Then Lord Byron, the wicked fascinating poet, had limped into society and set Caroline firmly on the road to madness.
What a romantic figure Byron had been! Three years younger than Caroline, he was not only a famous poet (Childe Harold was being discussed everywhere) but he had possessed great personal beauty. His grey eyes had been set off by enormously long dark lashes and his dark brown hair was a riot of curls over a high forehead; his teeth had been white and perfect; but it had been his expression which could be aloof, cold, vital and passionate all in the space of a few moments that people had talked of. Women had been immediately attracted by him – a challenge which Caroline had found irresistible. She wrote in her diary of him: ‘He is mad, bad and dangerous to know’ and therefore her great desire had been to know him.
Being as eager for notoriety as herself, Byron had not been averse. The wife of William Lamb would have seemed to be a worthy conquest, for it would be one which would excite the interest of society. It did. She and Byron were together everywhere; they quarrelled violently and publicly; they were reconciled and quarrelled again; and society watched with avid interest the growing indifference of Byron, the increasing passion of Lady Caroline and the seeming aloof indifference of William Lamb.
He had not been as detached as he had appeared to be, for it was at this time that he had begun seriously to consider a separation. His mother believed this should be arranged.
‘You have proved yourself in Parliament,’ she had declared. ‘You have your Whig standing. No one would blame you if you broke free of her. In fact society expects it, and this latest Byron affair perhaps makes it a necessity.’
Yet he had continued to smile and make no comment on Caroline’s behaviour. He shut himself away with his books and found great satisfaction in the Greek and Latin classics. At first they had been a drug to make him forget the difficulties of his marriage; later they became a necessity. While William improved his mind Lady Caroline had begun to lose her place in her lover’s affections. Lord Byron was bored; those dramatic and passionate scenes which had amused him in the beginning began to pall. He had had enough of Lady Caroline Lamb, and he told her so.
‘My poor Caroline,’ mused Melbourne, ‘why did you always take the road to self destruction?’ But then had she been a normal rational being she would have never exposed herself to such a scandal as she had. She had been completely frank; she had never stopped to consider. ‘I love Byron,’ she had told him, herself and the world, and she would not pretend otherwise.
She had tried to explain to her husband. ‘I love Byron, yes, and I love you, William Lamb. But it is enough to know you are there and always will be there. I don’t feel this mad craving for your company. I must see Byron or I shall go mad.’
And he had looked at her quizzically and thought: But Caroline my dear, you are already mad and can you be sure that I shall always be there?
He had shrugged his shoulders and gone back to Aeschylus which was more rewarding than the ramblings of a mad woman.
Perhaps his indifference had goaded her. Perhaps he had been wrong to shrug his shoulders. Perhaps she needed him to take her firmly in hand as other men would have done; either to have discarded her or to have fought to bring her back to him. But he did neither; his indifference had been clear; it was that which had saved him.
That was the most difficult of all times, when the whole of society, the whole of London was talking about Caroline Lamb’s crazy passion for Lord Byron who was trying to elude her. Neither of them had made concessions to conventional behaviour. They had cared nothing for the fact that their affair was made public. They insulted each other in company; they quarrelled in the open so that all might know how their relationship progressed. She pleaded; he scorned. She offered him all her jewels; she would wait outside his house for him to come home and then plead with him; she bribed his servants to let her into his house. There was no end to the follies of Caroline. She could not see that Byron was tired of her and that the more she pursued him the more she bored him.
Then there was that scene which was recalled even now when, finding herself at a party at which the poet was a guest, Caroline had accosted him, had accused him of neglect and quarrelled noisily with him to the outward consternation and inward delight of the other guests. He had expressed his contempt, his dislike and his great desire never to see her again, at which she had picked up a knife and tried to stab herself, and when this was wrested from her, crying passionately that she had no desire to live, she had snatched a glass, broken it and tried to cut her wrists.
William’s fortunes had seemed low then; he had lost his seat owing to his support of the Catholic Emancipation Bill and had remained out of the House of Commons for four years. He was not sure how he would have come through that trying time but for his love of literature. He became familiar with Tacitus and Horace, Aristotle and Cicero. His obsession with the past enabled him to be a detached observer of the present. It became clear during that period of Caroline’s maddest escapades that he was an unusual man. There was his mother to advise and comfort him. She applauded his attitude but continued to urge a separation from Caroline. There would be a time when he would come back to the House of Commons, she told him, and Caroline would be an unsuitable wife for a Prime Minister. She had not thought it incongruous to consider that he would attain this goal, and had the utmost confidence that one day he would be the leader of the Whigs.
‘Dear Mamma,’ he murmured. ‘Right as usual.’
And after that disastrous scene of Caroline’s attempted suicide he had taken her to Ireland and sought to calm her. Surprisingly, she had seemed tolerably happy there. He had always wanted a son and he had one, although two other children had died in infancy. When was it he had first been forced to admit that Augustus was not normal? The boy was only six years old at the time of Caroline’s attempted public suicide. ‘He’s a little backward,’ they had said. ‘Some children are.’ But of course later he knew that Augustus would go through life with the mind of a child.
What tragedy, people said, for William Lamb! A mad wife, his only child mentally deficient and his political career in ruins. But his charming indifference had made him as outstanding as their dynamic energy did most men.
Caroline had continued to fret for Byron and Lady Melbourne had decided it would be useful if the fascinating poet were married, so with characteristic verve she produced a wife for him – her own niece Annabella Milbanke – and rather to everyone’s astonishment Byron agreed to the match.
Caroline had been overtaken by melancholy when the marriage took place; she shut herself away in her rooms and did not emerge for days; it transpired later how she had occupied herself and in the meantime Lady Melbourne made William see that he must agree to a separation from his wife if he were to continue with his career. So he had agreed; and the deeds of separation had been drawn up. How Caroline had wept and thrown herself at his feet and clung to him and demanded to know what she would do without him! She was fascinated by Lord Byron, she declared; she was ready to die when he deserted her, and would have done so if she had not been prevented. But if William Lamb deserted her she would surely die. She was wild; she was mad; but he knew that she meant what she said. The loss of Byron had filled her with passionate rage; the loss of William Lamb would fill her with melancholy; and the latter was the more dangerous of the two.