It is at Kensal Green Cemetery in West London on May 21 1860 that Annabella was laid to rest and despite the incorrect spelling of her first name and that she had been born in the home of her mother's great friend Isabella Baker at Elemore Hall, her simple and elegant grave can be discovered in the shadow of the enormous Dissenter's Chapel. And one glorious afternoon in October I took a stroll through this fabulous cemetery to the grave of Byron's spouse...
"Oh! my God! how has my poor Child been sacrificed! not only to a wicked, but unmanly Creature!" The agitated author of this letter was the Hon. Judith Noel in the dying days of January 1816 as the marriage separation between her beloved only daughter and Lord Byron became increasingly acrimonious and as the latter prepared for a life in exile far away from the marital home of 13 Piccadilly Terrace in London. However, Judith was QUITE mistaken in her distraught prediction about her 'poor child's' imminent demise...
George Colman the Younger was the theatrical manager at Drury Lane and a wonderful writer of comedy who considered Lord Byron a friend and as they got drunk together on more than one occasion and he had an intuitive understanding of the complexities of the Byron marriage and the subsequent separation - perhaps his poem finally offers us a tantalising hint of what happened all those years ago?
By April 1816 Annabella having already contemplated the vagaries, distress and challenge that her brief marriage of one year to Byron had brought her and having made her decision to leave in February 1816, the 'Suffering Angel' was to remain formidable in her resolution and the process towards Annabella's desire to be 'securely separated' from Lord Byron over 200 years ago was reaching an increasingly bitter, fraught and heart breaking conclusion...
Although much altered over the intervening years, Seaham Hall is now a rather nice hotel and spa and on cold weekend in February and with the clearest skies imaginable, I returned to the place that Byron in his letter to Tom Moore was to confess to taking a liking to 'vastly'...
Yes, February is the month for a profusion of chocolates, expensive red roses and some very dubious Valentine's cards but oh, what a month of anticipation as Cupid's Arrow flies forth!
However, sadly not for the poet Lord Byron as February 1816 would be the month that his wife would unceremoniously ditch him!
As we know that no one lives forever - the Lady Noel was no exception for a mere seven months after Lord B's most facetious letter - his Mamma-At-Law died on Monday January 28 in 1822.
Byron was not to receive the news of Judith Noel's death until early March from Augusta and true to his detestation of 'cant', his response was brutally frank...
