The Rest Is History - 441. Lord Byron: Scandal, Sex and Celebrity (Part 2)

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

By 1809, Lord Byron found himself untethered and debt-ridden. Disenchanted with politics, frustrated by his literary career and haunted by his illicit homosexuality, he abandoned an oppressive England and set out upon his legendary Eastern adventure. First plunging into a Europe torn asunder by the exploits of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, Byron decried the imperialist militarism of the raging Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, he delighted in the danger and excitement of his travels, absorbing and subsuming the cultures he encountered, and exploring a predilection for transvestism. From Portugal and the Peninsula War, Byron travelled to Albania where he fascinated the infamous Ali Pasha, and then later charmed the Sultan of Constantinople. In Greece, he found a land of exotic romanticism where his growing sense of destiny took root in the Greek’s fight for liberty. At last, in 1811 Byron returned to England and published his poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Almost overnight he became the most famous man in London. Byromania had engulfed the nation… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Lord Byron’s remarkable travels abroad - his encounters with some of the most famous men of the age, his confrontations with danger and destiny, and his untethered eroticism… *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. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. 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. Ancient of days. Augusta, Thena, where, where are thy men of might, thy grand in soul, gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were? First in the race that led to glory's goal, they won and passed away.

Is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale. The wonder of an hour. The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole are sought in vain. And o'er each mouldering tower, dim with the mist of years, grey flits the shade of power. So that is the deathless poetry of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which is a poem that Lord Byron began in the autumn of 1809 while he was in Albania. And never, I think, Tom, did he envisage that it would be read

with such beauty, power, and power as the listeners have just been treated to. No, I'm sure he'd be thrilled. And of course, I've written a novel in which Byron is a vampire and so he's still alive. And so it's a possibility actually. He may be listening to this right now. He may get to hear that, which would be very exciting for him. Wonderful. Worth becoming a member of the living dead for. So yes, so that is from the poem that makes him famous. Yeah.

He's about to go off on his tours. And when he comes back, he will publish this and become a superstar. And Child's Hill Pilgrimage. So a child is a nobleman's son who has not yet won his spurs. It's a kind of archaicism. Right. And it follows the travels of this tormented nobleman who is haunted by the shadow of some nameless crime, fleeing dissipation, embarked on a voyage of

self-discovery, the kind of the archetype of the romantic hero. And he travels from his crumbling stately home through the Mediterranean all the way to Constantinople. And Byron claims in his introduction that it's nothing to do with him, that Harold is just the child of imagination. But of course, I mean, he knows that we know that that's rubbish, that basically Charles Harold's pilgrimage is child Byron's pilgrimage. And in fact, initially he had called child Harold child Byron. So I think as a poem, it's doubly fascinating because Harold is the alter ego of a man who will become, as the result of its publication, the most famous man, first in Britain and then in Europe. But it is also, as that passage that you read suggests, a meditation on history. So there he is pondering

how Greece was once beautiful and now it's lost to decay. That's become a cliche for us, but Byron is the first really to articulate it. But Charles Harold is also fascinating because he is traveling through a Europe that is at war. The backdrop to this is the Napoleonic Wars. Because we talked about Byron's early years in our first episode. He's this impecunious nobleman. He is shadowed by anxieties about his sexuality and by what he's going to do with his career. And so he decides that he is going to go abroad and the Napoleonic Wars are rumbling. So he's heading into a war zone when he does that. Yes. So the Peninsular War is underway, isn't it, in Portugal and Spain. Britain has been now at war for 16 years against France, off and on.

The stakes are getting higher and higher. It has become a total war. Yeah. One of national survival for Britain. You know, Napoleon's regime will either triumph and dominate Europe or be consumed. Yeah. So this is a different kind of war from the Seven Years' War or one of the previous 18th century wars. And you might think only a madman would say, brilliant, perfect time and place for a holiday. But Byron is that man. Well, I mean, it's a challenge because Byron can't go to France or to Italy,

which is the kind of the traditional destination for noblemen wanting a gap year. Because as you say, they're setting off at the time when Napoleon's power is at its absolute apogee. And in fact, while they're at sea, so they leave Falmouth in Cornwall on the 2nd of July, 1809. Byron is going with his Cambridge friend, John Cam Hobhouse. But while they are at sea, they're setting sail for Portugal. Napoleon wins a terrible battle against the Austrians, and the Austrians had been in alliance with Britain. Britain is always trying to kind of fracture Napoleon's continental system that is basically keeping them out of Europe, all their goods, but also, of course, as individual travellers. Napoleon defeats that,

so it looks as though his power is as secure as ever. But Byron, of course, again, we talked about this in the first episode, I mean, he kind of admires Napoleon. I think that's partly his natural perversity, his desire to strike an independent pose. It's partly his hostility to what he sees as the repressive character of a Tory Britain. But I think above all, it's flamboyant self-identification. Yes. You know, Byron sees himself as a would-be Napoleonic figure. Yeah, as a sort of man who is not self-made, of course, but he's self-invented, I suppose. Yeah.

And he thinks Napoleon has triumphed against these pettifogging bureaucrats who are in Britain. Yeah. Oh, he hopes it will triumph. And he sees himself as surrounded by mediocrities and he will soar above them in the same way that Napoleon has. Yeah. And Dominic, I mean, you, I know, would look very askance at a British peer identifying with Napoleon.

I think it's contemptible, Tom. But some reassurance, because you've just been finishing your new children's book, haven't you, on Nelson? Yeah. Byron does actually admire Nelson, you'll be relieved to hear. Oh, it's not all bad. I think possibly not least because it is thanks to Nelson winning the Battle of Trafalgar and securing the supremacy of the Royal Navy over the seas that Byron is able to travel at all.

Because if the British can't get onto the continent, then the French fleet can't really get onto the seas. And so this means that they can sail in relative security to Portugal. And actually, before he leaves, he has himself painted in a way that deliberately identifies himself with Nelson. So there's a famous portrait of Nelson at the Battle of the Nile being given French colours by a midshipman, kind of a boy. And Byron has himself painted in a kind of similar pose, except that there is a typically Byronic

twist, because instead of a midshipman, he has his page boy, Robert Rushton, who is accompanying him on his trip. Very good looking young lad. There's always something a little bit suspicious when Byron is in the room with a young page boy, I would say, isn't it, Tom? And am I not right in saying that he tells, I mean, this is an unbelievable fact. I read he writes to his housemaster at Harrow, his old housemaster, to say he's planning to do a survey of the morals of the Turks, which is a very disturbing suggestion. And then he says, I will write a treatise. Is this right? Do you want to read the title of his treatise? Yeah. The title was going to be Sodomy Simplified, or Pederasty Proved to be Praiseworthy from

Ancient Authors and Modern Practice. And I agree. I mean, imagine writing that to one of your teachers at your school. You know, he left a few years before. I mean, very odd. Anyway, we talked about how essentially this is one of the worst times ever to be gay in Britain. If you are convicted of what is called sodomy, you will very possibly suffer capital punishment. And so you can understand why Byron, who I think has very intense kind of gay longings, why he should feel so liberated to be gone. So he writes exultantly to a friend, the world is all before me and I leave England without regret. But Tom, can I ask you a question?

Sodom is simplified, okay, fine, he's gay. But pederasty proved to be praiseworthy from ancient authors and modern practice. So ancient authors, pederasty, Byron has already really invested in the idea that same-sex relationships between men and boys. This is even before he goes to Greece. He's going there to find it, right? He thinks Greece is the home and he's already got a taste for it. And how common is that in the time that he's writing? a taste for it. And how common is that in the time that he's writing? Because obviously it's the thing that we associate with the later Victorians, but in the Regency period, are there people who are saying, oh, the Greeks loved all this kind

of carry on. It's brilliant. We should do it more often. I think that it is part of the kind of sophisticated gay underworld of upper class people who are steeped in classics and who adopt it as a kind of precursor for their own desires. And I think that Byron is very interested in the Orient and therefore has read about sexual codes in, say, the Ottoman Empire, where it is a given that both women and boys are legitimate objects of sexual predation for powerful men. And that in fact, boys are easier to get than women who tend to be locked up and more inaccessible. Byron, over the course of his travels, will be a great cultural relativist and he will repeatedly compare the sexual taboos that operate in Britain and operate in the Ottoman Empire and kind of adopt the pose of saying,

well, they're both equally the product of their cultures. Why should it be wrong to sleep with a young boy? It's just what they do in their culture. And that is a kind of anthropological perspective that is clearly sharpened by his own personal tastes. I think it's fair to say. anthropological perspective that is clearly sharpened by his own personal tastes yeah i think it's fair to say but you can see why yeah greece and the empire of the turks would be an object of fascination too and he's also he's been dressing up in oriental garb hasn't he before

this yeah he loves all that so he's massively into this idea of i mean edward say in his famous book orientalism you know, argued that Westerners objected for the East, they projected onto it all this sensuality and all that kind of thing. And Byron is a perfect example of that, isn't he? Yeah. But for Byron, it's liberating. It's exciting. It's an escape from the kind of monochrome repression that he's come to identify with England. And also I think, I mean, he's come to identify with England. And also, I think, I mean, he's unusual because he is precocious in his anti-imperialism. He does not like militarism. He is opposed to it from the beginning. And of course he is going to Portugal, which is the one place pretty much at this point on the continent where the British can land. Because as you say, the Peninsular War is raging and Portugal,

our oldest ally, is in alliance with Britain. And as he lands, Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, he'd arrived in Lisbon only a few months before. He's won a great battle. And as Byron and Hobhouse are travelling from Lisbon towards Seville and then to Gibraltar, Wellesley is preparing for another battle, which will be fought on the 27th and 28th of July at Talavera, and it will be another great victory. But Byron is not impressed by this, partly, I think, because he sees Wellesley as a non-entity compared to Napoleon. But it's also, I think, due to a broader distaste for what he sees of the character of industrial warfare.

And this is despite the fact that he loves dressing up as a staff officer. He loves the uniforms. He loves all that. But when they're on their journeys, they kind of witness. So they pass French soldiers and Spaniards who've been accused of treachery being taken off to be hanged. Byron and Childe Harold writes about their journey through the Sierra Morena. At every turn, Morena's dusky height sustains aloft the battery's iron load, and far as mortal eye can compass sight, the mountain howitzer, the broken road, the

bristling palisade, the fossa flowed. So Benita Reisler, who, like Fiona McCarthy, author of two brilliant recent biographies of Byron, she says of this, without ever having seen a battle, Byron became the first major poet of modern warfare. And a distaste and an understanding of what modern warfare means is something that shadows Byron's poetry. He will write very, very powerfully about Waterloo, about wars between the Turks and the Russians. He understands long before the first world war poets, what industrial warfare can mean. So a bit like, I mean, this is the point when you get the first great anti-war art. I mean, Goya, for example, Goya's stuff is reflecting the atrocities of the Peninsular War.

Right. So, you know, this isn't all sort of dragoons and flashing sabres. No, absolutely not. This is hideous reprisals and mass executions. And as you say, it does anticipate the horrors of the 20th century. And it's interesting you mentioned Goya because he has a famous painting, doesn't he, of a giant kind of looming up over. And Byron has an almost identical image in Childe Harold of Spain in the shadow of the kind of god of war. Very, very terrifying and gothic.

So I think they leave Spain with some relief and they sail on via Sardinia to Malta, where he behaves in very Byronic fashion. So he has a fling with a celebrated beauty there, Mrs. Spencer Smith, who is, despite her name, actually the daughter of the Austrian ambassador to Constantinople and had married a Mr. Spencer Smith, whom she had then left, gone to Venice where she had been taken prisoner on Napoleon's personal orders. And she had then escaped by dressing up as a boy, climbing down a rope ladder and going off in a boat. Crikey. We should do a podcast about her. So, I mean, Byron loves all that kind of stuff. He also almost gets in a duel, so gets out of that. They sign up to going to Greece in a

British brig of war called the Spider, which is guarding a convoy of merchant ships. We mentioned Patrick O'Brien in the first episode. This is very Patrick O'Brien because they're sailing into enemy waters, because they're going up towards the Ionian Islands, which is Cephalonia and Ithaca and Corfu and all that. I mean, these are under French rule and it's all very exciting. So the spider captures a merchant ship and fits it out as a privateer and Byron and Hobhouse and various crew members of the spider get on board this ship, hoist up the Union Jack. They board various boats. They capture a Turkish vessel. There's a battle.

A bullet whistles past Hobhouse's ear. I mean, terribly exciting. Yeah, very Patrick O'Brien. Yeah. And meanwhile, they have caught their first sight of Greece, and they make landing. They kind of sail up the Gulf of Corinth, so the strip of sea between the two halves of Greece. Yeah. They make landing there at patras lots of romantic effusions and

then they get back on and they sail up the northwestern coast of greece towards albania which is where byron really wants to visit and on their way they pass an obscure seaside town called missolonghi oh yes i see it set amid swamps and lagoons. Yeah. And as they do that, all the way, they are conscious of the fact that Greece is a part of the Ottoman Empire. You know, there are minarets of mosques in the kind of the ancient cities. There are Turkish soldiers everywhere with pistols and daggers in their belts. And Greece has basically been a province of the Ottoman Empire since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire.

Yeah. You know, the conquest of Constantinople. Parts of it for 400 years by now. Yeah. So it's not a new thing. I mean, the idea of a Greek nationalism, of an independent Hellenic republic, to a lot of people, I suppose, at the time,

that would have seemed outlandish because all they've ever known is Greece being part of this vast Ottoman super state. But you can see, Charles Harold, and in Byron's comments more generally, why at this period the idea of Greece becoming free would start to emerge as an ideal. Because the idea of liberty, of national liberty, is something that has been very current since the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But also, Byron is classically educated and it appalls him that ancient Greece that had seen off the Persians should now be subject to the Turks. Childe Harold is full of

kind of so fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth, immortal though no more, they've fallen great. I mean, he's endlessly going on in this kind of way. But Tom, his image of Greece is an image that he's got from books and his own fantasies rather than from any acquaintance with Greece, right? Completely. I mean, he had this image of Greece before he even went to Greece. Yes, he does have this kind of shimmering sense of it in its classical heyday, but he's not naive, and he is also very, very interested in the Islamic world. I mean, he's not just going for ancient Greece. He is also going because he's fascinated by the civilization of the Ottoman Empire. And that's part of the reason why he wants to go to Albania, because Albania is properly obscure. I mean, up until this point,

he's been on shipping lanes of British ships everywhere. He's among people who are kind of part of his world. But going into Albania, this is properly a journey into the unknown. I mean, this must be the least well-known part of Europe in Britain. I mean, A, Britain now, but also particularly Britain in the early 19th century. I mean, most people would not have even been familiar with the word Albania or the idea of an Albania, an Albanian people. They'd have seen it as a part of the Balkans, part of the Ottoman Empire, obscure, mountainous, sort of tribal, backward. These would have been the associations I thought that people would bring to it. Yeah. And potentially very dangerous because it's, although formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, it's effectively a

kind of independent fiefdom under a former bandit chieftain by the name of Ali Pasha, who has been given the kind of the title Vizier of the Three Tales by the Sultan in Constantinople, but effectively rules as a despot. And of course, the French and the British who are engaged in this titanic global conflict are both wooing him. And fortunately for Byron, when they go into Albania, Ali Pasha is pro-British. And so therefore he is going to be very welcoming to a British peer. So Byron is kind of banking on that. But when they get there, Byron adores it right away. Hobhouse and Byron's servant Fletcher, who's come all the way from Newstead, hate it.

You know, the food, the flies, the plumbing, endless complaints about the toilets. You know, you have to kind of squat rather than sit. So when you say they get there. So Ali Pasha's most famous capital is a place called Yanina, which is now in Greece. And it's kind of a citadel on a lake. But he also has a base in what's now Albania. Yeah, Tepelan. Yeah. Which is where he is. So they go to Yanina and then they go to Tepelan.

So they are going through these kind of, what, they're on donkeys, mountain gorges, kind of peasant guides. All of that. Yeah. Eagles, wolves. Right. So as well as being a great poet, Byron is one of the great letter writers in English. And he writes this account of arriving in Tepelein to his mother. I'll read it in focus. It's really wonderful. The Albanians in their

dresses, the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold work cloak, daggers. The Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast palaces stretched in groups in an immense open gallery in front of the palace, the latter placed in a kind of cloister below it, 200 steeds ready caparison to move in a moment, couriers entering or passing out with dispatches, the kettle drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, all together with the singular appearance of the building itself. So you can see this is kind of overwhelming for someone who is already primed to respond to it in the most romantic manner possible. And Tom, do they have a guide? Do we know if they have interpreters? Yes, they have guides and they have bodyguards. Right. Who they've basically hired with gold or

silver or whatever? Well, they've been given guards by Ali Pasha's extended family and his lieutenants are looking after them because Ali Pasha is pro-British at the time. It would have been very different if he suddenly switched sides and became French and then they'd be absolute toast. But as it is, Ali Pasha is very welcoming and seems delighted to meet Byron. So he stands to greet him, which is seen as a tremendous compliment. Also compliments Byron on his looks, compliments him on his small ears and his delicate white hands. Small ears. He loves this. And he tells him to look on him as a father. Right. Basically, Dominic, he looks a bit like

Captain Edward Smith. Oh, our old friend from the Titanic. Very accomplished captain. Yeah. He's got a kind of white beard. He's stout. Quite jolly in appearance. And Byron is fascinated by the fact that this guy who basically looks like Father Christmas is also a man who rapes and murders and impales and roasts his enemies. Kind of, I think, identifies with him. Well, I was about to say, for Byron, I'm guessing, knowing Byron now through your account, that Byron rather idolizes somebody who roasts his enemies and leaves a sort of trail of deflowered virgins and burning villages in his wake. Because Byron has that fascination with the darkness, doesn't he? He has that fascination with the extremes. Well, you see, what's interesting, I think, is that had it been Wellington soldiers in Spain doing these atrocities, Byron would hate it.

But because it's exotic and glamorous and well-dressed, he feels slightly different about it. And the measure of his sense of identification with the Albanians is probably the most famous painting of him that I imagine most listeners will have some sense of, the kind of the pose where he's wearing this kind of flamboyant Albanian costume. And if you don't know it, we'll put it on our Twitter feed. And you asked about who is looking after him. This is where Ali Pasha gives Byron a kind of servant, a kind of bodyguard, a man called Vasily. Vasily is a person who has participated in a particularly famous atrocity when Ali Pasha's daughter-in-law had complained to Ali that her husband was going after other women, and in particular names a 17-year-old Greek girl. And Ali Pasha,

even though this Greek girl was completely blameless, I mean, she'd been raped by Ali Pasha's son. Nevertheless, he orders the girl to be sewn into a sack, 16 of her closest friends also to be sewn into sacks, and then thrown from the fortress wall into the lake. And Vasily had taken part in this. And I think Byron feels there's a kind of terrible glamour about this. And in fact, he will write about a Westerner whose girlfriend suffers exactly this fate in a famous poem called The Jower. One of those poems that kind of helps to make his name. So I think Byron clearly is identifying with Ali Pasha, but it may be that something more

happens between them as well. So I mentioned that Byron had taken his page boy, Robert Rushton, with him, but he'd actually sent him back from Gibraltar on the grounds that boys are not safe among the Turks. And it may be that, you know, 19-year-old peers aren't safe among the Turks either, because basically all that kind of complimenting Byron, telling him, oh, look on me like your father. Yeah. You know, Ali Pasha is sending him little sweets. I like your little ears.

Sherbet and fruit. I mean, he's behaving like a sugar daddy. Oh, you think something happened between Byron and Ali Pasha? Not clear. But Byron drops quite a few hints about it. And we'll see in the second half, Byron is interested in a certain degree of gender fluidity. He likes to play the kind of the rake, but he does also, there is a certain quality of submissiveness, a kind of passivity perhaps. So it's kind of complex. Anyway, so Byron is having

a lovely time. It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's kind of dangerous. Meanwhile, Hobhouse and Fletcher, Byron's valet, are continuing to crumble. Hobhouse is now complaining that he can't find someone to repair his umbrella. Not much call for umbrellas in Albania, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Byron is basically, I think, fired by a sense of how exciting life can be. As he leaves Albania and heading towards Athens, they're going via the site of Delphi, Thebes, so they're heading back into classical Greece, all the stuff that Byron had read about at school. He is starting work on Childe Harold's pilgrimage. I think as he goes, he is starting to get an elevated sense of what his destiny might be. So in the Child Harold pilgrimage, he has this line, who now shall call thy scattered children

forth, address to Greece. And in the very earliest version of the poem, he writes this line out five times and five times he writes down as the answer, Byron. And so right at this earliest point, he hasn't even reached Athens yet. It is as though he's been inspired by everything that he's seen to cast himself as the future savior of Greece. A lunatic ambition, you might think, Tom, but of course that's how Byron ends up being remembered. So maybe not so lunatic. And he's on his way to Athens he's had this shall we say colorful interlude in Albania but yet more colorful adventures await and we will find out what happens to him in Athens after the break

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Along Moraya's hills, the setting sun, Not as in northern climes obscurely bright, But one unclouded blaze of living light. Ah, the hush deep the yellow beam he throws gilds the green wave that trembles as it glows. On old Aegina's rock and Hydra's isle the god of gladness sheds his parting smile. O'er his own regions lingering loves to shine, though there his altars are no more divine.

Descending fast, the mountain shadows kiss, thy glorious gulf, unconquered Salamis. So that's The Curse of Minerva by our old friend Lord Byron, written, Tom, in Athens. Yes. And lots of, as you have written in your notes, lots of favourite Byronic themes. Yeah. So you've got the contrast between the brightness of Greece and the drizzle of Britain. You've got the contrast between the glory that was Greece and its present slavery, all that kind of thing. But the poem itself, actually, its principal theme is a topic that remains controversial to this day. And it's a satire, and the object of Byron's satire is Lord Elgin. Yeah, the hero of the marbles.

The man who brings the Parthenon freezes back from the Acropolis, the Elgin marbles. Byron is appalled by this. Actually, he writes about it in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as well. It kind of obsesses him for reasons that I think are very interesting. So, Byron and Hobhouse have been traveling from Albania through the autumn and into the winter through Greece, and they're heading for Athens. And they arrive in Athens on Christmas Day, 1809. And unsurprisingly, when they arrive there, full of visions of the Athens, of Pericles and Phidias and Socrates, they're incredibly disappointed because Athens is a pretty rundown, bedraggled, squalid shadow of what it had once been.

Kind of weeds growing in the cracks in the pavements kind of thing, isn't it? Narrow, crooked streets. I mean, there's no more than 10,000 people living there. And Hobhouse goes to walk around the walls and he times himself and takes him 47 minutes. But again, Byron kind of loves Athens. He'll be incredibly happy there. He and Hobhouse rent this beautiful house with a courtyard. It's got a lemon tree in the middle of it.

Unlike Albania, there are lots of international visitors there, Byron's kind of people. He settles into kind of expat life. Lots of sex, lots of sexual opportunities. Boys or girls, or both? Both, I think. Right. Okay. There's a lot of kind of editing going on of Byron's papers. And in fact, Hobhouse, while he's out there, makes Byron burn a whole load of stuff that Byron's written. So we can't be absolutely certain, but I think probably both. There are lots of antiquities and Byron has this kind of growing sympathy for the cause of

Greek liberty. And I think that it's that sense that he is there to defend Greece that makes him find in Lord Elgin's transportation of the friezes from the Parthenon a way of channeling that. Lord Elgin is Scottish, Byron's mother is Scottish, and so Byron comes to see Lord Elgin as the embodiment of everything that he's escaped. The provincialism that he associates with Britain, the philistinism, and as I say, above all, his mother, who he's never particularly got on with. So kind of deep waters. So the way that Byron comes to be obsessed by the Elgin Marbles is that two days after

they've arrived, so the 27th of December, he and Hobhouse are visited by an art connoisseur and collector from Naples by the name of Giovanni Battista Lucieri. And Lucieri had originally come to Greece as the agent of Sir William Hamilton, Dominic. Oh no, Sir William Hamilton. So he's the British envoy. Cuckolded by Nelson. Yeah, the British envoy in Naples. Married to Emma Hamilton, who's always doing her attitudes, isn't she? And Sir William Hamilton is obsessed with, I mean, he's a great antiquarian. He's obsessed with kind of Greek vases and- Yeah, he was in Love Island.

Yeah. And he performed poorly, as I recall. Yeah, he didn't do well. But anyway, so Lucieri is sent by William Hamilton to kind of make drawings of the antiquities. And then in 1799, he's hired by Lord Elgin, who at the time is the ambassador to Constantinople, to make drawings for him of the antiquities. And Lucieri reports back to Elgin in Constantinople that on the Parthenon, there are these friezes that date back to the original building of the temple in the time of Pericles. They're very, very beautiful, but they are also deteriorating very very fast and badly and so therefore elgin worried about the fact that they may not last very long and so elgin because he's been told that they're deteriorating gets permission for lucieri to go and make casts of

them and so the scaffolding goes up and lucieri is able to go up and look at the freezes up close he reports back to elgin says yeah they brilliant. They're even better than I'd imagined. And Elkin then thinks, well, I've got the scaffolding up. They're deteriorating. Why not take them back? Take them down, yeah. Why not remove them? Yeah. And so he, I mean, he offers bribes to get permission to remove them, but everyone is offering bribes. That's the way things are done.

That's the Ottoman system. Right. And no objections are raised at the time, either by the Turkish government or by any Greek, about what Elgin is doing. And in fact, the only objection comes from the garrison on the Acropolis, because the Acropolis is the Ottoman military garrison, who were worried that Lucieri's workmen will be able to peer into the garrison's harem. I love that detail. And so this has been ongoing for 10 years. And just before Baron's arrival, the last freeze has been taken down and is down at Piraeus, the port of Athens, waiting to be shipped off. It took them 10 years to take all this down. Yeah, it takes that long. And what is kind of adding jeopardy to the

whole thing is that, of course, the French are sniffing around takes that long. And what is kind of adding jeopardy to the whole thing is that, of course, the French are sniffing around it as well. And so the whole process is dependent on Britain maintaining its alliance with the Ottomans, because the Anglo-French rivalry is kind of echoing through the Ottoman Empire as well. And Napoleon has an agent right on the spot, doesn't he, who's trying to get the freezes himself? Yeah, he does. And he'd actually been planning to kind of grab Elgin's last haul, but he gets put in prison because suddenly the Ottomans have a bust up with Napoleon. So good timing for Elgin. So on the 8th of January, Byron is escorted by Lucieri up to the Acropolis, and a hobhouse goes

as well. And they're appalled by what they see, because of course they have this image of it as something from the time of Pericles. But as we said, it's a garrison. And so there are gun palisades all over the place. All the various temples are part of the fortifications. The garrison have their white houses anywhere that there isn't an antiquity. And notoriously, the Parthenon itself had been used by the Turks in the 17th century as an ammunition dump. Yeah. And there'd been a siege. The Venetians had besieged it.

A cannonball had hit the ammunition dump and the Parthenon had blown up. And Byron and Hobhouse had shown the large hole in the ground where the shell had landed. Now, Hobhouse and Byron react in very, very different ways to what they're shown. Hobhouse writes in his journal that he has been told by a workman that everyone up there is just kind of burning the marble freezers for lime, that whenever they need to do building projects, they just chuck them in. Why wouldn't they? And if you burn it, you can basically melt it down or whatever. Yeah. So that is ongoing. And that's what's happening. And so Hobhouse thinks, thank God we're rescuing them.

So this is what Hobhouse writes in his journal. If the progress of decay should continue to be as rapid as it has been for more than a century past, there will in a few years be not one marble standing upon another on the site of the Parthenon." So Hobhouse is basically blaming the Turks. Basically, no one in Athens has any interest in them. This is true of the Greeks as well as of the Turks. Hobhouse, as an antiquarian, is appalled by this and basically thinks, well, thank God Elgin is on hand to rescue and preserve them. Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, lists all the various barbarians who over the course of Greek history have plundered Athens. So the Romans and the Goths and the Turks. But he fixes on Lord Elgin as absolutely the worst of all the plunderers,

cold as the crags upon his native coast, his mind as barren and his heart as hard. It's harsh. And he's never met Elgin. Oh, he's not met him at this point. That's mad. No, he's never met Elgin. Right. Okay. But he goes after Elgin more savagely, perhaps, than almost any other person that he goes after in all his poetry. Elgin has got this disease. His nose has half been eaten away. Byron incorrectly blames it on syphilis and can't stop going on about it. He laughs at Elgin for being cuckolded by his wife, and he jeers at him as an absolute barbarian. I think it's very difficult not to feel that here

he is channeling his resentments of the childhood in Aberdeen. And you asked, did he feel Scottish? In certain ways he does. He always identifies with the rugged beauty of the landscape. But on the other hand, so in this poem, he refers to Scotland as a land of meanness, sophistry and mist. Harsh. And sees it as the kind of anti-Greece really. So his antipathy to Elgin, obviously so much of it is projection. Yeah. And his hostility to the removal of what we used to call the Elgin marbles, the Parthenon freezes, is presumably born of the fact that he wants Greece to be his and to be pristine and perfect. And here is the British establishment of which he

is the product, but which he resents. Here is the British establishment taking a bit of his Greece, preserving it and taking it back to Britain. And he takes that as a personal affront, doesn't he? Yeah. It's like his childhood has come back to stamp on him in the moment of his... And it's worse for him because he's dreamed about coming to Greece and he has this fantasy of what it'll be like. And he'll be walking around in his massive multicolored trousers, molesting boys or whatever. Yeah. And yet again, Scotland has followed him.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think that the sense of the contrast between the grim Aberdonian childhood that he had endured with the hideous nursemaid and his mother being awful and everything, and Greece, is sharpened by the fact that Byron is absolutely, at this point, living his best life. I mean, there's no question about it. He is having a lovely time. So he spends 10 weeks in Athens and then he crosses the Aegean and all this kind of posing amid ruins. I mean, it's the essence of the Byronic. There are loads of great ruins on the other sides of the Aegean as well. So he goes to Ephesus, a place that I'm sure lots of people listening to this may have gone on holiday when they go to Turkey, but there's nothing there. Byron goes and rides

out among the ruins and he reports that he hears thousands of jackals howling there. And then he goes to perhaps the most atmospheric and celebrated ancient site, possibly in the whole of Turkey, which is the Troad, the place where Troy had stood. Now, this is long before Schliemann will come and dig it up. And there are all kinds of people who say that Troy had never existed. Byron is very contemptuous of this. So in Don Juan, he will say, I've stood upon Achilles' tomb and heard Troy doubted. Time will doubt of Rome. For Byron, it's all very vivid. It's all very real. It's all true. And he wants to participate in the dimension of myth. And the most famous way in which he demonstrates this

is that on the 3rd of May, 1810, he swims the Hellespont. So the Hellespont is the sea that separates Europe and Asia in Turkey. That is gutsy, to be fair to him. Well, it is gutsy because this is a period where lots of people don't swim. So we talked about John Edelston, the choir boy in Cambridge who supposedly had drowned. I mean, this is perfectly plausible. People can't basically swim. And in due course, one of Byron's most celebrated friends, Percy Shelley, the poet, he will drown as well. But Byron loves swimming. And that, of course, is because he's lame. He has a club foot. And so in the water- It's as good as well. But Byron loves swimming. And that of course is because he's lame. He has a club foot. And so in the water-

It's as good as anybody. He's perfectly mobile. Yeah. Yes. And every opportunity to swim he takes. So he had actually already, before he'd done the Hellespont, he'd swum an even more impressive length, which is across the Tagus in Lisbon. Oh, that's quite a distance. Yeah. So it's a much tougher feat. Yeah. But of course, the Hellespont is the most romantic because in Greek mythology, Leander had swum across to his beloved in a tower on the other side, Hero.

And so Byron wants to emulate the feat of Leander in swimming across. And he does it in an hour and 10 minutes. And he's accompanied by an officer in the Royal Navy, Lieutenant William Eckenhead and again years later he's still incredibly proud of it so again he writes about it in don juan that it was a feat on which ourselves we prided leander mr eckenhead and i did so very very proud of it fair enough i mean i'd take my hat off to him for that. Right. So they are now sailing up the Hellespont, going up towards Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. And they arrive there on the 13th of May, and they're not allowed into old Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine and then the Ottoman Empire. Instead, they have to stay in a place called Pera, which is above the Galata,

so opposite on the far side of the Golden Horn from the old centre of Constantinople. Yes. Yeah. It's now the kind of commercial heart of Istanbul. Yeah. And they find it a kind of weird and for Bayer an exciting mix of the exotic and the familiar. So they have to take boat from the ship that's brought them, you know, that will row them across to the harbour at Galata. And as they're going, they look up at the palace walls and they see where the harem is, and they see dogs devouring a corpse there beneath the wall. And this, like so much that Byron sees on his trips, this will inspire him later when he comes to write a poem called The

Siege of Corinth. He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall, holder the dead, their carnival, gorging and growling a carcass and limb. They were too busy to bark at him. But against that, when he arrives there, they find there's a hotel with a billiard table. Oh, brilliant. Which they haven't had, you know, for a very long time. This is like the ultimate 19th century British trip, isn't it? Dead dogs, but also billions. Yeah. So, Byron is now, I mean, he's very much at home. He's having a lovely time, and he's basically become a figure of kind of beauty and glamour, not just for fellow Westerners, but even for the Turks themselves. So, they find him fascinating And on the 10th of July, he is received by the Sultan. Mahmud II, Tom.

So he's famous in the Ottoman world because he's the guy who's cracked down on the power of the Janissaries, who are the great kind of, they've been selected to be an elite kind of military corps. And they held power. They've been that kind of Praetorian guard. But also Mahmud ends up being a great westernizer so he anticipates what's called the tantamount which is the great period of reform for the ottoman empire and he loves byron doesn't he is very taken with byron yeah just as ali pasha had been so so there's a witness to it and says that the

sultan was much struck by his youthful and striking appearance and the splendor of his dress. And in fact, the Sultan thinks that Byron is a woman dressed as a man. And he always thinks that. And kind of what's intriguing about that is that Byron has, over the course of his trip, been exploring his female side. So Hobhouse, while they're in Athens, had recorded in his journal, dined to bed after Byron dressing up in female apparel and dancing with Demetrius. And in Don Juan, his hero, Don Juan, enters the harem disguised as a slave girl. So there's a kind of part of the romance and exoticism of Constantinople for Byron and the East generally, I think. There's a sense of gender fluidity, gender play going on as well as

everything else. Crikey. Very 21st century. And so you can understand why with all this kind of sense of personal exploration going on, it's kind of literary, it's cultural, it's psychological, it's sexual. Byron's not keen to go home at all. Hobhouse by now has to, you know, he's being summoned back by his family and they have this emotional parting. But I think Byron is quite relieved because Hobhouse is much more the Englishman abroad than he is. You know, he's moaning about umbrellas and toilets and things. And in due course, the first biography that is written of Byron by a friend of Byron's

Thomas More, who was also a poet, he at this point kind of rhapsodised on Byron's called Thomas More, who was also a poet. He, at this point, kind of rhapsodised on Byron's need for solitude. So enamoured had he become of these lonely musings that even the society of his fellow traveller, by which More means Hobhouse, though with pursuits so congenial to his own, grew at last to be a chain and a burden on him. And it was not till he stood companionless on the shore of the little island in the Aegean that he found his spirit breathe freely. And Hobhouse read this. He's not happy, is he? He was not happy at all. And he wrote in the margin, on what authority does Tom say this? He has not the remotest grasp of the real reason

which induced Lord B to prefer having no Englishman immediately or constantly near him. Okay, Tom. So that raises the question, what is the real reason why Lord B doesn't want an Englishman immediately or constantly near him? And I don't think after two hours or so of Lord Byron, I'm guessing a lot of listeners will be thinking maybe the reason that Byron doesn't want another English traveller near him

now in Constantinople is that he's actually up to no good. Sexually, he's behaving worse than ever. Well, you say up to no good. Sexually, he's behaving worse than ever. Well, you say up to no good. Byron writes back at this point in a kind of knowing turn. In England, people have their pipes and beer. And in Turkey, they have their opium and boys. And I really can't see any difference. It's all culturally relative. And this is the kind of the knowing tone of the citizen of the world. That is, I think, how he sees it. But Hobhouse, who has brought his English morality with him.

Well, Hobhouse is kind of, I mean, Hobhouse is ambivalent about it, I think. But maybe that ambivalence, Byron doesn't want that ambivalence. He wants Hobhouse to be all in on it. I think that's right. And he's conscious that part of his friends, that his great pal is perhaps disturbed about it. Yeah. And wrestling with that. And he thinks it'd be better off to have no... I think so.

Yes, I think so. Yeah. So anyway, so Byron stays another nine months, but eventually he has to go back basically because he's running out of money. Yeah. And because all his friends are liable for his debts back in England and they're all in danger of being arrested. So Byron feels he has to go back.

Yeah, I know. So he takes ship from Athens to Malta on a ship that is carrying the last consignment of the Parthenon freezes. So kind of very ironic. And Lucieri is actually sailing on the ship as well. And he's very depressed to be going back. So he writes to Hobhouse, I'm so out of spirits and hopes and humour and pocket and pocket and health and in malta he joins a troop ship and he is back in england on the 11th of july 1811 lands at sheer ness so in the midway yeah and he comes back and he's 23 and he still doesn't know what to do and he has that thing that i guess so often when you go abroad when you're

young and you've had an amazing time and you've seen all kinds of incredible things and you come back and you find that all your friends have become grownups. Yeah. They're all management consultants. Yeah. And you, Tom Holland, have come back from India. Exactly. Did you not come back in Indian garb? Is that not correct? All that kind of thing. Yeah. Byronic garb. So Byron comes back and he finds his schoolfellas in monstrous disguises in the garb of guardsmen, parsons fine gentlemen and such other masquerade dresses and he has this kind of panic that you know again people leaving university or whatever thinking yeah what am i going to do i'll grab any job i can and so byron i mean byron's equivalent of

going off and becoming a i don't know whatever yeah is he contemplates asking the duke of wellington for a commission. I mean, that's a measure of how desperate he is. Can you imagine? Yeah. And I think part of that is his natural, you know, he doesn't really want a job, but it's also because he comes back to find that England is even more kind of sexually uptight than when he'd left.

And Hobhouse explicitly tells Byron, do not tell Matthews about your sexual adventures. Even though Matthews was the great Methodist. Yeah, but Matthews, you know, he'll blab about it. And actually, ironically, Matthews also has written to Byron saying, you know, you've got to be careful. And he writes to him about this terrible scandal where a club of gentlemen had been found in a private meeting room in Veer Street in central London, and they'd been pilloried in the hay market. And Matthews described how all London was in an uproar on that day, how the said gents were bemired and beordered, so pelted with dung.

So that's terrifying for Byron. And adding to his gloom is the fact that no sooner does he get back than everyone starts dying. So his mother dies before he can go and see her. He's told, yeah, she's very ill. He rushes up, but she's dead before she gets there. Soon afterwards, Matthew dies, drowned, and it's unclear whether it's suicide or not. Byron writes and says, some curse hangs over me in mind. My mother lies a corpse in this house. One of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say or think or do?

Then in October, he's informed that his first great love, whom he's commemorated in his heart as the model of an innocent love, John Edelston, that he has died as well. So very, very grim for him. But the only thing that cheers him up is that his literary career seems to be going well. So on his second day back, he gets visited by a distant relative of his, a guy called Robert Dallas, who basically has kind of appointed himself Byron's literary agent. And he asks him if he's written anything while he's been away. And Byron shows him kind of various poems that he's written and Dallas thinks, oh, they're not very good. And he says, well, you sure? Haven't you got anything else? And so Byron then rather kind of diffidently hands him the manuscript

of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Which he's been scribbling while he was in Greece and Turkey. Yes. And Dallas reads it and is blown away. And he writes to Byron, you have written one of the most delightful poems I have ever read. I have been so fascinated with Childe Harold that I've not been able to lay it down. And just to recap, Tom, this is the long sort of epic poem that is modelled on Byron's own voyages across Europe. Yeah. And which has this kind of image of the doomed Byronic hero at its heart. So Dallas is basically, you know, he plays Brian Epstein and the George Martin is a publisher called John Murray, who runs not just a publishing business, but a book selling business.

Yes. And he has a whole array of publications. So his bestseller is kind of Jamie Oliver or whatever equivalent. It's Mrs. Rundle's Domestic Cookery. Yeah. But he also publishes textbooks, Navy lists, and the novels of Jane Austen. And although Murray is a Tory, and Byron is very suspicious of Tories, they actually get on tremendously well. They have a very creative editorial relationship. And Byron is happy that

he can rely on Murray. But he doesn't expect too much of it. And he retains this kind of lordly tone of contempt towards the whole pursuit of scribbling and decides, well, perhaps I'll go for a political career. And by early 1812, he is starting to become a feature in the great Whig salons. So the Whigs, they're very, very aristocratic. They're kind of bien pensant aristocrats, aren't they? Yeah. So the centre of power really are these salons that are rung by the Grand Dame of Whig society, of which the most formidable is Holland House.

Splendidly named. Very aptly named for a group of high-minded Francophiles. So Lord and Lady Holland. Lord Holland is like Byron, a big admirer of Napoleon, has busts of him up there, and is seen by Tories as the sinister figure, sinister subversive figure. And Lady Holland, his wife, she is the daughter of a Jamaican planter and had married Lord Holland two days after her first husband had divorced her. And so that gives to them a kind of flamboyant aura of raffishness and scandal.

And it's all very Byronic, except for the fact it's incredibly cold in Holland House because... She doesn't turn the heating on. Doesn't agree with heating. She doesn't turn the heating on. Doesn't like that. Mad. That's such weak behaviour. But she adores Byron.

And she basically is the first, but not the last, middle-aged lady who will become obsessed by him. And she always adored him. He was such a lovable person. I remember him sitting there with that light upon him, looking so beautiful. I bet she wouldn't say that if she'd seen him at work in Athens. Well, maybe, because, you know, they are Whigs. They do have sophisticated progressive opinions. Yeah. And so Byron thinks, well, you know, maybe my future is as a Whig politician. And so on the

27th of February, 1812, he gives his maiden speech in the House of Lords and he is opposing a Tory measure to make the breaking of mechanized looms a capital offence. So we're in the kind of, you know, the heyday of the industrial revolution. So Luddites, effectively, smashing up machines to try and protect jobs. Yeah. And Byron is speaking on behalf of the unemployed stocking weavers of Nottingham. You know, they've made representations to him. And so he's speaking up on their behalf. And his speech is very powerful. It's very passionate. It's very moving, but it's not really a politician's speech. It's a poet's speech. And Byron, even as he is affecting to despise a literary career, actually he has an eye on the forthcoming publication of Charles Harold's Pilgrimage, which is due to come out two weeks after he gives the

speech. He says, I'm basically doing it as an advertisement for it, which is incredibly modern. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, he's very, very alert to opportunities for promotion. He's the Nadine Doris, Tom, of regency politics. So two weeks after he's given his maiden speech, on the 3rd of March, John Murray publishes Child Harold's Pilgrimage and it sells out within three days. Crowds start mobbing booksellers first in London, then across the entire country. Byron, as he famously says, awakes to find himself famous. And basically there's only one word for the obsession with Byron that sweeps London. And it's a word that will be coined a few years later by a young woman of mathematical inclinations, but kind of suppressed romantic yearnings. An heiress who in due course will come to dream of saving Byron by the name of Annabella Milbank.

And the word she coins, Dominic, is Byromania. Byromania. Well, and the amazing thing about Byromania, Tom, is that even as Byromania kicks in, some of the most scandalous, colourful and sordid incidents in Byron's career are yet to come, aren't they? Unbelievable story. Unbelievable story. I mean, we've got some extraordinary stuff coming. If you want to hear those stories right away, you know what you have to do. I mean, we've got some extraordinary stuff coming. If you want to hear those stories right away, you know what you have to do. I mean, we've said this so many times,

you must be sick of it. Go to therestishistory.com, sign up to the Rest is History Club, all kinds of treats and benefits. And you also get to hear those episodes straight away. If not, I'm afraid you will just have to wait until Monday for episode three in this mighty series. Until then, please don't do anything that Lord Byron wouldn't do. And on that bombshell, thank you very much, Tom. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

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