Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
An unexpected series of deaths among the heirs of Byron’s uncle the “Wicked Lord” gave young George the family title. At the
age of ten he inherited Newstead Abbey and became the sixth Lord Byron. When he came to school for the first time after his
accession, the rector addressed him as “Georgius Dominus de Byron” and the other boys applauded. The new lord was so overcome
that he burst into tears and tried to run away. The title would always mean a great deal to him.
When Byron and his mother visited Newstead Abbey, they found that it lacked a roof and there were cattle stabled in the great
hall that had once been a drawing room. The only use for the abbey seemed to be as a setting for some of the popular Gothic
novels of the time. The founder of the genre, Horace Walpole, had fallen in love with the ruins when he had visited Nottinghamshire
in 1760, and the prolific and successful Ann Radcliffe had been inspired by the abbey when she was staying in the area while
writing
The Romance of the Forest
(1791). She also featured the “Wicked Lord” in one of her books. To the ten-year-old Lord Byron, of course, the estate was
enchanting. Because of its dilapidated condition, however, Byron and his mother lived in nearby Nottingham.
Byron entered the boarding school Harrow when he was thirteen. Though he was a small, fat boy with plastered-down hair, he
adjusted well and recalled Harrow as “a home, a world, a paradise.” He took part in sports, excelling in swimming, and he
even played cricket, despite his foot, which he refused to allow to hinder him.
Byron discovered at Harrow how easily he could write poetry, and he began to reveal a vast ambition. He wrote his mother in
1804: “I will cut myself a path through the world or perish in the attempt. . . . I will carve myself the passage to Grandeur,
but never with Dishonour. These Madam are my intentions.” But the seeds of his destruction also sprouted here. He had his
first crush on a boy when he met John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, who was four years younger. (Indications are that their love
was quite innocent, for Byron was shocked and disgusted when Lord Gray, a tenant who was occupying Newstead Abbey, made a
pass at him.) Byron recalled years later: “My School friendships were with
me passions
(for I was always violent) but . . . that with Lord Clare began one of the earliest and lasted longest. . . . I never hear
the word ‘
Clare
’ without a beating of the heart—even
now,
and I write it with the feelings of 1803-4-5—ad infinitum.” It was also while at Harrow that Byron began to correspond for
the first time with his half-sister, Augusta, who had been living with her maternal grandmother.
In 1805, when he was seventeen, Byron enrolled at Cambridge. Though Oxford had been his first choice—he could not go there
because there were no vacant rooms at the college he preferred—Byron claimed that these years were the happiest time of his
life. Many students of his social rank hardly cracked a book, but Byron read widely in the English classics and loved biographies
and history as well as modern poetry. He found his own voice with his first published book of poetry,
Poems on Various Occasions
. While attending Cambridge, he met a young choirboy of humble birth named John Edleston. He gave Byron a heart made of carnelian
quartz that Byron kept with him until he died. The young lord considered adopting Edleston and establishing a relationship
that would “put ‘the Ladies of Llangollen’ to the blush.” (The Ladies of Llangollen were two eccentric English aristocrats
who lived together and dressed as men; they had actually inspired Mary Wollstonecraft’s plans for her relationship with Fanny
Blood.) Byron, however, had nothing like an exclusive relationship with Edleston, nor with anyone else. During his Cambridge
years, he took mistresses, engaged in promiscuous sex, and fathered a son by his maid Lucy.
Byron was far from entirely studious, and he took full advantage of his aristocratic status, providing himself with a mistress,
two manservants, and his own carriage emblazoned with the Byron coat of arms and the family motto
Crede Byron!
(“Trust Byron”). He also kept at the university three horses, a bear, and several dogs. Throughout his life he liked a menagerie
around him. He sent his family lawyer a request for provisions: “I will be obliged to you to order me down 4 Dozen [bottles]
of Wine, Port—Sherry—Claret, & Medeira, one Dozen of Each; I have got part of my Furniture in, & begin to
admire
a College Life.” Byron always loved to dress up in costumes, and Cambridge provided plenty of opportunities. He wrote, “Yesterday
my appearance in the Hall in my State Robes was
Superb,
but uncomfortable to my Diffidence.” His noble title allowed him to eat with the dons at their table and to wear a richly
embroidered gown with a gold-tasselled mortarboard. He enjoyed other perks of a peer of the realm: he did not have to go to
lectures or take exams. It was easy, as a lord, to get credit from the local tradesmen and Byron fell into debt due to his
high living. When his mother saw the bills, she wailed, “That boy will be the death of me, & drive me mad . . . he has behaved
as ill as possible to me for years back, this bitter Truth I can no longer conceal, it is wrung from me by
heart rending agony
.”
Byron had entered Cambridge weighing more than two hundred pounds, having been fat all his life. Here the ugly duckling changed
into a beauty. He described his method of losing weight: “I wear
seven
Waistcoats, & a great Coat, run & play at Cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the
hot Bath daily, eat only a quarter of [a] pound [of] Butchers meat in 24 hours, no Suppers, or Breakfast, only one meal a
Day, drink no malt Liquor, little Wine, take physic occasionally, by these means . . . my Clothes, have been taken in nearly
half a yard
.” Byron returned home so much lighter that many of his friends did not recognize him. His weight loss—to 147 pounds—changed
his looks, and his face took on the chiseled features for which he became famous.
With no need actually to perform work to obtain a degree, Byron spent much of his time in London, where he took boxing lessons
from “Gentleman John” Jackson, who had been champion of England. Rumor had it that Jackson and his partner, a fencing master,
were homosexuals. Their “social club” was a gathering place for London’s demimonde, a milieu that Byron enjoyed. He gambled,
attended boxing matches, plays, and late-night clubs, and patronized teenage prostitutes, writing his Cambridge friend John
Cam Hobhouse, “I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality.” He also invited friends to join him at Newstead Abbey, where he planned
to establish a new version of the notorious Hell-Fire Club of the previous century, whose members gathered for orgies of spectacular
reputation. Byron amused his guests by firing pistols at the stone walls and serving wine in cups made from polished skulls
that he had disinterred from the abbey’s crypt.
On the surface, Byron seemed to be a feckless playboy. Part of his malaise during this period came from the fact that his
one published book of poetry had garnered harshly critical reviews. Yet despite what appeared to be a dissipated life, Byron
continued to write, now going on the counterattack and writing a poetic assault on reviewers and fellow poets, whose work
he savagely ridiculed. Published anonymously in early 1809,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
was sharp enough to attract attention, and the ill-kept secret of Byron’s authorship soon got out. Among its admirers were
Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley.
That same year Byron turned twenty-one, and was entitled to take his seat in the House of Lords, a privilege he exercised
almost at once. When the staid Earl of Eldon, Lord Chancellor of England and a leading Tory, or conservative, offered his
hand in welcome to the newest member, Byron merely touched the elder man’s palm—a calculated insult—and then sat on the left
side of the hall, home to the opposition party. (Byron would not, however, speak before the Lords until 1812.)
Finished with Cambridge and bored, he decided to leave England. It was a tradition for young Englishmen of the upper classes
to go on a grand tour of Europe to complete their education. Since the Napoleonic Wars made it impossible to visit some of
the usual countries, Byron and his companion Hobhouse planned a different itinerary, through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Sicily,
Albania, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. Leaving in July 1809, Byron thought he might not return, expressing his feelings
in
Childe Harold,
the poem that would result from the trip:
Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o’er the waters blue;
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea mew.
Yon Sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My native Land—Good Night.
For Byron, this journey was a life-shaping experience, in which he would begin constructing his own legend and developing
the cultural horizon that would make him a great poet. Young and adventurous, he wanted to make his mark on the world. In
Portugal, he tested his athletic prowess by swimming the Tagus River from Old Lisbon to the Terre de Belem, a grueling struggle
against the tide that took him two hours. An English officer stationed in Lisbon reported that Byron’s charms did not go unnoticed,
writing that he “became the idol of the women, and the lionising he underwent there might have made him exceedingly vain,
for he was admired wherever he went.”
Next, he and Hobhouse went on to Cadiz, in Spain, where they watched a bullfight from the governor’s box, an experience that
Byron turned into ten vivid stanzas in
Childe Harold:
On foams the bull, but not unscathed he goes;
Streams from his flank the crimson torrent clear:
He flies, he wheels, distracted with his throes;
Dart follows dart; lance, lance; loud bellowings speak his woes.
While in Cadiz the two friends also attended the opera, where the unmarried daughter of the commander of the Spanish fleet
flirted with Byron. He was surprised by her boldness, and reported to his mother, “If you make a proposal which in England
would bring a box on the ear from the meekest of virgins, to a Spanish girl, she thanks you for the honour you intend her,
and replies, ‘wait till I am married & I shall be too happy.’”
Byron and Hobhouse made their first Greek landing at the port of Patras in September. They were now in the Ottoman Empire,
for the Turks had controlled Greece and southeastern Europe for four hundred years. As they moved up the coast to Albania,
they found themselves in an exotic land, a startling contrast to England. Turks wearing turbans sported pistols and daggers
in their belts. Black-skinned slaves carried goods through the street markets. High-pitched voices from the soaring minarets
of mosques called the faithful to prayer. Byron was particularly fascinated and impressed by the Albanian Christian soldiers
called Suliotes, who reminded him in dress and spirit of the clans of northern Scotland. (One of Byron’s most famous portraits
would depict him wearing a Suliote outfit.)
Byron told a friend in later years that the air of Greece had made him a poet. It was, however, in Janina, Albania, that Byron
began
Childe Harold
on October 31, 1810. He described his reaction to the region:
The scene was savage, but the scene was new;
This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet.
Ali Pasha, ruler of Albania, welcomed the two English travelers and provided them with a military escort that safeguarded
them through the mountains to his palace. (Though Byron thought this courtesy was merely his due as an English lord, there
were political reasons for the hospitality; the English fleet had recently captured some Greek islands, and the wily pasha,
a former bandit chief, was angling for a military alliance.) Ali was a grossly fat man, short by European standards, but with
light blue eyes and a white beard. Byron, well turned out in a scarlet military uniform with glistening sword at his belt,
made quite an impression; the pasha even appeared to flirt with him. Homosexuality was not regarded with the same disapproval
in the Ottoman Empire as it was in England, and Byron found many new opportunities for sexual adventures. The public baths
employed young and handsome men to wash customers in private rooms and provide extra services for those who could pay. Byron
would later refer to the Turkish bath as “that marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy.”
On Christmas Day Byron and Hobhouse arrived in Athens, a city that their classical education had prepared them to love. They
explored the ruins of the Parthenon. It was at this time that Lord Elgin, the British attaché to the Ottoman Empire, stripped
the building of the marble friezes and statues that are today displayed in the British Museum as the “Elgin marbles.” Byron
would attack the art-loving Elgin as a cultural thief. Even so, he and Hobhouse settled down and became part of an expatriate
group that included Giovanni Battista Lusieri, whom Lord Elgin had employed to supervise the removal of the statues. Lusieri
introduced Byron to his brother-in-law, Nicolo Giraud, a boy in his midteens who became Byron’s Italian teacher, and then,
lover.
Ever expansive in his erotic tastes, Byron also wrote that he was “dying for love” of the three daughters of his landlady,
who ranged in age from twelve to fourteen. One of Byron’s friends recalled him describing his “act of courtship often practiced
in that country”—cutting himself across the chest with a dagger to impress one of the girls. Hobhouse, in his journal of
the trip, noted another occasion when Byron was dressing in “female apparel & dancing with Demetrius.”
After spending ten weeks in Athens, the two English travelers crossed the sea to the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia,
today’s Turkey. At the Dardanelles, the strait separating Europe and Asia, Byron recalled the mythical deed of the Greek Leander,
who swam the strait to reach his beloved, the priestess Hero. Byron set out to imitate it. The strait is about four miles
wide, with a strong tide. Byron swam while the water was still frigid from melting snow, wore long trousers to hide his deformity,
and yet he succeeded in duplicating the epic feat. Of swimming the Hellespont he wrote, “I plume myself on this achievement
more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.” He was building his own legend.