Lady Byron Vindicated

Here the writer proceeds to put together all the facts of Lady Byron’s case, just as an adverse lawyer would put them as against her, and for her husband.  The plea is made vigorously and ably, and with an air of indignant severity, as of an honest advocate who is thoroughly convinced that he is pleading the cause of a wronged man who has been ruined in name, shipwrecked in life, and driven to an early grave, by the arts of a bad woman,—a woman all the more horrible that her malice was disguised under the cloak of religion.

Having made an able statement of facts, adroitly leaving out ONE,[28 - This one fact is, that Lord Byron might have had an open examination in court, if he had only persisted in refusing the deed of separation.] of which he could not have been ignorant had he studied the case carefully enough to know all the others, he proceeds to sum up against the criminal thus:—

‘We would deal tenderly with the memory of Lady Byron.  Few women have been juster objects of compassion.  It would seem as if Nature and Fortune had vied with each other which should be most lavish of her gifts, and yet that some malignant power had rendered all their bounty of no effect.  Rank, beauty, wealth, and mental powers of no common order, were hers; yet they were of no avail to secure common happiness.  The spoilt child of seclusion, restraint, and parental idolatry, a fate (alike evil for both) cast her into the arms of the spoilt child of genius, passion, and the world.  What real or fancied wrongs she suffered, we may never know; but those which she inflicted are sufficiently apparent.

‘It is said that there are some poisons so subtle that they will destroy life, and yet leave no trace of their action.  The murderer who uses them may escape the vengeance of the law; but he is not the less guilty.  So the slanderer who makes no charge; who deals in hints and insinuations: who knows melancholy facts he would not willingly divulge,—things too painful to state; who forbears, expresses pity, sometimes even affection, for his victim, shrugs his shoulders, looks with

“The significant eye,
Which learns to lie with silence,—”

is far more guilty than he who tells the bold falsehood which may be met and answered, and who braves the punishment which must follow upon detection.

‘Lady Byron has been called

“The moral Clytemnestra of her lord.”

The “moral Brinvilliers” would have been a truer designation.

‘The conclusion at which we arrive is, that there is no proof whatever that Lord Byron was guilty of any act that need have caused a separation, or prevented a re-union, and that the imputations upon him rest on the vaguest conjecture; that whatever real or fancied wrongs Lady Byron may have endured are shrouded in an impenetrable mist of her own creation,—a poisonous miasma in which she enveloped the character of her husband, raised by her breath, and which her breath only could have dispersed.

“She dies and makes no sign.  O God! forgive her.”’

As we have been obliged to review accusations on Lady Byron founded on old Greek tragedy, so now we are forced to abridge a passage from a modern conversations-lexicon, that we may understand what sort of comparisons are deemed in good taste in a conservative English review, when speaking of ladies of rank in their graves.

Under the article ‘Brinvilliers,’ we find as follows:—

MARGUERITE D’AUBRAI, MARCHIONESS OF BRINVILLIERS.—The singular atrocity of this woman gives her a sort of infamous claim to notice.  She was born in Paris in 1651; being daughter of D’Aubrai, lieutenant-civil of Paris, who married her to the Marquis of Brinvilliers.  Although possessed of attractions to captivate lovers, she was for some time much attached to her husband, but at length became madly in love with a Gascon officer.  Her father imprisoned the officer in the Bastille; and, while there, he learned the art of compounding subtle and most mortal poisons; and, when he was released, he taught it to the lady, who exercised it with such success, that, in one year, her father, sister, and two brothers became her victims.  She professed the utmost tenderness for her victims, and nursed them assiduously.  On her father she is said to have made eight attempts before she succeeded.  She was very religious, and devoted to works of charity; and visited the hospitals a great deal, where it is said she tried her poisons on the sick.’

People have made loud outcries lately, both in America and England, about violating the repose of the dead.  We should like to know what they call this.  Is this, then, what they mean by respecting the dead?

Let any man imagine a leading review coming out with language equally brutal about his own mother, or any dear and revered friend.

Men of America, men of England, what do you think of this?

When Lady Byron was publicly branded with the names of the foulest ancient and foulest modern assassins, and Lord Byron’s mistress was publicly taken by the hand, and encouraged to go on and prosper in her slanders, by one of the oldest and most influential British reviews, what was said and what was done in England?

That is a question we should be glad to have answered.  Nothing was done that ever reached us across the water.

And why was nothing done?  Is this language of a kind to be passed over in silence?

Was it no offence to the house of Wentworth to attack the pure character of its late venerable head, and to brand her in her sacred grave with the name of one of the vilest of criminals?

Might there not properly have been an indignant protest of family solicitors against this insult to the person and character of the Baroness Wentworth?

If virtue went for nothing, benevolence for nothing, a long life of service to humanity for nothing, one would at least have thought, that, in aristocratic countries, rank might have had its rights to decent consideration, and its guardians to rebuke the violation of those rights.

We Americans understand little of the advantages of rank; but we did understand that it secured certain decorums to people, both while living and when in their graves.  From Lady Byron’s whole history, in life and in death, it would appear that we were mistaken.

What a life was hers!  Was ever a woman more evidently desirous of the delicate and secluded privileges of womanhood, of the sacredness of individual privacy?  Was ever a woman so rudely dragged forth, and exposed to the hardened, vulgar, and unfeeling gaze of mere curiosity?—her maiden secrets of love thrown open to be handled by roués; the sanctities of her marriage-chamber desecrated by leering satyrs; her parents and best friends traduced and slandered, till one indignant public protest was extorted from her, as by the rack,—a protest which seems yet to quiver in every word with the indignation of outraged womanly delicacy!

Then followed coarse blame and coarser comment,—blame for speaking at all, and blame for not speaking more.  One manly voice, raised for her in honourable protest, was silenced and overborne by the universal roar of ridicule and reprobation; and henceforth what refuge?  Only this remained: ‘Let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him as to a faithful Creator.’

Lady Byron turned to this refuge in silence, and filled up her life with a noble record of charities and humanities.  So pure was she, so childlike, so artless, so loving, that those who knew her best, feel, to this day, that a memorial of her is like the relic of a saint.  And could not all this preserve her grave from insult?  O England, England!

I speak in sorrow of heart to those who must have known, loved, and revered Lady Byron, and ask them, Of what were you thinking when you allowed a paper of so established literary rank as the ‘Blackwood,’ to present and earnestly recommend to our New World such a compendium of lies as the Guiccioli book?

Is the great English-speaking community, whose waves toss from Maine to California, and whose literature is yet to come back in a thousand voices to you, a thing to be so despised?

If, as the solicitors of the Wentworth family observe, you might be entitled to treat with silent contempt the slanders of a mistress against a wife, was it safe to treat with equal contempt the indorsement and recommendation of those slanders by one of your oldest and most powerful literary authorities?

No European magazine has ever had the weight and circulation in America that the ‘Blackwood’ has held.  In the days of my youth, when New England was a comparatively secluded section of the earth, the wit and genius of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ were in the mouths of men and maidens, even in our most quiet mountain-towns.  There, years ago, we saw all Lady Byron’s private affairs discussed, and felt the weight of Christopher North’s decisions against her.  Shelton Mackenzie, in his American edition, speaks of the American circulation of ‘Blackwood’ being greater than that in England.[29 - In the history of ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ prefaced to the American edition of 1854, Mackenzie says of the ‘Noctes’ papers, ‘Great as was their popularity in England it was peculiarly in America that their high merit and undoubted originality received the heartiest recognition and appreciation.  Nor is this wonderful when it is considered that for one reader of “Blackwood’s Magazine” in the old country there cannot be less than fifty in the new.’]  It was and is now reprinted monthly; and, besides that, ‘Littell’s Magazine’ reproduces all its striking articles, and they come with the weight of long established position.  From the very fact that it has long been considered the Tory organ, and the supporter of aristocratic orders, all its admissions against the character of individuals in the privileged classes have a double force.

When ‘Blackwood,’ therefore, boldly denounces a lady of high rank as a modern Brinvilliers, and no sensation is produced, and no remonstrance follows, what can people in the New World suppose, but that Lady Byron’s character was a point entirely given up; that her depravity was so well established and so fully conceded, that nothing was to be said, and that even the defenders of aristocracy were forced to admit it?

I have been blamed for speaking on this subject without consulting Lady Byron’s friends, trustees, and family.  More than ten years had elapsed since I had had any intercourse with England, and I knew none of them.  How was I to know that any of them were living?  I was astonished to learn, for the first time, by the solicitors’ letters, that there were trustees, who held in their hands all Lady Byron’s carefully prepared proofs and documents, by which this falsehood might immediately have been refuted.

If they had spoken, they might have saved all this confusion.  Even if bound by restrictions for a certain period of time, they still might have called on a Christian public to frown down such a cruel and indecent attack on the character of a noble lady who had been a benefactress to so many in England.  They might have stated that the means of wholly refuting the slanders of the ‘Blackwood’ were in their hands, and only delayed in coming forth from regard to the feelings of some in this generation.  Then might they not have announced her Life and Letters, that the public might have the same opportunity as themselves for knowing and judging Lady Byron by her own writings?

Had this been done, I had been most happy to have remained silent.  I have been astonished that any one should have supposed this speaking on my part to be anything less than it is,—the severest act of self-sacrifice that one friend can perform for another, and the most solemn and difficult tribute to justice that a human being can be called upon to render.

I have been informed that the course I have taken would be contrary to the wishes of my friend.  I think otherwise.  I know her strong sense of justice, and her reverence for truth.  Nothing ever moved her to speak to the public but an attack upon the honour of the dead.  In her statement, she says of her parents, ‘There is no other near relative to vindicate their memory from insult: I am therefore compelled to break the silence I had hoped always to have observed.’

If there was any near relative to vindicate Lady Byron’s memory, I had no evidence of the fact; and I considered the utter silence to be strong evidence to the contrary.  In all the storm of obloquy and rebuke that has raged in consequence of my speaking, I have had two unspeakable sources of joy; first, that they could not touch her; and, second, that they could not blind the all-seeing God.  It is worth being in darkness to see the stars.

It has been said that I have drawn on Lady Byron’s name greater obloquy than ever before.  I deny the charge.  Nothing fouler has been asserted of her than the charges in the ‘Blackwood,’ because nothing fouler could be asserted.  No satyr’s hoof has ever crushed this pearl deeper in the mire than the hoof of the ‘Blackwood,’ but none of them have defiled it or trodden it so deep that God cannot find it in the day ‘when he maketh up his jewels.’

I have another word, as an American, to say about the contempt shown to our great people in thus suffering the materials of history to be falsified to subserve the temporary purposes of family feeling in England.

Lord Byron belongs not properly either to the Byrons or the Wentworths.  He is not one of their family jewels to be locked up in their cases.  He belongs to the world for which he wrote, to which he appealed, and before which he dragged his reluctant, delicate wife to a publicity equal with his own: the world has, therefore, a right to judge him.

We Americans have been made accessories, after the fact, to every insult and injury that Lord Byron and the literary men of his day have heaped upon Lady Byron.  We have been betrayed into injustice and a complicity with villainy.  After Lady Byron had nobly lived down slanders in England, and died full of years and honours, the ‘Blackwood’ takes occasion to re-open the controversy by recommending a book full of slanders to a rising generation who knew nothing of the past.  What was the consequence in America?  My attention was first called to the result, not by reading the ‘Blackwood’ article, but by finding in a popular monthly magazine two long articles,—the one an enthusiastic recommendation of the Guiccioli book, and the other a lamentation over the burning of the Autobiography as a lost chapter in history.

Both articles represented Lady Byron as a cold, malignant, mean, persecuting woman, who had been her husband’s ruin.  They were so full of falsehoods and misstatements as to astonish me.  Not long after, a literary friend wrote to me, ‘Will you, can you, reconcile it to your conscience to sit still and allow that mistress so to slander that wife,—you, perhaps, the only one knowing the real facts, and able to set them forth?’

Upon this, I immediately began collecting and reading the various articles and the book, and perceived that the public of this generation were in a way of having false history created, uncontradicted, under their own eyes.

I claim for my countrymen and women, our right to true history.  For years, the popular literature has held up publicly before our eyes the facts as to this man and this woman, and called on us to praise or condemn.  Let us have truth when we are called on to judge.  It is our right.

There is no conceivable obligation on a human being greater than that of absolute justice.  It is the deepest personal injury to an honourable mind to be made, through misrepresentation, an accomplice in injustice.  When a noble name is accused, any person who possesses truth which might clear it, and withholds that truth, is guilty of a sin against human nature and the inalienable rights of justice.  I claim that I have not only a right, but an obligation, to bring in my solemn testimony upon this subject.

For years and years, the silence-policy has been tried; and what has it brought forth?  As neither word nor deed could be proved against Lady Byron, her silence has been spoken of as a monstrous, unnatural crime, ‘a poisonous miasma,’ in which she enveloped the name of her husband.

Very well; since silence is the crime, I thought I would tell the world that Lady Byron had spoken.

Christopher North, years ago, when he condemned her for speaking, said that she should speak further,—

‘She should speak, or some one for her.  One word would suffice.’

That one word has been spoken.