Francis Henry Gribble

LADY CAROLINE LAMB

The record of Byron’s social triumphs may be outlined in a few sentences.

Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be regarded as distinct, though there were points at which they touched each other. Among men of letters his chief friends were Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, then a man verging on fifty, whose superlative dinner we have seen him refusing to eat, and Thomas Moore, who had made his acquaintance by demanding satisfaction for an alleged affront in “English Bards,” which Byron had explained away. At the same time he “got on very well,” as he tells us, with Beau Brummell and the other dandies, being one of the three men of letters who were admitted to Watiers, and was lionised in the society which we should nowadays describe as “smart.”

It has been written that the roadway opposite to his apartments was blocked by liveried footmen conveying perfumed notes. That, we may take it, is a picturesque exaggeration; but, no doubt, he received more invitations than the laws of time and space allowed him to accept—most of them, though by no means all of them, to the great Whig houses. Lady Westmorland, Lady Jersey, Lady Holland, and Lady Melbourne were the most fashionable of the hostesses who competed for the privilege of his company; and Lady Melbourne had a daughter-in-law—Lady Caroline Lamb. She also had a niece—Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke; but it is of Lady Caroline Lamb that we must speak first.

Lady Caroline was three years older than Byron. She was the daughter of the third Earl of Bessborough, and the wife of William Lamb, who, as Lord Melbourne, afterwards became Prime Minister of England. It was a matter of opinion whether she was beautiful; it was also a matter of opinion whether she was sane—doctors consulted on that branch of the subject had returned doubtful, non-committal answers. She was not exactly mad, they said, but she was of a temperament allied to madness. She must not be pressed to study, but must be allowed to run wild and do as she liked.

She had run wild, for years, reading the works of Burns, which are not written for the young, and galloping about parks on bare-backed steeds, imagining the world about her instead of realising it, and, of course, imagining it wrong. It is on record that she believed that bread-and-butter was a natural product and that horses were fed on beef; also that she divided the community into two classes—dukes and beggars—and supposed that the former would always, by some law of nature, remain wealthy, whatever they did with their money. Her charm—and she could be very charming when she liked—was that of a high-spirited, irresponsible, wilful, wayward child. She was, in short, the kind of girl whom those who loved her best would describe, in the vernacular, as “a handful.”

Lady Caroline Lamb.

“Of all the Devonshire House girls,” William Lamb had said, “that is the one for me.” That was when she was thirteen; and six years later he was still of the same opinion. He was confirmed in it when she refused his offer of marriage, proposing instead to run away with him in boy’s clothes and act as his secretary. He accepted neither his dismissal nor her alternative suggestion, but persevered in his suit until he was accepted. The next thing that happened was that Lady Caroline broke into railing accusations against the bishop who performed the marriage rites, tore her wedding dress to tatters, and had to be carried to her carriage in a fainting fit. It was not a very auspicious commencement of married life, but one which prepares us for the general reflections on marriage found in her husband’s common-place book, recently edited by Mr. Lloyd Sanders:

“The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that no man can be free or independent....”“... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the offensive in society....”

“Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control than any public affairs on which he may be engaged....”

William Lamb’s experience of married life was to be, as it were, an object lesson on those texts. At one moment Lady Caroline was to overwhelm him with doting affection; at the next to make him ridiculous. Sometimes the two moods followed each other as quickly as the thunder follows the lightning, as in the case of a scene of which the Kembles were involuntary witnesses when staying in the same hotel with the Lambs in Paris.

Husband and wife had quarrelled in their presence, and had then withdrawn to their apartment which faced the rooms which the Kembles occupied. The lamps were lighted, and the blinds were not drawn, so that the Kembles looked across the courtyard and saw what happened. William Lamb was in his arm-chair. Lady Caroline first sat on his knee, and then slid to his feet, looking up into his face with great humility. This for a few moments. Then something that William Lamb said once more disturbed Lady Caroline’s equanimity. In an instant she was on her feet, running round the room, pursued by her husband, sweeping mirrors, candlesticks, and crockery on to the floor, in a veritable whirlwind of passion; whereupon William Lamb drew the blind and the Kembles saw no more.That story may serve as a symbolic epitome of William Lamb’s married life. We shall come to many stories of the same kind as we proceed. Lady Caroline was a creature of impulse, and there was nearly always a man in the case. She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her was in love with her—both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom she boasted—and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested. Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked to afficher herself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set forth on the hoardings.

Whether she deliberately sought notoriety, or merely did what she chose to do without fear of it, remains, to this hour, an open question. All that is certain is that she did, in fact, make herself very notorious indeed, and that there was more scandal than subtlety in her attempts to monopolise Byron, to whose heart she laid siege, with all the audacity of a stage adventuress, in the presence of a large, amused, and interested audience.

It was Lady Westmorland who introduced them. She did not introduce Byron to Lady Caroline, but Lady Caroline to Byron. Already, only a few days after the appearance of “Childe Harold,” he was on his pedestal, and was not expected to descend from it, even to show deference to ladies. “He has a club-foot and bites his nails,” Rogers had told her. “If he is as ugly as Æsop I must know him,” she had answered. But now that she was brought to him, she shrank from him, whether because she was afraid, or because she wished to provoke and pique him. “I looked earnestly at him,” she told Lady Morgan, “and turned on my heel”; and she went home and wrote in her diary the impression that Byron was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

That was the first scene in the comedy. The second took place at Holland House, and the third at Melbourne House. Lady Caroline’s recollections of them were recorded in Lady Morgan’s reminiscences:

He did; and “from that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at Melbourne House.” The rest, in Lady Caroline’s opinion—at all events in one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter—was all William Lamb’s fault.

That protest, however, is wholly unjust, and only partly true. A married woman who has no sooner met a man than she arranges to dine tÊte-À-tÊte with him is hardly entitled to ascribe her flirtation to her husband’s contributory negligence. Lady Caroline not only did that, but also, in her wilful way, plunged at once into a compromising correspondence. Her very first letter to Byron, according to Rogers, “assured him that, if he was in any want of money, all her jewels were at his disposal.” In another letter of approximately the same date we find her writing: “The rose Lord Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save it; probably from regret at its fallen fortunes.”

Evidently Lady Caroline had thrown herself at Byron’s head before William Lamb guessed what was happening. Afterwards, no doubt, he knew what the rest of the world knew. But he also knew—what the rest of the world did not know, and what Lady Caroline herself only imperfectly realised—how froward and changeable were his wife’s moods, how great was the risk of hysterical explosions if those moods were crossed, what a “handful” she was, in short, and how very difficult it was to handle her, and so he left things alone.

Leaving things alone, indeed, was William Lamb’s regular formula for the solution of the problems alike of public and of private life. He believed that problems left alone tended to solve themselves, just as letters left unanswered tend to answer themselves. On the whole the principle had worked, if not ideally, yet well enough for the practical purposes of domestic life. Things had happened before, and, being left alone, had ceased to happen. In his desk lay a letter relating to some previous ebullition the particulars of which are wrapped in mystery. “I think lately, my dearest William,” Lady Caroline had written, three years before, “we have been very troublesome to each other.” It was true, and it had not mattered. The fire, if there had been a fire, had burnt itself out. The hysterics—it is not to be doubted that there were hysterics—had subsided with the passing of the occasion which had called them forth. The clouds had been dispersed, and the sun had shone again. Why should not this chapter in his domestic history repeat itself? He was very fond of his wife; he hated rows; he wished to take no risks. The best way of avoiding risks was to humour her.

So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on one side.

No one knows whether she was, in the narrow sense of the word, “safe” with him or not. Rogers thought that she was, but admitted that he did not really know. In any case she was not safe from herself, or from the tongue of scandal. She was really in love—her devotion was no passing fancy—and she did not care who knew it. Indeed she behaved as if she thought that the more people who knew it, the better. The woman who, at a ball, called upon Byron’s friend Harness—that very serious young Cantab just about to take orders—to bear witness that she was wearing no fewer than six pairs of stockings, was not likely to hide the light of a grand passion under a bushel. She did not so hide it, but proceeded, as has been said, to afficher herself as if she were inviting the attention of the world to a great spectacular entertainment. She had not known Byron a couple of months before people were beginning to talk.

Rogers, in his “Table Talk,” is still more picturesque. He tells us how, when Byron and Lady Caroline quarrelled, she used to plant herself in his (Rogers’) garden, waiting to catch him on his return home and beg him to effect a reconciliation; and he continues:

In the midst of, and in consequence of, these spectacles, Lady Melbourne decided to take Lady Caroline to Ireland. She cherished, it seems, the double design of getting her daughter-in-law out of Byron’s way and marrying Byron to her niece. Of the success of the latter scheme there will be a good deal to be said in subsequent chapters. Much was to happen, however, both to Byron and to Lady Caroline before it succeeded. They continued to correspond during Lady Caroline’s absence; and the correspondence soon reached an acute phase which resulted in a series of violent scenes.