Lord Byron vs. Lady Lamb | History's Worst Breakups

Sending a lock of hair to your lover has fallen a little out of fashion. Sending a lock of pubic hair to your ex-lover ... well, we aren't sure that was ever in fashion. This is just one of the things that Lady Caroline Lamb is alleged to have done when her heart was broken by Lord Byron. For this episode, Kate is joined by Professor Paul Douglass to discuss the affair between Byron and Lamb, how it ended, and whether Lamb has been unfairly treated in the telling of this story. Paul is Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, and the author and editor of ‘Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography’ and a selection of Lady Caroline Lamb's letters, ‘The Whole Disgraceful Truth’. This episode was edited by Hannah Feoderov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:38Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. I'm just jumping in here real quick to remind you that if you wanted to come and see Betwixt the Sheets live and in the flesh, you can do so in May. We have got two live events, one in Edinburgh on the 23rd of May, and one in London Town on the 25th of May. There will be guests, there will be games, there will be smutty history aplenty. Tickets are available now at fane.co.uk, that's F-A-N-E.co.uk, and just search for Betwixt, and we will see you there.

• 1:15Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Thank you for coming back once again to Betwixt the Sheets. Welcome, welcome, come in, come in. We are so happy that you are here. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, and I will keep telling you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, news, paid adult too. God, do you feel safer? I feel safer. Right, let's crack on.

• 1:47Kate Lister?

  There are many recommended routes to finding peace and happiness after a breakup. Going no contact, that's an important one. I would recommend that one. Go no contact, just block them. You don't need to see them, you don't need to see their social media, just block them right now. Then there's the ice cream route. You can just sit on your sofa for a few months, eating nothing but Ben and Jerry's. You don't even need a bowl, you don't even need a spoon, do it with your hands. Then there's people who decide to get back into shape in a big way, and they have the ultimate breakup glow up. Then there is my grandmother's favourite advice, which is that you'll get over someone by getting under someone else. You know, all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. But then, then you could, if you really wanted to, burn an effigy of your ex in your garden

• 2:30Kate Lister?

  as local children dance around reciting poems that you've written about how awful they were. Does that sound tempting? Does that sound like something anyone would want to do? Well, somebody did, and that somebody was Caroline Lamb after her notorious affair with Lord Byron came to an end. Oh dear, oh dear.

• 3:16Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. It's February, the most romantic month of the year, so here we are discussing the absolute worst breakups in history. Now, we have spoken about Lord B a fair bit on Betwixt the Sheets before. I mean, come on, that man had enough in his back catalogue to sustain an entire year of episodes, let alone one month. So of course he was going to make a reappearance in our little mini-series on history's worst breakups. And to be fair, his breakup with Caroline, wow, just wow. But what really went on? Why

• 3:58Kate Lister?

  did he get all of the glory and she, well, she's kind of gone down in history as a bit of a nut job. She has. And maybe that's not entirely fair. Well, we are going to find out, because today we are joined by Professor Paul Douglas, author of Lady Caroline Lamb, A Biography, and editor of the whole disgraceful truth Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb. So if anyone can give us the skinny on Caroline, it's going to be Paul. Are you ready to open the X-Files? Well, I certainly am. Let's do it.

• 4:36Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Professor Paul Douglas. How are you doing?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I am doing really well and delighted to be here.

• 4:45Kate Lister?

  I'm thrilled that you are here because the subject of Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron and what happened absolutely fascinates me. But before we even get to that, you are Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose University, and you have written extensively on Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. Can I ask you, what brought you to them? Do you remember? Do you remember when you first met Lady Caroline Lamb and you thought, hello?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. It was really all the fault of my colleague and friend Fred Burwick, who got me interested in writing about Isaac Nathan, who was Lord Byron's partner in the Hebrew melodies. And as I read about this, I thought that Nathan had been dealt a bad hand. He needed to be given more credit for what he'd done. And then I realized that he was acquainted with Lady Caroline Lamb. And I began to wonder more about her. And how is it that someone who managed to write three novels and a load of poetry was basically consigned to the role of being Byron's worst nightmare?

• 5:58Kate Lister?

  [laughing]

• 5:59Speaker 01

  A sort of a Fatal Instinct story that got told over and over and over again. The more I learned about her, the more I thought, well, here's a woman who had a child who was probably epileptic, and she refused to let them do what would normally happen. He would have been sent off for a caretaker to occupy, and he would never have appeared. But they mainstreamed him. They tried to keep him in school. They kept him at home. They gave him everything they could. And I thought, well, that speaks volumes about someone. And I want to know more about this person.

• 6:38Kate Lister?

  For anyone that might have wandered into the podcast brand new and doesn't know, could you give us a very quick potted history of who Byron was? Before, we'll do away with him in a sec. But before we get to Lady Caroline Lamb and who she was, who was Byron?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Byron was a phenomenon, a true genius in the stereotypical way we had of thinking of genius from the Romantic period, live fast, die young. I don't know how he managed to write all that he wrote.

• 7:06Kate Lister?

  No.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Or how did he manage to make it as brilliant as he did? He seems to have just been a volcano himself of activity. He was also one of the first true celebrities in the modern sense. So when his poem "Child Herald" burst on the scene in 1812, which was a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his travels in Europe and the Middle East, he suddenly, as he said, found himself famous. And this was the beginning of an incredible explosion of creativity and of notoriety for him. And he was, as you know, from a

• 7:47Speaker 01

  previous broadcast you did with one of my colleagues, one of the most famous lovers, as famous as Napoleon in his way.

• 7:57Kate Lister?

  Yep. Without, and magnetic, even centuries later, people are drawn to him.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  It's true. He provides the model for, in his dress and in his demeanor of the bad boy, right down to, let's say, modern rock stars like Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger of the 60s and the 70s. And people still look to him as a model for how to behave in order to fascinate people and to sort of plumb the depths of human experience.

• 8:29Kate Lister?

  And of course, we've got the movie "Whether in Heights" about to drop, and Byron's influence on that is another example. He's still with us.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  He absolutely is. He's been the subject of many, many plays, movies, operas, and even epic poems and novels, including the very first novel about Byron's life to achieve any real popularity was Lady Caroline Lamb's "Glen Arvin," which appeared in 1816 just as he was leaving England forever.

• 8:59Kate Lister?

  So that's who Byron was in a nutshell, and he will appear again. Who was Lady Caroline Lamb? Because as you said, she so often is this awkward subsection of Byron's life, of this crazed mistress. But give us some background story on who she was.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Well, she was born as the child of one of the possibly three most politically influential women in England, Harriet Lady Besborough, who was the sister of the Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana.

• 9:34Kate Lister?

  Oh, oh, hello. Right, okay.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Harriet Lady Besborough are Spencer girls. They come from the family of Lord Spencer. So although Lady Carolyn Lamb doesn't have any direct descendants, she is a descendant in the same line as Princess Diana. Marie Antoinette was a family friend. So was the Prince of Wales. Before he became George IV, they called him Prinny. Edward Gibbon used to bounce Lady Carolyn Lamb on his knee when she was only six years old.

• 10:05Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  She told him his face was so ugly it frightened her puppy. Harriet Lady Besborough had a long-term affair with Richard Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright. And many people speculated that Sheridan might have been Lady Carolyn Lamb's father. He was a prolific talker. Sheridan was absolutely, I think, probably a case of mania, undiagnosed manic depression, you know, it's a retroactive diagnosis because that was not a term used in that era. But some of her characteristics have led people to wonder if they could have been related in blood. We'll, we'll never know that because there's nothing left of

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Lady Carolyn.

• 10:52Kate Lister?

  What, what do you think? I know we're speculating, but do you think, is that a theory that has legs?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I think it does, although it would take evidence that we just will never have access to, I think. So it's, it's something that you have to consider and realize you can't really rule it out, but you can't embrace it either. You can't be sure. She went on after she got married to William Lamb for love, and they were together until she died. She expected to become Lady Melbourne, and Lamb did eventually become Lord Melbourne and Prime Minister of England, but she never experienced that.

• 11:32Kate Lister?

  Wow. But she's born of like the hobbyist hobnobs. This is proper

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 11:38Kate Lister?

  elite level aristocrats.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, my understanding, and I'm not a Brit, but I I've tried to understand how this works. And if you start with the royal family, then the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire

• 11:54Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  right there.

• 11:56Kate Lister?

  Yeah, absolutely. Did she have a happy childhood?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  She had a very loving relationship with her mother. However, her mother's adventures, affairs, she had two illegitimate children, and so did the Duchess of Devonshire by Earl Grey. So it was a stormy kind of childhood. It was a childhood that was peripatetic. They were always moving from one house to another. And she was, actually, there was a term invented for this called children of the mist, meaning a great gaggle of children, many of whom might or might not be the legitimate children of the parents involved. And they were all collected

• 12:44Speaker 01

  together, the Devonshires and the Bestburrows, and they were traveling in Europe. I mean, they felt, clearly felt invulnerable. They were traveling even during the Napoleonic Wars, as if they had, you know, nothing to worry about.

• 12:59Kate Lister?

  Wow. How old was she when she got married? And I like that she got married for love. I think that's really interesting at this time.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  She was nineteen years old at the time that she married in eighteen oh five. She'd been born in seventeen eighty five. And as I say, she married for love. However, within about three years, she started to chafe. She'd gone through two miscarriages, well, one stillbirth, a miscarriage, and then had given birth to this little boy, Augustus, whom they loved desperately, but who turned out to be severely challenged.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  And she began to look around. Apparently, she just wanted attention all the time. And that's something that her grandmother knew about her. She had a very close relationship with her grandmother. But this led her to affairs, some of them sexual, some of them just romantic with people like the Duke of Wellington. She actually was friends with William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father, and Oga Foscalo, an Italian novelist who's famous as having invented the modern Italian novel, Edward Bulwer-Litten, and adventurers like Michael Bruce.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  So Byron was her principal love affair, but by no means was he the only one that she had an affair with.

• 14:23Kate Lister?

  These are big names. So we've got a still young aristocratic woman who is from the highest echelons of society and has grown up in quite either a permissive atmosphere, or perhaps it's more a we don't care what anyone else thinks atmosphere. Perhaps if you've got that much money, you can just do what you like.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  That's right. It was very permissive in some ways. In other ways, she had a very traditional upbringing with attending church, with lessons. The thing that made it stormy for her was that she absolutely, and she's not that unusual. She was a little girl who threw tantrums. If she didn't get her way, she would yell and scream and throw things. And she was hard to pacify. And this persisted. And whether that's the product of some sort of mental problems that she had that were underlying, or whether that's just the product of the kind of upbringing that she got, we'll probably never know.

• 15:28Kate Lister?

  No. So we have a young, beautiful, by all accounts, aristocrat who has grown up in a traditional, but also permissive atmosphere, who is married, but there's some pain and some difficulty there. She loves attention.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:42Kate Lister?

  She might be a bit bored. And then who does she meet at a party? Oh, no.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Well, whether she really met Byron at that party is part of the lore.

• 15:54Kate Lister?

  Oh, really?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, she apparently saw him and then permitted him to see her and then withdrew. So thus increasing the fascination that he might have with this person.

• 16:07Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And on his side, you've got to realize that while he was a baron, he was at the very lowest part of the aristocracy. He would not have been on invitation lists for the parties that Lady Carolyn Lamb and her husband, who the son of Lord Melbourne, or the Duchess of Devonshire, or Lady Besborough, he was not going to be there. In fact, he would have been there only because people were curious about him. But once he met Lady Carolyn Lamb, he had a kind of a ticket. His friend, Thomas More, said very directly, Byron is reveling in this attention that he's getting

• 16:48Speaker 01

  and the access that he's getting to all these places and these people because of his relationship with her.

• 16:56Kate Lister?

  When they have this famed meeting or she walks away from him and doesn't give him any attention or whatever it is, he is famous by this point, isn't he? He's published his Child Harold's pilgrimage and, you know, he's a celebrity overnight.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  He is. His fame, however, is spreading. He's very young. This story is very young. I mean, the poem was published in March. Some people knew about him. And then suddenly, a lot more people knew about him and a lot more people wanted to know more about him. And that's exactly the moment at which he arrives at the Melbourne's house and Lady Carolyn Lamb comes in, having been out riding. Riding was one of her passions, that and dogs. And she comes in, you know, all flustered and hot from her exercise. And there he is, and they meet and talk for the first time.

• 17:49Kate Lister?

  And she's, she's 26 and he's 24, or is it the other way around?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. He, well, certainly he is two to two and a half years younger than she is.

• 17:58Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 17:59Kate Lister?

  Okay, so we have this meeting of minds. Did they like each other straight away? Is this one of those affairs where like, maybe you didn't really notice them to begin with and they kind of grew on you? Or were they into each other straight away?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Well, they appear to have been into each other straight away. And I think that the reason that their breakup was so horrible is that they were matched like paper and fire. This was an incendiary combination. They were both kind of crazy in their behavior, willing to take on all kinds of things or behave in ways that were considered improper publicly. And there was a kind of a, of a dare quality to their relationship right from the very beginning.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Byron later said to Carolyn Lamb, "You are the cleverest, the most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2,000 years ago."

• 19:06Kate Lister?

  Oh, see, that's intoxicating.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Isn't it?

• 19:08Kate Lister?

  Like, every single woman wants to hear that being said about them.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and on her part, she, she would write things like, "Your, your pale face is my destiny." You know?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  They clicked and it became tit for tat. And she was not shy about showing her interest in him. They became an item in public. I mean, people in-

• 19:38Kate Lister?

  She is married?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  She's married. And William Lamb, almost unbelievably, for his time and place and his station, lived their entire married life without a known love affair.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  He never stepped out on her. Can you believe that? Every man in his station had something on the side, but not William.

• 20:04Kate Lister?

  And he must have known about this affair because everybody knew about it.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Everybody knew. Everybody knew. His family was angry with him because he wouldn't do anything. Now, let's remember, he was also fascinated with Byron. He actually, at one point, began writing a biography of Byron.

• 20:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, this is so messed up. Oh, this is so messed up.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  When she was writing her novel about Byron, again, considered one of the worst things you could do, a kiss and tell book at that level. She didn't think of it that way, but that's certainly how it was received. He also, you know, knew about that. A lot of people ask the question, what's really going on there? And I, I think it's partly William's personality, but also partly that William never really believed that even if Lady Carolyn found others to love, even if she had sex with them, that she would leave him or that their relationship would die. I think he really, he just,

• 21:09Speaker 01

  he loved her so much and he cared for her so much that almost nothing she could do was going to make him stop.

• 21:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  And that's incredible, isn't it?

• 21:22Kate Lister?

  That's, that's, I've never heard of that before.

• 21:27Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Paul after this short break.

• 21:41Speaker 02

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• 22:40Kate Lister?

  I'm sure there are other examples out there somewhere that I just, that I don't know about, but I'm struggling to think of an example of another man throughout history who knew that his wife was having very, very, very public affairs and just kind of let her get on with it.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  She had an affair before she met Byron with a guy who was two years younger than she, who had a terrible reputation, the Whips Club in London, which would normally accept anybody, would not accept him.

• 23:07Kate Lister?

  Oh, she has a type then, doesn't she?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yes, the bad boy type, the guy in the motorcycle jacket, you know? He had, he had a skull. Now, this is a story that's told about Byron, that there, he had a skull that he drank out of at Newstead Abbey. Well, before she met Byron, she met another guy who had a skull that he drank out of. And that was Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster. And she had a very flagrant public affair. It's possible that they never actually consummated their affair, but I talked with Margot Strickland, who was one of the early biographers to take Lady Carolyn Lamb seriously as a writer.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  And in the seventies, she published a book called The Byron Women, and she thinks that Webster and Lady Caroline Lamb did have sex and that it was very exciting for her. And Web-

• 24:04Kate Lister?

  She had a lot of sex with Byron, didn't she?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Apparently, although Byron, it's undoubted that it was a sexual affair. How many times they actually consummated their love rather than engaged in elaborate and sometimes torturous foreplay is really hard to say.

• 24:24Kate Lister?

  One of the things, because I've done a bit of digging into like the various biographies and trying to get a handle on Byron's sex life, it's odd, he does seem to have a thing about making young women dress up as boys. That seems to crop up a few times, and he does that with Lady Caroline Lamb.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  He absolutely does, and that's one of the things that excited him and may have excited her husband. She was not a typical femme fatale of the era, and in fact Byron's apparent taste in the physical characteristics of a female lover, you know, would have been a much more well upholstered human being. And, you know, he, he seems to have been truly bisexual, but this cross-dressing thing did absolutely seem to excite him, and she loved to do it. There is a question as to whether sodomy actually became part of their sexual relationship,

• 25:26Speaker 01

  or even Antonia Fraser, who recently published another short biography of Lady Caroline Lamb, has speculated that that may have been part of the relationship between William and Caroline. So there's, there's a lot of complexity and layering to the sexual attraction and the sexual excitement that Lady Caroline Lamb was experiencing in all these relationships, and the principal ones Byron and her husband.

• 25:58Kate Lister?

  You get a real sense that this is just, it's a meeting of minds, it's certainly a meeting of libidos, but it's just this clash of like- Fire and they're both so passionate and they're feeding off one another and it's almost like they were bored and then suddenly they've got this thing together and they're sparking and they're writing each other the most erotic and passionate letters and you dress up, no, I'll dress up, I'll chase you through the house and then, oh, we'll do this kind of sex and that kind of sex. It's so fiery.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yes. So later Byron would say, uh, he was giving advice to somebody who was interested in a relationship with Lady Carolyn Lamb. And he said to this gentleman, be careful and also be really careful. And then finally that she has to make everything public.

• 26:49Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Lady Carolyn Lamb makes everything public.

• 26:55Kate Lister?

  Yeah, because if you think about it, it's weird. We know this stuff. Like it's weird, like it's so indiscreet. Why do we know this?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Well, she, she should have known it. I mean, it was very obvious to everyone of her class and station that you could take lovers, you just had to be discreet.

• 27:15Kate Lister?

  She's not, she's making everything public.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  She could not be discreet at all. And Byron said that in the beginning, that publicity, that craziness that everyone can see is pequent, but in the end, it's tiresome.

• 27:31Kate Lister?

  So everything so far sounds great. I mean, she's married, but he doesn't seem to be bothered about it. They're having amazing electric cross-dressing, crazy sex. Fab, they're brilliant. This is great.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:44Kate Lister?

  What starts, what starts to go wrong?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Well, the problem is that she was ready to leave William and go off with Byron. And he thought, well, that's a fascinating game, but I'm not going to get trapped in that. And yet there came a moment when he and William Lamb's mother, Lady Carolyn's mother-in-law, and Lady Carolyn's mother, that is Lady Besborough, and everyone around them could see that Byron had painted himself into a corner. He had let it become so public.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  That he either had to run off with her or he had to break it off and probably get married.

• 28:31Kate Lister?

  Yikes.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  And he knew that. And this is, we can say that the disaster of Byron's marriage is almost certainly due to the desperation with which he faced the problem of what to do about Lady Carolyn Lamb.

• 28:47Kate Lister?

  And I also get a sense, like, reading through the various descriptions of this affair, that that in the beginning, the craziness was fun and it was exciting. And there's a point where it stops being fun, where you get a real sense of Byron going, okay, as if like, somebody is like, you're laughing together really heartily with someone and then the other person just doesn't stop laughing. And you're kind of there going, it's a bit weird now. It's gone a bit strange.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I totally agree. And this must have been one of the weirdest possible experiences for Byron, because he is brilliant and he is clever. And he is not used to having somebody who can match him. Joke for joke.

• 29:30Kate Lister?

  No.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Crazy thing for crazy thing. Outmaneuver him in a sense, you know, so that he begins to feel trapped. Rather than being the one to leave, he isn't sure where the exit door is. And I think this must have been a very strange experience for him. And this is why I say in many ways, they are perfectly matched. They both have this madcap quality. They are both brilliant conversationalists. They are both outrageous in their behavior. They are both, you know, probably bisexual, ambisexual. And it, it just became too much.

• 30:14Kate Lister?

  Too much. Like, she's, doesn't she start doing things like, like, like, he wakes up and she's standing there, like she's broken into his house and she's shouting in the middle of the night about how they've got to run away together.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Close, yes. It almost happened exactly like that. She does start to turn up in his apartments. And at one point, he would have, clearly, he would have left with her if his friend, John Cam Hobhouse, later Lord Broughton, hadn't been there and stopped them.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  Thank God for Hobhouse.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Well, yes, for everybody's sake, I think. So she ratchets this up and there's no end to it until finally, her family says, "We gotta get you out of town, honey. We're taking you to the family estate in Ireland." And now Byron makes what I think is one of the most interesting and most strategically stupid moves in his whole relationship with her. Just as she's about to leave, she sends him this gift of some of her pubic hair that she has cut off.

• 31:30Kate Lister?

  See, that's too much there, right there.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  It's over the top, or from the bottom. But in any case, she is, I mean, hair meant a lot. And the locks of hair that were clipped and shared, treasured, tresses kept. You know, this is an era in which the hair ornaments were made and so on. So hair is used as an intimacy in this generation and in this period in ways that we don't do anymore, and probably would consider to feel a little creepy. But the pubic hair is, so just as a side note, I have often wished that that pubic hair

• 32:12Speaker 01

  hadn't disappeared because she says that she cut herself slightly.

• 32:20Kate Lister?

  The DNA!

• 32:20Speaker 01

  If there had been blood on that hair. We would actually be able to verify whether Lady Carolyn Lamb had any relationship with, for example, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. So, oh, well. So Byron is a little shocked by the gift of the pubic hair.

• 32:42Kate Lister?

  And presumably, he says, no, Caroline, we have to go. No contact now. You have to go to Ireland and we'll both move on.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. She asks him for a return of the gift. She wants some from him. She's now leaving for Ireland and he sits down, and this is what I mean by the strategic error he makes, and he decides he will give her a send-off.

• 33:05Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  A kiss-off. He's going to tell her how much he loves her, that he never has loved anybody as much as he has loved her.

• 33:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  My dearest and beloved friend, I just can't express myself. Promise not to love you. Oh, that's past promising. I will with pleasure give up everything here on earth and go with you freely, when, where, and how you want.

• 33:37Kate Lister?

  Byron.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  So she now is leaving for Ireland, thinking that it's just a matter of time that she can work out how they can elope.

• 33:46Kate Lister?

  No. Why did he do that? Why? Like, this woman has become so obsessive about him that an intervention has been staged and she's been taken to another country. Why on earth did he write her a letter going, I love you?

• 34:03Speaker 01

  It's just before she leaves that he sends her this letter. And so then she starts to try to delay the departure to Ireland.

• 34:13Kate Lister?

  I bet she does.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And but then they finally drag her out of town. Well, you ask, why would he do this? Why would he say those things? I believe it's because he thought he knew how women work and how women in this culture work.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  And for example, if he sat down and told Lady Carolyn's mother, Lady Besborough, I just want to be done with this. I don't love her. You know what? I never really wanted this in the first place. That would offend Lady Carolyn Lamb's mother on behalf of her daughter. Because the gift, the thing that you could say about a love affair gone bad was, well, in the end, he really did truly love me. And so he thought that if he gives her this gift of stating how much in love he was,

• 35:12Speaker 01

  she can take that with her to the grave, you know, that Byron loved me. And he, in his way, he probably did. And there was a lot of sincerity in that. But if he really wanted to be done.

• 35:30Kate Lister?

  It's not a good move.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  That was absolutely the opposite of what he should have done.

• 35:40Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Paul after this short break.

• 35:51Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 36:35Kate Lister?

  I mean, the general rule about breaking up with somebody, the way to get over them is you go no contact immediately. It's very difficult to do, but delete them from your social media, block them, get rid of the number. It's horrible, it's painful, but you'll be over a lot quicker. It's not write them a letter saying how much you absolutely love and adore them and hope that that will give them some comfort. And it clearly doesn't do that for Caroline.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  No. And remember Byron is a real chameleon. He'll sit there and exchange letters with Lady Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law.

• 37:10Kate Lister?

  Yes, I was just about to ask you that. That was a bit dodgy, that one.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Caroline believed that there was even possibly a physical, sexual relationship between her mother-in-law and Byron. And he said, you know, Lady Melbourne, boy, if you were 25 years younger, man, you could do anything you want with me. And so Caroline picked up on that. So he is thinking that he knows how to push her off, but he doesn't do, as you pointed out, exactly what almost anybody else would do. And the real question then becomes, does he truly want the relationship to end? Does he really want to get married?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Does he just want to continue being in this crazy spin cycle of ups and downs and drama and so on? And I think the answer probably on balance is the last choice. He doesn't really want to cut everything off completely. He does feel guilty about the way that he's treated her. He doesn't want to get married. And when he finally does get married, as his friend Hobhouse said, no lover was in less haste to get to the marriage ceremony.

• 38:34Kate Lister?

  He got married for many reasons, but I'm interested in the kind of the one that you're saying there is that he was sort of, because he'd got himself inveigled into so many scandals. It was sort of like he sort of had to. Not only does he have this very tempestuous public relationship with Lady Caroline, also potentially knocking off her mother-in-law. We're not entirely sure about that one. Numerous nameless people, possibly his half-sister as well. So he gets married, doesn't he? Does he get married when Caroline is in Ireland trying to get over him? Or is she back by that point?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Oh, she's been back for a while. And this is the aftermath of the so-called breakup. Because before he actually gets engaged to Annabella Milbank.

• 39:16Kate Lister?

  Her cousin, isn't it?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  William's cousin. She does call Annabella cousin, but in fact, it's William's cousin. She's the niece of William's mother, Lady Melbourne. So Caroline called her cousin honorifically. But yeah, she has been back for a while. It's after she gets back that she stages this scene where she burns letters and so on, memorabilia. This is in December. So they meet in March. By August, the end of August, the affair is ending, according to the way a lot of people try to read it.

• 39:54Kate Lister?

  Five months.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then she's back.

• 39:56Kate Lister?

  Five months.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 40:00Kate Lister?

  I've got food in my fridge that's older than that. Five months.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Well, a lot can happen in five months, let me say.

• 40:06Kate Lister?

  A lot did happen.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And a lot did happen.

• 40:08Kate Lister?

  Okay, all right.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  And she's back and he is not engaged to be married and he still is worried that she is going to trap him into running off with her. And this is when we get some of the scenes that other people have written about extensively, like the ball that she goes to where she cuts herself. It's either with a broken glass or a pair of scissors or a dinner knife. The story gets told in a lot of different ways. And she says, I presume I can waltz now because Byron didn't want her to waltz because of his lame foot. He couldn't or wouldn't dance. And he says, well, you've waltzed with everybody else.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Go right ahead. I'll just watch. And so there's all of this aftermath going on.

• 40:59Kate Lister?

  Has he like shunned her at this point? If she's come back from Ireland, does she think, yay, it's back on? And just, does he like break it off at this point? Give her the firm no?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Well, while he was, while she was in Ireland, he wrote to her from one of her own friend's houses with a stamp showing her that he was now having a dalliance with someone else. And he wrote her a note and said, you, I am no longer your lover.

• 41:24Kate Lister?

  Oh my god.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  After that letter that I just described to you. So he's, now he's trying to push her away, right? So, but then when she comes back, she asks to see him and he agrees to do it. So he sits down and talks to her again. And so she's getting this, you know, whiplash effect of,

• 41:43Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Are we done? Are we not done? Are you going to talk to me? Are you not going to talk to me? And then finally, after all of this, she goes to his publisher and gives him a forged note so that she can take a picture to have it copied. She's just like a fetishist about everything having to do with him. And he can't get rid of her. So finally, he, he, he tries something else, which again is one of the most, the stupidest strategic decision he could make. He decides to tell her in veiled ways and in direct ways that he has committed homosexual acts, which is a felony in England,

• 42:27Speaker 01

  and that he's had an incestuous affair with his half sister, Augusta Lee. And this is just before he gets engaged to be married.

• 42:39Kate Lister?

  Why did he do that?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Cause he, he actually did the same thing with his wife to try to push her away.

• 42:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, he's, he's just a nightmare, this man.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  You know, at one point, Lady Carolyn Lamb said that Byron was mad, bad and dangerous to know. That's been turned around on her almost universally. But during this period, when he got married and then had a child and then got separated, Byron was acting like a madman.

• 43:09Kate Lister?

  This isn't, this is really cruel behavior. And this is something that I think all biographers of the man and all people that love his work have to reckon with is it's just awful, his treatment. He's blowing hot and cold. He's sending mixed messages, letters saying, I love you. Another one from the house of somebody that I'm shagging, saying, I'm no longer your lover. And then I'll meet you, then I won't know I was gay. And now I'm not, and I'm having sex with this person. And now I'm going to marry your cousin. I'm not surprised she went a bit loopy.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she was all already well down the road in the sense that she had this obsessive personality. A lot of people have wondered, can we diagnose retroactively what might have been going on with her? I don't think that there's any way of separating out this incredibly hot house environment that this life of privilege gave to her and her personality traits that would have been considered within the normal range, but were permitted to run amok from a possible, you know, she sometimes acts as though she has mania. She's does get depressed, but so do we, right? So it's

• 44:20Kate Lister?

  Yes, yes.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not clear. But it is true that almost everybody who met her, Edward Buller, Litten, Michael Bruce, Isaac Nathan, Byron himself, says she's just different from anybody I've ever met. She is unlike anybody else and sometimes not like herself from moment to moment, as if there's just this kaleidoscope of feelings and words and gestures and just pouring out of her. And that this fascinated almost anybody who met her, even people who had to live with

• 45:03Speaker 01

  her, like members of her husband's family, whom she drove crazy.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Had to admit that when you sat down and talked to her, she was just absolutely fascinating, a fascinating human being.

• 45:18Kate Lister?

  How did she take the news of Byron getting married?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Well, before it happened, she had written a letter to his publisher, who would later become her publisher, John Murray. And she said, you know, I think if there is ever a Lady Byron, if he ever gets married, I think I'm going to get a pistol and go down and stand in front of their house and shoot myself.

• 45:43Kate Lister?

  Oh, Caroline.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Well, nothing like that. What happened was she was silenced by that act. She tried to figure out how to be friends with Annabella Milbank, who was having nothing to do with Lady Carolyn as Lord Byron's most infamous former lover. And she tried in many ways to just calm everything down. That was her reaction.

• 46:14Kate Lister?

  Wow. What about this book that she writes about him, Glen Arvin? Because that that must have come like a bolt out of the blue. Was this Byron by this point, I think when she'd published it, he was already exiled, having to live abroad.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  He just left England when it came out.

• 46:30Kate Lister?

  Okay. And his relationship with his wife deteriorated rapidly on account of him being bisexual and having sex with his sister and everything else and being, he didn't treat her well at all, did he? And that all fell apart.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  That is right. And that is a very sad story. And at the very end, Lady Carolyn Lamb actually, I mean, she blew every which way. She wanted to hurt Byron. She wanted to to save Byron. She felt bad for his wife. She wanted revenge. She just wanted Byron back. But her initial reaction was to tell Byron to reconcile with his wife.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  She wrote to him on more than one occasion, saying, go to her, talk to her, make it up to her. And that's partly strategic for him to say, you can't afford to make an enemy out of your wife. You are too vulnerable. There's a lot of rumor going on around here about your half-sister. And then Lady Carolyn, looking at what Byron had done, she began to identify with Annabella more because, at the same time, all of this is going on, and Byron is leaving his wife and separating, or she's separating from him, Lady Caroline's

• 47:55Speaker 01

  relatives have procured a doctor to certify that she is not sane, and should be locked up and will lose access to her child.

• 48:07Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  So she starts to identify more with Annabella, because, of course, Annabella's baby is Byron's property. By British law of the era, just saying he was abusive is not enough. So she begins to tell Annabella, now, I know some things that I should have told you before you got married, and these are things that you can use in order to protect your child from it being taken away. And so that's why, for a lot of Byron supporters, and there still is a very large league of Byron defenders out there in the world, who don't want to hear any, anything negative, who still deny that there was a sexual relationship

• 48:53Speaker 01

  between himself and his half-sister.

• 48:55Kate Lister?

  No, now, come on.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  They don't want to accept it. So that is why Lady Carolyn Lamb has to be, in this case, a villain. She's horrible. She's a terrible human being, because she tries to help Byron's wife.

• 49:13Kate Lister?

  By giving her information.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Fend off the, the possible loss of her child.

• 49:17Kate Lister?

  She writes this book, Glen Arden, which is a thinly veiled tell-all, kiss and tell-all, and he's left the country. What was his reaction to that?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Well, apparently, he found it amusing.

• 49:30Kate Lister?

  Oh, did he now?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:32Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  She had done what, in a sense, he was doing. Which is take your life, put it into fiction. And in fact, Glen Arvan, for most people is, as you say, this thinly veiled version of her own life. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. You can find Lady Caroline in at least three major female characters in the book.

• 49:58Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  One of whom is an Irish revolutionary, one of whom is married into an aristocratic family that looks like Lady Caroline's family. And another of whom is a woman who has been spurned by her lover and who dies afterward. And the more you look at it, Byron appears as two different characters who later become one. Everyone thinks it's a Romana Clef, a novel with a key, where this person corresponds to that human being in real life. It really isn't that, and she didn't think of it that way. She was inspired to start the novel in Ireland, and it is set in Ireland.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  And it is set in Ireland in 1798, which is the year of the Great Rebellion that was so brutally crushed by the British Crown. And she turns Byron into a political traitor, a man who claims to be working for the rebels and for the cause of human

• 51:01Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Freedom. And he's a rat. And at the very end of the novel, she stages a sort of a Faustian retrieval of Byron's soul, the Byron character called Glen Arvan. He's on the deck of a ship and a monstrous satanic form comes up out of the ocean and drags him down to hell. So there's your revenge.

• 51:26Kate Lister?

  There's your revenge. I mean, that is a hell of a revenge. And I would like to think that after that was published, she managed to find some peace. But I don't know if she does, because the silly sod goes and dies over in Greece when he's 36. And that, I'm trying to get a sense of how this ends for her. For him, it ends trying to fight for Greek independence, the silly bugger. He's had sex with everybody, I was gonna say in Italy, but I'll just say everybody by this point. But he's got a kind of guts and glory ending, but her reputation is destroyed by this.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yes. She went on to write two more novels. She wrote two very interesting, uh, satirical send-ups of Byron's most famous poem, Don Juin. And she engaged in a lot of public works, or I should say, private philanthropy. For example, she was trying to help William Godwin, Mary Scheller's father, out of financial difficulties. So the way that aristocrats did this was they would circulate a begging letter among all their friends and say, I'm sponsoring this person who is in desperate need. It's like a GoFundMe, you know? Oh, okay. Of the era. So, um, she did things like that.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  She met and worked with these interesting other characters like Isaac Nathan, who set 10 of her songs to music. She published songs in her novels that were set to music by Isaac Nathan. It's, it's very clever. It is very clever. It's, and so she was trying to have a writing career. She was trying to bring up her son and protect him as much as possible. And she was still vulnerable to flattery as she knew this about herself. She just was such a sucker for somebody that would flatter her. And she, she wished she wasn't like that, but she knew that she was.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Uh, at one point she loaned her journals to this obscure poet named Wilmington Fleming, who then copied things out and tried to blackmail her, saying, I'm gonna publish this stuff. So she never quite managed to get out of hot water, but she continued to maintain her, uh, energy and her relationships until after Byron's death. You know, a weird story about that is that, uh, she'd just heard that he died and has, was beginning to recover after three or four days, went out riding, which was her principal form of exercise and just sort of communion with nature.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  And here comes Byron's hearse. No. Going through Wellwood, where she was at Brockett Hall, on its way to Newstead Abbey for his burial. I mean, isn't that a weird coincidence?

• 54:23Kate Lister?

  That's so weird.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  So.

• 54:25Kate Lister?

  And she dies, she dies young too, doesn't she?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  She only lived four years beyond the death of Byron. By the time Byron has died, laudanum or opium in a liquid form, which was widely used and abused in her period and by people in her station. And alcohol are beginning to have their effect on her. And her husband finally agrees that there should be a separation. She's given an allowance, she's sent off to France. Within three weeks, she's back and he says, oh, hell, go live at Brockett Hall. You know, and meanwhile, his career is beginning to take off. And he gets an assignment to go to Ireland as the liaison between the British government

• 55:13Speaker 01

  and the Irish and its dominion. So he leaves her and gradually she just simply goes downhill. I mean, to the point where she's retaining water, she's having, you know, organ failure. And William does come back with Augustus. They both made it back across the channel from Ireland within a day of her dying. And most people who knew her and saw her at the end said, this is a very docile, quiet, sweet natured person who is prepared to die.

• 55:52Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, I could honestly, I could talk to you about this forever. How do you think we should remember Caroline Lamb? Because like you said, they were so evenly matched, her and Byron. They were like, like one half of the same coin. And yet he's remembered as a great poet and a revolutionary and a romantic and one of the great lovers and he's mad, bad, dangerous now. She is just remembered as one of his exes, which seems unfair. How would you like her to be remembered?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think she should be remembered as one of those women who read about, sensed and understood that women could be different. They could be, their roles could be different. They could be liberated. And that one of the things that William loved about her was that she wouldn't take no for an answer and she wasn't going to curtail her potentialities. She was going to do the most she could with them. She once said, you know, I wonder why everyone wants to beat down on my little spark of genius. It's tiny. It's like something that a housemaid

• 57:07Speaker 01

  could get by beating on a matchbox, but it's there. I have something. And why is it that no one wants me to use it? Well, the answer is because you're a woman and this is not your role in our culture. So I think she should be remembered as somebody who is not a model to base your own behavior on, but somebody with tremendous talent, a lot of passion for life, as Antonia Fraser called her, a free spirit, someone who really did allow her passions to run amok, but who believed in passion as a principle, a guiding principle

• 57:51Speaker 01

  of life, and paid the price. She wrecked herself. She compared herself sometimes to a little boat that has come crashing onto a reef. And I think there's a lot of truth in that, but there's also a lot to admire and respect about the way she lived her life.

• 58:10Kate Lister?

  Paul, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for joining us. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Are you on social media at all?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Not very much, but I do have a website. If you Google Lady Carolyn Lamb and just go down the page a little bit, you'll see a website called Caro, C A R O, which is the nickname that a lot of people gave to her. They gave her other nicknames too, like Little Mania.

• 58:41Kate Lister?

  Caro was nicer.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  But Caro was the one that I used. And there you'll find all kinds of things, lots of her letters.

• 58:52Kate Lister?

  Amazing.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  That I've transcribed and posted. And I also am very excited to see that there are other people now. There are lots of scholars who are interested in Lady Carolyn and her work. Her work is not, you know, of the first quality, but it has its charms.

• 59:12Kate Lister?

  Certainly does. Thank you so much. You've been wonderful.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Thank you, Kate.

• 59:17Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Paul for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, the breakups are getting even messier with full-sized replica dolls and very public accusations of impotence. If you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to dash off an email about how terrible your ex is, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.