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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON
* * * * *
_Works by the Same Author_
MADAME DE STAËL AND HER LOVERS
GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS
ROSSEAU AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED
CHATEAUBRIAND AND HIS COURT OF WOMEN
THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Lord Byron._]
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON
by
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
Author of "George Sand and Her Lovers" etc.
London
Eveleigh Nash
Fawside House
1910
PREFACE
Whether a book is called "The Love Affairs of Lord Byron" or "The Life of
Lord Byron" can make very little difference to the contents of its pages.
Byron's love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost
the only ones. Like Chateaubriand, he might have spoke of "a procession of
women" as the great panoramic effect of his career. He differed from
Chateaubriand, however, in the first place, in not professing to be very
much concerned by the pageant, and, in the second place, in being, in
reality, very deeply affected by it. Chateaubriand kept his emotions well
in hand, exaggerating them in retrospect for the sake of literary effect,
picturing the sensibility of his heart in polished phrases, but never
giving the impression of a man who has suffered through his passions, or
been swept off his feet by them, or diverted by them from the pursuit of
ambition or the serene cult of the all-important ego. In all
Chateaubriand's love affairs, in short, red blood is lacking and
self-consciousness prevails. He appears to be equally in love with all the
women in the procession; the explanation being that he is more in love
with himself than with any of them. In spite of the procession of women,
which is admitted to have been magnificent, it may justly be said of
Chateaubriand that love was "of his life a thing apart."
Of Byron, who coined the phrase (though Madame de Staël had coined it
before him) it cannot be said. It may appear to be true of sundry of his
incidental love affairs, but it cannot stand as a broad generalisation.
His whole life was deflected from its course, and thrown out of gear:
first, by his unhappy passion for Mary Chaworth; secondly, by the way in
which women of all ranks, flattering his vanity for the gratification of
their own, importuned him with the offer of their hearts. Lady Byron
herself did so no less than Lady Caroline Lamb, and Jane Clairmont, and
the Venetian light o' loves, though, no doubt, with more delicacy and a
better show of maidenly reserve. Fully persuaded in her own mind that he
had pined for her for two years, she delicately hinted to him that he need
pine no longer. He took the hint and married her, with the catastrophic
consequences which we know. Then other women--a long series of other
women--did what they could to break his fall and console him. He dallied
with them for years, without ever engaging his heart very deeply, until at
last he realised that this sort of dalliance was a very futile and
enervating occupation, tore himself away from his last entanglement, and
crossed the sea to strike a blow for freedom.
That is Byron's life in a nutshell. His biographer, it is clear, has no
way of escape from his love affairs; while the critic is under an
obligation, almost equally compelling, to take note of them. It is not
merely that he was continually writing about them, and that the meaning of
his enigmatic sentences can, in many cases, only be unravelled by the help
of the clue which a knowledge of his love affairs provides. The striking
change which we see the tone of his work undergoing as he grows older is
the reflection of the history of his heart. Many of his later poems might
have been written in mockery of the earlier ones. He had his illusions in
his youth. In his middle-age, if he can be said to have reached
middle-age, he had none, but wrote, to the distress of the Countess
Guiccioli, as a man who delighted to tear aside, with a rude hand, the
striped veil of sentiment and hypocrisy which hid the ugly nakedness of
truth. The secret of that transformation is written in the record of his
love affairs, and can be read nowhere else. His life lacks all unity and
all consistency unless the first place in it is given to that record.
Since the appearance of Moore's Life, and even since the appearance of
Cordy Jeaffreson's "Real Lord Byron," a good deal of new information has
been made available. The biographer has to take cognisance of the various
documents brought together in Mr. Murray's latest edition of Byron's
Writings and Letters; of Hobhouse's "Account of the Separation"; of the
"Confessions," for whatever they may be worth, elicited from Jane
Clairmont and first printed in the _Nineteenth Century_; of Mr. Richard
Edgcumbe's "Byron: the Last Phase"; and of the late Lord Lovelace's
privately printed work, "Astarte."
The importance of each of these authorities will appear when reference is
made to it in the text. It will be seen, then, that some of the Murray
MSS. give precision to the narrative of Byron's relations with Lady
Caroline Lamb, and that others effectually dispose of Cordy Jeaffreson's
theory that Lady Byron's mysterious grievance--the grievance which caused
her lawyer to declare reconciliation impossible--was her husband's
intimacy with Miss Clairmont. Others of them, again, as effectually
confute Cordy Jeaffreson's amazing doctrine that Byron only brought
railing accusations against his wife because he loved her, and that at the
time when he denounced her as "the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord," he was
in reality yearning to be recalled to the nuptial bed. Concerning
"Astarte" some further remarks may be made.
It is a disgusting and calumnious compilation, designed, apparently, to
show that Byron's descendants accept the worst charges preferred against
him by his enemies during his lifetime. Those charges are such that one
would have expected a member of the family to hold his tongue about them,
even if he were in possession of evidence conclusively demonstrating their
truth. That a member of the family should have revived the charges on the
strength of evidence which may justly be described as not good enough to
hang a dog on almost surpasses belief. Still, the thing has been done, and
the biographer's obligations are affected accordingly. Unpleasant though
the subject is, he must examine the so-called evidence for fear lest he
should be supposed to feel himself unable to rebut it; and he is under the
stronger compulsion to do so because the mud thrown by Lord Lovelace is
not thrown at Byron only, but also at Augusta Leigh, a most worthy and
womanly woman, and the best of sisters and wives. It is the hope and
belief of the present writer that he has succeeded in definitely clearing
her character, together with that of her brother, and demonstrated that
the legend of the crime, so industriously inculated by Byron's grandson,
has no shadow of foundation in fact.
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES 1
II. CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW 10
III. A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER,
AND MARY CHAWORTH 23
IV. LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL 35
V. REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS" 50
VI. THE GRAND TOUR--FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN 63
VII. FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH 75
VIII. THE MAID OF ATHENS--MRS. WERRY--MRS. PEDLEY--THE SWIMMING
OF THE HELLESPONT 87
IX. RETURN TO ENGLAND--PUBLICATION OF "CHILDE HAROLD" 101
X. THE SECRET ORCHARD 114
XI. LADY CAROLINE LAMB 127
XII. THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE--HER CHARACTER AND
SUBSEQUENT CAREER 138
XIII. LADY OXFORD--BYRON'S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER 148
XIV. AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS--THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN
TRAVEL, AND OF MARY CHAWORTH 158
XV. RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH 170
XVI. MARRIAGE 182
XVII. INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER 194
XVIII. LADY BYRON'S DEMAND FOR A SEPARATION--RUMOURS THAT
"GROSS CHARGES" MIGHT BE BROUGHT, INVOLVING MRS. LEIGH 208
XIX. "GROSS CHARGES" DISAVOWED BY LADY BYRON--SEPARATION
AGREED TO 221
XX. REVIVAL OF THE BYRON SCANDAL BY MRS. BEECHER STOWE AND
THE LATE LORD LOVELACE 231
XXI. INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA
LEIGH--THE ALLEGATION THAT SHE "CONFESSED"--THE PROOF THAT SHE
DID NOTHING OF THE KIND 240
XXII. BYRON'S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT--HIS ACQUAINTANCE
WITH JANE CLAIRMONT 253
XXIII. LIFE AT GENEVA--THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT 264
XXIV. FROM GENEVA TO VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER'S WIFE 277
XXV. AT VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER'S WIFE--DISSOLUTE
PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE--ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND
REFORMATION 287
XXVI. IN THE VENETIAN SALONS--INTRODUCTION TO COUNTESS GUICCIOLI 300
XXVII. BYRON'S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER
HUSBAND AT RAVENNA 312
XXVIII. REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES--REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA 324
XXIX. THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA 336
XXX. FROM PISA TO GENOA 345
XXXI. DEPARTURE FOR GREECE 356
XXXII. DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE 369
APPENDIX 375
INDEX 377
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LORD BYRON _Frontispiece_
THE MAID OF ATHENS _To face page_ 88
LADY CAROLINE LAMB " 128
MARY CHAWORTH " 174
LADY BYRON " 222
COUNTESS GUICCIOLI " 302
CHAPTER I
ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES
The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were
rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years
elapsed before they distinguished themselves either for good or evil, or
emerged from the ruck of the landed gentry. There were Byrons at Crecy,
and at the siege of Calais; and there probably were Byrons among the
Crusaders. There is even a legend of a Byron Crusader rescuing a Christian
maiden from the Saracens; but neither the maiden nor the Crusader can be
identified. The authentic history of the family only begins with the grant
of Newstead Abbey, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, to
Sir John Byron of Clayton, in Lancashire--a reward, apparently, for
services rendered by his father at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and
their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war
between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then
fought on the King's side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the
eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton--a loyal, valiant, and impetuous
soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke
Haslerig's cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that
Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped
to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. "By Lord
Byron's improper charge," Prince Rupert reported, "much harm hath been
done."
He had been given his peerage--with limitations in default of issue male
to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies--in the
midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of
his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second--a lady
concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys' Diary. She was, Pepys
tells us, one of Charles II.'s mistresses--his "seventeenth mistress
aboard," who, as the diarist proceeds, "did not leave him till she got him
to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be
to God! she died before she got it."
This first Lord Byron died childless, and the title passed to his brother
Richard, who had also distinguished himself in the war on the King's side.
He was one of the colonels whose gallantry at Edgehill the University of
Oxford rewarded with honorary degrees; and he was Governor, successively,
of Appleby and Newark. He tried to seduce his kinsman, Colonel
Hutchinson, from his allegiance to the Parliament, but without avail.
"Except," Colonel Hutchinson told him, "he found his own heart prone to
such treachery, he might consider that there was, if nothing else, so much
of a Byron's blood in him that he should very much scorn to betray or quit
a trust he had undertaken."
The third Lord, Richard's son William, succeeded to the title in 1679. His
marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth, brings the name of
the heroine of the poet's first and last love into the story; and he is
also notable as the first Byron who had a taste, if not actually a turn,
for literature. Thomas Shipman, the royalist singer whose songs indicate,
according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe's criticism in the "Dictionary of
National Biography," that "the severe morals of the Roundheads were even
less to his taste than their politics," was his intimate friend; and
Shipman's "Carolina" contains a set of verses from his pen:
"_My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman's faithful friend;
And though I cannot amply speak your praise,
I'll wear the myrtle, tho' you wear the bays._"
That is a fair specimen of the third Lord Byron's poetical style; and it
is clear that his descendant did not need to be a great poet in order to
improve upon it. Of his son, the fourth Lord, who died in 1736, there is
nothing to be said; but his grandson, the fifth Lord, lives in history
and tradition as "the wicked Lord Byron." The report of his arraignment
before his fellow peers on the charge of murdering his relative, Mr.
William Chaworth, in 1765, may be read in the Nineteenth Volume of State
Trials, though the most careful reading is likely to leave the rights of
the case obscure.
The tragedy, whatever the rights of it, occurred after one of the weekly
dinners of the Nottinghamshire County Club, at the Star and Garter Tavern
in Pall Mall. The quarrel arose out of a heated discussion on the subject
of preserving game--a topic which country gentlemen are particularly
liable to discuss with heat. Lord Byron is said to have advocated
leniency, and Mr. Chaworth severity, towards poachers. The argument led to
a wager; and the two men went upstairs together--apparently for the
purpose of arranging the terms of the wager--and entered a room lighted
only by a dull fire and a single candle. As soon as the door was closed,
they drew their swords and fought, and Lord Byron ran Mr. Chaworth through
the body.
Those are the only points on which all the depositions agree. Lord Byron
said that Chaworth, who was the better swordsman of the two, challenged
him to fight, and that the fight was conducted fairly. The case for the
prosecution was that Chaworth did not mean to fight, and that Lord Byron
attacked him unawares. Chaworth, though he lingered for some hours, and
was questioned on the subject, said nothing to exonerate his assailant.
That, broadly speaking, was the evidence on which the peers had to come to
their decision; and they found Lord Byron not guilty of murder but guilty
of manslaughter. Pleading his privilege as a peer, he was released on
payment of the fees.
Society, however, inclined to the view that he had not fought fairly. Two
years before he had been Master of the Stag-hounds. Now he was cut by the
county, and relapsed into misanthropic debauchery. He quarrelled with his
son, the Honorable William Byron, sometime M.P. for Morpeth, for
contracting a marriage of which he disapproved. He drove his wife away
from Newstead by his brutality, and consorted with a low-born "Lady
Betty." The stories of his shooting his coachman and trying to drown his
wife were untrue, but his neighbours believed them, and behaved
accordingly; and an unpleasant picture of his retirement may be found in
Horace Walpole's Letters.
"The present Lord," Horace Walpole writes, "hath lost large sums, and
paid part in old oaks; five thousand pounds worth have been cut down
near the house. _En revanche_, he has built two baby forts to pay his
country in castles for the damage done to the Navy, and planted a
handful of Scotch firs that look like plough-boys dressed in old
family liveries for a public day."
Playing at naval battles and bombardments, with toy ships, on the little
lakes in his park, was, indeed, the favourite, if not the only,
recreation of the wicked lord's old age. It is said that his chief purpose
in cutting down the timber was to spite and embarrass his heirs; and he
did, at any rate, involve his heir in a law suit almost as long as the
famous case of Jarndyce _versus_ Jarndyce by means of an improper sale of
the Byron property at Rochdale.
His heir, however, was not to be either his son or his grandson. They both
predeceased him--the latter dying in Corsica in 1794--and the title and
estates passed to the issue of his brother John, known to the Navy List as
Admiral Byron, and to the navy as "foul weather Jack."
The Admiral had been round the world with Anson, had been wrecked on the
coast of Chili, and had published a narrative--"my granddad's
narrative"--of his hardships and adventures. He had later been sent round
the world on a voyage of discovery on his own account, but had discovered
nothing in particular. Finally he had fought, not too successfully,
against d'Estaing in the West Indies, and had withdrawn to misanthropic
isolation. His son, Captain Byron, of the Guards, known to his
contemporaries as "Mad Jack Byron," was a handsome youth of worthless
character, but very fascinating to women. His elopement, while still a
minor, with the Marchioness of Carmarthen, was one of the sensational
events of a London season.
Lady Carmarthen's husband having divorced her, Mad Jack married her in
1778. They lived together in Paris and at Chantilly--prosperously, for
the bride had £4000 a year in her own right. A child was born--Augusta,
who subsequently married Colonel Leigh; but, in 1784, his wife died, and
Captain Byron, heavily in debt, was once more thrown on his own resources.
He returned to England to look for an heiress, and he found one in the
person of Miss Gordon of Gight, whom he met and married at Bath in 1786.
The fortune, when the landed estates had been realised, amounted to about
£23,000; and Captain Byron's clamorous creditors took most of it. A
considerable portion of what was left was quickly squandered in riotous
living on the Continent. The ultimate income consisted of the interest
(subject to an annuity to Mrs. Byron's grandmother) on the sum of £4200;
and that lamentable financial position had already been reached when
Captain and Mrs. Byron came back to England and took a furnished house in
Holles Street, where George Noel Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, was born on
January 22, 1788.
There we have, in brief outline, all that is essential of the little that
is known of Byron's heredity. If it is not precisely common-place, it is
at least undistinguished. No one can ever have generalised from it and
said that the Byrons were brilliant, or even--in spite of the third Lord's
conscientious attempts at versification--that they were "literary." A far
more likely generalisation would have been that the Byrons were mad.
They were not quite that, of course, though some of them were eccentric;
and those who were eccentric had the courage of their eccentricity. But
they were, at least so far as we know them, impetuous and reckless
men--men who went through life in the spirit of a bull charging a gate,
doing what they chose to do because they chose to do it, with a defiant
air of "damn the consequences." We find that note alike in the first
Lord's "improper charge" on Marston Moor, and the fifth Lord's improvised
duel in the dark room of the Pall Mall tavern, and in Captain Byron's
dashing elopement with a noble neighbour's wife. We shall catch it again,
and more than once, in our survey of the career of the one Byron who has
been famous; and we shall see how much his fame owed to his pride, his
determined indifference, in spite of his prickly sensitiveness, to public
opinion, and his clear-cut, haughty character.
Legh Richmond, the popular evangelical preacher, once said that, if Byron
had been as bad a poet as he was a man, his poetry would have done but
little harm, but that criticism is almost an inversion of the truth.
Byron, in fact, imposed himself far less because his poetry was good than
because his personality was strong. He never saw as far into the heart of
things as Wordsworth. When he tried to do so, at Shelley's instigation, he
only saw what Wordsworth had already shown; and there are many passages in
his work which might fairly be described as being "like Wordsworth only
less so." None of his shorter pieces are fit to stand beside "The world is
too much with us," and he never wrote a line so wonderfully inspired as
Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity."
But he had one advantage over Wordsworth. He spoke out; he was not afraid
of saying things. His genius had all the hard riding, neck-or-nothing
temper of the earlier, undistinguished Byrons behind it. He was "dowered
with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,"--and he damned the
consequences with the haphazard blasphemy of an aristocrat who feels sure
of himself, and has no need to pick his words. He was quite ready to damn
them in the presence of ladies, and in the face of kings; and he damned
them as one having authority, and not as the democratic upstarts; so that
the world listened attentively, wondering what he would say next, and even
Shelley, observing how easily he compelled a hearing, was fully persuaded
that Byron was a greater poet than himself.
That, in the main, it would seem, was how heredity affected him. The
hereditary influences, however, were, in their turn modified by the
strange circumstances of his upbringing; and it is time to glance at them,
and see how far they help to account for the loneliness and aloofness of
Byron's temperament, for the sensitiveness already referred to, and for
the ultimate attitude known as the Byronic pose.