LADY OXFORD—BYRON’S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER

Byron’s separation from Lady Caroline Lamb, though suggested by Lady Melbourne, appears to have been negotiated by Hobhouse at the instance of Lady Bessborough. “Received a note from Lady Bessborough. Went to Byron, who agrees to go out of town,” is the entry in his Diary which reveals the part he played. A further entry relating that Lady Caroline found him and Lady Bessborough together, and charged them with looking like conspirators, adds all the confirmation needed. Byron went out of town as he had promised, stayed at Cheltenham, and presently wrote the letter in which he told Lady Caroline that he had ceased to love her. He added insult to injury, as Lady Caroline felt, by writing on notepaper bearing the arms of the Countess of Oxford.

She and Lady Oxford knew each other rather well, and had been friends. “Lady Oxford and Caroline William Lamb,” we read in one of the letters of Harriet Lady Granville, “have been engaged in a correspondence, the subject whether learning Greek purifies or inflames the passions.” The right answer to the conundrum is, perhaps, that it depends upon the learner—or else that it depends upon the teacher. Lady Oxford’s passions, at any rate, were, like Lady Caroline’s, inflammable. She was forty—the romantic age in the view of the philosophers; and she was unhappily married. Byron spoke of her to Medwin as “sacrificed, almost before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible.” A less prejudiced witness, Uvedale Price, wrote to Rogers, at the time of her death: “There could not, in all respects, be a more ill-matched pair than herself and Lord Oxford, or a stronger instance of the cruel sports of Venus or, rather, of Hymen.”

Byron was in love with her, or thought so—he was not quite clear which when he poured his confidences on the subject into Medwin’s ear. Lady Caroline’s suspicions, to that extent, were justified. The “autumnal charms”—it is he who calls them so—fascinated him for about eight months. “The autumn of a beauty like hers,” he said, “is preferable to the spring in others.” He added that he “had great difficulty in breaking with her,” and “once was on the point of going abroad with her, and narrowly escaped this folly.” How he escaped it—or why he avoided it—he does not say; but perhaps we may find a reason.

Of his intentions, at any rate, there is no room for doubt. We have no need to depend on Medwin’s evidence for the full proof is in Byron’s own letters. It is mixed up with a good deal of extraneous matter, but it is there; and a series of very brief citations will present the romance, such as it was, in outline:

Letters are dated from Presteigne on October 31, November 8, and November 16. A letter of November 22 begins, “On my return here (Cheltenham) from Lord Oxford’s.” A January letter shows Byron once again at Lord Oxford’s; and then the references to the contemplated foreign tour—letters of which there is no mistaking the significance—begin:

That is the skeleton of the romance. Such clothes as it is felt to need the imagination must provide. Byron’s position seems to have been perilously near that of a “tame cat,” though he might have preferred to call himself, then, as on a later occasion, a cavaliere servente. His excuse is that he was only twenty-five, and that a fascinating woman of forty can be very fascinating indeed, and very clever at getting her own way. Her attempt to annex Byron, though she was fifteen years his senior, may be viewed as her gambler’s throw for happiness. She threw and lost—but she lost quietly. She resembled Lady Caroline in being romantic, but she differed from her in not being “obstreperous.” There was no scandal for society to take note of, and the welkin never rang with her complaints, though she did walk about Rome displaying Byron’s portrait at her girdle.

Nor did it ring with Byron’s, who, indeed, had nothing to complain of. The few allusions to the affair which Hobhouse contributes throw very little light upon it. He notes, in one place, that Lady Oxford was “most uncommon in her talk and licentious.” He adds, on another page, the memorandum: “Got a picture of Lady Oxford from Mrs. Mee. Lord B.’s money for it.” That is all; and there are no hints to be derived from “occasional” verses. However much Lady Oxford may have pleased Byron, she did not inspire him. The period of his intimacy with her was, from the literary point of view, a singularly barren period; and the allusions cited from the letters—they are all the allusions that can be cited—are chiefly instructive because of the difference between their tone and the tone of certain other letters written very soon afterwards.There is no suggestion in them of deep sentiment. What they do suggest is—first, a young man desperately determined to go through with a desperate adventure, and very much afraid of being warned of the consequences of his folly—then a young man who, having a haunting doubt of his own sincerity, shouts to keep up his courage—finally a young man who is grateful to the circumstances, whatever they may have been, which have deflected him from a rash course, and saved him from himself. One turns a few pages, and finds Byron writing in a very different strain:

These passages are from letters to Moore. A few days before writing the last of them Byron had written to Miss Milbanke, whom he was shortly to marry:

No names are mentioned here; but certain inferences not only can, but inevitably must, be drawn. At some time towards the end of the summer of 1813, there was a crisis of Byron’s life. It did not come to a head until after Lady Oxford’s departure, and Lady Oxford had nothing whatever to do with it. The latter point not only follows from the sudden disappearance of Lady Oxford from Byron’s sphere of interest, but is specifically made in a letter (dated November 8, 1813) from Byron to his sister:

Those are the most significant of the letters, though there are others. Even if they stood alone, one would feel sure that there was a story behind them; but they do not stand alone. We have the poems to set beside them, and we have also the journal which Byron kept from November 14, 1813 till April 19, 1814. Letters, poems, and journal, read in conjunction, furnish a clue which it is impossible to mistrust. The distinction of having first so read them with sufficient care to find the clue belongs to Mr. Richard Edgcumbe.

Possibly Mr. Edgcumbe has proved just a little too much—that question will have to be faced when we come to it; but our immediate task must be to track the story along the lines which he has indicated, and see how all the mysteries connected with Byron can be solved, and all the emotional inconsistencies of his life unified, by the recollection that, of all the many passions of his life, there was only one which really mattered to him.

Many women were welcome to love him if they liked—he was a man very ready to let himself be loved; but only one woman had the power to make him suffer—and that woman was Mary Chaworth. The motto “Cherchez la femme” may, in short, in his case, be particularised. Whenever his conduct and his utterances seem, on the face of it, inexplicable, we have to look for Mary Chaworth and see her re-asserting a power which has been allowed to lapse; and we will turn to look for her now.