The Life of Lord Byron
Chapter I
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CHAPTER I.
Ancient descent.—Pedigree.—Birth.—Troubles of his
mother—Early education.—Accession to the title.
The English branch of the family of
key="LdByron"Byron came in with William the
Conqueror; and from that era they have continued to be reckoned among the
eminent families of the kingdom, under the names of Buron and
Biron. It was not until the reign of Henry
II. that they began to call themselves Byron, or de Byron.
Although for upwards of seven hundred years distinguished for the extent of
their possessions, it does not appear, that before the time of Charles
I., they ranked very highly among the heroic families of the kingdom.
Erneis and Ralph were the
companions of the Conqueror; but antiquaries and genealogists have not determined in what
relation they stood to each other. Erneis, who appears to have been the
more considerable personage of the two, held numerous manors in the counties of York and
Lincoln. In the Domesday Book, Ralph, the direct ancestor of the poet,
ranks high among the tenants of the Crown, in Notts and Derbyshire; in the latter county he
resided at Horestan Castle, from which he took his title. One of the lords of Horestan was a
hostage for the payment of the ransom of Richard Cœur de
Lion; and in the time of Edward I., the
possessions of his descendants were augmented by the addition of the Manor of Rochdale, in
Lancashire. On what account ![]()
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this new grant was given has not been
ascertained; nor is it of importance that it should be.
In the wars of the three Edwards, the de Byrons appeared with some
distinction; and they were also of note in the time of Henry
V. Sir John Byron joined Henry VII. on his landing at Milford, and fought gallantly at the
battle of Bosworth, against Richard III., for which he was
afterwards appointed Constable of Nottingham Castle and Warden of Sherwood Forest. At his
death, in 1488, he was succeeded by Sir Nicholas, his
brother, who, at the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales,
in 1501, was made one of the Knights of the Bath.
Sir Nicholas died in 1540, leaving an only son,
Sir John Byron, whom Henry
VIII. made Steward of Manchester and Rochdale, and Lieutenant of the Forest of
Sherwood. It was to him that, on the dissolution of the monasteries, the church and priory of
Newstead, in the county of Nottingham, together with the manor and rectory of Papelwick, were
granted. The abbey from that period became the family seat, and continued so until it was sold
by the poet.
Sir John Byron left Newstead, and his other possessions,
to John Byron, whom Collins and other writers have called his fourth, but who was in fact his
illegitimate son. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in
1579, and his eldest son, Sir Nicholas, served with
distinction in the wars of the Netherlands. When the great rebellion broke out against
Charles I., he was one of the earliest who armed in his
defence. After the battle of Edgehill, where he courageously distinguished himself, he was made
Governor of Chester, and gallantly defended that city against the Parliamentary army. Sir John Byron, the brother and heir of Sir
Nicholas, was, at the coronation of James I.,
made a Knight of the Bath. By his marriage with Anne, the eldest daughter
of Sir Richard Molyneux, he had eleven sons and a
daughter. The ![]()
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eldest served under his uncle in the Netherlands; and in
the year 1641 was appointed by King Charles I., Governor of the Tower of
London. In this situation he became obnoxious to the refractory spirits in the Parliament, and
was in consequence ordered by the Commons to answer at the bar of their House certain charges
which the sectaries alleged against him. But he refused to leave his post without the
king’s command; and, upon this, the Commons applied to the Lords to join them in a
petition to the king to remove him. The Peers rejected the proposition.
On the 24th October, 1643, Sir John Byron
was created Lord Byron of Rochdale, in the county of Lancaster, with
remainder of the title to his brothers, and their male issue, respectively. He was also made
Field-marshal-general of all his Majesty’s forces in Worcestershire, Cheshire, Shropshire
and North Wales: nor were these trusts and honours unwon, for the Byrons,
during the civil war, were eminently distinguished. At the battle of Newbury, seven of the
brothers were in the field, and all actively engaged.
Sir Richard, the second brother of the first lord, was
knighted by Charles I. for his conduct at the battle of
Edgehill, and appointed Governor of Appleby Castle, in Westmorland, and afterwards of Newark,
which he defended with great honour. Sir Richard, on the death of his
brother, in 1652, succeeded to the peerage, and died in 1679.
His eldest son, William, the third lord, married Elizabeth, the daughter of Viscount Chaworth, of Ireland, by whom he had five sons, four of
whom died young. William, the fourth lord, his son, was
Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Prince George of Denmark, and married, for
his first wife, a daughter of the Earl of Bridgewater, who died eleven
weeks after their nuptials. His second wife was the daughter of the Earl of
Portland, by whom he had three sons, who all died before their father. His third
wife was Frances, ![]()
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daughter of
Lord Berkley, of Stratton, from whom the Poet was descended. Her
eldest son, William, born in 1722, succeeded to the family
honours on the death of his father in 1736. He entered the naval service, and became a
lieutenant under Admiral Balchen. In the year 1763 he
was made Master of the Staghounds; and in 1765, he was sent to the Tower, and tried before the
House of Peers, for killing his relation and neighbour, Mr.
Chaworth, in a duel fought at the Star and Garter Tavern, in Pall-mall.
This Lord William was naturally
boisterous and vindictive. It appeared in evidence that he insisted on fighting with Mr. Chaworth in the room where the quarrel commenced. They
accordingly fought without seconds by the dim light of a single candle; and, although
Mr. Chaworth was the more skilful swordsman of the two, he received a
mortal wound; but he lived long enough to disclose some particulars of the rencounter, which
induced the coroner’s jury to return a verdict of wilful murder, and Lord
Byron was tried for the crime.
The trial took place in Westminster Hall, and the public curiosity was so
great that the Peers’ tickets of admission were publicly sold for six guineas each. It
lasted two days, and at the conclusion he was unanimously pronounced guilty of manslaughter. On
being brought up for judgment he pleaded his privilege and was discharged. It was to this lord
that the Poet succeeded, for he died without leaving issue.
His brother, the grandfather of the
Poet, was the celebrated “Hardy Byron;” or, as the sailors
called him, “Foulweather Jack,” whose adventures and services
are too well known to require any notice here. He married the daughter of John Trevannion, Esq., of Carhais, in the
county of Cornwall, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. John, the eldest, and the father of the Poet, was born in 1751, educated at
Westminster School, and afterwards placed in the Guards, where his conduct became so irregular
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and profligate that his father, the admiral, though a good-natured man,
discarded him long before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary éclat by the seduction
of the Marchioness of Carmarthen, under circumstances which
have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life. The meanness with which he
obliged his wretched victim to supply him with money would have been disgraceful to the basest
adulteries of the cellar or garret. A divorce ensued, the guilty parties married; but, within
two years after, such was the brutal and vicious conduct of Captain Byron,
that the ill-fated lady died literally of a broken heart, after having given birth to two
daughters, one of whom still survives.
Captain Byron then married Miss Catharine Gordon, of Gight, a lady of honourable descent, and of a
respectable fortune for a Scottish heiress, the only motive which this Don
Juan had for forming the connection. She was the mother of the Poet.
Although the Byrons have for so many ages been among the
eminent families of the realm, they have no claim to the distinction which the poet has set up
for them as warriors in Palestine, even though he says—
Near Ascalon’s tow’rs John of Horestan slumbers;
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for unless this refers to the Lord of Horestan, who was one of the hostages for the ransom
of Richard I., it will not be easy to determine to whom he
alludes; and it is possible that the poet has no other authority for this legend than the
tradition which he found connected with two groups of heads on the old panels of Newstead. Yet
the account of them is vague and conjectural, for it was not until ages after the crusades,
that the abbey came into the possession of the family: and it is not probable that the figures
referred to any transactions in Palestine, in which the Byrons were
engaged, if they were put up by the Byrons at all. They were, probably,
placed in their ![]()
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present situation while the building was in possession of
the churchmen.
One of the groups, consisting of a female and two Saracens, with eyes
earnestly fixed upon her, may have been the old favourite ecclesiastical story of
Susannah and the elders; the other, which represents a Saracen with a
European female between him and a Christian soldier, is, perhaps, an ecclesiastical allegory,
descriptive of the Saracen and the Christian warrior contending for the liberation of the
church. These sort of allegorical stories were common among monastic ornaments, and the famous
legend of St. George and the Dragon is one of them*.
Into the domestic circumstances of Captain and Mrs. Byron it would be
impertinent to institute any particular investigation. They were exactly such as might be
expected from the sins and follies of the most profligate libertine of the age.
The fortune of Mrs. Byron, consisting
of various property, and amounting to about 23,500l, was all wasted in
the space of two years; at the end of which the unfortunate lady found herself in possession of
only 150l. per annum.
Their means being thus exhausted, she accompa-
*
Gibbon says that St. George was no other than the Bishop of
Cappadocia, a personage of very unecclesiastical habits, and expresses
some degree of surprise that such a person should ever have been sanctified in the
calendar. But the whole story of this deliverer of the Princess of Egypt is an allegory
of the sufferings of the church, which is typified as the daughter of Egypt, driven
into the wilderness, and exposed to destruction by the dragon, the ancient emblem over
all the east, of imperial power. The Bishop of Cappadocia manfully
withstood the attempts of the Emperor, and ultimately succeeded in procuring an
imperial recognition of the church in Egypt. We have adverted to this merely to show
the devices in which the legends of the church were sometimes imbodied; and the
illuminated missals—even the mass-books, in the early stages of printing,
abundantly prove and illustrate the opinions expressed.
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nied her husband in the summer of 1786 to France, whence she returned to
England at the close of the year 1787, and on the 22d of January, 1788, gave birth, in
Holles-street, London, to her first and only child, the Poet. The name of Gordon was added to
that of his family in compliance with a condition imposed by will on whomever should become the
husband of the heiress of Gight. The late Duke of Gordon
and Colonel Duff, of Fetteresso, were godfathers to the
child.
In the year 1790 Mrs. Byron took up
her residence in Aberdeen, where she was soon after joined by Captain Byron, with whom she lived in lodgings in Queen Street; but their
reunion was comfortless, and a separation soon took place. Still their rupture was not final,
for they occasionally visited and drank tea with each other. The Captain also paid some
attention to the boy, and had him, on one occasion, to stay with him for a night, when he
proved so troublesome that he was sent home next day.
Byron himself has said, that he passed his boyhood at
Marlodge, near Aberdeen; but the statement is not correct; he visited, with his mother,
occasionally among their friends, and among other places passed some time at Fetteresso, the
seat of his godfather, Colonel Duff. In 1796, after an
attack of the scarlet fever, he passed some time at Ballater, a summer resort for health and
gaiety, about forty miles up the Dee from Aberdeen. Although the circumstances of Mrs. Byron were at this period exceedingly straitened, she
received a visit from her husband, the object of which was to extort more money; and he was so
far successful, that she contrived to borrow a sum, which enabled him to proceed to
Valenciennes, where in the following year he died, greatly to her relief and the gratification
of all who were connected with him.
By her advances to Captain Byron, and
the expenses she incurred in furnishing the flat of the house she ![]()
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occupied
after his death, Mrs Byron fell into debt to the amount
of 300l., the interest on which reduced her income to 135l.; but, much to her credit, she contrived to live without increasing
her embarrassments until the death of her grandmother, when she received 1122l., a sum which had been set apart for the old gentlewoman’s jointure, and
which enabled her to discharge her pecuniary obligations.
Notwithstanding the manner in which this unfortunate lady was treated by her
husband, she always entertained for him a strong affection; insomuch that, when the
intelligence of his death arrived, her grief was loud and vehement. She was indeed a woman of
quick feelings and strong passions; and probably it was by the strength and sincerity of her
sensibility that she retained so long the affection of her son, towards whom it cannot be
doubted that her love was unaffected. In the midst of the neglect and penury to which she was
herself subjected, she bestowed upon him all the care, the love and watchfulness of the
tenderest mother.
In his fifth year, on the 19th of November, 1792, she sent him to a
day-school, where she paid about five shillings a quarter, the common rate of the respectable
day-schools at that time in Scotland. It was kept by a Mr.
Bowers, whom Byron has described as a dapper,
spruce person, with whom he made no progress. How long he remained with Mr.
Bowers is not mentioned, but by the day-book of the school it was at least
twelve months; for on the 19th of November of the following year there is an entry of a guinea
having been paid for him.
From this school he was removed and placed with a Mr. Ross, one of the ministers of the city churches, and to whom he formed some
attachment, as he speaks of him with kindness, and describes him as a devout, clever little man
of mild manners, good-natured, and pains-taking. His third instructor was a serious, saturnine,
kind young man, named Paterson, the son of ![]()
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a shoemaker, but a good scholar and a rigid Presbyterian. It is somewhat
curious in the record which Byron has made of his early
years to observe the constant endeavour with which he, the descendant of such a limitless
pedigree and great ancestors, attempts to magnify the condition of his mother’s
circumstances.
Paterson attended him until he went to the
grammar-school, where his character first began to be developed; and his schoolfellows, many of
whom are alive, still recollect him as a lively, warm-hearted, and high-spirited boy,
passionate and resentful, but withal affectionate and companionable; this, however, is an
opinion given of him after he had become celebrated; for a very different impression has
unquestionably remained among some who carry their recollections back to his childhood. By them
he has been described as a malignant imp: was often spoken of for his pranks by the worthy
housewives of the neighbourhood, as “Mrs. Byron’s crockit
deevil,” and generally disliked for the deep vindictive anger he retained against
those with whom he happened to quarrel.
By the death of William, the fifth lord,
he succeeded to the estates and titles in the year 1798; and in the autumn of that year,
Mrs. Byron, with her son and a faithful servant of
the name of Mary Gray, left Aberdeen for Newstead.
Previously to their departure, Mrs. Byron sold the furniture of her humble
lodging, with the exception of her little plate and scanty linen, which she took with her, and
the whole amount of the sale did not yield Seventy-five Pounds.
Leigh Hunt,
Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828)
An article was
written in “The Westminster
Review” (Medwin says
by Mr. Hobhouse) to show that the Conversations were altogether unworthy of
credit. There are doubtless many inaccuracies in the latter; but the spirit remains
undoubted; and the author of the criticism was only vexed, that such was the fact. He
assumes, that Lord Byron could not have made this or that statement to
Captain Medwin, because the statement was erroneous or untrue; but
an anonymous author has no right to be believed in preference to one who speaks in his own
name: there is nothing to show that Mr. Hobhouse might not have been
as mistaken about a date or an epigram as Mr. Medwin; and when we find
him giving us his own version of a fact, and Mr. Medwin asserting that
Lord Byron gave him another, the only impression left upon the
mind of any body who knew his Lordship is, that the fault most probably lay in the loose
corners of the noble Poet’s vivacity. Such is the impression made upon the author of
an unpublished Letter to Mr.
Hobhouse, which has been shown me in print; and he had a right to it. The
reviewer, to my knowledge, is mistaken upon some points, as well as the person he reviews.
The assumption, that nobody can know any thing about Lord Byron but
two or three persons who were conversant with him for a certain space of time, and whom he
spoke of with as little ceremony, and would hardly treat with more confidence than he did a
hundred others, is ludicrous; and can only end, as the criticism has done, in doing no good
either to him or them. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
“Dear Sir;—Amongst the
agreeable things which you say of me in your life of Lord Byron, you conjecture that I
‘condemned’
Childe Harold
previously to its publication. There is not the slightest foundation for this
supposition—nor is it true as you state, ‘that I was the only person
who had seen the poem in manuscript, as I was with Lord
Byron whilst he was writing it.’ I had left
Lord Byron before he had finished the two cantos, and,
excepting a few fragments, I had never seen them until they were printed. My own
persuasion is, that the story told in Dallas’s Recollections of some
person, name unknown, having dissuaded Lord Byron from
publishing Childe Harold, is a
mere fabrication, for it is at complete variance with all Lord
Byron himself told me on the subject. At any rate, I was not that
person; if I had been, it is not very likely that the poem which I had endeavoured
to stifle in its birth, should, in its complete, or, as Lord
Byron says, in its ‘concluded state,’ be dedicated to
me. I must, therefore, request you will take the earliest opportunity of relieving
me from this imputation, which, so far as a man can be written down by any other
author than himself, cannot fail to produce a very prejudicial effect, and to give
me more uneasiness than I think it can be your wish to inflict on any man who has
never given you provocation or excuse for injustice. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
I am glad to find my college
stories administered relief to your nerves, when we were together in the Malta
packet some one and twenty years ago; and I am not sorry that my wearing a red
coat at Cagliari, and cutting my finger in the quarries of Pentelicus, should
have furnished materials for your present volume; but to repay me for having
supplied these timely episodes, as well as for your copious extracts from my
travels in Albania, and also for inserting my note about Madame Guiccioli without my leave, you must
positively cancel the passage respecting Childe Harold
in page 161 of your little volume. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
I wonder that even common policy did not induce you to be
more cautious in making statements which might be so easily disproved, and
which have, indeed, been already incontrovertibly refuted. The very
conversation, which you have judiciously selected from Medwin, as one of those parts of his trumpery book to the truth of which you
can speak, I know to be a lie; for I never went the tour of the lake of Geneva
with Lord Byron. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
You tell me that your wish has
been to give only an outline of his intellectual character. I am at a loss to
understand how your gossip about him and me, and the silly anecdotes you have
copied from very discreditable authorities, can be said to be fairly comprised
in such an outline. But your plan ought certainly to have compelled you to make
yourself thoroughly acquainted with his poetry, and to quote him just as he
wrote. Nevertheless, you have misrepresented him at least nine times in the ten
stanzas of that poem which you call the last, and which was not the last, he
ever wrote. Oh, for shame! stick to your acknowledged fictions—there you
are safe—you may deal with Leddy
Grippy and Laurie Todd as
you please, but not with those who have really lived, or who are still
alive. . . .
[John Wilson et. al.],
“Noctes Ambrosianae XVII” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
Vol. 16
No. 94 (November 1824)
And there was another funny thing o’ his, till a queer looking lad, one
Mr. Skeffington, that wrote a tragedy, that was called
“The Mysterious Bride,” the whilk
thing made the Times newspaper for once witty—for it
said no more o’t, than just “Last night a play called The Mysterious
Bride, by the Honorable Mr. Skeffington, was performed at Drury Lane.
The piece was damned.” Weel, ye see it happened that there was a masquerade some nights after,
and Mr. Cam Hobhouse gaed till’t in the disguise
o’ a Spanish nun, that had been ravished by the French army— . . .
Sir John Balchen (1670-1744)
English admiral; he was second in command to Byng in the Mediterranean and governor of
Greenwich Hospital.
John Bowers [Bodsy] (1750-1820)
John Bowers (or Bower) was Byron's first Aberdeen schoolmaster; a genealogy list reports
that he married an Ann Touch in 1784.
Ralph de Buron (1080 fl.)
Little is recorded of this founder of the Byron clan save the properties he held as given
in the Domesday Book, among them Horston Castle.
Amelia Byron, baroness Darcy (de Knayth) [née Darcy] (1754-1784)
Daughter and heir of Robert D'Arcy, fourth earl of Holdernesse; in 1773 she married
Francis Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen, who divorced her following her affair with Captain
John Byron whom she married in 1779. She was the mother of Augusta Byron, the poet's
half-sister.
Lady Frances Byron [née Berkeley] (d. 1757)
The daughter of William Berkeley, fourth Baron Berkeley of Stratton (d. 1741) she was the
third wife of William, fourth Baron Byron, married 1720.
Sir John Byron (1526 c.-1600)
Son of John Byron the Little; he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
Admiral John Byron [Foulweather Jack] (1723-1786)
In 1741 Byron was shipwrecked while serving as a midshipman in the Pacific under
Commodore Anson, an account of which he published as
The Narrative of the
Hon. John Byron (1768).
John Byron [Mad Jack] (1756-1791)
The son of Admiral John Byron; he was the father of Lord Byron, and of Augusta Byron by a
prior marriage with Amelia Darcy, Baroness Darcy (1754-84).
Sir Nicholas Byron (1596-1648)
Son of Sir John Byron (1560 c.-1623); he served as an officer under Charles I. fighting
at the battles of Edgehill and Newbury.
Sophia Byron [née Trevannion] (1758 fl.)
The daughter of John Trevannion of Carhays, Cornwall who married Admiral John Byron 8
September 1748; their two sons were both captains in the Royal Navy.
King Charles I of England (1600-1649)
The son of James VI and I; as king of England (1625-1649) he contended with Parliament;
he was revered as a martyr after his execution.
William Chaworth (1726-1765)
He was killed in a dispute with the fifth Lord Byron, who was convicted but not punished
for the crime.
Arthur Collins (1682-1760)
English antiquary and bookseller; the first edition of his famous work appeared in 1709
as
The Peerage of England, or, an historical and genealogical Account of
the present Nobility.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
Author of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776-1788).
Mary Gray (1800 fl.)
Byron's nurse, who replaced her sister Agnes.
Sir Richard Molyneux (1560 c.-1600 fl.)
The son of William Molyneux and father of Anne Molyneux, who married Sir John
Byron.
John Paterson (1780 c.-1797 fl.)
Byron's schoolmaster at Aberdeen and student of Marischal College (M.A. 1800). He is
usually identified as Joseph Paterson (1779-1871) who however informed John Murray that
Byron referred to his brother John.
Richard III, king of England (1452-1485)
He assumed the throne after the murder of Edward V. in 1483 and ruled until he was killed
at the battle of Bosworth in 1485.
James Ross (1760-1824)
Byron's schoolmaster at Aberdeen; he was minister of St. Nicholas (1795).
