A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (3 page)

In the summer of 1808, Byron visited his friend Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who was about eight years older than Byron. Grey made advances to him which were evidently not repulsed. The poet and lyricist Thomas Moore writing in his own biography of Byron, said that an intimacy sprang up between Byron and Grey.

Byron liked to use the phrase ‘pure relationship’ to describe one which did not involve actual penetrative intercourse. It is not, however, known what ‘intimacy’ meant in terms of Byron and Grey. All that is certain is that Byron was himself conscious of his early sexual initiation. In ‘Detached Thoughts’ – a journal he kept for a few months in 1821 – 1822 when he was living in Pisa, Italy – he admitted:

My passions were developed very early – so early –that few would believe me – if I were to state the period – and the facts which accompanied it.

On Monday, July 1 1805, Byron travelled to Cambridge to become a student at Trinity College, the largest and probably the most famous of the colleges of Cambridge University. In Byron’s time there was only one path to the degree, which was the Senate House Examination (SHE). The SHE was continually developing. At that time it was partially oral but mostly written, with the main subject of examination being mathematics, though a little classics and moral philosophy were thrown in too. However, most noblemen such as Byron treated Cambridge as a sort of finishing school and stayed only for one or two years, generally failing to graduate or even to make an attempt to do so.
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Byron certainly lived it large. He kept three horses and acquired a carriage soon after arriving in Cambridge. What he thought of the university was hardly complimentary. ‘This place is wretched enough,’ he wrote, ‘a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing.’

Within less than a year of his arrival he had borrowed hundreds of pounds from a money-lender at a high rate of interest. Byron wrote to his impoverished mother that he had ‘a few hundred in ready cash lying by me’, and he then went on to tell her that he could learn nothing at Cambridge and would prefer to go abroad.

Appalled, his mother Catherine wrote to John Hanson, a young married London lawyer who had befriended her before Byron was born and even lent Catherine money when she needed it. It was John Hanson’s brother, a Royal Navy captain, who had been given the caul in which Byron was born.

That boy will be the death of me, and drive me mad! I will never consent to his going abroad. Where can he get hundreds. Has he got into the hands of money-lenders. He has no feeling, no heart. This I have long known: he has behaved as ill as possible for years back. This bitter truth I can no longer conceal; it is wrung from me by heart-rending agony.

Byron didn’t go abroad but stayed on at university, where he spent much of his energy in crash dieting (he was prone to plumpness), boxing, gambling and sex, though he didn’t seem to enjoy any of it particularly and was convinced that he would never be happy.

By the time Byron was twenty on January 22 1808, the year he was to meet Lord Grey, his debts amounted to £5,000 (£5,000,000 today). At that age he had no source of income other than what he received from his relatively impoverished mother. Instead of curbing his personal expenditure upon his majority, Byron asked Hanson to raise the rents paid by tenants who lived in cottages in Newstead’s grounds. Byron also told Hanson to insist that the Newstead servants provide themselves with their own food rather than run up food bills for which Byron would be liable.

Byron was well aware that the most sensible course of action to deal with debts which by now were starting to run towards £15,000, was to sell Newstead Abbey. Except that Byron loved Newstead too much to sell it.

Instead, Byron travelled to the continent with his friend Hobhouse and four servants to escape his increasingly persistent creditors. Byron’s Grand Tour, which took place in warm southern Europe countries, naturally included Greece, and it was in Greece that Byron started writing the great poem which was eventually to feature the daughter who was still almost five years from being born:
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
.

When Byron returned to London in July 1811 he was depressed at being back in Britain and again being hard up. In addition, his mother died on August 1 1811. Resuming his life of writing poetry, being poor and borrowing, socialising and snatching such sexual opportunities as he could, he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords in February 1812 opposing the harsh Tory measures against riotous Nottingham weavers.

Then his life changed when, at the beginning of March 1812, the first two cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
were published, soon in ten editions issued prior to the publication in 1816 of the third canto of the poem. When the fourth canto was published in 1818, by which time Ada was a toddler, the enthusiasm for the fourth canto led readers to ask that the whole poem be printed together as a single book. There is a reliable estimate that between 15,000 and 20,000 copies were printed.

Byron, as he recalled in his memoirs, had awoken one morning and had found himself famous. It fanned his love life considerably. Soon he found himself – not entirely of his own volition – involved in a liaison with the passionate and fairly eccentric aristocrat and novelist Lady Caroline Lamb (she famously remarked of Byron that he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’). After their liaison collapsed, he began a relationship with Lady Oxford, who was a patron on the reform movement and about fourteen years older than Byron.

Meanwhile, Byron appears to have entered into a sexual relationship with his half sister Augusta, then married to a Colonel George Leigh, too. There remained, however, the small problem of Byron’s debts. While there is no doubt that his publisher, John Murray, earned a small fortune, Byron seems to have thought it vulgar to take money for his poetry. On at least one occasion, Byron asked his publisher, John Murray, to give away 1,000 guineas which Byron was owed as royalties for his poems (a guinea was one pound and one shilling, and was often used as the currency in genteel transactions). This sum, 1,000 guineas, was a vast amount indeed. What he needed rather more than another lover was a rich wife: Annabella Milbanke, for example.

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Annabella Milbanke (she was christened Anne Isabella but was generally called Annabella) was the daughter of a wealthy family that dwelt at Seaham Hall in the small town of Seaham, about fifteen miles south of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the coast of North-East England. Annabella was born on May 17 1792 and so she was about three years and eight months younger than Byron.

Annabella doesn’t appear to have been a great beauty; she had an excellent figure but a rather snub face with pronounced, apple-like cheeks. While her considerable intelligence cannot be doubted, by nature she was reserved, pedantic and not especially good company. She was an only child and when she was born her mother was over forty. Her parents doted on her and gave her full encouragement to think highly of herself and her opinions. Up in the provincial north of England, Annabella was a proud and wealthy fish in a small pond, but when she ventured down to London she encountered many women who were more beautiful, wittier and considerably more sexually forthcoming than she was.

On Sunday March 15 1812, Annabella was down from Seaham for her second London season. The ‘season’ was the period, usually from the spring to late summer, when eligible young women from wealthy families – the women were known as debutantes – spent time in London’s social scene, meeting new people and, hopefully, a prospective husband. The importance of the season had evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and peaked in its traditional form in the early twentieth century. It was once usual for debutantes to be presented to the monarch as part of their season.

That Sunday, March 15, Annabella wrote in her journal of a dinner she had with her relatives, the Melbournes. As she said: ‘Julius Caesar, Lord Byron’s new poem, and politics were the principal themes in conversation.’

By March 24 Annabella had read the first two cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
. Her praise of it in her journal was not – predictably, if you knew Annabella – unqualified. She conceded that Byron excelled in the ‘delineation of deep feeling, and in reflections relative to human nature’ but she also wrote that he was too much of a mannerist: a word she emphasised in her journal.

It never seems to have occurred to her that her analysis might be irrelevant to the chaotic and impulsively emotional way in which he lived his life.

The first time she set eyes on him was at a waltzing party given by Lady Caroline Lamb on Wednesday March 25 1812. Unlike Ada much later, Annabella found the whole experience of being in London, and in the company of eminent and famous people, intoxicating. By now Byron was a celebrity, one of the most famous men in England. Annabella gave Byron close attention. She was naïve for her years, understandable perhaps when her parents were quite old and when her upbringing had been sheltered and she had had no siblings. It’s difficult not to conclude that she simply didn’t realise that Lady Caroline and Byron were having an affair. Instead what she saw, as she later wrote, was a man in ‘desolate situation’, surrounded by unworthy admirers and friends who didn’t care for him.

Annabella (Anna Isabella) Milbanke, 1814.

Annabella’s father was already wealthy, but was also the heir to an even greater fortune that could reasonably be expected to come to Annabella after his death. There’s no doubt that Annabella, the intelligent but awkward, judgmental and naïve wallflower, was extremely (albeit temporarily) attractive to Byron.

Annabella confided to her journal her own thoughts on meeting him:

I saw Lord Byron for the first time. His mouth continually betrays the acrimony of his spirit. I should judge him sincere and independent – sincere at least in society as far as he can be, while dissimulating the violence of his scorn. He very often hides his mouth with his hand when speaking.

Annabella thought she had found a mind that matched her own:

It appeared to me that he tried to control his natural sarcasm and vehemence as much as he could, in order not to offend, but at times his lips thickened with disdain and his eyes rolled impatiently.

Annabella and Byron became friends, sort of. It’s not entirely clear how, but she was getting better known socially, and Byron got to know her. That he felt any sudden intense attraction for her seems unlikely. Inasmuch as posterity can ever know how Byron felt at any moment of his life, his initial feelings for Annabella appear to have been a mixture of boredom and gloominess, though mingled with a flickering curiosity over whether at some point he might be able to get her into bed.

Annabella seems to have continued to be oblivious to the fact that the literary hero she found so fascinating was having an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lady Caroline and Byron didn’t take any steps to disabuse her of this illusion. Except that in the summer of 1812, Caroline sent Annabella a drunken letter warning her against ‘fallen angels who are ever too happy to twine themselves round the young Saplings they can reach.’

The letter very likely influenced her to reject a half-hearted marriage proposal Byron made to her in October 1812, by letter. It was a bizarre marriage proposal as Byron was close friends with Annabella’s aunt Lady Melbourne, and together they delighted in gossip about Annabella’s pedantry and moral rectitude. Lady Melbourne was cut from a different cloth. During her own heyday, she had been notorious for her liberal granting of sexual favours to a wide range of aristocrats: one of them was rumoured to have bought her off another for £13,000. She had had numerous children born in wedlock, but by different aristocrats. Though one of the most well-known and influential society hostesses of the period, she was fifteen years older than Byron’s mother and theirs was a libertine friendship that remained pure.

Back in Seaham, on a lonely Sunday, August 22 1813, however, Annabella was staying with her parents and was obviously missing the excitement of London and her conquest of sorts; Lord Byron, the man whose name had been on everyone’s lips. She sought to resuscitate her friendship with him by letter after sounding out her aunt, Lady Melbourne. After the failed marriage proposal and presumably declaration of his love, she appeared unsure of their relationship and the letter has no salutation, though it is signed formally ‘Yours faithfully, A. Milbanke’.

You have remarked the serenity of my countenance, but mine is not the serenity of one who is a stranger to care, nor are the prospects of my future years untroubled. It is my nature to feel long, deeply and secretly, and the strangest affections of my heart are without hope. I disclose to you what I conceal even from those who have most claim to my confidence because it will be the surest basis of that unreserved friendship which I wish to establish between us – because you will not reject my admirations as the result of cold calculation when you know that I
can
suffer as you have suffered.

With little to do in Seaham and hearing fresh news about him, she laid out an ambitious plan for Byron’s well-being:

No longer suffer yourself to be the slave of the moment, nor trust your noble impulses to the chances of life. Have an object that will permanently occupy your feelings and exercise your reason. Be good.

Feel benevolence and you will inspire it. You
will
do good.

Annabella’s letter to Byron started a strange correspondence in which they deepened their intimacy without actually meeting, rather like two people who meet on an internet dating site.

For Annabella, who delighted in writing critical accounts of people in Seaham, the medium of correspondence was perfect. She could continue to put into practice her theory about Byron – that he was misunderstood by most people and was really a sensitive and admirable person who would respond to the doting love of a cautious and prudent individual such as her.

As 1813 progressed into the autumn, Annabella began to fancy herself in love. In early October 1813 she sent her aunt Lady Melbourne (with whom she warily ‘felt little sympathy’ in summer) her reactions to Byron’s poem
The Giaour
.

The description of Love almost makes
me
in love. Certainly he excels in the language of passion… I consider his acquaintance as so desirable that I would risk being called a Flirt for the sake of enjoying it, provided I may do so without detriment to myself – for you know that his welfare has been as much the object of my consideration as if it were connected with his own.

Byron, at this time, was writing at Augusta’s home at the small village of Six Mile Bottom near Newmarket in Cambridgeshire. In response to Lady Melbourne’s attempts to caution him against an affair with Augusta, Byron wrote to Lady Melbourne that he thought the risk he ran was ‘worth while’, but said ‘I can’t tell you why – and it is
not
an ‘
Ape
’ and if it is – that must be my fault.’ What exactly he meant by Ape is not clear; he might have meant the common idea that the child of incest would be an ape.

Nonetheless, on November 10 1813 Byron wrote to her that he was writing another poem, also set in Turkey, and that he would like to send her a copy. This poem was
The Bride of Abydos.
In the same letter he enquired when she was likely to be in town, and flirtatiously added; ‘I imagine I am about to add to your thousand and one pretendants’, adding ‘I have taken exquisite care to prevent the possibility of that’. While Annabelle remained on the short list, on March 22, Byron nonetheless noted in his journal that he might marry Lady Charlotte Leveson Gower, apparently because (as Byron put it) ‘she is a friend of Augusta, and whatever she loves, I can’t help liking.’

Fanned by Lady Melbourne – who no doubt had also provided Byron with an informed view of Annabella’s financial future – Annabella was now deeply in love. ‘Pray write to me,’ she begged him on June 19 1814, ‘for I have been rendered uneasy by your long silence, & you cannot wish me so.’ And on August 6 1814, Annabella wrote coquettishly to Byron to question whether he should come to Seaham as there might be a danger that he felt ‘more than friendship’ towards her.

All this time, Byron had continued wooing Lady Charlotte Leveson Gower, his main prospect – marrying rather than writing for gain being the more noble pursuit. But in a major setback, on September 8 or 9 1814, Lady Charlotte wrote to Byron to tell him that her family had other plans for her romantically.

Byron, confronted with this news, panicked. ‘I could not exist without some object of attachment,’ he often acknowledged during this time and scrambled to get one and decided it would be Annabella. He showed the draft of his proposal to Augusta, who said: ‘Well, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it shall not go. I never read a prettier one. ‘Then it
shall
go,’ said Byron.

Annabella, overjoyed, accepted at once. Byron, busy with literary business and with telling his friends about his forthcoming marriage, was in no hurry, however, to visit his prospective wife.

It was only when Annabella wrote to him on October 22 1814 to tell him that a wealthy childless uncle of hers, Lord Wentworth, had journeyed some three days to the Milbanke home at Seaham from Leicestershire expressly to meet Byron and had been most disappointed not to find him there. She added ‘It is odd that my task should be to pacify the old ones, and teach
them
patience. They are growing quite ungovernable, and I must have your assistance to manage them.’

On the way to his betrothed, Byron stopped off to see Augusta and her husband Colonel Leigh who was staying with his wife, as he sometimes did. The colonel was not at all happy to learn of Byron’s impending marriage, as the colonel had hoped Augusta would be Byron’s only heir.

There was a more welcoming reception at Seaham. Byron was buoyed by his meeting with Lord Wentworth, who had announced he now intended to make Annabella his heiress by his will. Then there was Annabella’s family who said they would be providing a dowry of £20,000 (£18 million). This would be immediate help to alleviate his debts, which had mounted to a monumental £30,000 at the time (£28 million).

On the morning of his wedding, Monday, January 2 1815, Byron awoke in gloomy spirits, but with a determination to go ahead with the deed. By eleven o’clock in the morning Byron and Annabella were man and wife. At Six Mile Bottom, at that very hour when Augusta knew the vows would have been completed, she felt, as she put it, ‘as the sea trembles when the earth quakes’.

‘
Had
Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner,’ Byron laconically reported on his marriage day in his memoirs which were partly remembered by various friends who had seen some of the memoirs prior to their destruction.

The newly-wed couple had arranged to spend the first few days of their wedded bliss at a Yorkshire country house, Halnaby, that belonged to the Milbanke family. Arriving at Halnaby, the ground was covered in deep snow. The servants and tenants of the Milbankes were waiting in the wintry weather to greet Annabella and Byron. A reliable source testifies that when the carriage stopped, Byron at once jumped out and walked away, not bothering to help Lady Byron down from the carriage.