171-] English Literature
Lord Byron
Byron
was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge before travelling extensively across
Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice,
Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to being threatened
with lynching. During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and
fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of
Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during
that war, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died in 1824 at the
age of 36 from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of
Missolonghi.
His
only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, was a founding figure in the field of
computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical
Engine. Byron's extramarital children include Allegra Byron, who died in
childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh, daughter of his half-sister
Augusta Leigh.
Early
life
George
Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street in London, England –
his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the department store
John Lewis.
Byron
was the only child of Captain John Byron (known as 'Jack') and his second wife
Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral John Byron and Sophia
Trevanion.[13] Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Vice
Admiral John Byron set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After
he became embroiled in a tempestuous voyage during the American Revolutionary
War, John was nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack' Byron by the press.
Byron's
father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia, Marchioness
of Carmarthen, with whom he had been having an affair – the wedding took place
just weeks after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months
pregnant. The marriage was not a happy one, and their first two children –
Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy. Amelia herself died in
1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's
half-sister Augusta Mary. Though Amelia died from a wasting illness, probably
tuberculosis, the press reported that her heart had been broken out of remorse
for leaving her husband. Much later, 19th-century sources blamed Jack's own
"brutal and vicious" treatment of her.
Jack
then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for
her fortune. To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took
the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron
Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron Gordon of
Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new
husband's debts, and in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some
£23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income
in trust of only £150. In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied
her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of
1787 to give birth to her son.
The
boy was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London, and
christened at St Marylebone Parish Church as "George Gordon Byron".
His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as her husband
remained absent, the young Byron's mother named him after her own father George
Gordon of Gight, who was a descendant of James I of Scotland, and who had died
by suicide some four years earlier, in 1779.
Catherine
moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, and Byron spent part of his childhood
there. His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the
couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts
of melancholy, which could be partly explained by her husband's continuously
borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to
support his demands. One of these loans enabled him to travel to Valenciennes,
France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably
tuberculosis – in 1791.
When
Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord
Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the sixth Baron Byron of
Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire.
His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing
state of disrepair and, rather than live there, she decided to lease it to Lord
Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.
Described
as "a woman without judgment or self-command", Catherine either
spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her
drinking disgusted him and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent,
which made it difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been
born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated and, in a fit of
temper, referred to him as "a lame brat". However, Byron's
biographer, Doris Langley Moore, in her 1974 book Accounts Rendered, paints a
more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron, showing how she was a staunch supporter of
her son and sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at
Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions 19th-century biographer John
Galt's claim that she over-indulged in alcohol.
Byron's
mother-in-law Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, died in 1822, and her will
required that he change his surname to "Noel" in order to inherit
half of her estate. He accordingly obtained a Royal Warrant, enabling him to
"take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the
said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point, he
signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being
merely the name of the peerage, in this case simply "Byron"). Some
have speculated that he did this so that his initials would read
"N.B.", mimicking those of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. Lady Byron
eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady
Wentworth".
Education
Byron
received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School in 1798 until
his move back to England as a 10-year-old. In August 1799 he entered the school
of Dr. William Glennie, in Dulwich. Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he
was encouraged to exercise in moderation but could not restrain himself from
"violent" bouts of activity in an attempt to compensate for his
deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him
from school, which arguably contributed to his lack of self-discipline and his
neglect of his classical studies.
In
1801, he was sent to Harrow School, where he remained until July 1805. An
undistinguished student and an unskilled cricketer, he nevertheless represented
the school during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805.
His
lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love
with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school, and she was the reason he
refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, "He has
no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all
maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss
Chaworth." In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as
the first object of his adult sexual feelings."
John
FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare
Byron
finally returned in January 1804, to a more settled period, which saw the
formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which
he recalled with great vividness: "My school friendships were with me
passions (for I was always violent)". The most enduring of those was with
John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare—four years Byron's junior—whom he was to
meet again unexpectedly many years later, in 1821, in Italy. His nostalgic
poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a
prescient "consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make
England untenable to him." Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive
contain evidence of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic
relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.
The
following autumn, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and
formed a close friendship with the younger John Edleston. About his
"protégé" he wrote, "He has been my almost constant associate
since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted
my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for
ever." After Edleston's death, Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies,
in his memory. In later years, he described the affair as "a violent, though
pure love and passion". This statement, however, needs to be read in the
context of hardening public attitudes toward homosexuality in England and the
severe sanctions (including public hanging) imposed upon convicted or even
suspected offenders. The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been
"pure" out of respect for Edleston's innocence, in contrast to the
(probably) more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School. The poem
"The Cornelian" was written about the cornelian that Byron had
received from Edleston.
Byron
spent three years at Trinity College, engaging in sexual escapades, boxing,
horse riding, and gambling. While at Cambridge, he also formed lifelong
friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse, who initiated him into the
Cambridge Whig Club, which endorsed liberal politics, and Francis Hodgson, a
Fellow at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other
matters until the end of his life.
Career
Early
career
While
not at school or college, Byron lived at his mother's residence, Burgage Manor
in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. While there, he cultivated friendships with
Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and her brother John, with whom he staged two plays for
the entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of Elizabeth
Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to write his
first volumes of poetry. Fugitive Pieces was printed by Ridge of Newark, which
contained poems written when Byron was only 17. However, it was promptly
recalled and burned on the advice of his friend the Reverend J. T. Becher, on
account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem To Mary.
Hours
of Idleness, a collection of many of the previous poems, along with more recent
compositions, was the culminating book. The savage, anonymous criticism it
received (now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham) in the Edinburgh
Review prompted Byron to compose his first major satire, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers (1809). Byron put it into the hands of his relative R. C. Dallas,
and asked him to "...get it published without his name." Alexander
Dallas suggested a large number of changes to the manuscript, and provided the
reasoning for some of them. Dallas also stated that Byron had originally
intended to prefix an argument to this poem, which Dallas quoted. Although it
was published anonymously, that April R. C. Dallas wrote that "you are
already pretty generally known to be the author". The work so upset some
of his critics that they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in subsequent
editions, it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.
Autograph
letter signed to John Hanson, Byron's lawyer and business agent. Fondazione
BEIC
After
his return from travels he entrusted R. C. Dallas, as his literary agent, with
the publication of his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron thought to
be of little account. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were
published in 1812 and were received with critical acclaim. In Byron's own
words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He followed up
this success with the poem's last two cantos, as well as four equally
celebrated "Oriental Tales": The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The
Corsair, and Lara. About the same time, he began his intimacy with his future
biographer, Thomas Moore.
First
travels to the East
Byron
racked up numerous debts as a young man, owing to what his mother termed a
"reckless disregard for money". She lived at Newstead during this
time, in fear of her son's creditors. He had planned to spend some time in 1808
cruising with his cousin George Bettesworth, who was captain of the 32-gun
frigate HMS Tartar, but Bettesworth's death at the Battle of Alvøen in May 1808
made that impossible.
From
1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour, then a customary part of the
education of young noblemen. He travelled with Hobhouse for the first year, and
his entourage of servants included Byron's trustworthy valet, William Fletcher.
Hobhouse and Byron often made Fletcher the butt of their humour. The Napoleonic
Wars forced Byron to avoid touring in most of Europe; he instead turned to the
Mediterranean. His journey enabled him to avoid his creditors and to meet up
with a former love, Mary Chaworth (the subject of his poem "To a Lady: On
Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring "). Letters to
Byron from his friend Charles Skinner Matthews reveal that a key motive was
also the hope of homosexual experiences. Another reason for choosing to visit
the Mediterranean was probably his curiosity about the Levant; he had read
about the Ottoman and Persian lands as a child, was attracted to Islam
(especially Sufi mysticism), and later wrote, "With these countries, and
events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end."
Byron
began his trip in Portugal, from where he wrote a letter to his friend Mr
Hodgson in which he describes what he had learned of the Portuguese language:
mainly swear words and insults. Byron particularly enjoyed his stay in Sintra,
which he later described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as "glorious
Eden". From Lisbon he travelled overland to Seville, Jerez de la Frontera,
Cádiz, and Gibraltar, and from there by sea to Sardinia, Malta, Albania and
Greece. The purpose of Byron's and Hobhouse's travel to Albania was to meet Ali
Pasha of Ioannina and to see the country that was, until then, mostly unknown
in Britain.
While
in Athens, Byron met 14-year-old Nicolo Giraud, with whom he became intimate,
and who taught him Italian. Byron arranged to have Giraud enrolled in school at
a monastery in Malta, and wrote him into his will, with a bequest of £7,000.
(That will, however, was later cancelled.) Byron wrote to Hobhouse from Athens,
"I am tired of pl & opt Cs, the last thing I could be tired of."
Opt Cs refers to a quote from Petronius' Satyricon, "coitum plenum et
optabilem," "complete intercourse to one's heart's desire,"
their shared code for homosexual experiences.
In
Athens in 1810, Byron wrote "Maid of Athens, ere we part" for a
12-year-old girl, Teresa Makri (1798–1875).
Byron
and Hobhouse made their way to Smyrna, where they cadged a ride to
Constantinople on HMS Salsette. On 3 May 1810, while Salsette was anchored
awaiting Ottoman permission to dock at the city, Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead,
of Salsette's Marines, swam the Hellespont. Byron commemorated this feat in the
second canto of Don Juan. He returned to England from Malta in July 1811 aboard
HMS Volage.
England
1811–1816
After
the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812),
Byron became a celebrity. "He rapidly became the most brilliant star in
the dazzling world of Regency London. He was sought after at every society
venue, elected to several exclusive clubs, and frequented the most fashionable
London drawing-rooms." During this period in England he produced many
works, including The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos (1813), Parisina, and The
Siege of Corinth (1815). On the initiative of the composer Isaac Nathan, he
produced in 1814–1815 the Hebrew Melodies (including what became some of his
best-known lyrics, such as "She Walks in Beauty" and "The
Destruction of Sennacherib"). Involved at first in an affair with Lady
Caroline Lamb (who called him "mad, bad and dangerous to know") and
with other lovers and also pressed by debt, he began to seek a suitable
marriage, considering – amongst others – Annabella Millbanke. However, in 1813
he met for the first time in four years his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumours
of incest surrounded the pair; Augusta's daughter Medora (b. 1814) was
suspected to have been Byron's child. To escape from growing debts and rumours,
Byron pressed in his determination to marry Annabella, who was said to be the
likely heiress of a rich uncle. They married on 2 January 1815, and their
daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year. However, Byron's continuing
obsession with Augusta Leigh (and his continuing sexual escapades with
actresses such as Charlotte Mardyn and others) made their marital life a
misery. Annabella considered Byron insane, and in January 1816 she left him,
taking their daughter, and began proceedings for a legal separation. Their
separation was made legal in a private settlement in March 1816. The scandal of
the separation, the rumours about Augusta, and ever-increasing debts forced him
to leave England in April 1816, never to return.
Life
abroad (1816–1824)
Switzerland and the Shelleys
After
this break-up of his domestic life, and by pressure on the part of his
creditors, which led to the sale of his library, Byron left England, and never
returned. (Despite his dying wishes, however, his body was returned for burial
in England.) He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river . In
the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland,
with his personal physician, John William Polidori. There Byron befriended the
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's future wife, Mary Godwin. He was also
joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he'd had an affair in
London, which subsequently resulted in the birth of their illegitimate child
Allegra, who died at the age of 5 under the care of Byron later in life.
Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which
turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the
time.
Kept
indoors at the Villa Diodati by the "incessant rain" of "that
wet, ungenial summer" over three days in June, the five turned to reading
fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana, and then devising their own
tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus, and Polidori produced The Vampyre, the progenitor of the Romantic
vampire genre. The Vampyre was the inspiration for a fragmentary story of
Byron's, "A Fragment".
Byron's
story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the
third canto of Childe Harold.
Italy
Byron
wintered in Venice, pausing in his travels when he fell in love with Marianna
Segati, in whose Venice house he was lodging, and who was soon replaced by 22-year-old
Margarita Cogni; both women were married. Cogni could not read or write , and
she left her husband to move in with Byron. Their fighting often caused Byron
to spend the night in his gondola; when he asked her to leave the house, she
threw herself into the Venetian canal.
In
1816, Byron visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, where he acquainted
himself with Armenian culture with the help of the monks belonging to the
Mechitarist Order. With the help of Father Pascal Aucher (Harutiun Avkerian),
he learned the Armenian language and attended many seminars about language and
history. He co-authored Grammar English and Armenian in 1817, an English
textbook written by Aucher and corrected by Byron, and A Grammar Armenian and
English in 1819, a project he initiated of a grammar of Classical Armenian for
English speakers, where he included quotations from classical and modern
Armenian.
Byron
later helped to compile the English Armenian Dictionary (Barraran angleren yev
hayeren, 1821) and wrote the preface, in which he explained Armenian oppression
by the Turkish pashas and the Persian satraps and the Armenian struggle of
liberation. His two main translations are the Epistle of Paul to the
Corinthians, two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia, and
sections of Nerses of Lambron's Orations.
His
fascination was so great that he even considered a replacement of the Cain
story of the Bible with that of the legend of the Armenian patriarch Haik. He
may be credited with the birth of Armenology and its propagation. His profound
lyricism and ideological courage have inspired many Armenian poets, the likes
of Ghevond Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Ruben Vorberian, and
others.
In
1817, he journeyed to Rome. On returning to Venice, he wrote the fourth canto
of Childe Harold. About the same time, he sold Newstead Abbey and published
Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan
were written between 1818 and 1820. During this period he met the 21-year-old
Countess Guiccioli, who found her first love in Byron; he asked her to elope
with him. After considering migrating to Venezuela or to the Cape Colony, Byron
finally decided to leave Venice for Ravenna.
Because
of his love for the local aristocratic, young, newly married Teresa Guiccioli,
Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. Here he continued Don Juan and wrote
the Ravenna Diary and My Dictionary and Recollections. Around this time he
received visits from Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from Thomas Moore, to
whom he confided his autobiography or "life and adventures", which
Moore, Hobhouse, and Byron's publisher, John Murray, burned in 1824, a month
after Byron's death. Of Byron's lifestyle in Ravenna we know more from Shelley,
who documented some of its more colourful aspects in a letter: "Lord Byron
gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom ... at 12. After
breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine
forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit
up gossiping till six in the morning. I don't suppose this will kill me in a
week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.'s establishment
consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys,
five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses,
walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated
quarrels, as if they were the masters of it... . [P.S.] I find that my
enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective ... . I have
just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian
crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these
shapes."
"Byron's
Grotto" in Porto Venere, Italy, named in Byron's honour because, according
to local legend, he meditated here and drew inspiration from this place for his
literary works
Α
19th-century sculptural composition by Henri-Michel Chapu and Alexandre
Falguière depicting Greece in the form of a female figure crowning Lord Byron
in the National Park in Athens (Άγαλμα Λόρδου Βύρωνος)
In
1821, Byron left Ravenna and went to live in the Tuscan city of Pisa, to which
Teresa had also relocated. From 1821 to 1822, Byron finished Cantos 6–12 of Don
Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt and Shelley in
starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in whose first number The Vision
of Judgment appeared. For the first time since his arrival in Italy, Byron
found himself tempted to give dinner parties; his guests included the Shelleys,
Edward Ellerker Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and Edward John Trelawny;
and "never", as Shelley said, "did he display himself to more
advantage than on these occasions; being at once polite and cordial, full of
social hilarity and the most perfect good humour; never diverging into
ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout
the evening."
Shelley
and Williams rented a house on the coast and had a schooner built. Byron
decided to have his own yacht, and engaged Trelawny's friend, Captain Daniel
Roberts, to design and construct the boat. Named the Bolivar, it was later sold
to Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington, and Marguerite, Countess of
Blessington, when Byron left for Greece in 1823.
Byron
attended the beachside cremation of Shelley, which was orchestrated by Trelawny
after Williams and Shelley drowned in a boating accident on 8 July 1822. His
last Italian home was in Genoa. While living there he was accompanied by the
Countess Guiccioli, and the Blessingtons. Lady Blessington based much of the
material in her book, Conversations with Lord Byron, on the time spent together
there. This book became an important biographical text about Byron's life just
prior to his death.
Ottoman
Greece
Byron
was living in Genoa in 1823, when, growing bored with his life there, he
accepted overtures for his support from representatives of the Greek
independence movement from the Ottoman Empire. At first, Byron did not wish to leave
his 22-year-old mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who had abandoned her
husband to live with him. But ultimately Guiccioli's father, Count Gamba, was
allowed to leave his exile in the Romagna under the condition that his daughter
return to him, without Byron. At the
same time that the philhellene, Edward Blaquiere, was attempting to recruit
him, Byron was confused as to what he was supposed to do in Greece, writing:
"Blaquiere seemed to think that I might be of some use-even here;—though
what he did not exactly specify". With the assistance of his banker and
Captain Daniel Roberts, Byron chartered the brig Hercules to take him to
Greece. When Byron left Genoa, it caused "passionate grief" from
Guiccioli, who wept openly as he sailed away. The Hercules was forced to return
to port shortly afterwards. When it set sail for the final time, Guiccioli had
already left Genoa. On 16 July, Byron left Genoa, arriving at Kefalonia in the
Ionian Islands on 4 August.
His
voyage is covered in detail in Donald Prell's Sailing with Byron from Genoa to
Cephalonia. Prell also wrote of a coincidence in Byron's chartering the
Hercules. The vessel was launched only a few miles south of Seaham Hall, where
in 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke. Between 1815 and 1823 the vessel was
in service between England and Canada. Suddenly in 1823, the ship's Captain
decided to sail to Genoa and offer the Hercules for charter. After taking Byron
to Greece, the ship returned to England, never again to venture into the
Mediterranean. The Hercules was aged 37 when, on 21 September 1852, she went
aground near Hartlepool, 25 miles south of Sunderland, the place where her keel
had been laid in 1815. Byron's "keel was laid" nine months before his
official birth date, 22 January 1788. Therefore in ship years, he was also 37
when he died in Missolonghi.
Byron
initially stayed on the island of Kefalonia, where he was besieged by agents of
the rival Greek factions, all of whom wanted to recruit Byron for their own
cause. The Ionian islands , of which Kefalonia is one, were under British rule
until 1864. Byron spent £4,000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet. When
Byron travelled to the mainland of Greece on the night of 28 December 1823,
Byron's ship was surprised by an Ottoman warship, which did not attack his
ship, as the Ottoman captain mistook Byron's boat for a fireship. To avoid the
Ottoman Navy, which he encountered several times on his voyage, Byron was
forced to take a roundabout route and only reached Missolonghi on 5 January
1824.
After
arriving in Missolonghi, Byron joined forces with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a
Greek politician with military power. Byron moved to the second floor of a
two-story house and was forced to spend much of his time dealing with unruly Souliotes
who demanded that Byron pay them the back-pay owed to them by the Greek
government. Byron gave the Souliotes some £6,000. Byron was supposed to lead an
attack on the Ottoman fortress of Navpaktos, whose Albanian garrison were
unhappy due to arrears in pay, and who offered to put up only token resistance
if Byron was willing to bribe them into surrendering. However, Ottoman
commander Yussuf Pasha executed the mutinous Albanian officers who were
offering to surrender Navpaktos to Byron and arranged to have some of the
arrears paid out to the rest of the garrison. Byron never led the attack on
Navpaktos because the Souliotes kept demanding that Byron pay them more and
more money before they would march; Byron grew tired of their blackmail and
sent them all home on 15 February 1824. Byron wrote in a note to himself:
"Having tried in vain at every expense, considerable trouble—and some
danger to unite the Suliotes for the good of Greece-and their own—I have come
to the following resolution—I will have nothing more to do with the
Suliotes-they may go to the Turks or the devil...they may cut me into more
pieces than they have dissensions among them, sooner than change my
resolution". At the same time, Guiccioli's brother, Pietro Gamba, who had
followed Byron to Greece, exasperated Byron with his incompetence as he
continually made expensive mistakes . For example, when asked to buy some cloth
from Corfu, Gamba ordered the wrong cloth in excess, causing the bill to be 10
times higher than what Byron wanted. Byron wrote about his right-hand man:
"Gamba—who is anything but lucky—had something to do with it—and as
usual—the moment he had—matters went wrong".
The reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi
To
help raise money for the revolution, Byron sold his estate in England, Rochdale
Manor, which raised some £11,250. This led Byron to estimate that he now had
some £20,000 at his disposal, all of which he planned to spend on the Greek
cause. In today's money Byron would have been a millionaire many times over.
News that a fabulously wealthy British aristocrat, known for his financial
generosity, had arrived in Greece made Byron the object of much solicitation in
that desperately poor country. Byron wrote to his business agent in England,
"I should not like to give the Greeks but a half helping hand",
saying he would have wanted to spend his entire fortune on Greek freedom. Byron
found himself besieged by various people, both Greek and foreign, who tried to
persuade him to open his pocketbook for support. By the end of March 1824, the
so-called "Byron brigade" of 30 philhellene officers and about 200
men had been formed, paid for entirely by Byron. Leadership of the Greek cause
in the Roumeli region was divided between two rival leaders: a former Klepht
(bandit), Odysseas Androutsos; and a wealthy Phanariot Prince, Alexandros
Mavrokordatos. Byron used his prestige to attempt to persuade the two rival
leaders to come together to focus on defeating the Ottomans. At the same time,
other leaders of the Greek factions like Petrobey Mavromichalis and Theodoros
Kolokotronis wrote letters to Byron telling him to disregard all of the
Roumeliot leaders and to come to their respective areas in the Peloponnese.
This drove Byron to distraction; he complained that the Greeks were hopelessly
disunited and spent more time feuding with each other than trying to win
independence. Byron's friend Edward John Trelawny had aligned himself with
Androutsos, who ruled Athens, and was now pressing for Byron to break with
Mavrokordatos in favour of backing the rival Androutsos. Androutsos, having won
over Trelawny to his cause, was now anxious to persuade Byron to put his wealth
behind his claim to be the leader of Greece. Byron wrote with disgust about how
one of the Greek captains, former Klepht Georgios Karaiskakis, attacked
Missolonghi on 3 April 1824 with some 150 men supported by the Souliotes as he
was unhappy with Mavrokordatos's leadership, which led to a brief bout of
inter-Greek fighting before Karaiskakis was chased away by April 6.
Byron
adopted a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl called Hato, whose parents had been
killed by the Greeks. He ultimately sent her to safety in Kefalonia, knowing
well that religious hatred between the Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks was
running high and that any Muslim in Greece, even a child, was in serious
danger. Until 1934, most Turks did not have surnames; Hato's lack of a surname
was quite typical for a Turkish family at this time.
Byron
pursued his Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, with whom he had fallen madly in
love, but the affections went unrequited. Byron spoiled the teenage
Chalandritsanos outrageously, spending some £600 (the equivalent of about
£24,600 in today's money) catering to his every whim over the course of 6
months and writing his last poems about his passion for the Greek boy.
Chalandritsanos was only interested in Byron's money. When the famous Danish
sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen heard about Byron's heroics in Greece, he
voluntarily resculpted his earlier bust of Byron in Greek marble.
Death
Mavrokordatos
and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth
of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire master to prepare artillery, and
he took part of the rebel army under his own command despite his lack of
military experience. Before the expedition could sail, on February 15, 1824, he
fell ill, and bloodletting weakened him further. He made a partial recovery,
but in early April he caught a violent cold; the therapeutic bleeding insisted
on by his doctors exacerbated it. He contracted a violent fever and died in
Missolonghi on 19 April.
His
physician at the time, Julius van Millingen, son of Dutch–English archaeologist
James Millingen, was unable to prevent his death. It has been said that if
Byron had lived and had gone on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been
declared King of Greece. However, modern scholars have found such an outcome
unlikely. The British historian David Brewer wrote that in one sense, Byron
failed to persuade the rival Greek factions to unite, won no victories and was
successful only in the humanitarian sphere, using his great wealth to help the
victims of the war, Christian and Muslim, but this did not affect the outcome
of the Greek war of independence.
Brewer
went on to argue,
In
another sense, though, Byron achieved everything he could have wished. His
presence in Greece, and in particular his death there, drew to the Greek cause
not just the attention of sympathetic nations, but their increasing active
participation ... Despite the critics, Byron is primarily remembered with
admiration as a poet of genius, with something approaching veneration as a
symbol of high ideals, and with great affection as a man: for his courage and
his ironic slant on life, for his generosity to the grandest of causes and to
the humblest of individuals, for the constant interplay of judgment and
sympathy. In Greece, he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few
Greeks are, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard
epithet, megalos kai kalos, a great and good man.
George
Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an
English poet and peer He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement,
and is regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known
works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many
of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Byron
was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge before travelling extensively across
Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice,
Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to being threatened
with lynching. During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and
fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of
Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during
that war, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died in 1824 at the
age of 36 from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of
Missolonghi.
His
only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, was a founding figure in the field of
computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical
Engine. Byron's extramarital children include Allegra Byron, who died in
childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh, daughter of his half-sister
Augusta Leigh.
Early
life
George
Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street in London, England –
his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the department store
John Lewis.
Byron
was the only child of Captain John Byron (known as 'Jack') and his second wife
Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral John Byron and Sophia
Trevanion.[13] Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Vice
Admiral John Byron set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After
he became embroiled in a tempestuous voyage during the American Revolutionary
War, John was nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack' Byron by the press.
Byron's
father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia, Marchioness
of Carmarthen, with whom he had been having an affair – the wedding took place
just weeks after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months
pregnant. The marriage was not a happy one, and their first two children –
Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy. Amelia herself died in
1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's
half-sister Augusta Mary. Though Amelia died from a wasting illness, probably
tuberculosis, the press reported that her heart had been broken out of remorse
for leaving her husband. Much later, 19th-century sources blamed Jack's own
"brutal and vicious" treatment of her.
Jack
then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for
her fortune. To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took
the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron
Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron Gordon of
Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new
husband's debts, and in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some
£23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income
in trust of only £150. In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied
her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of
1787 to give birth to her son.
The
boy was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London, and
christened at St Marylebone Parish Church as "George Gordon Byron".
His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as her husband
remained absent, the young Byron's mother named him after her own father George
Gordon of Gight, who was a descendant of James I of Scotland, and who had died
by suicide some four years earlier, in 1779.
Catherine
moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, and Byron spent part of his childhood
there. His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the
couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts
of melancholy, which could be partly explained by her husband's continuously
borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to
support his demands. One of these loans enabled him to travel to Valenciennes,
France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably
tuberculosis – in 1791.
When
Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord
Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the sixth Baron Byron of
Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire.
His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing
state of disrepair and, rather than live there, she decided to lease it to Lord
Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.
Described
as "a woman without judgment or self-command", Catherine either
spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her
drinking disgusted him and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent,
which made it difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been
born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated and, in a fit of
temper, referred to him as "a lame brat". However, Byron's
biographer, Doris Langley Moore, in her 1974 book Accounts Rendered, paints a
more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron, showing how she was a staunch supporter of
her son and sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at
Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions 19th-century biographer John
Galt's claim that she over-indulged in alcohol.
Byron's
mother-in-law Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, died in 1822, and her will
required that he change his surname to "Noel" in order to inherit
half of her estate. He accordingly obtained a Royal Warrant, enabling him to
"take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the
said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point, he
signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being
merely the name of the peerage, in this case simply "Byron"). Some
have speculated that he did this so that his initials would read
"N.B.", mimicking those of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. Lady Byron
eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady
Wentworth".
Education
Byron
received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School in 1798 until
his move back to England as a 10-year-old. In August 1799 he entered the school
of Dr. William Glennie, in Dulwich. Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he
was encouraged to exercise in moderation but could not restrain himself from
"violent" bouts of activity in an attempt to compensate for his
deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him
from school, which arguably contributed to his lack of self-discipline and his
neglect of his classical studies.
In
1801, he was sent to Harrow School, where he remained until July 1805. An
undistinguished student and an unskilled cricketer, he nevertheless represented
the school during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805.
His
lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love
with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school, and she was the reason he
refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, "He has
no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all
maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss
Chaworth." In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as
the first object of his adult sexual feelings."
John
FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare
Byron
finally returned in January 1804, to a more settled period, which saw the
formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which
he recalled with great vividness: "My school friendships were with me
passions (for I was always violent)". The most enduring of those was with
John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare—four years Byron's junior—whom he was to
meet again unexpectedly many years later, in 1821, in Italy. His nostalgic
poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a
prescient "consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make
England untenable to him." Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive
contain evidence of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic
relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.
The
following autumn, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and
formed a close friendship with the younger John Edleston. About his
"protégé" he wrote, "He has been my almost constant associate
since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted
my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for
ever." After Edleston's death, Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies,
in his memory. In later years, he described the affair as "a violent, though
pure love and passion". This statement, however, needs to be read in the
context of hardening public attitudes toward homosexuality in England and the
severe sanctions (including public hanging) imposed upon convicted or even
suspected offenders. The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been
"pure" out of respect for Edleston's innocence, in contrast to the
(probably) more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School. The poem
"The Cornelian" was written about the cornelian that Byron had
received from Edleston.
Byron
spent three years at Trinity College, engaging in sexual escapades, boxing,
horse riding, and gambling. While at Cambridge, he also formed lifelong
friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse, who initiated him into the
Cambridge Whig Club, which endorsed liberal politics, and Francis Hodgson, a
Fellow at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other
matters until the end of his life.
Career
Early
career
While
not at school or college, Byron lived at his mother's residence, Burgage Manor
in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. While there, he cultivated friendships with
Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and her brother John, with whom he staged two plays for
the entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of Elizabeth
Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to write his
first volumes of poetry. Fugitive Pieces was printed by Ridge of Newark, which
contained poems written when Byron was only 17. However, it was promptly
recalled and burned on the advice of his friend the Reverend J. T. Becher, on
account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem To Mary.
Hours
of Idleness, a collection of many of the previous poems, along with more recent
compositions, was the culminating book. The savage, anonymous criticism it
received (now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham) in the Edinburgh
Review prompted Byron to compose his first major satire, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers (1809). Byron put it into the hands of his relative R. C. Dallas,
and asked him to "...get it published without his name." Alexander
Dallas suggested a large number of changes to the manuscript, and provided the
reasoning for some of them. Dallas also stated that Byron had originally
intended to prefix an argument to this poem, which Dallas quoted. Although it
was published anonymously, that April R. C. Dallas wrote that "you are
already pretty generally known to be the author". The work so upset some
of his critics that they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in subsequent
editions, it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.
Autograph
letter signed to John Hanson, Byron's lawyer and business agent. Fondazione
BEIC
After
his return from travels he entrusted R. C. Dallas, as his literary agent, with
the publication of his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron thought to
be of little account. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were
published in 1812 and were received with critical acclaim. In Byron's own
words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He followed up
this success with the poem's last two cantos, as well as four equally
celebrated "Oriental Tales": The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The
Corsair, and Lara. About the same time, he began his intimacy with his future
biographer, Thomas Moore.
First
travels to the East
Byron
racked up numerous debts as a young man, owing to what his mother termed a
"reckless disregard for money". She lived at Newstead during this
time, in fear of her son's creditors. He had planned to spend some time in 1808
cruising with his cousin George Bettesworth, who was captain of the 32-gun
frigate HMS Tartar, but Bettesworth's death at the Battle of Alvøen in May 1808
made that impossible.
From
1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour, then a customary part of the
education of young noblemen. He travelled with Hobhouse for the first year, and
his entourage of servants included Byron's trustworthy valet, William Fletcher.
Hobhouse and Byron often made Fletcher the butt of their humour. The Napoleonic
Wars forced Byron to avoid touring in most of Europe; he instead turned to the
Mediterranean. His journey enabled him to avoid his creditors and to meet up
with a former love, Mary Chaworth (the subject of his poem "To a Lady: On
Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring "). Letters to
Byron from his friend Charles Skinner Matthews reveal that a key motive was
also the hope of homosexual experiences. Another reason for choosing to visit
the Mediterranean was probably his curiosity about the Levant; he had read
about the Ottoman and Persian lands as a child, was attracted to Islam
(especially Sufi mysticism), and later wrote, "With these countries, and
events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end."
Byron
began his trip in Portugal, from where he wrote a letter to his friend Mr
Hodgson in which he describes what he had learned of the Portuguese language:
mainly swear words and insults. Byron particularly enjoyed his stay in Sintra,
which he later described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as "glorious
Eden". From Lisbon he travelled overland to Seville, Jerez de la Frontera,
Cádiz, and Gibraltar, and from there by sea to Sardinia, Malta, Albania and
Greece. The purpose of Byron's and Hobhouse's travel to Albania was to meet Ali
Pasha of Ioannina and to see the country that was, until then, mostly unknown
in Britain.
While
in Athens, Byron met 14-year-old Nicolo Giraud, with whom he became intimate,
and who taught him Italian. Byron arranged to have Giraud enrolled in school at
a monastery in Malta, and wrote him into his will, with a bequest of £7,000.
(That will, however, was later cancelled.) Byron wrote to Hobhouse from Athens,
"I am tired of pl & opt Cs, the last thing I could be tired of."
Opt Cs refers to a quote from Petronius' Satyricon, "coitum plenum et
optabilem," "complete intercourse to one's heart's desire,"
their shared code for homosexual experiences.
In
Athens in 1810, Byron wrote "Maid of Athens, ere we part" for a
12-year-old girl, Teresa Makri (1798–1875).
Byron
and Hobhouse made their way to Smyrna, where they cadged a ride to
Constantinople on HMS Salsette. On 3 May 1810, while Salsette was anchored
awaiting Ottoman permission to dock at the city, Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead,
of Salsette's Marines, swam the Hellespont. Byron commemorated this feat in the
second canto of Don Juan. He returned to England from Malta in July 1811 aboard
HMS Volage.
England
1811–1816
After
the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812),
Byron became a celebrity. "He rapidly became the most brilliant star in
the dazzling world of Regency London. He was sought after at every society
venue, elected to several exclusive clubs, and frequented the most fashionable
London drawing-rooms." During this period in England he produced many
works, including The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos (1813), Parisina, and The
Siege of Corinth (1815). On the initiative of the composer Isaac Nathan, he
produced in 1814–1815 the Hebrew Melodies (including what became some of his
best-known lyrics, such as "She Walks in Beauty" and "The
Destruction of Sennacherib"). Involved at first in an affair with Lady
Caroline Lamb (who called him "mad, bad and dangerous to know") and
with other lovers and also pressed by debt, he began to seek a suitable
marriage, considering – amongst others – Annabella Millbanke. However, in 1813
he met for the first time in four years his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumours
of incest surrounded the pair; Augusta's daughter Medora (b. 1814) was
suspected to have been Byron's child. To escape from growing debts and rumours,
Byron pressed in his determination to marry Annabella, who was said to be the
likely heiress of a rich uncle. They married on 2 January 1815, and their
daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year. However, Byron's continuing
obsession with Augusta Leigh (and his continuing sexual escapades with
actresses such as Charlotte Mardyn and others) made their marital life a
misery. Annabella considered Byron insane, and in January 1816 she left him,
taking their daughter, and began proceedings for a legal separation. Their
separation was made legal in a private settlement in March 1816. The scandal of
the separation, the rumours about Augusta, and ever-increasing debts forced him
to leave England in April 1816, never to return.
Life
abroad (1816–1824)
Switzerland and the Shelleys
After
this break-up of his domestic life, and by pressure on the part of his
creditors, which led to the sale of his library, Byron left England, and never
returned. (Despite his dying wishes, however, his body was returned for burial
in England.) He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river . In
the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland,
with his personal physician, John William Polidori. There Byron befriended the
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's future wife, Mary Godwin. He was also
joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he'd had an affair in
London, which subsequently resulted in the birth of their illegitimate child
Allegra, who died at the age of 5 under the care of Byron later in life.
Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which
turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the
time.
Kept
indoors at the Villa Diodati by the "incessant rain" of "that
wet, ungenial summer" over three days in June, the five turned to reading
fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana, and then devising their own
tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus, and Polidori produced The Vampyre, the progenitor of the Romantic
vampire genre. The Vampyre was the inspiration for a fragmentary story of
Byron's, "A Fragment".
Byron's
story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the
third canto of Childe Harold.
Italy
Byron
wintered in Venice, pausing in his travels when he fell in love with Marianna
Segati, in whose Venice house he was lodging, and who was soon replaced by 22-year-old
Margarita Cogni; both women were married. Cogni could not read or write , and
she left her husband to move in with Byron. Their fighting often caused Byron
to spend the night in his gondola; when he asked her to leave the house, she
threw herself into the Venetian canal.
In
1816, Byron visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, where he acquainted
himself with Armenian culture with the help of the monks belonging to the
Mechitarist Order. With the help of Father Pascal Aucher (Harutiun Avkerian),
he learned the Armenian language and attended many seminars about language and
history. He co-authored Grammar English and Armenian in 1817, an English
textbook written by Aucher and corrected by Byron, and A Grammar Armenian and
English in 1819, a project he initiated of a grammar of Classical Armenian for
English speakers, where he included quotations from classical and modern
Armenian.
Byron
later helped to compile the English Armenian Dictionary (Barraran angleren yev
hayeren, 1821) and wrote the preface, in which he explained Armenian oppression
by the Turkish pashas and the Persian satraps and the Armenian struggle of
liberation. His two main translations are the Epistle of Paul to the
Corinthians, two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia, and
sections of Nerses of Lambron's Orations.
His
fascination was so great that he even considered a replacement of the Cain
story of the Bible with that of the legend of the Armenian patriarch Haik. He
may be credited with the birth of Armenology and its propagation. His profound
lyricism and ideological courage have inspired many Armenian poets, the likes
of Ghevond Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Ruben Vorberian, and
others.
In
1817, he journeyed to Rome. On returning to Venice, he wrote the fourth canto
of Childe Harold. About the same time, he sold Newstead Abbey and published
Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan
were written between 1818 and 1820. During this period he met the 21-year-old
Countess Guiccioli, who found her first love in Byron; he asked her to elope
with him. After considering migrating to Venezuela or to the Cape Colony, Byron
finally decided to leave Venice for Ravenna.
Because
of his love for the local aristocratic, young, newly married Teresa Guiccioli,
Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. Here he continued Don Juan and wrote
the Ravenna Diary and My Dictionary and Recollections. Around this time he
received visits from Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from Thomas Moore, to
whom he confided his autobiography or "life and adventures", which
Moore, Hobhouse, and Byron's publisher, John Murray, burned in 1824, a month
after Byron's death. Of Byron's lifestyle in Ravenna we know more from Shelley,
who documented some of its more colourful aspects in a letter: "Lord Byron
gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom ... at 12. After
breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine
forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit
up gossiping till six in the morning. I don't suppose this will kill me in a
week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.'s establishment
consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys,
five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses,
walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated
quarrels, as if they were the masters of it... . [P.S.] I find that my
enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective ... . I have
just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian
crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these
shapes."
"Byron's
Grotto" in Porto Venere, Italy, named in Byron's honour because, according
to local legend, he meditated here and drew inspiration from this place for his
literary works
Α
19th-century sculptural composition by Henri-Michel Chapu and Alexandre
Falguière depicting Greece in the form of a female figure crowning Lord Byron
in the National Park in Athens (Άγαλμα Λόρδου Βύρωνος)
In
1821, Byron left Ravenna and went to live in the Tuscan city of Pisa, to which
Teresa had also relocated. From 1821 to 1822, Byron finished Cantos 6–12 of Don
Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt and Shelley in
starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in whose first number The Vision
of Judgment appeared. For the first time since his arrival in Italy, Byron
found himself tempted to give dinner parties; his guests included the Shelleys,
Edward Ellerker Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and Edward John Trelawny;
and "never", as Shelley said, "did he display himself to more
advantage than on these occasions; being at once polite and cordial, full of
social hilarity and the most perfect good humour; never diverging into
ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout
the evening."
Shelley
and Williams rented a house on the coast and had a schooner built. Byron
decided to have his own yacht, and engaged Trelawny's friend, Captain Daniel
Roberts, to design and construct the boat. Named the Bolivar, it was later sold
to Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington, and Marguerite, Countess of
Blessington, when Byron left for Greece in 1823.
Byron
attended the beachside cremation of Shelley, which was orchestrated by Trelawny
after Williams and Shelley drowned in a boating accident on 8 July 1822. His
last Italian home was in Genoa. While living there he was accompanied by the
Countess Guiccioli, and the Blessingtons. Lady Blessington based much of the
material in her book, Conversations with Lord Byron, on the time spent together
there. This book became an important biographical text about Byron's life just
prior to his death.
Ottoman
Greece
Byron
was living in Genoa in 1823, when, growing bored with his life there, he
accepted overtures for his support from representatives of the Greek
independence movement from the Ottoman Empire. At first, Byron did not wish to leave
his 22-year-old mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who had abandoned her
husband to live with him. But ultimately Guiccioli's father, Count Gamba, was
allowed to leave his exile in the Romagna under the condition that his daughter
return to him, without Byron. At the
same time that the philhellene, Edward Blaquiere, was attempting to recruit
him, Byron was confused as to what he was supposed to do in Greece, writing:
"Blaquiere seemed to think that I might be of some use-even here;—though
what he did not exactly specify". With the assistance of his banker and
Captain Daniel Roberts, Byron chartered the brig Hercules to take him to
Greece. When Byron left Genoa, it caused "passionate grief" from
Guiccioli, who wept openly as he sailed away. The Hercules was forced to return
to port shortly afterwards. When it set sail for the final time, Guiccioli had
already left Genoa. On 16 July, Byron left Genoa, arriving at Kefalonia in the
Ionian Islands on 4 August.
His
voyage is covered in detail in Donald Prell's Sailing with Byron from Genoa to
Cephalonia. Prell also wrote of a coincidence in Byron's chartering the
Hercules. The vessel was launched only a few miles south of Seaham Hall, where
in 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke. Between 1815 and 1823 the vessel was
in service between England and Canada. Suddenly in 1823, the ship's Captain
decided to sail to Genoa and offer the Hercules for charter. After taking Byron
to Greece, the ship returned to England, never again to venture into the
Mediterranean. The Hercules was aged 37 when, on 21 September 1852, she went
aground near Hartlepool, 25 miles south of Sunderland, the place where her keel
had been laid in 1815. Byron's "keel was laid" nine months before his
official birth date, 22 January 1788. Therefore in ship years, he was also 37
when he died in Missolonghi.
Byron
initially stayed on the island of Kefalonia, where he was besieged by agents of
the rival Greek factions, all of whom wanted to recruit Byron for their own
cause. The Ionian islands , of which Kefalonia is one, were under British rule
until 1864. Byron spent £4,000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet. When
Byron travelled to the mainland of Greece on the night of 28 December 1823,
Byron's ship was surprised by an Ottoman warship, which did not attack his
ship, as the Ottoman captain mistook Byron's boat for a fireship. To avoid the
Ottoman Navy, which he encountered several times on his voyage, Byron was
forced to take a roundabout route and only reached Missolonghi on 5 January
1824.
After
arriving in Missolonghi, Byron joined forces with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a
Greek politician with military power. Byron moved to the second floor of a
two-story house and was forced to spend much of his time dealing with unruly Souliotes
who demanded that Byron pay them the back-pay owed to them by the Greek
government. Byron gave the Souliotes some £6,000. Byron was supposed to lead an
attack on the Ottoman fortress of Navpaktos, whose Albanian garrison were
unhappy due to arrears in pay, and who offered to put up only token resistance
if Byron was willing to bribe them into surrendering. However, Ottoman
commander Yussuf Pasha executed the mutinous Albanian officers who were
offering to surrender Navpaktos to Byron and arranged to have some of the
arrears paid out to the rest of the garrison. Byron never led the attack on
Navpaktos because the Souliotes kept demanding that Byron pay them more and
more money before they would march; Byron grew tired of their blackmail and
sent them all home on 15 February 1824. Byron wrote in a note to himself:
"Having tried in vain at every expense, considerable trouble—and some
danger to unite the Suliotes for the good of Greece-and their own—I have come
to the following resolution—I will have nothing more to do with the
Suliotes-they may go to the Turks or the devil...they may cut me into more
pieces than they have dissensions among them, sooner than change my
resolution". At the same time, Guiccioli's brother, Pietro Gamba, who had
followed Byron to Greece, exasperated Byron with his incompetence as he
continually made expensive mistakes . For example, when asked to buy some cloth
from Corfu, Gamba ordered the wrong cloth in excess, causing the bill to be 10
times higher than what Byron wanted. Byron wrote about his right-hand man:
"Gamba—who is anything but lucky—had something to do with it—and as
usual—the moment he had—matters went wrong".
The reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi
To
help raise money for the revolution, Byron sold his estate in England, Rochdale
Manor, which raised some £11,250. This led Byron to estimate that he now had
some £20,000 at his disposal, all of which he planned to spend on the Greek
cause. In today's money Byron would have been a millionaire many times over.
News that a fabulously wealthy British aristocrat, known for his financial
generosity, had arrived in Greece made Byron the object of much solicitation in
that desperately poor country. Byron wrote to his business agent in England,
"I should not like to give the Greeks but a half helping hand",
saying he would have wanted to spend his entire fortune on Greek freedom. Byron
found himself besieged by various people, both Greek and foreign, who tried to
persuade him to open his pocketbook for support. By the end of March 1824, the
so-called "Byron brigade" of 30 philhellene officers and about 200
men had been formed, paid for entirely by Byron. Leadership of the Greek cause
in the Roumeli region was divided between two rival leaders: a former Klepht
(bandit), Odysseas Androutsos; and a wealthy Phanariot Prince, Alexandros
Mavrokordatos. Byron used his prestige to attempt to persuade the two rival
leaders to come together to focus on defeating the Ottomans. At the same time,
other leaders of the Greek factions like Petrobey Mavromichalis and Theodoros
Kolokotronis wrote letters to Byron telling him to disregard all of the
Roumeliot leaders and to come to their respective areas in the Peloponnese.
This drove Byron to distraction; he complained that the Greeks were hopelessly
disunited and spent more time feuding with each other than trying to win
independence. Byron's friend Edward John Trelawny had aligned himself with
Androutsos, who ruled Athens, and was now pressing for Byron to break with
Mavrokordatos in favour of backing the rival Androutsos. Androutsos, having won
over Trelawny to his cause, was now anxious to persuade Byron to put his wealth
behind his claim to be the leader of Greece. Byron wrote with disgust about how
one of the Greek captains, former Klepht Georgios Karaiskakis, attacked
Missolonghi on 3 April 1824 with some 150 men supported by the Souliotes as he
was unhappy with Mavrokordatos's leadership, which led to a brief bout of
inter-Greek fighting before Karaiskakis was chased away by April 6.
Byron
adopted a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl called Hato, whose parents had been
killed by the Greeks. He ultimately sent her to safety in Kefalonia, knowing
well that religious hatred between the Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks was
running high and that any Muslim in Greece, even a child, was in serious
danger. Until 1934, most Turks did not have surnames; Hato's lack of a surname
was quite typical for a Turkish family at this time.
Byron
pursued his Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, with whom he had fallen madly in
love, but the affections went unrequited. Byron spoiled the teenage
Chalandritsanos outrageously, spending some £600 (the equivalent of about
£24,600 in today's money) catering to his every whim over the course of 6
months and writing his last poems about his passion for the Greek boy.
Chalandritsanos was only interested in Byron's money. When the famous Danish
sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen heard about Byron's heroics in Greece, he
voluntarily resculpted his earlier bust of Byron in Greek marble.
Death
Mavrokordatos
and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth
of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire master to prepare artillery, and
he took part of the rebel army under his own command despite his lack of
military experience. Before the expedition could sail, on February 15, 1824, he
fell ill, and bloodletting weakened him further. He made a partial recovery,
but in early April he caught a violent cold; the therapeutic bleeding insisted
on by his doctors exacerbated it. He contracted a violent fever and died in
Missolonghi on 19 April.
His
physician at the time, Julius van Millingen, son of Dutch–English archaeologist
James Millingen, was unable to prevent his death. It has been said that if
Byron had lived and had gone on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been
declared King of Greece. However, modern scholars have found such an outcome
unlikely. The British historian David Brewer wrote that in one sense, Byron
failed to persuade the rival Greek factions to unite, won no victories and was
successful only in the humanitarian sphere, using his great wealth to help the
victims of the war, Christian and Muslim, but this did not affect the outcome
of the Greek war of independence.
Brewer
went on to argue,
In
another sense, though, Byron achieved everything he could have wished. His
presence in Greece, and in particular his death there, drew to the Greek cause
not just the attention of sympathetic nations, but their increasing active
participation ... Despite the critics, Byron is primarily remembered with
admiration as a poet of genius, with something approaching veneration as a
symbol of high ideals, and with great affection as a man: for his courage and
his ironic slant on life, for his generosity to the grandest of causes and to
the humblest of individuals, for the constant interplay of judgment and
sympathy. In Greece, he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few
Greeks are, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard
epithet, megalos kai kalos, a great and good man.
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