secretlives

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[secretlives]

Lord Byron

Truth is always strange,” George Gordon Noel Byron once wrote. “Stranger than fiction.” In one line of verse he gave us both a truism still heard today and the perfect tagline for his brief, scandalous, hedonistic life.

When you’re the son of a guy known as “Mad Jack,” chances are you’re in for a wild ride. Little George didn’t get to know his father very well, for dear old dad drank himself to death when the boy was only three. But Mad Jack’s legacy of excess seeped into his offspring’s consciousness, if not his genes. In any case, Byron had little choice but to be his father’s son, since his mother hated him. She called him her “lame little brat,” on account of his clubfoot, and once tried to beat him to death with a set of fire tongs. Even worse, Byron’s governess, May Gray, reportedly molested him at the age of nine. About the only good thing to happen in his childhood was that he inherited his uncle’s wealth along with his title: Baron Byron of Rochedale. From then on, George Gordon was known as Lord Byron.

He grew into a strikingly handsome man. Other than his lame foot, for which he compensated through displays of athletic prowess, Byron’s only imperfection was a tendency to put on weight. In typical nineteenth-century fashion, he overcame this predisposition by starving himself and taking copious quantities of laxatives. Sex would prove to be his real nourishment, anyway. Byron was the Wilt Chamberlain of his day, reportedly bedding 250 women in Venice in one year alone. His long list of lovers included Lady Caroline Lamb (who famously described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”), her cousin Anne Isabella Milbanke (who became Lady Byron in 1815), and, reportedly, his own half sister, Augusta Leigh. Nor did he restrict himself to one gender. Byron had numerous homosexual affairs, often with underage boys. Other than the exotic animals he kept for companionship, there didn’t seem to be too many creatures he wasn’t interested in having sex with.

As a consequence, Byron became Europe’s most celebrated rake. His poetic achievements never garnered as much attention as did the wild rumors that sprang up about him. Oddly enough, a lot of the gossip involved Byron drinking wine out of someone’s skull. (Sometimes it was a dead monk’s, sometimes an old mistress’s.... The legends tended to outrace reality.) Fed up with the philandering, Lady Byron gave her husband his walking papers in 1816—just one year into their marriage. He then left England for the Continent and never returned. It was the only way to avoid public censure by British society.

Byron spent that summer in Switzerland with his personal physician, John Polidori. They struck up a friendship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his fiancée, Mary Godwin. During a stretch of rainy weather, the group entertained themselves by writing monster stories. Mary produced an early version of what would become her novel Frankenstein, while Polidori used Byron as the inspiration for “The Vampyre.” The story of a suave British nobleman who sucks the blood out of unsuspecting victims, it would prove to be major influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

From Switzerland, Byron traveled to Italy, where he had an affair with the very married Countess Teresa Guiccioli. He remained there until 1823, when he left for Greece and a rendezvous with destiny, helping the Greek independence movement repel the Ottoman Turks. Despite a complete lack of military experience, Byron helped drill troops and provided needed cash to the rebel forces. To this day, he is still considered a Greek national hero.

Before he could see any action, Byron was felled by an attack of malarial fever and died on Easter Sunday 1824. Soon after his death, which was mourned throughout England, a group of his friends gathered in London to read over his memoirs. The manuscript was filled with vivid descriptions of Byron’s sexual escapades, which, the group felt, might just destroy his hard-won “heroic” reputation. Determined that the memoirs never see the light of day, they proceeded to set them on fire.

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YOU’VE GOT ME BY THE SHORT HAIRS

In the days before photography, Byron had an unusual way of memorializing his former lovers. He placed snippets of his old girlfriends’ pubic hair in envelopes, marking each with the name of the woman immortalized within. Well into the 1980s, the envelopes and their curly contents remained on file at Byron’s publishing house in London. After that the trail goes cold.

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SHE’S MY NIECE AND MY DAUGHTER!

Byron’s many paramours may have included his own half sister, Augusta Leigh. She was married at the time, but hey, if you’re going to commit incest, why not go all the way and commit adultery as well? Many scholars now contend that Augusta’s daughter Medora was in fact the product of Byron’s loins, making him, well, an even more complicated figure than we thought.

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ANIMAL LOVER

Along with married women and young boys, Byron loved animals. At times his menagerie included horses, geese, monkeys, a badger, a fox, a parrot, an eagle, a crow, a heron, a falcon, a crocodile, five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. While a student at Cambridge, Byron kept a pet bear as a cheeky protest against university rules prohibiting dogs in the dormitories. In one of his letters, he even went so far as to suggest that his ursine companion “sit for a fellowship.”

Byron also kept more conventional pets. He traveled with five cats, including one named Beppo (also the title of one of his poems). Perhaps the best known of Byron’s animal pals is his Newfoundland, Boatswain, who died of rabies in 1808, at age five. In “Epitaph to a Dog,” Byron immortalized Boatswain in verse and erected a monument to him in the family burial vault that is larger than Byron’s own.

Lady Byron did not share her husband’s love of fauna. After they split, she wrote pointedly that “the reason why some tyrannical characters have been fond of animals and humane to them is because they have no exercise of reason and could not condemn the wickedness of their master.”

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LET IT BLEED

Byron’s death at age thirty-six was unnecessary—the byproduct of one of the most misguided medical techniques of the nineteenth century. He contracted a fever during a rain-soaked horseback ride through the Greek countryside and was quite literally bled to death by his doctors. They affixed twelve leeches to Byron’s temples in an attempt to “draw out” the cause of his high temperature. They also fed him castor oil to induce diarrhea, another common practice deemed insane by today’s medical authorities. All told, the leech brigade sapped more than four pounds of blood from a man already weakened by fever. No wonder Byron grew delirious, calling out in English and Italian. He was probably asking for his lawyer. Less than twenty-four hours later, he was dead.

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LORD BYRON WAS THE WILT CHAMBERLAIN OF HIS DAY, REPORTEDLY BEDDING 250 WOMEN (AND AN OCCASIONAL YOUNG MAN) IN VENICE IN ONE YEAR ALONE.

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ONE LAST LOOK

Byron had hoped to be interred in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, but the dean felt he was too notorious to be included alongside such paragons of virtue as Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Instead, Byron was laid to rest in his family vault at Hucknall Torckard. That rest was disturbed in June 1938 when, in a ghoulish examination conducted for reasons that remain unclear, forty people crowded into his freshly opened tomb hoping to glimpse his body. When the lid was finally lifted off the dead poet’s casket, only three stout souls remained. One of the gawkers described the poet’s corpse as being “in an excellent state of preservation.” Minus his heart and brains (removed during autopsy) and a detached right foot, Byron looked pretty good for a guy who had been decomposing more than 114 years. One witness remarked that his “sexual organ showed quite abnormal development.” Well hung even in death, Byron appeared to have the last laugh on his exhumers. The next day they sealed up his vault and left him in peace.