Dan Snow's History Hit - The House of Byron

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

Emily Brand has written a brilliant book about the Byrons. Not just the great romantic, poet and adventurer, George Gordon Byron, but his parents and grandparents who are equally as deserving of our attention. I loved this opportunity to delve into 18th Century British life. There are admirals, villains, heroines and lovers all over the place. One family give us an entree into a world different to ours yet tantalisingly similar. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's the Easter holiday weekend here in the UK, we've got some public holidays, so I hope people are able to try and enjoy those even though we're in very straitened circumstances here so try

and spend some time with family i hope or or some time by yourself which in my case sounds quite attractive i spent plenty of time with family i can tell you got my kids around the whole time at the moment right zia certainly yes and they're pretty excited about the chocolate The flow of chocolate that is about to engulf this house I can't wait for some more chocolate In the meantime they're doing a lot of history You're doing a lot of history with your grandpa aren't you Zia? Yeah And I'm watching Horrible Histories

She's watching a lot of Horrible Histories She's learnt more from Horrible Histories than she has from her dad I'll tell you that much Let's test your grandfather's history Are you ready? Zia Zia. What red-haired queen

which king burnt the cakes that he was supposed to? King Alfred the Great. Name a castle built by... Tower of London. I didn't know who I was going to say. Because you asked me yesterday. What? Built by William the Conqueror?

Yeah I might have said Henry II What have you said then? Dover Have I told you that before? No That's right Nice work

What else happened at Dover? Remember what else happened at Dover? Who landed at Dover and jumped into the spraying foam Leading his comrades up the beach Towards where the Britons were defending. Remember, I told that story hundreds of times. Julius Caesar. Remember?

The guy jumped into the water. Come on, sharpen up, girl. Anyway, so... All right. So this podcast is about Lord Byron. But it's actually not just about Byron. It's about his incredibly brilliant family and the wonderful historian Emily Brand

who's been on the podcast before talking about love in the 18th century is here talking about one of the most remarkable dynasties in modern British history she's going to tell us all about why Byron, why the apple did not fall far from the tree there were heroes, there were villains

there were lovers, there were fighters no one was boring in the Byron family and obviously like me There were villains, there were lovers, there were fighters. No one was boring in the Byron family. And obviously... Like me. Like you. And actually, I was about to say, obviously the real hero of this piece is Byron's daughter.

Oh. Remember, who's Ada Lovelace? She was a person who invented a computer, and she was a mathematician. Pretty good. I'll give you that. So, this podcast is all about that that if you want to hear more podcasts please go to historyhit.tv it's at my new history channel there are hundreds of hours of history documentaries hundreds and hundreds of podcasts lots of great stuff on there if you use the code pod1 p-o-d-1 you will get your first

month for free and then you'll get the month after that for just one pound or euro or dollar. You're going to absolutely love it. There's plenty to watch on there. In the meantime, everyone, here's Emily Brand talking about Team Byron. So, Ada Lovelace is Lord Byron's daughter. Good to have you back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's so cool.

This is a monster, a monster. Okay, I've heard of Byron. Yes. I didn't know about the whole dynasty. So what is the dynasty? Well, I think when most people think of Byron, yeah, absolutely. Well, if they're not thinking of Burgess,

they are thinking of the poet because he was such a famous character in his own time, huge sort of rock star and has this amazing reputation both for his writing and for his scandalous sort of exploits as well. But I wanted to shift the gaze a little bit just backwards so my book starts two, three generations before the poet so it's kind of a prequel really. It's sort of the 1720 to 1798, which is when the poet inherits Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire as a 10-year-old boy. And then, yeah, it just traces them through wars, through revolutions,

a lot of sex scandals and yeah. Well listen, it's like the Joker. It's like the Joker for Byron, it's the backstory. Listen, I'm gonna ask you to do this. Let's go, let's get into it, right? Let's go, let's start the start. Who is the, who is the, who do you start with? And also I feel a bit bad you started with someone

because that means their dad was like super boring. Who, who's dad? Who do you, no, like the first person you go, this is awesome, this guy is so dramatic and so scandally. Yeah. But like why did not, there must have come a point where you go, no, he's really boring, let's start here.

Well actually it was the very first thing that drew me into this whole story. Obviously my history, research history is in sort of love and sex and scandal, so the poet is obviously, he was constantly intruding on that sort of thing. But then as a separate avenue into this book, I came across this portrait, a Thomas Gainsborough portrait of this woman, sort of 30-odd woman, aristocrat, dated around 1760, and I just fell in love with it totally. And then when I was looking up information who this was, it turned out she was a Byron, she was the poet's great aunt Isabella, so it was her that drew me into the story actually and then when I went

down this rabbit hole of research and I found out about her eldest brother who was the fifth lord and he was supposedly a wicked lord and he was doing all these murders and all this business and then the second brother had this amazing navy career and shipwrecked adventure and I just thought I have to do something on these a group biography on these three siblings and there were two others but they just weren't as interesting but they don't feature so much but so it was certainly these three amazing siblings that I just felt like I had to pull their stories together and tell it as one sort of dynasty, really, a saga. Amazing.

Okay, so let's start with the woman who you first, who was your entry point. Why was her life so interesting? Well, what first drew me was obviously this portrait, and she just looks, I don't know how to put it, she just sort of intrigued me immediately. I bet that was Gainsborough for you, I wish she painted me, I'd look like a tree, even me.

Yeah well she's just sort of really gazing very directly out, she's gorgeous looking, she's got, well it looks like she's got lilac hair which I just thought was great, it was a bit of pink and pastel colored hair powder did exist in those days so I do think she did go for a bit of a statement hairdo there but there wasn't very much out of out there about her at all and so I had to start digging into proper archives without knowing if she was going to be interesting or not. Fortunately there is a lot of her original correspondence to some of her friends and, crucially, to her second husband, who was this meticulous bloke who kept their correspondence over the course of ten years from them in this secret whirlwind engagement right through

until they have this terrible separation and she's refusing to sleep in the same bed as him and all this so I was reading this correspondence and it just gripped me totally. And you found that? I've never seen it published anywhere it was catalogued which is how I came across it. Oh my god that's like a trick you must have been that must be so it's to see someone the painting and then to realise that there's a whole archive. Yes and then she's got a bunch of stuff at Castle Howard as well, which was she became mistress of Castle Howard on marrying. So they've got a lot of, they've got the painting actually and they've got a lot of her letters to her daughters as well.

But she was just this brilliant, very headstrong, very romance-led woman. And I don't think you get that so often with 18th century women where they're all sort of aristocrats anyway where they're sort of abiding by their etiquette and going to ballrooms and doing what they're told and marrying Mr Darcy and all this sort of thing but she was desperate to find true love and she was going off with men 15 years younger than her and well below her rank and eventually she sort of elopes to the continent with a German conman soldier and tries to pass him off as an aristocrat very unsuccessfully and sort of lives in disgrace with the man that she loves. So, yeah, you know, she's

not changing the world in the same way that maybe her brother John was but I just thought her story was great. You've done that thing that so many wonderful historians are doing at the moment, you've just excavated an extraordinary overlooked and forgotten female character from our history, that's so exciting. I've been really really pleased that I've been able to tell her story on an equal footing with her brothers because in the Byron family you have these sort of great nicknames of the male characters

and they've got all these traditions and myths that have risen around them but then Isabella tends to be totally forgotten or people just say oh she was eccentric and that's it. So it's been good to be able to figure out why people are saying that about her. So talk to me about her brothers then. out why people were saying that about her. So talk to me about her brothers then. Yes so I suppose her eldest brother who was a year younger than her William and he became the fifth lord Byron and he in the course of the 1820s and 30s so we're talking after the poet's death so long after William's death he becomes the wicked lord and there's this legend of this old reclusive lunatic who lives at Newstead and refused to refuses to see people and has done the occasional murder and tried to murder his wife and all of these things and you will find

these stories at the beginning of most biographies of the poet, modern biographies of the poet as well, the same sort of things rattled out about him. So I wanted to get to the heart of what of that was true, I was wondering if I could maybe rehabilitate him a little bit, turns out no he was genuinely categorically awful but he wasn't necessarily this sort of raving mad murderer. Just really unpleasant. Yeah, just a horrible dude really. So these three siblings remind me, they are the poet's uncles and aunts.

So you've got his grandfather who's John and then the elder brother is William who is the fifth lord, so that's the poet's great uncle, and then Isabella is their sister, so it's his great aunt. There is a family tree in the book. So we got the fifth lord is awful. Yes, pretty much awful. And badly behaved in an interesting way or just unpleasant? Well at the beginning of his life, he's got a reputation by about the age of 25 for being a terrible coward. And all his neighbours are sort of saying, oh, he's got a very sad character in everything, is what one of his neighbours says. But in a sort of cowardly, embittered, very entitled, actually, is what I mean to say, an entitled way.

As he progresses through his life, he just can't control his spending. He pursues an actress to the point of sexual harassment, really. He has her sort of abducted and tried to convince to sleep with him. Loads of affairs. And then the main point in his life where he becomes most notorious is when he gets drunk at a Nottinghamshire club dinner and has a dispute a very boring dispute about sort of estate management with one of his neighbours and then he ends up stabbing him through the stomach and killing this guy that

he's known all his life so he ends up on trial for murder at the House of Lords in 1765. So then the Byron name there gets attached to this idea of duelling and villainy. Does he swing for it? He doesn't. There's a real feeling that he might because five years earlier another lord has been, that's happened to him for killing one of his servants. One of his servants, yeah. In this case he manages to turn on the charm quite enough just to be able to sort of convince his lordly peers

that he didn't kill him on purpose, it was an accident. And also he's got some quite high-up relatives, sort of Lord of the Tower of London probably helps, that he's got those connections. So essentially he just gets a fine and gets sent home in a chair that day after he's acquitted. In a chair. Okay, and then dies a horrible, lonely old man. Basically, yeah.

Right, yeah. What about the other brother? So the other brother is John. His name, he's gone down in history as Foulweather Jack Byron. And so he is the poet's grandfather and his is the only name and the only sort of legends that have risen up that I can trace to his actual lifetime which I was really really happy to be able to do because you know it proves that they weren't just all stories that were invented in the 19th century but he went off to the Navy when he was 14 and then when he was 16 to 17 he was involved in this amazing shipwreck just off the coast of South America and then a subsequent five and a half year long journey of him trying to make his way up through Chile and then

get back to England, encountering all these... Anything that could go wrong goes wrong for him, basically. So he gets his first fame as a 22-year-old when he gets home from that story. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire

Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man

who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. And the best nickname I've ever come across in history, Foulweather Jack Byron.

Yes, we've got Foulweather Jack, the Wicked Lord Byron, and then Mad Jack, who was the poet's father. But the Foulweather Jack is the only one I'm going to definitively say he had in his lifetime. Oh my gosh. Because that's the only... That's very cool. I've actually heard of that story, and I knew it was a Byron, but I didn't know that that was a relative of the poet. Yeah, absolutely. And the poet was super proud of his grandad. He never met him. John died two years before the poet was born so he didn't know him but the story seeps into Don Juan. There's a scene in Don Juan where the hero

it's just totally lifted and the poet has to actually say something along the lines of, oh his sufferings were comparative to those related in my granddad's narrative. He has to name check his granddad because otherwise everyone would know he's just stolen all the details. So yeah, there's a good link there. He was very aware of that story. And he went on to become an Admiral, did he? He did, yeah. He rose steadily through sort of the ranks I suppose. After he got back he got married, had a bunch of children, his poor wife was just constantly left. Every time he went off on a voyage she was always one month pregnant. So she went through this on her own the whole time, every single time. But he sort of distinguished himself in the Seven Years' War and then was promoted to, I think it was Rear Admiral,

just before the American Revolution breaks out. And so he's sort of sent off to play his part, quite disappointing part in that war as well for him. And that was where we can trace his name, Foulweather Jack II, because every time he tries to tries to pursue this French fleet, the storm gets him. Don't talk to me about those storms. We'd still be one big happy family,

out of the bad weather of the American war. Well, kind of. Okay, so he has a son, Jack, who's mad. He is called Mad Jack and we have one likely very unreliable print of him and this is from the first time when he explodes into the public scene and that's because he's having an affair with a married Martianess and all the newspapers are gossiping about it and he gets a special sex scandal column in one of the

magazines of the time. But he's had, his dad's been absent a lot when he was growing up, I feel a bit sorry for him, right? I was looking at this, he was away for some of the time but most of the time there's a good two, three year chunks where he's stationed in Plymouth, which is just down the road. So I think he's been framed as this absent father but I think most of the time he's probably maybe unless he just didn't go home so mad possibly so mad Jack is making aim for himself in all the wrong ways yeah he's from a very young age I think as a teenager he's

convincing his dad to let him have have bits of inheritance early and then going off and spending it on swords and new jackets and stuff like that. So he knows what he's after in his life and it's very quickly gambling and women. I won't say he's mad, but he wasn't great either. I want to say the George Best and the rest of it he wasted. I want to say the George Best and the rest of it he wasted. And so how does he grow up to, he has the poet at some stage, does he? Yeah, so he has this first marriage actually, this first affair is so public and this Lady Carmarthen who he has an affair with falls pregnant. She confesses to her husband Lord Carmarthen and he obviously throws her out.

So these two quickly get married. I think she's eight-plus months pregnant at this point. Is that unusual in Georgian society, that there'd be an actual divorce and a remarriage? It would certainly have been very expensive. So I think, I don't know, I'm not sure why Amelia, Lady Carmarthen, would quite have done that unless she was just besotted with Jack and felt like she had to be with this man. They've been having an affair for a few months. By all accounts, they were having a great time as it came out in the sort of court case about it. Do you get details in the court case?

Yes, so it's all transcribed. It's brilliant. It's all these tales. The servants are giving their testimony and it's all you know we heard them giggling behind the closed door and when we went in the sheets were very much tumbled and we've seen him creeping around the house with no breeches on and all this sort of thing. That's a smoking gun. It's damning, it's very damning. So they get married. So they get married they have three children of whom just one survives and this is Augusta and she's a very big figure in the poet's life later on. And then Amelia dies a year after that. Jack sort of rocks around spending

money. He's done alright after this marriage because she was very rich and he's got some of that or has benefited from that at least. He goes off to France, he stays with his Aunt Isabella who's my Gainsborough portrait lady, gets the money out of her, spends that. I think that she convinces him to go back to Bath, to England to find a new wife which is what he does. He goes to the assembly rooms of Bath and a very fashionable society of the time and there he finds Catherine Gordon who's a Scottish heiress, and this is the poet's mother. And within a matter of weeks, she's totally seduced.

They get married in Bath, they don't even leave. And then the poet is born about three years after that. He abandons them fairly quickly. When the poet's two and a half, he leaves. Money problems again. He's spent all of her fortune. Has a bit of an incestuous affair with his sister in France while he's living there, and then he dies. He has an affair with his sister in France?

Yes, so it's a bit of a weird parallel in that obviously one of the things that the poet was most notorious for was having a sexual relationship with his half-sister Augusta Jack's daughter but there's a lot of correspondence it's at the Bodleian Library and it is all of Jack's correspondence to his

elder sister Fanny Lee sort of it's very hard not to come to the conclusion that they they were having a sexual relationship unless he was just being a total weirdo in every letter that he wrote to her but it's all full of you are the most handsome woman I've ever known and it makes me so mad that you are my sister he gives tales of all these women that he's having sex with um courtesans and actresses and all of this but then he'll make some really inappropriate comment like um i have been with all these women

but whenever i do anything extraordinary underlined i always think of you so it's very much like a bit grim reading really um but his letters they're always sexually charged always really inappropriate um so yeah it seems that while they were in France if not before because they could have been doing this their whole lives and just the letters don't exist and don't survive so that's a grim end to his story okay and Okay, and so then the poet comes of age. And is the poet's reputation for sexual licence and adventure, I mean, what elements of his reputation do you think are fair? Probably most of it.

I would say so. I think we've got such an amazing survival rate of his letters. He was a prolific letter writer, and I'm sure there are many that haven't survived, but there are so many left. You can see in them how he's presenting himself to different people and with different stories, and sometimes he just can't help but reveal a little bit too much about some affair that he's had with some woman. reveal a little bit too much about some affair that he's had with some woman. When he was at Cambridge at university, he and his friends had the sort of coded language for their sexual relationships with boys as well. So the sort of homosexual code kind of thing that they had for them. So it runs

through his life and he was generally quite terrible. The big question we always ask about Georgian but also Victorian society is like what is, to what extent is this family unusual, to what extent are they kind of superficial customs that seem to govern social interactions within the aristocracy, just a sort of front for like, you know, savage boozing and shagging. What do you think? Do you think this family that you've managed to track actually had something weird going on,

or do you think they were pretty normal? I think with the poet himself, obviously loads of attention is drawn to it because he's such a public figure and because he relished it so much he liked to sort of be this enigmatic character coming into a ballroom and all the ladies start swooning because you know they wish that he would ruin their reputation sort of thing. With his ancestors it was a self-professed era of boredness and boozing and all that, as you say. But they do come up with weird regularity in sort of these sex scandal columns.

So Foulweather Jack, who is otherwise, from this perspective, is quite the gallant character. But he turns up in this sex scandal column and everything's laid bare about his affair with a teenage chain maid when he's in his mid-50s. So there's no right proper goodies and baddies here, they're all sort of getting involved. There is maybe one goodie who was Byron's daughter. Well this is true, she didn't have to put up with any of their nonsense, probably. So, I mean, it's probably beyond the range of your book, I guess. It is. So my book, the poet kind of frames it, but it is the prequel to his life, and he turns up in 1798, and for the most part, that's the end of the book. But of course,

these are all Ada's relatives as well. These are all Ada Lovelace, for everyone who doesn't know, who was possibly the world's first computer programmer. She came up with the idea. Yeah, amazing. What a family. They're great. I love them. I'm so glad to be able to tell their story in this way, I think for the first time. I mean, it's been done, there's been academic studies and there's been 2000 year long genealogical studies but this is really getting to the nitty gritty of how they viewed the century and lots of things that haven't been revealed before.

As someone who's obsessed with the 18th century this sounds like a must read, it's just a completely different take on it and it's a lovely, lovely way through the century. Thank you. The book is called? It's called The Fall of the House of Byron. It's drama, sounds dramatic. It does. Was it a fall? Was it because I guess they, were they rich and then by the time... book is called? It's called The Fall of the House of Byron. It's drama, sounds dramatic. It does.

Was it a fall? Was it because I guess they, were they rich and then by the time? They were fine at the beginning actually. The fourth lord, they weren't wildly wealthy but the fourth lord had made Newstead this amazing mansion. It was very much admired. He'd been sort of a careful, cautious money keeper. So when the fifth lord inherits at 13 he's got a decent enough fortune he runs through the whole thing and more um and then you know by the end of the century newstead is literally a ruin because he's not been able to afford to afford the upkeep for it so cool well you know um it's the fall of the house of byron but um it must have been a hell of a ride thank you very much for it so cool well you know um it's the fall of the house of byron but um it must have

been a hell of a ride thank you very much for coming the podcast thank you i hope you enjoyed the podcast just before go, bit of a favor to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free.

Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there

and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists,

entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.