Byron in Love Page 2

  In August, when Mad Jack had not returned to complete the family tableau, Catherine and her infant son set out on the public coach for Aberdeen and once again she was obliged to take rooms above a shop. Her husband did appear from time to time, to extract money from a woman whose income was now reduced to £150 a year. The vicious rows that ensued and that Byron claimed to remember left him, as he put it, ‘with little taste for matrimony’.

  Life in Aberdeen for mother and son was spartan and somewhat volatile, Catherine a woman of extremes, veering from excessive affection to bouts of anger, her son retaliating with his own unfettered temper, neighbours recalling how Mrs Byron would take the tongs to him, brand him a ‘cripple’ and five minutes later smother him with kisses. For his part, he amused himself at church services by sticking a safety-pin in his mother’s plump arms. He refused to be subdued. Dressed in the Gordon tartans of blue and green, he rode a pony, carried a whip and if his lameness was mocked, as it frequently was, he wielded the whip with ‘Dinnya speak of it’.

  From France, Mad Jack pleaded with his sister Frances, who had also been his lover, ‘for God’s sake to come’ as he had no bed, no person to care for him and was living on scraps. In August 1791 he died of consumption in Valenciennes, having dictated a will to two notaries leaving the three-year-old son responsible for his debts and funeral expenses, which Catherine managed to discharge by borrowing on a legacy of just over one thousand pounds, which she was due to receive on the death of her grandmother. When she learnt of her husband’s death, her screams were heard down the length of Broad Street, her grief ‘bordering on distraction’. In a fairly imperious letter to her sister-in-law, whom she addressed as ‘My dear Madam’, she emphasised her great grief, then requesting a lock of his hair, she reiterated the love between herself and her ‘dear Jonnie’.

  At five and a half, Byron had become so unruly that Catherine sent him to school in the hope that he could be kept ‘in abeyance’. Schisms and tempers at home, Catherine referring to him as that ‘lame brat’, the castigation so etched in his memory that years later in a drama, The Deformed Transformed, Arnold the hunchback is addressed by his mother as an incubus and a nightmare, as he pleads with her not to kill him, while hating his vile form.

  Under the tutelage of a Mr Bowers he quickly developed a passion for history, especially Roman history, revelling in the stories of battle and shipwreck, which he would later enact for himself. When he was six he was translating Horace, reading the great but grave accounts of death, how death made itself felt in palace halls and in huts, his imagination fearfully quickened. Before he was eight years old he had read all the books of the Old Testament, finding the New Testament not nearly so rich in description. When he was enrolled in a grammar school, he reckoned, though we must allow for some boyish exaggeration, that he had read four thousand works of fiction, his favourites being Cervantes, Smollett and Scott. But history was his greatest passion and Knolles’s Turkish History would incite the hunger to visit the Levant as a young man and provide the exotic background for many of his oriental tales.

  It was at a dancing school, aged eight, that he was smitten by the charms of Mary Duff and though he did not know it by name, felt the attendant joys and uncertainty of first rapturous love. Mary was one of those evanescent beings, made of rainbow, with a Greek cast of features, to whom he would for ever be susceptible, her successor being a distant cousin, Margaret Parker, for whom he also conceived a violent love. That twin soul he sought again and again in blood relatives, passions by which he would be thrown into ‘convulsive confusion’. The antithesis to such tenderness was his countering cruelty. He had a fascination for a gothic novel, Zeluco, in which the anti-hero was fated to commit crimes he could not control, strangling those closest to him, taming a pet sparrow in order to be able to wring its neck, dark deeds that instead of consigning him to the dungeons, elevated him to the status of Magus, which Byron himself would aspire to.

  There was no fraternising with the Byron family, though Catherine tried to enlist Frances Leigh to get financial help from the Wicked Lord–‘You know Lord Byron. Do you think he will do anything for George or be at any expense to give him a proper education or if he wished to do it, is his present fortune such a one that he could spare anything out of it?’ Each letter was ignored. Then one morning in 1798 news reached them that the Wicked Lord had died, aged sixty-five, his son William Byron already having been killed in Corsica by a cannonball at the Battle of Calvi in 1794. The ten-year-old George became the sixth Lord Byron, an ennoblement by which mother and son were briefly borne on wings of Icarus.

  The whole cosmos of Byron’s childhood was altered. He would be given wine and cake by the headmaster at his grammar school and yield to a bout of tears when at the roll call, instead of Byron, he answered Dominus de Byron, and when the looking glass failed to reveal a different him, he determined to become different within and acquit himself like a lord. For his mother also it was a dizzying ascent into a new world, the move down to England would be dislocating, her new friends would be Byron relatives and in time she would become her son’s minion and a tenant in her son’s house.

  Her first appearance at the Abbey did not impress the toll mistress, who thought her slovenly and also thought that the boy was far too plump to be sitting on the lap of his nurse, May Gray. Catherine had had to sell her furniture to help towards the funeral of the Wicked Lord, who lay for weeks in the Abbey as creditors seized whatever they could. Her effects yielded £74 17s 6d and her one somewhat lofty request was that the Newstead servants wear black at the funeral. When by the end of August 1798 she had accrued enough money, she set out for the 377-mile journey, on the public stagecoach, with Byron and May Gray; the three-day journey entailed stops at the very unprepossessing inns that her meagre funds would allow.

  THREE

  Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the Scottish burr, blue hills and deep-black salmon streams were no more. Instead an ancestral seat, the twelfth-century monastery flanked by buildings from later centuries, some ramshackle and open to the sky, yet the effect can only have been that of wonder to such a susceptible trio, mother and son shedding (as they would have thought) the gloom and stigma of rented rooms for such inestimable grandeur. Newstead Abbey, a massive structure of grey granite, with Gothic arches and Gothic windows, the scene of orgies and rituals, and was said to be presided over by the ghost of a black-hooded monk who stalked the empty galleries at night, avenging the crime of its being converted from a place of worship to a place of hedonism.

  Inside, haunted rooms, vaulted passages, a cloister and an armoire, where some of the Wicked Lord’s pistols had escaped the clutches of the creditors. In the main bedroom, which Byron promptly assigned to himself, hung the iron sword with which the Wicked Lord had slain his cousin and the family arms depicting a mermaid flanked by two chestnut horses and bearing the motto ‘Crede Byron’. Never mind that it was a ruin, one wing open to the sky, the refectory serving as a hayshed, cattle in the cloisters, it was his magic Castle. Joe Murray, the old truculent servant who had been used to the madman’s ways, resented the presence of the hot-tempered mother, who complained about the dirt and disorder, and of the precocious son with his airs. Byron’s conduct was that of musts, insisting that he be waited upon, that he be allowed to do pistol shooting, even indoors if he felt like it, and that he be allowed to carry loaded pistols in his waistcoat pockets, a habit which he adopted for life. Furious that the forest had been felled, he planted an acorn and said, somewhat loftily, ‘As it prospers, so I shall prosper.’

  Annesley Hall, the home of the slain Viscount Chaworth, was joined to Newstead by a long avenue of oaks, known as the Bridal Path, since the third Lord Byron had married Elizabeth, daughter of the Viscount. Mr Hanson, the family lawyer who was to administer the estate, had come from London to welcome them and noting Byron’s precociousness, remarked that there lived there a very pretty young cousin called Mary Ann, whom Byron might marry. The crisp rejoinder was–�
�What. Mr Hanson? The Capulets and the Montagues intermarry?’ Mary Ann would be another of those etherealised beings for whom he would fall into an ‘ebullition of passion’, except that her sighs were for a Mr Musters, a foxhunting gentleman, rumoured to be the illegitimate son of the Prince Regent, but according to Mary Ann’s parents ‘a monster of profligacy and depravity’.

  He would meet cousins, aunts, great-aunts and by being the only boy among them he was duly spoilt. The first letter that Byron, aged eleven, penned to his Great-aunt Frances Byron Parker-Parkyns is arch and self-possessed:

  Dear Madam,–My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please–She begs you will ask Mrs Parkyns if she would wish the poney to go round by Nottingham or go home the nearest way as it is now quite well but too small to carry me–I have sent a young Rabbit which I beg Miss Frances will accept off and which I promised to send before–My Mamma desires her best compliments to you all in which I join–I am,

  Dear Aunt, Yours Sincerely,

  BYRON

  I hope you will excuse all blunders as it is the first letter I ever wrote.

  By November the Abbey was freezing and damp, so that mother and son had to decamp, Byron with his nurse May Gray to the Parkyns cousins in nearby Southwell and Catherine travelling to London to plead with Mr Hanson to persuade Lord Carlisle, another distant cousin, to become Byron’s guardian, a duty he took on most reluctantly. For the period of Byron’s minority, Catherine having only £122 per annum of her own, pleaded with Lord Carlisle to use his influence to secure a pension from the Civil List, and so with his influence and the Duke of Portland’s, the King ordered the Prime Minister, Mr Pitt, to pay her £300 a year. But it was not enough to restore the Abbey or the outbuildings as she tried helplessly to set new rents for farm tenants and disentangle the legal knots by which the estate was encumbered. He would escape at night to go back and look at Newstead, his lost paradise and the rage at banishment was not dissimilar to that of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Byron thought to be the partial inspiration for Emily Brontë’s brooding and thwarted hero.

  Since the young Parkyns girls received private tuition from a Mr Dummer Rogers, Byron decided that he must be treated likewise and wrote peremptorily to his mother in London: ‘Mr Rogers could attend me every night at a separate hour from the Miss Parkynses…I recommend this to you because, if some plan of this kind is not adopted, I shall be called, or rather branded with the name of Dunce, which you know I could never bear.’ Byron and Mr Rogers read Virgil and Cicero together, the tutor only too aware that his pupil was in torment from the contraption on his foot, but stoically determined that it should not be mentioned. Mr Lavender, a truss-maker from the General Hospital, who styled himself ‘surgeon’, had been engaged by Catherine to ensure that Byron would no longer be a ‘cripple’. Mr Lavender’s course of treatments was primitive, the deformed foot was rubbed with hot oil, then twisted and forced into a wooden contraption, so that Byron was in worse torture. When he came to London a year later and Mr Hanson brought him to a more experienced physician, a Dr Baillie, he must have raged at hearing the two men say that it was in infancy that the malformation should have been treated and so the blame heaped upon his mother was all the more vindictive.

  Catherine came to be ostracised by her scornful son, Mr Hanson and his family, the dilettante Lord Carlisle. Dr Glennie, the headmaster at Dr Glennie’s academy in Dulwich, to which Byron was admitted at the age of eleven on Carlisle’s recommendation. He wrote of her thus–‘Mrs Byron is a total stranger to English society and English manners, with an exterior far from prepossessing, a mind wholly without cultivation and the peculiarities of Northern opinions, Northern habits and Northern accent…not a Madame de Lambert endowed with powers to retrieve the fortune and form the character and manners of a young nobleman, her son.’ In a world of male sovreignty, poor Catherine did not stand a chance.

  When a fellow pupil at Glennie’s school had said to him ‘Your mother is a fool’, Byron’s caustic retort was ‘I know it but you must not say so’. Her foolishness had become evident for him in her infatuation with a French dancing master, M. de Louis, whom she had met at Brompton, where she had gone to learn a few steps and then unwisely she had brought him to the school on visiting Sunday. Thereafter she was forbidden visits, but she came anyhow, screamed and harangued at the gate, causing Dr Glennie to describe her as one of the Furies. In a letter to his half-sister Augusta born in 1783, the child of Mad Jack and his first wife, Lady Amelia D’Arcy, who had eloped with him, leaving her husband, Lord Carmarthen, Byron sneered at his mother’s weakness, a woman who had ‘sunk’ her age, as he put it, a good six years, averring that she was only eighteen when he was born, whereas in fact she was just twenty-three. They were alike in their burning temperaments and yet unalike, the mother loud, gross-featured and provincial, Byron in dress and in manner already patrician and fastidious. His demands on her were not that of a son but of a tyrannical husband. No captive Negro, he would claim, ever longed for liberation as dearly as he.

  ‘To Harrow Boarding School he went.’ Dr Glennie wrote that Byron was ‘as little prepared as it is natural to suppose from two years of elementary instruction, thwarted by every art that could estrange the mind of youth from preceptor, from school and from all serious study’. John Cam Hobhouse, who would become Byron’s lifelong friend, provided an unvarnished perspective of English boarding schools, describing them as temples of fagging, flogging and homoerotic initiation.

  Harrow, a mere twelve miles from London, with a view of Windsor and Oxford in the distance, was the boarding school for prospective dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, lords, hons and baronets, many of whom were sent there at the tender age of six. Byron was just thirteen when he enrolled, but already he had acquired mastery over his mother, insisting, despite her meagre allowance from Chancery, he be togged out in keeping with his nobility. He had ticking trousers, buckskin breeches, a coat of superfine olive cloth, a new brace for his foot and a special padded built-up boot to hide the unseemliness of his shin.

  At first he was made to feel his lameness ‘most bitterly’, jeered and bullied by older boys, something which in time he would address, by learning to fight, cultivating strength in chest, arms and lungs. The headmaster’s wife Mrs Drury recalled ‘the lame boy Birron struggling up the hill like a ship in a storm, without rudder or compass’. Her husband however saw that what had been submitted to his tutelage was ‘a wild mountain colt’, but he also recognised that the young boy had ‘mind in his eyes’. Schooling was rigorous, boys at their desks before six in the morning and by the light of a single tallow wick, reading, parsing and memorising the Greek and Latin texts. The classrooms were cold, the oak walls and benches blackened from the fire, birches and flogging stools for miscreants and laggards. Punishment of a more questionable kind featured in the dormitories at night, which were not supervised, boys bathing together and some, for a lesser fee, sharing a bed. Boys blessed with good looks, which certainly Byron was, were accorded female names and chosen as ‘bitches’ by the bigger boys for their sport. The pleasure of inflicting ‘stripes’ was a precursor to greater intimacies. Those who declined got a cuffing or a kicking until they submitted. These grosser carryings-on were tempered in daylight with more ideal sentiments, tributes and verses from pupil to pupil. Byron’s school friendships were, as he said, ‘passions’ because of his violent disposition, first for a fellow peer, William Harness, aged ten, also lame, and when that led to estrangement it was John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, whom Byron claimed to love ‘ad infinitum’, a love interrupted only by distance, claiming he could never hear the word ‘Clare’ without a murmur of the heart.

  At school holidays however his ‘passions’ branched in the opposite direction, his affections once again centred on Mary Chaworth, and he recalls as it were an epiphany, Mary and he visiting a cave in Derbyshire, lying side by side in a small raft,
pushed by a ferryman to whom he gave the incendiary name of Charon, thereby coupling bliss with damnation. No breath, no being, existed for him but hers. His immolation was utter and in a poem, ‘The Dream’, written thirteen years later, he admitted that he had ceased to live within himself, she was his life, ‘the ocean to the river of his thoughts’.

  When the time came to return to Harrow, he refused, the letters from him at Annesley, to his mother in Southwell, becoming more and more pleading: ‘I only desire, entreat, this one day, and on my honour I will be over tomorrow…Those that I most love live in this County; therefore in the name of Mercy I entreat this one day to take leave…’ His mother, jealous of this love, would in time take revenge, being the first to give him the intelligence of the wedding between Mr Musters and Miss Chaworth, forewarning him that he might need his handkerchief. A cousin, observing his feigned indifference, saw that he was determined to conceal the wound, but felt bitterness towards Catherine for telling him.

  The various wretchednesses and rebuffs had made him more pugilistic and back at Harrow, for the spring term, he was a formidable opponent with his sharp tongue and his strong fists. He gathered around himself a clan, cohorts who would revel in his arrogance and his rebelliousness. Dr Drury was to say Byron spread ‘riot and confusion’ in the house, and so subversive did his pranks become that for the following term he was suspended and only with the interceding of Lord Carlisle was he ever allowed back.

  His letters of those four years, with such a stellar command of language, show him in many alternating moods, precocious, arrogant or suppliant, depending on whom he was writing to. During a school holiday he had met his half-sister Augusta at General Harcourt’s house in Portland Place in London, and this languid, amiable girl was soon to become the recipient of a trove of gallant and over-affectionate missives. She was his ‘dearest sis’, his nearest relative in the world, and he was bound to her by ties of both blood and affection. Ah, how wretched he was at their being hitherto separated, all the jealous work of his mother, whom he depicted as ‘a happy compound of derangement and folly’. Catherine was merely necessary to provide money, to go to Mr Sheldrake in the Strand to order a new brace and most significantly of all, to defend his honour. Dr Drury’s son Henry, who was his tutor, had called him ‘a blackguard’, an appellation which sent Byron into a towering rage, telling Catherine that if she did not do something to redress it, he would leave Harrow immediately–better let them take away his life than ruin his character. He also added that if she loved him she must now show it, reminding her that he was carving for himself the passage to Greatness though never to Dishonour.