At seventeen he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There he took expensive quarters, with servants, a dog, and a bear as room-mates. He patronized the local prostitutes and physicians, and occasionally sought more distinguished service in London. On a vacation at Brighton (1808) he kept with him a girl disguised as a boy; but, with due impartiality, he developed at Cambridge what he described as “a violent, though pure, love and passion” for a handsome youth.5 Also, by his exuberance, generosity, and charm, he made several lasting friendships; best of all with John Cam Hobhouse, who, almost two years his senior, contributed some momentary sense and caution to Byron’s often lawless life. For the young poet seemed bent on ruining himself with a moral freedom that would not wait for intelligence to replace the prohibitions of a lost religious faith.
In June, 1807, aged nineteen, he published a volume of poems—Hours of Idleness by George Gordon, Lord Byron, a Minor. He went to London to arrange for favorable notices of the book. The Edinburgh Review for January, 1808, greeted it with sarcastic comments on the title as a pose, and on the signature as an excuse; why had not the adolescent peer waited a decent time for some measure of maturity?
He reached his majority on January 22, 1809. He paid off the more pressing of his debts, and incurred more by gambling. He took his seat in the House of Lords, and suffered under the silence recommended to novices; but three days later he blasted the critics of his book in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a clever and slashing satire imitating, and almost rivaling, Pope’s Dunciad. He ridiculed the sentimental Romantic movement (of which he was soon to be a leader and a god), and called for a return to the masculine vigor and classic style of England’s Augustan Age:
Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey….
We learn from Horace, “Homer sometimes sleeps”;
We feel, without him, Wordsworth sometimes wakes.6
Then, after taking his M.A. degree at Cambridge, befriending pugilists, practicing fencing, and taking an additional course in London’s night life, he sailed with Hobhouse, July 2, 1809, for Lisbon and points east.
II. THE GRAND TOUR: BYRON, 1809–11
It was not traditionally grand: England was at war, and Napoleon controlled France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Italy; so Byron spent most of his two-year trip in Albania, Greece, and Turkey, with considerable effect on his politics, his views of women and marriage, and his death. He left £13,000 of debts behind him, and took four servants with him. He found Lisbon impoverished even beyond wont by the Peninsular War; every native seemed hostile, and Byron carried two pistols wherever he went. His party moved on horseback to Seville and Cádiz, and thence by a British frigate to Gibraltar (where he released all of his servants except his accustomed valet, William Fletcher), and on to Malta. There (September 1–18, 1809) he fell in love with Mrs. Spencer Smith, and so conspicuously that a British captain commented on his precipitance. Byron sent him a challenge, with an added flourish: “As the vessel on which I am to embark must sail with the first change of wind, the sooner our business is arranged, the better. Tomorrow at six will be the best hour.” The captain sent his regrets.
On September 19 Byron and Hobhouse left Malta on the brig Spider. A week’s sail brought them to Patras. There they went on shore briefly, if only to set foot on Greek soil; but on the same evening they reboarded the Spider and continued past Missolonghi and Penelope’s Ithaca, and debarked at Preveza, near the Actium so fatal to Anthony and Cleopatra. Thence they moved north on horseback through Epirus and into Albania, from whose capital the terrible Turk, Ali Pasha, ruled Albania and Epirus with sword and style. He accorded Byron all the honors judiciously due to a British lord; for (he told the poet) he knew him to be of aristocratic lineage by his small hands and ears.
On October 23 Byron and company turned back, and on the 27th they reached Janina, capital of Epirus. There he began to record his impressions of his tour in the autobiographical Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. On November 3 the party traveled south through the modern Aetolia, escorted (by order of the Pasha) by a band of Albanian mercenaries each noted for his skill in murder and robbery. They fell in love with their new master, partly because he seemed fearless of death. When Byron came down with a fever they threatened to kill the doctor if his patient died; the doctor ran away, and Byron recovered. On November 21 the party took ship from Missolonghi to Patras; thence, with a new guard, they proceeded on horseback through the Peloponnesus and Attica, saw Delphi and Thebes, and entered Athens on Christmas Day of 1809.
It must have been for the two pilgrims a day of mingled joy and gloom. The evidences of ancient grandeur and modern decay, and the apparently humble acceptance of Turkish rule by a once proud people now reduced from strength to subtlety, and content with the business and gossip of the day, amused Hobhouse but saddened Byron, who incarnated the spirit of independence and the pride of race. The poet made Childe Harold cry out for revolt, and thought of how he might help these heirs of greatness to be free.
In any case their women were beautiful, with their dark, inflammatory eyes and their yielding grace. Byron and Hobhouse were housed and served by the widow Macri, who had three daughters, all of them under fifteen. The young roué learned to feel for them an affection that rejoiced in their innocence. Apparently it was Theresa, aged twelve, who taught him the melodious greeting Zoé mou sas agapo—“Life of my life, I love you.” Around that tender phrase he wrote his famous song: “Maid of Athens, ere we part, / Give, oh give me back my heart!”
On January 19, 1810, Byron and Hobhouse set out, with a servant and a guide, and two men to care for the horses, to visit one of the most inspiring sights in Greece. The ride took them four days, but the end justified the means: they came in sight of the surviving columns of a temple to Poseidon raised, in the heroic past, on Sunium Promontorium (Cape Colonna) to tell mariners that they had sighted Greece. It was in remembering that shattered perfection, and the seemingly smooth Aegean far below, that Byron composed “The Isle of Greece,” later inserted into the third canto of Don Juan. From Sunium it was but a day’s ride to Marathon, where the poet was moved with feelings that soon took form in famous lines:
The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave
I could not deem myself a slave.
On March 5 Byron and Hobhouse left Athens on an English vessel, the Pylades, for Smyrna. Forced to wait there for a month, the poet completed Canto 11 of Childe Harold. A side trip of three days to Ephesus revealed the ruins of a city that had lived through three zeniths—Greek, Christian, and Mohammedan. “The decay of three religions,” Hobhouse remarked, “is there presented to one view.”7
On April 11 they took passage on the frigate Salsette for Constantinople. Contrary winds and diplomatic obstructions kept the vessel anchored for a fortnight at the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles. Byron and Hobhouse trod the Troad plain, hoping that it covered Homer’s Ilium, but Schliemann had not yet been born. On April 15 Byron and an English naval officer, Lieutenant William Ekenhead, had themselves conveyed across the Hellespont to the European side, and then tried to swim back; but the strength of the current and the coldness of the water were too much for them. On May 3 they tried again, crossing from Sestos in European Turkey to Abydos in Asia Minor; Ekenhead accomplished the feat in sixty-five minutes, Byron in seventy. At that point the channel is one mile wide, but the current forced the new Leanders to swim over four miles.8
The tourists reached Constantinople on May 12, admired the mosques, and left on July 14. On the 17th their vessel anchored in the harbor of Zea on the island of Keos, where they parted; Hobhouse continued to London, Byron and Fletcher changed to a boat bound for Patras. Again they crossed overland to Athens. There Byron resumed his long inquiry into feminine diffe
rences; he boasted of his conquests, contracted gonorrhea, and adopted melancholy as a career. On November 26 he wrote to Hobhouse: “I have now seen the world…. I have tested all sorts of pleasure; … I have nothing more to hope, and may begin to consider the most eligible way of walking out of it…. I wish I could find some of Socrates’ Hemlock.”9 In January, 1811, he took rooms for himself and some servants in a Capuchin monastery at the foot of the Acropolis, and dreamt of monastic peace.
On April 22 he left Athens for the last time, stayed a month in Malta, and went on to England. He reached it on July 14, two years and twelve days after leaving it. While busy renewing contacts in London he received news that his mother had died, aged forty-six. He rushed up to Newstead Abbey, and spent a night sitting in the dark beside her corpse. When a maid begged him to retire to his room, he refused, saying, “I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone!” He had said the same thing in an epitaph for his Newfoundland dog Boatswain, who had died in November, 1808, and had been buried in the Abbey garden vault:
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never had but one,—and here he lies.
In August, 1811, Byron drew up a will entailing the Abbey to his cousin George Byron, specifying gifts for his servants, and leaving directions for his burial: “I desire that my body may be buried in the vault of the garden of Newstead, without any ceremony or burial service whatever, and that no inscription, save my name and age, be written on the tomb tablet; and it is my will that my faithful dog may not be removed from the said vault.”10 Having arranged his death, he proceeded to conquer London.
III. THE LION OF LONDON: BYRON, 1811–14
He made friends readily, for he was attractive in person and manners, fascinating in conversation, widely informed in literature and history, and more faithful to his friends than to his mistresses. He took rooms at 8 St. James’s Street, where he welcomed Thomas Moore, Thomas Campbell, Samuel Rogers, Hobhouse …; and they welcomed him in turn. Through Rogers and Moore he entered the famous circle at Holland House. There he met Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was declining in political influence, but had not lost his conversational flair. “When he talked,” Byron recalled, “we listened, without one yawn, from six till one in the morning …. Poor fellow! he got drunk very thoroughly and very soon. It occasionally fell to my lot to convey him home.”11
Stimulated by these Whiggish wits, Byron took up the cause of the “Luddite” frame–breakers of Nottinghamshire, his own county. On February 20, 1812, the Commons passed a bill condemning any captured frame-breaker to death. The measure moved to the House of Lords, and on February 27 Byron rose to speak against it. He had written his address in advance, in excellent English, and he began in a tone of modesty expected of a maiden speech. He admitted that some workers had been guilty of violence involving considerable losses to property, and that the shattered machines might in the long run have been a boon to the national economy; but meanwhile they had thrown out of work hundreds of men who had through time and labor acquired a skill suddenly made useless to them in supporting their families; they were now reduced to poverty and charity, and their despair and bitterness could be gauged from their violence. As he proceeded the young orator lost caution and support by attacking the war as the source of unprecedented misery among English laborers. The Lords frowned, and passed the bill. On April 21 Byron made a second speech, denouncing British rule in Ireland, and called for the emancipation of Catholics throughout the British Empire; the Lords praised his eloquence, rejected his plea, and set him down as a political innocent useless to his party. He abandoned politics, and decided to plead his case through poetry.
Twelve days after his maiden speech the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were offered to the public. Their almost unprecedented success—the first edition (five hundred copies) sold out in three days—encouraged the author to believe that he had found a medium more enduring than forensic speech. Now he made the exuberant remark “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”12 Even his old enemies at the Edinburgh Review praised him, and, in gratitude, he sent an apology to Jeffrey for having bruised him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
Almost every door was now opened to him; almost every prominent hostess invited him; a dozen women, warming to his handsome face, fluttered about him, hoping to snare the young lion in their varied charms. They were not repelled by his reputation for sexual voracity, and his lordly title made him seem a precious prize to those who did not know his debts. He enjoyed their attentions, being readily excited by their mysterious radiation. “There is,” he said, “something to me very softening in the presence of a woman—some strange influence, even if one is not in love with them—which I cannot account for, having no very high opinion of the sex.”13 Despite all his skeptical intelligence he succumbed again and again to the magnet that every healthy woman is to any healthy man.
One of his first conquerors was Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828). Daughter of the third Earl of Bessborough, she married, at twenty, William Lamb, second son of Lord and Lady Melbourne. After reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage she resolved to meet the author; but on being presented to him she took fright and quickly turned away from him as “dangerous to know.” The rejection stimulated him; when they met again “he begged permission to see me.” He came. She was three years his senior and already a mother; but she made herself pleasant and fragrant, and she was heiress to a great fortune. He came again, almost every day. Her husband, busy with his own affairs, accepted him as the British equivalent of an Italian cavaliere servente. She grew more and more attracted to him; went to his rooms, openly or dressed as a page; she wrote him passionately amorous letters. For a time his temperature rose with hers, until he proposed to elope with her;14 but when her mother and her husband took her off to Ireland (September, 1812), he readily resigned himself, and was soon entangled in a liaison with Lady Oxford.
Amid such exaltations Byron kept some stability by writing rapidly, in fluent verse, a series of Oriental tales of adventure, violence, and love. They made no pretense to greatness; they were romantic imaginations, echoing the poet’s travels in Albania, Epirus, and Greece; they required little thought from the author, and none from the reader, and sold excitingly well. First came The Giaour, in March, 1813; soon, in December, The Bride of Abydos, of which six thousand copies were bought in a month; better still, The Corsair (January, 1814), which shattered all precedents by selling ten thousand copies on the day of its publication; then Lara (1815) and The Siege of Corinth (1816). The publisher gathered his guineas, and offered a share to Byron, who, proud as a lord, refused to take payment for his poems.
Even while composing these tales of dashing outlaws, the author was wearying of his lawless life. He could not go on philandering until he had worn out his health, his welcome, and his funds. He and Hobhouse had vowed to shun marriage as a prison of the spirit as well as the flesh; now he wondered whether marriage might not be a necessary mooring for desires which, let loose, could derange not only the individual but society itself. He felt that he might be persuaded to surrender his freedom for stability and calm, or for a surer income than his crumbling Abbey could provide.
Annabella Milbanke seemed to meet all his requirements. She had beauty and education, and was the only child of a substantial fortune. When he first met her, March 25, 1812, at the home of her aunt, Lady Melbourne, he was favorably impressed: “Her features were small and feminine, though not regular. She had the fairest skin imaginable. Her figure was perfect for her height, and there was a simplicity, a retired modesty about her, … that interested me exceedingly.”15 He did not speak to her, for each waited for the other to take the initiative. But she too was interested, for in her diary and letters she spent some time analyzing his character: “Acrimony of spirit, … dissimulant, the violence of its scorn…. Sincere and independent…. It is said that he is an infidel, and I think it probable from the general character of his mind. His poem [Childe
Harold] sufficiently proves that he can feel nobly, but he has discouraged his own goodness.”16 This was a perceptive phrase; perhaps the thought came to her how interesting, though dangerous, it would be to try to save this sensitive man from his senses, to release his shy virtues, and, incidentally, to capture the young lion of London from all those women who were enthralled by his scandalous reputation.
Months passed, during which Lady Caroline Lamb held the stage. Then that flame was cooled by the Irish Channel; and on September 13, 1812, Byron wrote to Lady Melbourne a strange letter that opened a fatal direction in his life: “I was, am, and shall be, I fear, attached to … one to whom I never said much, but have never lost sight of; … one whom I wished to marry, had not this [Lamb] affair intervened…. The woman I mean is Miss Milbanke …. I never saw a woman whom I esteemed so much.”17 Lady Melbourne, well pleased, told her niece of Byron’s confession, and asked would she consider a proposal. On October 12 Miss Milbanke sent a reply worthy of Talleyrand:
Believing that he never will be the object of that strong affection which would make me happy in domestic life, I should wrong him by any measure that might, even indirectly, confirm his present impressions. From my limited observation of his conduct, I am predisposed to believe your strong testimony in his favour, and I willingly attribute it more to the defect of my own feelings than of his character, that I am not inclined to return his attachment. After this statement, which I make with real sorrow from the idea of its giving pain, I must leave our future intercourse to his judgement. I can have no reason for withdrawing from an acquaintance that does me honour and is capable of imparting so much rational pleasure, except the fear of involuntarily deceiving him.18