Lady Byron Vindicated

Let us consider the probability of this question.

If Lady Byron were such a woman, and wished to ruin her husband’s reputation in order to save her own, and, being perfectly unscrupulous, had circulated against him a story of unnatural crime which had no proofs, how came two of the first lawyers of England to assume the responsibility of offering to present her case in open court?  How came her husband, if he knew himself guiltless, to shrink from that public investigation which must have demonstrated his innocence?  Most astonishing of all, when he fled from trial, and the report got abroad against him in England, and was believed even by his own relations, why did not his wife avail herself of the moment to complete her victory?  If at that moment she had publicly broken with Mrs. Leigh, she might have confirmed every rumour.  Did she do it? and why not?  According to the ‘Blackwood,’ we have here a woman who has made up a frightful story to ruin her husband’s reputation, yet who takes every pains afterwards to prevent its being ruined.  She fails to do the very thing she undertakes; and for years after, rather than injure him, she loses public sympathy, and, by sealing the lips of her legal counsel, deprives herself of the advantage of their testimony.

Moreover, if a desire for revenge could have been excited in her, it would have been provoked by the first publication of the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ when she felt that Byron was attacking her before the world.  Yet we have Lady Anne Barnard’s testimony, that, at this time, she was so far from wishing to injure him, that all her communications were guarded by cautious secrecy.  At this time, also, she had a strong party in England, to whom she could have appealed.  Again: when ‘Don Juan’ was first printed, it excited a violent re-action against Lord Byron.  Had his wife chosen then to accuse him, and display the evidence she had shown to her counsel, there is little doubt that all the world would have stood with her; but she did not.  After his death, when she spoke at last, there seems little doubt from the strength of Dr. Lushington’s language, that Lady Byron had a very strong case, and that, had she been willing, her counsel could have told much more than he did.  She might then have told her whole story, and been believed.  Her word was believed by Christopher North, and accepted as proof that Byron had been a great criminal.  Had revenge been her motive, she could have spoken the ONE WORD more that North called for.

The ‘Quarterly’ asks why she waited till everybody concerned was dead.  There is an obvious answer.  Because, while there was anybody living to whom the testimony would have been utterly destructive, there were the best reasons for withholding it.  When all were gone from earth, and she herself was in constant expectation of passing away, there was a reason, and a proper one, why she should speak.  By nature and principle truthful, she had had the opportunity of silently watching the operation of a permitted lie upon a whole generation.  She had been placed in a position in which it was necessary, by silence, to allow the spread and propagation through society of a radical falsehood.  Lord Byron’s life, fame, and genius had all struck their roots into this lie, been nourished by it, and had derived thence a poisonous power.

In reading this history, it will be remarked that he pleaded his personal misfortunes in his marriage as excuses for every offence against morality, and that the literary world of England accepted the plea, and tolerated and justified the crimes.  Never before, in England, had adultery been spoken of in so respectful a manner, and an adulteress openly praised and fêted, and obscene language and licentious images publicly tolerated; and all on the plea of a man’s private misfortunes.

There was, therefore, great force in the suggestion made to Lady Byron, that she owed a testimony in this case to truth and justice, irrespective of any personal considerations.  There is no more real reason for allowing the spread of a hurtful falsehood that affects ourselves than for allowing one that affects our neighbour.  This falsehood had corrupted the literature and morals of both England and America, and led to the public toleration, by respectable authorities, of forms of vice at first indignantly rejected.  The question was, Was this falsehood to go on corrupting literature as long as history lasted?  Had the world no right to true history?  Had she who possessed the truth no responsibility to the world?  Was not a final silence a confirmation of a lie with all its consequences?

This testimony of Lady Byron, so far from being thrown out altogether, as the ‘Quarterly’ proposes, has a peculiar and specific value from the great forbearance and reticence which characterised the greater part of her life.

The testimony of a person who has shown in every action perfect friendliness to another comes with the more weight on that account.  Testimony extorted by conscience from a parent against a child, or a wife against a husband, where all the other actions of the life prove the existence of kind feeling, is held to be the strongest form of evidence.

The fact that Lady Byron, under the severest temptations and the bitterest insults and injuries, withheld every word by which Lord Byron could be criminated, so long as he and his sister were living, is strong evidence, that, when she did speak, it was not under the influence of ill-will, but of pure conscientious convictions; and the fullest weight ought, therefore, to be given to her testimony.

We are asked now why she ever spoke at all.  The fact that her story is known to several persons in England is brought up as if it were a crime.  To this we answer, Lady Byron had an undoubted moral right to have exposed the whole story in a public court in 1816, and thus cut herself loose from her husband by a divorce.  For the sake of saving her husband and sister from destruction, she waived this right to self-justification, and stood for years a silent sufferer under calumny and misrepresentation.  She desired nothing but to retire from the whole subject; to be permitted to enjoy with her child the peace and seclusion that belong to her sex.  Her husband made her, through his life and after his death, a subject of such constant discussion, that she must either abandon the current literature of her day, or run the risk of reading more or less about herself in almost every magazine of her time.  Conversations with Lord Byron, notes of interviews with Lord Byron, journals of time spent with Lord Byron, were constantly spread before the public.  Leigh Hunt, Galt, Medwin, Trelawney, Lady Blessington, Dr. Kennedy, and Thomas Moore, all poured forth their memorials; and in all she figured prominently.  All these had their tribes of reviewers and critics, who also discussed her.  The profound mystery of her silence seemed constantly to provoke inquiry.  People could not forgive her for not speaking.  Her privacy, retirement, and silence were set down as coldness, haughtiness, and contempt of human sympathy.  She was constantly challenged to say something: as, for example, in the ‘Noctes’ of November 1825, six months after Byron’s death, Christopher North says, speaking of the burning of the Autobiography,—

‘I think, since the Memoir was burned by these people, these people are bound to put us in possession of the best evidence they still have the power of producing, in order that we may come to a just conclusion as to a subject upon which, by their act, at least, as much as by any other people’s act, we are compelled to consider it our duty to make up our deliberate opinion,—deliberate and decisive.  Woe be to those who provoke this curiosity, and will not allay it!  Woe be to them! say I.  Woe to them! says the world.’

When Lady Byron published her statement, which certainly seemed called for by this language, Christopher North blamed her for doing it, and then again said that she ought to go on and tell the whole story.  If she was thus adjured to speak, blamed for speaking, and adjured to speak further, all in one breath, by public prints, there is reason to think that there could not have come less solicitation from private sources,—from friends who had access to her at all hours, whom she loved, by whom she was beloved, and to whom her refusal to explain might seem a breach of friendship.  Yet there is no evidence on record, that we have seen, that she ever had other confidant than her legal counsel, till after all the actors in the events were in their graves, and the daughter, for whose sake largely the secret was guarded, had followed them.

Now, does anyone claim, that, because a woman has sacrificed for twenty years all cravings for human sympathy, and all possibility of perfectly free and unconstrained intercourse with her friends, that she is obliged to go on bearing this same lonely burden to the end of her days?

Let anyone imagine the frightful constraint and solitude implied in this sentence.  Let anyone, too, think of its painful complications in life.  The roots of a falsehood are far-reaching.  Conduct that can only be explained by criminating another must often seem unreasonable and unaccountable; and the most truthful person, who feels bound to keep silence regarding a radical lie of another, must often be placed in positions most trying to conscientiousness.  The great merit of ‘Caleb Williams’ as a novel consists in its philosophical analysis of the utter helplessness of an innocent person who agrees to keep the secret of a guilty one.  One sees there how that necessity of silence produces all the effect of falsehood on his part, and deprives him of the confidence and sympathy of those with whom he would take refuge.

For years, this unnatural life was forced on Lady Byron, involving her as in a network, even in her dearest family relations.

That, when all the parties were dead, Lady Byron should allow herself the sympathy of a circle of intimate friends, is something so perfectly proper and natural, that we cannot but wonder that her conduct in this respect has ever been called in question.  If it was her right to have had a public exposé in 1816, it was certainly her right to show to her own intimate circle the secret of her life when all the principal actors were passed from earth.

The ‘Quarterly’ speaks as if, by thus waiting, she deprived Lord Byron of the testimony of living witnesses.  But there were as many witnesses and partisans dead on her side as on his.  Lady Milbanke and Sir Ralph, Sir Samuel Romilly and Lady Anne Barnard were as much dead as Hobhouse, Moore, and others of Byron’s partisans.

The ‘Quarterly’ speaks of Lady Byron as ‘running round, and repeating her story to people mostly below her own rank in life.’

To those who know the personal dignity of Lady Byron’s manners, represented and dwelt on by her husband in his conversations with Lady Blessington, this coarse and vulgar attack only proves the poverty of a cause which can defend itself by no better weapons.

Lord Byron speaks of his wife as ‘highly cultivated;’ as having ‘a degree of self-control I never saw equalled.’

‘I am certain,’ he says, ‘that Lady Byron’s first idea is what is due to herself: I mean that it is the undeviating rule of her conduct . . . .  Now, my besetting sin is a want of that self-respect which she has in excess . . . .  But, though I accuse Lady Byron of an excess of self-respect, I must, in candour, admit, that, if any person ever had excuse for an extraordinary portion of it, she has; as, in all her thoughts, words, and actions, she is the most decorous woman that ever existed.’

This is the kind of woman who has lately been accused in the public prints as a babbler of secrets and a gossip in regard to her private difficulties with children, grandchildren, and servants.  It is a fair specimen of the justice that has generally been meted out to Lady Byron.

In 1836, she was accused of having made a confidant of Campbell, on the strength of having written him a note declining to give him any information, or answer any questions.  In July, 1869, she was denounced by ‘Blackwood’ as a Madame Brinvilliers for keeping such perfect silence on the matter of her husband’s character; and in the last ‘Quarterly’ she is spoken of as a gossip ‘running round, and repeating her story to people below her in rank.’

While we are upon this subject, we have a suggestion to make.  John Stuart Mill says that utter self-abnegation has been preached to women as a peculiarly feminine virtue.  It is true; but there is a moral limit to the value of self-abnegation.

It is a fair question for the moralist, whether it is right and proper wholly to ignore one’s personal claims to justice.  The teachings of the Saviour give us warrant for submitting to personal injuries; but both the Saviour and St. Paul manifested bravery in denying false accusations, and asserting innocence.

Lady Byron was falsely accused of having ruined the man of his generation, and caused all his vices and crimes, and all their evil effects on society.  She submitted to the accusation for a certain number of years for reasons which commended themselves to her conscience; but when all the personal considerations were removed, and she was about passing from life, it was right, it was just, it was strictly in accordance with the philosophical and ethical character of her mind, and with her habit of considering all things in their widest relations to the good of mankind, that she should give serious attention and consideration to the last duty which she might owe to abstract truth and justice in her generation.

In her letter on the religious state of England, we find her advocating an absolute frankness in all religious parties.  She would have all openly confess those doubts, which, from the best of motives, are usually suppressed; and believed, that, as a result of such perfect truthfulness, a wider love would prevail among Christians.  This shows the strength of her conviction of the power and the importance of absolute truth; and shows, therefore, that her doubts and conscientious inquiries respecting her duty on this subject are exactly what might have been expected from a person of her character and principles.

Having thus shown that Lady Byron’s testimony is the testimony of a woman of strong and sound mind, that it was not given from malice nor ill-will, that it was given at a proper time and in a proper manner, and for a purpose in accordance with the most elevated moral views, and that it is coincident with all the established facts of this history, and furnishes a perfect solution of every mystery of the case, we think we shall carry the reader with us in saying that it is to be received as absolute truth.

This conviction we arrive at while as yet we are deprived of the statement prepared by Lady Byron, and the proof by which she expected to sustain it; both which, as we understand, are now in the hands of her trustees.

CHAPTER VI.  PHYSIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

The credibility of the accusation of the unnatural crime charged to Lord Byron is greater than if charged to most men.  He was born of parents both of whom were remarkable for perfectly ungoverned passions.  There appears to be historical evidence that he was speaking literal truth when he says to Medwin of his father,—

‘He would have made a bad hero for Hannah More.  He ran out three fortunes, and married or ran away with three women . . .  He seemed born for his own ruin and that of the other sex.  He began by seducing Lady Carmarthen, and spent her four thousand pounds; and, not content with one adventure of this kind, afterwards eloped with Miss Gordon.’—Medwin’s Conversations, p.31.

Lady Carmarthen here spoken of was the mother of Mrs. Leigh.  Miss Gordon became Lord Byron’s mother.

By his own account, and that of Moore, she was a passionate, ungoverned, though affectionate woman.  Lord Byron says to Medwin,—

‘I lost my father when I was only six years of age.  My mother, when she was in a passion with me (and I gave her cause enough), used to say, “O you little dog! you are a Byron all over; you are as bad as your father!”’—Ibid., p.37.

By all the accounts of his childhood and early youth, it is made apparent that ancestral causes had sent him into the world with a most perilous and exceptional sensitiveness of brain and nervous system, which it would have required the most judicious course of education to direct safely and happily.

Lord Byron often speaks as if he deemed himself subject to tendencies which might terminate in insanity.  The idea is so often mentioned and dwelt upon in his letters, journals, and conversations, that we cannot but ascribe it to some very peculiar experience, and not to mere affectation.

But, in the history of his early childhood and youth, we see no evidence of any original malformation of nature.  We see only evidence of one of those organisations, full of hope and full of peril, which adverse influences might easily drive to insanity, but wise physiological training and judicious moral culture might have guided to the most splendid results.  But of these he had neither.  He was alternately the pet and victim of his mother’s tumultuous nature, and equally injured both by her love and her anger.  A Scotch maid of religious character gave him early serious impressions of religion, and thus added the element of an awakened conscience to the conflicting ones of his character.

Education, in the proper sense of the word, did not exist in England in those days.  Physiological considerations of the influence of the body on the soul, of the power of brain and nerve over moral development, had then not even entered the general thought of society.  The school and college education literally taught him nothing but the ancient classics, of whose power in exciting and developing the animal passions Byron often speaks.

The morality of the times is strikingly exemplified even in its literary criticism.

For example: One of Byron’s poems, written while a schoolboy at Harrow, is addressed to ‘My Son.’  Mr. Moore, and the annotator of the standard edition of Byron’s poems, gravely give the public their speculations on the point, whether Lord Byron first became a father while a schoolboy at Harrow; and go into particulars in relation to a certain infant, the claim to which lay between Lord Byron and another schoolfellow.  It is not the nature of the event itself, so much as the cool, unembarrassed manner in which it is discussed, that gives the impression of the state of public morals.  There is no intimation of anything unusual, or discreditable to the school, in the event, and no apparent suspicion that it will be regarded as a serious imputation on Lord Byron’s character.

Modern physiological developments would lead any person versed in the study of the reciprocal influence of physical and moral laws to anticipate the most serious danger to such an organisation as Lord Byron’s, from a precocious development of the passions.  Alcoholic and narcotic stimulants, in the case of such a person, would be regarded as little less than suicidal, and an early course of combined drinking and licentiousness as tending directly to establish those unsound conditions which lead towards moral insanity.  Yet not only Lord Byron’s testimony, but every probability from the licence of society, goes to show that this was exactly what did take place.

Neither restrained by education, nor warned by any correct physiological knowledge, nor held in check by any public sentiment, he drifted directly upon the fatal rock.

Here we give Mr. Moore full credit for all his abatements in regard to Lord Byron’s excesses in his early days.  Moore makes the point very strongly that he was not, de facto, even so bad as many of his associates; and we agree with him.  Byron’s physical organisation was originally as fine and sensitive as that of the most delicate woman.  He possessed the faculty of moral ideality in a high degree; and he had not, in the earlier part of his life, an attraction towards mere brutal vice.  His physical sensitiveness was so remarkable that he says of himself, ‘A dose of salts has the effect of a temporary inebriation, like light champagne, upon me.’  Yet this exceptionally delicately-organised boy and youth was in a circle where not to conform to the coarse drinking-customs of his day was to incur censure and ridicule.  That he early acquired the power of bearing large quantities of liquor is manifested by the record in his Journal, that, on the day when he read the severe ‘Edinburgh’ article upon his schoolboy poems, he drank three bottles of claret at a sitting.

Yet Byron was so far superior to his times, that some vague impulses to physiological prudence seem to have suggested themselves to him, and been acted upon with great vigour.  He never could have lived so long as he did, under the exhaustive process of every kind of excess, if he had not re-enforced his physical nature by an assiduous care of his muscular system.  He took boxing-lessons, and distinguished himself in all athletic exercises.

He also had periods in which he seemed to try vaguely to retrieve himself from dissipation, and to acquire self-mastery by what he called temperance.

But, ignorant and excessive in all his movements, his very efforts at temperance were intemperate.  From violent excesses in eating and drinking, he would pass to no less unnatural periods of utter abstinence.  Thus the very conservative power which Nature has of adapting herself to any settled course was lost.  The extreme sensitiveness produced by long periods of utter abstinence made the succeeding debauch more maddening and fatal.  He was like a fine musical instrument, whose strings were every day alternating between extreme tension and perfect laxity.  We have in his Journal many passages, of which the following is a specimen:—

‘I have dined regularly to-day, for the first time since Sunday last; this being Sabbath too,—all the rest, tea and dry biscuits, six per diem.  I wish to God I had not dined, now!  It kills me with heaviness, stupor, and horrible dreams; and yet it was but a pint of bucellas, and fish.  Meat I never touch, nor much vegetable diet.  I wish I were in the country, to take exercise, instead of being obliged to cool by abstinence, in lieu of it.  I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh: my bones can well bear it.  But the worst is, the Devil always came with it, till I starved him out; and I will not be the slave of any appetite.  If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way.  O my head! how it aches!  The horrors of digestion!  I wonder how Bonaparte’s dinner agrees with him.’—Moore’s Life, vol. ii. p.264.

From all the contemporary history and literature of the times, therefore, we have reason to believe that Lord Byron spoke the exact truth when he said to Medwin,—

‘My own master at an age when I most required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.’—Medwin’s Conversations, p.42.