Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  For several days, it looked as though the sergeant would die of his wound. Local sympathy now turned against the English party. Masi recovered. But for a fortnight the members of the ‘Pisa circle’ were all treated by the Tuscan authorities like the suspects in a classic detective story. With the exception of the inglorious Taaffe – now nicknamed ‘Falstaaffe’ – the group presented a united front under pressure and the threat of danger. This was the more striking as the Shelleys and the Williamses between them had three very small children in their care. Depositions were taken. Byron enlisted the aid of the British consul at Florence, Edward Dawkins. Gradually, tensions eased. Two of Byron's servants and one of Count Gamba's remained in prison pending charges. Otherwise, on the surface at least, by the middle of April the affair had blown over.46

  It had all been avoidable. Byron's extreme sensitivity to insult had magnified a trivial annoyance into the ‘Masi affair’ that still takes up several pages in most biographies of the protagonists. Its most serious repercussions were yet to come. Afterwards, Byron laid all the blame on Taaffe, a poor horseman and inconsistent in his version of what had happened. So incensed was all the ‘circle’ with the Irishman's conduct that Byron had to restrain Trelawny from ‘breaking his bones’, or so he would later claim.47 But the truth is that Byron was spoiling for a fight, that Sunday afternoon. He had already threatened the poet laureate, Southey. In the previous month, Shelley had feared he might be goaded into fighting a duel with him over Claire and Allegra. Now, Sergeant Masi turned out to be beneath his notice. Byron seemed to have no luck in picking his antagonists.

  A fortnight after the affray, on 9 April, Byron signed a six-month lease on the Villa Dupuy at Montenero, in the hills outside Livorno.48 The following day, Shelley was confident that his own party, which would now include Claire, would be leaving for the Gulf of Spezia, ‘the moment the weather permits’.49 With the relaxation of tension, the two parties – Byron's and Shelley's – were again making plans to spend the summer apart.

  Then, on the evening of Monday 22 April, a courier arrived at the Casa Lanfranchi from Ravenna. Allegra had died two days ago, in the convent at Bagnacavallo.50 Byron's first thought was for the Shelleys. ‘Lord Byron did not have the courage to give Shelley the melancholy tidings himself’, Teresa remembered, almost half a century later. She was sent in his stead. Calling at the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on the twenty-third, Teresa must narrowly have missed meeting Claire, who had just left. ‘Evil news’, Mary noted in her journal.51

  Shelley seems to have been ready to go across to the Casa Lanfranchi at once. Byron intervened to pre-empt him:

  There is nothing to prevent your coming to-morrow; but, perhaps, to-day, and yester-evening, it was better not to have met. I do not know that I have any thing to reproach in my conduct, and certainly nothing in my feelings and intentions toward the dead. But it is a moment when we are apt to think that, if this or that had been done, such event might have been prevented, – though every day and hour shows us that they are the most natural and inevitable.52

  Whatever his own personal feelings may have been about the loss of his natural daughter, Byron's extreme constraint here, perhaps even masking alarm, has everything to do with his relationship with Shelley. Byron had already put himself badly in the wrong with Shelley, after refusing so intemperately to allow Allegra's mother to visit her. Now the wrong could never be put right. Worse, all Claire's fears, everything that Shelley had been urging on Byron, ever since the girl had been consigned to the convent, had been proved absolutely correct. This is the letter of a proud man who can no longer hide from himself that he has been in the wrong, but still cannot bring himself to admit the plain fact that shines through his words. We can be sure that Byron was not moved to this by consideration for Claire, the bereaved mother. It is Shelley's reaction that Byron dreads.

  Shelley and Mary now determined to leave Pisa at the earliest opportunity, and spirit Claire away from Byron's vicinity before they broke the news to her.53 Byron was no doubt relieved by their precipitate departure, whether or not he knew that Claire was with them. When Shelley wrote to him thereafter, it was without rancour, but without apology, either, for conveying the grieving mother's last requests. Shelley wrote to Byron four times before they next met. Only one letter from Byron survives, though he did write at least one other.

  Shelley is at pains to salvage the outward form of the old friendship, referring to the boats that are imminently expected, and the still-awaited Hunts. He almost, but not quite, invites Byron to visit.54 Byron is less forgiving. He reverts to an old habit in forwarding to Shelley a letter of violent recrimination received from Claire, that Shelley had been unable to intercept. He is tetchy about the Masi affair, and bitter about the critics who had once praised what he terms the ‘exaggerated nonsense’ of his own earlier works, but now rubbish his more recent plays. In this mood of angry self-pity, Byron quite forgets that Shelley, too, has written plays. He never so much as mentions Hellas.55

  At almost exactly the same time, Shelley was writing to another correspondent: ‘I do not write – I have lived too long near Lord Byron & the sun has extingushed [sic] the glowworm; for I cannot hope with St. John, that “the light came into the world, & the world knew it not”.’ By the end of May, Shelley was convinced there was no risk that Byron would visit. Between Byron and himself, he confided to Claire, ‘I suspect there is a great gulph fixed, which by the nature of things must daily become wider.’56

  There was something eerie about the Casa Magni, on the coast near Lerici on the Gulf of Spezia. This was now home to the Shelleys, the Williamses, their children, and their respective servants. Built right on the edge of the sea, with the woods rising steeply behind and no other house within miles, it was a lonely spot. Often, even when there was no wind, a heavy swell would break along the beach and under the arches of the lower floor, disturbing the sleep of those in the rooms above.57 There was a local community of peasants or fishermen, whose extreme poverty, coarse dialect, and noisy festivities on the shore disgusted Mary and seem not to have been noticed at all by anyone else. Mary loathed the place. Shelley loved it.58 Once his boat arrived from Genoa, he and Williams spent all their time sailing and overhauling her. Particularly at sea, he seems to have been elated and serenely happy. But these moods would swing wildly and unpredictably to bitter despair and thoughts of suicide. Mary's state of mind cannot have been helped by being three months pregnant at the time when they moved there. On 16 June she suffered a miscarriage, and would have died from loss of blood had it not been for Shelley's decisive intervention. This left her very weak for some time afterwards.

  During June, there seems to have been no direct contact between Shelley and Byron. Trelawny sailed Byron's schooner down from Genoa, and made a stop at the Casa Magni on the way. He carried news of the Shelleys to Byron in Pisa. From there, he reported to Shelley by letter that Byron had finished two more cantos of Don Juan before the end of the month.59

  After the departure of the Shelleys and the Williamses, Byron had stayed on in Pisa until the third week of May.60 The Villa Dupuy at Montenero was in the hills immediately above Livorno. From there he intended to sail his newly acquired schooner, with Trelawny as captain of its small crew. It is not clear how seriously Byron ever took the plans for a summer exploring the coast from the sea, that had been excitedly plotted by Shelley and Williams, with the encouragement of Trelawny, back in January and February. His new acquisition, when Trelawny sailed it into the harbour of Livorno on 18 June, was large enough to attract the attention of the Tuscan authorities, the more so as the vessel carried cannon and was named Bolivar, after the hero of the revolutionary wars in South America.61 It was now that the aftermath of the Masi affair began to have unpleasant consequences for Byron. Restrictions were placed upon his use of the Bolivar. He at once gave up the idea of ever sailing in her.

  Life at Montenero was not easy. The Tuscan authorities were watching the Gambas as well as Byron, as Pierino ha
d also been involved peripherally in the affray with the dragoon. As June went on, the heat worsened. There was a shortage of water in the house. It began to look as if the residence permits for Ruggero and Pietro would not be renewed. In that case, Teresa would have to leave Tuscany too. By 26 June, Byron was so annoyed at what he saw as harassment of himself and his friends by the government, that he was threatening to quit the country as soon as the last legal formalities resulting from the Masi affair were dealt with.62

  The flashpoint came at the end of June. In towns and villages, processions of priests were praying for rain.63 On the afternoon of 28 June, one of Byron's servants ran amok. Pierino was slightly injured in the affray, the second to involve Byron's household in only a few months. The police were called. By the time they arrived, it seems that Byron's authority had been sufficient to restore order. But the damage had been done. As luck would have it, that was the afternoon when Leigh Hunt, having finally reached Livorno, came out to Montenero to look for Byron. Hunt arrived in the middle of what he later described as a scene out of the classic gothic horror novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. It was the worst possible start to the collaboration on The Liberal.64

  The following day an order went out from the Buongoverno in Florence to the local judicial authorities in Pisa and Livorno. In view of their conduct in the affair of Sergeant Masi, Counts Ruggero and Pietro Gamba were to have their residence permits revoked and be told to leave the Duchy, pending a formal order of exile.65

  This was the situation into which Shelley and Williams sailed in Shelley's boat, named the Don Juan after Byron's epic poem, intending to meet Hunt and help him and his family install themselves in the Casa Lanfranchi in Pisa. They arrived in the harbour of Livorno late in the evening of Monday 1 July and spent the night on board. Hunt had in the meantime returned from his harrowing visit to Montenero, and was greeted by Shelley with rapturous enthusiasm on the quayside next morning.66 Byron was in town too. The Gambas, father and son, had received a summons that morning to attend a tribunal, at which the order from the Buongoverno was handed down to them, with the additional stipulation that they had only four days in which to leave Tuscan soil.67 Byron had accompanied them from Montenero and must have been raging by the time Shelley, Hunt, and Williams caught up with him outside Henry Dunn's general store in the port. They were in time to witness him deliver a mortal snub to Captain Roberts, who had built his boat.68

  Over the next few days, Williams kicked his heels in Livorno while Shelley, assisted by Byron and Teresa, helped the Hunts settle into their new home in Pisa.69 From there Shelley reported to Mary: ‘Lord Byron is at this moment on the point of leaving Tuscany…His first idea was to sail to America, which was changed to Switzerland, then to Genoa, & at last to Lucca. – Everybody is in despair & every thing in confusion.’ Byron too, in a letter written the same day, gives the same list of possible destinations, although in a different order. To Medwin, a couple of months later, he would declare that he had actually been on the point of embarking for America, ‘the only country which is a sanctuary of liberty’.70 By ‘liberty’, all Byron meant was a place where he could live in peace and quiet with Teresa. The last thing in his mind, more than a year into the Greek Revolution, was Greece.

  Even before the Hunts’ arrival, Shelley had already thought the prospects for The Liberal were bleak. Now they looked bleaker still. Shelley had not revised his opinion of Byron, and determined to see little of him from now on. Byron, he wrote, is ‘so mentally capricious that the least impulse drives him from his anchorage’. What Shelley's plans were for himself at this time is hard to determine.71 But, during the five days that he spent with Hunt and Byron in Pisa, he exerted himself to the utmost to secure what he could for the joint project, with or without his own future participation.

  By the time Shelley left Pisa to return to Williams and the Don Juan at Livorno, on Sunday, 7 July, he had extracted from Byron a number of promises. This way, the new journal had at least a fighting chance. Byron would ensure that the stricken Hunt family had the means to subsist in Italy. Probably also as a result of Shelley's persuasion, Byron was prevailed upon not to leave Tuscany immediately with the Gambas. In slightly more emollient mood, he was now urging Dawkins in Florence to intercede with the authorities in neighbouring Lucca to allow them to remain there.72 In the meantime, in defiance of both the order from the government and the terms of her legal separation from her husband, Teresa remained at the Casa Lanfranchi.

  After Shelley left Pisa, Byron seems to have had no inclination to return to the Villa Dupuy at Montenero. A new rhythm was beginning to be established, albeit uneasily, on the Lung’Arno. Byron embarked at once on a new canto of Don Juan. Earlier, he had promised Teresa that he would give up the poem, then secretly started work on it again in the spring. Very possibly it was thanks to Shelley's persuasive powers that Teresa now relented and gave her blessing to its continuation. By the end of the first week of the new regime, Byron was still serious enough about the joint project with Hunt and Shelley to write to his poet friend Tom Moore to solicit contributions for The Liberal – though he confessed at the same time that Hunt ‘seems sanguine about the matter, but (entre nous) I am not’. Whatever the state of their relations at the time when Shelley left for Livorno – and such evidence as exists suggests that they were at least cordial – this new and more serious Byron was surely the consequence of Shelley's presence. The ‘Snake’ had proved persuasive yet again.73

  The heat wave had finally broken on Monday 8 July, with thunder, violent rain, and wind. Reports reaching Pisa from the coast prompted Hunt to send a note to Shelley at the Casa Magni, probably on Wednesday: ‘pray write to tell us how you got home’.74 It was Trelawny, according to his own account, who first raised the alarm. This would have been on Thursday, 11 July. Trelawny had seen Shelley, Williams, and their boy sailor, Charles Vivian, off on board the Don Juan shortly before the storm broke. Since then, he had been trying to get news of them from the ships’ crews as they came into port. Trelawny says that he confided his fears to Hunt first, then went upstairs to Byron. ‘When I told him, his lip quivered, and his voice faltered as he questioned me.’75

  It was after midnight on Friday night, and Teresa was standing on the first-floor balcony of the Casa Lanfranchi watching an eclipse of the moon, when she heard a carriage in the street below. Mary and Jane, seriously alarmed after the arrival of Hunt's letter, had come straight from Lerici to find out what he knew. Hunt had gone to bed, but Byron was still up, as usual. Teresa met the women on the stairs. Mary looked like a ghost, from worry and the effects of her recent miscarriage. ‘Sapete alcuna cosa di Shelley?’ – Do you know anything of Shelley? she managed to ask. The visitors stayed only long enough to discover that nothing was known. In the small hours of the morning, they left again for Livorno, in search of Trelawny or Roberts, the boatbuilder who had also been in the harbour when the Don Juan put to sea. By Sunday, 14 July, Byron had received an answer to his own separate enquiry to Roberts. ‘Your opinion has taken from me the slender hope to which I still clung’, he wrote in reply, and authorised the use of the Bolivar, implicitly to search for the bodies.76

  By the time they were washed ashore, they had been more than a week in the sea. As soon as he heard that they had been found, Byron rode out to the coast on two successive days ‘for the purpose of ascertaining the circumstances – and identifications of the bodies’. But the local quarantine authorities had got in first. The remains of Shelley and Williams had already been buried in quicklime where they were found.77

  What happened aboard the Don Juan on the afternoon of Monday, 8 July has been the subject of speculation that continues to this day. Byron will have wondered, as others did at the time and biographers have ever since, was it an accident? Was the Don Juan seaworthy? Was Williams a competent sailor? – almost certainly not. Was any other boat involved? – again, almost certainly not, despite a number of claims. Was Shelley's death in some sense suicide? – if so, what was W
illiams doing, and did neither of them think of young Charles Vivian, who drowned with them and is hardly ever remembered?78 We will never know. But Byron's biographer, Leslie Marchand, surely understates the case when he says, ‘The death of Shelley made a greater impact on Byron than he expected.’79

  ‘And I will war…’

  The sequel must surely be one of the most bizarre episodes in English literary history. On 15 August, the festival of the Dormition of the Virgin and one of the most celebrated days in the Catholic year, a handful of bemused onlookers, some in boats, others apparently smart ladies in carriages, were drawn to a spot on the beach near the mouth of the river Serchio, close to the border that in those days divided Tuscany from Lucca. The day was windless, there was no shade on the beach, the sand was scorching to the touch. There, under the watchful eyes of a small detachment of dragoons and officials from the Health Department, and under the direction of four foreign gentlemen, soldiers in workmen's overalls began digging at the sand, not far above the tideline. When they had found what they were looking for, using hooks mounted on long poles, the soldiers removed a bulky object and several smaller pieces from the sand and manoeuvred them into a cage-like contraption made of iron bars and sheet metal. Two cartloads of wood now appeared. When a quantity of wood had been heaped up below and around the cage, it was set alight. The fire was then fed continually for several hours, during which time a nearby coastguard shelter went up in flames too. While the flames were at their height, three of the foreign gentlemen stripped off their clothes and swam out to the schooner that was riding at anchor, a mile or two offshore. When they came back, the soldiers were instructed to carry the red-hot cage, supported on long poles, down to the water to douse it. What it contained was then scooped into a casket, conveyed to a carriage that was waiting behind the beach, and driven off with two of the gentlemen to Pisa. The other two foreigners stayed that night at a nearby inn.