by Edna O'Brien
On 23 July, intending to travel north with Hanson to visit the beleaguered coalfields, he sent a cryptic letter to his mother, giving her timely notice of his brief visit, adding that she may in future consider Newstead as her house and not his. He did not allude to the bailiffs that were installed in the Abbey or the numerous demands from creditors that had been pinned on the front door, then covered over with brown paper by the ingenious Joe Murray. Away from Catherine, his letters were friendly, often confiding, though not of course alluding to the sherbet and sodomy debauches. But now that he was about to meet with her again the old residual anger and subsequent hauteur resurfaced. It was in Athens, to his friend the Marquis of Sligo, that he had described the final scene with Mrs Byron before he left England, she succumbing to one of her ‘fits’ willing that he might prove as ill-formed in mind as he was in body.
Poor Mrs Byron, as Tom Moore put it in his biography of Byron, was a woman ‘whose excessive corpulence rendered her at all times, rather a perilous subject for illness’ and so it was that she was indisposed while Byron lingered in London, and with a sad prescience she said to her maid, ‘If I should be dead before Byron comes down, what a strange thing it would be.’ That is exactly what happened. On 1 August he got a letter from the local physician to say her condition was worsening and that he was apprehensive for ‘the Event’. Byron, cash-strapped once again, went to Hanson to borrow money and Hanson not being in his office, Mrs Hanson had to lend him £40 for the journey. It was on his way to Newstead at a coaching inn that Robert Rushton arrived on horseback to tell him that his mother had died. The servants at the Abbey were overcome with grief and soon the Prodigal Son would sink into that same state of bathos and remorse.
There were different reports as to what Catherine had died from, obesity, dropsy, drunkenness, and one claim that she had died in a fit of rage upon receiving an upholsterer’s bill for £1,600, money owed for furnishings that Byron had ordered before his departure to the Levant. It was only when he saw the corpse that Byron broke down. He sat beside her all night in the dark and could be heard calling out, ‘Oh Mrs By, I had but one friend in the world.’ Too stricken to accompany the hearse to Hucknall Torkard next day, he watched the carriage and the pallbearers go down the drive and then called to Rushton to get his boxing gloves and without speaking, jabbed and punched with a violence he had not hitherto shown, then threw down his gloves and left the room. Her faults would be washed away as she became his amiable Mama, he at three and twenty left alone and no one with whom to ‘retrace the laughing part of life’.
His grief was compounded by news of other deaths. Hobhouse informed him by letter that their friend Skinner Matthews had drowned in canal water, enmeshed in a bed of weeds in the Cam River in Cambridge, leaving not a scrap of paper to enlighten his friends as to why he had taken his own life. Byron was devastated, believing some curse hung over him, and scarcely able to live with his feelings he wrote to Scrope Davies, ‘Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate.’
Not too long after, he received a letter from Ann Edleston to say that her brother John had died of consumption in May. At once Edleston was enshrined in a poem and given the name Thyrza to disguise his sex–
Yet did I love thee to the last
As fervently as thou,
Who didst not change through all the past,
And canst not alter now.
The poem would be added to Childe Harold, but not before Dallas was informed that it was addressed to no particular person. Poetry aside, he felt remorse and disgust at not having spared ‘a better being’.
EIGHT
Certain publishers, whom Dallas had approached, had rejected Childe Harold on grounds of indecency and also because of Byron’s wayward attacks on writers in the earlier satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published in March 1809. But Mr John Murray, publisher and bookseller of 32 Fleet Street, ‘who ranked high among the brethren of the trade’, responded favourably. He was the publisher of Walter Scott, Robert Southey, the critic William Gifford and Jane Austen, who by being a woman, mattered less in that masculine constellation. Childe Harold, begun in Jannina in Albania in 1809 and completed at Smyrna in 1810, with its exotic and ghastly descriptions happened to suit the prevailing taste for ‘strong excitement’.
Mr John Murray’s letter of acceptance to Byron was so complimentary that Byron said it was not usual, as Dr Johnson had noted, ‘to hear the truth from one’s bookseller’. Yet Byron baulked. Dallas tells us he had extreme repugnance about being published at all, while at the same time he was craving immortality. In the end he agreed, emphasising the fact that Childe Harold must not be confused with him.
In youthful noblesse Byron took no money for the work, the profits being shared equally between Dallas and John Murray, who had paid for the printing and publication. And so began a relationship unique between author and publisher, as intriguing as any marriage, but more erudite; flattery, disquiet and rebuttal, as they praised, scolded and jabbed, threats of defection from Byron followed by sudden reconciliation, a devious dance of dependence and independence, charted vividly in their rum exchange of letters. Byron would allude to the natural antipathy between bookseller and author, the ‘ferine nature’ of the bookseller always breaking forth, forgetting to mention his own violent nature. Murray would come to know Byron the Classicist, Byron the Jester, Byron the Buffoon, Byron the Bulldog, Byron the Stoic, Byron the Lover and Poet and increasingly, Byron the lover of ‘lucre’.
Murray guessed that Cantos One and Two would indeed strike an immediate chord, the young hero sick ‘with the fullness of satiety’ and rejecting all thought or hope of redemption was bound to have an appeal in Regency England, except that there were problems. He was appealing to Dallas to persuade Byron to remove or at least ‘soften’ some of the more dangerous stanzas and to temper his outrageous religious sentiments, which were bound to deprive Mr Murray of customers ‘among the orthodox’. Byron parried. He had no time for religion, said it was rife with rival villainous sects ‘tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other’. Murray especially objected to unpatriotic passages concerning the war in Spain and Portugal, when Byron was critical of the sovereign allies, sentiments which certainly did not harmonise with the general, prevalent feeling in England. Byron was intransigent, being too sincere for recantation, adding that with regard to the political content, he could alter nothing and anyhow had high authority for his ‘errors on that point’, because the Aeneid was a political poem and written for a political purpose. Depicting battles and barbarities from ancient times, it reflected the spirit of his own time, England at war, even as Regency London was hellbent on banquet and profligacy. He would however oblige, tag on some more rhymes or stanzas, write an introductory stanza if the poem opened too abruptly, and these offerings he brought in person to Mr Murray’s office, fencing at the bookshelves, jesting as he tried to anticipate Murray’s opinion, quoting Congreve with a warning–‘If you put me in a phrenzy I will never call you Jack again.’
NINE
‘The poet yields to the orator’ Byron announced to Dallas as he prepared for his maiden speech in the House of Lords. He chose to speak for the Whig opposition against the Tory Framework Bill. In 1811 the weavers of Nottingham had rioted because the manufacturers had introduced new machinery for the making of gloves and stockings, so that one man could take the place of seven. The weavers reacted by breaking the new machines, militia regiments were sent to quell them and a commission appointed to try them and possibly sentence them to hanging. Byron deferred to Lord Holland, leader of the Whig Party, nephew and protégé of Charles James Fox, saying his motive for speaking was the palpable injustice and efficiency of the Tory law, adding that his speech would be brief.
So in February 1812, he was plunged into all that Gothic splendour, peers in their scarlet and ermine robes bristling to outdo one another in wit and invective, innately suspicious of a newcomer. It is hardly surprising that Byron woul
d be nervous and Dallas tells us that he wrote out his entire speech and then memorised it ‘like a Harrow oration’. His voice normally sweet and melodious became unnatural as he declaimed to the assembled House the injustice and the inequity of the Bill, insisting it was not punishment those starving workers deserved, but compassion and bread for their children. ‘Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows?’ he asked. He challenged them by asking if a human life was valued at less than the price of a stocking frame, and Lord Eldon the Lord Chancellor was put very much out of humour by such audaciousness. He quoted passages from Cobbett, his sentences having the construction of Edmund Burke’s, a little theatrical as he later conceded, but afterwards he was very elated by compliments from his own party and the opposition. That evening, in a gathering at Lord Holland’s, his host praised him fulsomely, but in his memoirs Holland would say that Byron’s speech, full of fancy, wit and invective, ‘was not exempt from affectation, not well balanced, not well reasoned and not suited to the common notion of political eloquence’.
It mattered not. Byron was launched. Dallas saw the speech as the best advertisement for Childe Harold and Murray delayed the publication for a few days in March, the better to whet the appetite of a curious elite. Sheets of the poem were dispatched to influential people and advertisements in the Courier and Morning Chronicle titillated them with what was to come. The first edition of five hundred copies was sold out in three days as Murray hastened to print a second smaller edition at half the price. Byron’s ‘reign’ would last through spring and summer, he, the only topic of conversation, men jealous of him and women ‘stark mad’ over him, besieging him with letters, both openly and clandestinely, enough, as he boasted, to fill a volume. A shop window carried a copy of Childe Harold, which had been specially bound for Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent.
Praise was unanimous. Tom Moore described Byron as as much ‘the child of the revolution, in poesy, as another great man of the age, Napoleon, was in statesmanship and warfare’. Critics who had formerly attacked his youthful and precocious verses were won over by the strength, vibrancy and startling genius of the new work. Dallas remarked on Byron’s temper being ‘soothed’, but for Byron, only twenty-four and fame unfurling so rapidly, there were other hidden consequences, a duality, a self-deluding grandeur, a necessity to fall in love with some heiress despite his homosexual proclivities, and above all, not to be toppled from his throne.
Carriages bearing invitations from the nobility thronged the street of his lodgings in St James’s and the lame poet with the features of Adonis was thrust upon the world.
And so he was welcomed into the drawing rooms of the Whig aristocracy, Holland House, Melbourne House, Devonshire House, the recherché society, which as Leslie Marchand wrote in his massive biography of Byron, were places ‘where irregularities of conduct were the prerogatives of an uninhibited upper class’. In a city of one million inhabitants, Byron met only with the privileged, apart from his servants and his firelighter, the withered Mrs Mule. The world of poverty, destitution, oppression, lawlessness and riots, that of thieves, pedlars, harlots and drunks, the lame and indigent, the ‘swinish multitude’ who thronged to Tyburn to see the executions did not have a place in Byron’s works. The East in all its mystery, was the mainspring for his creative energies.
Though more at home in the company and bantering of intellectual men, Byron was swamped by women, all seeing him as the archetype of Childe Harold, despite his every camouflage not to be. There was something cold and fastidious in his bearing, yet the effect of his arrival in these places was dizzying. Hearts fluttered, senses went haywire, Lady Rosebery almost fainted and Lady Mildmay said that when he spoke to [her] in a doorway [her] heart beat so violently that [she] could hardly answer him. What can he have said? His ‘underlook’, as it was called, excited them, as indeed did the rumours that he was an infidel and dreadfully perverted. His lameness, while evoking pity, also quickened desire. The combination of genius and Satanism was irresistible, all thirsting for an introduction if only to receive a lash of his bitter tongue or maybe, maybe, to feature ‘in his lays’. The Duchess of Devonshire, writing to her son Augustus Foster in Washington, described the enthusiasm and curiosity that surrounded him dwarfing any mention of the war in Spain or Portugal, flattered and praised wherever he appeared. One lady, Annabella Milbanke, sighting him in that intoxicating season of his fame, found him ‘wanting in the calm benevolence that would touch [her] heart’, though she would go on to fall in love with him.
In the daytime, to offset the hazards of nightly revels, he boxed with Gentleman Jackson, fenced with Henry Angelo and had Fletcher rub him down with liniments in order that he could reappear that same evening with the air of ‘cool languor’ that he cultivated.
In his dark clothes, exuding an air of mystery, his whole appearance was a testimony to the cureless wound within. Even women barred by class and by circumstance from these gilded salons sought to introduce themselves to Byron and he was inundated with declarations of love. Oh yes, their motives, they each insisted, were totally honourable, they wished only to reach the poetic soul of Childe Harold, whom Byron himself deemed ‘a repulsive personage’.
‘You whom everybody loves or wishes to love’ the courtesan Harriette Wilson wrote, asking if they might meet alone, her letters bearing the seal of a cupid. She knew he was clever, she knew he was unhappy, but whatever his faults or defects, her honest heart was prepared to love him. He was Poet, Devil and God, attributes that appealed to every woman, but especially her, pleading that she might once hope to kiss him before he died. Henrietta d’Ussieres, receiving no reply to her effusions on gilt-edged notepaper tied with blue ribbon, said that if he wished her not to continue writing to him, he had only to send his servant to the ‘penny post office in Mount Street’ to tell the clerk that he wished no more correspondence from her, but that if he kept silent, then she would go on writing to him. She too believed she was his Thyrza. Touching on a future scenario, she cast herself as ‘the sister whom he love[d]’ but did not realise it. True to his unpredictability, Byron did put pen to paper and reading it, Henrietta yielded to ‘breathless palpitations’, she was ready to bare her soul. She was a mountain girl with a touch of the savage in her, had had a fraught upbringing, had been married at a young age to a superannuated rake and claimed to have met Napoleon in Lausanne, who spoke ‘soothing words’ to her after she was almost trampled on by the horse of his aide-de-camp. She imagined herself in his rooms, moving about on tiptoe, arranging his papers while he wrote his ‘angelic verses’. However, when they did meet, her fluster was great, having encountered Byron the man, rather than Byron the poet, and all illusion was shattered.
TEN
From 1812 to 1814, at the peak of his fame, Byron’s heart, as he said, was always alighting on the nearest perch and there were many perches at his disposal.
The fugue of women involved with him included Lady Melbourne, his tactique confidante and co-conspirator; Lady Caroline Lamb, her daughter-in-law; Lady Oxford, his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Lady Frances Webster and Annabella Milbanke. To Lady Melbourne he wrote three and four times a day, enclosing copies of all the love letters he was receiving, flattering her, adding that if she were younger she would turn his head as she had indeed turned his heart; and to Annabella Milbanke, her niece and his future wife, he would in one of his treacherous boasts, claim of having had ‘criminal connections with the old Lady’, at her instigation, though she being old, he hardly knew how to set about it. But in 1812 at the zenith of his fame, he was her ‘creature’. Lady Melbourne was not a woman of great virtue, but she knew how to conduct an affair in those gladiatorial circles. She had been married at sixteen to Sir Peniston Lamb, who presently took a mistress, inculcating in her a withering cynicism. With her friend Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, she had sat for Daniel Gardner’s portrait Macbeth, Witches round the Cauldron. She did not languish in marital doldrums, became a
‘favourite’ of the Prince of Wales and mistress of Lord Egremont, to whom she bore two children. Her son William Lamb, whom she was grooming for a political career, was having an affair with Caroline’s mother, Lady Bessborough, when he sighted her, at the age of thirteen, deciding that she was by far the most ravishing and covetable of the Devonshire set.
Byron’s affair with ‘Caro, the little volcano’, lasted under five months, incurring a disproportionate amount of attention at the time and subsequently the subject of biographies, novels including Glenarvon, penned by the aggrieved lady herself, in which Byron the anti-hero is accredited with every crime from murder to incest to infanticide, but as he said he had not sat long enough for the portrait.
Lady Caroline and he seemed destined for each other, both aristocratic, preening and disdainful. Wildly unconventional, Caro often dressed in the scarlet and sepia livery of her pages and in her commonplace book, gave herself the nicknames of Sprite, Ariel, Titania and Little Fairy Queen. As with every other young woman, she was agog to meet the author of Childe Harold, since author and fictional hero were interchangeable. Samuel Rogers, a banker and poet whose poems were, according to Byron, ‘all sugar and sago’, had given her a copy of Childe Harold, which so enthralled her that she resolved she must meet him, even if he was as ugly as Aesop.