Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (15 page)

Unbeknownst to Byron, however, he was shortly to be subject to a very different kind of company. In the early spring of 1816 Claire Clairmont did something extraordinary. Out of the blue, she wrote Byron a letter, in which she offered herself to him fully and freely:

If a woman, whose reputation has yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years, if she should secure to you secrisy & safety, if she should return your kindness with fond affection & unbounded devotion could you betray her, or would you be as silent as the grave?
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The writer of this letter was a complete stranger to Byron, but he was not the man to ignore such an approach. Claire was admitted to Piccadilly Terrace, where she charmed and flattered Byron into a state of pleasantly bewildered acquiescence. She chose her persona carefully, presenting herself as an independent woman with literary aspirations. She reinforced her liberal credentials by telling Byron of her friendship with Shelley, whose
Queen Mab
Byron admired.  Claire was determined to attract Byron’s attention and, for a brief period, she succeeded. With Claire leading the way at every turn the pair flitted from London one Thursday evening to spend the night at an inn.  ‘There we shall be free & unknown’, she told Byron. ‘I have arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited.’
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In order to ensure a degree of respectability Claire brought Mary to Piccadilly Terrace to introduce her to Byron, although she warned him not to keep Mary waiting in the hall as he did Claire, since ‘she is accustomed to be surrounded by her own circle who treat her with the greatest politeness.’  The word ‘circle’ had been substituted in this note for ‘coterie’, suggesting that Claire didn’t want to sound as though she were excluded from Shelley’s social world.
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Her letters to Byron grew ever more passionate as the date of his departure from England approached. ‘Now do not smile contemptuously & call me a “little fool” when I tell you I weep at your departure’, she begged.  ‘Pray write.  I shall die if you don’t write.’
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What possessed Claire to act in this way, and how was it possible for her to fall for Byron in such a short time? The answer to these questions probably lies in her exile in Lynmouth, where she had ample opportunity to brood on her position. Whatever Claire felt towards Shelley, and however flirtatious he had been with her, it was clear that she would not succeed if she competed for his affections with Mary; and the hazards of becoming too close to him were obvious. Yet she now knew that she could – intermittently – hold the interest of a poet.  Claire was both competitive and wounded and Byron – famous, brooding, brilliant – was a much bigger catch than Shelley, of whom few people had heard. Mary and Shelley had known each other for less than three months when they eloped together and Claire was a close witness to their relationship. She now had no difficulty in convincing herself that she was in the grip of an equally grand passion. Mary’s example also suggested that romance could bring with it independence – in her case, from the Godwins. Claire wanted a similar degree of autonomy, both from her mother and stepfather and from Mary and Shelley themselves. A relationship with Byron might allow her to break away from both households in favour of an existence in which she could play the part of the romantic heroine, rather than that of an insignificant dependant. Claire had been part of Mary’s story since their childhoods, and she now wanted a story of her own. Shelley and Mary had made a life together outside the confines of marriage: Claire saw no reason why she and Byron should not do the same. Throughout her life she would demonstrate her capacity for rapid emotional shifts and her decision to fall in love with Byron combined matters of the heart and a Shelleyan ideology of free love most satisfactorily.

Unfortunately Byron did not see matters in this light. For him, the situation was straightforward: an unattached girl of indeterminate class and unconventional views had thrown herself at him and offered him sex. He was still married to Annabella, so there was no suggestion that a relationship with Claire would be anything more than a brief diversion before he left England. He had had affairs before, both with high-born ladies who understood the rules of the game, and with actresses who likewise understood the code of the green room. As he prepared for his departure, he grew less interested in an increasingly demanding Claire. By the time he left England her letters, with their constant repetitions of her unhappiness at his impending absence, had simply become irritating.

However, in another extraordinary act, which had implications for all those around her, Claire decided to follow him. She knew Byron was planning to travel down the Rhine valley into Switzerland so she proposed to Shelley and Mary that they should all embark on a new European adventure. Beset by arguments with both Godwin and his father about money, Shelley agreed. He was, by this time, restless and bored with the quiet life he and Mary were leading. He was also keen to meet Byron, the most famous poet of the age. Friendship with Byron was a glamorous and exciting prospect, but Shelley – ever in search of sympathetic friends – must also have hoped that he would be an intellectually stimulating companion. So it was that on 3 May, Shelley wrote to Godwin from Dover, explaining that he was taking Mary out of the country once again. A few days later Claire wrote to Byron from Paris, informing him that she would be joining him in Switzerland. From two different directions, Shelley, Byron and their respective parties began their gradual convergence on Geneva.

Shelley, Mary and Claire arrived first. This time they travelled through Europe by carriage, memories of sore feet, the wisdom of additional years and the presence of baby William making a re-enactment of their 1814 European odyssey out of the question. The journey through France, newly subjugated by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, led Shelley to write nostalgically to Peacock of England, ‘a free country where you may act without restraint & possess that which you possess in security.’
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The emphasis here on possession is notable: Shelley never advocated violent revolution, but his sense of entitlement to his property and inheritance nevertheless sat uneasily with the radical philosophy of
Queen Mab
.
Mary was acutely aware that Britain had played a significant role in the reinstatement of the monarchy in France and felt this was reflected in their treatment at the inns in which they stayed. ‘Nor is it wonderful’, she told Fanny, ‘that [the French] should regard the subjects of a government which fills their country with hostile garrisons, and sustains a detested dynasty on the throne, with an acrimony and indignation of which that government alone is the proper object.’
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Claire was more focused on the romance of Switzerland, ‘the land of my ancestors’ (she believed her father to be the Swiss Charles Gaulis, one of her mother’s ‘husbands’). After ten days on the road they arrived in Geneva, and settled themselves at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Sécheron on the outskirts of the city. There was no sign of Byron, but Claire was relieved to find letters directed to his travelling companion waiting at the post office.

Byron was in fact pursuing a leisurely progress through Belgium and the Rhine valley. He was accompanied by a young doctor, John Polidori, who was being paid by the canny John Murray to keep a diary of his travels with Byron. Polidori seemed a sensible appointment when Byron was preparing to leave England, but he turned out to be moody and difficult. Byron’s journey was made more uncomfortable by his decision to travel in a huge carriage modelled on the one used by Napoleon.  The carriage broke only a few days into the journey, delaying the travellers on the road between Ghent and Antwerp. They limped on to Brussels, where they stayed for a few days while Byron visited the field of the Battle of Waterloo and the carriage underwent repairs. They then proceeded slowly through Germany, visiting the castles of the Rhine en route, but were forced to halt again when Polidori became ill. Byron found a diversion in the shape of a chambermaid, with whom he had a ‘ludicrous adventure’ and whose looks ‘made me venture upon her carnally’.
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A more serious diversion was his writing: he had embarked on a third canto of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, transforming the scenes through which he travelled into an evolving narrative of European exile. Like his creator, the central figure of the third canto of
Childe Harold
is an outcast, driven from his native land. As he travelled further away from England, Byron reshaped the poem which had brought him fame into an indictment of the society which had first lionised and then rejected him. A moving, beautiful lyric to Augusta and stanzas in which he mourned his separation from his daughter did nothing to damp down speculation about his private life when the poem was published at the end of 1816.

Ten days after the Shelley party installed themselves in the Hotel d’Angleterre, Byron’s travelling carriage finally rolled into Sécheron. Exhausted and more than a little irritated with Polidori, Byron entered his age in the hotel register as 100, causing Claire, who had been watching the comings and goings at the hotel (
the
destination for all English travellers) to despatch a note to his room: ‘I am sorry you are grown so old, indeed I suspected you were 200, for the slowness of your journey.  I suppose your venerable age could not bear quicker travelling. Well, heaven send you sweet sleep – I am so happy.’ She instructed Byron to reply under cover of a note to Shelley, but no response was forthcoming.
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Billets-doux from an importunate young woman who failed to understand the rules of aristocratic
affaires
did not improve the mood of a man who had been travelling for weeks with only Polidori for company.  Two days later Claire wrote again to complain of his treatment of her. ‘I have been in this weary hotel this fortnight & it seems so unkind, so cruel, of you to treat me with such marked indifference.’
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Claire did have her meeting with Byron, although not the romantic reunion she envisaged. The encounter took place a few days after Byron’s arrival, as Shelley, Mary and Claire bumped into Byron while he and Polidori were climbing out of their boat on to the lakeside quay. Everyone was shy and Polidori was so ill at ease he abandoned his patron entirely, taking the boat back on to the lake until all danger of interaction had passed. But later that day Shelley and Byron furthered their acquaintance. Shelley, Polidori reported succinctly, was ‘separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of Godwin, who practise his theories; one L[ord] B[yron]’s.’
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Shelley and Byron quickly became friends. On the surface, it was an unlikely pairing.   Byron, at twenty-eight, was jaundiced and embittered about being hounded out of England, in contrast to the idealistic, enthusiastic twenty-three year old Shelley.  Byron was also a famous poet of superior rank, while Shelley was heir to a mere baronetcy, and was still struggling to get his poetry published. But their friendship flourished in spite of these differences. Each recognised and respected the other’s talent, and each knew something of life as an outcast. Before long the two parties moved out of the gossipy Hotel d’Angleterre, Byron to the Villa Diodati, on the shores of the lake, and the Shelley group to a small chalet named Montalègre about ten minutes walk away from Diodati. A regular daily pattern emerged. Shelley and Byron would breakfast together, sometimes in the company of Mary. Mornings spent reading gave way to afternoon expeditions on the lake, as Shelley and Byron discovered a mutual passion for boating. Sometimes they took to the lake again in the evenings, taking Mary, Claire and Polidori with them. Occasionally they would land and walk along different parts of the shore, Byron hiding his limp by loitering behind the rest, trailing his sword-stick through the grass. Mary later recalled evenings when the wind buffeted the boat and, while she rejoiced in their ‘contest with the elements’, Byron would add to the drama by singing Albanian songs – which mostly consisted of ‘strange, wild howls’.
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It was the kind of situation in which Shelley thrived. Like Mary, he loved the feeling of battling against the weather, and Byron combined theatrical exoticism with a formidable intellect. They spent their boating afternoons and evenings arguing about poetry, love and the relationship between place and inspiration. This was a more glamorous version of the 1815 Thames boat trip with Peacock and Charles Clairmont, and it bolstered Shelley’s confidence to realise that he was influencing Byron’s thinking and the direction of his poetry. It was also a sign of how far he had come – socially and intellectually – since he had sat with Mary and Claire on Rhine barges reading and teasing his fellow travellers. Then he had been entirely alone in the world: now he was a friend and confidant of Byron, an older, celebrated poet. Shelley loved boats, and throughout his life he would solidify friendships by embarking on shared nautical projects. The boat he hired with Byron for expeditions around Lake Geneva symbolised their friendship, their joint commitment to the Swiss landscape, and the inspiration they drew from each other. Shelley could hardly have presented more of a contrast to Hunt, cultivating friendship and inspiration in a series of enclosed, claustrophobic rooms.