who languishes in a castle tower until rescued by a heroic lover who dies
defending her.
But Byron did not
mention knowing the Princess.
More in the next edition of Byronmania