The Rest Is History - 440. Lord Byron: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (Part 1)

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

Few lives from history can have contained as many strange and exciting strands as that of Lord Byron's, whose story reflects the great dramas of the Napoleonic era. A vampiric hero of devilish charisma; a martyr for liberty, a licentious lothario; Byron’s cultural and literary impact cannot be underestimated. The remarkable course of his life, and his mercurial nature can in part be explained by the dark events of his childhood, and the outlandish history of his own family. Born with a club foot - his “satanic mark” - to “Mad Jack” Byron, a former gigolo dogged by incest and financial ruin, and an unpredictable mother, a strange curse seemed to lie over the family. Impoverished before the inheritance of his title and a romantic ruin in Nottinghamshire, the plump and provincial boy would finally find solace at school and university, where he transformed into the glamorous rake he would become. There too would he discover the dubious sexual passions that would haunt his life… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the diabolic history of the Byron family, and the young Byron’s birth, troubled upbringing, and controversial adolescence. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, Tom Holland here. This is just to warn you that this episode contains sexually sensitive content, so please do be warned. But don't necessarily be put off listening to it for that reason. I was 14 when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity. I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone, Byron is dead.

So that was Alfred Lord Tennyson, the author of The Charge of the Light Brigade, poet laureate of the United Kingdom in the 19th century. And Tennyson is remembering the moment when one of his great heroes, Lord Byron, died at Missolonghi on the 19th of April, 1824, 200 years ago, Tom. 200 years ago, this coming Friday, if you're listening to this episode in the week it goes out.

Crikey. And this is a very poignant moment for you because you love Lord Byron, don't you? Let's be honest. Let's just put it out there. He was my favourite poet because we should add that Missolonghi is in Greece and Byron Dye is a martyr for Greek freedom. He wrote a lot about Greece. I was very into Greece. I was very romantic. He spoke for me. And he is a figure who is not just a poet, but a kind of legend really. And so the news of his death, a martyr for Greek freedom, only 36 years old, it kind of sent shockwaves, not just across Britain, but across the whole of Europe. Because I think there's a case for saying that he is the first great international celebrity and by far the most famous British person of his day. More famous than Nelson, Tom, surely not.

I guess Nelson is dead by the time that Byron has his apogée. But yes, because I think that Nelson is a national hero, but Byron is a focus for international adulation. I mean, I have to say that when I was coming back to his poetry and to his life to work out the structure for these episodes, one thing that struck me was that in many ways of all the people that we have done episodes on so far, including even John Lennon, I cannot imagine anyone who is more calculated to infuriate you than Byron. Yeah. He's the kind of anti-Dominic Sandbrook. Well, so for people who don't like one of the presenters of The Rest is History,

this will be a dream series. Yes, Tom. So I'll be honest, I approach this in a spirit of Byron phobia, but I'm prepared to be converted. You know, I'm open-minded. That said, irrespective of my own personal views about Byron, it is an extraordinary story. I mean, this series will take-minded. That said, irrespective of my own personal views about Byron, it is an extraordinary story. I mean, this series will take in, as you said,

the origins of kind of celebrity culture, kind of merchandising of a personality. There's a lot of sex. So much sex. There's a lot of travel. I mean, it's like a Bond film. Every 10 minutes, we're at a different location. Albania, Greece, Constantinople.

You know, he's going all over the Mediterranean and then back to Britain and all kinds of jumping in and out of people's beds and stuff. But it's a brilliant window, isn't it? Into the world of the kind of, I guess it's the Regency. It's what we think of as Regency Britain. Yeah, it is the Regency. And I think also what's fascinating about it is that he stands on the cusp of the regency moving into the Victorian period. And he is a focus for all kinds of moral indignation. And that also is a part of the story. It's a part of his appeal, but it's also why he is so feared and traduced. So before we start the account of his life, probably worth, just for those who don't really know very

much about him, just going through why he becomes so famous. So above all, he is a great poet. Yeah. And he is successful in a way that no poet before, or more particularly since, has ever been. I mean, poets today tend not to be rock stars. Byron was, in a way, the kind of the prototype of the rock star. So he writes this poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which is basically a kind of a travelogue. It's an account of his gap year, basically. But it's so romantic. It situates him as this kind of dark, charismatic hero at the centre of it. And the whole of Regency London

swoons over it. And Byron's famous comment on it is, I awoke one morning and found myself famous. And he's kind of like the Beatles, you know, having released She Loves You or something. The hits just keep coming. So he releases this poem called The Corsair, which again is all about a dramatic, doomed, heroic hero out in the Aegean. And that sells 10,000 copies on publication day, which is a record that still stands. I mean, no poet will ever beat that. No, because who's going to rush out and buy 10,000 copies of any poet's work these days? And the woman that he ends up marrying, and it's a disastrous marriage, but she is as obsessed by him as everyone else. And she coins this term, Byromania. So that is the prototype

for every kind of cultural mania that has followed. And I think it's worth emphasising that he's a genuinely great poet. I mean, his best poem, Don Juan, is incredibly darkly funny. Byron is very funny as well as very romantic. I would say the most readable long poem in English. But it's not just his literary talent that makes him famous, because he is incredibly good looking. He is the embodiment of the romantic rake. And there's just a succession of aristocratic women who are swooning over him. Lady Roseberry, who almost faints when she sees him. Lady Mildmay said that when he spoke to her, her heart beat so violently that she could hardly answer him. And the aristocratic lady who becomes most notoriously obsessed by him, Caroline Lamb,

she is kind of the prototype of the groupie really. The woman who becomes completely obsessed by a star and is driven to kind of madness. But the aristocratic posh groupie, right? The posh groupie. But I mean, it's not just posh groupies. So feminists also feel his allure. So Mary Shelley, the wife of Percy Shelley, of course, Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein after spending time with Byron in the year without a summer of 1816. She said of Byron, I mean, she was obsessed by him as well. There was something enchanting in his manner, his voice, his smile, a fascination in them. So, I mean, absolutely the glamour of the rock star as well as the great poet, I think. Pure charisma.

Yeah, incredible charisma. I mean, often quite dangerous charisma, incredible charisma. I mean, often quite dangerous charisma, dark charisma. I mean, no one would say he was a good man, but he's an exciting man, right? He's an exciting man. And his charisma is not just that of a poet, of course, but also that of a freedom fighter. So as we said, he dies a martyr for Greece, taking part in the Greek War of Independence that had begun in 1821 and was still raging when he dies in 1824. And although he doesn't really contribute to the campaign, he dies of fever without ever having fought a battle. His death kind of fires up Europe

to support the Greeks. It's kind of as, I don't know, as though Taylor Swift were to die a martyr for Ukraine or something like that. It's kind of on that level. It transfigures the sense of what is at stake. And Byron, to this day, is probably the most celebrated foreigner in Greece. There are statues of him everywhere, squares that are named after him, streets. So hugely popular in Greece, but also dominant. I mean, he becomes an inspirational figure to people throughout the 19th century, doesn't he? Within a year of his death in Russia, the Tsar Alexander I dies. There's a kind of an attempted liberal uprising before his heir, Nicholas I, comes to power. So the Decembrists, it's called. They all get rounded up and executed. And a volume of Byron's poetry is in the hands of one of the poets who is executed.

And the French painter, Eugène Delacroix, so he painted the famous picture of liberty on the barricades that people often identify with the French Revolution. He said, just remember passages from Byron when you wish to rekindle the flame. Yeah. And so, a big inspiration in the revolutions of 1848. I mean, he's the Che Guevara, really. I mean, he's a kind of an icon of cool and liberty. But you mentioned that he's also quite a bad man. So, mad bad and dangerous to know, Lady Caroline Lamb. It's her famous description of him. And Tennyson, when he is an adult, repudiates his childhood obsession with

Byron. So this is the guy at the beginning who, when he was 14, shouted Byron is dead or wrote it or whatever and was so upset. And he says, actually, do you know what I've thought about it? And Byron's a terrible person. And actually in that story, you have the transition from Regency morality to Victorian morality, don't you? Because the Victorians basically thought Byron was a terrible man. I mean, he is a rake. He is a libertine. His marriage, I think beating even Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath into second place is the most notorious in literary history. The kind of charges of sodomy and incest floating around. Yeah. You don't really want a charge of incest hanging over you, do you? Well, particularly not in the heyday of the

Victorian period. But I think the reason why, in a way, that just adds to his allure is because it kind of fuses with the element of self-portrayal in his poetry. I mentioned the corsair, this poem, the record-breaking poem. It has this couplet, he left a corsair's name to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes. But there's a sense in which actually the image of the Byronic hero is actually rather the other way around, that the Byronic hero is a man of incredible power, potency, quality, but is shadowed by a single terrible crime. And there was a very funny feature about this by Sam Leith, great writer, recently marking the anniversary in Unheard, Dominic, U-N-H-E-R-D. So I'll just read what Sam said. To be Byronic is to be willful, ardent, brooding, superhumanly attractive,

and to have a thrilling disregard for bourgeois convention. It is to be an existential hero. It is, admittedly, usually to have a flaw, but the flaw is of the ennobling tragic flaw sort, like being too tempestuous and passionate. The flaw in a Byronic hero is the sort of humble, braggery flaw that makes him, it's always him, more interesting. You'll never catch a Byronic hero is the sort of humble braggery floor that makes him it's always him more interesting you'll never catch a Byronic hero having the sort of flaws the rest of us deal with

such as being a bit thick or suffering from athlete's foot Byronic heroes may be cruel and self-involved but chicks dig them so Byron I mean you mentioned at the beginning you said we've done lots of episodes and other disreputable and unpleasant characters. And you mentioned John Lennon. And this is obviously the same thing that people would say of John Lennon, isn't it? Oh yes, he's flawed, but he's so interesting and difficult and dangerous and glamorous and artistic. And his flaws, in a weird way, to his admirers, actually accentuate his appeal rather than diminish it. And that's true of Byron too, right? Yeah, but I think that Byron foregrounds the sense of danger and kind of moral danger more obviously than John Lennon.

I mean, John Lennon would always say that he was on the side of angels, just give a piece of chance. Byron is more, I mean, he's self-consciously satanic. Sympathy for the devil. Sympathy for the devil, yeah. So, I mean, it's-consciously satanic sympathy for the devil sympathy for the devil yeah so I mean it's Mick Jagger rather than John Lennon

who identifies with the romantic poets yeah and particularly Shelley and Byron and Byron in particular is hugely influential I would say

on the whole course of popular culture from his lifetime right the way up to the present day so very very obviously he's a big influence on the Brontes

so Rochester or Heathcliff. Heathcliff, obviously, brooding, big coat, standing on moors, all that kind of stuff. Absolutely. And from them, of course, comes the matinee hero right the way into Hollywood and everything, but also a big influence on kind of the way that gay heroes are presented. So Dorian Gray is hugely influenced by Byron. And of course, the figure of the vampire, because Byron is the model for the first aristocratic vampire. So Count Dracula would be unthinkable without him. So just on the vampire, wouldn't it be a brilliant thing if somebody had written a series of novels about vampires with Lord Byron in them? It would.

Is there such a person involved with the rest of history? Possibly. Very possibly. My first ever literary offering. Just Google Tom Holland vampire and you'll open the door to a cornucopia of delights. A can of worms. But it's also, I think, a reason for doing a series on Byron. It's his anniversary. He's a very interesting cultural figure. But also, I mean, he does hold, as you said at the start,

a kind of a mirror up to really fascinating periods. So it is the Napoleonic era. Byron and Napoleon are often compared, not least by Byron himself. Yeah. Amazing quotation from Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, great historian. Yeah. Two men have died within our recollection who at a time of life in which few people have completed their education had raised themselves each in his own department to the height of glory. One of them died at Longwood, the other at Missolonghi. So Longwood is where Napoleon died on St Helena and Missolonghi is where Byron died.

Yeah, and both are exiles. And the point there is actually both are exiles, but also both were young. That's a really important part of Byron's legend, isn't it? He doesn't get old. He achieves extraordinary success at a very young age. And there's your kind of rock star, because film stars tend to break through very young. And often their age is part of their charisma, isn't it? Yes. And because he's the icon both of Greek nationalism and of romanticism, both of them,

I think, over the course of the 19th century come to be associated with youth. And again, that's something that you very much see in the 1848 revolutions, where Byron's ghost is stalking all the episodes of that extraordinary year. So I think he is a really, really fascinating historical figure. I mean, his story is incredible and he sheds light on this really, really significant moment in European history, Napoleonic Wars and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the repression, which Byron is very opposed to, but also this shift from the Regency era, the Georgian era, the era of, you know, roistering and doistering and Jaco Macaco and all that kind of thing into the Victorian period. And the ambivalences that he creates, I think,

are not completely gone because I think there's a temptation to think, oh, the Victorians, they're so stuffy. Ha ha. Yeah. Which is not right. Why can't they get down with it? But actually there are reasons, I think, right the way into the present day, why people would look at Byron in a slightly morally condemnatory way. And we'll touch on some of them. Yeah. So the thing about Byron is that basically everything about him is insanely melodramatic. And this is true of his ancestry. Okay. Because he's not just Byron, he is Lord Byron. He is a peer of the realm. And that also, I think, is an incredibly important part of his glamour. And Byron, even as he affected the pose of a rebel, was also very, very insistent on his rank.

And that rank derives from the fact that his ancestors had come over with William the Conqueror and had been given lands by William in the Midlands, and they settled there. And then, like so many other members of the gentry in the Reformation, they take advantage of the dissolution of the monasteries. They profiteer from Henry VIII's attack on the Catholic Church. They do. So they're in the Midlands and there is an abbey there at a place called Newstead, which in fact was not an abbey. It was an Augustinian priory that had been founded by Henry II. But it gets dissolved and it gets sold by

henry viii's agents in 1540 to sir john byron and the byrons settle in newstead abbey and they leave a large section of the abbey basically just to decay so they build their house in the middle of it but there are whole sections yeah and in time, this will make it everything that the romantics adore. The sense of, you know, bare ruined choirs, all that kind of thing. Right. I have to say, Tom, it's not in a terribly romantic part of the country. So it's near Mansfield, isn't it? Sort of Nottinghamshire mining country.

Yeah, that's right. And not a place that you would normally identify with romance and glamour. I don't want to offend our listeners from Nottinghamshire. But as we will see, mining actually plays quite an important part in this story. Oh, tantalising. Because it comes with the lands on which there are quite a lot of coal mines. Okay. So that's a source of his wealth. So the first Lord Byron is created in 1643,

which of course is when the Civil War is being fought. The guy who becomes Sir John Byron, who becomes Lord Byron, he's fighting on the side of the king. And he's given his peerage as a reward for his valour at the first battle of Newbury. And he then commands the right wing at Marston Moor, not to any great effect. Because of course the royalists lose Marston Moor. And when the king is defeated, he goes into exile. So prefiguring what will happen to his descendant. And he dies in Paris in 1652. So it's heroism, but kind of faintly hapless heroism.

Right. And that's a tradition that continues because Lord Byron's grandfather, the poet's grandfather, is probably after Byron the most famous of his family. He's a very entertaining person, I think. He is. So he's the second son of the fourth Lord Byron, and he joins the Navy. We're now in the 18th century, so the heyday of the rise of the Navy to global power. Yeah. Royal Britannia, Heart of Oak, people eating roast beef on ships, all that. Yes. So he joins as a midshipman rises up through the ranks and he has a slightly

unfortunate name of foul weather jack well that's his nickname not his name you wouldn't name somebody foul weather as they know so the ship that he joins as midshipman it's been the subject of a very good book recently yeah by david gran who also wrote killers of the flat moon the thing that inspired the film, yeah. Very successful American non-fiction writer. Yeah. So the guy who will come to be nicknamed Foulweather Jack joins it in 1740,

and the HMS Wager is going around the world. And in 1741, it is shipwrecked on an island of Patagonia. Yeah. And Foulweather Jack is one of 19 men who get into a lifeboat, and they're cast adrift and he has taken with him his little pet dog and the pet dog gets eaten by the starving men and byron adapts this as an episode in his his great poem don jewin on the sixth day they fed upon his hide and jewin who had still refused because the creature was his father's dog that died,

now feeling all the vulture in his jaws, with some remorse received, they first denied, as a great favour, one of the four paws, which he divided with Pedrillo, who devoured it, longing for the other two. Pedrillo is Juin's tutor, who in due course will be eaten by the men. And Dominic, this is also the inspiration for patrick o'brien's novel the unknown shore so that was a precursor wasn't it of the auburn matter in master and commander series so some people say the relationship in that book anticipates russell crowe and who's mattering paul bettany anyway that's by the by right but the whole um patrick o'brien royal navy all that kind of thing i mean this is very much the world that Fowler Jack is part of. And he does tremendously well. He does a heroic service in the Seven Years

War, ends up commanding the British Navy in American waters during the War of Independence, has nine children, and dies in 1786 before his father. So he never actually becomes Lord Byron. And instead, the person who becomes the new Lord Byron, the fifth Lord Byron, is his younger brother, William, who also goes to sea, but then gives it up when he inherits the title. And he is known as the Wicked Lord. And the Wicked Lord, so just to get this into context, the Wicked Lord is your Lord Byron's great uncle. Is that right? That's right. Okay. Yes. So the wicked Lord,

why the wicked Lord? Well, because he kills a neighbour in a brawl. Okay. In a tavern on Pall Mall in London. Okay. He's said to have organised orgies at Newstead Abbey, to have shot his coachman dead, to have murdered his wife by throwing her into the lake. None of which I think is actually true, but it's kind of reflective of his reputation. Oh no, but you thought we'd throw it in there anyway, just to muddy his name. He runs badly out of money, chops down all the wood in the woods around Newstead Abbey for timber, flogs off everything in the property from paintings to toothpicks. And he leases 20,000 acres of coal mines in Rochdale in lancashire for 60 pounds annual rent which is obviously a terrible deal and again money worries will be a shadow over

the poet's life right right because obviously you know the fact that he is burning through the inheritance is not good news for whoever's going to succeed him now what a foul weather jack's elder son who is the father of the poet so he he also has a nickname it's mad jack mad jack we've got a mad jack a wicked lord and foul weather jack yeah we're now onto mad jack and he's basically a real life mr wickham okay so in pride and prejudice the cad who runs off with lydia yeah and mad jack i mean he's worse than a cad i'd say he's a bounder a rotter a rotter okay he's a rotter right so he goes to westminster hopeless yeah gets sent to military school in paris where he has a lovely time kind of swagging around in his uniform being heartless and getting off with people and you know

seducing them and dumping them he's a great one for gambling debts his parents end up cutting him off because he's burnt through so much money and so he becomes a gigolo like a professional gigolo yeah professional gigolo like money changes hands yeah wow okay but all the time he's looking around for an heiress yeah and in 1778 he meets with a very distant ancestor of George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the pod show host, who's called Amelia Osborne, who is the wife of the Marquess of Carmarthen. Mad Jack and Amelia Osborne elope and they settle in France. They have three children. Two of them die, but one of them, a girl called Augusta, survives to adulthood. But Amelia Osborne dies very soon afterwards. She dies in 1784. It is rumoured of ill usage from her husband, but Byron, it is fair to say,

always defended his father, commented, it is not by brutality that a young officer in the guard seduces and carries off a marchioness and marries two heiresses it is true that he was a very handsome man which goes a long way that's a terrible excuse i mean i think that's a pathetic excuse i mean it's perfectly possible he could have abused his wife and yet been very handsome i mean those two things are not i know but byron's sticking up for his dad that's touching okay fine so his dad mad jack has got one girl called augusta and his son's a wife yeah and lord byron has yet to enter the story so i'm going to assume that he marries again yeah so byron in that comment said that he'd married two heiresses so the second heiress is someone who he meets in bath so the moment that

his first wife is dead he comes back to England, goes to Bath. Of course. Which, as all readers of Jane Austen will know, that is where you go. That's the marriage market. Yeah. And there he meets with a young Scottish heiress, Catherine Gordon,

who is heiress to the estates of Gite, which is near Aberdeen. Right. And she, it is fair to say, is considerably less glamorous than the Marchioness of Cormoran. I can see the words staring out at me from the notes. Frumpish, waddling, plain. That's harsh.

And provincial and socially awkward. So what was it attracted, Mad Jack, to the... Oh yes, the estates of Gite. The wealthy heiress. Estates of Gite. So he mirrors this woman purely for her money. Purely for her money, yes. And the moment they've got married and they get married in Bath, she immediately starts

selling off her inheritance to pay off her husband's debts. Oh, this is all very bad. And I mean, this is so familiar from anyone who's ever read a 19th century novel. Yeah. You know, the gauche, hapless provincial girl who gets seduced by the cad and then he squanders all her money. I feel sorry for her some and you know she gets pregnant very quickly and you know he blows her money so quickly that even before she's given birth her husband is is having to borrow money from his tailor

incredibly humiliating yeah and flee to france and Catherine has to move, I mean, it's shocking, she has to move into a flat above a shop, which she does in Cavendish Square. In Marleybone, yeah. And that is where, on the 22nd of January, 1788, George Gordon Byron is born, her son. So Gordon comes from her family, obviously a Scottish name. Yes. Quick question about Byron, does he ever think of himself as Scottish? We'll come to that.

Okay, oh, exciting. It's a very interesting question. Yes. Quick question about Byron. Does he ever think of himself as Scottish? We'll come to that. Okay. Oh, exciting. It's a very interesting question. Okay. So he is born with a club foot and they can't really afford the treatment for it. And later in life, he'll be very resentful of this. He will feel that it was his mother's fault that this club foot wasn't cured. Okay. And he comes to see it as a kind of a marker of what sets him apart. It's a kind of a satanic stamp. The mark of Cain kind of thing. The mark of Cain. But he kind of feels, even as he is tortured by it, he also feels that it kind of elevates him above the common run. It's something that marks him as different. And the reason that there is no possibility of kind of getting proper medical treatment for it the moment he's born is because obviously daddy isn't there because daddy is off

dodging the bailiffs. I think it's pretty harsh to blame his mother and not his father for it, frankly. It is very harsh. I guess it's because basically daddy is barely there. So Byron doesn't know him where he has lots of scope to blame his mother because his mother is always there. Anyway, they move from London to Aberdeen because that's in Scotland. And so therefore, under Scottish law, Jack can't be arrested for debts accrued in England. And it's obviously a complete nightmare. Jack Byron comes and joins his wife there. But again, they have so little money that they have to, again, live in a flat above a shop. And just to add to the fun, they have a sternly Calvinist nursemaid called Agnes Grey, who just makes it terrible. They're endlessly rowing. Byron's mother is kind of

always losing her temper with him, calling him a damned lame brat and then smothering him in kisses. Jack is leeching her out of every last penny. He then vanishes to France, where Dominic, he embarks on an affair with his sister. Okay. Stop right there, Tom. More incest will feature in this podcast. What is it about the Byrons and incest? Why is he sleeping with his sister? I don't know. I mean, she has lots of money. He knows her. That's not the reason. Well, it is because he has so little money. Whoever can get the money off. That's fine. But I mean, it seems weird for his sister to say, listen, it's a condition of me bailing you out. I mean, that's not normal.

I agree. It's very much not the kind of behavior that you get in Chipping Norton. I entirely accept that. But it's the kind of thing that if you're a mad rake, that's what you do. But anyway, the sister goes off to bath, leaves Jack there, and he's so skint. He starts coughing up blood, probably dies of TB. Byron thinks that he'd slit his throat, but probably not. And he is dead by 1791. I mean, he's in France at the heyday of the terror and everything. Yeah.

But he obviously has other things on his mind. Yeah. And the consequence of all this is with his club foot, his father going off, sleeping with his sister, coughing up blood, possibly killing himself. Byron feels that he has a cursed inheritance. Well, I think it's fair to say he hasn't had the ideal start in life, isn't it, Tom? And things actually get worse, excitingly.

So we'll return after the break to see how things could possibly get worse for him. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the life of George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, great rake, great poet, great character, an international celebrity of the early 19th century. Tom, his childhood so far has had something of the Victorian novel about it and actually becomes even more Victorian novel after his father's death, doesn't it?

Yeah, because they're stranded in Aberdeen. You know, this little boy growing up there with his mother who's been fleeced by his father and this stern Calvinist nursemaid, Agnes Grey. And it's awful, basically. They're very poor. He has very kind of rudimentary schooling. It all looks awful. But then, great expectations. Because what happens is that the wicked law's heir is only surviving grandson. So that's Byron's cousin, I'm guessing. Second cousin or something, would it? I don't know. It's all very confusing.

Okay. But basically, as it stands, Byron is not going to succeed because the wicked Lord has a grandson. But then this grandson gets killed at the siege of Calvi in 1794, which is the same one that Nelson loses his eye at, I think, isn't it? Yeah. Hit by spinsters in his eye, shrapnel. Yeah. So this is on Corsica. The British are trying to capture Corsica.

They're trying to get a Mediterranean base in 1794. They're fighting the French Revolutionary Forces. They actually do capture Calvi, but this guy is killed. Yeah. And Byron is now in prime position to inherit what is left of the estate. He is the heir. Right. And so immediately, you know, his prospects have massively brightened.

He's moved to the grammar school, gets much better education. And because he now knows that he's going to become a lord, I think he starts kind of chafing against what he sees as the provincialism of Aberdeen. And he escapes it in two ways. One by, he comes to love the grandeur of the mountains around him. He sees rugged terrain as an escape from, you know, the shop and the nursery maid and all that kind of thing. Which is very 1790s, isn't it?

Unbelievably 1790s. I mean, the love of nature and the great vistas and brooding thoughts out on the craggy hills and all that stuff. All that kind of thing. Yeah. But also very 1790s is losing yourself in books because this is exactly what Napoleon did. So like Napoleon, Byron is obsessed by Roman history, but also by Oriental history.

So he loves travel accounts of people going to the Ottoman Empire, say, or to Greece or wherever. Yeah. And he loves the Arabian Nights. And this is a fascination that will be with him forever. A taste for the exotic, I guess it's fair to say. Yeah. And then comes the moment they've all been waiting for, 19th of May, 1798, the death of the wicked Lord. And he leaves so little money that actually it's a bit of an effort

for Byron's mother, Catherine, to scrape the money together. But they get it, get into a stage coach, head down to Nottinghamshire, move to Newstead Abbey, and it's basically a ruin. The Wicked Lord has not been a dab hand at the DIY, I think it's fair to say. But to the newly elevated Lord Byron, it's absolutely thrilling. He's 10 years old. He's inherited this kind of broken down ruin. I mean, unbelievably exciting. Right. He's got this kind of broken down ruin. I mean, unbelievably exciting. Right.

He's got a bit of a couplet here, haven't you? A nice poem. Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle. Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay. This is the kind of poetry he writes to begin with. It's very kind of melodramatic, but you could see why. Yeah. So slightly gothic.

It's a gothic scene. Completely gothic. I mean, this is the age of the gothic, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Sort of bare ruined choirs, memories of the past, the wind howling, all that business. Yes. But his affairs are in an absolute mess. And he has this lawyer, John Hanson, who in time will show himself to be rather sinister. But he's trying to get it all in order, try and raise some money, which he does pretty effectively.

And Byron's mother stays at Newstead, but Byron himself is taken out because it's felt that this isn't a good place for a boy to be growing up. He's only 10, right? I mean, it'd be mad for him to be there. So he is sent to Nottingham to live with Agnes Grey, the Bible-thumping nursemaid. Yeah. Who nevertheless turns out to be very badly behaved. So despite her stern Calvinism, she's actually spending all her time getting drunk and having flings with coachmen. And then she starts sexually abusing the young Byron. Okay.

What on earth is going on there? He's 10. When you say she's sexually abusing him, I mean. She starts masturbating him. Manipulating him. Yeah. Messing around with him. Yeah.

And he doesn't want this to happen? It's against his will? Well, I mean, it has a seismic influence on him. Yeah. I mean, so firstly, he comes to associate Christianity with hypocrisy and cant. Not unreasonably in her case. Absolutely. Because, you know, she's speaking the Bible while she's fiddling around with him.

Yes. But I think it also leaves him with kind of tortured, ambivalent attitudes to women. Yeah, of course. Feeling that they can't really be trusted. Yeah. And he reflects about the impact of it on him shortly before he dies, you know, years later. And he says, my passions were developed very early, so early that few would believe me if I were to state the period and the facts which accompanied it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts, having anticipated life.

He's probably, what, 11, 12 when this is happening? Yeah, and he's very much not Byronic at this point. He's kind of fat. He's bashful he's shy and his neighbors so they're in provincial england they see him as provincial yeah so he's in a bad way really so tom i have to say having disloyal byron earlier on i feel sorry for him that because this is a terrible thing to have happened to him but also dominic the other thing that you'd like about what happens next is that Hanson's solution

is to send him to a private school. I applaud that. You applaud that. Yeah. So Byron gets sent to Harrow in April 1881. So he's going up in the world. Yeah.

And obviously he hates it at first because he has a club foot. I was about to say, if you've got a club foot, going to a Regency-era boarding school is probably not ideal. It's not. Yeah, it's not ideal.

And so he gets horribly bullied, but he stands up for himself. And rather like Tom Brown, Dominic, he stands up for all the other boys as well. So he's full of pluck. Oh, brilliant. But he probably doesn't do the praying and stuff that Tom Brown does. No, he doesn't do that. He doesn't do that. And then age 15, very un-Tom Brown, he develops a massive pash. A pash? A pash. Tom, you're the first person in about 40 years to use the word pash. I know. It just seems the appropriate word.

Right. For an 11-year-old boy, Lord Clare. And the memory of this stays with Byron for the rest of his life. And in fact, in 1821, while they're in Italy, their coaches pass each other and Byron is absolutely unsettled by it. They kind of meet and talk for five minutes and he rushes back and writes in his journal, I never hear the word Clare without a beating of the heart, even now. So does anything happen between him and this Lord Clare? It's just kind of, he has a crush on him, basically.

Yeah, I don't think so. But I mean, I think there are all kinds of schoolboyish crushes going on. And Byron will remember Harrow as a home, a world, a paradise to me, in the way that lots of romantic private school boys do. They remember it as a kind of Eden from which they get exiled. Right. And I think that a further reason why Byron remembers it as a paradise is that once he has left Harrow and gone out into the wide world, he keeps his tastes for boys. But of course, this is now much more dangerous. And it's something that in the traditional biographies of Byron was always suppressed. It was part of what his friends wanted of edit out of the story. But I think it's pretty fundamental. And all kinds of texts over the course of the past few hundred years have been found

that demonstrate pretty conclusively that Byron's tastes were definitely homosexual. And there was a groundbreaking book that came out in the 70s, Byron and Greek Love, which, I mean, it emphasises, but also emphasizes how dangerous it was because the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars has led the British very strongly to identify homosexuality with Jacobinism, Napoleon, all kinds of filthy rot like that. And so, um, basically if you're caught having a gay affair no matter how upper class you are you risk being put in the pillory kind of beaten up or hanged and this is a kind of shadow that hangs over byron from the moment he leaves school right so he has this shadow hanging over him but

it's not all bad because of course cambridge Cambridge awaits. And the Byrons go to Trinity College. So Byron goes off to Trinity College. And basically, he loves that as well. I mean, he's loved Harrow. He loves Cambridge. He gets to wear a fancy robe covered in gold because he's a peer. So he loves that. They have different gowns if they're peers. Yeah. Really? You get a special one. I don't know whether that's still the case. Maybe if we have any Cambridge undergraduate members of the peerage. Love to know that. I mean, he cuts a tremendous dash.

He turns up for freshers week and writes to Hanson, dear sir, I will be obliged to you to order me down four dozen of wine, port, sherry, claret and Madeira, one dozen of each. So Hanson is the guy running his estate? Yes, the lawyer. So he's still dependent on Hanson? Well, Hanson is his lawyer. Okay. So he's the guy who Hanson. Well, Hanson is his lawyer. Okay. So he's the guy who's responsible for fixing things.

Right. Byron, by now, he's a peer. He's getting a taste for hard living. You know, he's not going to obey college rules. He's told that he can't have a dog. So he famously brings in a bear, installs a bear in the college. And he, in the kind of the very heady romantic way of young men in this period, and right the way through the next two centuries, who go to Oxford or Cambridge, he develops very,

very close friendships. And these are friends who will be a part of his life for a long time. The most important of these friends is a man called John Cam Hobhouse, who is actually very serious, very sober, from a radical dissenting background. So not the kind of person who would obviously hang out with a hard living peer. And to begin with, they hate each other, but they end up, I mean, Hobhouse will be Byron's closest friend throughout his life. I guess because they're both outsiders, they're both conscious of being outsiders. Yes, I think so. I think so. Yes yes but i think also they come to share so many experiences yeah and that the other one is a man called charles skinner matthews who has two very

telling nicknames one of them is citizen which is kind of you know the regency equivalent of comrade yes of course matthews is he's an atheist he's a republican you know and this is a time where expressing atheist or republican views could really get you in trouble. But so also, you know, as we've said, sodomy can get you in trouble as well. And Matthew's other nickname is the Methodist. And his homosexuality, so Charles Skinner Matthews, that would be well known to his friends. It wouldn't be hidden from them. Yeah. Be well known to his friends. Kind of, you know, a bit like Sebastian Flight in Brideshead Revisited. Yeah. It's that kind of... If you know the code, if you're part of the group, if you know the code. Yeah, exactly. Do you fancy a bit of Methodism that kind of absolutely and it's pretty clear i think that i mentioned sebastian flight byron in his second year comes back and he is transformed

into an unbelievably handsome figure so before that he'd been a bit overweight and he becomes obsessed by losing it so he sets up in a gym with gentleman john jack, who had been champion of all England from 1798 to 1803. And he also goes on an absolute starvation diet. And I think he basically becomes bulimic. Oh, really? Yeah. He's very, very obsessed by diet.

He has all kinds of weird phobias about it. For instance, he can't bear to watch a woman eat. It's kind of very weird. But over the course of his time at Cambridge, he loses almost four stone. Crikey. And I think at this point, his gay identity is incredibly important to him. Yeah. And so he has this great love affair.

And it's with a choir boy called John Edelston, who is two years younger than Byron at this point. So 16. So Byron is 18 and this guy is 16. Yeah. Okay. And it's said that Byron rescued him from drowning in the cam. Whether that's true or not, we don't know. But Byron is completely devoted to him. He claims later in life that it was a

violent though pure love and passion. We don't know whether it was. But what is certainly the case is that when Edelson's voice breaks, Byron's passion slightly fades and he goes and finds him a job in the city as an apprentice clerk. Okay. So that is, it's a thing for boys, not for men. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm not going to say anything. I mean, listeners can draw their own conclusions. No. So that is an aspect that would, you know, would raise eyebrows in the 21st century. Yeah, absolutely. And you can see why Byron is nervous about it. Yeah. And I think that because of that,

when he leaves Cambridge, he kind of becomes aggressively heterosexual. So he writes to Matthew saying, I've plunged into an abyss of sensuality. And he's talking about women, not boys at that point. But it's absolutely typical that he has a particular affair with a young prostitute called Caroline. He installs her in his rooms in London. But when she goes with him to Brighton, which of course is the most fashionable place in England at the time, made famous by the Prince Regent, he dresses her up as a boy and passes her off as his brother Gordon.

Okay, that's pretty peculiar behaviour. So again, there's the kind of hint of incest there. Yeah. I mean, let's be honest. At this point, he is somebody who, if you were describing that personality and that upbringing today, I mean, I know it's a silly thing to do, but if you did, you would say of him, he's somebody who's completely messed up.

He's had the most terrible upbringing that has really messed him up. Yeah. And he is now, to some degree, reproducing... The patterns of him. He's somebody who's completely messed up. He's had the most terrible upbringing that has really messed him up. And he is now, to some degree, reproducing- The patterns of behavior. Yeah, the patterns of behavior, the abuse that he has suffered. I mean, that guy, Edelston, by the way, was an orphan, wasn't he? So I mean, there's no way I think of dressing that up and it looking anything other than very, very dodgy. Well, I suppose you could say in Byron's defense, he's very generous. I mean, Edelson's an orphan. He doesn't have anyone to look after him. It gives him lots of money, sets him up with a job. We had this conversation about Oscar Wilde, didn't we?

Yeah. Where do you stand when you look at those kinds of relationships? Do you say this is exploitative and there is a massive power dynamic? Or do you say, actually, there's generosity here, there is genuine affection, and the other person is gaining lots from it? It's hard to know where to stand. Yeah. I think that as with Wilde, say with Byron, the aspects of his life that appalled the Victorians are not necessarily what appalled us, but there are aspects that are morally troubling to both the Victorians and to people in the 21st century, and which continues to give him this kind of selfless quality.

So you say he's messed up. I mean, he's also massively in debt. So he's been renting out Newstead all this time to try and raise cash, and he's been renting it to a guy who seems to have come on to Byron. They have a massive falling out. He kicks this guy out, goes back to Newstead and kind of has a brilliantly gothic time. He invites all his friends. They drink Madeira out of cups that are made out of the monk's skulls. They practice their shooting in the main hall of Newstead. But he's running so badly out of money that he thinks, I'm going to

have to sell it. And the other thing that's worrying him, which of course is something that worries everybody when they leave universities, what are you going to do with your life? He's been a big name on campus. Great things are expected of him, but what? So the obvious thing would be politics. He's a peer, so he can sit in the House of Lords and he takes his seat. Right. So he's automatically a politician if he wants to be. Yeah. Yeah. so he takes his seat in March 1809. And I guess by instinct, he would incline to the Whigs. So Britain at this time is governed by the Tories.

They're fighting a war. It's a pretty repressive form of government. Lots of civil liberties have been suspended. Byron strongly identifies with the more radical wing of the Whigs, the kind of Whigs who actually pretty much support Napoleon. They love the French Revolution and they love Napoleon. There's kind of Charles James Fox, you know, let's all worship at the altar of France, that kind of thing.

Yeah. But Byron, although he kind of sides with them, he doesn't want to identify with them basically because he's too egocentric, too lordly, too independent. You know, he doesn't want to have his individuality subsumed within a party system. You can't imagine him being a party man, can you? No, he's absolutely not. And so he delays giving his maiden speech. The other career, perhaps, is that as a poet. So he's been writing poetry throughout his time at Cambridge, and he publishes a collection of these poems in 1807 when he's 19, calls it Hours of Idleness. And he publishes this, at the head of it, he kind of writes this introduction where he basically says,

you know, I must plead my minority. I'm just a young man. Have these trifles. And everyone is very polite about them because, you know, he's a peer and he's very young. But the Edinburgh Review, which is a Whig publication, and so byron would have expected it to be supportive i mean just tears into him gives him one of the all-time terrible reviews in the history of english literature well byron is in good company there because there are other people in history who have had disobliging reviews from scottish newspapers yes of course and And you will recall that there was a brilliant production of the play Beckett in Scotland

in the 1990s that received a one-star review from the Scotsman. And I was playing the lead, would you believe? Right. And the impact of that devastating review on you. Yeah. Well, actually, that Byron comparison, which has often been made between the two of us. So Byron's response was to drink three bottles of claret and then to dash off a vituperative satire on the literary scene, which he called English bards and Scotch reviewers. And so he's not just attacking the people at the Edinburgh Review.

He's also basically attacking every famous poet in Britain, which Fiona McCarthy in her great biography of Byron, Byron Life and Legend, describes as an almost manic act of courage because he's basically taking on the entire literary establishment. So basically, his literary career isn't going well. And adding to the problem is that he kind of despises poets. They're not people getting out there and doing things. They're not shaping the fate of nations. They're not Napoleon. They just scribble away. Because he's like so many people, Tom, does he live in the shadow of nations they're not napoleon yeah you know they just scribble away because he's like so many people tom does he live in the shadow of napoleon because lots of people do in this period they think napoleon is a self-made man he's the kind of person who didn't exist before he's the ultimate romantic hero and i i mean you see this so much in i don't know the red and the

black by stondahl great french novel and stondahl meets byron oh really yeah i can imagine they would get on very well well so this sort of sense which I don't think people have massively had before a sense of inadequacy because they're not Napoleon does Byron have this?

well I mean in Britain by now Napoleon is well literally the bogey yes but he's Byron is unusual in the degree of hero worship

that he shows so as a boy at Harrow he had had a bust of Napoleon and had defended it against people who'd been trying to smash it and he always. So as a boy at Harrow, he had had a bust of Napoleon and had defended it against people who'd been trying to smash it. And he always kind of has a soft spot for Byron, clearly kind of does identify with him. And I think that this is all part of the churn that means that, you know, by 1809, he's 19. He doesn't really know what to do with himself.

He's harried by debts. He's worried that he's going to get arrested and either hanged or put in the pillory for his sexuality. He doesn't really want to go into politics, doesn't really want to kind of hang around and be a scribbler. And so he decides to go abroad, escape his career anxieties, his money worries, escape his sense of the oppressive character of English morality. And the moment he decides to do this, he immediately becomes more cheerful. He decides that he will go to the place that has always haunted his imaginings, which is the Orient. On the 2nd of July 1809, Byron heads down to the southwest, to Falmouth. He takes ship to Portugal, and this will be the first step on his eastern adventure. Well brilliant what a cliffhanger Tom and if people want to join Lord Byron on that adventure

right away just to give you a taste of what is coming he's going to Portugal in the middle of the Peninsular War, Sir Arthur Wellesley the future Duke of Wellington fighting against Napoleon's forces, he's going to Malta, to Albania, to Greece, to Constantinople. He'll meet the Sultan, won't you, Tom? Is that right? He meets the Sultan. So lots of drama, lots of colour to come. You can, of course, listen to that right now. All you have to do is join the Rest is History Club with all the glittering benefits and baubles that that brings you. Yeah yeah that's a kind of an exotic fantasy in its own right isn't it the rest is history club and you can join that by going to

the rest is history.com if not if you're a petty fogging pooterish victorian kind of person you just want to wait for the next episode with all the ads. Fair enough. Be my guest. You'll just have to wait till next time. But what delights and treats are in store for us, eh, Tom? Absolutely. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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