The Crest of the Byron Family (a mermaid with glass and comb) surmounts this page. Their Arms and Motto appear in Life of Byron. in making himself-what he wished to be-the most celebrated 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 shadowy 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, 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. The 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, 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 favorite 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 $20,000 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. (Pages 305, 326, 327.) At Edgehill there were seven Byrons on the 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, "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 iminediate 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 staghounds. In 1765, the year of the passing of the American Stamp Act, an event occurred which colored 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 neighbor 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 tallowcandle being placed on the table, the door was shut. A few minutes later a bell was rung, and the hotelmaster 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 Clarendon, indeed, informs us, that on the morning on a charge of murder. The interest in the trial, before the battle, Falkland, "very cheerful, as always which subsequently took place in Westminster Hall, upon action, put himself into the first rank of the was so great that tickets of admission were sold for Lord Byron's regiment." This slightly antedates his six guineas. The peers, after two days' discussion, title. The first battle of Newbury was fought on Sep-unanimously returned a verdict of manslaughter. Byron, tember, 1643. For his services there, and at a previous pleading his privileges, and paying his fees, was set at royal victory, over Waller in July, Sir John was, on liberty; but he appears henceforth as a spectre-haunted October 24th of the same year, created Baron of Roch- man, roaming about under false names, or shut up in dale, and so became the first Peer of the family.* 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 figlits with wooden ships about the rookeries of the lake and building ugly turrets on the battlements. He hated his heir presumptive, sold the estate of Rochdale -a proceeding afterwards challenged by the poet (entailing law costs of more than $70,000)—and cut down the trees of Newstead, to spite him; but he survived his three sons, his brother, and his only grand For nobler combats here reserved his life, To lead the band where godlike Falkland fell." This first lord was succeeded by his brother Richard (1605-1679), 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, in 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 endeavors 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, For a condensed summary of the Genealogy of the Byron family, the reader is referred to the Genealogical Table preceding this "Life." son, who was killed in Corsica in 1794. On his own death, in 1798, the estates and title passed to George Gordon, the future poet, 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 England was at war, in the South Seas. Byron took service as a midshipman in one of those ships-all more or less unfortunatecalled "The Wager." Being a bad sailer, 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 John 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 "foulweather 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, was father of the poet; 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 effrontry, he seduced Amelia D'Arcy, the daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, in her own right Countess Conyers (the beautiful and accomplished wife of the Marquis of CarInarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds). "Mad Jack," * In allusion to the charges by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 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 rumors that were afloat, till an intercepted letter, containing a remittance of money, for which Byron, in reverse of the usual relations, was always clamoring, 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. John 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 of these daughters 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 Augusta 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, whose inwho seems to have had the fascinations of a Barry come of $20,000 ceased with her life, John Byron, Lyndon, succeeded in marrying 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 in land and bank shares-a fortune which rumor had of Huntly. Miss Gordon had a fortune of $115,000doubled. This union suggested the ballad of an old rhymer, beginning "O whare are ye gaen, bonny Miss Gordon, The prophecy of the rhymer was soon fulfilled. The property of the Scotch heiress was squandered with impetuous rapidity by the English rake. For We may here note the comparison would have been unfavorable to Mrs. Byron had Captain Byron compared her with a woman of ordinary attractiveness. though she had royal blood in her veins, and belonged to the superior branch of the Gordons, it would not have been easy to find a gentlewoman whose person and countenance were less indicative of ancestral purity.t † See poem and foot-note, page 325. A dumpy young woman, with a large waist, florid next morning after the child, she was told by Captain complexion, and homely features, she would have been Byron that hehad had quite enough of his young visitor." mistaken anywhere for a small farmer's daughter or a After a short stay in the north, the Captain, extorting petty tradesman's wife, had it not been for her silks enough money from his wife to enable him to fly from and feathers, the rings on her fingers and the jewelry his creditors, escaped to France. His absence must about her short thick neck. At this early time of her have been a relief; but his death is said to have so afcareer she was not quite so graceless and awkward as fected the unhappy lady, that her shrieks disturbed the Mrs. Cardurcis (in Lord Beaconsfield's "Venetia "), neighborhood. The circumstance recalls an anecdote but it was already manifest that she would be cum- of a similiar outburst-attested by Sir Walter Scott, brously corpulent on coming to middle age; and even who was present on the occasion-before her marriage. in her twenty-fifth year she walked in a way that Being present at a representation, in Edinburgh, of the showed how absurdly she would waddle through Fatal Marriage, when Mrs. Siddons was personating drawing-rooms and gardens on the development of Isabella, Miss Gordon was seized with a fit, and carher unwieldy person. In the last century it was ried out of the theatre, screaming out, "O my Biron, not uncommon for matrons of ancient lineage to my Biron." All we know of her character shows it to possess little learning and no accomplishments; but have been not only proud, impulsive, and wayward, Miss Gordon's education was very much inferior to but hysterical. She constantly boasted of her descent, the education usually accorded to the young gentle- and clung to the courtesy title of "honorable," to women of her period. Unable to speak any other which she had no claim. Her affection and anger were language, she spoke her mother tongue with a broad alike demonstrative, her temper never for an hour seScotch brogue, and wrote it in a style that in this cure. She half worshipped, half hated, the spendpoliter age would be discreditable to a waiting-woman. thrift to whom she was married, and took no effective Though she was a writer of long epistles, they seldom steps to protect her property; her son she alternately contained a capital letter, or a mark of punctuation, petted and abused. "Your mother's a fool!" said a to assist the reader in the sometimes arduous task of school companion to him years after. "I know it," discovering their precise meaning; and though she was his unique and tragic reply. Never was poet could spell the more simple words correctly, when she born to so much illustrious, and to so much bad blood. was writing in a state of mental placidity, she never The records of his infancy betray the temper which used her pen in moments of excitement without com- Byron preserved through life-passionate, sullen, demitting comical blunders of orthography. To Captain | fiant of authority, but singularly amenable to kindness. Byron, however, the lady's temper was more grievous On being scolded by his first nurse for having soiled a than her defects of person, breeding, and culture. It dress, without uttering a word he tore it from top to should, however, be remembered by readers who seam, as he had seen his mother tear her caps and would do her justice that Mrs. Byron was by no means gowns; but her sister and successor in office, May Gray, devoid of the shrewdness and ordinary intelligence of acquired and retained a hold over his affections, to inferior womankind, and was capable of generous im- which he has borne grateful testimony. To her trainpulses to the persons whom, in her frequent fits of un- ing is attributed the early and remarkable knowledge controllable fury, she would assail with unfeminine of the Scriptures, especially of the Psalms, which he violence, and even with unnatural cruelty. possessed: he was, according to her later testimony, peculiarly inquisitive and puzzling about religion. In 1786 Mrs. Byron left Scotland for France, and returned to England towards the close of the following year. On the 22d of January, 1788, in Holles Street, London, Mrs. Byron gave birth to her only child, the future poet, George Gordon, sixth lord. Shortly after, being pressed by his creditors, the father abandoned both, and leaving them with a pittance of $750 a year, fled to Valenciennes, where he died, in August, 1791. CHAPTER II. EARLY YEARS AND SCHOOL LIFE. [1788-1808.] ON after the birth of her son, Mrs. Byron took him To this practical orphanhood, and inheritance of feverish passion, there was added another, and to him a heavy and life-long burden. A physical defect in a healthy nature may either pass without notice or be turned to a high purpose. Accounts differ as to the extent and origin of his deformity; and the doubts on the matter are not removed by the inconsistent accounts of the indelicate post-mortem examination made by Mr. Trelawny at Missolonghi. It is certain that one of the poet's feet was, either at birth or at a very early period, so seriously clubbed or twisted as to affect his gait, and to a considerable extent his habits. It also appears that the surgical means-boots, bandages, etc.— adopted to straighten the limb only aggravated the evil. His sensitiveness on the subject was early awakened by careless or unfeeling references. "What a pretty boy Byron is ! " said a friend of his nurse. "What a Sto a child, with flashing eyes, cutting at her with a baby's whip, cried out, "Dinna speak of it." His mother herself, in her violent fits of anger, when the boy ran round the room laughing at her attempts to catch him, used to say he was a little dog, as bad as his father, and to call him "a lame brat "- -an incident which suggested the opening scene of the Deformed Transformed.* In the height of his popularity he fancied that the beggars and street-sweepers in London were mocking him. He satirized and discouraged dancing; he preferred riding and swimming to other exercises, because they concealed his weakness; and on his death-bed asked to be blistered in such a way that he might not be called on See text and foot-notes on pages 241, 244, 247. 1 |