ANCESTRY AND FAMILY
CHAPTER II.
EARLY YEARS AND SCHOOL-LIFE. 1788-1808.
CHAPTER III.
CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP--HOURS OF IDLENESS--BARDS AND
REVIEWERS. 1808-1809.
CHAPTER IV.
TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL. 1809-1811.
CHAPTER V.
LIFE IN LONDON--CORRESPONDENCE WITH SCOTT AND MOORE--SECOND PERIOD OF
AUTHORSHIP--HAROLD (I., II.). AND THE ROMANCES. 1811-1815.
CHAPTER VI.
MARRIAGE AND SEPARATION--FAREWELL TO ENGLAND. 1815-1816.
CHAPTER VII.
SWITZERLAND--VENICE--THIRD PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP--HAROLD (III., IV.)
--MANFRED. 1816-1820.
CHAPTER VIII.
RAVENNA--COUNTESS GUICCIOLI--THE DRAMAS--CAIN--VISION OF JUDGMENT.
1820-1821.
CHAPTER IX.
PISA--GENOA--THE LIBERAL--DON JUAN. 1821-1823.
CHAPTER. X.
POLITICS--THE CARBONARI--EXPEDITION TO GREECE--DEATH. 1821-1824.
CHAPTER XI.
CHARACTERISTICS, AND PLACE IN LITERATURE
INDEX
BOOKS CONSULTED.
1. The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron, Commodore, in a late
Expedition Round the World, &c. (Baker and Leigh) 1768
2. Voyage of H.M.S. _Blonde_ to the Sandwich Islands in the years
1824-1825, the Right Hon. Lord Byron, Commander (John Murray) 1826
3. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Hon. Lord Byron (H.
Colburn) 1822
4. The Life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of G.G. Noel Byron, with
courtiers of tho present polished and enlightened age, &c., &c.,
3 vols. (M. Hey) 1825
5. Narrative of Lord Byron's last Journey to Greece, from Journal of
Count Peter Gamba 1825
6. Medwin's Conversations with Lord Byron at Pisa, 2 vols. (H. Colburn)
1825
7. Leigh Hunt's Byron and His Contemporaries (H. Colburn)
1828
8. The Works of Lord Byron, with Life by Thomas Moore, 17
vols. (Murray) 1832
9. Galt's Life of Lord Byron (Colburn and Buntley) 1830
10. Kennedy's Conversations on Religion (Murray) 1830
11. Countess of Blessington's Conversations (Colburn) 1834
12. Lady Morgan's Memoirs, 2 vols. (W.H. Allen) 1842
13. Recollections of the Countess Guiccioli (Bentley) 1869
14. Castelar's Genius and Character of Byron (Tinsley) 1870
15. Elze's Life of Lord Byron (Murray) 1872
16. Trelawny's Reminiscences of Byron and Shelley 1858
17. Torrens' Memoirs of Viscount Melbourne (Macmillan) 1878
18. Rev. F. Hodgson's Memoirs, 2 vols. (Macimillan) 1879
19. Essays and Articles, or Recorded Criticisms, by Macaulay, Scott,
Shelley, Goethe, G. Brandes, Mazzini, Sainte Beuve, Chasles, H.
Taine, &c.
20. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage 1879
GENEALOGY OF THE BYRON FAMILY.
THE BYRON FAMILY, FROM THE CONQUEST
Ralph de Burun (estates in Nottingham and Derby).
|
Hugh de Burun (Lord of Horestan).
|
Hugh de Buron (became a monk).
|
Sir Roger de Buron (gave lands to monks of Swinstead).
|
| Sir Richard Clayton.
| |
Robert de Byron. = Cecelia
|
Robert de Byron
|
Sir John Byron (Governor of York under Edward I.).
|
--------------------------------
| |
Sir Richard Byron. Sir John (knighted at siege of Calais)
|
Sir John (knighted in 3rd year of Henry V.).
|
| Sir John Butler.
| |
Sir Nicholas. = Alice.
|
-----------------------------------
| |
Sir Nicholas (made K.B. at Sir John (knighted by Richmond
marriage of Prince Arthur, at Milford; fought at Bosworth;
died 1503). died 1488).
|
Sir John Byron = 2nd wife, widow of George Halgh.
(received grant of Newstead from Henry VIII., May 26,1540).
|
Bar // Sinister
| Sir Nicholas Strelleye
| |
John Byron, of Clayton = Alice
(inherited by gift, knighted by Elizabeth, 1579).
|
-------------------------------------
| |
| Sir Nicholas
| Sir Richard Molyneux
| |
Sir John = Anne
(K.B. at coronation of James I; Governor of Tower).
|
--------------------------------------
| |
RICHARD, 2nd Lord (1605-1679) Sir JOHN 1st Lord (created
(Buried at Hucknal Torkard) Baron Byron of Rochdale,
| Oct. 24, 1643; at Newbury,
| Edgehill, Chester, &c.
| Viscount Chaworth Governor of Duke of York; died
| | at Paris, 1652).
WILLIAM, 3rd Lord = Elizabeth.
(died 1695)
| Lord Berkeley.
| |
WILLIAM, 4th Lord = Frances (3rd wife)
(1669-1736)
|
---------------------------
| |
Admiral John (1723-1786) |- WILLIAM, 5th Lord (1722-1798) (killed Mr.
| "Foul-weather Jack"). | Chaworth; survived his sons
| | and a grandson, who died 1794;
| | called "The wicked Lord").
| |
| | - Isabella = Lord Carlisle
| |
| Lord Carlisle (the poet's
| guardian).
---------------------------
| |
| |- A daughter
| | |
| | Colonel Leigh
| |
| |- George Anson (1758-1793).
| |
| Admiral GEORGE ANSON, 7th Lord
| (1789-1868)
| |
| ----
| |- Frederick
| | |
| | GEORGE F. WILLIAM, 9th and present
| | Lord Byron.
| |
| |- GEORGE, 8th Lord (1818-1870)
|
-------------------
|
1. Marchioness = John Byron (1751-1791) = 2. Miss Gordon of Gight
of Carmarthen | |
| |
Colonel Leigh = Augusta GEORGE GORDON, 6th Lord
| | (1788-1824). Married
Several daughters | Anna Isabella (1792-1860),
| daughter of Sir Ralph
| Milbanke and Judith,
| daughter of Sir Edward
| Noel (Viscount Wentworth),
| and by her had
-------------------------
|
Earl Lovelace = Augusta-Ada (1815-1852).
|
--------------------------------------
| | |
Mr. Blunt = Lady Anne. Byron Noel Ralph Gordon,
(died 1862) now Lord Wentworth
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY AND FAMILY.
Byron's life was passed under the fierce light that beats upon an
intellectual throne. He succeeded in making himself--what he wished to
be--the most notorious personality in the world of letters of our century.
Almost every one who came in contact with him has left on record various
impressions of intimacy or interview. Those whom he excluded or
patronized, maligned; those to whom he was genial, loved him. Mr. Southey,
in all sincerity, regarded him as the principle of Evil incarnate; an
American writer of tracts in the form of stories is of the same opinion:
to the Countess Guiccioli he is an archangel. Mr. Carlyle considers him to
have been a mere "sulky dandy." Goethe ranks him as the first English
poet after Shakespeare, and is followed by the leading critics of France,
Italy, and Spain. All concur in the admission that Byron was as proud of
his race as of his verse, and that in unexampled measure the good and evil
of his nature were inherited and inborn. His genealogy is, therefore, a
matter of no idle antiquarianism.
There are legends of old Norse Buruns migrating from their home in
Scandinavia, and settling, one branch in Normandy, another in Livonia. To
the latter belonged a distant Marshal de Burun, famous for the almost
absolute power he wielded in the then infant realm of Russia. Two members
of the family came over with the Conqueror, and settled in England. Of
Erneis de Burun, who had lands in York and Lincoln, we hear little more.
Ralph, the poet's ancestor, is mentioned in Doomsday Book--our first
authentic record--as having estates in Nottinghamshire and Derby. His son
Hugh was lord of Horestan Castle in the latter county, and with his son of
the same name, under King Stephen, presented the church of Ossington to
the monks of Lenton. Tim latter Hugh joined their order; but the race was
continued by his son Sir Roger, who gave lands to the monastery of
Swinstead. This brings us to the reign of Henry II. (1155-1189), when
Robert de Byron adopted the spelling of his name afterwards retained, and
by his marriage with Cecilia, heir of Sir Richard Clayton, added to the
family possessions an estate; in Lancashire, where, till the time of Henry
VIII., they fixed their seat. The poet, relying on old wood-carvings at
Newstead, claims for some of his ancestors a part in the crusades, and
mentions a name not apparently belonging to that age--
Near Ascalon's towers, John of Horestan slumbers--
a romance, like many of his, possibly founded on fact, but incapable of
verification.
Two grandsons of Sir Robert have a more substantial fame, having served
with distinction in the wars of Edward I. The elder of these was governor
of the city of York. Some members of his family fought at Cressy, and one
of his sons, Sir John, was knighted by Edward III. at the siege of Calais.
Descending through the other, Sir Richard, we come to another Sir John,
knighted by Richmond, afterwards Henry VII., on his landing at Milford. He
fought, with his kin, on the field of Bosworth, and dying without issue,
left the estates to his brother, Sir Nicholas, knighted in 1502, at the
marriage of Prince Arthur. The son of Sir Nicholas, known as "little Sir
John of the great beard," appears to have been a favourite of Henry VIII.,
who made him Steward of Manchester and Lieutenant of Sherwood, and on the
dissolution of the monasteries presented him with the Priory of Newstead,
the rents of which were equivalent to about 4000l. of our money. Sir John,
who stepped into the Abbey in 1540, married twice, and the premature
appearance of a son by the second wife--widow of Sir George Halgh--brought
the bar sinister of which so much has been made. No indication of this
fact, however, appears in the family arms, and it is doubtful if the poet
was aware of a reproach which in any case does not touch his descent. The
"filius naturalis," John Byron of Clayton, inherited by deed of gift, and
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1579. His descendants were prominent as
staunch Royalists during the whole period of the Civil Wars. At Edgehill
there were seven Byrons on the field.
On Marston, with Rupert 'gainst traitors contending,
Four brothers enrich'd with their blood the bleak field.
Sir Nicholas, one of the seven, is extolled as "a person of great
affability and dexterity, as well as martial knowledge, which gave great
life to the designs of the well affected." He was taken prisoner by the
Parliament while acting as governor of Chester. Under his nephew, Sir
John, Newstead is said to have been besieged and taken; but the knight
escaped, in the words of the poet--never a Radical at heart--a "protecting
genius,
For nobler combats here reserved his life,
To lead the band where godlike Falkland foil."
Clarendon, indeed, informs us, that on the morning before the battle,
Falkland, "very cheerful, as always upon action, put himself into the
first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment." This slightly antedates his
title. The first battle of Newbury was fought on September, 1643. For his
services there, and at a previous royal victory, over Waller in July, Sir
John was, on October 24th of the same year, created Baron of Rochdale, and
so became the first Peer of the family.
This first lord was succeeded by his brother Richard (1605-1079), famous
in the war for his government and gallant defence of Newark. He rests in
the vault that now contains the dust of the greatest of his race, Hucknall
Torkard Church, where his epitaph records the fact that the family lost
all their present fortunes by their loyalty, adding, "yet it pleased God
so to bless the humble endeavours of the said Richard, Lord Byron, that he
repurchased part of their ancient inheritance, which he left to his
posterity, with a laudable memory for his great piety and charity." His
eldest son, William, the third Lord (died 1695), is worth remembering on
two accounts. He married Elizabeth, the daughter of Viscount Chaworth, and
so wove the first link in a strange association of tragedy and romance: he
was a patron of one of those poets who, approved by neither gods nor
columns, are remembered by the accident of an accident, and was himself a
poetaster, capable of the couplet,--
My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman's faithful friend,--
an ambition which, considering its moderate scope, may be granted to have
attained its desire.
His successor, the fourth lord (1669-1736), gentleman of the bedchamber to
Prince George of Denmark, himself living a quiet life, became, by his
third wife, Frances, daughter of Lord Berkeley, the progenitor of a
strange group of eccentric, adventurous, and passionate spirits. The
eldest son, the fifth lord, and immediate predecessor in the peerage of
the poet, was born in 1722, entered the naval service, left his ship, the
"Victory," just before she was lost on the rocks of Alderney, and
subsequently became master of the stag-hounds. In 1765, the year of the
passing of the American Stamp Act, an event occurred which coloured the
whole of his after-life, and is curiously illustrative of the manners of
the time. On January 26th or 29th (accounts vary) ten members of an
aristocratic social club sat down to dinner in Pall-mall. Lord Byron and
Mr. Chaworth, his neighbour and kinsman, were of the party. In the course
of the evening, when the wine was going round, a dispute arose between
them about the management of game, so frivolous that one conjectures the
quarrel to have been picked to cloak some other cause of offence. Bets
were offered, and high words passed, but the company thought the matter
had blown over. On going out, however, the disputants met on the stairs,
and one of the two, it is uncertain which, cried out to the waiter to show
them an empty room. This was done, and a single tallow candle being placed
on the table, the door was shut. A few minutes later a bell was rung, and
the hotel master rushing in, Mr. Chaworth was found mortally wounded.
There had been a struggle in the dim light, and Byron, having received the
first lunge harmlessly in his waistcoat, had shortened his sword and run
his adversary through the body, with the boast, not uncharacteristic of
his grand nephew, "By G-d, I have as much courage as any man in England."
A coroner's inquest was held, and he was committed to the Tower on a
charge of murder. The interest in the trial which subsequently took place
in Westminster Hall, was so great that tickets of admission were sold for
six guineas. The peers, after two days' discussion, unanimously returned a
verdict of manslaughter. Byron, pleading his privileges, and paying his
fees, was set at liberty; but he appears henceforth as a spectre-haunted
man, roaming about under false names, or shut up in the Abbey like a
baited savage, shunned by his fellows high and low, and the centre of the
wildest stories. That he shot a coachman, and flung the body into the
carriage beside his wife, who very sensibly left him; that he tried to
drown her; that he had devils to attend him--were among the many weird
legends of "the wicked lord." The poet himself says that his ancestor's
only companions were the crickets that used to crawl over him, receive
stripes with straws when they misbehaved, and on his death made an exodus
in procession from the house. When at home he spent his time in
pistol-shooting, making sham fights with wooden ships about the rockeries
of the lake, and building ugly turrets on the battlements. He hated his
heir presumptive, sold the estate of Rochdale,--a proceeding afterwards
challenged--and cut down the trees of Newstead, to spite him; but he
survived his three sons, his brother, and his only grandson, who was
killed in Corsica in 1794.
On his own death in 1798, the estates and title passed to George Gordon,
then a child of ten, whom he used to talk of, without a shadow of
interest, as "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen." His sister Isabella
married Lord Carlisle, and became the mother of the fifth Earl, the poet's
nominal guardian. She was a lady distinguished for eccentricity of
manners, and (like her son satirized in the _Bards and Reviewers_) for the
perpetration of indifferent verses. The career of the fourth lord's second
son, John, the poet's grandfather, recalls that of the sea-kings from whom
the family claim to have sprung. Born in 1723, he at an early age entered
the naval service, and till his death in 1786 was tossed from storm to
storm. "He had no rest on sea, nor I on shore," writes his illustrious
descendant. In 1740 a fleet of five ships was sent out under Commodore
Anson to annoy the Spaniards, with whom we were then at war, in the South
Seas. Byron took service as a midshipman in one of those ships--all more
or less unfortunate--called "The Wager." Being a bad sailor, and heavily
laden, she was blown from her company, and wrecked in the Straits of
Magellan. The majority of the crew were cast on a bleak rock, which they
christened Mount Misery. After encountering all the horrors of mutiny and
famine, and being in various ways deserted, five of the survivors, among
them Captain Cheap and Mr. Byron, were taken by some Patagonians to the
Island of Chiloe, and thence, after some months, to Valparaiso. They were
kept for nearly two years as prisoners at St. Iago, the capital of Chili,
and in December, 1744, put on board a French frigate, which reached Brest
in October, 1745. Early in 1746 they arrived at Dover in a Dutch vessel.
This voyage is the subject of a well-known apostrophe in _The Pleasures of
Hope_, beginning--
And such thy strength-inspiring aid that bore The hardy Byron from his
native shore. In torrid climes, where Chiloe's tempests sweep
Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep, 'Twas his to mourn
misfortune's rudest shock, Scourged by the winds and cradled by the
rock.
Byron's own account of his adventures, published in 1768, is remarkable
for freshness of scenery like that of our first literary traveller, Sir
John Mandeville, and a force of description which recalls Defoe. It
interests us more especially from the use that has been made of it in that
marvellous mosaic of voyages, the shipwreck, in _Don Juan_, the hardships
of his hero being, according to the poet--
Comparative
To those related in my grand-dad's narrative.
In June, 1764, Byron sailed with two ships, the "Dolphin" and the "Tamar,"
on a voyage of discovery arranged by Lord Egmont, to seek a southern
continent, in the course of which he took possession of the largest of the
Falkland Islands, again passed through the Magellanic Straits, and sailing
home by the Pacific, circumnavigated the globe. The planets so conspired
that, though his affable manners and considerate treatment made him always
popular with his men, sailors became afraid to serve under "foul-weather
Jack." In 1748 he married the daughter of a Cornish squire, John
Trevanion. They had two sons and three daughters. One of the latter
married her cousin (the fifth lord's eldest son), who died in 1776,
leaving as his sole heir the youth who fell in the Mediterranean in 1794.
The eldest son of the veteran, John Byron, father of the poet, was born in
1751, educated at Westminster, and, having received a commission, became a
captain in the guards; but his character, fundamentally unprincipled, soon
developed itself in such a manner as to alienate him from his family. In
1778, under circumstances of peculiar effrontery, he seduced Amelia
D'Arcy, the daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, in her own right Countess
Conyers, then wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds.
"Mad Jack," as he was called, seems to have boasted of his conquest; but
the marquis, to whom his wife had hitherto been devoted, refused to
believe the rumours that were afloat, till an intercepted letter,
containing a remittance of money, for which Byron, in reverse of the usual
relations, was always clamouring, brought matters to a crisis. The pair
decamped to the continent; and in 1779, after the marquis had obtained a
divorce, they were regularly married. Byron seems to have been not only
profligate but heartless, and he made life wretched to the woman he was
even more than most husbands bound to cherish. She died in 1784, having
given birth to two daughters. One died in infancy; the other was Augusta,
the half sister and good genius of the poet, whose memory remains like a
star on the fringe of a thunder-cloud, only brighter by the passing of the
smoke of calumny. In 1807 she married Colonel Leigh, and had a numerous
family, most of whom died young. Her eldest daughter, Georgiana, married
Mr. Henry Trevanion. The fourth, Medora, had an unfortunate history, the
nucleus of an impertinent and happily ephemeral romance.
The year after the death of his first wife, John Byron, who seems to have
had the fascinations of a Barry Lyndon, succeeded in entrapping a second.
This was Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight, a lady with considerable estates
in Aberdeenshire--which attracted the adventurer--and an overweening
Highland pride in her descent from James I., the greatest of the Stuarts,
through his daughter Annabella, and the second Earl of Huntly. This union
suggested the ballad of an old rhymer, beginning--
O whare are ye gaen, bonny Miss Gordon,
O whare are ye gaen, sae bonny and braw?
Ye've married, ye've married wi' Johnny Byron,
To squander the lands o' Gight awa'.
The prophecy was soon fulfilled. The property of the Scotch heiress was
squandered with impetuous rapidity by the English rake. In 1780 she left
Scotland for France, and returned to England toward the close of the
following year. On the 22nd of January, 1788, in Holles Street, London,
Mrs. Byron gave birth to her only child, George Gordon, sixth Lord.
Shortly after, being pressed by his creditors, the father abandoned both,
and leaving them with a pittance of 150 _l_ a year, fled to Valenciennes,
where he died, in August, 1791.