Byron in Love (20 page)

At Mavrocordatos's orders, the guns were fired over the lagoon at given intervals and answered by volleys of rejoicing cannon from the Turks at Patras and Lepanto. The Greek woman who had laid him out said that the ‘corpse was white like the wing of a young chicken' and the citizens of Missolonghi kept asking for his heart. Twenty-one days of mourning were ordered to be held in every church in Greece.

‘Let not my body be hacked or sent to England–here let my bones moulder', were two injunctions of Byron's that were ignored. Just as the poet Orpheus had his body hacked by women infuriated by the constancy of his love for Eurydice, Byron's body was likewise hacked. His doctors decided on a general autopsy to settle among themselves the bitter dispute as to the cause of his death. They paused, as the young Dr Millingen would write in his
Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece
some seven years later, ‘in silent contemplation of this abused clay which still bore witness to the physical beauty which had attracted so many men and women…the only blemish of his body which might otherwise have vied with that of Apollo himself, was the congenital malformation of his left foot and leg'. In this orgy of lament, Millingen got the foot wrong. The brain and the dura mater was what interested them, thinking, as witch doctors might, to trace the mysteries within the man. They found the cranium could be that of a man of eighty, the heart of great size but flaccid, the liver showing the toll of alcohol, stomach and kidneys impaired. Those honoured organs were placed in urns for embalming, but the lungs allowed to reside in the Church of San Spiridione so that the local citizens might shed their tears over them. No lead coffin being available, the body was placed in a packing case lined with tin, the urns beside it, the lid hermetically closed and fixed with the seals of the Greek authorities.

There was much squabbling as to where Byron should be buried. Trelawny, temporarily forsaking his ‘great mission' with Odysseus, travelled for three days, fording torrents and mountain passes, pursued by mad dogs; come supposedly to mourn, but with ghoulish curiosity he asked Fletcher to lift the shroud and allow him to see the deformed foot which Byron had hidden all his life. No marble bust, he claimed, could do justice to the beautiful white face and perfect features. He was of the same opinion as Stanhope that Byron should be buried in the Acropolis; Lord Sydney Osborne, the British Ambassador at Zante, arguing that if the Turks were to recapture Athens, Byron's tomb would be desecrated, Gamba, Parry and Fletcher repeating Byron's conflicting orders; stasis until Lady Byron's wishes were made known.

The coffin, draped with his helmet and the sword with which he had meant to charge on Lepanto, along with a crown of laurels, was placed in San Spiridione. The locals, wishing for his heart to be left there, were given instead his lungs and larynx, which were placed in an urn and stolen not too long afterwards. In churches and in makeshift churches in olive groves, warriors and citizens alike came to hear orations to his greatness, Byron a son of Greece, whose arms would receive him, whose tears would bathe the tomb containing his body and be perpetually shed over his precious heart. Even Stanhope, who was by then in Salona, forgetting their quarrels, waxed eloquent in his letter to the London Committee, saying England had lost her brightest genius, Greece her noblest friend and that what remained were the emanations of a splendid mind.

On 23 May the embalmed remains were brought onto the brig
Florida
, bound for England, the brig, ironically, on which Captain Blaquiere had travelled, bringing with him the first portion of the loan from the Greek Committee.

From Zante, the news had reached Lady Blessington at Naples, Leigh Hunt at Florence, and the Guiccioli family at Ravenna. Mary Shelley's condolence letter and all newspapers were kept away from Teresa until her father was permitted to leave Ferrara so as to tell her himself, except that his courage failed him. The story goes that Teresa had a premonition of it upon seeing an old school friend arrive at her doorstep in the hottest hour of day.

The ‘fatal intelligence' came upon England like an earthquake on 14 May, the blue envelope bearing the official letter from Lord Sydney Osborne was delivered to Douglas Kinnaird, who sent it by courier to Hobhouse, who read it in ‘an agony of grief'.

There were also letters from Count Gamba and from Fletcher, Gamba saying that Byron had died in a strange land and amongst strangers, but that no man was more loved and more wept over, while Fletcher asked to ‘please excuse all defects', followed with a commodious account of Byron's last days.

‘Byron is dead. Byron is dead.' Thus did Jane Welsh write to her future husband Thomas Carlyle, who felt as if he had lost a brother, as did Victor Hugo in France, where young men wore black crêpe bands on their hats in mourning. A hasty painting, depicting Byron on his deathbed, was placed in the Passage Feydeau in Paris, where crowds filed past, and in the newspapers it was noted that the two greatest men of the century, Napoleon and Byron, had departed in the same decade. School children were put to reciting verses of
Childe Harold
. Tennyson, aged fifteen, ran into the woods and carved the same grieving sentence on sandstone rock near his father's rectory.

Byron's nephew, Captain George Byron, now the seventh heir, travelled to Kent to tell Annabella, then reported to Hobhouse that he had left her in a ‘distressing state' and that she expressed the wish for any account of Byron's final weeks. Sir Francis Burdett broke the news to Augusta at St James's Palace, who clung to a sanctimonious straw, gathered from Fletcher's letter, that Mylord, since his first seizure, had placed the Bible she had given him on the breakfast table each morning. It seems to be the only recorded time that Byron appeared at a breakfast table. Hobhouse advised that she should not disclose such a confidence, convinced as he was that Byron would not make ‘superstitious use' of the Holy Book. As a rising young parliamentarian, Hobhouse appointed himself as Byron's keeper.

So in that great flux of grief and condolence, something ugly and incontrovertible was afoot, with Hobhouse as its mastermind, backed, as he wrote triumphantly in his diary, by Murray's decisive conduct. The ‘plaguy' Memoirs were for burning.

‘After the first excessive grief was over, I determined to lose no time in doing my duty of preserving all that was left to me of my friend–his fame'; so Hobhouse wrote in his diary. At the very same time Sir William Hope, in his esteem for Lady Byron, sent her solicitor, G. B. Wharton, a letter pointing out that it would be most cruel and lamentable for her ladyship to ‘undergo any further mortification'. The mortification devolved around Byron's Memoirs, which Mr Murray had told him were written ‘in a language so horrid and disgusting' that as a man of honour, he would not publish them.

In 1819 when Tom Moore visited him in his villa at Brenta, near Venice, Byron presented him with 78 folio pages of his Memoirs, written as he said ‘in his finest, fiercest, Caravaggio style'. Byron's one stipulation was that they would not be published in his lifetime and he gave Moore the freedom to sell them if he had to. He also gave Moore the discretionary power to change a thing or two, to add what he pleased from his own knowledge of the author and to contradict where necessary. He admitted that a reader would find a host of opinions and some fun in the detailed autopsy of his marriage and its consequences. The summation was no doubt unforgiving but we must remember that Byron did not spare himself either.

Lady Byron had been invited to read ‘this long and minute account' of their marriage and separation, with the freedom to detect any falsity and to mark any passages which did not coincide with the truth. The story he wished to tell was for future generations, which neither he nor she could arise from the dust to prove or disprove. She declined to read it, but after conferring with her solicitors thought that such a memoir was wholly unjustifiable and that she would not ever sanction it.

Byron wrote and despatched many more pages to Moore who, finding himself in ‘pecuniary difficulties' and with Byron's knowledge, sold them to Murray for two thousand pounds, the agreement being that he could buy them back when he so wished.

In May 1824, while Byron's remains had not even left the port of Zante, the machinations had begun, with Hobhouse and Murray as the masterminds. Augusta had at first dithered, but soon, under the sway of Robert Wilmot-Horton, Byron's avowed enemy, she capitulated. Lady Byron, while professing detachment in the matter, appointed Colonel Doyle to act as her arbiter.

The four men met in Murray's drawing room in Albemarle Street in London along with Moore and the poet Henry Luttrell whom he had brought as an ally to augment his case but who was already wavering. Moore had borrowed two thousand guineas from Longmans the publishers and arrived determined to buy the Memoirs back from Murray, who along with interest was also requesting collateral expenses. Moore was detested by all of Byron's friends and mocked for being the son of a Dublin grocer, hailing, as Leigh Hunt had said, ‘from the bogs of Clontarf', a neighbourhood, to my knowledge, free of bogland. Augusta called him that ‘detestable little man', yet nevertheless Moore was the one to whom Byron in a letter not long before his death, bequeathed the last ‘dregs of affection in [his] heart'.

Moore had interviewed Samuel Rogers, Henry Brougham and Lord Lansdown, all of whom agreed with him that total destruction of the Memoirs was uncalled for. The thrust of his argument was that it was an injustice to condemn the work, to throw it aside as if it were ‘a pest bag', and that the burning would throw a stigma on it which it did not deserve. Murray retaliated, saying that Mr Gifford of
The Quarterly Review
, to whom he had sent it, said that it was ‘only fit for a brothel'. Moore's various arguments were unavailing as Hobhouse in league with Murray was ‘for total suppression of the work'. In the vehement argument that ensued, Moore and Hobhouse almost came to blows as Hobhouse claimed that in September 1822, at their last meeting in Italy, Byron had expressed uneasiness about the gift of the Memoirs and only delicacy for Moore's feelings had kept him from requesting that they be returned.

Wilmot-Horton at one point surprisingly proposed that the original manuscript and the one copy be deposited under seals in the hands of some banker, something which Moore seized on with a passion, except that his entreaties fell on deaf ears.

The burning of the Memoirs remains an act of collective vandalism and redounds badly on all, on Moore for his fecklessness in having sold the manuscript in the first place, on Hobhouse for his bogus sincerity regarding Byron's reputation and on Murray for his evident self-righteousness, describing himself as ‘a tradesman determined to preserve' that reputation; on Augusta and Annabella, the silent colluders, and on the two ‘executioners' Colonel Doyle and Wilmot-Horton who tore the pages from their binding and fed them to the fire. Murray called his sixteen-year-old son and heir into the room to witness the momentous piece of history. Hobhouse later claimed that he was invited to toss a few pages in but refrained from ‘the pious deed' while wholeheartedly approving it. The folio sheets, bearing Byron's singular mesh-like handwriting, which Mrs Byron had paid a Mr Duncan the sum of seven shillings to tutor her son in, were swept in a fierce carnival of flame, before curdling to ash.

The ship
Florida
carrying Byron's remains arrived in England in July 1824. On board were Colonel Stanhope, Dr Bruno, Tita, Lega Zambelli, Fletcher, Benjamin the black groom and Byron's two dogs, along with Byron's trunks of books, trunks of weapons, trunks of clothes, his bed and a cache of champagne. At the London docks the undertaker broke open the tin-lined coffin and the body was transferred to a new lead coffin with the ship's flag flying above it. Hobhouse could not bear to look at his dead friend, though he did so later on when Byron lay in state in Sir Edward Knatchbull's front parlour in Great George Street, which Hobhouse had hired in order for the streams of mourners to pay their respects. He found Byron so greatly changed as to be almost unrecognisable, while Augusta thought his expression was one of ‘mocking serenity'.

Colonel Stanhope expected the state barges to come bearing dignitaries and bands to play sacred music, but he was to be sorely disappointed. Byron in death, just as in life, would suffer what John Clare called ‘mildewing censure'.
The Times
, in a tempered obituary, noted that ‘others were more tenderly beloved than Lord Byron', something which Hobhouse stoutly contested, saying that Byron's magical influence radiated to all who met him.
The Times
had also been precipitate in stating that Byron would be buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, something that the Dean, Dr Ireland, who had been approached by Murray and Kinnaird, summarily scotched, and unable to repress his disgust, told them ‘to carry the body away and say as little about it as possible'.

It was in the undertaker's barge with his Newfoundland dog Lyon at his feet that Byron arrived at Palace Yard Stairs, the riverbank already lined with curious spectators. Byron mania was to hit London again as it had at the height of his fame in 1812, but this time it was not in the gilded drawing rooms, it was the masses who thronged to pay their respects, believing that something of them had died with him. Tears, flowers, odes, laments and notes on black-bordered cards were strewn in that little parlour, but as Hobhouse ruefully put it, ‘No one of note came.' Lit by tallow candles, Byron's coat of arms hastily painted on a wooden board, they thronged in numbers ‘beyond precedent', the mêlée becoming so obstreperous that a wooden frame was erected around the bed and police sergeants called to maintain order. The number of ladies according to a newspaper was ‘exceedingly great'.

The hearse, with its twelve sable plumes, drawn by six black horses, left Westminster on a warm July day, bound for the family vault at Hucknall Torkard Church, not far from Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Byron's coronet on a velvet cushion was borne by a charger which walked ahead. People flowed into the streets to bid their farewells. Hobhouse, smarting at the rejection by the Dean of Westminster, said that Byron would be buried like a nobleman, since they could not bury him like a poet, but the nobility did not share his sentiment. Of the forty-seven crest-emblazoned carriages forty-three were empty, no loyal friend from the houses of Holland, Devonshire, Melbourne or Jersey had come to mourn. Since it was not customary for women to attend funerals, Augusta was absent, but in one of life's small ironies, her husband Colonel Leigh led the cortège. Sir Ralph Noel, Annabella's father, had been invited but did not respond and the seventh Lord Byron, offended at having been omitted in Byron's will, excused himself on the grounds of ill health.