University of Virginia Library

ANNESLEY HALL.

At about three miles distance from Newstead
Abbey, and contiguous to its lands, is situated
Annesley Hall, the old family mansion of the Chaworths.
The families, like the estates, of the
Byrons and Chaworths, were connected in former
times, until the fatal duel between their two
representatives. The feud, however, which prevailed
for a time, promised to be cancelled by
the attachment of two youthful hearts. While
Lord Byron was yet a boy, he beheld Mary Ann
Chaworth, a beautiful girl, and the sole heiress
of Annesley. With that susceptibility to female
charms, which he evinced almost from childhood,
he became almost immediately enamoured
of her. According to one of his biographers it
would appear that at first their attachment was
mutual, yet clandestine. The father of Miss
Chaworth was then living, and may have retained
somewhat of the family hostility, for we are
told that the interviews of Lord Byron and the
young lady were private, at a gate which opened
from her father's grounds to those of Newstead.

However, they were so young at the time that
these meetings could not have been regarded as
of any importance: they were little more than
children in years; but as Lord Byron says of
himself, his feelings were beyond his age.

The passion thus early conceived was blown
into a flame, during a six weeks' vacation which
he passed with his mother at Nottingham. The
father of Miss Chaworth was dead, and she resided
with her mother at the old Hall of Annesley.
During Byron's minority, the estate of Newstead
was let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, but its youthful
Lord was always a welcome guest at the
Abbey. He would pass days at a time there,
and from thence make frequent visits to Annesley
Hall. His visits were encouraged by Miss
Chaworth's mother; she partook none of the
family feud, and probably looked with complacency
upon an attachment that might heal old
differences and unite two neighbouring estates.

The six weeks' vacation passed as a dream
amongst the beautiful bowers of Annesley. Byron
was scarce fifteen years of age, Mary Chaworth
was two years older; but his heart, as I have
said, was beyond his age, and his tenderness for
her was deep and passionate. These early loves,
like the first run of the uncrushed grape, are the
sweetest and strongest gushings of the heart, and
however they may be superseded by other attachments

in after years, the memory will continually
recur to them, and fondly dwell upon
their recollections.

His love for Miss Chaworth, to use Lord
Byron's own expression, was “the romance of
the most romantic period of his life,” and I think
we can trace the effect of it throughout the
whole course of his writings, coming up every
now and then, like some lurking theme that runs
through a complicated piece of music, and links
it all in a pervading chain of melody.

How tenderly and mournfully does he recall
in after years, the feelings awakened in his youthful
and inexperienced bosom, by this impassioned,
yet innocent attachment; feelings, he says, lost
or hardened in the intercourse of life:

Whether this love was really responded to by
the object, is uncertain. Byron sometimes speaks
as if he had met with kindness in return, at other
times he acknowledges that she never gave him
reason to believe she loved him. It is probable,

however, that at first she experienced some
flutterings of the heart. She was at a susceptible
age; had as yet formed no other attachments;
her lover, though boyish in years, was a
man in intellect, a poet in imagination, and had
a countenance of remarkable beauty.

With the six weeks' vacation ended this brief
romance. Byron returned to school deeply
enamoured, but if he had really made any impression
on Miss Chaworth's heart, it was too
slight to stand the test of absence. She was at
that age when a female soon changes from the
girl to the woman, and leaves her boyish lovers
far behind her. While Byron was pursuing his
school-boy studies, she was mingling with society,
and met with a gentleman of the name of
Musters, remarkable, it is said, for manly beauty.
A story is told of her having first seen him from
the top of Annesley Hall, as he dashed through
the park, with hound and horn, taking the lead
of the whole field in a fox chase, and that she
was struck by the spirit of his appearance, and
his admirable horsemanship. Under such favourable
auspices, he wooed and won her, and when
Lord Byron next met her, he learned to his dismay
that she was the affianced bride of another.

With that pride of spirit which always distinguished
him, he controlled his feelings and maintained
a serene countenance. He even affected

to speak calmly on the subject of her approaching
nuptials. “The next time I see you,” said
he, “I suppose you will be Mrs. Chaworth,” (for
she was to retain her family name.) Her reply
was, “I hope so.”

I have given these brief details preparatory
to a sketch of a visit which I made to the scene
of this youthful romance. Annesley Hall I understood
was shut up, neglected, and almost in
a state of desolation; for Mr. Musters rarely
visited it, residing with his family in the neighbourhood
of Nottingham. I set out for the Hall
on horseback, in company with Colonel Wildman,
and followed by the great Newfoundland
dog Boatswain. In the course of our ride we
visited a spot memorable in the love story I have
cited. It was the scene of this parting interview
between Byron and Miss Chaworth, prior to her
marriage. A long ridge of upland advances into
the valley of Newstead, like a promontory into
a lake, and was formerly crowned by a beautiful
grove, a landmark to the neighbouring country.
The grove and promontory are graphically described
by Lord Byron in his “Dream,” and an
exquisite picture given of himself, and the lovely
object of his boyish idolatry—

I stood upon the spot consecrated by this memorable
interview. Below me extended the
“living landscape,” once contemplated by the
loving pair; the gentle valley of Newstead, diversified
by woods and corn fields, and village
spires, and gleams of water, and the distant
towns and pinnacles of the venerable Abbey.
The diadem of trees, however, was gone. The
attention drawn to it by the poet, and the romantic
manner in which he had associated it with
his early passion for Mary Chaworth, had nettled
the irritable feelings of her husband, who
but ill brooked the poetic celebrity conferred on

his wife by the enamoured verses of another.
The celebrated grove stood on his estate, and in
a fit of spleen he ordered it to be levelled with
the dust. At the time of my visit the mere roots
of the trees were visible; but the hand that laid
them low is execrated by every poetical pilgrim.

Descending the hill, we soon entered a part
of what once was Annesley Park, and rode
among time-worn and tempest-riven oaks and
elms, with ivy clambering about their trunks,
and rooks' nests among their branches. The
park had been cut up by a post road, crossing
which, we came to the gate house of Annesley
Hall. It was an old brick building that might
have served as an outpost or barbacan to the
hall during the civil wars, when every gentleman's
house was liable to become a fortress.
Loopholes were still visible in its walls, but the
peaceful ivy had mantled the sides, overrun the
roof, and almost buried the ancient clock in
front, that still marked the waning hours of its
decay.

An arched way led through the centre of the
gate house, secured by grated doors of open
iron work, wrought into flowers and flourishes.
These being thrown open, we entered a paved
court yard, decorated with shrubs and antique
flower pots, with a ruined stone fountain in

the centre. The whole approach resembled
that of an old French chateau.

On one side of the court yard was a range of
stables, now tenantless, but which bore traces
of the fox hunting squire; for there were stalls
boxed up, into which the hunters might be
turned loose when they came home from the
chase.

At the lower end of the court, and immediately
opposite the gate house, extended the hall
itself; a rambling, irregular pile, patched and
pieced at various times, and in various tastes,
with gable ends, stone balustrades, and enormous
chimneys, that strutted out like buttresses from
the walls. The whole front of the edifice was
overrun with evergreens.

We applied for admission at the front door,
which was under a heavy porch. The portal
was strongly barricadoed, and our knocking was
echoed by waste and empty halls. Every thing
bore an appearance of abandonment. After a
time, however, our knocking summoned a solitary
tenant from some remote corner of the pile.
It was a decent looking little dame, who emerged
from a side door at a distance, and seemed a
worthy inmate of the antiquated mansion. She
had, in fact, grown old with it. Her name, she
said, was Nanny Marsden; if she lived until next
August, she would be seventy-one: a great part

of her life had been passed in the Hall, and when
the family had removed to Nottingham, she had
been left in charge of it. The front of the house
had been thus warily barricadoed in consequence
of the late riots at Nottingham; in the course of
which, the dwelling of her master had been
sacked by the mob. To guard against any
attempt of the kind upon the Hall, she had put
it in this state of defence; though I rather think
she, and a superannuated gardener comprised
the whole garrison. “You must be attached to
the old building,” said I, “after having lived so
long in it.” “Ah, sir!” replied she, “I am
getting in years, and have a furnished cottage
of my own in Annesley Wood, and begin to feel
as if I should like to go and live in my own
home.”

Guided by the worthy little custodian of the
fortress, we entered through the sally port by
which she had issued forth, and soon found ourselves
in a spacious, but somewhat gloomy hall,
where the light was partially admitted through
square stone-shafted windows, overhung with
ivy. Every thing around us had the air of an
old fashioned country squire's establishment. In
the centre of the hall was a billiard table, and
about the walls were hung portraits of race
horses, hunters, and favourite dogs, mingled
indiscriminately with family pictures.

Staircases led up from the Hall to various
apartments. In one of the rooms we were shown
a couple of buff jerkens, and a pair of ancient
jack boots, of the time of the cavaliers; relics
which are often to be met with in the old English
family mansions. These, however, had peculiar
value, for the good little dame assured us they
had belonged to Robin Hood. As we were in the
midst of the region over which that famous outlaw
once bore ruffian sway, it was not for us to
gainsay his claim to any of these venerable
relics, though we might have demurred that the
articles of dress here shown were of a date
much later than his time. Every antiquity,
however, about Sherwood Forest is apt to be
linked with the memory of Robin Hood and his
gang.

As we were strolling about the mansion, our
four-footed attendant, Boatswain, followed leisurely,
as if taking a survey of the premises. I
turned to rebuke him for his intrusion, but the
moment the old housekeeper understood he had
belonged to Lord Byron, her heart seemed to
yearn towards him.

“Nay, nay,” exclaimed she, “let him alone,
let him go where he pleases. He's welcome.
Ah, dear me! If he lived here I should take great
care of him—he should want for nothing.—
Well!” continued she, fondling him, “who would

have thought that I should see a dog of Lord
Byron in Annesley Hall?”

“I suppose, then,” said I, “you recollect something
of Lord Byron, when he used to visit
here?” “Ah, bless him!” cried she, “that I do!
He used to ride over here and stay three days at
a time, and sleep in the blue room. Ah! poor
fellow! He was very much taken with my young
mistress; he used to walk about the garden and
the terraces with her, and seemed to love the
very ground she trod on. He used to call her
his bright morning star of Annesley.”

I felt the beautiful poetic phrase thrill through
me.

“You appear to like the memory of Lord
Byron,” said I.

“Ah sir! why should not I? He was always
main good to me when he came here. Well!
well! they say it is a pity he and my young
lady did not make a match. Her mother would
have liked it. He was always a welcome guest,
and some think it would have been well for him
to have had her; but it was not to be! He
went away to school, and then Mr. Musters
saw her, and so things took their course.”

The simple soul now showed us into the
favourite sitting room of Miss Chaworth, with a
small flower garden under the windows, in which
she had delighted. In this room Byron used to

sit and listen to her as she played and sang,
gazing upon her with the passionate, and almost
painful devotion of a love-sick stripling. He
himself gives us a glowing picture of his mute
idolatry:

There was a little Welsh air, called Mary
Ann, which, from bearing her own name, he
associated with herself, and often persuaded her
to sing it over and over for him.

The chamber, like all the other parts of the
house, had a look of sadness and neglect; the
flower plots beneath the window, which once
bloomed beneath the hand of Mary Chaworth,
were overrun with weeds; and the piano, which
had once vibrated to her touch, and thrilled the
heart of her stripling lover, was now unstrung
and out of tune.

We continued our stroll about the waste apartments,
of all shapes and sizes, and without much

elegance of decoration. Some of them were
hung with family portraits, among which was
pointed out that of the Mr. Chaworth who was
killed by the “wicked Lord Byron.”

These dismal looking portraits had a powerful
effect upon the imagination of the stripling poet,
on his first visit to the Hall. As they gazed
down from the wall he thought they scowled
upon him, as if they had taken a grudge against
him on account of the duel of his ancestor. He
even gave this as a reason, though probably in
jest, for not sleeping at the Hall, declaring that
he feared they would come down from their
frames at night to haunt him.

A feeling of the kind he has embodied in one
of his stanzas of Don Juan:

Nor was the youthful poet singular in these
fancies; the Hall, like most old English mansions
that have ancient family portraits hanging
about their dusky galleries and waste apartments,
had its ghost story connected with these

pale memorials of the dead. Our simple hearted
conductor stopped before the portrait of a lady,
who had been a beauty in her time, and inhabited
the Hall in the heyday of her charms.
Something mysterious or melancholy was connected
with her story; she died young, but
continued for a long time to haunt the ancient
mansion, to the great dismay of the servants,
and the occasional disquiet of the visiters, and
it was with much difficulty her troubled spirit
was conjured down and put to rest.

From the rear of the Hall we walked out into
the garden, about which Byron used to stroll and
loiter in company with Miss Chaworth. It was
laid out in the old French style. There was a
long terraced walk, with heavy stone balustrades
and sculptured urns, overrun with ivy and evergreens.
A neglected shrubbery bordered one
side of the terrace, with a lofty grove inhabited
by a venerable community of rooks. Great
flights of steps led down from the terrace to a
flower garden, laid out in formal plots. The rear
of the Hall, which overlooked the garden, had
the weather stains of centuries, and its stone-shafted
casements, and an ancient sun dial
against its walls, carried back the mind to days
of yore.

The retired and quiet garden, once a little
sequestered world of love and romance, was

now all matted and wild, yet was beautiful even
in its decay. Its air of neglect and desolation
was in unison with the fortune of the two beings
who had once walked here in the freshness of
youth, and life, and beauty. The garden, like
their young hearts, had gone to waste and ruin.

Returning to the Hall we now visited a
chamber built over the porch, or grand entrance:
it was in a ruinous condition; the ceiling having
fallen in, and the floor given way. This, however,
is a chamber rendered interesting by
poetical associations. It is supposed to be the
oratory alluded to by Lord Byron in his Dream,
wherein he pictures his departure from Annesley,
after learning that Mary Chaworth was
engaged to be married—

In one of his journals, Lord Byron describes
his feelings after thus leaving the oratory. Arriving
on the summit of a hill, which commanded
the last view of Annesley, he checked his horse,
and gazed back with mingled pain and fondness
upon the groves which embowered the Hall, and
thought upon the lovely being that dwelt there,
until his feelings were quite dissolved in tenderness.
The conviction at length recurred
that she never could be his, when, rousing himself
from his reverie, he stuck his spurs into his
steed and dashed forward, as if by rapid motion
to leave reflection behind him.

Yet, notwithstanding what he asserts in the
verses last quoted, he did pass the “hoary threshold”
of Annesley again. It was, however, after
the lapse of several years, during which he had
grown up to manhood, had passed through the

ordeal of pleasures and tumultuous passions, and
had felt the influence of other charms. Miss
Chaworth, too, had become a wife and a mother,
and he dined at Annesley Hall at the invitation
of her husband. He thus met the object of his
early idolatry in the very scene of his tender
devotions, which, as he says, her smiles had
once made a heaven to him. The scene was
but little changed. He was in the very chamber
where he had so often listened entranced to the
witchery of her voice; there were the same instruments
and music; there lay her flower garden
beneath the window, and the walks through which
he had wandered with her in the intoxication of
youthful love. Can we wonder that amidst the
tender recollections which every object around
him was calculated to awaken, the fond passion
of his boyhood should rush back in full current
to his heart. He was himself surprised at this
sudden revulsion of his feelings, but he had
acquired self possession and could command
them. His firmness however was doomed to
undergo a further trial. While seated by the
object of his secret devotion, with all these recollections
throbbing in his bosom, her infant
daughter was brought into the room. At sight
of the child he started; it dispelled the last lingerings
of his Dream, and he afterwards confessed,
that to repress his emotion at the moment
was the severest part of his task.

The conflict of feelings that raged within his
bosom throughout this fond and tender, yet painful
and embarrassing visit, are touchingly depicted
in lines which he wrote immediately afterwards,
and which, though not addressed to her by
name, are evidently intended for the eye and
the heart of the fair lady of Annesley—

The revival of this early passion, and the
melancholy associations which it spread over
those scenes in the neighbourhood of Newstead,
which would necessarily be the places of his
frequent resort while in England, are alluded to
by him as a principal cause of his first departure
for the Continent—

It was in the subsequent June that he set off
on his pilgrimage by sea and land, which was to
become the theme of his immortal poem. That
the image of Mary Chaworth, as he saw and
loved her in the days of his boyhood, followed
him to the very shore, is shown in the glowing
stanzas addressed to her on the eve of embarcation—

The painful interview at Annesley Hall which
revived with such intenseness his early passion,
remained stamped upon his memory with singular
force, and seems to have survived all his “wandering
through distant climes,” to which he trusted
as an oblivious antidote. Upwards of two years
after the event, when, having made his famous
pilgrimage, he was once more an inmate of
Newstead Abbey; his vicinity to Annesley Hall
brought the whole scene vividly before him, and
he thus recalls it in a poetic epistle to a friend—

“It was about the time,” says Moore in his
life of Lord Byron, “when he was thus bitterly
feeling and expressing the blight which his heart
had suffered from a real object of affection, that
his poems on an imaginary one, “Thyrza,' were
written.” He was at the same time grieving
over the loss of several of his earliest and dearest
friends, the companions of his joyous school-boy
hours. To recur to the beautiful language of
Moore, who writes with the kindred and kindling
sympathies of a true poet: “All these recollections
of the young and the dead mingled themselves
in his mind with the image of her, who,
though living, was, for him, as much lost as they,
and diffused that general feeling of sadness and
fondness through his soul, which found a vent in
these poems. * * * It was the blending of
the two affections, in his memory and imagination,
that gave birth to an ideal object combining
the best features of both, and drew from him
those saddest and tenderest of love poems, in
which we find all the depth and intensity of real

feeling touched over with such a light as no
reality ever wore.”

An early, innocent, and unfortunate passion,
however fruitful of pain it may be to the man,
is a lasting advantage to the poet. It is a well
of sweet and bitter fancies; of refined and
gentle sentiments; of elevated and ennobling
thoughts; shut up in the deep recesses of the
heart, keeping it green amidst the withering
blights of the world, and, by its casual gushes and
overflowings, recalling at times all the freshness,
and innocence, and enthusiasm of youthful days.
Lord Byron was conscious of this effect, and
purposely cherished and brooded over the remembrance
of his early passion, and of all the scenes
of Annesley Hall connected with it. It was this
remembrance that attuned his mind to some of
its most elevated and virtuous strains, and shed
an inexpressible grace and pathos over his best
productions.

Being thus put upon the traces of this little
love story, I cannot refrain from threading them
out, as they appear from time to time in various
passages of Lord Byron's works. During his
subsequent rambles in the East, when time and
distance had softened away his “early romance”
almost into the remembrance of a pleasing and
tender dream, he received accounts of the object
of it, which represented her, still in her paternal

Hall, among her native bowers of Annesley,
surrounded by a blooming and beautiful family,
yet a prey to secret and withering melancholy—

For an instant the buried tenderness of early
youth and the fluttering hopes which accompanied
it, seem to have revived in his bosom, and
the idea to have flashed upon his mind that his
image might be connected with her secret
woes—but he rejected the thought almost as
soon as formed.

The cause of her grief was a matter of rural
comment in the neighbourhood of Newstead and
Annesley. It was disconnected from all idea
of Lord Byron, but attributed to the harsh and

capricious conduct of one to whose kindness and
affection she had a sacred claim. The domestic
sorrows which had long preyed in secret on her
heart, at length affected her intellect, and the
“bright morning star of Annesley” was eclipsed
for ever.

Notwithstanding lapse of time, change of place,
and a succession of splendid and spirit-stirring
scenes in various countries, the quiet and gentle
scene of his boyish love seems to have held a
magic sway over the recollections of Lord Byron,
and the image of Mary Chaworth to have
unexpectedly obtruded itself upon his mind like
some supernatural visitation. Such was the fact
on the occasion of his marraige with Miss Milbanke;
Annesley Hall and all its fond associations
floated like a vision before his thoughts,
even when at the altar, and on the point of pronouncing
the nuptial vows. The circumstance

is related by him with a force and feeling that
persuade us of its truth.

The history of Lord Byron's union is too well
known to need narration. The errors, and humiliations,
and heart-burnings that followed upon
it, gave additional effect to the remembrance of
his early passion, and tormented him with the
idea, that had he been successful in his suit to
the lovely heiress of Annesley, they might both

have shared a happier destiny. In one of his
manuscripts, written long after his marriage,
having accidentally mentioned Miss Chaworth
as “my M. A. C.” “Alas!” exclaims he, with
a sudden burst of feeling, “why do I say my?
Our union would have healed feuds in which
blood had been shed by our fathers; it would
have joined lands broad and rich; it would have
joined at least one heart, and two persons not ill
matched in years—and—and—and—what has
been the result!”

But enough of Annesley Hall and the poetical
themes connected with it. I felt as if I could
linger for hours about its ruined oratory, and
silent hall, and neglected garden, and spin reveries
and dream dreams, until all became an ideal
world around me. The day, however, was fast
declining, and the shadows of evening throwing
deeper shades of melancholy about the place.
Taking our leave of the worthy old housekeeper,
therefore, with a small compensation and many
thanks for her civilities, we mounted our horses
and pursued our way back to Newstead Abbey.