George Byron
From Philosopedia
- - Byron when 25
Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron [6th Baron] (1788—1824)
Byron had a clubfoot but swam the Bosphorus; was a baron but opposed industrialists and monopolies; was a poet but broke all the classical rules; and was philosophic but raised a storm of abuse for the skeptical attitude shown toward religion in his Cain (1821). Byron’s clubfoot was worsened by the treatments of quack doctors, and his obese, somewhat hysterical mother habitually referred to him as her “little lame brat.”
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Youth
His father, Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron drank himself to death by the time the boy was three and also managed to squander most of his wife’s fortune. Further evidence of his colorful childhood: His mother once attempted to beat him to death with a pair of fire tongs, his nurse seduced him when he was nine, and he conquered his overweight by starvation diets and the consumption of laxatives. The 5’ 7” Byron always walked with a limp, but he made great efforts to overcome his physical shortcomings by excelling in sports, including boxing, fencing, riding, cricket, and swimming. At Cambridge, he kept both a tame bear and a mistress whom he liked to dress as a boy.
When rumors circulated concerning an incestuous relationship between the poet and his half sister, Augusta Leigh, Byron did not deny anything, adding, “I could love anything on earth that appeared to wish it.” However, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, a highly educated mathematician who hoped she could tame “the wild lord.” On their wedding night Byron told her, “It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to hate you!” When she became pregnant, he acted insanely, tormenting her by shooting off guns in her bedroom. Eventually, he acceded to her request for a separation. By this time he had become a recognized poet, known for having a coach designed after that of his hero, Napoleon, one which contained a bed, library, and complete dining and cooking facilities.
Lady Caroline Lamb once described Byron as being the most notorious of the Romantic poets because he was “mad–bad–and dangerous to know.” Lord Byron’s detestation of convention is epitomized in his epic-satire and acknowledged masterpiece, Don Juan (1819—1824). He also wrote Childe Harold (1812—1818) and The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). Cain (1821), which was anti-religious, was denounced from the pulpits, and was not allowed to be copyrighted (which allowed freethinkers to appropriate the work widely).
On Revealed Religion
To the Rev. Francis Hodgson in 1811, Byron wrote, “I do not believe in any revealed religion. . . . I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. . . . The basis of your religion is injustice; the Son of God, the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty.” He added
- I am no Platonist, I am nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and the hatred of each other.
In Parliament
When Lord Byron took his seat in parliament, he insisted upon doing so “without the oath.” Like his father, Byron was not a member of the Church of England. Colin McCall, commenting upon Byron’s outlook, has written that although Byron’s most searching religious questioning has to do with evil, “this does not make him an atheist, like Shelley. Shelley, in fact, once mentioned that he had “not the smallest influence over Lord Byron” on the question of religion, adding “if I had I certainly would employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity.” As J. M. Robertson said, Byron was ‘too wayward to hold a firm philosophy.’ ”
His Virility
An estimated two hundred women, mostly of the lower class but including Caroline Lamb and his Italian mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, attested to his virility (as did a large number of men, particularly nubile Mediterranean boys he hired as valets or pages; he is said to have consulted a doctor about a relaxation of his friend Nicolo Giraud’s sphincter muscle, describing him as “the most beautiful being I have ever beheld”). A. L. Rowse in Homosexuals in History (1977) relates further tales of Byron’s poetic inspirations, including the Ravenna gondolier who inspired, “Tita’s heart yearns for you, and mayhap for your silver broadpieces.” Byron’s liaison with the seventeen-year-old stepsister of poet Shelley’s wife, Mary, resulted in a daughter, Allegra. After settling in Venice, and spending five years with Countess Teresa Guiccioli, he became bored with his mistress and decided to go to Greece in order to fight for Greek liberation from the Turkish empire. He had long before identified himself with the cause of “liberalism,” once using his hereditary seat in the House of Lords to deliver a celebrated attack on industrialists and monopolies.
Edna O'Brien's Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life (2009) led critic Harold Bloom to write,
- The ultimate contrast in English poetry is between Byron and Shakespeare. Of Byron the passional man, we know nearly everything, while of Shakespeare's inwardness we know nothing. Shelley, a superb literary critic, considered Byron's Don Juan to be the great poem of the age, surpassing even Goethe and Wordsworth. . . .
- Living the expected debauchery of a young lord in alternation between Cambridge and London, Byron exceeded all expectations even for Regency rakes. His invariable motive was self-dramatization, and since his lust was for lasting fame above all, he demands and rightly obtains (and rewards) appreciation. . . .
- It needs a storyteller with the skills and experience of Edna O'Brien to intimate something of Byron's sexual, literary, and social dazzle in Whiggish London between 1812 and 1819. Literally scores of noblewomen, married and not, offered themselves openly or in clandestine letters to the hero of Childe Harold.
Religion's Reliability
As for religion’s reliability, Byron wrote:
Even gods must yield; religions take their turn, ’Twas Jove’s, ’tis Mahomet’s, and other creeds Will rise with other years, till man shall learn Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds– Poor child of doubt and death, whose hope is built on reeds.
A Description
Claude Rawson, a professor of English at Yale, has succinctly described the poet:
Byron’s life was lordly and rakish. In the family seat of Newstead Abbey, the young lord imitated the blasphemous and orgiastic practices of the Hell-Fire Club. He and his friends, wearing monkish dress, drank Burgundy from a human skull and, “after reveling on choice viands, and the finest wines of France,” one of his guests wrote, proceeded with unmentionable “evening diversions” until the small hours. In addition to several renowned and high-profile heterosexual romances, as well as a string of humbler amours with maidservants and prostitutes, he had a series of homosexual attachments. Pedophilia, incest, masochism, cross-dressing (he danced in woman’s dress with a Greek boy and liked his women to wear men’s clothes) were part of his repertory. His most scandalous mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, married to a future prime minister, liked to dress as a pageboy. He appears to have told her she reminded him of John Edleston, his most beloved homosexual lover, a Cambridge choirboy who had died of consumption.
His Illness and Death
Byron contracted a fatal illness, malarial fever, in Greece while helping Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos unify the divergent Greek forces. Thomas Moore’s Byron’s Life and Letters describes the final moments: “Exposure, which his declining health was unfitted to bear, brought on a fever, and the soldier-poet of freedom died without proper attendance, far from those he loved. He conversed a good deal at first with his friend Parry, who records that ‘he spoke of death with great composure.’ The day before he expired, when his friends and attendants wept round his bed at the thought of losing him, he looked at one of them steadily, and said, half smiling, ‘Oh questa a una bella seena!’ (Oh this is a fine scene!) After a fit of delirium, he called his faithful servant Fletcher, who offered to bring pen and paper to take down his words. ‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘there is no time. Go to my sister–tell her–go to Lady Byron–you will see her, and say . . . .’ Here his voice became indistinct. For nearly twenty minutes he muttered to himself, but only a word now and then could be distinguished. He then said, ‘Now, I have told you all.’ Fletcher replied that he had not understood a word. ‘Not understand me?’ exclaimed Byron, with a look of the utmost distress, ‘what a pity!–then it is too late; all is over.’ He tried to utter a few more words, but none were intelligible except ‘my sister–my child.’ After the doctors had given him a sleeping draught, he reiterated, ‘Poor Greece!–poor town!–My poor servants! my hour is come!–I do not care for death–but why did I not go home?–There are things that make the world dear to me: for the rest I am content to die.’ He spoke also of Greece, saying, ‘I have given her my time, my means, my health–and now I give her my life! What could I do more?’ About six o’clock in the evening he said, ‘Now, I shall go to sleep.’ He then fell into the slumber from which he never woke. At a quarter past six on the following day, he opened his eyes and immediately shut them again. The physicians felt his pulse–he was dead.”
At the end, when bloodletting had further weakened him, Byron’s face was so swollen that he was barely recognizable. Phyllis Grosskurth in Byron (1997) describes how part of his skull and his internal organs were removed for grisly souvenirs, and then his body was stitched back up.
The Burial
Because of his allegedly scandalous personal life, Byron was not allowed burial in Westminster Abbey. For one thing, he was never forgiven for satirizing the parson whose “jokes were sermons, and his sermons jokes.”
Byron was then buried in the family vault beneath Hucknall Paris Church at Hucknall Torckard, not far from Newstead. Byron’s own views on the subject of death-beds had been expressed in a letter to Murray, dated June 7th, 1820. “A death-bed,” he wrote, “is a matter of nerves and constitution, not of religion.” He also remarked that “Men died calmly before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity.”
Byron’s vault was opened twice, the first time in 1852 when a velvet-draped coffin containing the body of his thirty-eight-year-old daughter Augusta Ada, by his wife Annabella, was lowered into it. In 1938, the lid of his coffin was removed and the poet was seen again 114 years after his burial. The opening was motivated by the church vicar’s desire “to clear up all doubts as to the poet’s burial place and compile a record of the contents of the vault.” First, the wooden lid of his lead casket was raised. Inside was another lid made of lead, and when this was raised, there was still a third lid, made of wood. When the final lid was pulled off, A. E. Houldsworth, the church warden, noted the following:
- . . . we were able to see Lord Byron’s body which was in an excellent state of preservation. No decomposition had taken place and the head, torso, and limbs were quite solid. The only parts skeltonised were the forearms, hands, lower shins, ankles and feet, though his right foot was not seen in the coffin. [Houldsworth later wrote biographer Elizabeth Longford]: “His right foot was detached from his leg and lay at the bottom of the coffin.”] The hair on his head, body, and limbs was intact, though grey. His sexual organ shewed quite abnormal development. There was a hole in his breast and at the back of his head, where his heart and brains had been removed. These are placed in a large urn near the coffin.”
The following day, the coffin was closed, the vault sealed, and Byron was left alone.
Another Burial
However, Byron’s heart and lungs, in another version of the story, are buried in Italy near Shelley’s body (minus Shelley’s heart—or liver—which Trelawny during the cremation had plucked out for return to Mary Shelley in London). Little known until publicized in the mid-twentieth century was Byron’s having fallen in love in Cephalonia during the last months of his life. He had helped a Greek widow, then had fallen in love with her fifteen-year-old son Lukas. Hiring him as a page, he bought Lukas a uniform and gave him a command of a troop of thirty soldiers. When Lukas contracted a fever, Byron doctored him and gave him his own bed. Lukas, however, irritated him by asking for money and luxuries, and one of Byron’s last three poems, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty Sixth Year,” speaks of his being in love with a person who does not return the affection “though it be my lot / To strongly–wrongly–vainly–love thee still.” Augusta Ada, who was born in 1815 of his ill-fated marriage to Annabella Milbanke, saw little of her father and was fifteen before she found that he was a famous poet. A mathematician like her mother, she almost bankrupted her husband by applying her mathematical techniques to racetrack betting. At the age of thirty-six, she died. The other daughter, whose mother was Claire Clairmont who had followed Byron to Switzerland and Italy, was variously called Alba, Clara, and finally Allegra. Although never legitimized, she was supposed to have received a legacy from her father’s estate. However, she died of a fever in the convent where he had installed her to “get a proper Catholic upbringing,” just before her sixth birthday.
(See entry for Shelley. Also, see Nancy H. Medved’s and Irving Wallace’s essays on Byron in The People’s Almanac, essays which document much of the above; Colin McCall’s “Byron Raises Cain” in The Freethinker [March 1996); and “Byron: Enemy of English Cant,” The Freethinker, May 1998])
{BDF; CE; CL; FO; ILP; PA; ILP; JM; RAT; Claude Rawson, The New York Times Book Review, 9 May 1999; RE; RSR; TYD}
