Lord Byron

• 1. Introduction

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  Lord Byron got up at two in the afternoon. By the time he sat down to dinner, the house around him resounded with the unarbitrated quarrels of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon, with peacocks and an Egyptian crane wandering the grand staircase. This was the household Percy Bysshe Shelley described in Ravenna, calling it a Circean Palace where he wondered who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes. The man at the centre of it was George Gordon Byron, born on the 22nd of January 1788, and dead by the 19th of April 1824. He woke one morning to find himself famous, then fled England never to return, then died of a fever in a Greek swamp town at the age of 36. How did a lame boy from Aberdeen, mocked by his own mother as a lame brat, become a folk hero whom Greeks still revere like a Homeric figure? What drove a celebrity of Regency drawing-rooms to spend his fortune arming a foreign rebellion? And why did Westminster Abbey refuse his body for reasons of questionable morality, only to honour him 145 years later?

• 2. Blood And Debt

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  Ralph de Buran arrived in England with William the Conqueror, and the family land holdings appear in the Domesday Book of 1086. From that ancient line came Byron's grandfather, Vice Admiral John Byron, who survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman and set a speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After a tempestuous voyage during the American War of Independence, the press nicknamed him Foul-Weather Jack.

  Byron's father, Captain John Jack Byron, married Catherine Gordon of Gight on the 13th of May 1785, by all accounts only for her fortune. The large estate, worth some 23,500 pounds, was squandered inside two years. It left the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only 150 pounds. Jack had already married scandalously before, to Amelia Osborne, weeks after her divorce and while she was around eight months pregnant.

  Catherine returned from France to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son. She named the boy after her own father, George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of James I of Scotland who had died by suicide in 1779. Jack joined the family in Aberdeen but the couple quickly separated, and he died abroad of a long and suffering illness in 1791, probably tuberculosis. When the wicked Lord Byron died on the 21st of May 1798, the 10-year-old inherited the title sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

• 3. The Limping Devil

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  From birth, Byron had a deformity of his right foot. Some modern medical authors attribute it to infantile paralysis, others to a dysplasia, a failure of the bones to form properly. Whatever the cause, the limp brought him lifelong psychological and physical misery. He nicknamed himself le diable boiteux, French for the limping devil, after the name given to Asmodeus by Alain-Rene Lesage in a 1707 novel.

  Byron refused to wear any brace that might improve the limp, though he wore specially made shoes to hide the foot. The Scottish novelist John Galt thought his oversensitivity to this innocent fault was unmanly and excessive, since the limp was not greatly conspicuous. Galt met him on a voyage to Sardinia and did not realise he had any deficiency for several days, by which time Byron had developed a mode of walking across a room that was scarcely perceptible.

  Byron's adult height was five feet nine inches, his weight swinging between 9.5 stone and 14 stone. He was renowned for his beauty, which he enhanced by wearing curl-papers in his hair at night. For most of his life he was a vegetarian, often living for days on dry biscuits and white wine, then occasionally gorging on meat and desserts before purging himself. He attended boxing tuition at the Bond Street rooms of the former champion Gentleman John Jackson, whom Byron called the Emperor of Pugilism.

• 4. Mad Bad And Dangerous

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  I awoke one morning and found myself famous, Byron said of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, published in 1812. He rapidly became the most brilliant star in the dazzling world of Regency London, sought after at every society venue and elected to several exclusive clubs.

  Lady Caroline Lamb gave Byron his lasting epitaph when she described him as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. She had spurned him at their first meeting, but then pursued him relentlessly. She lost so much weight that Byron told her mother-in-law he was haunted by a skeleton. She stalked him in disguise as a pageboy, and once wrote Remember me on a book at his desk, prompting his poem Remember Thee, which ends Thou false to him, thou fiend to me. After he tired of her, she published the novel Glenarvon, casting him as its seedy title character.

  In 1813 Byron met his half-sister Augusta Leigh for the first time in four years. Rumours of incest surrounded the pair, and her daughter Medora, born in 1814, was suspected to be his child. To escape debts and gossip he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, called Annabella, at Seaham Hall on the 2nd of January 1815. Their daughter Ada was born that December. By January 1816 Annabella had left him, taking the child, and the scandal of the separation forced him out of England in April 1816, never to return.

• 5. A Wandering Englishman

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  Belgium first, then up the Rhine, then the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. There Byron settled with his physician John William Polidori, befriended Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin, and was joined by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, with whom he had a daughter, Allegra. Kept indoors by incessant rain over three days in June, the group read fantastical stories and devised their own. Mary Shelley produced Frankenstein, and Polidori produced The Vampyre, inspired by a fragment of Byron's own.

  Byron wintered in Venice, where he fell in love with Marianna Segati, then the 22-year-old Margherita Cogni, who could neither read nor write and threw herself into a canal when he asked her to leave. In 1816 he visited the monks of the Mechitarist Order on San Lazzaro degli Armeni, learning the Armenian language with Father Pascal Aucher. He co-authored grammars of the language and wrote a preface describing Armenian oppression by Turkish pashas and Persian satraps.

  The Countess Teresa Guiccioli drew him to Ravenna from 1819 to 1821, then to Pisa, where he finished cantos of Don Juan and joined Leigh Hunt and Shelley in a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal. He attended the beachside cremation of Shelley, who drowned with Edward Williams on the 8th of July 1822. His last Italian home was in Genoa, at the Villa Saluzzo Bombrini.

• 6. The Greek Cause

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  Blaquiere seemed to think that I might be of some use, even here, Byron wrote, confused about what he was meant to do in Greece. Bored with Genoa, he accepted overtures from the independence movement and chartered the brig Hercules, leaving on the 16th of July 1823 and reaching Kefalonia on the 4th of August. Teresa Guiccioli wept openly as he sailed away.

  Byron spent 4,000 pounds of his own money to refit the Greek fleet. To reach the mainland he took a roundabout route to avoid the Ottoman Navy, reaching Missolonghi on the 5th of January 1824. There he joined Alexandros Mavrokordatos and spent much of his time dealing with unruly Souliotes, who demanded back-pay; he gave them some 6,000 pounds before sending them home on the 15th of February 1824. He may go to the Turks or the devil, he wrote, having tried in vain to unite them for the good of Greece.

  Byron sold his estate Rochdale Manor for some 11,250 pounds, reckoning he now had around 20,000 pounds to spend entirely on the Greek cause. By the end of March 1824 the so-called Byron brigade of 30 philhellene officers and exactly 231 men had formed, paid for by him alone. He complained the Greeks were hopelessly disunited, feuding among themselves more than fighting the Ottomans. When the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen heard of Byron's heroics, he resculpted his earlier bust of the poet in Greek marble.

• 7. Death At Missolonghi

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  Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire master to prepare artillery and took part of the rebel army under his own command, despite his lack of military experience. Before the expedition could sail, on the 15th of February 1824, he fell ill, and bloodletting weakened him further.

  In early April he caught a cold, and the therapeutic bleeding insisted on by his doctors made it worse. He contracted a fever and died in Missolonghi on the 19th of April. His physician, Julius van Millingen, son of the British archaeologist James Millingen, could not prevent his death. Some have said that had Byron lived to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been declared King of Greece, though modern scholars find that unlikely.

  The historian David Brewer judged that Byron won no victories and succeeded only in the humanitarian sphere, yet his death drew sympathetic nations into active participation in the Greek cause. In Greece he is still revered as no other foreigner, accorded the honorific epithet megalos kai kalos, a great and good man. The national poet of Greece, Dionysios Solomos, wrote To the Death of Lord Byron, and a suburb of Athens was named Vyronas in his honour.

• 8. What England Owed Him

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  According to some sources, Byron's heart remained at Missolonghi. His embalmed body was sent to England with his manservant Tita, but Westminster Abbey refused burial for reason of questionable morality. Huge crowds viewed his coffin as he lay in state for two days at number 25 Great George Street, Westminster. He was buried at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, where a marble slab given by the King of Greece lies above his grave.

  Byron's friends raised 1,000 pounds for a statue, and Thorvaldsen offered to sculpt it for that amount. For ten years after its completion in 1834, British institutions turned it down. The British Museum, St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the National Gallery all refused it before Trinity College, Cambridge placed it in its library.

  Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was later buried beside him. She collaborated with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine, a predecessor to modern computers, and is recognised as one of the world's first computer programmers. Her father, the man Westminster would not take, finally received a memorial there in 1969, lobbied for since 1907, when a national newspaper asked whether ignoring Byron was a thing of which England should be ashamed. The Hellenic Parliament went further, designating the 19th of April, the anniversary of his death, as the Day of Philhellenism and International Solidarity.