Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Lord Byron vs. Lady Lamb | History's Worst Breakups

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. I'm just jumping in here real quick to remind you that if you wanted to come and see Betwixta 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, a plenty. Tickets are available now. at Fane.co.uk. That's F-A-N-E.com.com. And just search for Betwixt. And we will see you there. Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Cade Lister. Thank you for coming back once again to Betwixt the Sheeds. Welcome, welcome. Welcome. Welcome to Adults. To other adults about adulty things in an adulty way. Covering a range of

adults, subjects. Newspirited adult too. God, do you feel safe? I feel safer, right, let's crack on. Any 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. They have the ultimate breakup glow. up. Then there is my grandmother's favorite 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 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's something. Somebody. was Caroline Lamb after her notorious affair with Lord Byron came to an end.

Oh dear, oh dear. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and 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 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 Lam.

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. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Professor Paul Douglas. How are you doing? I am doing really well and delighted to be here. 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? Yes, I do. It was really all the fault of my colleague and friend, Fred Berwick, 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 Carolyn Land. 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 in a sort of a fatal instinct story that got told over and over and over again? The more I learned about 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. 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 Lamon who she was, who was Byron. 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.

No. 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 previous broadcast you did with one of my colleagues, one of the most famous lovers, as famous as Napoleon in his way. Yeah, without an magnetic, even centuries later people are drawn to him. 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. And of course, we've got the movie, Wethering Heights's about to drop. And Byron's influence on that is another example.

example, he's still with us. 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 Carolyn Lambs, Glenn Arvin, which appeared in 1816 just as he was leaving England forever. 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, this crazed mistress. But give us some background story on who she was. 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, Georgianne. Oh, oh, hello. Right, okay. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Harriet Lady Besboro 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 Prinney. Edward Gibbon used to bounce Lady Carolyn Lamb on his. his knee when she was only six years old. Oh, wow.

She told him his face was so ugly, it frightened her puppy. Harriet, Lady Besboro, had a long-term affair with Richard Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright. And many people have 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 never know that because there's nothing left of Lady Carolyn. What do you think? I know we're speculating, but do you think, is that a theory that has legs? I think it does, although it would take evidence that we just will never have access to, I think. So 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. But she's born of like the hobbyist hobnobbs. This is proper elite level aristocrats. Yes. I mean, my understanding, and I'm not a Brit, but I've tried to understand how this works. And if you start with the royal family, then the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire are right there. Yeah, absolutely. Did she have a happy childhood?

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 Gray. 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... 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 together, the Devonshires and the Best Burroughs, and they were traveling in Europe. I mean, they clearly felt invulnerable. They were traveling even during the Napoleonic wars, as if they had nothing to worry about. 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. She was 19 years old at the time that she married in 1805. She'd been born in 1785. 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. 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 Hugo Foskelo, an Italian novelist, whose famous is having invented the modern Italian novel. Edward Bullwer Lytton and adventurers like Michael Bruce. So Byron was her principal love affair,

but by no means was he the only one that she had an affair with. 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. That's right. It was very permissive in some ways. In other ways, she had a very traditional upbringing with attending church, with less. 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. 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. Yep. She might be a bit bored. And then who does she meet at a party? Oh, no. Well, whether she really met Byron at that party,

is part of the lore. Oh, really? 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. Oh. 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 Carolom Lamb and her husband, the son of Lord Melbourne, or the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady

Bestboro, 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 Moore said, very directly, Byron is reveling in this attention that he's getting and the access that he's getting to all these places and these people because of his relationship with her. 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. 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. Writing 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. And she's 26 and he's 24, or is it the way around? Yes, that's right. He, well, certainly he is two to two and a half years younger than she is. Okay. That's right. Okay. So we have this meeting of mice.

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? 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 dare quality to their relationship right from the very beginning. 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. Oh, see, that's intoxicated. Isn't it? Like every single woman wants to hear that being said about them. Yeah. And on her part, she would write things like, your pale face is my destiny, you know.

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... She's married. She's married. And William Lamb, almost unbelievably for his time and place in his station, lived their entire married life without a known love affair. He never stepped out on her. Can you believe that?

Every man in his station had something on the side, but not William. And he must have known about this affair, because every... Everybody knew about it. 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. Oh, this is so messed up. Oh, this is so messed up. 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 knew about that. A lot of people asked the question, what's really going on there? And 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, he loved her so much and he cared for her so much that almost nothing she could do was going to make him stop. Oh, wow. And that's incredible, isn't it? I've never heard of that before. I'll be back with Paul after this short break. 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. wife was having very, very, very public affairs and just kind of let her get on with it. 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. Oh, she has a type then, doesn't she? Yes, the bad boy type, the guy in the motorcycle jacket, you know. He had a skull. Now, this is a story that's told. about Byron that 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 Vassel 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. And in the 70s, she published a book called The Byron Women, and she thinks that Webster and Lady Carolyn Lamb did have sex and that it was very exciting for her. She had a lot of sex with Byron, didn't she? 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. One of the things, because I've done a bit of digging into 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. 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 would have been a much more well-apholstered human being.

And, you know, 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. Or even Antonia Frazier, 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 a lot of complexity and layering to the sexual attraction and the sexual excitement that Lady Carolyn Lamb was experiencing in all these relationships and the principal ones, Byron and her husband. 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 in it. 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. Yes. So later, Byron would say 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. Oh, that's interesting. Lady Carolyn Lamb makes everything public. 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? Well, she should have known it. I mean, it was very obvious to every one of her. her class and station that you could take lovers, you just had to be discreet. She's not. She's making everything public. She could not be discreet at all. And Byron said that

in the beginning, that publicity, that craziness that everyone can see is piquant. But in the end, it's tiresome. 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 election. electric, cross-dressing, crazy sex. FAP, brilliant, this is great. Yes. What starts to go wrong? 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 Carolan's mother, that is Lady Besboro, and everyone around them could see that Byron had painted himself into a corner. He had let it become so public that he either had to run off with her or he had to break it off and probably get married. Yikes. And he knew that. And this is, we can say that the disaster of Byron's marriage is almost certain. do to the desperation with which he faced the problem of what to do about Lady Carolyn Lamb.

And I also get a sense, like reading through the various descriptions of this affair, 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. 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. No. 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 just became too much. Too much. Doesn't she start doing things 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? 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. Clearly, he would have left with her if his friend John Cam Hobhouse, later Lord Broughton, hadn't been there and stopped them. Thank God for Hobhouse. 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 got to 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. See, that's too much there, right there. 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 cremate. But the pubic hair is, so just as a side note, I have often wished that that pubic hair hadn't disappeared because she says that she cut herself slightly. The DNA! 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 Brunsley Sheriff. So, oh well. So Byron is a little shocked by the gift of the pubic hair.

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. 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. Oh, no. 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. Oh, no. 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. 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.

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

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. And for example, if he sat down and told Lady Carolyn's mother, Lady Besboro, 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, 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, it's not a good move. That was absolutely the opposite of what he should have done. I'll be back with Paul after this short break. I mean, the general rule about breaking up with somebody, the way to get over him is you go no contact immediately. You just, it's a very difficult to do it, but delete them from your social media, block them, get rid of the number.

It's horrible and 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. No. And remember, Byron is a real chameleon. He'll sit there and exchange letters with Lady Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law. Yes, I was just about to ask you that. That was a bit. dodgy that one. 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 Carolyn 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? Does he just want to continue being in this crazy spin cycle of ups and downs and drives? 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. He got married for many reasons. But I'm

interesting the kind of the one that you're saying there is that he was sort of, because he'd got himself and vagled in 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, I'm 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? 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 Millbank. Her cousin, isn't it?

Williams' 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. Five months? Yeah. And then she's back. Five months. That's right. That's right. I've got food in my fridge that's older than that five months.

Well, a lot can happen. happened in five months, let me say. A lot did happen. And what did happen. Okay, all right. 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. Go right ahead. I'll just watch. And so there's all of this aftermath going on. As he shunned her at this point,

If she's come back from Ireland, does she think, yay, it's back on? And does he like break it off at this point? Give her the firm no. 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, I am no longer your lover. Oh, my God. After that letter that I just described to you. So 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, 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 tries something else, which again is one of the most 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, 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. Why did he do that? Because he actually did the same thing with his wife to try to push her away. Oh, he's just a nightmare, this man. 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, you know. universally. But during this period when he got married and then had a child and then got separated, Byron was acting like a madman. 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. It's just awful his treatment. He's blowing hot and cold. He's sending mixed messages, letter saying, I love you, another one from the house of somebody that I'm shagging saying I'm no longer your lover. Exactly. meeting then I won't. No, I was gay and now I'm not. Now 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. 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 does get depressed, but so do we, right? So it's, yes, it's not, it's not clear. But it is true that almost everybody who met her, Edward Buller Litton,

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 her, like members of her husband's family, whom she drove crazy, had to admit that when you sat down and talked to her,

she was just absolutely fascinating, a fascinating human being. How does she take the news of Byron getting married? 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.

Oh, Caroline. 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. Wow. What about this book that she writes about him, Glenn Arvin?

because 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. He just left England when it came out. 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 he didn't treat her well at all, did he? And that all fell apart. That is right.

And that is a very sad story. at the very end, Lady Carolyn Lamb actually, I mean, she blew every which way. She wanted to hurt Byron. She wanted 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. 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 that Byron is leaving his wife and separating, or she's separating from him, Lady Caroline's relatives have procured a doctor to certify that she is not sane and should be locked up and will lose access to her child. Oh, no. 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 anything negative who still deny that there was a sexual relationship between himself and his half-sister. Now, come on. 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. By giving her information. Fend off the possible loss of her child. She writes this book, Glenn Arvin, which is a thinly veiled tell-all, kiss and tell-all, and he's left the country. What was his reaction to that? Well, apparently he found it amusing. Oh, did he now?

Yes. Right. Okay. She had done what, in a sense, he was. doing, which is take your life, put it into fiction. And in fact, Glenn Arvin, 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, one of whom is an Irish revolutionary, one of whom is married into an aristocratic family that looks like

Lady Carolyn'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, you know, 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. 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 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 Glenn Arvin. 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. 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.

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 like 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 going to 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 yes she went on to write two more novels She wrote two very interesting satirical send-ups of Byron's most famous poem, Don Juan. And she engaged in a lot of public works, or I should say private philanthropy. For example, she was trying to help William Godwin, Marischeller'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 go-fund me, you know, of the era. So she did things like that. 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. That's very clever.

It is very clever. And so she was trying to have a role. 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. At one point, she loaned her journals to this obscure poet named Wilmington Fleming, who then copied things out. and tired to blackmail her saying, I'm going to publish this stuff. So she never quite managed to get out of hot water, but she continued to maintain her energy and her relationships until after Byron's death.

You know, a weird story about that is that she just heard that he died and 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. And here comes Byron's hearse. No. Going through Wellwyn, where she was at Brockett Hall, on its way to Neustad Abbey for his burial. I mean, isn't that a weird coincidence? That's so weird.

So. And she dies young too, doesn't she? 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 set 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 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 a. 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. So as a final question then, for I could honest, I could talk to you about this forever. How do you think we should remember Caroline Lamb? Because like, said, they were so evenly matched her in Byron. They were 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? Well, I think she should be remembered as one of those women who read about, sensed and understood that women could be different. 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 potentiality. She was going to do the most she could with them. She once said, you know, I wonder why everyone wants to, wants to beat down on my little spark of genius. It's tiny. It's like something that a housemaid 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 Frazier 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 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. 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? 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. Caro is nice. But Caro was the one that I used.

And there you'll find all kinds of things, lots of her letters 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 of the first quality, but it has its charms. Certainly does. Thank you so much. You've been wonderful. Thank you, Kate.

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 whatever 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 betwixtat history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G, the senior producer, was Freddie Chick.

Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. The podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.