Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  Who lick, yet loathe, the hand that waves the sword.

  To save them from the wrath of Gaul’s unsparing lord.

  As we shall see, Lisbon was in a particularly sorry way in 1809, not the Grand Tour scene of exotic ribaldry and gaiety which Byron envisaged two years before at Cambridge. But he was abroad and the Grand Tour proper would now start.

  As for the crew of Vasco da Gama, Terry takes his kit bag and hip flask to Gibraltar, texts us that he makes it with loads of time to spare (ha!), Gillian finds a spa, a beautician and a hairdresser and regroups looking ravishing, and the writer wallows awhile in a hot bath, sleeps and dreams of whale revenge. Vasco herself can’t quite see what all the hoo-ha is about. But we are all abroad and the re-Tour proper is about to start.

  Chapter Two

  PORTUGAL, WAR ALL AROUND

  7-24 JULY 1809 | 3-12 JULY 2008

  Lisbon has always tended towards shabby elegant rather than shiny bright, but the Lisbon of 1809 that greeted the Byron entourage found itself at a particularly low ebb. The massive earthquake of 1755 that had reduced its palaces, churches and places of government to rubble still defines the time-line of the city today, and it was then for many a catastrophe in living memory and for all a catastrophe in talking memory.

  Portugal had always been one of Europe’s poorest countries. The infertile land, sparse population, geographical isolation, feudal society and endless wars with Spain had held it in the Dark Ages until the great discoveries of the sixteenth century had brought it sudden and amazing wealth. But the wealth had been wasted by a series of profligate monarchs on an inbred court and idle diversions. Portugal, with a population of less than a million, could not manage the cost of maintaining its sea borne empire, an extraordinary empire which at its height in the mid-sixteenth century traded from Peru to Japan and two dozen city states and three oceans in between.

  By the early nineteenth century Portugal had found itself powerless to resist the persistence of Napoleon Bonaparte and his Imperial Army. At the country’s lowest fortunes of 1807, just two years before the Princess Elizabeth arrived from Falmouth, the Portuguese royal family, the court and government, fifteen thousand souls in all, boarded all eighty ships of the Portuguese navy and, organised by Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, upped and sailed to the safety of Brazil.

  The remnants of the Portuguese forces joined an alliance with Britain and Spain and together fought The Peninsular Wars against France. But for the demoralised Portuguese their allies were cold comfort: the Spanish themselves had been allied to the French in a joint invasion of Portugal two years previously, and they had just been betrayed disgracefully at the Convention of Cintra by the British, led by, among others, the then Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley.

  The same Wellesley, well on his way to thunder booting himself to the dukedom of Wellington and in either guise one of Byron’s bêtes noires, had returned to Lisbon with the British expeditionary force in the spring of 1809, and quickly recaptured Oporto and promised to retake Madrid. When the Byron entourage landed just three months later, on 7 July 1809, Lisbon was in effect a British garrison under the command of General Robert Craufurd, whose Light Brigade had taken part in Sir John Moore’s Corunna campaign a few months earlier.

  In this war-zone atmosphere Hobhouse never really mucked in with the Portuguese; he found Lisbon ‘one hundred years’ behind the times. He wasn’t sure what appalled him most: the fact that the retreating French had killed ten thousand of Lisbon’s dogs or that by doing so they had also ruined the city’s only sanitation system. He made several notes in his journal about the life he and Byron saw:

  There is a good police guard of 1,500 horse and foot to prevent disturbances in Lisbon - the police were picked out of the troops by the French, and continued by the English - but there is no justice, no punishment but imprisonment except in extraordinary cases, and that may be bought off; convents are supported by begging, and dead bodies are exposed in the churches with a plate on them, and are not buried until sufficient money is collected to pay the priest; the army is recruited by surrounding the public gardens and taking all the persons not married; all the equipages of the nobility have been ordered off for the army, and the articles paid for by paper money worth nothing - the best way for a traveller to buy Portuguese money is in Cheapside, London; the Inquisition is not abolished quite - twenty people lately sent there - to the dungeons under the great square Roccio; the young ecclesiastics affect levity - I saw some monks pulling about a woman in a church close to a woman praying before a shrine; married women, many of them, prostitutes for pay, which they divide with their husbands; avarice is the reigning passion of the Portuguese. Boys well-dressed attend the lobbies of the theatres for the purpose of branler le pique aux gens polis. Sanguinetti [their Portuguese guide for the journey to Gibraltar] told us he had seen the thing himself done in the streets - stabbing not so common, but everyone wears a knife - Sanguinetti saw a man killed by a boy of thirteen, in a chandler’s shop.

  If Byron and Hobhouse disliked all they saw around them, Byron also saw in Portugal one overwhelming advantage: it was abroad, and so was he. He wrote ecstatically to Hodgson:

  I am very happy here, because I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own, and I goes into society (with my pocket-pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears in Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.

  When the Portuguese are pertinacious, I say ‘Carracho!’, the great oath of the grandees, that very well supplies the place of ‘Damme,’ and, when dissatisfied with my neighbour, I pronounce him ‘Ambra di merdo’. With these two phrases, and a third, ‘Avra louro’, which signifieth ‘Get an ass,’ I am universally understood to be a person of degree and a master of languages. How merrily we lives that travellers be! - if we had food and raiment. But, in sober sadness, any thing is better than England, and I am infinitely amused with my pilgrimage as far as it has gone.

  In retrospect he was more circumspect about Lisbon; this from Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage:

  But whoso entereth within this town,

  That sheening far celestial seems to be,

  Disconsolate will wander up and down,

  ‘Mid many things unsightly to strange ee,

  For hut and palace show like filthily;

  The dingy denizens are reared in dirt;

  No personage of high or mean degree

  Doth care for cleanness of surtout or shirt,

  Though shent with Egypt’s plague, unkempt, unwashed, unhurt.

  Byron and Hobhouse notwithstanding, the city still feels behind the times today, but in ways which today’s times make important: it takes us two days to find a wi-fi that works, the incoming mobile phone calls keep cutting off just when you press the green button, Lisbon time is a stepping stone to Jamaica time, the ‘everybody’ who spoke Latin two hundred years ago were as few as the ‘everybody’ who speaks English today, and the disdain for commercialism is charming unless you want something to be done.

  The entourage stayed at the Buenos Ayres Hotel, run by an Englishman called Barnewell, and where Hobhouse records various other English guests, Messrs. Duff, Drummond, Marsden and Westwood, and where they dined most nights. Sadly there is no Buenos Ayres, or even Buenos Aires, Hotel in Lisbon any more, and the closest to a Barnewell in the Lisbon phone book is Gregorio Barevell. I call him on the off chance of an ancestorship.

  ’Hello, do you speak English?’

  ’Que?’

  ’English, the language. Do you speak it?’

  ’No, no inglês. Quien és?’

  So much for the Barnewell lineage, but Hobhouse recorded that most nights they went to the theatre on the Rua dos Condes to see whatever w
as on, their favourite being an erotic Spanish revue. Local legend has it that Byron was challenged outside the theatre after the revue by an irate husband who accused the Englishman of spending more time flirting with his wife than watching the revue. There were fisticuffs, from which the amateur boxer Byron emerged the last man standing.

  Be that as it may, today, there, right bang in the middle of the Rua dos Condes is the very theatre, albeit a replica rococo version having a bad hair day, but it still puts on a show at 9.30 pm everynight, even if it is that Mousetrap of musicals, Jesus Cristo Superstar, spectacular de Tim Rice y Andrew Lloyd Webber. On its four corners it now has a Hard Rock Café, opposite that and behind a peeling tiled wall and rusty forlorn hanging lantern La Restaurante Chînese, thena bustling table clothed Tandoori Restaurante Indes, and the timeless ceramic and mirrored Parfumeria La Vogue.

  Certain that this was the same theatre, I ask the doorman in gestures if I could have a look inside. ‘Si,’ he shrugs. It is mid-afternoon, and hot. The inside bears no resemblance to the façade.Contracted vandals have smoothed over the ornamental relief with plaster - already cracking - and paint - already peeling. New seats, as pressed together as on a Ryanair flight, stand straight in line not curved in elegance. Fire extinguishers abound. Strip lights are cold lights. A glance up shows three boxes mid way up each side. Byron boxes no doubt, but the doors are locked.

  ***

  After a few days whatever novelties Lisbon on its uppers had to offer had worn thin and Byron and Hobhouse headed off to the more promising uplands of nearby Sintra. Already famous throughout Europe for its fabulous follies and palaces, gardens and aspects, it had the additional attraction for Byron of having seen recent Beckford activity.

  William Beckford was an outrageously rich, flamboyant and decadent figure of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His wealth came from the family’s West Indian sugar plantations, and his decadence found its flavour in flaunting openly with young boys and in his couldn’t-care-less attitude to the subsequent scandals. By 1785 even Beckford could not live with the public outrage and was forced into exile; as Byron wrote in an early version of Childe Harold:

  How wondrous bright the blooming morn arose

  But thou wert smitten with unhallowed thirst

  Of nameless crime, and thy sad day must close

  To scorn, and Solitude unsought - the worst of woes.

  He was also an avid collector, polyglot and sophisticate who bought Gibbon’s library in Lausanne and an inquisitive traveller who lived most of his life abroad in splendid palaces, between times seeing the storming of the Bastille. He was also the author of Vathek, an Arabian Tale, one of Byron’s two favourite books (the other being Anastasius, by the artist Thomas Hope), and no doubt his louche and scandalous lifestyle appealed to Byron as well; he called Beckford ‘the great Apostle of Pæderasty’. He eventually settled at Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, where he indulged his craving for beauty, whether in people or art or landscaping or theatre or architecture. Fonthill now belongs to the National Trust, and Beckford’s magnificent antiquarian creations can be seen here and in his own collection in the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  Beckford’s place of exile in Sintra was the magnificent palace and gardens of Monserrate, and although he had left there ten years before it was Monserrate that Byron and Hobhouse visited first in Sintra. A few miles west of Sintra, set in several hundred acres of deliberately cultivated English romantic gardens, Monserrate is a monument to English eccentricity. Originally built for the famous Mello e Castro family of Portuguese patricians, it was rented in 1790 by the first of three immensely rich English families who between them loved and expanded it until 1947. Beckford took it for only a short time, from 1794 to 1799, but he spent money on it with a vengeance, creating the Romantic Garden that blooms so fulsomely today, carving a waterfall, a chapel and an India gateway, not to mention a cromlech and lake. In 1856 Monserrate was taken over by the equally eccentric Cook family, whose fortunes came from textiles, and Sir Francis Cook wasted no time in dubbing himself the first Conde de Monserrate; together with Lady Brenda he spent as much on the palace as Beckford had on the gardens. Today Monserrate is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

  At Monserrate one sees immediately the attraction it would have held for Byron: not just the Beckford wild excess and extravagance, but the very size and shape of it, the scale of the imagination in concept and reality, the boldness of the ornate interior and with its eastern and oriental themes. Outside as well the rambling romantic landscape with its echoes of English nobility and stability tied in exactly with his own ideas of his destiny both on this Grand Tour and his life as a whole. Ten days earlier he had been in the grey, slate, workaday naval port of Falmouth, ready to leap into the unknown, and now he was already in Beckford’s Xanadu with all the east, the real East, awaiting him.

  Byron was immediately captivated by the rest of Sintra too, and wrote of it being a place ‘Perhaps in every respect the most delightful in Europe’, of it having ‘Palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts, and precipices, convents on stupendous heights’ and in Childe Harold of ‘The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown’d’.

  Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes

  In variegated maze of mount and glen.

  Ah me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen,

  To follow half on which the eye dilates

  Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken

  Than those whereof such things the bard relates,

  Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates?

  The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown’d,

  The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,

  The mountain moss by scorching skies imbrowned,

  The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep,

  The tender azure of the unruffled deep,

  The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,

  The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,

  The vine on high, the willow branch below,

  Mixed in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.

  Sintra’s best luck today is that it remains fairly inaccessible; it is too far inland for the cruise ship zombies, full size tour coaches cannot make the twisty, branchy climb, there is nowhere close to park a car, and the only way to reach it is by making the effort with public transport. Sintra has tourists, of course, but they tend to be the more committed type, the type who spend time looking at the sights themselves rather than walking around reading about them in their guidebooks.

  The site was originally developed from the fifteenth century onwards by rich and courtly Portuguese nobles and merchants escaping the plagues and unpleasantness of the Lisbon summer. In fact Sintra does have the air of a Raj hill station about it, the smell of wood smoke, the sound of stillness, the sight of untold shades of green bathing in the light and shade. The roads and tracks meander up and down through the shrubs and plants and forests, and every turn reveals another palace. There must be more palaces, (proper palaces, not grand old houses) in Sintra than anywhere else on earth. Half of them are deserted, beyond any individual’s budget to restore. The lucky ones are government- or UNESCO-run tourist sights, and the really lucky ones, like the breathtaking Palacio de Seteais, which Byron and Hobhouse visited when it belonged to the Marialva family, are being turned into five or more star hotels. And if you should chance to look up, just when you thought Sintra could not be more fanciful, there will be a surprisingly intact eighth-century Moorish castle, with full flags flying from the battlements, to put all the splendour below firmly in its place.

  Does Venice meet Darjeeling in Sintra? Yes, with the great advantage that whereas Venice and Darjeeling have become hopelessly overcrowded - Venice by overloads of tourists and Darjeeling by the broad masses from the plains - Sintra
remains rather stately, happily old fashioned and slightly disdainful of those that do make the effort to see what Rose Macaulay saw: ‘its lush and cool verdures and grandiose battlements on wild hills’.

  Byron’s other port of call, the Palacio de Seteais, mentioned above and soon to be the Tivoli Palace Seteais Hotel and Country Club, from where the treacherous Convention of Cintra momentarily ending the Peninsular War was dispatched, is a construction site and so I ask the Tourist Office if there are any other Byronobilia in Sintra as Hobhouse doesn’t mention anywhere else. ‘Yes, of course, he stayed at the Lawrence Hotel. Beckford stayed there too.’

  A short walk down the hill, on the right by a small gorge and above a stream stands a newly painted darkish yellow three-storey building with ‘Lawrence’s Hotel’ painted high under the beam. The river rushes past below. In the shade the air is cool, blessed with hyacinths and wood smoke. We are back in the Himalayas again. The door is around the side by the stream and as you reach it a signs say ‘Lord Byron stairs’. Just inside, the reception desk is newly decorated too, but in a restrained non-chain hotel way.

  ’Hello, do you speak English?’

  ’Yes, of course,’ a tall, tightly drawn, close cropped lady from the Low Countries replies.

  ’I understand that Lord Byron and his colleague John Cam Hobhouse stayed here.’

  ’Yes, of course,’ she agrees ‘for ten days in 1809. Let me show you around.’ Actually it was for only two days, but it seems churlish to interrupt her flow. ‘This is where they had their Tiffin, and he stayed where we now have the Byron Suite. It’s full, I’m afraid I cannot show you the room. This is our dining room, his favourite table was by the window looking south. In the library, the Byron Library we call it, is where he and Mr. Hobhouse studied and wrote their diary and poems. Outside, follow me please, is where they went down the stairs, the Byron stairs, to the Byron garden.’

  ’And William Beckford stayed here too?’