David Crane: Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

The Deponent endeavoured to dissuade her very much from going, and represented the Impropriety of it, in her, Mrs Trelawny’s then state of Pregnancy, but she persisted in going, and the Deponent in Consequence agreed to accompany her. They accordingly left home, but had not proceeded far before Mrs Trelawny complained of being very poorly, and requested the Deponent to get someone else to accompany her, saying that she would return home. The Deponent accordingly parted with Mrs Trelawny but followed her home in about a quarter of an Hour afterwards and let herself in with a private Key of her own. She tried the Parlour Door, but found it locked, and then walked out into the Garden behind the House where she observed the Blind of Captain Coleman’s Bed Room Window not quite drawn down, and she at the same time observed a Towel lying on the Roof of an adjoining Outhouse, having apparently fallen from Mr and Mrs Trelawny’s Bed Room Window. The Deponent’s Suspicions having been excited by the Circumstances before deposed of, and by the sudden return home of Mrs Trelawny, she walked out on to the Roof of the said Outhouse which she could very easily do, as if to pick up the Towel, and looked into Captain Coleman’s Bed Room, through that part of the Window over which the Blind was not drawn down: It was between eight and nine o’Clock in the Evening, and not quite dark. The Door between the Bed Room and Parlour was also open, and there was light in the latter: the Deponent could therefore distinguish every Object in the Bed Room, and she saith that she then saw Captain Coleman and Mrs Trelawny on the Bed together: Captain Coleman had his Coat and Waistcoat off, his Pantaloons were down, and he was lying upon Mrs Trelawny whose Petticoats were up; and they were then in the Act of Sexual Intercourse with each other. The Deponent remained a Minute or two at the Window, greatly surprised, until she saw Mrs Trelawny get off the Bed, and then she returned into the House, and waited on the Stairs, where in about five minutes she saw Mrs Trelawny come out of the Parlour Door very hastily with her Shoes in her Hand. 16

Mrs Prout testified that she had confronted Caroline with the evidence of her adultery, and demanded that the Trelawnys should leave. After an initial denial Trelawny’s wife had confessed everything, but ‘entreated her not to tell her husband of it’,

as her, Mrs Trelawny’s life depended on it: She also promised most fervently, never to be guilty of such a Crime again, and begged that the Deponent would herself make the Excuse to Mr Trelawny for wishing him to quit his lodgings. 17

The excuse Mrs Prout came up with was that she needed to paint their rooms, and sometime towards the end of July or the beginning of August the couple moved to new lodgings near Bath owned by a Captain White. Within a short time an unrepentant Caroline was recruiting different members of the White family to collect mail addressed to her under fictitious names at addresses in the town, but if the trial evidence is to be believed, no hint of this seems to have reached Trelawny, who alone among his landladies, servants and his mother-in-law was unaware of his wife’s liaison.

Even if Trelawny was ignorant of what was going on, however, relations between him and Caroline had deteriorated beyond repair, and after the birth of their second daughter at Vue Cottage communications between them were bizarrely limited to written requests for interviews. Unable to tolerate this atmosphere any longer, Mrs White finally asked them to leave, fixing 31 December for their departure. ‘About four o’Clock in the Afternoon however of that day,’ Mrs White testified to the Consistory Court,

Mrs Trelawny being wanted in the Drawing Room, the Deponent and others of her family went to seek her all over the House but she was not to be found: Captain White and Mr Trelawny then left the House to go different ways in search of her, and the Deponent was afterwards informed by her said husband that he had met with Mrs Trelawny who had acknowledged to him that she had eloped with the Intention of proceeding to Captain Coleman at Southampton, and pressed him (Captain White) not to prevent her, but that he had conducted her to her Mother in Bath, and left her under her said Mother’s protection, without apprizing Mr Trelawny therof. 18

Trelawny’s humiliation was complete, the injury to his pride as the case dragged through the courts public and prolonged. For over two years after her elopement he was forced to live with the sordid details of her betrayal, with the bleak evidence that crumpled sheets and billets doux, towels drying at parlour windows and provincial intimacies made up the sad reality of his waking hours.

The one consolation to emerge from this crisis was the friendship of the White family with whom he and Caroline had boarded, and in particular with the young daughter Augusta. In the wider picture of his life this relationship is of only marginal importance but, in the way their kindness brought out all those feelings that had been stifled in childhood and the navy, it foreshadows the most important ties of his life. From the start the Whites had taken his side against Caroline and when, in the February after her elopement, Captain White, dragged down by debts and depression, killed himself, their friendship was sealed. ‘After so dreadful a catastrophe most of your friends would write lamentations at your Father’s rash fate,’ he wrote to Augusta,

but as I differ and am not swayed by opinions of other men – I shall commence with rejoicing that your unfortunate Father has at last ended his miseries … tell your mother to command me in every way … If I can be of the most trivial service command me and I will fly down to my loved Sisters … Your mother shall find in me a Son, you a Brother, and your Brothers a Father. 19

That last note, so revealing of the emotional vacuum marriage had done nothing to fill, is repeated in another letter to Augusta, written from his family house in Soho Square on 1 October 1817. ‘With my trunks,’ he wrote,

arrived your affectionate letters My Dear Kind Sister, they infused new life, into my drooping soul, – ought not such a friend to counterbalance, all the ills I have endured, – Your love, and sympathy, soothed my signed soul – and bid me hope … O my dearest Sister could you but see my heart, you would wonder it should be inclosed, in so rough a form; – my study through life, has been, to hide under the mask of affected roughness, the tenderest, warmest, and most affectionate sencibility. 20

Only a handful of Trelawny’s letters survive from this period, and yet colourful as they are, they need to be treated warily as evidence of his feelings. The temptations of so sympathetic a correspondent for a humiliated cuckold are too obvious to need spelling out, but what is more interesting is the impression his letters give that he had neither the education nor the vocabulary at this period to express or even understand the more complex aspects of his personality.

Trelawny was a late and slow developer, and nowhere is this plainer than in his correspondence. With the mature Trelawny it is a safe bet that when he writes something he says precisely what he means to say, but in his early years there is an invariable sense of a man struggling for a voice and character, of a writer fumbling towards an identity that he has not yet made his own.

In their very turbulence, however, their romantic theatricality, their heavy posturing, these letters remain the clearest sign of the inward transformation that Trelawny underwent during the unhappy years of navy and married life. There is no doubt that in the best traditions of romantic alienation he went out of his way to exaggerate his loneliness to any woman prepared to listen, but as in childhood the misery was real enough and the overriding consequence of his marriage was to drive Trelawny into an internalized world of the imagination in which he could take refuge from the disappointments of life.