Marriage
When Lord Byron proposed a second time to Miss Milbanke in September 1814, she accepted. The couple were married privately, and by special licence, at Seaham Hall in County Durham on January 2, 1815 (the officiating clergyman was her illegitimate cousin, the Rev. Thomas Noel of Kirkby Mallory, natural son of her uncle, Viscount Wentworth.) The couple lived at Picadilly Terrace in London.
Byron was then in extreme financial distress. He rejected payments offered for his written works, as he believed the sums were insufficient. He was having difficulty selling his estates at Newstead Abbey and Rochdale to clear his debt. During the summer of 1815, he began to unleash his anger and hostility on his wife. His moods were dark and he began to drink heavily. In a letter to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, he stated his suspicions that his wife had broken the lock on his desk and searched it. Later in the year he began an affair with Susan Boyce, a London chorus girl.
Lady Byron became increasingly upset. In the late stages of pregnancy, she feared Byron might be going mad. In November 1815, she wrote to Leigh and told her of Byron's moods and behavior. In answer to her sister-in-law's letter, Leigh traveled to the Byrons' home to assist. Upon her arrival, she became the subject of Byron's wrath and believed him to be temporarily insane. On December 10, Lady Byron gave birth to the couple's only child, a daughter whom they named Ada. Byron's despair seemed to increase.
Read more about this topic: Anne Isabella Byron, Baroness Byron
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“the mother lies down on her marriage bed
and eats up her heart like two eggs.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“After the first couple of months, she and Charlie didn’t see much of each other except at breakfast. It was a marriage just like any other marriage.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)