INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA LEIGH—THE ALLEGATION THAT SHE “CONFESSED”—THE PROOF THAT SHE DID NOTHING OF THE KIND

First as to the inherent probabilities:

The accusation, as elaborated by Lord Lovelace, is, it must be observed, that Byron had yielded to an unnatural passion for his sister at a period anterior to his marriage—the period covered by the Journal from which we have quoted, and by those mysteriously morbid and gloomy poems of which “The Bride of Abydos” and “Lara” are the most remarkable. This passion, according to Lord Lovelace, was the cause of the spiritual “crisis” through which poems and Journal alike prove him to have passed. When Byron writes that “The Bride” was “written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of * * *,” Lord Lovelace interprets him to mean that it was written to drive his thoughts from the recollection of Mrs. Leigh. Hers, he invites us to believe, was the “dear sacred name” which was to “rest ever unrevealed.”

That theory is not only nonsense, but arrant nonsense—obviously so to readers who are familiar with Byron’s letters, and demonstrably so to those who are not. All that can be said in favour of the view is that some of the passages in some of the poems are so obscure that they can be tortured into accord with the most preposterous hypothesis. On the other hand, while there is no direct evidence on the subject at all, there is conclusive circumstantial evidence which effectually disposes of Lord Lovelace’s calumnious assertion—evidence, happily, so simple that one almost can sum it up in a sentence.

Throughout the whole of the “crisis” in question Byron was in correspondence with Mrs. Leigh; and a great deal of the correspondence has been published. The letters are letters in which Byron takes his sister into his confidence. We find him writing to her, first about his “affairs” with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and then about his desolating passion for another lady whom we have seen reason to identify with Mary Chaworth. Nor does it matter, for the purposes of the present argument, whether that identification is correct or not. The solid fact, in any case, remains that, at the very time when Lord Lovelace represents Byron as engaged in an intrigue with Augusta Leigh, he was, in fact, writing to her to apologise for his “long silence,” and attributing that silence to trouble in connection with another lady: “It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess, and, if you do, do not tell.”

There are other letters to the same effect, but that letter should suffice. No sane man will believe Byron to have been devoured by a guilty passion for the woman to whom he confided secrets of that sort; and, if there were any disposition to entertain the belief were still harboured, it could hardly fail to be expelled by an examination of the letters which passed between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and between Mrs. Leigh and Francis Hodgson.

Mrs. Leigh had been with Lady Byron during her confinement. There had been no quarrel between them, and no suspicion or suggestion of a quarrel. When Lady Byron left Piccadilly Terrace for Kirkby Mallory, Mrs. Leigh continued, with her knowledge, and without any hint of an objection, to stay in her brother’s house. Even when Lady Byron communicated her decision not to return to her husband, she expressed neither surprise at Mrs. Leigh’s remaining there, nor desire for her departure. On the contrary, at the very time when she was insisting upon separation, and hinting at charges too awful to be preferred unless the particulars were dragged from her, she was corresponding with Mrs. Leigh, not merely on terms of ordinary politeness, but on terms of confidential intimacy and cordial affection—addressing her as “My dearest A.,” “My dearest Sis,” “My dearest Gus,” &c., &c.

A long series of these letters is printed in Mr. Murray’s latest edition of Byron’s Works. Readers who desire full particulars must be referred to them. A few sentences only need be given here, as an indication of their tone:

Some of these letters were written at a time when Lady Byron believed her husband to be mad. All of them were written at a time when she was accusing him of improper relations with her correspondent—as is established beyond dispute by her signed statement, published in “Astarte.” The excerpt printed last was written at the time when she professed to entertain both beliefs. It amounts, when analysed, to an expression of gratification that her sister-in-law, to whom she claims to be deeply attached, is in a position to continue incestuous and adulterous intercourse with a raving maniac. It is incredible, of course, that she can either have felt, or intended to express, any such gratification at any such state of things. The letter is explicable on one hypothesis, and one only: that Lady Byron herself did not really believe the story which she had told to her advisers.

We have already seen—from the wording of Lady Byron’s statement and from her correspondence with Colonel Doyle—that she had no proofs of her story. We have also seen that, when Byron’s friends tried to pin her to the story, she disavowed it. The conclusion that she did not even believe it at the time when she told it comes as a fitting climax; and it needs but little conjecture or imagination to divine her motives and give coherence to the narrative of her proceedings.

She had come to hate her husband, and had resolved to separate from him at all costs. Such hatreds are sometimes conceived by women without adequate cause, just before and just after pregnancy. One suspects that pathological explanation, though one does not know enough of the facts to insist upon it. The hatred, at any rate, was there, impelling Lady Byron to seek a separation, and she proceeded to take advice. Probably she was advised that her case was too weak to be taken into Court with confidence; and she certainly was advised that reconciliation was preferable to separation. The only way of securing the firm support of her own friends was to lay fresh facts before them.

That is the stage of the proceedings at which we are told that fresh facts came to her knowledge. But the alleged facts were only treated as facts for the purposes of argument. They were scandals—the scandals implicating Mrs. Leigh, and launched, as is believed, by Lady Caroline Lamb, who subsequently disavowed them as explicitly as Lady Byron herself. In order to make sure of her separation Lady Byron adopted those scandals and laid them before Lushington. Lushington may or may not have believed them. So long, however, as he remained in charge of the case he was bound to behave as if he did; and the nature of the charges was such that, even if he only believed them in the sense in which a barrister is required to believe the contents of his brief, he was obviously bound to take the line that they precluded all idea of a reconciliation.

He did take that line; and Lady Byron got her separation. She was so eager to get it that she first made abominable charges against her husband in order to win the sympathy of her own friends, and then withdrew them in order to disarm Byron’s friends. All this without informing Mrs. Leigh that her name was being mixed up in the matter, and without withdrawing from Mrs. Leigh’s society. Ultimately, no doubt, she did come to believe the story which she had first circulated and then disavowed. It is hardly to be questioned that she believed it at the time when she told it to Mrs. Beecher Stowe. But she clearly did not believe it at the time when she made use of it; and one can only attribute her final belief in it to a kind of auto-suggestion, induced by dwelling on her grievances, and akin to the process by which George IV. persuaded himself that he had taken part in the Battle of Waterloo.

That is the most plausible supposition as to the motives inspiring Lady Byron’s conduct; and there is nothing except the motives themselves which stands in need of explanation. From Lushington’s action no inference whatever is to be drawn, for it was the only action which the rules of professional etiquette left open to him; and the Byron question is not: On what evidence did Lady Byron act as she did? It is merely: Why did Lady Byron act as she did without any evidence at all? It is so small a question that, having offered a tentative solution, we may fairly leave it and glance at Mrs. Leigh’s correspondence with Hodgson.

Hodgson, as has already been mentioned was brought in by Mrs. Leigh as a peacemaker. The letters which she wrote to him before, during, and after the quarrel appear in the Life of Hodgson by his son, published in 1878. They are too long to be given at length; but their bearing on the issue, which no one who takes the trouble to read them will dispute, must be briefly stated.In the first place they, most obviously, are not the letters of a guilty woman, or of a woman who feels herself in any way personally implicated in the dispute which she seeks to compose. Every line in them demonstrates, not merely that the writer is conscious of rectitude, but also that the writer is ignorant that she herself is, or can be, the object of sinister suspicion. They are just the flurried letters of a simple body who feels that circumstances have laid upon her shoulders a heavier load of responsibility than they can bear, but would rather be helped to bear the burden than run away from it; and it is a fair summary of them to say that they exonerate Byron by exonerating the alleged accomplice in his crime.

In the second place the letters show Mrs. Leigh, ignorant, indeed, of the specific enormities with which Byron is charged, but well aware of certain circumstances which had made Byron’s marriage a dubious experiment. In the earlier letters, indeed those circumstances are only hinted at obscurely, but in the later letters the meaning of the hints is made quite clear. For instance:

That was written during the honeymoon. In letters written shortly after the honeymoon there are similar vague expressions of anxiety. It is not until we come to the letters written after the separation that we begin to get sight of the particulars; but then we light upon this significant passage:

The idea that the fatal recollections here deplored are recollections of guilty acts in which the writer of the letter was a partner would be too preposterous to be treated with respect even if we did not know what the nature of those recollections was; but, as a matter of fact, a later passage in the same letter supplies the information:

And there, of course, the truth is out. Mrs. C—— is, and can be no one else than, Mary Chaworth. The “causes too simple to be found out” had to do with Byron’s imperishable passion for the lady whom we have seen his wife calling a “cat.” Byron could not live happily with Lady Byron because he could not forget Mary Chaworth—and Lady Byron knew it. Consequently she set her heart upon obtaining a separation, and, in order to make sure of that separation, “put up” the story, suggested by Lady Caroline Lamb’s poisonous tongue. The whole business is as simple as all that; and the subject might properly be dropped at that point if it were not for Lord Lovelace’s assertion that papers in his hands demonstrated that Mrs. Leigh had “confessed.”

But the so-called confession of Augusta Leigh is like the so-called confession of Captain Dreyfus. We are told that it exists; and when our curiosity has been thus aroused we are told that it is not worth while to produce it. Augusta, says Lord Lovelace, “admitted everything in her letters of June, July, and August, 1816”; and then he goes on to say: “It is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and made clear by the correspondence of 1819 in another chapter.” But when we turn to the correspondence of 1819, we find that no confession is contained in them. The most that one can say is that, the language of the letters being sometimes enigmatic, and the subjects to which they relate being uncertain, one or two passages in them might conceivably be read as referring to a confession, if one knew that a confession had been made. Even on that hypothesis, however, they might just as easily be read as referring to something else; and the real clue to their meaning may, almost certainly, be found in a letter which Lord Lovelace prints in the chapter entitled “Some Correspondence of Augusta Byron.”

The letter[9] in question is a love letter. It begins “My dearest Love” and ends “Ever Dearest.” Lord Lovelace prints it as addressed by Lord Byron to Mrs. Leigh in May 1819. It is a letter, however, in which both the signature and the address are erased; but though there is no great reason for doubting that Byron was the writer, there is no reason whatever for believing that Mrs. Leigh was the recipient. Indeed, one has only to place it side by side with the letters which we actually know Byron to have written to Mrs. Leigh a little before May 1819, and a little afterwards, in order to be positive that she was not; and one has only to remember that Byron still sometimes wrote to Mary Chaworth, and that his correspondence passed through his sister’s hands, in order to satisfy oneself whose letter it was that Lord Lovelace found among Lord Byron’s papers. So that our conclusion must be:

And we may go further, and say, with confidence, not only that the alleged confession does not exist at the present time, but that it never did exist; for even that conclusion follows irresistibly from the known circumstances of the final meeting between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, at Reigate, in the presence of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, in 1851.

They had remained friends until 1830, and had then quarrelled, not about Byron, but about the appointment of a new trustee under a settlement. After that, they had ceased to see each other; and the Reigate interview, of which Robertson drew up a memorandum, was avowedly and admittedly arranged because Lady Byron desired, and expected, to receive a confession before a witness of unimpeachable integrity. Nothing is more obvious than that Lady Byron would have had no need to solicit a verbal confession in 1851 if she had succeeded in extracting a written confession in 1816; and it is common ground that, in 1851, Mrs. Leigh not only confessed nothing, but denied that she had anything to confess.

The whole story of the confession, therefore, vanishes like smoke; and one is free, at last, to quit this painful part of the subject. It was necessary to dwell on it carefully and at length on account of the sophistical cobwebs spun round it by Lord Lovelace’s awkward hands and because, while justice injoined the vindication of Lord Byron, his biographer could not let any prudish scruples or false delicacy withhold him from the task of definitely clearing the memory of Byron’s sister from the shameful aspersions cast upon it, by Byron’s grandson. But one, nevertheless, gets away from it with relief, and returns with a sense of recovered freedom to the facts of Byron’s career at the time when the storm broke about his head and drove him from the country.