by Edna O'Brien
Though the recipient of ‘many a thundery Jobation’ from Dr Drury, he was aggrieved at the idea of Drury stepping down and, with an irrational venom, opposed the appointment of a Dr Butler. When Dr Butler was appointed, Byron insisted on remaining in the same house so as to inflict torments, of which he was wondrously inventive. He circulated a broadsheet in which Butler was described as ‘pomposus’, a man of florid jargon, and to add piquance to the environment, he sprinkled gunpowder along the floors and tore down the iron grating over the windows, claiming that it darkened the hall.
Byron’s departure was met with relief, but he did not leave as a ‘finished scholar’, having only come third in his grade. For his final speech day he orated King Lear’s address to the storm, holding his audience so captive that news of his triumph reached Nottinghamshire. Catherine, who had not been invited, nevertheless asked Mr Hanson to send a dozen of wine and six ports to her son. Determined to avoid her, he invited himself to the Hanson household for the holiday season and further displayed his subversive spirit by firing at the cook’s hat, because she had not been sufficiently beholden.
FOUR
‘Four score miles’ between himself and Mrs Byron, was his triumphant yodel, as the Cambridge stagecoach set out from Fetter Lane in London in October 1805. Mrs Byron and he, as he wrote to Augusta, were now totally separated, he had despaired of the futility of natural ties and sought refuge with strangers.
Of the dozen or so young bloods who enrolled at Trinity College, Byron was surely the most striking, what with his romantic aura, his strange combination of diffidence and hauteur and his ‘super excellent’ rooms, which Mr Hanson had been ordered to fit with furnishings, silver plate, glasses, decanters, along with four dozen of wine, port, sherry and claret. He brought his bulldog with him, a creature proving so vicious that it had to be replaced with a bear, which Byron mockingly suggested might sit for a fellowship.
Tutors and masters were soon to find that there was no checking the antics or vivaciousness of the seventeen-and-half year-old peer. Friendships burgeoned, his table was strewn with invitations and study regarded as the last of his pursuits. Those friendships that he forged at Cambridge lasted throughout his life and chief among them was John Cam Hobhouse, renamed Hobby, son of a Bristol baronet, liberal-minded, with an interest in politics and literature, penning satires in imitation of Juvenal. Another was Charles Skinner Matthews, avowed atheist and homosexual, eccentric to the point that though he was poor, he would pay a shilling in a certain coffee house in the Strand in London because he could keep his hat on. There was Scrope Davies, Byron’s jovial drinking companion, ‘a profane scoffer’, who claimed that Byron wore paper curls in bed, which he well may have. Lastly, Douglas Kinnaird, who would eventually have the unenviable role of becoming Byron’s banker.
These friendships show Byron at his most endearing. Their escapades have all the mischief, glee and daftness which Dickens would accord to Mr Pickwick and his troupe of gallants. Years later, recalling a night with Scrope at the gaming tables, before he was yet of age, Scrope, drunk, had lost everything and was being entreated by his friends to quit, except that he wouldn’t. Next day, two friends with ‘severe headache and empty pockets’ found him in his rooms, sound asleep, without a nightcap, the chamber pot by his bedside, ‘brim full of banknotes’.
His friends were ever loyal to him and, after his death, Hobhouse wrote that no man ever lived that had such devoted friends, his power of attaching people to him was magical, he was ‘commanding without being over-awing, a decisiveness in his conversation and yet exceedingly free, open and unreserved’.
His first appearance in the hall at Trinity in his state robes was, as he told Hanson, quite superb. He determined to live gaily, forget the muse, which was for ‘musty old sophs and fellows’, forgo reading, as no one bothered to look into an author, ancient or modern; the master, as he noted, ‘eats, drinks and sleeps, the fellows likewise, except that they also pun’. He was in urgent need of money, adding that he would settle for his saddle, harness and accoutrements later on. When Hanson advised some thrift, he admitted to a life of dissipation, but almost at once dashed off another letter full of umbrage towards Hanson for having charged him with that very same condition. The tone of his letters henceforth to his solicitor was peremptory and defiant. Mr Hanson was to keep Mrs Byron from ever appearing at Trinity and if that were to happen he would quit, even though rustication or expulsion might be the consequence. Most unfairly of all, he blamed that selfsame mother for his depravity, saying she had had an obligation to protect, cherish and instruct her young offspring but had failed in her duties and her perversion of temper had led to a corruption of his. He also wished it known that university was a waste for a man of his rank.
In the midst of all this dissipation, something beautiful and stirring and possibly frightening occurred. First it was the voice, silver and soaring like the skylark, the voice of a fifteen-year-old choirboy in Trinity Chapel, then the face, seen in candlelight, chiselled and beautiful. John Edleston, two years younger than Byron and an orphan of low birth, was one for whom he formed the purest and most intense passion, a mystic thread joining them both. Edleston had been recruited to Cambridge and given a stipend of one and a half shillings a term along with his board and education. In that rarefied environment, their friendship flourished, like Juno’s swans, inseparable. There were glances, trysts and never a single tiresome moment between them. They went moonlighting, swam in the river below Grantchester, a secret wooded haunt that came to be called ‘Byron’s pool’. He showered his protégé with gifts. At the Christmas recess Edleston gave him a cornelian ring in the shape of a heart, mounted on a thin gold band, which he wore on his little finger. This ‘toy of blushing hue’ he celebrated in a verse, ‘Pignus Amoris–The Colour of Love’, in which the inexpensive jewel attests to the love of the giver, the stone, it seemed to him, emitting a tear of emotion. Neither time nor distance, he believed, could alter it, except that time, distance, caution and self-preservation brought it to a ruthless end.
Heading for London, he took lodgings with a Mrs Massingberd in Piccadilly, a room for himself and another for Fletcher, his valet. Now in the metropolis, his quarterly allowance from Chancery not payable until the New Year, he urgently needed funds. It was then and ongoingly that he put himself in the clutches of the moneylenders, the ‘tribe of Levi’. ‘Jew King’ was the reigning moneylender of the time, whose name Byron found in a newspaper advertisement. Being a minor he wrote to his half-sister Augusta in the most ‘inviolable secrecy’, asking her to go as guarantor for him, adding boastfully that his property was worth one hundred times the sum he needed to raise, referring to riches that would soon be forthcoming. This surge of optimism was prompted by Mr Hanson, the perfect prototype for the dilatory and prevaricating lawyers which Dickens depicted in Bleak House. Without any real foundation, Mr Hanson assured him that the lawsuit to regain the Rochdale property and its lucrative collieries was progressing apace. This proved to be a figment, since it staggered on for years.
Byron asked Augusta that his request be kept secret from that ‘grandee’ Lord Carlisle or ‘the chattering puppy, Hanson’. Augusta, wary at the thought of moneylenders, offered the few hundred pounds from her own allowance, which Byron on point of honour declined, saying he would not accept her money even if he was in danger of starvation. In her dilemma, she told Lord Carlisle and Hanson, and Byron severed relations with her, refusing to answer her pleading and contrite letters. It was Mrs Massingberd in the end who went guarantor and set Byron on the long punitive relationship with the ‘sordid bloodsuckers’. Happy with his new-found, albeit indentured wealth, he wrote to his mother to say he had discharged his college bills along with debts that were left from Harrow, but that he would not be returning to Cambridge for the following term. He found it inconvenient to remain at an English university, as improvement to a man of his rank was impossible, the very idea of such a place ‘ridiculous’. He intended to go
abroad, France being prohibited because of England’s alliance with the Bourbons against Napoleon, but Germany, the courts of Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg were still open and he could, if necessary, be accompanied by a tutor of her choosing.
For his ‘first season’ in London he availed himself of many diversions, took fencing lessons from Henry Angelo and boxing lessons from John ‘Gentleman’ Jackson–a famous boxing champion. He was determined, as was true for his hero the hunchback Alexander Pope, that his lameness should neither blight nor curtail his prowess, claiming that the initial repugnance led to greater fierceness. Jackson, a bit of a bruiser, had great appeal for Byron, who noted his ‘balustrade calf and beautifully turned but not over delicate ankle’.
But as the money ran out and he found it necessary to leave London, he warned the ‘Furiosa’, his mother, that he would be coming to that ‘execrable kennel’ at Southwell, hoping she had engaged a manservant, since his servant must attend to his horses and, moreover, that she herself cut a very indifferent figure with all those maids in her habitation.
When he did eventually return to Cambridge, the fornicating and escapading of London had not quenched his love for Edleston–on the contrary, it had deepened it. His extravagance took an even wider radius, Edleston was showered with gifts, a hunting watch with gold chain and gold seal, and to his mother’s consternation Byron acquired a carriage, along with the necessary horses, harnesses and uniformed footmen. He soon realised that Edleston was the love he could not live without and yet could not live with, as suspected sodomites were imprisoned, the crime being punishable by hanging. Contending with such looming and frightening factors, he knew that it must end, but procrastinated, being still in love. The finale came when Edleston’s voice broke and being no longer an asset to the choir, he had to leave Cambridge. Byron told his cousin Elizabeth Pigot that the young man would be stationed in a mercantile house of pre-eminence in the metropolis, but as things emerged Edleston was a lowly clerk in an investment office in Lombard Street. Though his mind was a chaos of hope and sorrow, after the separation, Byron threw himself into even more daring revels, expanding his circle to include jockeys, gamblers, boxers, authors and parsons, his rooms furnished in an Ottoman style that would befit a sultan.
The bitter aftermath would occur later, when Edleston wrote to ask for help and Byron, though innately generous, bristled, causing his ‘Cornelian’ to write an abject and somewhat hypocritical letter saying that his only wish had been to secure Byron’s patronage so that he could get a respectable occupation and not be burthensome to anyone.
Byron’s comings and goings to and from Cambridge over the next three years are those of a fitful, prodigal and fugitive young Lord. He would be in some hotel or other in London, frequenting the clubs, where the dice rattled through the night, gambling on upcoming prizefighters, and consorting with prostitutes, whom he ‘rescued’ temporarily from the street. Lost in this abyss of sensuality, living in constant concubinage with these Marys, Corinnas or Phyllises, he sometimes had to take to his bed and undergo a course of restoration, taking Pearson’s prescription for gonorrhea Virgulata, along with laudanum for the pain. The Cocoa Tree Club, a chocolate house in Piccadilly, was the popular retreat at the time, a place, as Edward Gibbon said, ‘where the first men of the Kingdom in point of Fashion and Fortune assemble[d]’. Byron paints a more bibulous picture: ‘We clareted and champagned till two–then supped and finished with a kind of Regency punch composed of Madeira, brandy and green tea, no real water being admitted therein.’
Jackson, as well as being his boxing master, helped in his ever-burgeoning yen for gambling, purchased a pony and pedigree greyhounds for him, along with encouraging him to bet on promising fighters. Another of his haunts was the apartment of Madame Catalani, a prima donna from the opera Masquerade at Covent Garden, who entertained whores, bawds and gigolos, which Byron described to Hobhouse as ‘a glorious Harem’. His relationship with Caroline Cameron, a sixteen-year-old prostitute, whom he called Dahlia, was so intense that for a week or so he even considered marriage. When they went to Brighton to join his old friends Hobhouse, Scrope, Ned Long and Wedderburn Webster, Caroline was paraded on the seafront in boy’s clothing, Byron introducing her to strangers as his brother Gordon. Though Byron was lame and ever conscious of it, Webster noted that he could vault ‘with the agility of a harlequin’.
When the poetry ‘mania’ came on him, he would spin a prologue or a few satires, visiting Southwell whenever he chose, whence, by the most rigorous dieting, he had metamorphosed himself, becoming gaunt and spectral, in Hamlet guise. All his life he fretted about being overweight and in a letter to Hanson at that time, he boasted of his regime of violent exercise and fasting–‘I wear seven waistcoats and a great coat, run, and play at cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the Hip Bath daily; eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher’s Meat in twenty four hours, no Suppers or Breakfast, only one meal a day; drink no malt liquor, but a little wine, and take Physic occasionally. By these means my Ribs display skin of no great Thickness…’
He dabbled in love, verse, and writing plays, which he also starred in, and his cousin Elizabeth Pigot nicknamed him ‘Tristam Fickle et L’Amoureuse’. It was she who observed that he did not know his own mind for more than ten minutes. His conceit was unbounded. When his tutor, the Reverend Thomas Jones, enquired if he might be returning to Cambridge, Byron’s reply was categoric and condescending–‘I have other reasons for not residing at Cambridge, I dislike it…I have never considered it my alma mater, but rather as a nurse of no very promising appearance, on whom I have been forced against her inclinations and contrary to mine.’
The break with Edleston drew him more seriously to his poetry, perfecting and honing the several pieces which he had written over the past few years. Translations and imitations from Virgil and Anacreon were gathered together to be published in a slim volume, titled Hours of Idleness, in 1807. It was not, as he told Elizabeth Pigot, for the approbation of ‘Citizen Mob’, but for a few elite friends. It was to be published by a printer in Newark, Mr Ridge, whom Byron instructed and bullied, then sold by a Mr Crosby, a London bookseller, who would also be the butt of Byron’s impetuous demands. Mr Ridge was bombarded with corrections, additions, disquisitions over the size of print, the illustrations, whether they should be of Harrow, Newstead or a portrait of Byron himself, and was latterly told to suspend all printing, as the poet had decided to give the work a new form.
Though he suffered the author’s ‘usual trepidations’, he told his Cambridge friend William Bankes, a classicist and art collector, that he did not wish to be ‘cloyed with insipid compliments’, except that he did. To Elizabeth he wrote that sales were going well in the town and the watering places but sluggish with the rustics, due to provincial ignorance.
Crosby proved to be not only bookseller and friend of the printer, he was also the reviewer for the Monthly Literary Recreations and rhapsodised somewhat about the young and noble author, with such a degree of modesty, deciding that his beauties grew on ‘the soil of genius’. In the same issue, Byron reviewed two volumes of Wordsworth’s poetry, towards whom he had a political and poetic antipathy, his review confirming his stated opinion that men of the quill are sworn enemies. Wordsworth’s muse, he conceded, was ‘simple and flowing’, but there were deformities, strong and sometimes irresistible feelings rendered with ‘unexceptional sentiments’.
FIVE
Byron was now the literary swain, passing his time in some London hotel, read by duchesses, his life an annal of ‘Routs, Riots, Balls and Boxing Matches, Dowagers and Demi-Reps, Cards and Crimcon [adultery], Parliamentary Discussion, Political Details, Masquerades, Mechanics…Wine, Women, Waxworks and Weathercocks’. He might however have been less scathing towards Wordsworth, ‘the laker’, had he foreseen the savagery which Hours of Idleness would incur. Mr Hewson Clarke, a sizar of Emmanuel College, reviewing it in The Satirist, wondered what could have ind
uced ‘George Gordon Lord Byron, a minor, to have favoured the world with this collection’, then lampooned the Lord walking around Cambridge with his bear and heaped insults on that ‘drunken harridan’, Byron’s mother.
But it was by a notice in the Edinburgh Review that Byron was ‘cut to atoms’. It was the journal of the time; the reviewer, writing anonymously, was Henry Brougham, later Baron Brougham and future Lord Chancellor. Brougham excoriated him for pleading his minority, his privilege and for a mendaciousness by asking his readers to indulge his lack of talent or originality. He then went on to propose the prerequisites for a work–‘We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem, and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers or differently expressed.’ He erroneously concluded by saying that it would be the last the world would hear of Byron.
