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Teresa’s Conjecture:
The Model for Eleanor in
“The Lament of Tasso”
In the first volume of this
e-journal I presented a case for the possibility of a romance between Byron and
Charlotte, the Princess of Wales between 1813 and 1815.
Although the Princess
mentions Byron and his poetry several times in letters to their mutual friend,
Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, there is no record in any of Byron’s letters or
journals of his having met the Princess or any mention of her before the report
of her death in childbirth in 1817 reached him in Venice. She does,
intriguingly, appear at the climax of his autobiographical poem, Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage. She appears in the poem in stanza 167, as a spirit rising
from the abyss. A few stanzas later,
speaking as the poet, he says that he wishes that:
. . . the Desert were my dwelling
place,
With one fair Spirit for my
minister
That I might all forget the human
race,
And, hating no one, love but only her[i]
There had been a set
of oddly concurrent circumstances in the lives of Byron and Princess Charlotte
including, for each of them, a mysterious love affair. Historians and biographers have not
conclusively determined either who it was that Byron loved in 1813-1814 or who
was Charlotte’s love at that time. It
was rumoured to be the Duke of Devonshire, her cousin the Duke of Cumberland or
Prince Frederick of Prussia. Whoever it was, he had given the Princess a ring
with a heart shaped turquoise that she treasured.[ii]
There is one more
piece to this puzzle after the poetic reference to the Princess by Byron in
April 1817, a suggestive remark made years later in a letter. This was in Italian and written two years
after poor Princess Charlotte, with her still born son, was in her grave.
Byron had left
England in April 1816 to live the rest of his life in warmer and more
comfortable lands. Whoever his “perverse
passion” of the summer of 1813 had been, he had left that love behind with
all others in the collapse of his fortunes and family life.
His older half
sister, Augusta Leigh, assumed to have been that lover by many contemporaries
and later biographers, was increasingly under the control of his wife,
Annabella, Lady Byron, from whom he was legally separated. She had agreed to show all Byron’s letters
to Annabella and had finally acquiesced in her jealous demand that she not
receive him if he ever returned to England.
In Italy, Byron at
first settled down into a comfortable and convenient relationship with the wife
of his landlord but soon expanded his sexual activities to the point of
dissipation. After a year or two of
living as an embodiment of Don Juan, he was disillusioned. He wrote one of his most memorable short
poems to Tom Moore about the state of his psyche on February 28th,
1817:
So, we’ll go no more a’roving
So late into the night
Though the heart be still as
loving
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears it’s
sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to
breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for
loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a’roving
By the light of the moon.[iii]
Yet, he roved
on.
Just as he had become
utterly weary of this life he met the Contessa Teresa Giucciolli, a nineteen
year old, newly married beauty with a husband nearing sixty. She was on the look out for a lover. A ‘cavaliere servente’ was an accepted, even
an essential attribute of a high born Italian lady. As he put it in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse on the 6th
of April 1819, a week after meeting her. “I have hopes Sir – hopes. What shall I do ! I am in love - and tired of promiscuous concubinage -
& have now an opportunity of settling for life.” [iv]
He had found his last
attachment.
On June 15th
1819, Byron, now most deeply in love, answered a letter from Teresa. He loved her, of course, for her voluptuous
beauty, but also for her educated interest in poets and poetry.
My love: I speak of Love and you
reply with “Tasso” – I write about you and you ask me about Eleanor.
If you want to make me to become more crazy than him - I assure you that you
have the chance of succeeding. In fact
my Dear your research seems superfluous, you know my story at least in part -
and even without this you can imagine that in order to describe strong passions
one must have experienced them. One of
these days... when we are alone - I will tell you in person whether or not your
conjecture about the original of the portrait is based on truth... answering
your question if E[leanor] was the etc. etc.[v][vi]
In Byron’s “The Lament of
Tasso”, that Teresa had read in translation, Tasso addresses the woman he
loves from his cell in a mad-house. He
had been committed to it by the Duke of Ferrara because he loved the Princess
Eleanor. He is resigned to his fate
because: “ A Princess was no love mate for a Bard”.
Byron
expresses the poet’s loneliness and desolation that a socially inappropriate
love had separated him from society and his family. He refuses, however to disclose his love or to repudiate it.
Byron, writing his letter in
Italian, wrote “la etc. etc.”, for “the etc. etc” If Teresa had asked about his
wife or his sister he would have written “mia etc etc”. Why couldn’t he answer her question in
writing? If he had taken (unalike as the circumstances of the relationships
were) Lady Frances Webster or Lady Oxford or Lady Caroline Lamb as model for
Eleanor why not write about it to Teresa in Italian, in 1819? What could require that level of
circumspection? Frances Webster was the object of scandal as Wellington’s
mistress, Lady Oxford wore Byron’s miniature around her neck and Caroline Lamb
had written Glenarvon. Who could
it have been whose love separated Byron from society yet required complete
secrecy? If it was Augusta, would he discuss it with Teresa?
What was Teresa’s conjecture
about the identity of the woman whose love, inappropriate and devastating, had
been the model in Byron’s life for the love of Tasso’s Lament? He wrote to her
“you know my story at least in part”.
What had he told her? Byron
didn’t admit, in writing, who had been Princess Eleanor’s model. Teresa’s letter is lost, and with it
her question, which he answered in person, so we can only guess - and sigh.
The Royal scandal of 1813, if
there was one, remains Byron’s secret.
I was indeed delirious in my
heart
To lift my love so lofty as thou
art;[vii]
That thou wert beautiful and I
not blind,
Hath been the sin which shuts me
from mankind;[viii]
And yet my love without ambition
grew;
I knew thy state, my station, and
I knew
A Princess was no love mate for a
bard
I told it not, I breathed it not,
it was
Sufficient to its self, its own
reward[ix]
The last words are
Byron’s:
. . . you know my story at least in part - and even without
this you can imagine that in order to describe strong passions one must have
experienced them[x]
By the bye - - - the
Princess’s name was Charlotte Augusta.
References
Aspinall,
A. 1949. Letters of Princess Charlotte;
1811 – 1817, Home and Van Thal: London
Byron.
“The Lament of Tasso”
-------
“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
Marchand,
L. A. 1973-1979 Byron’s Letters and
Journals, Vols. 5,6. Murray: London