Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 1 With His Letters and Journals

Name: Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 1 With His Letters and Journals
Author: Thomas Moore

by Thomas Moore

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Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824

In: Biographies·British Literature

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The favourable reception which I ventured to anticipate for the First Volume of this work has been, to the full extent of my expectations, realised; and I may without scruple thus advert to the success it has met with, being well aware that to the interest of the subject and the materials, not to any merit of the editor, such a result is to be attributed. Among the less agreeable, though not least valid, proofs of this success may be counted the attacks which, from more than one quarter, the Volume has provoked;--attacks angry enough, it must be confessed, but, from their very anger, impotent, and, as containing nothing whatever in the shape either of argument or fact, not entitled, I may be pardoned for saying, to the slightest notice.

Of a very different description, both as regards the respectability of the source from whence it comes, and the mysterious interest involved in its contents, is a document which made its appearance soon after the former Volume,[2] and which I have annexed, without a single line of comment, to the present;--contenting myself, on this painful subject, with entreating the reader's attention to some extracts, as beautiful as they are, to my mind, convincing, from an unpublished pamphlet of Lord Byron, which will be found in the following pages.[3]

Sanguinely as I was led to augur of the reception of our First Volume, of the success of that which we now present to the public, I am disposed to feel even still more confident. Though self-banished from England, it was plain that to England alone Lord Byron continued to look, throughout the remainder of his days, not only as the natural theatre of his literary fame, but as the tribunal to which all his thoughts, feelings, virtues, and frailties were to be referred; and the exclamation of Alexander, "Oh, Athenians, how much it costs me to obtain your praises!" might have been, with equal truth, addressed by the noble exile to his countrymen. To keep the minds of the English public for ever occupied about him,--if not with his merits, with his faults; if not in applauding, in blaming him,--was, day and night, the constant ambition of his soul; and in the correspondence he so regularly maintained with his publisher, one of the chief mediums through which this object was to be effected lay. Mr. Murray's house being then, as now, the resort of most of those literary men who are, at the same time, men of the world, his Lordship knew that whatever particulars he might wish to make public concerning himself, would, if transmitted to that quarter, be sure to circulate from thence throughout society. It was on this presumption that he but rarely, as we shall find him more than once stating, corresponded with any others of his friends at home; and to the mere accident of my having been, myself, away from England, at the time, was I indebted for the numerous and no less interesting letters with which, during the same period, he honoured me, and which now enrich this volume.

In these two sets of correspondence (given, as they are here, with as little suppression as a regard to private feelings and to certain other considerations, warrants) will be found a complete history, from the pen of the poet himself, of the course of his life and thoughts, during this most energetic period of his whole career;--presenting altogether so wide a canvass of animated and, often, unconscious self-portraiture, as even the communicative spirit of genius has seldom, if ever, before bestowed on the world.

Some insinuations, calling into question the disinterestedness of the lady whose fate was connected with that of Lord Byron during his latter years, having been brought forward, or rather revived, in a late work, entitled "Galt's Life of Byron,"--a work wholly unworthy of the respectable name it bears,--I may be allowed to adduce here a testimony on this subject, which has been omitted in its proper place,[4] but which will be more than sufficient to set the idle calumny at rest. The circumstance here alluded to may be most clearly, perhaps, communicated to my readers through the medium of the following extract from a letter, which Mr. Barry (the friend and banker of Lord Byron) did me the favour of addressing to me soon after his Lordship's death[5]:--"When Lord Byron went to Greece, he gave me orders to advance money to Madame G----; but that lady would never consent to receive any. His Lordship had also told me that he meant to leave his will in my hands, and that there would be a bequest in it of 10,000_l._ to Madame G----. He mentioned this circumstance also to Lord Blessington. When the melancholy news of his death reached me, I took for granted that this will would be found among the sealed papers he had left with me; but there was no such instrument. I immediately then wrote to Madame G----, enquiring if she knew any thing concerning it, and mentioning, at the same time, what his Lordship had said as to the legacy. To this the lady replied, that he had frequently spoken to her on the same subject, but that she had always cut the conversation short, as it was a topic she by no means liked to hear him speak upon. In addition, she expressed a wish that no such will as I had mentioned would be found; as her circumstances were already sufficiently independent, and the world might put a wrong construction on her attachment, should it appear that her fortunes were, in any degree, bettered by it."

It has been said of Lord Byron, "that he was prouder of being a descendant of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England, than of having been the author of Childe Harold and Manfred." This remark is not altogether unfounded in truth. In the character of the noble poet, the pride of ancestry was undoubtedly one of the most decided features; and, as far as antiquity alone gives lustre to descent, he had every reason to boast of the claims of his race. In Doomsday-book, the name of Ralph de Burun ranks high among the tenants of land in Nottinghamshire; and in the succeeding reigns, under the title of Lords of Horestan Castle,[6] we find his descendants holding considerable possessions in Derbyshire; to which, afterwards, in the time of Edward I., were added the lands of Rochdale in Lancashire. So extensive, indeed, in those early times, was the landed wealth of the family, that the partition of their property, in Nottinghamshire alone, has been sufficient to establish some of the first families of the county.

Its antiquity, however, was not the only distinction by which the name of Byron came recommended to its inheritor; those personal merits and accomplishments, which form the best ornament of a genealogy, seem to have been displayed in no ordinary degree by some of his ancestors. In one of his own early poems, alluding to the achievements of his race, he commemorates, with much satisfaction, those "mail-covered barons" among them,

who proudly to battle Led their vassals from Europe to Palestine's plain.

As there is no record, however, as far as I can discover, of any of his ancestors having been engaged in the Holy Wars, it is possible that he may have had no other authority for this notion than the tradition which he found connected with certain strange groups of heads, which are represented on the old panel-work, in some of the chambers at Newstead. In one of these groups, consisting of three heads, strongly carved and projecting from the panel, the centre figure evidently represents a Saracen or Moor, with an European female on one side of him, and a Christian soldier on the other. In a second group, which is in one of the bed-rooms, the female occupies the centre, while on each side is the head of a Saracen, with the eyes fixed earnestly upon her. Of the exact meaning of these figures there is nothing certain known; but the tradition is, I understand, that they refer to some love-adventure, in which one of those crusaders, of whom the young poet speaks, was engaged.

Of the more certain, or, at least, better known exploits of the family, it is sufficient, perhaps, to say, that, at the siege of Calais under Edward III., and on the fields, memorable in their respective eras, of Cressy, Bosworth, and Marston Moor, the name of the Byrons reaped honours both of rank and fame, of which their young descendant has, in the verses just cited, shown himself proudly conscious.

It was in the reign of Henry VIII., on the dissolution of the monasteries, that, by a royal grant, the church and priory of Newstead, with the lands adjoining, were added to the other possessions of the Byron family.[7] The favourite upon whom these spoils of the ancient religion were conferred, was the grand-nephew of the gallant soldier who fought by the side of Richmond at Bosworth, and is distinguished from the other knights of the same Christian name in the family, by the title of "Sir John Byron the Little, with the great beard." A portrait of this personage was one of the few family pictures with which the walls of the abbey, while in the possession of the noble poet, were decorated.

At the coronation of James I. we find another representative of the family selected as an object of royal favour,--the grandson of Sir John Byron the Little, being, on this occasion, made a knight of the Bath. There is a letter to this personage, preserved in Lodge's Illustrations, from which it appears, that notwithstanding all these apparent indications of prosperity, the inroads of pecuniary embarrassment had already begun to be experienced by this ancient house. After counselling the new heir as to the best mode of getting free of his debts, "I do therefore advise you," continues the writer,[8] "that so soon as you have, in such sort as shall be fit, finished your father's funerals, to dispose and disperse that great household, reducing them to the number of forty or fifty, at the most, of all sorts; and, in my opinion, it will be far better for you to live for a time in Lancashire rather than in Notts, for many good reasons that I can tell you when we meet, fitter for words than writing."

From the following reign (Charles I.) the nobility of the family date its origin. In the year 1643, Sir John Byron, great grandson of him who succeeded to the rich domains of Newstead, was created Baron Byron of Rochdale in the county of Lancaster; and seldom has a title been bestowed for such high and honourable services as those by which this nobleman deserved the gratitude of his royal master. Through almost every page of the History of the Civil Wars, we trace his name in connection with the varying fortunes of the king, and find him faithful, persevering, and disinterested to the last. "Sir John Biron," says the writer of Colonel Hutchinson's Memoirs, "afterwards Lord Biron, and all his brothers, bred up in arms, and valiant men in their own persons, were all passionately the king's." There is also, in the answer which Colonel Hutchinson, when governor of Nottingham, returned, on one occasion, to his cousin-german, Sir Richard Biron, a noble tribute to the valour and fidelity of the family. Sir Richard having sent to prevail on his relative to surrender the castle, received for answer, that "except he found his own heart prone to such treachery, he might consider there was, if nothing else, so much of a Biron's blood in him, that he should very much scorn to betray or quit a trust he had undertaken."

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