A Byronic Legacy

© Seán Manchester, 2003

“Years roll on years; to ages, ages yield;

Abbots to abbots, in a line succeed ... “

~ Lord Byron

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The Byron family coat-of-arms.

To My Son, incorrectly dated 1807 by Thomas Moore, was first published six years after Byron’s death. Lucy’s pregnancy, of course, did not take place until early 1809. Moore misread the date. Furthermore, the housemaid did not die the early death of the young mother eulogised by the poet whose “lowly grave the turf has prest.” According to the housekeeper, Nanny Smith, Lucy overcame the “high and mighty airs she gave herself as Byron’s favourite,” married a local lad, and ran a public house in Warwick. The fate of the child enters the forlorn and forgotten realm of so many illegitimate offspring of servants, and does not resurface again until a century later when my Derbyshire maternal grandparents returned the bloodline to Newstead Abbey Park where they purchased twenty or so acres and had a comfortable lodge built almost within the shadow of Byron’s ancestral home. In the poem, Byron changed the scenario of Lucy’s end to conform to the sentimental moralising of the period, which required that the fallen woman must pay with her life: “The mother’s shade shall smile in joy, / And pardon all the past, my Boy!”

The poem addresses Byron’s natural child, challenging the convention that would withhold from his “little illegitmate” a father’s loving concern, along with any claim to social position. Byron’s pride, along with his sense of honour, was offended by the common practice of turning out pregnant maidservants. He knew the fate of country girls who bore illegitimate children, surviving on the pittance provided by parish poor rates, the workhouse, or making their way to the nearest city and entering a life of prostitution. Along with keeping Lucy employed, Byron made provision — exceptionally generous by the standards of the day — for her and their child in his will. Lucy was to have an annuity of £100 (later reduced to £50); the other £50 was to go to the child.

The poet’s only legitimate child was born of Annabella, Lady Byron, on the night of 9 December 1815. She was named Augusta Ada. His half-sister, also called Augusta, would later tell him that while Ada resembled her mother more than Byron, “still there is a look. I never saw a more healthy little thing. It was a melancholy pleasure to see Lady B for I had suffered great uneasiness of which I had given you hints.” Well might she feel uneasy, for, on 15 April 1814, she had given birth to a daughter of her own, Elizabeth Medora, whose father was rumoured to be Byron. There was absolutely no way he could be sure that he was the father, even though at the time this was assumed to be the case, and he never acknowledged the fact. He nonetheless showed great fondness for Medora, and Lady Byron herself was struck by the child’s extraordinary beauty. Absence of proof positive allowed licence for speculation, needless to say, of which the most astonishing example was the theory advanced by Richard Edgcumbe in Byron: the Last Phase (1909) that Medora was Byron’s daughter by his boyhood’s love, Mary Chaworth, obligingly adopted by Augusta. However, his half-sister Augusta did write to him of “a likeness in your picture of Mignonne [Medora].”

Clara Allegra (1817-1822). Augusta Ada (1815-1852).

Claire Clairmont gave birth at Bath to a daughter, on 12 January 1817, whom she named Alba, after Albé, the name the Shelley family had assigned to Byron while in Geneva. Byron asked rhetorically: “Is the brat mine? — I have reason to think so.” Before leaving England with her mother, the child was baptised “Clara Allegra Byron, born of Rt Hon George Gordon Lord Byron ye reputed father by Clara Mary Jane Clairmont.” Allegra was spoilt, wilful, and undisciplined — a carbon copy of her father when he was a child. By the age of four Byron arranged for her to be enrolled at a Capucine convent at Bagnacavallo, Italy. On 20 April 1822, Allegra, aged five years and three months, was dead, to the profound grief of the nuns who regarded her a very special child. When Byron heard the news he sank into a chair, and asked to be left alone. Three years later he told Lady Blessington: “While she lived, her existence never seemed necessary to my happiness; but no sooner did I lose her than it appeared to me as if I could not live without her.” The body of Allegra was sent back to England to be buried at Harrow Church near Peachey Stone where the poet had spent so many hours as a boy. The rector of Harrow refused to erect Byron’s proposed tablet, and the child was buried just inside the threshold of the church. Byron had wanted the words: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”

* * *

No such problem would beset my parents. Their corporeal remains rest in the private chapel at my present home, a considerable distance from the one time abode of my maternal grandparents at Newstead Abbey Park. My mother wrote a modest memoir, pencilled in her beautiful copperplate hand, titled Recollections. She commented that Newstead “held a secret,” adding that “the walk to the Abbey was short. It was in the same grounds as my parents’ home. I remember how absorbed Seán became with the whole atmosphere of the place — very intent.”

I knew little concerning Byron’s life when I was a child, and would not trouble to read a biography about him until I was nineteen. Yet I recall the poet’s name cropping up in hushed tones when I was still quite young. It did not take long for an awareness to develop of the family connection, albeit one that was to remain firmly in the cupboard where Byron’s skeleton nevertheless rattled from time to time, despite the bloodline’s illegitimate origin. Unlike today, such things were not considered at all appropriate for dissemination. Hence much caution was in evidence about the Byronic legacy my mother and I had inherited. In those days it would remain a topic unmentioned in company, and even in private it was to be a mysterious family legend.

By the time I had my first complete work published (as opposed to contributions I had made to anthologies edited by other authors) there was no question in my mind that the book would be dedicated to the memory of my illustrious ancestor Lord Byron.

Not unlike the poet’s early work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, my first complete work in print became an immediate bestseller. My mother recounted in her Recollections:

“Newstead held a magic for me. Seán loved it too. He went about the grounds with my brother, Colin, who had a tree house and a gun. Dad only allowed Colin to have a gun because the poor rabbits were dying in agony from myxomatoses. I was given a book of English poetry by my father. Seán picked it up and out of the one thousand one hundred and fifty poems chose Byron’s She walks in Beauty to read. I don’t think Seán even knew the connection between Lord Byron at that time.”

The longest absence from Newstead when I was a child was the period spent in Canada where my parents sought their future and fortune overseas. “I heard some lovely reports about Montreal, which I related to Allen,” my mother recorded.

The author and his parents ~ united in Canada.

“These little stories fired our imagination and we decided to go. Seán was aged three. Allen went first by air. Seán and I stayed at home until three months later when we were passengers on the Aquitania from Southampton to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Allen had been in Toronto for three months, but we settled in Montreal, a beautiful city built around a mountain topped by a cross. This seemed significant to me at the time. I had collected crosses for years. The highlight of our day was to take the bus to St Catherine’s Street where we would have a chocolate éclair each with a beverage. Weekends would find the three of us walking up the mountain or visiting the lake. It was all very pleasant, but our future in Canada was really doomed from the start as many things were not what we had been used to in England. The accommodation left much to be desired, and Allen discovered that work was in short supply. So back home we came on the Ascania, a much smaller version of the Aquitania, which proved to be a smelly little ship. We docked at Liverpool and from there we sailed to Dublin where we stayed with Mr and Mrs Berry. He was the keeper of Dublin Castle.”

The rickety and foul-smelling tug called the Ascania should have been scrapped years before we boarded it, and almost certainly was soon after our arrival in Liverpool. This was in marked contrast to our time at Dublin Castle as a guest of the Berrys. In the previous century the spectre of a frail gazelle of a girl of medium height, in Regency clothes, flitted down the corridors with large, enquiring eyes brimming with tears. She occupied the shadowy places I now found myself wandering. I would write her biography one day. It was the last book my mother read before she died in 1992.

Within a couple of months my parents had left Ireland, and once again I was amongst the familiar scenery of our beloved Newstead Abbey Park. Soon after my fifth birthday, however, I began attending Hungerford School in north London, and visits during holidays were all that was now possible. My mother’s Recollections continued:

“A lovely city, Dublin, but it held no future for us, so we came back to England via Dunleary to Holyhead, staying in Nottinghamshire. Allen went ahead of me to London. Seán and I joined him shortly after to find temporary accommodation in Highbury Hill. Then we found rooms in Holloway, followed by the Mansions where we had a porter and cleaner. I recall how eager Seán was to read and write, and he made fast progress. Seán had talked at a very early age. It was when he went to school that we noticed the early signs of his originality. He was different, always different from others, and he had a way with words from the start. He was also very perceptive right from his first year. He seemed to read one’s thoughts and feelings.”

Visits to Newstead continued on a fairly regular basis. It was in the Abbey’s vast collection where I discovered a pencil portrait of my Dublin Castle phantom: a quarter-length drawing of a pensive young girl with slightly downcast eyes. Mesmerised by the elfin creature, a window seemed to open within my subconscious mind to rich colours lit by candelabras stuffed with melting candles, heavy brocades and tapestries, exquisitely decorated harpsichords, sombre paintings in large frames, dark oak furniture, and reverberating, melodic strains from another time. Amidst all this appeared a ghostly female with rosebud lips, fawn curls and large, sad eyes.

Lady Caroline Lamb.

Momentary glimpses of Romanticism’s haunted realm where the flickering, wavering image glided in step to echoes from a tinkling, distant spinet, offered somewhere I would visit throughout my life thereafter — a primitive form of time travel. The identity of my apparition became soon became apparent. It was Lady Caroline Lamb.

Caroline’s husband was Secretary of Ireland in 1827, two years after their separation, and he would have stayed at Dublin Castle for long periods of time. This was three years after the tragic death of Caroline’s fatal passion Lord Byron. She had stayed at the castle prior to when her husband, William, became Secretary. He almost certainly accepted the post because he could not bear to watch her suffering any longer in the wake of the terrible news about her lover Byron. It would destroy her in the end.

My psychic portal grew faint as childhood innocence itself gradually eroded over the years, but later in life I renewed my acquaintance in becoming the biographer of Lady Caroline Lamb. Lord Brocket invited me to Caroline’s country residence in Hertfordshire, Brocket Hall, and Lady Brocket entered into a correspondence where she told of the haunting at the Hall. In February 1992, Lady Brocket wrote of “a woman in the Ballroom” when she was playing some Chopin on the piano.

Frédéric Chopin ― my mother’s favourite composer ― and mine. How memories are stirred whenever the sound of his music fills the air. Each visit I made to Chopin’s tomb at Père-Lachaise in Paris, I would invariably discover freshly cut red roses on the grave ― lovingly placed by a mysterious admirer.

The author paying homage at Chopin’s tomb in Paris.

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The above text and pictures from Stray Ghosts by Seán Manchester (unpublished memoir) are copyright protected and cannot be reproduced without consent.