Byron George Gordon Byron - Joy unconfined: Lord Byrons grand tour re-toured

Title Page

JOY UNCONFINED

Lord Byrons Grand Tour, Re-Toured

By

Ian Strathcarron

Publisher Information

First published in 2010 by

Signal Books Limited

36 Minster Road

Oxford

OX4 1LY

www.signalbooks.co.uk

Digital Edition converted and published by

Andrews UK Limited 2012

www.andrewsuk.com

Copyright 2012 Ian Strathcarron

The author has asserted his moral rights

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition, that no part of this book is to be reproduced, in any shape or form. Or by way of trade, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser, without prior permission of the copyright holder.

Prologue

LORD BYRON, PRE-TOUR

George Gordon Byron, by now the sixth Baron Byron, our Lord Byron, was twenty-one and a half years old when he and his inevitable entourage left London on his Grand Tour on 19 June 1809. Byron being Byron, he did not travel lightly or without style: in tow were his best friend, his valet, the old family retainer, his pageboy, his Farsi translator and eight portmanteaux containing his library, his clothing and costumes, his bedding, his saddles and his shoes, as well as a campaign desk, two army beds and four camp beds. And Byron being Byron, he left for contradictory reasons: pulled by the promise of exotic rites of passage and a literary led yearning for the East, and pushed by the hope that his freewheeling debts would accrue more slowly in less expensive places in which to keep his camp following.

He had been born those twenty-one years earlier in reduced circumstances in lodgings off Cavendish Square, London W1, circumstances reduced by his fathers determined wastage of his wives fortunes.Mad Jack Byron had been a dashing Guards Officer and then the infamous bounder who scandalised London by eloping with Lady Carmarthen to Paris before she could become the Duchess of Leeds. When her fortune, and her life, had been spent he went to Bath determined find a new heiress and duly found one in a salon de th , a Georgian version of Blue Rinse Cruise Lines. There he wooed and married the Scottish heiress who was to become Georges mother. He spent so profusely and borrowed so recklessly that by the time George was born he could only visit London to see his wife and son on Sundays, Sundays by English law being the only day that debtors were free from writs and harassment by the bailiffs.

George Byrons mother, Catherine Gordon, the 13th Laird of Gight in her own right, rescued what little her husband had not squandered and repaired with her young son to even lesser circumstances in Aberdeen where George spent his early childhood and school days learning the Bible and Latin by rote. In these constrained early days Georges only birthright was a club foot, an infliction which brought him bullying at school, physical pain as various physicians tried to force it back into shape in later youth, and tenderness and sympathy from the many men and women attracted to him in later life.

When George was six, on a battlefield at Calvi in Corsica, where Nelson lost an eye, a careless cannonball killed his uncles grandson, by which circuitous route George became the heir apparent to the Byron title and lands. His uncle, known as the Wicked Lord, but in reality better described as the Most Batty Eccentric Lord That Ever Lived was by now 72, and helpfully died four years later. Thus in 1798, at the age of ten, George became Byron and for the first time his life took on some interest, where it would take root and flourish handsomely as legend until his death for the cause of Greek independence twenty-six years later.

Unscrambling the wayward uncles affairs was not the matter of a moment, as he too had borrowed and loaned and mortgaged and re-mortgaged without recording exactly what went and came to whom and when, but doing so brought the young peers family into renewed contact with John Hanson, a lawyer thirty years Byrons senior. For the next ten years Hanson was to become the poets guide and mentor, his legal guardian and father figure, and he brought Byron into the Hanson family who throughout his remaining youth and adolescence took the awkward young provincial peer under their more sophisticated Kensington wings.

But Hanson could do nothing about the real state of Byrons inheritance: there was Newstead Abbey and Park and over 3,000 adjoining acres, but the park had been denuded of its trees for easy cash, parts of the abbey were roofless and the rest heading towards ruin, and the Rubens, the Titian, the Holbeins and the Canaletto had all long been sold to pay off various debts. There were some potentially highly valuable coal mines in Rochdale, as well as a farm in Wymondham in Norfolk, but on closer examination these were part of an unholy mortgaged mess - a mess still not solved at the time of Byrons death. What must have seemed like a handsome inheritance turned out to be an illusion, but the illusion was all that Byron needed to fuel his largesse. When it came to spending money he was indeed his fathers son and his uncles nephew.

Hanson did manage to arrange a place for Byron at a crammer in Dulwich and then at thirteen one at Harrow, for his mother to be supported by the Civil List, and for the Earl of Carlisle to be his guardian in the House of Lords. At his grammar school in Scotland he had learned to read and write, and to read and read and read, and here he developed his first interest in the Orient. He later wrote that Knolless Turkish History, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady Montagu, Hawkinss translation of Mignots History of the Turks, Arabian Nights, all travels, or histories, or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well as Rycaut, before I was ten.

By the time he arrived at Harrow he had already started writing poetry and it was there that he discovered Alexander Pope who was to be such an influence on his poetic values. He continued to read voraciously: Rousseaus Confessions , the biographies of Cromwell, Charles II, Newton, Catherine II and dozens more; books on law, books on philosophy, and poetry, more and more poetry, poetry in French and Latin, poetry in Italian and Greek. He started writing his own poetry, private poetry about the adolescent love for the pretty boys he met in the term and the pretty girls he met in the holidays. But the private poetry remained private, and all his elders agreed his main talent lay in Oratory, a talent displayed with passion and commitment on Speech Days, and a talent that sat well with a future member of the House of Lords.

After Harrow Hanson organised a place for him at Trinity College Cambridge and in the three years there the overweight, gawky and fringed schoolboy became the reassured man, if not yet the Byronic hero, we like to think we know so well today. Yet to his surprise Byron soon became bored and disillusioned with the decadence and sloth around him at Cambridge. He found amusement in his pet bear, Bruin, acquired because the authorities forbade students to keep dogs. Furthermore he did not even study anything in particular; a chap simply didnt. An ancient rite made it unnecessary for the peerage to take exams or even attend lectures, and not too much pressure was applied to the commoners either if they chose to follow the peers example, the peer group pressure.