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  Byron, oppressed by debts, by the outcry over his marriage and by his conviction that England didn’t deserve a poet as great as him, departed from his native land on Thursday, April 25, 1816, three months and ten days after Annabella had left him.

  Even the sumptuous gilded coach in which Byron and his friends travelled down to the Kentish seaport of Dover hadn’t been paid for; bailiffs seeking the price of it pursued him. Byron’s coach, a replica of one of Napoleon’s, cost £500 (perhaps £50,000 today) or would have cost if Byron had paid for it. The pursuit soon grew more intense. He boarded a ship just in time, taking his luxurious conveyance with him. The bailiffs, with no legal right to pursue him beyond the shores of England, remained in Dover, staring out in frustration at the bubbling English Channel.

  The Channel was indeed bubbling as if heated by hell-fire. Byron escaped his creditors, lovers, Annabella’s wrath, Augusta, England and mundane reality in a ‘rough sea and contrary wind,’ as John Hobhouse, a close friend from Byron’s university days, reported.

  The weather during the crossing to Ostend, a seventy-five-mile journey, was so harsh the voyage took a nightmarish sixteen hours when it should have lasted less than half as long. During the horrible passage, Byron – amidst bouts of seasickness – wrote the first three stanzas of the third canto of his long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The first two cantos had been published, to great success, in 1812. He scratched his anguish at leaving Ada onto paper as the furious waves battered the ship in the darkness, and as England, and all that England meant to him, receded into oblivion:

  Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!

  Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?

  When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,

  And then we parted, – not as now we part,

  But with a hope. –

  Awaking with a start,

  The waters heave around me; and on high

  The winds lift up their voices: I depart,

  Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by

  When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

  Yet Byron’s emotional convalescence didn’t last much beyond his landfall at Ostend. When he finally reached the port, he celebrated his new freedom by seducing the chambermaid of his hotel room as soon as he had checked in.

  2

  Lord Byron: A Scandalous Ancestry

  The little boy fated to become Lord Byron the poet, Ada’s father, was the son of John Byron, who had been born on February 7, 1756.

  John’s older brother William – known as the ‘Wicked Lord,’ whose crimes included stabbing a neighbour to death during a ferocious argument over the best way to hang game – held the title of Lord Byron, which was awarded the previous century to the Byron family by King Charles I. The Wicked Lord managed to escape the hangman’s noose by persuading his peers in the House of Lords that the crime was manslaughter rather than murder. He was absolved from his crime on the condition he paid a fine and retired to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, the ancestral home of the Byron family. Founded in the late twelfth century, its priory status had come to an end in 1539, when it was closed by King Henry VIII due to his falling-out with the Roman Catholic Church over his marriage to Anne Boleyn; he granted it to the Byron family.

  John Byron, Ada’s grandfather, was nominally a British army officer, but he spent as much time as he could philandering and spending money that wasn’t his. These two pastimes had always been popular among the Byrons, who traced their ancestry back to a Ralph du Biron, who came to England in 1066 with William the Conqueror and his horde of fortune-hunters and land-robbers. John Byron soon acquired the nickname of ‘Mad Jack.’ Mad he might have been, but he was also a handsome fellow. Before long he lost interest in his profession and, in the family tradition, devoted himself to dissipation.

  John Byron’s first wife, Amelia, had an annual income of £4,000 – worth about £400,000 today – which was presumably one reason why Mad Jack married her. Their daughter, Augusta Mary, was born in Paris on January 26, 1784, and is an important character in Ada’s story. Amelia Byron did not survive Augusta’s birth, and the girl was cared for, most probably, by an uncle. The causes of Amelia’s actual death remain a sinister mystery: sources vary between stating that she died of consumption (this usually meant tuberculosis), of a fever contracted when she went hunting too soon after giving birth, or even of ‘ill-usage’ at her husband’s hands. Some reports hold that her death took place in Paris, but her death certificate states that she died in London.

  Whatever the true cause of Amelia’s demise, her income died with her, and as Mad Jack had by now abandoned his military career, he needed cash badly.

  In the traditional way of handsome aristocratic rakes who did not want to do anything as tedious and time-consuming as earn a living, Mad Jack ventured to Bath, a famous west-of-England spa town whose very name proclaims its primary historical function. The Romans had pioneered bathing in the supposedly healthy water. By the eighteenth century, Bath was still famous for its waters, and also for the opportunities it offered impoverished noblemen for finding a wealthy heiress.

  Before long, Jack’s good looks and easy charm had enabled him to do precisely that. The lady he successfully wooed ticked all his boxes of youth, wealth and vulnerability.

  The lady, Catherine Gordon, was Scottish, a big girl and rather ungainly in her manner, though she enjoyed dancing and was good-natured. Catherine was the oldest and by that time the only living daughter of George Gordon, twelfth Laird of Gight. Catherine was born in the County of Aberdeen in 1764, and brought up in the Castle of Gight, which is in the parish of Fyvie in the Formartine district of Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

  Catherine had plenty of money due to her family inheritance. Mad Jack was as interested in Catherine’s money as in Catherine, and indeed probably more so. The Byrons were not famous for the longevity of their virtue, or of their marriages. Soon after the happy couple were united, Mad Jack – relishing the prospect of living in a castle, and even more delighted at the juicy prospect of gaining comprehensive access to Catherine’s money – began an orgy of spending.

  Married women had few legal rights at the time and were not even regarded as a separate legal entity from their husband. Any money a woman had automatically became her husband’s once they were married.

  Poor Catherine – well, she would be poor soon, anyway – fell head over heels for Mad Jack, but only because in the classic fashion of rakes, he’d been careful to disguise his true nature until after the wedding.

  Within a year of the marriage being solemnised, John Byron had spent much of his wife’s fortune. Before she met him, she had about £22,000 (£2.2 million today). The inheritance rapidly disappeared, even to the extent of forests on Gight land being felled in order for the timber to be sold and the money to line Mad Jack’s pockets for the brief tenure it had in them before being expended on some insane frivolity.

  Within eighteen months of the marriage, there was almost no money left in the estate, and what was still there was paid to Mad Jack’s new creditors because, in common with many of his Byron forebears, he wasn’t only content to spend money he had, but also money he didn’t. Catherine remained not only in love with her husband but infatuated with him. The scale of his financial extravagance, however, upset her profoundly.

  Before long, the threat of jail for debt induced Mad Jack to flee to Paris. Flitting off to the Continent was the usual Byron technique for dealing with debt. By the end of 1787, Catherine – unwilling, despite her persisting love for her husband, to spend any more time in Paris living in straitened circumstances – returned to London. She was left only with the income from about £4,200 (around £420,000) that her trustees had managed to sequester from her husband.

  Mad Jack couldn’t join her in London because if he had, he would have been jailed for debt right away. By now, Catherine was pregnant. On January 22, 1788, her son and only child came into this world. Cathe
rine named him George Gordon, after her father.

  The future poet Lord Byron was born with a caul, a harmless natural membrane, over his head. In medieval times, a caul was seen as a mark that a child born with one would be destined for greatness. Dried cauls were believed to prevent their owner from drowning. Some were sold for significant sums to sailors and there is a reference to this practice in the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850). There were no takers for David’s caul, but baby George’s was given to a professional sailor Catherine knew. George came into this world with a deformed right foot, which would cause him physical and psychological pain throughout his life. The deformity was at the time referred to as a club foot. Today, the condition is known medically as talipes. Byron’s right leg was thinner than it should have been and his long narrow foot curved inwards and was so stiff that it affected the movement of the ankle. Byron’s walk, throughout his life, had a certain sliding gait to it, which everyone noticed. All the same, this was a time when many people had something more or less wrong with them, so Byron’s problem would not have been as conspicuous as it would have been today.

  Catherine was deeply (and, based on his track record, most likely justifiably) concerned that even now her husband, living in Paris, was accruing more debts. Certainly, the pressure on what money Catherine still had was apparently endless. Mad Jack was unable to get credit and was reduced to living only on bread. He was by now also dangerously ill with tuberculosis. On June 21, 1791, he made his will, thoughtlessly making his penniless son (four years old at the time) responsible for his, the father’s, debts. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1791, John Byron died at the age of thirty-five.

  Catherine bravely contrived to manage on what money she had left. She sent George to a variety of schools in London. Finally she returned to Scotland and there, in 1794, when George Byron was six years old, he was enrolled at Aberdeen Grammar School.

  Mad Jack’s demented older brother, the Wicked Lord, was still alive at this point, but when he died four years later the ten-year-old George became the sixth Lord Byron. On hearing the news, the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School called George into his office, informed the boy of his momentous social elevation, and gave him a glass of port, as if determined to welcome the boy symbolically into the bibulous world of the aristocracy.

  In 1798, becoming a peer was seen as becoming a new kind of semi-divine being. Early in August of that year, Catherine and the ten-year-old Lord Byron, accompanied by his nanny Mary Gray, whom he called May, journeyed to Newstead Abbey, where he took possession of his estate. The boy was delighted with Newstead Abbey and spent a month or so roaming the grounds.

  Nanny May was a woman of considerably loose virtue. She had regular romantic adventures with young men of about her own age, seventeen or eighteen.*

  According to Byron’s friend John Hobhouse – who later in Byron’s life was told about these events by the poet himself – during this time when May Gray was Byron’s nursemaid, she started taking the boy into her bed and masturbating him. Her interest in Byron, though, was not only that of a sexual initiator. She liked to alternate the masturbation with beatings; for which actual or imagined offences is not clear. May even enjoyed showing off to her male companions the power she had over Byron and she enjoyed beating the boy while they looked on. Very likely, the young Byron also witnessed the drunken copulations of May and her friends.

  It was the beatings, not the masturbation, that young George Byron finally reported to his mother. When Catherine heard from her son that May was flogging him, Catherine dismissed May and removed Byron from Newstead Abbey. His education continued in London. At the age of thirteen, Byron entered Harrow School, at that time, with Eton, one of the two most renowned schools in Britain.

  Life at Harrow was tough. You had to get up at six o’clock, and lessons continued for twelve hours, with some breaks for mealtimes. Floggings administered on younger boys by senior boys and by masters were commonplace; for the floggers, they were a high point of the school routine.

  Academic standards could be high, but the syllabus was fairly unvaried. This was 1801 and the syllabus of Britain’s public schools was mostly classical, with the intention of turning young men (there were very few schools that gave much of a classical education to young women) into proxy citizens of the great Roman Empire that had collapsed due to Barbarian predations about 1,400 years ago, but which still had an enormous cultural hold on the Anglo-Saxon mentality. This was partly at least because the Britons admired the way the Romans had built up their empire: with violence, yes, but also with a genuine concern for the welfare of the governed.

  One of Byron’s schoolfellows was to become important in Ada’s life. This was the young Robert Peel, also born in 1788, though Peel was born on February 5 and so was Byron’s junior by exactly two weeks. Byron, later in his life, was generous about Peel’s talents.

  Byron was prone to bouts of depression, and may even have suffered from a form of manic depression (nowadays known as bipolar syndrome). Byron often seems to have used sex more as a diversion and as a way of forgetting his own low spirits than as a supreme physical and spiritual pleasure. He was in addition often curiously passive in courtship; when he reached adulthood and had many female (and male) admirers, they often found it frustrating that they had to initiate things.

  Indeed, Byron was also sometimes as intensely taken with chastity as with sexuality. His life’s work fills a closely printed book of almost 900 pages, and a man who spends most of his life indulging himself sexually and who dies at the age of thirty-six, is not likely to produce such a vast body of work – maybe around one million words in total. So while certainly Byron had bouts of energetic indulgence in sex, he wasn’t always, so to speak, in the mood.

  He was certainly bisexual. While at Harrow, he fell ardently in love with a younger boy called John Edleston. The social and moral atmosphere of Harrow was much of the time literally a hotbed of homosexual activity. The poet and critic John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), himself bisexual, was one of the first to write explicitly about homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, when homosexual practices were still an imprisonable offence. Addington Symonds wrote this in his memoirs of Harrow, which he started attending in 1854:

  Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk of the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there, one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences.

  In the summer of 1808, Byron visited his friend Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who was about eight years older than Byron. Grey made advances to him which were evidently not repulsed. The poet and lyricist Thomas Moore writing in his own biography of Byron, said that an intimacy sprang up between Byron and Grey.

  Byron liked to use the phrase ‘pure relationship’ to describe one which did not involve actual penetrative intercourse. It is not, however, known what ‘intimacy’ meant in terms of Byron and Grey. All that is certain is that Byron was himself conscious of his early sexual initiation. In ‘Detached Thoughts’ – a journal he kept for a few months in 1821–1822 when he was living in Pisa, Italy – he admitted:

  My passions were developed very early – so early – that few would believe me – if I were to state the period – and the facts which accompanied it.

  On Monday, July 1, 1805, Byron travelled to Cambridge to become a student at Trinity College, the largest and probably the most famous of the colleges of Cambridge University. In Byron’s time there was only one path to the degree, which was the Senate House Examination (SHE). The SHE was continually developing. At that time it was partially oral but mostly written, with the main subject of examination being mathematics, though a little classics and mor
al philosophy were thrown in too. However, most noblemen such as Byron treated Cambridge as a sort of finishing school and stayed only for one or two years, generally failing to graduate or even to make an attempt to do so.†

  Byron certainly lived large. He kept three horses and acquired a carriage soon after arriving in Cambridge. What he thought of the university was hardly complimentary. ‘This place is wretched enough,’ he wrote, ‘a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing.’

  Within less than a year of his arrival he had borrowed hundreds of pounds from a money-lender at a high rate of interest. Byron wrote to his impoverished mother that he had ‘a few hundred in ready cash lying by me’ and went on to tell her that he could learn nothing at Cambridge and would prefer to go abroad.

  Appalled, his mother Catherine wrote to John Hanson, a young married London lawyer who had befriended her before Byron was born and even lent Catherine money when she needed it. It was John Hanson’s brother, a Royal Navy captain, who had been given the caul in which Byron was born. Catherine wrote:

  That boy will be the death of me, and drive me mad! I will never consent to his going abroad. Where can he get hundreds. Has he got into the hands of money-lenders. He has no feeling, no heart. This I have long known: he has behaved as ill as possible for years back. This bitter truth I can no longer conceal; it is wrung from me by heart-rending agony.

  Byron didn’t go abroad but stayed on at university, where he spent much of his energy in crash dieting (he was prone to plumpness), boxing, gambling and sex, though he didn’t seem to enjoy any of it particularly and was convinced that he would never be happy.