A Byronic Legacy

 

      

George Gordon, the Lord Byron.         Seán Manchester (from the half-title page of Stray Ghosts.)

 

In the year of my first pilgrimage to Lord Byron’s tomb in the company of The Byron Society whose honorary director, Mrs Elma Dangerfield, suspected a personal connection with the poet, I was still yet to hear from Professor Leslie A Marchand himself whose later correspondence in private about the “records of births and deaths of the lower (servant) class in those days” helped establish facts about the poet and Lucy, my great, great, great grandmother. Byron was seldom without consolation of the female kind and of the various servant maids who slipped between his sheets to keep him company at Newstead, Lucy was far and away his favourite. He called her Lucinda, but in the following lines she appears as Lucietta:

 

                                                                                    Lucietta my dear,

                                                                                                                That fairest of faces!

                                                                                                                Is made up of kisses …

 

A letter, 17 January 1809, to John Hanson confirms that “the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish.” On 4 February 1809, Byron wrote to Hanson: “Lucy’s annuity may be reduced to fifty pounds, and the other fifty go to the Bastard.” He had originally provided her with an annuity of one hundred pounds. Three years after making Lucy pregnant he put her in charge as revealed in a letter to Francis Hodgson, written from Newstead on 25 September 1811: “Lucy is extracted from Warwickshire [where his and her son had been weaned]; some very bad faces have been warned off the premises, and more promising substituted in their stead … Lucinda to be commander of all the makers and unmakers of beds in the household.”

 

Byron’s letters might suggest a callousness in his relationships that is perhaps unwarranted. When his illegitimate child by Lucy was born, he wrote a poem in which he hailed his “dearest child of love.” He had always wanted a son and Lucy provided him with his first and last. Surviving progeny that followed were all female. He composed To My Son when Lucy’s child was born:

 

 

                                                                                                Those flaxen locks, those eyes of blue,

                                                                                                Bright as thy mother’s in their hue;

                                                                                                Those rosy lips, whose dimples play

                                                                                                And smile to steal the heart away,

                                                                                                Recall a scene of former joy,

                                                                                                And touch thy father’s heart, my Boy!

 

                                                                                                And thou canst lisp a father’s name —

                                                                                                Ah, William, were thine own the same, —

                                                                                                No self-reproach — but, let me cease —

                                                                                                My care for thee shall purchase peace;

                                                                                                Thy mother’s shade shall smile in joy,

                                                                                                And pardon all the past, my Boy!

 

                                                                                                Her lowly grave the turf has prest,

                                                                                                And thou hast known a stranger’s breast;

                                                                                                Derision sneers upon thy birth,

                                                                                                And yields thee scarce a name on earth;

                                                                                                Yet shall not these one hope destroy, —

                                                                                                A Father’s heart is thine, my Boy!

 

                                                                                                Why, let the world unfeeling frown,

                                                                                                Must I fond Nature’s claim disown?

                                                                                                Ah, no — though moralists reprove,

                                                                                                I hail thee, dearest child of love,

                                                                                                Fair cherub, pledge of youth and joy —

                                                                                                A Father guards they birth, my Boy!

 

                                                                                                Oh, ’twill be sweet in thee to trace,

                                                                                                Ere age has wrinkled o’er my face,

                                                                                                Ere half my glass of life is run,

                                                                                                At once a brother and a son;

                                                                                                And all my wane of years employ

                                                                                                In justice done to thee, my Boy!

 

                                                                                                Although so young thy heedless sire,

                                                                                                Youth will not damp parental fire;

                                                                                                And, wert thou still less dear to me,

                                                                                                While Helen’s form revives in thee,

                                                                                                The breast which beat to former joy,

                                                                                                Will ne’er desert its pledge, my Boy!

 

To My Son, incorrectly dated 1807 by Thomas Moore, was first published six years after Byron’s death. Lucy’s pregnancy, of course, did not take place until early 1809. Moore misread the date. Furthermore, the housemaid did not die the early death of the young mother eulogised by the poet whose “lowly grave the turf has prest.” According to the housekeeper, Nanny Smith, Lucy overcame the “high and mighty airs she gave herself as Byron’s favourite,” married a local lad, and ran a public house in Warwick. The fate of the child enters the forlorn and forgotten realm of so many illegitimate offspring of servants, and does not resurface again until a century later when my Derbyshire maternal grandparents returned the bloodline to Newstead Abbey Park where they purchased twenty or so acres and had a comfortable lodge built almost within the shadow of Byron’s ancestral home. In the poem, Byron changed the scenario of Lucy’s end to conform to the sentimental moralising of the period, which required that the fallen woman must pay with her life: “The mother’s shade shall smile in joy, / And pardon all the past, my Boy!”  

 

The poem addresses Byron’s natural child, challenging the convention that would withhold from his “little illegitmate” a father’s loving concern, along with any claim to social position. Byron’s pride, along with his sense of honour, was offended by the common practice of turning out pregnant maidservants. He knew the fate of country girls who bore illegitimate children, surviving on the pittance provided by parish poor rates, the workhouse, or making their way to the nearest city and entering a life of prostitution. Along with keeping Lucy employed, Byron made provision ~ exceptionally generous by the standards of the day ~ for her and their child in his will. Lucy was to have an annuity of £100 (later reduced to £50); the other £50 was to go to the child.

 

To walk the ancient corridors of the Abbey again was an unearthly experience which filled me with a mixture of strange emotions. There was the haunting drawing of Caroline and many more pictures of Byron. Childhood memories were stirred and I reflected on the kindred experiences of Countess Guiccioli when she saw Byron’s home for the first time ~ eight years after his death. Her sad journey would include a lone visit to the poet’s tomb at Hucknall Torkard. From the door, even before there was time for it to close, she prostrated herself on the flagstone that is situated above the remains of Lord Byron. There she remained for over an hour. It was evening when, in the footsteps of the Countess, I arrived at the church wherein the Byron Family Vault dwells beneath the chancel. It simply bears the name BYRON and, underneath, the date of his birth and death. I laid a wreath.

 

Seán Manchester in his childhood.

 

(Above text, in part, has been edited and revised from an unpublished memoir, Stray Ghosts, and also Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know  © Seán Manchester, 1992.)

 

Claire Clairmont gave birth at Bath to a daughter, on 12 January 1817, whom she named Alba, after Albé, the name the Shelley family had assigned to Byron while in Geneva. Byron asked rhetorically: “Is the brat mine? ~ I have reason to think so.” Before leaving England with her mother, the child was baptised “Clara Allegra Byron, born of Rt Hon George Gordon Lord Byron ye reputed father by Clara Mary Jane Clairmont.” Allegra was spoilt, wilful, and undisciplined ~ a carbon copy of her father when he was a child. By the age of four Byron arranged for her to be enrolled at a Capucine convent at Bagnacavallo, Italy. On 20 April 1822 Allegra, aged five years and three months, was dead, to the profound grief of the nuns who regarded her a very special child. When Byron heard the news he sank into a chair, and asked to be left alone. Three years later he told Lady Blessington: “While she lived, her existence never seemed necessary to my happiness; but no sooner did I lose her than it appeared to me as if I could not live without her.” The body of Allegra was sent back to England to be buried at Harrow Church near Peachey Stone where the poet had spent so many hours as a boy. The rector of Harrow refused to erect Byron’s proposed tablet, and the child was buried just inside the threshold of the church. Byron had wanted the words: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”

 

                                         

Clara Allegra Byron (1817-1822).                                                        Augusta Ada Byron (1815-1852).

 

The poet’s only legitimate child was born of Annabella, Lady Byron, on the night of 9 December 1815. She was named Augusta Ada. His half-sister, also called Augusta, would later tell him that while Ada resembled her mother more than Byron, “still there is a look. I never saw a more healthy little thing. It was a melancholy pleasure to see Lady B for I had suffered great uneasiness of which I had given you hints.” Well might she feel uneasy, for, on 15 April 1814, she had given birth to a daughter of her own, Elizabeth Medora, whose father was rumoured to be Byron. There was absolutely no way he could be sure that he was the father, even though at the time this was assumed to be the case, and he never acknowledged the fact. He nonetheless showed great fondness for Medora, and Lady Byron herself was struck by the child’s extraordinary beauty. Absence of proof positive allowed licence for speculation, needless to say, of which the most astonishing example was the theory advanced by Richard Edgcumbe in Byron: the Last Phase (1909) that Medora was Byron’s daughter by his boyhood’s love, Mary Chaworth, obligingly adopted by Augusta. However, his half-sister Augusta did write to him of “a likeness in your picture of Mignonne [Medora].”

 

Augusta, Byron’s half-sister.

 

In 1765 the fifth Lord Byron, known as “The Wicked Lord,” had killed a man in a duel following an argument on the best way to preserve game. A descendant of the man killed was Mary Chaworth, Byron’s first love, who would capture and break his heart.

 

Document (below) signed “Byron” by the poet's great-uncle, William Byron, 5th Lord (1772-1798, “The Wicked Lord”), one page folio, red wax seal, 27 April 1752. A bond for the payment of £9,000 plus interest to Samuel Child, bearing embossed revenue stamps. The 5th Lord was perhaps more dangerous to know than his nephew and heir who became the most famous Byron of all. Described by Horace Walpole as a madman, he so mistreated his wife that she left him. The 6th Lord (below) inherited the title from him, his son and grandson having predeceased him, but the poet’s dislike for all his relations meant that the two never met.