Lady Byron Vindicated | Page 9

Murray nor any of Byron's partisans seem to have
pondered the admission in these last words.
Here, as appears, was a woman, driven to the last despair, standing with
her child in her arms, asking from English laws protection for herself
and child against her husband.
She had appealed to the first counsel in England, and was acting under
their direction.
Two of the greatest lawyers in England have pronounced that there has
been such a cause of offence on his part that a return to him is neither
proper nor possible, and that no alternative remains to her but
separation or divorce.
He asks her to state her charges against him. She, making answer under
advice of her counsel, says, 'That if he insists on the specifications, he
must receive them in open court in a suit for divorce.'
What, now, ought to have been the conduct of any brave, honest man,
who believed that his wife was taking advantage of her reputation for
virtue to turn every one against him, who saw that she had turned on
her side even the lawyer he sought to retain on his; {24} that she was
an unscrupulous woman, who acquiesced in every and any thing to gain
her ends, while he stood before the public, as he says, 'accused of every
monstrous vice, by public rumour or private rancour'? When she, under
advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal separation or open
investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?
HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.
Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England,--let any
lawyer who knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr.
Lushington, ask whether they were the men to take a case into court for
a woman that had no evidence but her own statements and impressions?
Were they men to go to trial without proofs? Did they not know that
there were artful, hysterical women in the world, and would they, of all
people, be the men to take a woman's story on her own side, and advise

her in the last issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of
the strongest kind? Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this
statement of Byron's--that he was condemned unheard, and had no
chance of knowing whereof he _was accused--never appeared in
public_.
It, however, was most actively circulated in private. That Byron was in
the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various kinds to
be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have already
shown. We have recently come upon another instance of this kind. In
the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new document has turned up,
of which Mr. Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after Byron's
death, he published in the preface to his 'Domestic Pieces' the sentence:
'_He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented
when threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons_.' It appears that, up
to 1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who now fills his
place, had taken any notice of this newly found document, which we
are now informed was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817, while
Mr. Hobhouse was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice, given to
Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, for circulation among friends in England,
found in Mr. Lewis's papers after his death, and now in the possession
of Mr. Murray.' Here it is:--
'It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal
advisers of Lady Byron have declared "their lips to be sealed up" on the
cause of the separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed
up, they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can
confer upon me will be to open them. From the first hour in which I
was apprised of the intentions of the Noel family to the last
communication between Lady Byron and myself in the character of
wife and husband (a period of some months), I called repeatedly and in
vain for a statement of their or her charges, and it was chiefly in
consequence of Lady Byron's claiming (in a letter still existing) a
promise on my part to consent to a separation, if such was really her
wish, that I consented at all; this claim, and the exasperating and
inexpiable manner in which their object was pursued, which rendered it
next to an impossibility that two persons so divided could ever be

reunited, induced me reluctantly then, and repentantly still, to sign the
deed, which I shall be happy--most happy--to cancel, and go before any
tribunal which may discuss the business in the most public manner.
'Mr. Hobhouse made this