ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES

The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years elapsed before they distinguished themselves either for good or evil, or emerged from the ruck of the landed gentry. There were Byrons at Crecy, and at the siege of Calais; and there probably were Byrons among the Crusaders. There is even a legend of a Byron Crusader rescuing a Christian maiden from the Saracens; but neither the maiden nor the Crusader can be identified. The authentic history of the family only begins with the grant of Newstead Abbey, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, to Sir John Byron of Clayton, in Lancashire—a reward, apparently, for services rendered by his father at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then fought on the King’s side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton—a loyal, valiant, and impetuous soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke Haslerig’s cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. “By Lord Byron’s improper charge,” Prince Rupert reported, “much harm hath been done.”

He had been given his peerage—with limitations in default of issue male to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies—in the midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second—a lady concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys’ Diary. She was, Pepys tells us, one of Charles II.’s mistresses—his “seventeenth mistress aboard,” who, as the diarist proceeds, “did not leave him till she got him to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be to God! she died before she got it.”

This first Lord Byron died childless, and the title passed to his brother Richard, who had also distinguished himself in the war on the King’s side. He was one of the colonels whose gallantry at Edgehill the University of Oxford rewarded with honorary degrees; and he was Governor, successively, of Appleby and Newark. He tried to seduce his kinsman, Colonel Hutchinson, from his allegiance to the Parliament, but without avail. “Except,” Colonel Hutchinson told him, “he found his own heart prone to such treachery, he might consider that there was, if nothing else, so much of a Byron’s blood in him that he should very much scorn to betray or quit a trust he had undertaken.”

The third Lord, Richard’s son William, succeeded to the title in 1679. His marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth, brings the name of the heroine of the poet’s first and last love into the story; and he is also notable as the first Byron who had a taste, if not actually a turn, for literature. Thomas Shipman, the royalist singer whose songs indicate, according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe’s criticism in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” that “the severe morals of the Roundheads were even less to his taste than their politics,” was his intimate friend; and Shipman’s “Carolina” contains a set of verses from his pen:

“My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman’s faithful friend;
And though I cannot amply speak your praise,
I’ll wear the myrtle, tho’ you wear the bays.”

That is a fair specimen of the third Lord Byron’s poetical style; and it is clear that his descendant did not need to be a great poet in order to improve upon it. Of his son, the fourth Lord, who died in 1736, there is nothing to be said; but his grandson, the fifth Lord, lives in history and tradition as “the wicked Lord Byron.” The report of his arraignment before his fellow peers on the charge of murdering his relative, Mr. William Chaworth, in 1765, may be read in the Nineteenth Volume of State Trials, though the most careful reading is likely to leave the rights of the case obscure.

The tragedy, whatever the rights of it, occurred after one of the weekly dinners of the Nottinghamshire County Club, at the Star and Garter Tavern in Pall Mall. The quarrel arose out of a heated discussion on the subject of preserving game—a topic which country gentlemen are particularly liable to discuss with heat. Lord Byron is said to have advocated leniency, and Mr. Chaworth severity, towards poachers. The argument led to a wager; and the two men went upstairs together—apparently for the purpose of arranging the terms of the wager—and entered a room lighted only by a dull fire and a single candle. As soon as the door was closed, they drew their swords and fought, and Lord Byron ran Mr. Chaworth through the body.

Those are the only points on which all the depositions agree. Lord Byron said that Chaworth, who was the better swordsman of the two, challenged him to fight, and that the fight was conducted fairly. The case for the prosecution was that Chaworth did not mean to fight, and that Lord Byron attacked him unawares. Chaworth, though he lingered for some hours, and was questioned on the subject, said nothing to exonerate his assailant. That, broadly speaking, was the evidence on which the peers had to come to their decision; and they found Lord Byron not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. Pleading his privilege as a peer, he was released on payment of the fees.

Society, however, inclined to the view that he had not fought fairly. Two years before he had been Master of the Stag-hounds. Now he was cut by the county, and relapsed into misanthropic debauchery. He quarrelled with his son, the Honorable William Byron, sometime M.P. for Morpeth, for contracting a marriage of which he disapproved. He drove his wife away from Newstead by his brutality, and consorted with a low-born “Lady Betty.” The stories of his shooting his coachman and trying to drown his wife were untrue, but his neighbours believed them, and behaved accordingly; and an unpleasant picture of his retirement may be found in Horace Walpole’s Letters.

Playing at naval battles and bombardments, with toy ships, on the little lakes in his park, was, indeed, the favourite, if not the only, recreation of the wicked lord’s old age. It is said that his chief purpose in cutting down the timber was to spite and embarrass his heirs; and he did, at any rate, involve his heir in a law suit almost as long as the famous case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce by means of an improper sale of the Byron property at Rochdale.

His heir, however, was not to be either his son or his grandson. They both predeceased him—the latter dying in Corsica in 1794—and the title and estates passed to the issue of his brother John, known to the Navy List as Admiral Byron, and to the navy as “foul weather Jack.”

The Admiral had been round the world with Anson, had been wrecked on the coast of Chili, and had published a narrative—“my granddad’s narrative”—of his hardships and adventures. He had later been sent round the world on a voyage of discovery on his own account, but had discovered nothing in particular. Finally he had fought, not too successfully, against d’Estaing in the West Indies, and had withdrawn to misanthropic isolation. His son, Captain Byron, of the Guards, known to his contemporaries as “Mad Jack Byron,” was a handsome youth of worthless character, but very fascinating to women. His elopement, while still a minor, with the Marchioness of Carmarthen, was one of the sensational events of a London season.

Lady Carmarthen’s husband having divorced her, Mad Jack married her in 1778. They lived together in Paris and at Chantilly—prosperously, for the bride had £4000 a year in her own right. A child was born—Augusta, who subsequently married Colonel Leigh; but, in 1784, his wife died, and Captain Byron, heavily in debt, was once more thrown on his own resources. He returned to England to look for an heiress, and he found one in the person of Miss Gordon of Gight, whom he met and married at Bath in 1786.

The fortune, when the landed estates had been realised, amounted to about £23,000; and Captain Byron’s clamorous creditors took most of it. A considerable portion of what was left was quickly squandered in riotous living on the Continent. The ultimate income consisted of the interest (subject to an annuity to Mrs. Byron’s grandmother) on the sum of £4200; and that lamentable financial position had already been reached when Captain and Mrs. Byron came back to England and took a furnished house in Holles Street, where George Noel Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, was born on January 22, 1788.

There we have, in brief outline, all that is essential of the little that is known of Byron’s heredity. If it is not precisely common-place, it is at least undistinguished. No one can ever have generalised from it and said that the Byrons were brilliant, or even—in spite of the third Lord’s conscientious attempts at versification—that they were “literary.” A far more likely generalisation would have been that the Byrons were mad.

They were not quite that, of course, though some of them were eccentric; and those who were eccentric had the courage of their eccentricity. But they were, at least so far as we know them, impetuous and reckless men—men who went through life in the spirit of a bull charging a gate, doing what they chose to do because they chose to do it, with a defiant air of “damn the consequences.” We find that note alike in the first Lord’s “improper charge” on Marston Moor, and the fifth Lord’s improvised duel in the dark room of the Pall Mall tavern, and in Captain Byron’s dashing elopement with a noble neighbour’s wife. We shall catch it again, and more than once, in our survey of the career of the one Byron who has been famous; and we shall see how much his fame owed to his pride, his determined indifference, in spite of his prickly sensitiveness, to public opinion, and his clear-cut, haughty character.

Legh Richmond, the popular evangelical preacher, once said that, if Byron had been as bad a poet as he was a man, his poetry would have done but little harm, but that criticism is almost an inversion of the truth. Byron, in fact, imposed himself far less because his poetry was good than because his personality was strong. He never saw as far into the heart of things as Wordsworth. When he tried to do so, at Shelley’s instigation, he only saw what Wordsworth had already shown; and there are many passages in his work which might fairly be described as being “like Wordsworth only less so.” None of his shorter pieces are fit to stand beside “The world is too much with us,” and he never wrote a line so wonderfully inspired as Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.”

But he had one advantage over Wordsworth. He spoke out; he was not afraid of saying things. His genius had all the hard riding, neck-or-nothing temper of the earlier, undistinguished Byrons behind it. He was “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,”—and he damned the consequences with the haphazard blasphemy of an aristocrat who feels sure of himself, and has no need to pick his words. He was quite ready to damn them in the presence of ladies, and in the face of kings; and he damned them as one having authority, and not as the democratic upstarts; so that the world listened attentively, wondering what he would say next, and even Shelley, observing how easily he compelled a hearing, was fully persuaded that Byron was a greater poet than himself.

That, in the main, it would seem, was how heredity affected him. The hereditary influences, however, were, in their turn modified by the strange circumstances of his upbringing; and it is time to glance at them, and see how far they help to account for the loneliness and aloofness of Byron’s temperament, for the sensitiveness already referred to, and for the ultimate attitude known as the Byronic pose.