The Life of Byron by
Robert Cohen and Chris Bunyan
When the poor but extravagant Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Byron and his wife,
the wealthy Catherine Gordon of Gight were delivered of a child in January 1788,
no one could realistically have predicted that the club-footed product of the
venture would grow up to be a popular hero:
yet, in the thirty-six years of his life, scandal, intrigue and poetry
emanated from George Byron in a manner which thrilled and delighted as many as
it shocked and offended. He became
as famous as a king and as infamous as a tyrant, and remains a legend 168 years
after he ceased to draw breath.
Byron’s upbringing was unsettled, but not unhappy.
Until he was ten he lived with his temperamental mother in Aberdeen:
‘Mad Jack’ turned up only when he could do so without attracting the
attentions of bailiffs. Although he
was to die when his son was three, Byron later claimed to remember him clearly,
having acquired ‘a very early horror of matrimony, from the sight of domestic
broils.’ In 1798, his great uncle
the fifth Lord Byron died, and young George inherited his first debts, along
with the family title and Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire.
The sixth Lord was destined to uphold proudly his great uncle’s
tradition of drunken misbehavior, reckless spending and sexual extravagance.
Byron discovered love at an early age—forming an attachment to one Mary
Duff at the age of eight—and sex not much later.
When he was eleven his nurse, May Gray, used to come home drunk after a
night on the town, get into his bed and, as the biographies would have it,
‘introduce him to sex.’ Byron
himself felt more abused than enlightened, and after complaining to his lawyer
the nurse was dismissed and the boy was shipped off to boarding school in
London, first in Dulwich, then at Harrow.
Although he made a number of close friendships at Harrow, it seemed that
his romantic education took place mostly during holidays, and never with very
happy results. On one vacation he and his mother were both subjected to the
advances of Lord Grey du Ruthyn, who was now renting Newstead from them.
Byron recoiled as he had done from the pawings of Nurse Gray, but in the
long term neither experience would deflect him from the sexual experimentation
that helped to make his name. During
another vacation he fell in love with a neighbor and cousin, Mary Chaworth, and
when she failed to return his feelings—she was engaged to a Colonel
Musters—he refused to return for the new term at Harrow.
When he was in attendance at the school, Byron busily developed his sense of
destiny and determination. Teased by his classmates about his deformed foot, the
young lord fought to win their respect, winning six brawls out of seven.
Through a remarkable feat of willpower he also trained himself to be a
strong swimmer, and played cricket against Eton—all he needed was someone else
to do the running for him. From
increasing confidence developed the famous Byron arrogance:
on one occasion he wrote home to his mother, ‘The way to
riches, to greatness lies before me. I
can I will cut myself a path through the world, or perish in the attempt.’
He went on to do both.
In October 1805 Byron arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his
collection of verse, Hours of Idleness, earned him his first professional publication.
Another first was the discovery that, despite his adverse reaction to
Lord Grey’s advances, his passions were not after all to be restricted to the
opposite sex. A young chorist, John
Edleston dominated his affects to the extent that he was later to describe his
years at Cambridge as ‘the most romantic period of my life.’
Certainly this was to be the most intense and enduring of his gay
relationships, though he stressed that theirs was ‘a violent, though pure,
love and passion. Byron lavished
money on his platonic lover, helping to amass a debt of £13,000 by the end of
his studies: other indulgences
included a tame bear which he kept in his room.
Early in 1809 Byron reached the age of 21, and took his seat in the House
of Lords. However, though he made a
number of speeches, his heart was not really in it:
now that he was old enough to do what he wanted, he wanted to go East.
He had recently published English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a satire in which he attacked the Edinburgh
Review for rubbishing Hours of
Idleness. However, the
royalties from this could not make a dent in his debts, and he was forced to
borrow yet more money from a friend in order to facilitate his departure for
Europe in July 1809. With his
companion John Cam Hobhouse, he set off on a great tour of Spain, Albania,
Greece and Turkey.
Byron’s vision of mankind and the world were broadened by his travels,
and when he returned to England after two years, he set down his adventures in
the semi-autobio-graphical Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the story of a defiant outcast who
seeks distraction through travel after a life of sin and pleasure.
Published in March 1812, the first two cantos met with tremendous
success: as he later recalled, ‘I
woke up one morning and found myself famous.’
Byron’s literary success quickly gained him access to London society,
where his good looks, curly dark hair and soft blue eyes won him yet more
admirers. Soon he was leaping from
one affair to another, displaying a penchant for the immediacy of passion, but
rarely feeling able to sustain his feelings.
Unfortunately, not all of his aristocratic lovers were as emotionally
malleable as himself. Lady Caroline
Lam was one of those who refused to take his post-coital indifference in good
humor; despite confiding to her diary that Byron was ‘mad, bad and dangerous
to know,’ she bombarded him with love letters, but not even a mailing of her
pubic hair could win him back.
It was partly to shake himself loose of Lady Caroline that he first
proposed to the bookish Annabella Milbanke.
The reason for his second, successful proposal was less clear.
Friends theorized that she represented to Byron a certain haughtiness of
character which would balance his volatile nature.
More likely is the financial incentive which she represented as an
heiress; in addition to this she could be seen as a safe haven from the
incestuous affair he had more recently been conducting with his half-sister
Augusta Leigh. Whatever the motive,
though, the marriage was a spectacular failure. No sooner had the knot been tied than the groom began to feel
constrained by what he had done; between bouts of suicidal depression he would
taunt his wife with the superior charms of Augusta, and when money problems
added to their woes, he sought refuge in heavy drink and the theatre.
Soon after the birth of their daughter
Ada, just over a year into the
marriage, the Byrons separated. Shame-faced
but relieved, Byron consented to Anabella’s subsequent divorce suit.
There was much speculation as to why he was so amenable over the divorce:
what were the ‘unnatural causes’ cited by Lady Byron?
Had she been repulsed by the discovery of his past homosexual
relationships? Had she discovered
the full truth about his affair with Augusta, who had borne him his first child
in 1814? Or was it that he had
forced his wife to have anal sex with him when eight months pregnant? Whatever the truth of these rumors, the outcome was divorce
not only from his wife but also from most of the beautiful people of Childe
Harold four years before. In
April 1816 Byron left England for good.
The continent offered Byron a sense of liberation, and his writings
received a new lease of life from the friendship that started in Geneva with
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Several months were spent in the company of Shelley, his wife
Mary and her sister Claire, with whom Byron had had a brief fling shortly before
leaving England. It turned out, in
fact, that Claire was carrying his baby, and on learning this he turned his back
on her. In the meantime, though,
the foursome spent many a long night discussing poetry and metaphysics, and it
was after one of their candle-lit sessions of ghost-story-telling that Mary
Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
In October 1816 Byron moved on across the Alps to Venice, where he
attracted fresh scandal by involving himself in the Italians’ struggle for
independence from Austria, and by falling in love with Teresa Guiccioli, the
19-year-old wife of a count three times her age.
Her husband made several attempts to move her out of reach, but the young
poet always followed, and by 1820 the old man was renting the upper floor of his
Ravenna palace to his wife’s lover. Later
that year, Teresa received a Papal separation from her husband, on the
understanding that she should live under the roof of her father, Rugerro Gamba.
Under these circumstances Byron accepted an invitation to join the
Shelleys at Pisa in November 1821, taking the entire Gamba family with him.
It was a useful time to go, for the Austrian authorities in Ravenna had
been growing increasingly intolerant of his subversive activities. But Byron was not content to settle back and bask in the west
coast sunshine: he was looking for
another struggle to join, and Greece seemed the obvious choice.
He had been captivated by the country from the time of his first visit in
1809, but in recent years his love for Teresa had prevented him from returning
there. However, in July 1822 he
lost one of his main reasons for staying, when Shelley was drowned in a boating
accident. Byron found that that his love for Teresa was no longer enough to hold
him, and the following April he embarked for Greece, despite (or perhaps because
of) his presentiment that he would die there.
“I hope it may be in action,” he told a friend, “for that would be
a good finish to a very triste existence, and I have a horror of death-bed scenes.”
However, despite a year of relentless and fearless campaigning against
the occupying Turks, Byron failed to liberate his adopted country:
in fact, by the time the Greeks acquired independence in 1830, Byron was
lying beneath the green grass of an English churchyard.
This was as the result of an ill-advised decision, on 9 April 1824, to go
riding in torrential rain near the Greek town of Missolonghi. The soldier-poet caught a chill, which rapidly became a
fever, and soon he was the star player in the thing he dreaded most:
a long and painful deathbed scene. It
lasted for ten days. At first he
resisted his doctors’ fanatical demands to bleed him, but after a week, when
it seemed they could do little more harm than the fever, he finally put himself
at their mercy. During the last few
days he was unburdened of pints of blood and filled with useless purgatives,
until, at about 6 p.m. on the evening of Easter Sunday, he murmured, ‘Now I
want to sleep,’ and proceeded to do so. The
next day, 19 April 1824, he died without regaining consciousness.
 Byron's Author’s Notes
It seems that all over the world, people have heard of Lord Byron.
We all know that Byron, though lame, was as beautiful as a young Apollo,
that women adored him, that he wrote passionate and romantic poetry and that he
died, young, fighting for the freedom of Greece.
But the full truth is more complicated.
He was certainly eccentric, indeed, many considered him mad.
It has to be admitted that his behavior was often both bad and dangerous.
His beauty was maintained by a strict died of dry biscuits and wine
diluted with soda water. He preferred his silly good humored undemanding half-sister
Augusta, his “dear goose” as he called her, to all the hysterical society
beauties who threw themselves at his feed.
And his poetry was different. Unlike
that of his contemporaries, Byron’s style was racy, readable, cynical, full of
humor, sometimes even shocking, with an occasional lyric of exceptional beauty
thrown in—just to prove he could do it. He
seemed to delight in upsetting the English Establishment and he liked to live
sensationally. At the same time he
had a powerful sense of his own destiny and a determination to make himself a
‘name.’
My aim has been to present, for a short while, Lord Byron in person.
It is for this reason I have used so many of Byron’s actual writings.
At this juncture I apologize to anyone who feels I have left out their
favorite piece. I had to be fairly
ruthless in my choice of poems. I
also decided that, apart from Byron’s own words, and those of his
contemporaries, it would difficult to give a true portrait of the man without
involving the women in his life. So,
Isla Blair joins Derek Jacobi with the formidable task of playing not only the
many important women in Byron’s life but acting narrator as well.
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