#Byron king noel viscount ockham full
#Byron king noel viscount ockham series

Hobhouse wrote that after the ceremony he felt ‘as if I had buried a friend’.Įxactly what happened in the 12 months before Annabella left Byron, taking with her their baby daughter, Ada, is impossible now to know. Thus the company assembled for the muted wedding ceremony at Seaham Hall on 2 January 1815 came with incompatible hopes and expectations. His friend John Cam Hobhouse made strenuous efforts to stop the whole thing, while the Milbankes merely wanted their daughter settled. Augusta wanted Byron to marry so that her relations with him would have a respectable front. They now had a daughter, Medora, born in 1814. Since his initial proposal, however, Byron’s financial difficulties had eased, and fatally, he had been reunited and fallen in love with his married half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Lady Melbourne, much deeper in his confidence than Annabella, was in favour of any marriage that would get him away from her daughter-in-law.

#Byron king noel viscount ockham series

She had invented an imaginary alternative suitor and so now had to un-invent him in a series of convoluted letters as she became more set on marrying Byron, who remained at best ambivalent. Having refused Byron once and attempted to turn him into another of her male friends, Annabella changed her mind. If there was a literary parallel for the tortuous manipulations that surrounded the marriage it was Les Liaisons dangereuses. In their courtship she was more of a Catherine Morland, naively in thrall to a fictional worldview and unable to see beyond it. If Byron was no Darcy, Annabella was no Elizabeth Bennet. Deeply impressed by Pride and Prejudice, Annabella wanted a project, and in Byron she saw a man whom she might save from his own flaws. Annabella was enjoying her independence and, Seymour suggests, comparing the contented lives of her older women friends, a striking number of whom remained unmarried, with the scandal and intrigue in which the marriages in her circle were entrammelled, most especially those of her aunt, the ‘unblushingly scandalous’ Lady Melbourne, and her permanently overwrought daughter-in-law, Caroline Lamb, who made no secret of her relations with Byron.Īnnabella was too clever and too easily bored to settle for a man like George Eden, whose enthusiastic suit was pressed by his parents and hers: he was too nearly a paragon. At least half a dozen suitors were turned away or turned into friends. Apart from land, which they didn’t wish to sell, Annabella was her parents’ greatest asset and she proved a stubbornly illiquid one. The Milbankes were short of money and at 65 Lord Wentworth was in discouragingly robust health. She enjoyed herself thoroughly at dances and parties, aware that her status as an heiress gave her considerable cachet.

From Seaham Hall, a solid neoclassical house which she always loved, with its views across the terraced gardens to the sea, Annabella was catapulted into Regency London, and a milieu of high taste and low morals. In due course she was brought from the family home in County Durham to be launched in London. Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke were justified in admiring their daughter’s intelligence and high spirits, if less sensible in giving in to them. Money, inherited wealth and the time many people consequently spent waiting for other people to die, are recurring themes in Miranda Seymour’s deft and compelling account of the whole horrible saga.Īnne Isabella, as she was christened, was the late and much loved only child of ageing parents who doted on her. Noel’s bad luck was the good luck on which Byron was counting to pay his debts.

#Byron king noel viscount ockham full

An illegitimate cousin of Annabella, he knew full well that the vast fortune of his father, Viscount Wentworth, would not come to him but would pass, in due course, to her. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. A marriage that makes a good end to a comedy will often make as good a beginning to a tragedy.