Devonshire Feb 16

Part of the
Royal Albert
Memorial
Museum
collection - a
gift from the
Western Times
Company in
1952
Views of Exmouth from the Beacon Walls, Devon by William H. Hallett, 1850
The ladies who lived on the hill
Two noble and extraordinary women, both bitterly betrayed by their
famous but outrageously wayward husbands, came to live quietly in Devon
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, looking for a retreat from the
gossips and scandalmongers of London and Bath.
AS CHANCE WOULD HAVE IT,
Frances Lady Nelson, wife of the
naval hero and Anne Lady Byron,
wife of the poet both came to live
a few doors from each other at
numbers 6 and 19 the Beacon, a
genteel and secluded row of fine,
newly-built properties perched
high above the then seaside fishing
village of Exmouth.
But history had not finished with
either of them, even after the deaths
of their spouses: Nelson from his
wounds at Trafalgar in 1805 and
Byron, the poet, in 1824 from
a fever during the Greek war of
independence.
Lady Nelson suffered tragedy upon
tragedy, losing two husbands: her
first, Dr. Josiah Nisbet to a fever
contracted in the West Indies where
she had first met and married him,
the second to her ‘Hero of the Nile’
husband lost to the embrace of
‘that woman’, the notorious Emma
Hamilton. But these events were
only the beginning of suffering
for a woman who never spoke
ill of her husband and defended
both his name and reputation
throughout her life. Following her
move to Exmouth, Frances lost not
only her son by her first marriage
– Josiah - but no fewer than four of
her grandchildren, all of whom are
buried with her at nearby Littleham,
of which more anon.
Maddening silence
Lady Byron’s tragic lot was to lead to
her fleeing with her infant daughter,
Ada, when she believed, barely a
year after her marriage, that she
was wedded to a madman – a man
whose countless well-documented
sexual encounters with both men
and women (including his half
sister Augusta) would earn him
the title of one who was “mad, bad
and dangerous to know”.
Like her titled neighbour a few steps
along the elegant terrace at the
Beacon, Lady Anne never maligned
her husband: unlike Byron who
slandered and wrote against her
for the rest of his life, whilst she
remained stoically silent - something
that infuriated him.
In fact it was not until after her
death that her friend and confidante,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the
American author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and a lifelong campaigner
against slavery and for the rights of
married women, turned the tables
on the Byron camp and spoke at
length on behalf of her wickedly
maligned friend in her book, Lady
Byron Vindicated:
During all this trial, strange to
say, her belief that the good in Lord
Byron would finally conquer was
unshaken. To a friend who said to
her, "O, how could you love him!" she
answered, briefly, "My dear, there
was the angel in him."
She read every work that Byron
wrote, read it with a deeper knowledge
than any human being but
herself could possess. The ribaldry
and the obscenity and the insults,
with which he strove to make her
ridiculous in the world, fell at her
pitying feet unheeded.
Healing broken hearts
So did those two ladies-in-exile on
the sunny southern slopes of what
was fast becoming one of Devon’s
favourite resorts, confide in each
other, over the garden wall? Did
Fanny and Annabella (Lady Byron’s
familiar name to her friends) share
their innermost thoughts about
their errant husbands?
The answer is almost certainly
‘no’. Although Society was fueled
by gossip – then as now – Fanny
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