To my friend

  Salman Rushdie

  A free spirit

  ‘How vain are the commands of a despot, and of what avail is force against the free spirit.’

  Lady Caroline Lamb, Ada Reis, 1823

  NOTE ON NAMES

  (with date of birth in brackets)

  Caroline alone is always Lady Caroline Lamb, occasionally called Caro, or Caroline William, as the wife of William Lamb. (1785)

  Caroline St Jules, later Caro George, is the daughter of Lady Elizabeth Foster; married to George Lamb. (1785)

  Harriet alone is always the Countess of Bessborough, born Lady Henrietta (Harriet) Spencer, Caroline Lamb’s mother. (1761)

  Harryo is Lady Harriet Cavendish, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, wife of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, later Viscount Granville. (1785)

  Little G is Lady Georgiana Cavendish, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, married to Lord Morpeth, later Earl of Carlisle. (1783)

  Hart is the Marquess of Hartington, later 6th Duke of Devonshire. (1790)

  William alone is always William Lamb; it was only from June 1828, when his father died, that he was known as 2nd Viscount Melbourne – which is outside the period of this book. (1779)

  Lord Melbourne is Sir Peniston Lamb, created 1st Viscount Melbourne, legal father of William Lamb. (1745)

  Lady Melbourne or Lady M. is Elizabeth, the mother of William Lamb. (1751)

  Emily is born Emily Lamb, sister of William, and marries Earl Cowper; she later marries Lord Palmerston outside the period of this book. (1787)

  Fred is the Hon. Frederick Lamb, younger brother of William, son of Lord Melbourne. (1782)

  George Lamb is the Hon. George Lamb, younger brother of William. (1784)

  John or John Lord Duncannon is the brother of Caroline; he became Earl of Bessborough after the death of his father. (1781)

  Frederick Ponsonby is the brother of Caroline, son of Lord Bessborough. (1783)

  Willy or William Ponsonby is the brother of Caroline, son of Lord Bessborough. (1787)

  Bulwer is Edward Bulwer-Lytton, later created 1st Lord Lytton, the son of General Bulwer and Elizabeth Lytton. (1803)

  Author Notes:

  I have sometimes made minor alterations in the spelling or punctuation of Lady Caroline’s letters for the sake of clarity for the reader; I have not altered the sense.

  I have from time to time given rough estimates of the value of particular sums in our own day, using round figures for convenience. The website of the Bank of England provides a proper detailed guide.

  PROLOGUE

  BREAKING THE RULES

  Lady Caroline Lamb broke the rules. These were not the acknowledged rules of Church and State. Although her life was certainly not without sin, in the way the Church understood the word, it was the unacknowledged, powerful rules of Society which were broken so flamboyantly by Lady Caroline Lamb. In so doing she showed an independence and indeed a courage which few women emulated in the early nineteenth century. In this sense she was a free spirit.

  During the process she outraged her contemporaries, notably the celebrated women who formed her family circle. In terms of history, it was to prove even more important that she outraged the admirers of Lord Byron, not only at the time but ever since. By his numerous biographers and other commentators she is frequently referred to as ‘the infamous Lady Caroline Lamb’. She has not fared much better with the biographers of her husband, subsequently the Victorian Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who are similarly united in their disapproval. In the presence of these two great men, Lady Caroline has too often been denied a balanced estimate. Just as her literary works, including three novels, have been too often considered purely for the clues they give to her personal life.

  This book can be seen as a coda to my three books on early-nineteenth-century reform, the third of which concerned Caroline Sheridan Norton, the possible mistress of Lord Melbourne, and reform of the rights of married women.

  It can also be regarded as the culmination of an exciting and fulfilling life spent studying History.

  Here I have attempted to write about a human being – and a woman, and incidentally a mother – who at a time of woman’s submission, both legally and socially, went her own way.

  PART ONE

  EVERY WISH OF HER HEART

  ‘Early loved and early won by a young man who was at the same time a nobleman and a statesman, every wish of her heart, every aspiration of her mind, would appear to have been gratified by success.’

  Lady Morgan’s Memoirs

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lovely and Lively

  ‘A lovely little Girl – who seems very lively and in perfect health’

  Countess Spencer, 1785

  CAROLINE PONSONBY – THE future Lady Caroline Lamb – was born on 13 November 1785, into an exotic world. Her mother Harriet was the sister of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, the star of Whig Society; it was this famous aunt who would salute Caroline:

  Fairy, sprite, whatever thou art

  Magic genius waits on thee

  And thou claimst each willing heart

  Whilst thy airy form we see.

  The Duchess duly gave her niece a pencil to record her own poems.1

  Rather more soberly, Caroline’s grandmother Countess Spencer, who was present, described the birth in her diary. Harriet was established in the house of her parents-in-law, the Earl and Countess of Bessborough, a handsome Georgian building at 17 Cavendish Square. It was evidently quite a long labour, although it had a happy ending. Lady Spencer was sent for at eight in the morning, to find that Harriet had been ‘grumbling’ since the early hours. Labour finally ended at half past four the next morning when Harriet ‘was brought to bed with a lovely little Girl – who seems very lively and in perfect health’. Even if Harriet herself was ‘a little low’.2

  Caroline’s petite size was emphasised from the first; she was the ‘little girl’ of the family following two boys, John the heir, and Frederick Ponsonby, with a further brother William born two years later. But she was also an elfin creature – a sprite in the words of the Duchess – compared to the cousins with whom she was brought up. Georgiana Cavendish (Little G), daughter of the Duchess, was born in 1783; the Duchess of Devonshire gave birth to another daughter Harriet Cavendish, always known as Harryo, a few months before Caroline was born. No one ever compared Little G or Harryo to a sprite. When the Duchess finally managed to give birth to an heir, the Marquess of Hartington, to be known as Hart, he grew up dazzled by his little fairy-like cousin, despite the fact that he was four years younger.

  The closeness of the two families, Devonshire and Bessborough, Cavendish and Ponsonby, was symbolised by the fact that Little G and Frederick Ponsonby shared a christening. Not only were their respective mothers sisters, but their fathers were actually first cousins. There were however other members of the family circle equally close, yet without conventional status: there was the mysterious list of children of dubious parentage – constantly added to over the years – whose existence must surely have been baffling to the young until they were old enough to understand the truth. The contemporary phrase for them was ‘Children of the Mist’. This convoluted circle of parents and children, with marriage the outsider, bore out the lament of a pamphlet published in 1785, the year of Caroline’s birth: ‘It is a melancholy reflection that infidelities are much more frequent among people of elevated rank than those of less exalted status.’3

  Above all there was the seductive presence of Lady Elizabeth Foster, mistress of the Duke of Devonshire. A contemporary of the Spencer sisters, Georgiana and Harriet, Bess, as she was known, was the daughter of the Earl of Bristol, and had two sons by her husband John Foster. Her powers to charm were legendary: ‘no man could withstand her’ wrote one man who observed her when she was young (although hardly surprisingly the Devonshire daughters Little G and Harryo detested her). Physically Bess has been described as the opposite of Georgiana, tiny to Georgiana’s magnificently glamorous appearance.4

  Caroline St Jules, so called, was Bess’s illegitimate daughter by the Duke; the elderly Comte de St Jules agreed to accept paternity. There would be a son, William Clifford, born in 1788. Caroline St Jules was actually born on 16 August 1785, four days before the Duchess gave birth to her own Harryo, implacably demonstrating that the Duke had had sex with his wife and mistress within days. As the children grew up, the extreme closeness of Georgiana Duchess and Lady Bess must have added to the confusion; the tone of their correspondence (‘my dearest, dearest, Bess, my lovely friend’ etc.) might almost suggest that the two women were genuine lovers. However Georgiana Duchess was not without her own, more conventional admirers. In turn she would dive abroad a few years later to give birth to Eliza Courtney, daughter of her lover, Charles Grey.

  This was a grand private society with its own nicknames. Hence the Duke of Devonshire was Canis, the Duchess The Rat, Lady Elizabeth Foster The Raccoon, and so on. With merriment went notorious unpunctuality: at Chatsworth it was said that dinner was served at 4.30 p.m. but the ladies went up to dress at 5.45! Nor did religion play a great part in their lives. Fanaticism, as perceived by the Whigs, did not meet with favour: Harriet Bessborough, for example, did not approve of nuns. Theirs was not a religion of certainty. Richard Payne Knight summed it up in his poem The Progress of Civil Society of 1796:

  Religion’s lights, when loose and undefined

  Expand the heart, and elevate the mind…

  But, in do
gmatic definitions bound,

  They only serve to puzzle and confound…

  Caroline herself put it more simply: alas, she did not know how to ‘believe or doubt’.5

  The upbringing of the Ponsonby and Cavendish children, privileged in many ways, deprived in others, was conducted in a variety of dwellings, from palaces to gracious houses. In the upper rooms, attended by a warren of domestics, the children flourished with frequent forays downstairs to their parents’ lavish apartments. Foremost among these residences was the magnificent Palladian house in St James’s, overlooking Green Park, built by Caroline’s grandparents. Spencer House is described by one authority as ‘the queen of London houses’.6 Then there were the residences of her aunt and uncle: Devonshire House, also overlooking Green Park from the other side of Piccadilly, between Berkeley Street and Stratton Street, and Chatsworth, set in the countryside of Derbyshire.I

  There was also a neo-classical villa at Roehampton, on the outskirts of London, conveniently near Richmond Park, which had been designed for Lord Bessborough in 1760; it was celebrated in verse:

  We seem to breathe & tread on Classic Ground…

  Ask ye, from whence these various Treasures came

  These scenes of wonder? Need I Bessborough name?

  And in contrast there were the trips abroad – for reasons of health, a term which covered a variety of experiences, some murkier than others. As will become apparent, a great deal of Caroline’s youth was spent abroad.

  In 1785, the year of Caroline’s birth, King George III had been on the throne since 1760, and the period of his public ‘madness’ had not yet commenced. The unmarried Prince of Wales – the future Prince Regent, subsequently George IV – contracted a secret illegal marriage to the Catholic Mrs Fitzherbert in December. The American Revolution had been accomplished and Independence secured; the storming of the Bastille, which marked the beginning of the French Revolution, was a few years ahead. William Pitt the Younger headed a Tory government. Whigs and Tories were not organised political parties in the modern sense and the designation was not always clear-cut; words like Conservative and Liberal were not yet in use. Politics – of a sort – permeated the lives of the Whig aristocracy into which Caroline was born: a bright young man was very likely to try for Parliament, in an age before reform of the House of Commons (Pitt for example failed to abolish so-called ‘rotten boroughs’) when family influence would secure a seat. A bright young woman on the other hand would expect to marry well, meaning material prosperity as well as social position.

  Reform, whether successfully achieved or not, was the buzzword of the time, which the children picked up. A characteristically roguish letter from Caroline when she was twelve years old to her cousin Little G Cavendish, another infant Whig, began: ‘A reform a reform, did you write a reform? then goodby cousin… I disdain to reform at this time. I will reform in heart but not in hand. I will reform myself but not my letters, you lilly-livered girl.’ She then gives a glimpse of her family life: ‘there is papa, mama, my brothers and I, and I am always going out in Town and then when I come here we play at battlecock and shuttledore [a children’s game originating in India] and mama reads Shakespeare in the evening’. When her mother goes up to bed, Caroline continues to ‘rail out a song’ with her brothers in the great hall while ‘the Men drink in the dining-room, them men generally are poor, Papa and some dogs lying by the fire, we go out a great deal here’. Lots of jokes on the concept of Reform followed in her letters to Little G. ‘Sweet G, we will reform but not till we meet,’ she wrote.7

  In this nest of cousins, connections and friends, Caroline from the first stood out for her charm – and her wilfulness.

  When her grandmother Lady Spencer described her from time to time as ‘lively’, she was alluding to a certain tempestuous quality, adorable or annoying in a tiny child, but apparent in Caroline from an early stage. When she was eleven, Caroline had the wit to write to Little G:

  I’m mad

  That’s bad

  I’m sad

  That’s bad

  I’m bad

  That’s mad8

  It was a wry self-knowledge which would only develop with the years.

  Caroline’s father was the twenty-seven-year-old Frederick Ponsonby, future 3rd Earl of Bessborough. At the time of her birth he was known as Lord Duncannon, a courtesy title given to the heir to the earldom; he inherited the Bessborough title seven years later, and at this point little Caroline, as an earl’s daughter, became Lady Caroline and John, his eldest son, Lord Duncannon.

  Possessed of Irish estates in which he was thought to take little interest, as an Anglo-Irish peer Bessborough would nevertheless feel sufficiently strongly to speak out against the proposed Act of Union of 1801. A Parliamentary report of the time described him as ‘a man of the most amiable and mild manners; without at all affecting the character of an orator, he is an excellent speaker’. At one point he became First Lord of the Admiralty. Bessborough was not however particularly rich nor particularly amusing, and as such he received very little attention compared to his wife, Harriet. It was significant that this Lord’s amiable manners did not prevent him from shouting at her in public: on one occasion he upbraided Harriet at a party for wearing her diamonds against his wishes – which did at least attract public notice. But perhaps that was the point.9

  His wife, born Henrietta Spencer, daughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, came from a family with a tradition of strong women: epitomised perhaps by their ancestress Sarah, the great Duchess of Marlborough, favourite of Queen Anne. Harriet suffered in childhood from being the sister of the beautiful Georgiana, although at the same time the two girls were devoted to each other. Nevertheless Harriet, as she was always called, was generally dismissed as being ‘an ugly little girl’, except for an abundance of brown hair.10 The effect of this dismissal on Harriet, far from subduing her, was to make her, in the absence of physical beauty, cultivate an extraordinary power to attract. A portrait of her in 1793 by Angelica Kauffman shows a young woman of distinct allure, with a sultry mouth and beckoning eyes. As she grew older, age did not seem to diminish her attraction as she developed into a commanding presence.

  Married at the age of nineteen, giving birth to her eldest son the next year, it was not long before Harriet enacted that notorious pronouncement of Lord Egremont on the Whig world: ‘There was hardly a young married lady of fashion who did not think it a stain upon her reputation, if she was not known as having cuckolded her husband.’ He added: ‘The only doubt was who was to assist her in the operation.’11

  Harriet Bessborough was, as it were, assisted in the operation for a period of years by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright and politician, in equal parts dissolute and fascinating. There were others including Charles Wyndham, a younger son of the Earl of Egremont, a member of the Prince of Wales’s dissolute circle: many years later a famous man would dismiss Lady Bessborough contemptuously as ‘the hack whore of the last half century’.12 But the significant relationship of the years surrounding Caroline’s birth, inevitably casting doubt on her actual parentage, was with Sheridan. The possibility that the future Lady Caroline Lamb shared the mesmerising Irish blood of the Sheridans certainly existed.II

  More important to Caroline’s character and upbringing than this notional genetic inheritance is the fact that she adored her fascinating, dominating mother. The sexual morals that she must have observed in her dearest relation, whether they were to be emulated or rejected, could not be ignored. The chatter of innumerable servants – that unstoppable source of intimate news – meant that Caroline would inevitably have known much about her mother’s so-called private life, without necessarily understanding it at the time.

  The Bessboroughs however were not always quite as outwardly serene in the conduct of their private lives as the Devonshires. The Sheridan affair was not actually allowed by the future Lord Bessborough to remain in discreet Whig obscurity. Relations between the couple were bad enough for Caroline’s father to institute a rare proceedings in the ecclesiastical court (the only method of divorce then legal). It was his brother-in-law the Duke who persuaded him to drop the case and leave things as they were.13