Lord Byron

George Noel Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, lived from 22 January 1788 to 19 April 1824 and was a British poet. A central figure in the Romantic movement, he is counted among the greatest British poets. His most famous works include the long narrative poems *Don Juan* and *Childe Harold's Pilgrimage*, and many of his short lyrics from *Hebrew Melodies* also gained wide popularity.

He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating, he traveled extensively across Europe, spending seven years in Italy—in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa—after threats of lynching forced him to flee England. While in Italy, he often visited his friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, and Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died at age 36 while leading a campaign in 1824, from a fever he caught after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi.

Byron was born on Holles Street in London; his birthplace now supposedly sits under a branch of the John Lewis department store. His family in the English Midlands traces back without interruption to Ralph de Buran, who arrived with William the Conqueror in the 11th century, with land holdings listed in the Domesday Book of 1086. He was the only child of Captain John "Jack" Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire. His paternal grandparents were Vice Admiral John Byron and Sophia Trevanion. The admiral, after surviving a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, set a speed record for circumnavigating the globe; later, a stormy voyage during the American War of Independence earned him the nickname "Foul-Weather Jack" Byron from the press.

Byron's father had previously been scandalously married to Amelia Osborne, Marchioness of Carmarthen, with whom he had an affair—the wedding came just weeks after her divorce, when she was about eight months pregnant. That marriage was unhappy; their first two children died in infancy. Amelia herself died in 1784, almost exactly a year after giving birth to their third child, the poet's half-sister Augusta Mary. Though Amelia died from a wasting illness, likely tuberculosis, the press claimed her heart broke from remorse over leaving her husband. Nineteenth-century sources blamed Jack's own "brutal and vicious" treatment of her.

Jack then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, apparently only for her fortune. To claim her Scottish estate, he added the surname "Gordon," becoming "John Byron Gordon," and sometimes styled himself "John Byron Gordon of Gight." Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts. Within two years, the large estate, worth about £23,500 (equivalent to £3,053,949 in 2023), was squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual trust income of only £150 (equivalent to £19,493 in 2023). To avoid creditors, Catherine went with her husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth.

Byron was born in January 1788 and christened at St Marylebone Parish Church. His father wanted to name him "William," but since he was absent, his mother named him after her own father, George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of James I of Scotland who had died by suicide in 1779. Byron's mother moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, and he spent part of his childhood there. His father soon joined them in lodgings on Queen Street, Aberdeen, but the couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly had mood swings and bouts of melancholy, partly because her husband kept borrowing money from her, driving her deeper into debt. One loan allowed him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness"—probably tuberculosis—in 1791.

When Byron's great-uncle, later called the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. His mother took him to England, but the Abbey was in disrepair, so she leased it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn and others during Byron's adolescence. Described by some biographers as "a woman without judgment or self-command," Catherine allegedly either spoiled her son or vexed him with capricious stubbornness. Her drinking disgusted him, and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent, making it hard for her to catch him. Byron was born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated in a fit of temper, calling him "a lame brat." However, biographer Doris Langley Moore, in her 1974 book *Accounts Rendered*, paints a more sympathetic view, portraying Mrs. Byron as a staunch supporter who sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at Harrow and Cambridge. Langley Moore questions the claim by 19th-century biographer John Galt that she over-indulged in alcohol.

Byron's mother-in-law, Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, died in 1822, and her will required him to change his surname to "Noel" to inherit half her estate. He obtained a Royal Warrant to "take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour." From then on, he signed himself "Noel Byron."