by Edna O'Brien
Byron was devastated, swearing to have done with poetry for ever, his little fabric of fame among the duchesses had collapsed. In a poem, ‘Stanzas to Jessy’, that he had written for Edleston, he spoke of ‘destiny’s relentless knife’ which severs lovers, and now he was to experience the relentless knives of critics, couching their spleen and venting their jealousy in lethal pedantry, for the very reason that they could never be him.
In 1808 Byron had installed himself at Newstead, a tenant Lord Grey de Ruthyn dismissed for having visited ravages upon the house, windows broken, woods further despoiled. The hares and rabbits that Lord Grey had got for his shoots had eaten all the young trees and foliage. Heedless of his debts, Byron enlisted stonemasons, carpenters, glaziers, upholsterers, so that the ancestral seat could be restored to its former glory. His tastes inclined towards the ostentatious, draperies, frills, tassels, valances, gilded four-posters, coronets, and true to his penchant for the macabre, he had skulls which had been found in the crypt, mounted on silver to be used as drinking cups.
‘Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days’…he invited friends from Harrow and Cambridge to make merry with him, local wenches recruited as maids wearing full uniform, save for caps, which were excused. Mrs Byron was not permitted a visit, since it would not, he said, ‘be proper or practical for either party’. For their evening revels the guests had to dress as monks, try their hand at a bit of amateur acting, quaff the wines and do their host’s bidding. Byron remained outside it all, orchestrating these elaborate stunts, his laughter light and high and most infectious, yet curiously and tormentingly detached.
A visitor, Charles Skinner Matthews, whom Byron admired and who did not, as with many of the Cambridge circle, conceal his homosexual predilections, describes the visit in all its whimsicality to his sister. First he paints a picture of the Abbey, a fine crumbling piece of antiquity, surrounded by bleak and barren hills, its lake bordered with castellated buildings, an old kitchen, dilapidated apartments, but a ‘noble room’ seventy feet in length and twenty-three in breadth, for receiving. Then he guides her on an imaginary visit–
Be mindful to go there in broad daylight, and with your eyes about you. For, should you make any blunder, should you go to the right of the hall steps, you are laid hold of by a bear; and should you go to the left, your case is still worse, for you run full against a wolf! Nor, when you have attained the door, is your danger over; for the hall being decayed, and therefore standing in need of repair, a bevy of inmates are very probably banging at one end of it with their pistols; so that if you enter without giving loud notice of your approach, you have only escaped the wolf and the bear to expire by the pistol-shots of the merry monks of Newstead…As for our way of living, the order of the day was generally this:–for breakfast we had no set hour, but each suited his own convenience–everything remaining on the table until the whole party had done; though had one wished to breakfast at the early hour of ten, one would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up. Our average hour of rising was one. I…was always…the first of the party, and was esteemed a prodigy of early rising…Then, for the amusements of the morning, there was reading, fencing, single-stick or shuttle-cock, in the great room; practising with pistols in the hall; walking–riding–cricket–sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined; and our evening lasted…till one, two, or three in the morning…I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human skull filled with burgundy. After revelling on choice viands, and the finest wines of France…A set of monkish dresses, which had been provided, with all the proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures etcetera, often gave a variety to our appearance, and to our pursuits.
Unluckily, he fell ill in the draughty abode, then quarrelled with Hobhouse, with whom he had to walk the one hundred and thirty-five miles back to London, neither speaking, the journey taking an entire week, because of having to take shelter from the rains. Before he left, Byron had invited Skinner Matthews as a companion to Constantinople, but as he would write to his sister, it was probably ‘but a wild scheme’ and required ‘twice thinking upon’.
SIX
Greece, for Byron, was the cradle of civilisation, yet there were less loftier reasons for his need to escape. Greece would indeed be an impetus for his future poetry, Parnassus, ‘snow-clad, the “Pythian hymn” of the priestess at Delphi or Daphne’s “deathless plant’”. He owed £12,000, his two ancestral seats, Newstead and Rochdale reaped next to nothing, servants went unpaid, the miners in the Lancashire coal pits threatened to revolt and his mother was obliged to lead a shiftless and stranded existence, moving from place to place and able to curb neither her son’s hauteur nor his extravagances. Also there were indignant reactions to his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire, a work in which he made bold and unfettered attacks on all his literary enemies, and so like Robinson Crusoe he was setting out on the ‘vide vorld of vaters’.
He commissioned a miniaturist to paint portraits of all his male friends, ‘heartless fellows’ though they were, and was leaving England without regret. With a £2,000 loan from a Mr Birch, Hanson’s partner, and bonds of over £4,000, guaranteed by his friend Scrope Davies, Byron was able to gather a motley crew for his travels. There was Joe Murray, who had been butler to the Wicked Lord, ‘timber headed’ Fletcher, Byron’s valet, Robert Rushton, his young comely page, on whom he had visited the ‘cowpox’, a Prussian who had formerly served in Persia and spoke Arabic and his friend Hobhouse, who was intending to write a book of his travels, taking with him one hundred pens and two gallons of ink.
On 2 July 1809, the packet sailed from Falmouth under the command of Captain Kidd, some of the passengers to grumble, some to spew. The inebriate Captain Kidd regaled Byron with sea stories and tales of the supernatural, one in which, asleep in his cabin, he had felt the weight of his brother’s limbs, the brush of his brother’s wet uniform, not knowing that that very brother had died while serving in the East Indies.
Removed from the cold climes and dark skies of England and from the constraints that though he defied them, were ever present, Byron’s experience of Spain and Portugal was one of dazzlement–beauties of every description, natural and artificial, palaces and gardens rising from rocks, crags and precipices, mountains moss-embrowned, cork forests, the tender azure of the deep, chimera and fantasy amidst carnage and gore. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s failed conquest of Spain and Portugal during 1808, Lisbon, their first stop, was a ravaged city, garrisoned by British and Spanish soldiers, a thousand Albion keels guarding the shore. The unclaimed dead lay with saucers on their breasts awaiting alms in the wan hope of eventual burial, and the ten thousand dogs, which the French had slaughtered before retreating, lay rotting on the streets. Beauty and carnage conjoined, each sight seeping into his unconscious as he accrued the startling material for his poetry.
The experiences of the next two years of travel would yield not just eggs and oranges and fleas and hard beds and stinking latrines and ‘fooleries’ with boys and young women, it would also provide the shimmering background for his poem Childe Harold, initially called Childe Burun, the lowly lay of a youth, darkly disconsolate, who had spent his time ‘in riot most uncouth’, drugged with pleasures, longing betimes for woe, and in imitation of Dante’s penitents journeying to the Underworld to witness the straits of the departed.
Such a proliferation of sights and sounds, encounters with generals and admirals, princes and pashas, a variety of conjugal excitements, the classical beauty of Greece, the natural beauty of Albania, dangers and hazards in remote places without a name, changed Byron both as a man and as an artist. Yet something remained, the melancholy that could be routed out and the wounds of childhood. On a much later journey, exiled from England in disgrace in 1814, he remarked in his ‘Alpine Journal’, written for Augusta, that the woods of withered trees, their trunks stripped and barkless, their branches lifeless, remin
ded him of himself and of his family. For all his gaiety and legendary colloquy, Byron was obsessed with the idea of a withering, recalling more than once Swift’s remark of ‘dying at the top’, signifying the loss of reason, a dread he shared with the Mad Dean.
His time abroad would also yield a crop of imperious letters to his solicitor Hanson, who was not sending remittances fast enough, because Byron had determined to live like a potentate.
‘I should have joined the army, but we have no time to lose before we get up the Mediterranean and Archipelago’, he wrote to his mother, masking the fact that political idealism does not tally with the horror of war. As he saw it, there were no winners, all were eventual victims and this conviction would be tellingly rendered both in Childe Harold and Don Juan, the foe, the victim and the fond ally fighting for all but fighting in vain, corpses to feed the ravens and fertilise the fields.
His letters were also filled with the observations and playfulness of a young man adapting himself to the habits of another country–‘I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin to the monks…and I goes into society (with my pocket pistols), and I swims in the Tagus…and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea and bites from the mosquitoes,’ he wrote to his friend Francis Hodgson. Hobhouse and he, being of such contrasting dispositions, saw things differently, Hobhouse disgusted by lasciviousness and Byron enthralled by it. For Hobhouse, the women, nasty and frightful, were ‘the ugliest race of animals’, whereas for Byron, the Portuguese and Spanish belles, with their glossy black hair and large black eyes, their gift of intrigue, were irresistible, replacing the ‘Lancashire witches’ in his affections.
So the party of men, Rushton, Fletcher, old Joe Murray, Hobby and Byron, travelled and bickered, searched for rooms in inns and in the headquarters of the defeated royalist militia. Byron and Hobhouse would leave their cards with various ambassadors and consuls, sometimes to no avail, and arriving in Seville they were obliged to take lodgings with the two unmarried Beltram sisters. They went ‘supperless and dinnerless’ as Hobhouse noted and even worse, were crammed into one little bedroom, not at all the salubrious setting that Byron would have liked. But very soon the charms of the sisters compensated, especially Donna Josepha, the elder, who became his ‘preceptress’ in love, a passion they furthered with the aid of a dictionary.
In the Governor’s box at a bullfight in Cadiz, Byron was both captivated and repelled, the savagery, the ceremony, the blood-lust of the spectators, more shocking than the disembowelling of man or beast, the effect on him so profound that he devoted eleven stanzas of Childe Harold to this Sabbath death. In the Cathedral he vented his wonted repugnance for art, hating the works of Velázquez and Murillo, blaspheming all art, unless it reminded him of something, and feeling as if he might spit on the representations of saints. But Donna Josepha had furnished him with sweet moments and sweet memories and on his departure for Cadiz, she had cut off a lock of her hair, three feet in length, which he sent to his mother to be ‘retained’ until he returned home, though perversely vowing that he would never return to England again.
His ambiguity about his native land revealed itself at every twist and turn and standing on the quayside with Hobby, witnessing the celebratory landing of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Lord Wellington, Byron railed at the sight of Wellesley charioteering over the French flag, because Napoleon was and would remain Byron’s god. He held with Charles Fox’s creed that the fall of the Bastille was the greatest and best event in the history of the world.
Poised for adventures in the East and the Socratic pleasures, intending to ‘cull as many hyacinths as possible’, he sent Joe Murray home, along with Rushton, asking his mother to show the lad kindness, saying he would have taken him but that young boys were not safe among the Turks.
On the packet Townshend to Malta in August, Byron caught the attentions of John Galt, a Scotsman who having failed as entrepreneur and smuggler, had taken up the trade of literature and became one of the many who attached themselves to Byron, studied his every mood and wrote down his Quixotic conversation in order to preserve him in their own distinctive aspic. ‘Boswellised’ as Byron would call it, though none had Boswell’s humour, humanity or genius. Seeing Byron embarking, Galt noticed that His Lordship manifested more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion. His dress was that of a metropolitan beau, with its own peculiarity of style, the physiognomy prepossessing and intelligent but with a terrible scowl. Byron, the embodiment of a poet, stood alone at the ship’s rails, leaned on the mizzen shrouds, seeming to study the gloomy rocks in the distance. Then after three days as his humour bettered he provided pistols, encouraging his fellow passengers and Galt to shoot at bottle tops as he uncorked vast quantities of champagne ‘in the finest condition’.
As his horizons widened, so did his sense of entitlement. Preparing for an audience with the King of Sardinia, he purchased a most superb uniform of court dress, but had to settle for the sight of the royal family in a box at the opera, to which the British Minister, a Mr Hill, had brought him. Again, before arriving at Malta, he had a message sent to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, believing that due to his rank he would be welcomed by a royal salute of guns. As the other passengers disembarked, Hobby and Byron waited on board and by dusk, when no such honour was forthcoming, they had to be rowed to the port, somewhat dejected and crestfallen.
They were eventually received by the Governor, who arranged lodgings for them in a house belonging to a Dr Moncrieff, and were soon welcomed as gallants in English social circles. Determined to have some knowledge of Arabic for their ongoing journey, Byron bought an Arabic grammar book and engaged a tutor to give him lessons, his studies, however, halted by the emergence of ‘absurd womankind’. A ravishing beauty with translucent skin, golden hair and brilliant blue eyes, such was his new-found ‘Calypso’ in the person of the 26-year-old Mrs Constance Smith. Daughter of an Austrian baron, ‘select’ friend of the Queen of Naples and somewhat tepid wife of John Spencer Smith, Constance was a woman ‘touched with adventure’ and her story could easily have emanated from the pen of Lord Byron. In 1806 she had been arrested by the Napoleonic government in Venice and while being conveyed under heavy guard to a prison at Valenciennes in France, she was dramatically rescued by a Sicilian marquis who was in love with her and who had conceived this daredevil ingenious scheme. They travelled incognito from inn to inn, Constance in the disguise of a page boy, midnight escapades through windows, until finally the marquis secured a boat to ferry her across Lake Garda and thereafter to her family in Graz. Byron and she became inseparable and writing to his mother, towards whom he had become more cordial, he extolled the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘eccentric’ Constance. They were, he believed, on the brink of elopement to the Friuli Mountains, north of Venice, except that Constance was expected, as mother of two, to join her husband in England. Before their parting, Constance had relieved him of his large yellow diamond ring. Before setting sail, Byron challenged a Captain Cary to a duel, believing he had impeached his inamorata’s honour, but luckily for him, Hobhouse had huddled him onto a brig-of-war bound for Patras in Greece. Constance was poeticised as ‘Sweet Florence’ and in Childe Harold would be accorded the enchantments of ‘Calypso’, but after three weeks the ‘everlasting passion’ had faded, the spell was broken and Byron’s attachments would be transferred to beautiful young men ‘with all the Turkish vices’.
Byron’s love at that time, whether towards young men or women, was always high-flown, bathed in romantic, glowing and sometimes furtive light and always ending in ennui with his departure towards new latitudes and new conquests.
Albania, ‘rugged nurse of savage men’, was part of the Ottoman Empire and within sight of Italy, but as Gibbon had said was ‘as unknown as the interior of America’. Byron, Hobhouse, Fletcher, ‘the reverse of valiant’, and Albanian soldiers armed with sabres and long guns set out with their equipment of four leather trunks, three smaller trunks, a canteen, thr
ee beds and bedding, two bed-heads, on horseback, over rugged land, where the beauties of nature and the savageries of man starkly contrasted, domes, minarets, orange and lemon groves, mutilated bodies and roasted heads left hanging as a warning to other offenders.
Ali Pasha, a ruthless Turkish vizier, governed Albania, Epirus, Macedonia and parts of Greece as far south as the Gulf of Corinth and was said to have more power than the Sultan. For his redoubtable conquests, he had been christened ‘Mahometan Napoleon’ and Napoleon had offered to make him King of Epirus, except that friendship with the English suited his political ambitions better. Hearing that an Englishman of rank, that is to say Byron, was in his dominions, Ali Pasha left orders with his commandant in the city of Jannina that the party be treated with hospitality, he at that very time engaged in une petite guerre with another warlord, Ibrahim Pasha, whom he had driven into a fortress in Berat.
To Byron the landscape recalled the Highlands of his childhood, the castles like those Sir Walter Scott had depicted, the very mountains seemed Caledonian, the Albanians in kilts, the strut of their cloaks, the shimmer of their daggers, all reminiscent of Highland warriors. Albania was a mixture of races, Albanians in their gold-worked cloaks and crimson jackets, Tartars with high caps, Turks in their vast pelisses and turbans and such were the arcane laws of loyalty or disloyalty that a throat could be slit at the slightest affront. The young women whom Byron thought the most beautiful he had ever seen were ‘beasts of burthen’, ploughing, digging and levelling the highways broken down by torrential rains.
