Linder, Boxiana, 2008

Celebrity Byron

Seventy years ago, on the 15th June 1938, Canon Thomas Gerrard Barber reopened the Byron family vault in Hucknall church. Vandals had been there before him. Byron’s lordly coronet was still resting on his coffin, but its pearls and silver orbs were missing.

As the Diocesan Surveyor reached across the coffin to measure the tiny crypt, strewn with rubble and the bones of Byron’s ancestors, the lid moved. At half past ten that night, perhaps driven by a curiosity as intense as that which pursued the poet during his glory days of 1812, Canon Barber reverently removed it.

A hundred and fifty years after Byron had been embalmed in Greece and brought back for burial, most of his body was perfectly preserved. The five or six men crowded into the crypt noticed the full lower lip and the curly hair of a man who still seemed “extraordinarily handsome.” What secrets did that “clay”, as Byron would have called it, conceal? In death, as in life, Lord George Gordon Byron had become a blank canvas on which were projected the most fevered fantasies, not just of his own age, but of those that have followed it.

At the height of his fame between 1812 and 1816, almost everyone in England seemed caught up in it. His lifelong friend John Cam Hobhouse noticed how even a bishop jostled to accompany this self-professed atheist when he returned to the roaring welcome of his old university at Cambridge. Bryon had, as his half-sister Augusta wrote, a “soaring spirit”, and he made other spirits soar. His short journey from London to Hucknall Church lasted only 36 years via, variously, Aberdeen, Nottingham, Harrow, Southwell, Cambridge, Brighton, Albania, Turkey, Switzerland, Italy and Greece. The fat, lame, shy boy, whose first inauspicious social outings were in Southwell, became a byword for amorous adventure. He was the prototype Romantic hero, famously “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, as his cross-dressing, high society lover Lady Caroline Lamb noted the moment she met him. His astonishing physical beauty, apparent after his first drastic weight loss while still at university, was allied to a blazing sexual charisma. His contradictions appear irreconcilable, yet they were compulsively played out in public. He had, in fact, many of the attributes of an A-list 21st century celebrity.

His consumption, for instance, was conspicuous – on horses, homes, carriages, and clothes – and he built up huge debts. His extravagant replica of Napoleon’s coach, shipped to Europe when he left England so suddenly, had apparently still not been paid for by the time he died. He fought doggedly against fat, often literally, sweating it out swathed in layers of extra clothing as he obsessively boxed or fenced. His diet appeared at that time eccentric, although his avoidance of meat in favour of vegetables and wine for water is mirrored in many a modern magazine. His amassed exotic animals wherever he lived, including peacocks, a badger, monkeys, an Eygptian crane, and he kept a bear at university. He carefully manipulated his own image – in contrast to the plainer portraits he had painted for friends or family, those for public consumption were almost always heroically – sometimes Orientally - attired. He was a fashion icon, who pioneered the Romantic costume of open necked shirt and carelessly flung cloak, and he certainly loved a man in uniform, ordering extravagant martial outfits for war zones, including the fanciful Greek helmet now at Newstead.

Like a modern celebrity, too, it was essential for his self-image that he lived his life in the limelight. “The truth is that my friend Byron has a most extraordinary anxiety that…all the accidents of his life…should be in some shape or other before the world,” wrote his exasperated friend Hobhouse. His candid letters, some read aloud to other admirers by their fortunate recipients, were written with the frequency and compromising ease of emails.

As with the modern celebrity, Byron’s fall from favour was as rapid and brutal as the vicious censure that follows a tabloid expose. There was his society marriage, on the rocks as soon as it started, the vengeful indiscretions of discarded kiss and tell lovers, and, worst of all, the hints of dark sexual secrets, apparently made by Byron himself, as well as others. Like others famous since him, he seemed to have shared the fervid courting of fame that can still compensate the social or sexual outsider. Byron was, according to his most influential modern biographer Fiona MacCarthy, bi-sexual. The most flamboyantly heterosexual lover of his age cultivated younger boys at Harrow and a chorister at Cambridge, while his early travels to Greece, Albania and Turkey may have been partly for their more tolerant attitude to homosexual affairs, at a time when “sodomy” was punishable by death in England. After the collapse of his marriage the rumours rife were not simply of incest with his half-sister, but of his youthful same sex relationships, and his friends feared for his physical safety. MacCarthy suggests that this was the real reason for his exile in 1816.

Byron certainly courted emotional entanglement. The women in his life were often complicated, powerful and intellectual. The discreet adulterous affairs then sanctioned by the aristocracy produced, to modern minds, strange domestic scenarios. Byron’s affair with the beautiful Lady Oxford meant a summer spent with her six children, reared by the natural precepts of Rousseau, and intermittently, her husband. One of his closest confidantes was the celebrated Whig grandee Lady Melbourne. Her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, dressed as a pageboy to please him. Lady Caroline’s violent passion turned to obsessive stalking that shocked even complacent London high society. To his female fans, many of whom wrote to him so plaintively, he could be as cruel as a cat, by turns cold and seductive. And, of course, there was his half-sister Augusta Leigh, whom he met for the first time when he was fifteen. Some of his most affecting poems are addressed to her. With Augusta, snowed up at Newstead while she was nine months pregnant, or sharing a seaside villa with her and her other two children, he enjoyed an undemanding domestic happiness that was largely to be denied him.

The analogy between Byron and today’s celebrities could never, of course, be complete, since his fame was based on incandescent ability. Whatever he was doing, he wrote - an output that spans styles, subjects and scenarios. In an age when travel was the preserve of the rich, before photography and film, he made his readers see splendid vistas through his own awed eyes, galloped them through breathless adventure narratives. In contrast, his love poetry has an emotional simplicity that still sounds through the centuries, while his satirical epics took power to pieces, its humour disguising a devastating contempt. Most of all, perhaps, he made his readers want to be Byron, to live the life of an idealised individual, ungoverned by fatuous and hypocritical convention. In reality, inevitably, that life fell far short of the legend. Cremating Shelley’s corpse on the beach after he had drowned was not the beautiful Romantic episode of later imagination: Shelley’s body had decomposed, and his heart wouldn’t burn. It was eventually retrieved and presented to Mary.

Byron was, it has been noted, the child of the French Revolution. His writing, to many, embodied Liberty and Freedom in an age of emerging nation states. It was also a time of rapid technological advance, facilitating the Industrial Revolution and its consequent social and economic dislocation. “I suppose we shall soon travel by air-vessels; make air instead of sea voyages; and at length find our way to the moon,“ he mused in 1822. Byron was always for the under-dog. His first speech in the House of Lords defended the frame breakers at work in his native Nottinghamshire. And at the end of his life he became, if never quite a man of action – despite his showy long distance swims – at least an important political player. He joined the clandestine Italian Carbonari, the underground opposition to Austrian rule, a dangerous decision for which the Government relentlessly harried him. In Greece he contributed not only very substantial sums of money to the fight against Turkish occupation, but also the highly valuable propaganda of his own presence. There, too, he appears to have shown a growing sense of statesmanship. Had he lived, he might have directed and fought his first battle. He might even, it has been suggested, have been made king.

Byron’s death at Missolonghi, stunned Europe and was indirectly a means of securing European support for an independent Greece. He died, unpardonably, after excessive bleeding with leaches by zealous doctors anxious to cure a fever. At the end he was enough of a real revolutionary, sexual and political, for the Establishment to close ranks. London saw an outpouring of grief by the common people, not the aristocracy, in scenes prescient of Princess Diana’s funeral.

His cortege halted overnight at Nottingham, where huge crowds viewed his body at an inn on Pelham Street, controlled by a large contingent of the constabulary. The people of Nottingham were encouraged to join his funeral procession next day, to a church so crowded that the principal mourners had to elbow their way in.

Byron didn’t believe in the after life. “Why I came here – I know not – where I shall go it is useless to enquire – in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds – stars – systems – infinity – why should I be anxious about an atom?” he wrote.

Yet he is still with us. Byron, wrote his faithful friend Hobhouse after his death, “seemed always made for that company in which he found himself.” Perhaps that is as true today.

The “reckless brilliance” of his writing, as Fiona MacCarthy calls it, is partly, she says, a consequence of his sexual concealment. Likewise it shapes layers of personas, masks and meaning that speak to our own sense of the post-modern. But perhaps, after all, the beautiful corpse beneath Hucknall Church must remain Romantic. The human heart, after all, ensures a very long life after death.