Byron in Love Read online

  Moore had interviewed Samuel Rogers, Henry Brougham and Lord Lansdown, all of whom agreed with him that total destruction of the Memoirs was uncalled for. The thrust of his argument was that it was an injustice to condemn the work, to throw it aside as if it were ‘a pest bag’, and that the burning would throw a stigma on it which it did not deserve. Murray retaliated, saying that Mr Gifford of The Quarterly Review, to whom he had sent it, said that it was ‘only fit for a brothel’. Moore’s various arguments were unavailing as Hobhouse in league with Murray was ‘for total suppression of the work’. In the vehement argument that ensued, Moore and Hobhouse almost came to blows as Hobhouse claimed that in September 1822, at their last meeting in Italy, Byron had expressed uneasiness about the gift of the Memoirs and only delicacy for Moore’s feelings had kept him from requesting that they be returned.

  Wilmot-Horton at one point surprisingly proposed that the original manuscript and the one copy be deposited under seals in the hands of some banker, something which Moore seized on with a passion, except that his entreaties fell on deaf ears.

  The burning of the Memoirs remains an act of collective vandalism and redounds badly on all, on Moore for his fecklessness in having sold the manuscript in the first place, on Hobhouse for his bogus sincerity regarding Byron’s reputation and on Murray for his evident self-righteousness, describing himself as ‘a tradesman determined to preserve’ that reputation; on Augusta and Annabella, the silent colluders, and on the two ‘executioners’ Colonel Doyle and Wilmot-Horton who tore the pages from their binding and fed them to the fire. Murray called his sixteen-year-old son and heir into the room to witness the momentous piece of history. Hobhouse later claimed that he was invited to toss a few pages in but refrained from ‘the pious deed’ while wholeheartedly approving it. The folio sheets, bearing Byron’s singular mesh-like handwriting, which Mrs Byron had paid a Mr Duncan the sum of seven shillings to tutor her son in, were swept in a fierce carnival of flame, before curdling to ash.

  The ship Florida carrying Byron’s remains arrived in England in July 1824. On board were Colonel Stanhope, Dr Bruno, Tita, Lega Zambelli, Fletcher, Benjamin the black groom and Byron’s two dogs, along with Byron’s trunks of books, trunks of weapons, trunks of clothes, his bed and a cache of champagne. At the London docks the undertaker broke open the tin-lined coffin and the body was transferred to a new lead coffin with the ship’s flag flying above it. Hobhouse could not bear to look at his dead friend, though he did so later on when Byron lay in state in Sir Edward Knatchbull’s front parlour in Great George Street, which Hobhouse had hired in order for the streams of mourners to pay their respects. He found Byron so greatly changed as to be almost unrecognisable, while Augusta thought his expression was one of ‘mocking serenity’.

  Colonel Stanhope expected the state barges to come bearing dignitaries and bands to play sacred music, but he was to be sorely disappointed. Byron in death, just as in life, would suffer what John Clare called ‘mildewing censure’. The Times, in a tempered obituary, noted that ‘others were more tenderly beloved than Lord Byron’, something which Hobhouse stoutly contested, saying that Byron’s magical influence radiated to all who met him. The Times had also been precipitate in stating that Byron would be buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, something that the Dean, Dr Ireland, who had been approached by Murray and Kinnaird, summarily scotched, and unable to repress his disgust, told them ‘to carry the body away and say as little about it as possible’.

  It was in the undertaker’s barge with his Newfoundland dog Lyon at his feet that Byron arrived at Palace Yard Stairs, the riverbank already lined with curious spectators. Byron mania was to hit London again as it had at the height of his fame in 1812, but this time it was not in the gilded drawing rooms, it was the masses who thronged to pay their respects, believing that something of them had died with him. Tears, flowers, odes, laments and notes on black-bordered cards were strewn in that little parlour, but as Hobhouse ruefully put it, ‘No one of note came.’ Lit by tallow candles, Byron’s coat of arms hastily painted on a wooden board, they thronged in numbers ‘beyond precedent’, the mêlée becoming so obstreperous that a wooden frame was erected around the bed and police sergeants called to maintain order. The number of ladies according to a newspaper was ‘exceedingly great’.

  The hearse, with its twelve sable plumes, drawn by six black horses, left Westminster on a warm July day, bound for the family vault at Hucknall Torkard Church, not far from Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Byron’s coronet on a velvet cushion was borne by a charger which walked ahead. People flowed into the streets to bid their farewells. Hobhouse, smarting at the rejection by the Dean of Westminster, said that Byron would be buried like a nobleman, since they could not bury him like a poet, but the nobility did not share his sentiment. Of the forty-seven crest-emblazoned carriages forty-three were empty, no loyal friend from the houses of Holland, Devonshire, Melbourne or Jersey had come to mourn. Since it was not customary for women to attend funerals, Augusta was absent, but in one of life’s small ironies, her husband Colonel Leigh led the cortège. Sir Ralph Noel, Annabella’s father, had been invited but did not respond and the seventh Lord Byron, offended at having been omitted in Byron’s will, excused himself on the grounds of ill health.

  Mary Shelley, who had written in her diary that her ‘dear capricious Albe’ had quitted the desert world, and had gone to Great George Street to pay her respects, watched now from an upstairs window in Kentish Town, along with Jane Williams, as from all the windows people craned to see the bier of the man they knew only by hearsay. The poet John Clare, bordering on madness, seeing a beautiful young girl sigh with sorrow, thought it and the homage of the common people, the surest testament for Byron the Poet.

  At St Pancras Church, where the cobblestones ran out, the empty carriages turned back. The procession took four days to reach Nottingham, mourners thronged the roadside and then at the Blackamoor’s Head in Nottingham, where the remains lay in a little parlour, the crush of people was so great that a large body of constabulary had to keep order; squires, squireens and farmers come to pay their respects and according to one account, a youth bashfully recited from ‘Waterloo’:

  The earth is cover’d thick with other clay,

  Which her own clay shall cover, heap’d and pent,

  Rider and horse–friend, foe–in one red burial blent!

  At the very same time, the memoirs of Dallas, aided by his son the Reverend Alexander, were being hurried through the printing press as an epidemic of Byron mania struck the world. The literary deification, bludgeoning and misrepresenting was now afoot. Books of gossip, smut, malice, lies and ‘intrinsic nothings’, as Thomas Love Peacock called them, were soon to proliferate. Peacock himself parodied Byron, giving him the name of Mr Cypress in Nightmare Abbey.

  Fascination, envy and literary malfeasance on Byron were unceasing. Before the end of that year Southey, the Poet Laureate, in The Quarterly Review, accused Byron of committing ‘high crime, misdemeanours against society, work in which mockery was mingled with horror, filth and impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander’. A Mr Dugdale was even more extreme, justifying his pirating of Cain and Don Juan as quite reasonable, since the works were ‘so shocking and flagitious’ as to be unworthy to be dignified by the word ‘copyright’.

  Hobhouse was wrong. They did bury him like a poet, but he resurrected as a legend. Why? we may ask. Why him above the legion of poets down the years? He was the embodiment of Everyman, human, ambitious, erratic, generous, destructive, dazzling, dark and dissonant, but yet there is the unfathomable that eludes us, and perhaps even eluded him. It is not simply that he was a poet whose poetry burst upon the world or that he was a letter-writer of consummate greatness, he reincarnates for each age as an icon with a divine spark and all-too-human flaws.

 

 

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