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In The Rural Life of England, I have already recorded my visits to two
of the most interesting haunts of Lord Byron--Newstead Abbey and
Annesley Hall. In this paper we will take a more chronological and
consecutive survey of his haunts and abodes.
Lord Byron was, it appears, born in London, in lodgings in
Holles-street, as his mother was on her way from France to Scotland. His
mother, whose history and ill-starred marriage are well known through
Moore's life of the poet, had accompanied her husband to France soon
after their marriage, to avoid the swarm of claimants on her property,
the creditors of her dissipated husband, which that marriage had brought
upon her. The Byrons, who had inherited the estate of Newstead, in
Nottinghamshire, since the reign of Henry VIII., when it was granted to
Sir John Byron, generally called The Little Sir John Byron, had
distinguished themselves greatly in the civil wars, but had of late
years been much more conspicuous for their poverty and eccentricity.
Commodore Byron, whose name will always be remembered from the narrative
of the sufferings of himself and crew, in consequence of the wreck of
the Wager, and who was still better known by the name of "Foul-weather
Jack," from the singular fact that he never put to sea, even when
holding the rank of admiral, and in command of the fleet for the
protection of the West Indies, without encountering the most tempestuous
weather, was his grandfather. His father, Captain Byron, appears to have
been one of the most unprincipled and dissipated men of his day. He ran
off with the wife of Lord Carmarthen to the Continent; and this, of
course, leading to a divorce, he married Lady Carmarthen, and had by her
one daughter, the present Hon. Augusta Leigh, the wife of Colonel Leigh.
Lady Carmarthen did not live long; and covered with debt, and pursued by
hungry creditors, Captain Byron looked out for some woman of fortune to
victimize to his own comfort. This species of legalized robbery, that
is, of selecting a simple and unsuspecting woman to plunder under the
sanction of the laws, instead of running the hazard of hanging or
transportation by the more vulgar method of highway robbery,
house-breaking, or forgery, is one so fashionable, that a man like
Captain Byron was not likely to boggle at it. Of all species of theft,
it is the most dastardly and despicable, because it is performed under
the sacred name of affection. The vampire who means to suck the blood of
the selected victim, makes his approach with flatteries and vows of the
deepest attachment, of the most eternal tenderness, and protection from
the ills of life. He wins the heart of the confiding woman by the basest
lies, and then deliberately proceeds to the altar to pronounce before
the all-seeing God the same falsehood, "to love and comfort," and
"cherish till death," the helpless creature that is binding herself for
life to ruin and deception. One would think it were enough for a man to
feel, as he stands thus before God and man, that he is a mere seeker of
creature comforts and worldly honor while he is wedding a rich wife; but
knowingly to have picked out his prey under the pretense of loving her
above all of her sex, in order to hand over her estate to his creditors,
to defray the scores of his gambling and licentiousness, that
characterizes a monster of so revolting a kind, that nothing but the
gradual corruption of society through the medium of conventionalism
could save him from the expatriating execrations of his fellows. There
are cases of peculiar aggravation of this kind, those where the property
of the victim is almost wholly demanded for the liquidation of the
demon-lover's debts, and the wife is left to instantaneous beggary. The
marriage of Captain Byron was one very much of this kind. His wife's
most convertible property, as bank shares, salmon fisheries, money
securities, were hastily disposed of; then went the timber from her
estates, then the estates themselves, all amounting to probably £30,000,
leaving her a mere annuity of £123! The property gone to this mite, the
harpy husband still hung upon her, and upbraided her with the want of
further means to contribute to his reckless riot. With cash extorted
from her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for the
Continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was three years
old.
Such were the circumstances in which Lord Byron entered the world. If he
were the prey of violent passions; if he, too, had a tendency to
dissipation; if he, in future years, followed his father's example,
though not to so culpable a degree, and married an heiress,
"And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,"
there may be some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. His
father was not the solitary instance of irregularity, violent passions,
and wastefulness. His great-uncle, to whose title and diminished
property he succeeded, was of the like stamp. His violence had led to
his wife's separation from him; he had killed his next neighbor, Mr.
Chaworth, in a duel; he had shot his coachman; he had hewed down
extensive plantations on his estate, with the avowed purpose of
preventing his son's enjoyment of their profit, because he had offended
him. This son, and also his grandson, died before him, and the wifeless
and childless old lord had led a moody and solitary life in the decaying
abbey of Newstead, which threatened to drop about his ears, feeding a
heap of crickets on the hearth, and feared by the whole peasant
population of the country round.
Such was the paternal lineage of Lord Byron; his maternal one, if more
moral, was not the less fiery and volcanic. His mother, a little fat
woman, was a woman of a most excitable temperament, an evil which no
doubt was much aggravated by the outrage on her warm affections and
trust in her husband, which the base object of his marriage with her
revealed in all its blackness to her. She appeared all feeling and
passion, with very little judgment to control them. She was fond to
distraction of her child, and used to spoil him to the utmost extreme,
at the same time that her passions occasionally broke out so impetuously
against his freaks, that she would fling the tongs or poker at his head
when a mere child.
At the age of eleven brought to England, and, with all this ancestral
fire in him, introduced to the ruinous and gloomy abode of his
forefathers, with the stories of their recent doings rife all around
him, no wonder that on his peculiarly sensitive mind the impression
became deep. He grew up a Byron in the eccentricity and other
characteristics of his life; like his father, his morals were not very
nice, his habits were not very temperate, he too married to repair the
waste of his lands, and quitted his wife to live abroad, and die there a
comparatively early death. Happily, there was implanted in him an
ethereal principle, which gave a higher object to the exercise of his
passions and energies than had of late distinguished his fathers. He
was a born poet, and the divine gift of poetry converted, in some
degree, his hereditary impetuosity into an ennobling instrument. His
very dissipations extended his knowledge of life and human nature, and
if they led him too frequently to seek to embellish sensuality, they
compelled him to depict in the strongest terms that language can
furnish, the disgust and remorse which inevitably pursue vice. He was a
strange mixture of the poet and the man of the world; of the radical and
the aristocrat; of the scoffer at creeds, and the worshiper of the
Divine Being in the sublimity of his works. Well was it for him and the
world that his early years were cast amid the beauty and the solitude of
nature, where he could wander wholly abandoned to the influences of
heath and mountain, river and forest; and that the prospect of
aristocratic splendor did not come in to disturb those influences till
they had acquired a life-long power over him. The grandeur of nature can
not make a poet; thousands and millions live during their whole
existences amid its most glorious displays, and are little more sentient
than the rocks that tower around them; but where the spark of poetry
lies latent, it is sure to call it forth.
They who ever visit, then, the earliest scenes of Lord Byron's life,
will not be surprised at the influence which they exercised upon him,
nor at the fondness with which he cherished the memory of them. This is
strongly expressed in one of his juvenile poems.