After the Shelley party had arrived back in England, the two men continued to write to each other and Claire also tried to correspond with Byron; but her several heart-rending letters, begging him to keep the promise she claimed he had made to communicate with her, received no reply. She was taken by Mary and Shelley to Bath to await the birth of her child, and established in a boarding house there, away from any of her previous contacts in London (that she was pregnant was successfully hidden from her parents). Her baby was born on 12 January 1817 and initially called Alba, in allusion to Byron's nickname. At his request this was later changed to Allegra. Claire clearly hoped that Allegra would alter Byron's attitude to her, but that never happened. She was thus entirely dependent for moral as well as financial support on Shelley, who quickly had many other matters to preoccupy him. In December 1816, for example, his deserted wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine. He spent many subsequent months trying to recover from Harriet's family the two children he had had with her and, in order to make him seem more respectable to the legal authorities who would decide the issue, married Mary. This second sacrifice of his ideological objections to marriage cut no ice with the Court of Chancery, where it was pointed out that Shelley had shown very little previous interest in his two children by his first wife; that he had abandoned her; and that he held, in any case, such extreme political and religious views that he was unfit to be a parent.