Lady Byron Vindicated

‘She felt a satisfaction which her friends rejoiced in when her daughter married Lord King, at present the Earl of Lovelace, in 1835; and when grief upon grief followed, in the appearance of mortal disease in her only child, her quiet patience stood her in good stead as before.  She even found strength to appropriate the blessings of the occasion, and took comfort, as did her dying daughter, in the intimate friendship, which grew closer as the time of parting drew nigh.

‘Lady Lovelace died in 1852; and, for her few remaining years, Lady Byron was devoted to her grandchildren.  But nearer calls never lessened her interest in remoter objects.  Her mind was of the large and clear quality which could comprehend remote interests in their true proportions, and achieve each aim as perfectly as if it were the only one.  Her agents used to say that it was impossible to mistake her directions; and thus her business was usually well done.  There was no room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and sneers about the misapplication of bounty.

‘Her taste did not lie in the “Charity-Ball” direction; her funds were not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as admirable as its quantity.  Her chief aim was the extension and improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she did not administer.

‘In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular success.  For one instance among a thousand: A lady with whom she had had friendly relations some time before, and who became impoverished in a quiet way by hopeless sickness, preferred poverty with an easy conscience to a competency attended by some uncertainty about the perfect rectitude of the resource.  Lady Byron wrote to an intermediate person exactly what she thought of the case.  Whether the judgment of the sufferer was right or mistaken was nobody’s business but her own: this was the first point.  Next, a voluntary poverty could never be pitied by anybody: that was the second.  But it was painful to others to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings which attends poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting that pain.  Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighbouring bank the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent purposes; and, in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had made the money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so that the sufferer’s name need not appear at all.

‘Five and thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must make up a great amount of human happiness; but this was only one of a wide variety of methods of doing good.  It was the unconcealable magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households within the four seas.  Years ago, it was said far and wide that Lady Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was difficult to imagine how anybody could do more.

‘Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of her property while he lived, and left away from her every shilling that he could deprive her of by his will; yet she had, eventually, a large income at her command.  In the management of it, she showed the same wise consideration that marked all her practical decisions.  She resolved to spend her whole income, seeing how much the world needed help at the moment.  Her care was for the existing generation, rather than for a future one, which would have its own friends.  She usually declined trammelling herself with annual subscriptions to charities; preferring to keep her freedom from year to year, and to achieve definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to extend partial help over a large surface which she could not herself superintend.

‘It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of the public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while sorely misjudging her character.  We hear much now—and everybody hears it with pleasure—of the spread of education in “common things;” but long before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name was found for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the thing, and put it in the way of making its own name.

‘She was living at Ealing, in Middlesex, in 1834; and there she opened one of the first industrial schools in England, if not the very first.  She sent out a master to Switzerland, to be instructed in De Fellenburgh’s method.  She took, on lease, five acres of land, and spent several hundred pounds in rendering the buildings upon it fit for the purposes of the school.  A liberal education was afforded to the children of artisans and labourers during the half of the day when they were not employed in the field or garden.  The allotments were rented by the boys, who raised and sold produce, which afforded them a considerable yearly profit if they were good workmen.  Those who worked in the field earned wages; their labour being paid by the hour, according to the capability of the young labourer.  They kept their accounts of expenditure and receipts, and acquired good habits of business while learning the occupation of their lives.  Some mechanical trades were taught, as well as the arts of agriculture.

‘Part of the wisdom of the management lay in making the pupils pay.  Of one hundred pupils, half were boarders.  They paid little more than half the expenses of their maintenance, and the day-scholars paid threepence per week.  Of course, a large part of the expense was borne by Lady Byron, besides the payments she made for children who could not otherwise have entered the school.  The establishment flourished steadily till 1852, when the owner of the land required it back for building purposes.  During the eighteen years that the Ealing schools were in action, they did a world of good in the way of incitement and example.  The poor-law commissioners pointed out their merits.  Land-owners and other wealthy persons visited them, and went home and set up similar establishments.  During those years, too, Lady Byron had herself been at work in various directions to the same purpose.

‘A more extensive industrial scheme was instituted on her Leicestershire property, and not far off she opened a girls’ school and an infant school; and when a season of distress came, as such seasons are apt to befall the poor Leicestershire stocking-weavers, Lady Byron fed the children for months together, till they could resume their payments.  These schools were opened in 1840.  The next year, she built a schoolhouse on her Warwickshire property; and, five years later, she set up an iron schoolhouse on another Leicestershire estate.

‘By this time, her educational efforts were costing her several hundred pounds a year in the mere maintenance of existing establishments; but this is the smallest consideration in the case.  She has sent out tribes of boys and girls into life fit to do their part there with skill and credit and comfort.  Perhaps it is a still more important consideration, that scores of teachers and trainers have been led into their vocation, and duly prepared for it, by what they saw and learned in her schools.  As for the best and the worst of the Ealing boys, the best have, in a few cases, been received into the Battersea Training School, whence they could enter on their career as teachers to the greatest advantage; and the worst found their school a true reformatory, before reformatory schools were heard of.  At Bristol, she bought a house for a reformatory for girls; and there her friend, Miss Carpenter, faithfully and energetically carries out her own and Lady Byron’s aims, which were one and the same.

‘There would be no end if I were to catalogue the schemes of which these are a specimen.  It is of more consequence to observe that her mind was never narrowed by her own acts, as the minds of benevolent people are so apt to be.  To the last, her interest in great political movements, at home and abroad, was as vivid as ever.  She watched every step won in philosophy, every discovery in science, every token of social change and progress in every shape.  Her mind was as liberal as her heart and hand.  No diversity of opinion troubled her: she was respectful to every sort of individuality, and indulgent to all constitutional peculiarities.  It must have puzzled those who kept up the notion of her being “strait-laced” to see how indulgent she was even to Epicurean tendencies,—the remotest of all from her own.

‘But I must stop; for I do not wish my honest memorial to degenerate into panegyric.  Among her latest known acts were her gifts to the Sicilian cause, and her manifestations on behalf of the antislavery cause in the United States.  Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers, that she bequeathed a legacy to a young American to assist him under any disadvantages he might suffer as an abolitionist.

‘All these deeds were done under a heavy burden of ill health.  Before she had passed middle life, her lungs were believed to be irreparably injured by partial ossification.  She was subject to attacks so serious, that each one, for many years, was expected to be the last.  She arranged her affairs in correspondence with her liabilities: so that the same order would have been found, whether she died suddenly or after long warning.

‘She was to receive one more accession of outward greatness before she departed.  She became Baroness Wentworth in November, 1856.  This is one of the facts of her history; but it is the least interesting to us, as probably to her.  We care more to know that her last days were bright in honour, and cheered by the attachment of old friends worthy to pay the duty she deserved.  Above all, it is consoling to know that she who so long outlived her only child was blessed with the unremitting and tender care of her grand-daughter.  She died on the 16th of May, 1860.

‘The portrait of Lady Byron as she was at the time of her marriage is probably remembered by some of my readers.  It is very engaging.  Her countenance afterwards became much worn; but its expression of thoughtfulness and composure was very interesting.  Her handwriting accorded well with the character of her mind.  It was clear, elegant, and womanly.  Her manners differed with circumstances.  Her shrinking sensitiveness might embarrass one visitor; while another would be charmed with her easy, significant, and vivacious conversation.  It depended much on whom she talked with.  The abiding certainty was, that she had strength for the hardest of human trials, and the composure which belongs to strength.  For the rest, it is enough to point to her deeds, and to the mourning of her friends round the chasm which her departure has made in their life, and in the society in which it is spent.  All that could be done in the way of personal love and honour was done while she lived: it only remains now to see that her name and fame are permitted to shine forth at last in their proper light.’

We have simply to ask the reader whether a life like this was not the best, the noblest answer that a woman could make to a doubting world.

CHAPTER V.  THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON’S GRAVE

We have now brought the review of the antagonism against Lady Byron down to the period of her death.  During all this time, let the candid reader ask himself which of these two parties seems to be plotting against the other.

Which has been active, aggressive, unscrupulous? which has been silent, quiet, unoffending?  Which of the two has laboured to make a party, and to make that party active, watchful, enthusiastic?

Have we not proved that Lady Byron remained perfectly silent during Lord Byron’s life, patiently looking out from her retirement to see the waves of popular sympathy, that once bore her up, day by day retreating, while his accusations against her were resounding in his poems over the whole earth?  And after Lord Byron’s death, when all the world with one consent began to give their memorials of him, and made it appear, by their various ‘recollections of conversations,’ how incessantly he had obtruded his own version of the separation upon every listener, did she manifest any similar eagerness?

Lady Byron had seen the ‘Blackwood’ coming forward, on the first appearance of ‘Don Juan,’ to rebuke the cowardly lampoon in words eloquent with all the unperverted vigour of an honest Englishman.  Under the power of the great conspirator, she had seen that ‘Blackwood’ become the very eager recipient and chief reporter of the stories against her, and the blind admirer of her adversary.

All this time, she lost sympathy daily by being silent.  The world will embrace those who court it; it will patronise those who seek its favour; it will make parties for those who seek to make parties: but for the often accused who do not speak, who make no confidants and no parties, the world soon loses sympathy.

When at last she spoke, Christopher North says ‘she astonished the world.’  Calm, clear, courageous, exact as to time, date, and circumstance, was that first testimony, backed by the equally clear testimony of Dr. Lushington.

It showed that her secret had been kept even from her parents.  In words precise, firm, and fearless, she says, ‘If these statements on which Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly formed their opinion were false, the responsibility and the odium should rest with me only.’  Christopher North did not pretend to disbelieve this statement.  He breathed not a doubt of Lady Byron’s word.  He spoke of the crime indicated, as one which might have been foul as the grave’s corruption, unforgivable as the sin against the Holy Ghost.  He rebuked the wife for bearing this testimony, even to save the memory of her dead father and mother, and, in the same breath, declared that she ought now to go farther, and speak fully the one awful word, and then—‘a mitigated sentence, or eternal silence!’

But Lady Byron took no counsel with the world, nor with the literary men of her age.  One knight, with some small remnant of England’s old chivalry, set lance in rest for her: she saw him beaten back unhorsed, rolled in the dust, and ingloriously vanquished, and perceived that henceforth nothing but injury could come to any one who attempted to speak for her.

She turned from the judgments of man and the fond and natural hopes of human nature, to lose herself in sacred ministries to the downcast and suffering.  What nobler record for woman could there be than that which Miss Martineau has given?

Particularly to be noted in Lady Byron was her peculiar interest in reclaiming fallen women.  Among her letters to Mrs. Prof. Follen, of Cambridge, was one addressed to a society of ladies who had undertaken this difficult work.  It was full of heavenly wisdom and of a large and tolerant charity.  Fénelon truly says, it is only perfection that can tolerate imperfection; and the very purity of Lady Byron’s nature made her most forbearing and most tender towards the weak and the guilty.  This letter, with all the rest of Lady Byron’s, was returned to the hands of her executors after her death.  Its publication would greatly assist the world in understanding the peculiarities of its writer’s character.

Lady Byron passed to a higher life in 1860.[25 - Miss Martineau’s Biographical Sketches.]  After her death, I looked for the publication of her Memoir and Letters as the event that should give her the same opportunity of being known and judged by her life and writings that had been so freely accorded to Lord Byron.

She was, in her husband’s estimation, a woman of genius.  She was the friend of many of the first men and women of her times, and corresponded with them on topics of literature, morals, religion, and, above all, on the benevolent and philanthropic movements of the day, whose principles she had studied with acute observation, and in connection with which she had acquired a large experience.

The knowledge of her, necessarily diffused by such a series of letters, would have created in America a comprehension of her character, of itself sufficient to wither a thousand slanders.

Such a Memoir was contemplated.  Lady Byron’s letters to Mrs. Follen were asked for from Boston; and I was applied to by a person in England, who I have recently learned is one of the existing trustees of Lady Byron’s papers, to furnish copies of her letters to me for the purpose of a Memoir.  Before I had time to have copies made, another letter came, stating that the trustees had concluded that it was best not to publish any Memoir of Lady Byron at all.

This left the character of Lady Byron in our American world precisely where the slanders of her husband, the literature of the Noctes Club, and the unanimous verdict of May Fair as recorded by ‘Blackwood,’ had placed it.

True, Lady Byron had nobly and quietly lived down these slanders in England by deeds that made her name revered as a saint among all those who valued saintliness.

But in France and Italy, and in these United States, I have had abundant opportunity to know that Lady Byron stood judged and condemned on the testimony of her brilliant husband, and that the feeling against her had a vivacity and intensity not to be overcome by mere allusions to a virtuous life in distant England.

This is strikingly shown by one fact.  In the American edition of Moore’s ‘Life of Byron,’ by Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, Philadelphia, 1869, which I have been consulting, Lady Byron’s statement, which is found in the Appendix of Murray’s standard edition, isentirely omitted.  Every other paper is carefully preserved.  This one incident showed how the tide of sympathy was setting in this New World.  Of course, there is no stronger power than a virtuous life; but, for a virtuous life to bear testimony to the world, its details must be told, so that the world may know them.

Suppose the memoirs of Clarkson and Wilberforce had been suppressed after their death, how soon might the coming tide have wiped out the record of their bravery and philanthropy!  Suppose the lives of Francis Xavier and Henry Martyn had never been written, and we had lost the remembrance of what holy men could do and dare in the divine enthusiasm of Christian faith!  Suppose we had no Fénelon, no Book of Martyrs!

Would there not be an outcry through all the literary and artistic world if a perfect statue were allowed to remain buried for ever because some painful individual history was connected with its burial and its recovery?  But is not a noble life a greater treasure to mankind than any work of art?

We have heard much mourning over the burned Autobiography of Lord Byron, and seen it treated of in a magazine as ‘the lost chapter in history.’  The lost chapter in history is Lady Byron’s Autobiography in her life and letters; and the suppression of them is the root of this whole mischief.

We do not in this intend to censure the parties who came to this decision.

The descendants of Lady Byron revere her memory, as they have every reason to do.  That it was their desire to have a Memoir of her published, I have been informed by an individual of the highest character in England, who obtained the information directly from Lady Byron’s grandchildren.

But the trustees in whose care the papers were placed drew back on examination of them, and declared, that, as Lady Byron’s papers could not be fully published, they should regret anything that should call public attention once more to the discussion of her history.

Reviewing this long history of the way in which the literary world had treated Lady Byron, we cannot wonder that her friends should have doubted whether there was left on earth any justice, or sense that anything is due to woman as a human being with human rights.  Evidently this lesson had taken from them all faith in the moral sense of the world.  Rather than re-awaken the discussion, so unsparing, so painful, and so indelicate, which had been carried on so many years around that loved form, now sanctified by death, they sacrificed the dear pleasure of the memorials, and the interests of mankind, who have an indefeasible right to all the help that can be got from the truth of history as to the living power of virtue, and the reality of that great victory that overcometh the world.

There are thousands of poor victims suffering in sadness, discouragement, and poverty; heart-broken wives of brutal, drunken husbands; women enduring nameless wrongs and horrors which the delicacy of their sex forbids them to utter,—to whom the lovely letters lying hidden away under those seals might bring courage and hope from springs not of this world.

But though the friends of Lady Byron, perhaps from despair of their kind, from weariness of the utter injustice done her, wished to cherish her name in silence, and to confine the story of her virtues to that circle who knew her too well to ask a proof, or utter a doubt, the partisans of Lord Byron were embarrassed with no such scruple.

Lord Byron had artfully contrived during his life to place his wife in such an antagonistic position with regard to himself, that his intimate friends were forced to believe that one of the two had deliberately and wantonly injured the other.  The published statement of Lady Byron contradicted boldly and point-blank all the statement of her husband concerning the separation; so that, unless she was convicted as a false witness, he certainly was.

The best evidence of this is Christopher North’s own shocked, astonished statement, and the words of the Noctes Club.

The noble life that Lady Byron lived after this hushed every voice, and silenced even the most desperate calumny, while she was in the world.  In the face of Lady Byron as the world saw her, of what use was the talk of Clytemnestra, and the assertion that she had been a mean, deceitful conspirator against her husband’s honour in life, and stabbed his memory after death?

But when she was in her grave, when her voice and presence and good deeds no more spoke for her, and a new generation was growing up that knew her not; then was the time selected to revive the assault on her memory, and to say over her grave what none would ever have dared to say of her while living.

During these last two years, I have been gradually awakening to the evidence of a new crusade against the memory of Lady Byron, which respected no sanctity,—not even that last and most awful one of death.