THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE—HER CHARACTER AND SUBSEQUENT CAREER

“While in Ireland,” Lady Caroline Lamb told Lady Morgan, “I received letters constantly—the most tender and the most amusing.”

She received one letter in which Byron, after speaking of “a sense of duty to your husband and mother” declared that “no other in word or deed shall ever hold the place in my affections which is, and shall be, most sacred to you,” and concluded: “I was and am yours freely and most entirely, to obey, to honour, love—and fly with you when, where, and how you yourself might and may determine.” What did he mean?

Apparently he meant to let Lady Caroline down gently—to give her the right of boasting of his undying regard—and to obtain his liberty in exchange. We need not stop to consider whether the bargain would have been a fair one, for Lady Caroline did not agree to it. There were no bounds to her infatuation, and she could not bear the thought that there should be any bounds to his. But there were. “Even during our intimacy,” he told Medwin, “I was not at all constant to this fair one, and she suspected as much.” It looks as though her suspicions decided her to return to England. At all events she started, and at Dublin, received another letter to which the epithets “tender” and “amusing” were equally inapplicable.

“It was,” she told Lady Morgan, “that cruel letter I have published in ‘Glenarvon’”—the novel in which, some five years later, she gave the world her version of the liaison. The text of it, as given in ‘Glenarvon,’ is as follows:

Byron appears to have admitted to Medwin that “a part” of the letter was genuine. The rest of it—the gratuitously offensive part of it—was doubtless doctored, if not actually fabricated, by the novelist for the purposes of her art. In any case, however, quite enough was written to send Lady Caroline into a fit, from which she only recovered to renew her eccentricities. “I lost my brain,” she confesses. “I was bled, leeched; kept for a month in the filthy Dolphin Inn at Rock. On my return I was in great prostration of mind and spirit.” And then scenes followed—scene on the heels of scene. It is impossible to be quite sure of arranging them in their proper order; but that matters little.

There was a scene in Brocket Park, where Lady Caroline burnt Byron in effigy. Together with his effigy she burnt copies of his letters, keeping the originals for reference. A number of girls, attired in white, danced round the pyre, chanting a dirge which she had composed for the occasion:

“Is this Guy Faux you burn in effigy?
Why bring the Traitor here? What is Guy Faux to me?
Guy Faux betrayed his country, and his laws.
England revenged the wrong; his was a public cause.
But I have private cause to raise this flame.
Burn also those, and be their fate the same.”

And also:

“Burn, fire, burn, while wondering Boys exclaim,
And gold and trinkets glitter in the flame.
Ah! look not thus on me, so grave, so sad;
Shake not your heads, nor say the Lady’s mad.”

Et cetera.

Then there was a scene in Byron’s chambers, whither Lady Caroline pursued him in order to obtain confirmation of certain suspicions, thus described by Byron to Medwin:

After that, according to Medwin, it was agreed that, if they met, they were to meet as strangers; but Lady Caroline did not carry out her part of the agreement. “We were at a ball,” the reporter represents Byron as saying. “She came up and asked me if she might waltz. I thought it perfectly indifferent whether she waltzed or not, or with whom, and told her so, in different terms, but with much coolness. After she had finished, a scene occurred, which was in the mouths of everyone.” Fanny Kemble, however, gives a more sensational version of the story.

“Lady Caroline,” she says, “with impertinent disregard of Byron’s infirmity, asked him to waltz. He contemptuously replied, ‘I cannot, and you nor any other woman ought not.’” Whereupon, the narrator continues, Lady Caroline rushed into the dressing-room, threw up the window, and tried to throw herself out of it, exclaiming with Saint-Preux: “La roche est escarpÉe; l’eau est profonde!” Then, saved by someone who saw her intention and caught hold of her skirts, she asked for water, bit a piece out of the glass which was handed to her, and tried to stab herself with it, but was ultimately persuaded to return home and go to bed.

Fact and fancy, no doubt, are inextricably woven together in that narrative. All that is quite certain is that Lady Caroline did go home, and that her temper became so ungovernable that William Lamb, who also, in spite of his easy-going ways, had a temper, proposed a separation. The proposal was agreed to, and the family lawyer was instructed to draw up the deed. He drew it up; but when he brought it to the house to be signed, sealed, and delivered, he found Lady Caroline sitting on her husband’s knee, “feeding him,” says his biographer, “with tiny scraps of transparent bread and butter.” His professional tact bade him retire before this unexpected tableau; and the separation was postponed for twelve years.

That is practically the whole of the story, so far as Byron is concerned with it. Lady Caroline was to write him other letters to which it will be necessary to refer as we proceed; but she had now passed out of his life, even if he had not passed out of hers. Other urgent interests were springing up to occupy him; and he had once more heard the leit motif for which we always have to listen when we find his actions, his letters, and his poems perplexing us.

Society—that is to say, the women of society—blamed him for his conduct; but the blame, if it is to have any sting in it, seems to require the assumption that every woman has a right to every man’s heart if she demands it with sufficient emphasis, and that any man who refuses to honour the demand is, ipso facto, “behaving badly.” Women, perhaps, are a little more ready to make that assumption than are philosophers to allow its validity. Granting the assumption, we shall be bound to admit that Byron did treat Lady Caroline shamefully; but suppose we do not grant it—then, perhaps, our chief task will be to search for excuses for Lady Caroline herself.

The excuses to which she is entitled are those which were very obviously made for her by her husband and his mother. They did not quarrel with her, though they sometimes lost their temper with her; and—what is more to the purpose—they did not quarrel with Byron. Evidently, therefore, they held the view that Lady Caroline was responsible for Byron’s conduct—but could not be held responsible for her own. They had the doctor’s word for it that, though she was not mad, she might easily become so. If she was to be kept sane, she must be humoured. In humouring her up to a point, Byron had acted for the best. Neither a husband nor a mother-in-law could blame him for his unwillingness to go beyond that point. His proposal to fly with her may strike one as excessive; but it may perhaps be classed with the promises sometimes made to passionate children in the hope of keeping them quiet till the passion passes. There is really no reason to think that either William Lamb or Lady Melbourne regarded it in any other light.It was “really from the best motives,” Byron assured Hodgson, that “I withdrew my homage.” The best motives, as we shall perceive, were mixed with other motives; but they were doubtless there. Byron could justly speak of himself as “restoring a woman to her family, who are treating her with the greatest kindness, and with whom I am on good terms.” It was only to be expected that he would be flattered by her attentions when he was twenty-four and new to society. It was equally to be expected that he should execute a retreat when he realised that he had to do with a dÉtraquÉe whose pursuit at once threatened a scandal and made him as well as her husband look ridiculous.

The proofs that her mind was unhinged are ample. “She appears to me,” wrote Lady H. Leveson Gower to Lady G. Morpeth, “in a state very little short of insanity, and my aunt describes it as at times having been very decidedly so.” That is an example of the direct evidence; and the circumstantial evidence is even more abundant. The scene at the ball, of which Lady Caroline herself gave a spluttering account in a rambling and incoherent letter to Medwin, is only a part of it. An attempt which she made to forge Byron’s signature in order to obtain his portrait from John Murray points to the same conclusion. The inconsistent and inconsequential picture which she draws of herself in her letters and her writings affords the most conclusive testimony of all.

From the correspondence and other documents one could not possibly gather whether she preferred her husband to her lover or her lover to her husband; whether she “worshipped” Byron for three years only or throughout her life; whether her attachment to him ceased, or did not cease, after her visit, in men’s clothes, to his chambers; whether she did or did not rejoice in the unhappiness of his married life. On all these points she repeatedly contradicted herself with the excessive emphasis of the hysterical. To say that Byron’s treatment of her drove her mad would be to talk nonsense. At the most it only gave an illusion of method to her madness, and supplied the monomania for which her unbalanced mind was waiting.

William Lamb humoured her long after Byron had ceased to do so. She knew it, and, in her comparatively lucid intervals, appreciated both his forbearance and his character. “Remember,” she wrote to Lady Morgan, “the only noble fellow I ever met with is William Lamb; he is to me what Shore was to Jane Shore.” She also placed “William Lamb first” in the order of the objects of her affection; but, in the very letter in which she did so, she spoke of “Lord Byron, that dear, that angel, that misguided and misguiding Byron, whom I adore.” We must make what we can of it; but, in truth, there is nothing to be made of it except that Lady Caroline was mad. Presently she became so obviously mad that she smashed her doctor’s watch in a fit of rage and had to be placed in the charge of two female keepers.

There came a day when, riding near Brocket, she met a funeral procession, and was told that it was Byron’s. Then she fainted; and it was after that incident that her uncontrollable violence caused the long-postponed separation to be carried into effect. Some verses which she wrote on the occasion are printed among Lord Melbourne’s papers:

“Loved One! No tear is in mine eye,
Though pangs my bosom thrill,
For I have learned, when others sigh,
To suffer and be still.
Passion, and pride, and flattery strove,
They made a wreck of me;
But oh, I never ceased to love,
I never loved but thee.”

There are two other—very similar—stanzas. The inadequacy of the expression is, perhaps, the most pathetic thing about them. A child seems to be struggling to utter the emotions of a grown-up person—a clouded mind, to be striving to clear itself under the influence of a sudden shock. And the mind in truth was, at that date, very far from clear. The drinking of laudanum mixed with brandy often helped in the clouding of it; and the end was not very far removed.

The last illness began towards the end of 1827. William Lamb, when he heard of it, hurried to his wife’s side; devoted to her, and eager to humour her, in spite of everything, to the last. She was “able to converse with him and enjoy his society,” and he found her “calm, patient, and affectionate.” She died of dropsy on January 28, 1828; and William Lamb published an article consecrated to her memory in the Literary Gazette in the course of the following month. One gathers from it, reading between the lines, not only that he forgave, but that he understood. Hopes, he admitted, had been drawn from her early years which “her maturity was not destined to realise”; but he concluded: “Her manners, though somewhat eccentric, and apparently, not really, affected, had a fascination which it is difficult for any who never encountered their effect to conceive.”

All this, however, though not irrelevant, is taking us a long way from Byron, to whom it is now time to return.