Conditions were hardly what Byron was used to. The town, originally home to three thousand fishermen and their families, was in an unhealthy location next to a stagnant lagoon. Its muddy lanes were covered with human and animal excrement. Rain fell constantly, turning the place into a swamp where mosquitoes bred.
For the first time in his life, Byron was in a situation where he could not solve his problems with a clever turn of phrase or a flash of his rapier wit. The aristocrat who liked to sleep till noon now was besieged with requests and questions at all hours. Nothing could be done until Byron decided it must be done. He forced himself to rise by nine, receiving reports and issuing the orders of the day over breakfast. He personally inspected the supply accounts—guaranteeing payment for new supplies from his own accounts. Every day he met with the other leaders, who squabbled incessantly.
The London Greek Committee’s assistance was often unhelpful. The committee’s representative in Missolonghi, Colonel Leicester Stanhope, felt that the Greeks—of all people—needed to be educated in republican principles. He had ordered a printing press, which Byron had brought from Cephalonia, so that he could publish a newspaper, even though few Greeks outside the cities could read. The committee had also promised a drill instructor and artillery experts, but neither had yet arrived. The soldiers at Missolonghi included volunteers from many other countries, making communication difficult, though Byron attempted to train them himself (without great success).
Lady Blessington, his confidante in Italy, had observed that she could easily imagine Byron going courageously into battle, but not “enduring the tedious details, and submitting to the tiresome arrangements, of which as a chief, he must bear the weight.” She was correct: Byron yearned for action. At his request, Mavrocordatos gave him the title Archistrategos, and “permission” to stage an attack on the fortress of Lepanto, still under Turkish control. Byron’s plan may have been as much from historical consciousness as anything else, for Lepanto was the site of a famous victory over the Turks in 1471 by the combined forces of Spain and Venice.
Byron put himself at the head of a brigade of Suliotes, the Albanian warriors who had charmed him on his first trip to the Near East eleven years before. Unfortunately, he found them riotous and mutinous. When a ship brought needed supplies, Byron’s Suliotes refused to carry them from the beach, because they had arrived on a saint’s day. Enraged, Byron started the job himself until others finally joined him.
On his birthday, January 22, 1824, Byron was feeling depressed. Despite the favors he had shown to his beloved Lukas (“Luke”)— even putting him in charge of a squad of thirty soldiers—the boy was greedy, arrogant, and worst of all, unloving to Byron. Byron emerged from his bedroom that morning to read a poem he had written especially for the occasion, titled “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year.” The poem reveals a man obsessed by age and the loss of his youth—and along with it, his physical beauty and sexual power.
’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move;
Yet though I cannot be beloved
Still let me love!
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
. . . . . . .
Awake! (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit! Think throughwhom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!
Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!—unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.
If thou regrett’st thy youth,why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:—up to the field and give
Away thy breath!
Seek out—less often sought than found —
A soldier’s grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.
Byron knew by now that he was trapped. Any kind of military success seemed farther out of reach every day, yet he could not leave Greece, for the hopes of too many people rested on him. The disgrace he would suffer by departing would be monumental.
Despite the continual rains, Byron insisted on taking a horseback ride each day, accompanied by an honor guard of Suliotes, who kept up with him even though they were on foot. Many times he returned drenched to the skin, further undermining his uncertain health. The many years of alternating between starvation diets and wild living had undoubtedly weakened him physically. On February 15, he suffered a convulsive fit, probably the result of a high fever. Byron feared it was a symptom of epilepsy and allowed the doctors to treat him by applying leeches to his forehead. They overdid the treatment and had trouble stanching the flow of blood. Byron fainted. “It [the seizure] was very painful,” he wrote in his journal, “and had it lasted a moment longer must have extinguished my mortality.”
Over the next two months, Byron’s health continued to deteriorate. His doctors, young men just out of medical school, continually advised bleeding by the application of leeches. It was then a standard treatment, but Byron resisted, declaring that more people died from being bled than were saved by it. Above all, he wished to keep his mental functioning as high as possible. Sometimes, to reassure himself that he was not losing his memory, Byron recited Latin verses from his school days. Someone reported that he held conversations with his Newfoundland dog: “Lyon, thou art an honest fellow, Lyon. Thou art more faithful than men, Lyon; I trust thee more.”
Meanwhile, the rains kept coming—much as they had during the summer of 1816. When the sky cleared for a while on April 9, Byron went out riding with Pietro Gamba. They were caught in a sudden shower, and returned to the town sopping wet. Byron was shivering and feverish, but insisted on going out again the next day. In the evening, his doctor found him lying on a sofa. Byron “became pensive,” and said that he had been thinking of a prediction “made to him, when a boy, by a famed fortune-teller in Scotland.” He had warned Byron to beware of his thirty-seventh year—this year.
Byron continued his running dispute with the doctors as to the necessity of applying leeches to bring down his fever. In the end, the doctors won by arguing that if his illness progressed it would deprive Byron of his sanity. It was the only argument that would move him. Byron, who had inspired the image of the vampire, now began to give up his blood—two pounds of it the first day, according to the doctors’ account. “Come,” he told them, “you are, I see, a d——d set of butchers.”
For the next three days, a weakened Byron drifted in and out of consciousness, delirious and shivering. “I fancy myself a Jew,” he told someone sitting at his bedside, “a Mohamedan, and a christian of every profession of faith. Eternity and space are before me; but on this subject, thank God, I am happy and at ease.” At other times he fell into the delusion that he had been cursed by an evil eye and commanded that the witches who had done this be brought to his bedside so he could confront them. Day after day the doctors drained his blood, at one point applying a dozen leeches to his temples. Byron retained one last shred of pride: when the doctors wanted to apply mustard plasters, he would not allow them to uncover his foot.
On the afternoon of Easter Sunday, Byron realized that he was dying and his thoughts turned to those dearest to him. He began calling out the names of his daughter Ada and of his much-loved sister Augusta. Knowing that death was near, he pleaded that his body not be chopped up or sent to England. On the evening of April 18, Byron opened his eyes a last time and said, “I want to sleep now.” That night there was a violent thunderstorm. The Greek villagers knew what it meant: a great man was departing the earth. Byron died the next morning, virtually two years to the day from the death of Allegra in the convent at Bagnacavallo.
Despite Byron’s request, the surgeons had not finished; they now cut him
open for no good reason except possibly to find the source of his genius. They weighed the brain, reporting that it was much larger than an ordinary man’s. Even the famous foot now lay exposed to the curious physicians who had killed their patient. Dr. Millingen wrote later of “the congenital malconformation of his left foot and leg,” though those who knew and loved Byron always said it was his right foot.
At his funeral in Missolonghi, the chief mourner solemnly said, “All Greece is his sepulchre.” Gamba described the scene: “The wretchedness and desolation of the place . . . the wild and half civilized warriors around us; their deep-felt, unaffected grief; the fond recollections; the disappointed hopes . . . all contributed to form a scene more moving, more truly affecting, than perhaps was ever before witnessed around the grave of a great man.” A less sentimental view came from William Fletcher, Byron’s faithful retainer, who wrote to Thomas Moore, “With great grief I inform you of the death of my late dear Master, my Lord, who died this morning at ten of the Clock of a rapid decline and slow fever, caused by anxiety, sea-bathing, women, and riding in the Sun against my advice.” He ended the letter with a request for a job. No man is a hero to his valet.
Mary learned of Byron’s death nearly a month later, on May 15. She had spent a miserable evening the night before, tormented by sad thoughts of Shelley and Italy. She wrote in her journal the next day:
This [Byron’s death] then was the “coming event” that cast its shadow on my last night’s miserable thoughts. Byron has become one of the people of the grave—that innumerable conclave to which the beings I best loved belong. I knew him in the bright days of youth, when neither care or fear had visited me: before death had made me feel my mortality and the earth was the scene of my hopes—Can I forget our evening visits to Diodati—our excursions on the lake when he sang the Tyrolese hymn—and his voice was harmonized with winds and waves?—Can I forget his attentions & consolations to me during my deepest misery?— Never.
Beauty sat on his countenance and power beamed from his eye—his faults being for the most part weaknesses induced one readily to pardon them. Albe—the dear capricious, fascinating Albe—has left this desart world! . . . God grant I may die young!
The Greeks wanted to bury Byron in their soil, but it was feared that if the Turks won the struggle, they would desecrate the body. An urn containing Byron’s lungs was reportedly interred in a church in Missolonghi. The rest of him was placed in a tin-lined box which was then submerged in a barrel of alcohol and sent to England. Byron’s lifelong friend John Cam Hobhouse met the ship and noted that Byron’s Newfoundland dog had remained by his master. On viewing the body, Hobhouse said the once-beautiful person was virtually unrecognizable —“not a vestige of what he was.”
A closed coffin containing Byron’s body was put on display in a London undertaker’s. Admirers, enemies, and the merely curious filed through the room for seven days. On July 9, Mary Shelley went to see it, resting her hand on the casket for a moment as she passed. Hobhouse had requested a burial at Westminster Abbey; that was refused, so a funeral procession brought the body to the family church in Hucknall Torkard near Newstead. Mary wrote to Trelawny that “it went to my heart when the other day the hearse that contained his lifeless form, a form of beauty which in life I often delighted to behold, passed my window going up Highgate Hill on his last journey.”
Hobhouse now took steps to protect Byron’s “honor and fame.” Byron had given a copy of his memoirs to Thomas Moore, telling him he could make some money by having it published, as long as he waited till after Byron’s death. The Irish poet had in fact already deposited it with John Murray, in exchange for a loan of two thousand guineas, with the agreement that Moore might publish it. Hobhouse knew of this arrangement and worked hard to prevent the publication of the memoirs. He claimed that he did this to save the feelings of Byron’s wife and half-sister, but Hobhouse, by this time a member of Parliament, might well have feared any revelations concerning the trip he and Byron had made to the Near East as young men. He prevailed, and on May 17, the manuscript of Byron’s memoirs was burned in the fireplace of John Murray’s house. Moore had protested that the others had not even read the manuscript, but they apparently saw no need to: the thought that Byron might have written a true account of his life was enough for them to feel it had to be destroyed.
Nowhere was Byron mourned more deeply than in Greece. He remains a national hero there today—statues of him are found throughout the peninsula, streets and squares are named for him. After his death poems and klephtic ballads celebrating his deeds became popular. Byron’s modern biographer, Leslie Marchand, quoted from one of the ballads:
Missolonghi groaned and the Suliots cried
For Lord Byron who came from London.
He gathered the klephts and made them into an army. . . .
The klephts gave to Byron the name of father
because he loved the klephts of Roumele. . . .
The woodlands weep, and the trees weep. . . .
Because Byron lies dead at Missolonghi.
In 1825, the Turks began a yearlong siege of Missolonghi. In the spring of the following year, some inhabitants tried to escape through enemy lines. Those too weak to flee stayed behind to burn the town to prevent the Turks from taking it. In the end, there were only a few survivors. But Missolonghi’s sacrifice became an inspiration for the independence struggle, partly because of the town’s association with Byron. The Greeks won in 1832, and Prince Mavrocordatos served several terms as the nation’s prime minister.
Byron had been one of the most famous people in the world; his early death only increased his celebrity. As those who had known him began to publish their own recollections of his life and exploits, the Romantic hero that he personified grew to mythical status. Soon after his death, Thomas Medwin published his Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron at Pisa, which most of Byron’s longtime friends accused of distorting the poet’s memory. Others, including Thomas Moore, tried to write his life, but Byron himself knew that no one would be able to get him down on paper. He told Lady Blessington a year before his death,
People take for gospel all I say, and go away continually with false impressions. Mais n’importe! it will render the statements of my future biographers more amusing. . . . I am so changeable, being every thing by turns and nothing long,—I am a such a strange melange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. There are but two sentiments to which I am constant,—a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant, and neither is calculated to gain me friends.
Byron’s personality was so powerful that people who had been only peripherally associated with him shared a part of his charisma. The young Benjamin Disraeli, who would one day be a novelist and then prime minister of Britain, was another of his admirers. He visited Lake Geneva in 1826 and wrote his father,
I take a row on the lake every night with Maurice, Lord Byron’s celebrated boatman. Maurice is very handsome and very vain, but he has been made so by the English, of whom he is the regular pet. He talks of nothing but Lord Byron, particularly if you shew the least interest in the subject. He told me that on the night of the famous storm [June 13] described in the third canto of C[hilde] H[arold], had they been out five minutes more the boat must have been wrecked. He told Lord Byron at first of the danger of such a night voyage, and the only answer which B. made was stripping quite naked and folding around him a great robe de chambre, so that in case of wreck he was prepared to swim immediately. I asked him if [Byron] spoke. He said he seldom conversed with him or any one at any time.
Of Byron’s female admirers, the Countess Guiccioli returned to her husband after writing, at the count’s request, an account of her love affair with Byron. The most reckless of Byron’s loves, Lady Caroline Lamb, continued her literary career, but never strayed far from her original subject. Her husband’s family, who didn’t want her scandalous behavior to ruin his political career, persuaded him to separate from her. He became prim
e minister, and Caroline spent her final years in an alcoholic haze, guarded by servants at a large country house. Her only companion was her mentally disabled son, whom Byron had been kind to. Lady Caroline’s sister referred to the son as “Frankenstein.”
The author of Frankenstein confided her deepest feelings about Byron to her journal, but even there was unable to express them frankly: “At the age of twenty six,” Mary wrote,
I am in the condition of an aged person—all my old friends are gone—I have no wish to form new—I cling to the few remaining—but they slide away & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world—Albe, dearest Albe, was knit by long associations—Each day I repeat with bitterer feelings “Life is the desart and the solitude—how populous the grave,” and that region to the dearer and best beloved beings which it has torn from me, now adds that resplendent Spirit, whom I loved whose departure leaves the dull earth dark as midnight.
Someone, using a different color ink, later crossed out the three words “whom I loved.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MARY ALONE
Alone—alone—all—all—alone
Upon the wide, wide sea—
And God will not take pity on
My soul in agony!
—a slightly revised quotation from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as written in Mary Shelley’s journal, 1841
FROM THE TIME Mary hid behind the family sofa and first heard Coleridge recite his great poem, it had moved her deeply. On April 16, 1841, nineteen years after Percy’s death, Mary wrote a verse from it from memory—slightly misquoting—in her journal. Like the Ancient Mariner, Mary now felt herself isolated, friendless, and alone.
She had felt that way for a long time. By coincidence, the day before she learned of Byron’s death in May 1824, she had begun a new novel, titled The Last Man. Like Frankenstein, it was what we would call a science fiction novel, though no such term existed then. The book’s premise is that a plague wipes out the entire human race, except the eponymous last man. Mary felt herself well qualified to describe such a person, for as she wrote in her journal: “The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct before me.”
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