Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Scandalous Life of Lord Byron About this episode WARNING: This episode includes discussion of sexual abuse and explicit language.
He appalled and titillated Regency polite society in equal measure. Lord Byron was a poet, a lover, a rebel, a romantic, an appalling husband and eventually a freedom fighter. He made terrible decisions, was notoriously bad-tempered and treated women and men appallingly. Yet, everybody who met him fell in love with him.
Dan is joined by Dr Kate Lister, historian and host of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, to unravel the many phases and contradictions of Lord Byron's complicated life in an attempt to discover the man behind the scandalous reputation.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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0:39 Dan Snow? Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're going to be talking about of history's greatest headline makers, the original celebrity bad boy. Yes, yes, it's time, we're going there. Today, we're talking about Lord Byron. Poet, politician of sorts, lover, exile, self-started rebel, romantic, hideous, hideous partner, and eventually, freedom fighter. He appalled untitled Regency Britain's polite society, set hearts racing. He managed to keep a bear as a pet, and he just made lots of really, really terrible decisions, and yet strangely made them look glamorous at the same time.
1:22 Dan Snow? He was born into a Britain that was experiencing multiple revolutions. The Industrial Revolution, huge leaps in technology, changes in the way that people lived, people were becoming subordinated to machines, people were leaving the countryside and entering these massive, dark, smoky cities. There were questions about how we ought to organise ourselves in this new world, who should get the profit, who should get the surplus value from all this labour, and whether these new workers deserved protections, deserved rights. Across the channel, there was another revolution brewing, the French Revolution, a complete overhaul of France's society, aristocrats losing their head, talk of freedom and equality and liberty.
2:04 Dan Snow? Byron managed to somehow come to embody all of these revolutions whilst remaining quintessentially the aristocratic Brit as well.
2:13 Dan Snow? He is an impossible tangle of contradictions. He was witty, he was brilliant, in fact, he was politically engaged, he was a bestselling poet. His verses were deeply stirring to people. He was also vulnerable, cruel, anxious, traumatised, jealous, ambitious. He was all the things. And to help us make sense of that, because we're tackling the poster boy for sex and scandal and regency society, there is only one person on this earth breathing today who can do justice to this story, and that is the inimitable Kate Lister. Dr Kate Lister, historian, host of our sister podcast Betwixt the Sheets.
2:53 Dan Snow? So lace up your true, pull up your stockings, buckle on your swords, because we are heading back to the 18th century to meet the poet who lived fast, loved hard and died young, Lord Byron. Who was he? The man behind the headlines? And did he deserve that epic reputation? One of the greatest obituaries ever written, that he was mad, bad and dangerous to know? Let's find out. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, we'll get into it.
3:22 Dan Snow? Kate, how are you doing? Good to see you.
3:23 Speaker 01 I'm doing fabulously well.
3:25 Dan Snow? The House of Byron, I mean, they were all wronguns, weren't they?
3:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, they really were. The further you go back, the madder they get as well.
3:33 Dan Snow? Yeah, I know. And actually, weirdly, our Byron was probably the most centrist dad of them all, and that's saying something.
3:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, and his mum's family, they were pretty bonkers as well.
3:43 Dan Snow? Were they?
3:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, quite a high rate of suicide. He had like an aunt that killed herself and then some paternal, yeah, there's quite a lot of mental instability kicking around.
3:53 Dan Snow? Right. I mean, frankly, if I lived before modern medicine, dentistry, you know, food, et cetera, I think I'd have mental instability. I genuinely, I find the ability of humans to survive in these, so the kind of things we're going to talk about, the kind of situations people are thrown into, you know, losing half your kids when they're in, you know, before the age of 10. I just think the mental instability must have been endemic.
4:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would have thought so. Quite how we've even made it as a race is pretty impressive. But when you look at some of the obstacles these people were overcoming and just the kind of horror that was pretty much standard in everyday life. Yeah, it's a wonder anyone was sane. But I liked it. Maybe there was one or two sane Byron who just never made the news.
4:33 Dan Snow? Yes.
4:33 Speaker 01 Who just like, you know, tended a little herb garden and were perfectly well adjusted.
4:36 Dan Snow? Right. And the problem is, is we're not making the podcast about them. You know, therein lies the problem, right?
4:42 Speaker 01 No.
4:43 Dan Snow? Yeah. So anyway, talk about the Byron family. We've sort of talked a little bit about it. But I mean, are they a grand fan? Were they famous before our Byron came along?
4:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, they were. They were. His dad was known as Mad Jack Byron, who was a notorious scallywag. He has the title and also a bit of incest with his own sister. So that's kind of kicking around this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all a bit like that. But it was more his mother, who was an aristocrat, sort of low level aristocrat from Scotland. That's where their peerage came from. So he's really, the aristocratic bit comes more from his mother. His grandfather, paternal grandfather, was, I don't want to say naval person, but he was famous for being shipwrecked a lot. He was known as Bad Weather Byron. He was shipwrecked. And there's a story about how he had to eat his dog's paws after they'd been buried for several weeks. It's a whole thing. But Byron grows up with stories of
5:34 Speaker 01 these legends around him and they have a quite profound impact on him.
5:37 Dan Snow? His grandfather goes on Anton's voyage around the world. And he had a terrible reputation, Admiral Byron, foul weather Jack, didn't he? So they all seem to have nicknames and they all seem to have endless scrapes of death.
5:48 Speaker 01 Endless scrapes with death, addiction issues, mental health issues, terrible womanizing, a spot of incest thrown in. There's some speculation about whether or not our Byron's dad actually took his own life, or whether it was all a terrible accident. But by the time he dies, he's living in Penury, and I think it was France because he had to flee his creditors. Yeah, it's all a mess.
6:08 Dan Snow? My goodness, the misery of dying in France. I mean, it's one thing to be poverty stricken.
6:12 Speaker 01 That's where you picked up from that, dying in France.
6:14 Dan Snow? Yeah. And so a very, very turbulent family, very colourful, you might say, but also turbulent and colourful times. I mean, this is the end of the 18th century. We've got all the isms coming in. We've got, you know, the French Revolution. We've got ideas around democracy and ideas, dare we even say, about feminism. We've had the American Revolution. It is a tumultuous time.
6:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, it absolutely is. Byron is born one year before the French Revolution kicks off and he's very much a child of the revolution of these new ideas that are sweeping the world, that maybe we could do things differently. Maybe it doesn't have to be the way it's always been. And there's challenges to religion and religious authority and the status quo and all of that is in the background. Of course Byron is ultimately a massively privileged, upper-class man walking around, talking about revolution, but still, this is the background.
7:09 Dan Snow? Is dad and mum together when he was born? I mean, obviously they were together nine months before he was born, but.
7:14 Speaker 01 No, no, they weren't. They absolutely were not. His dad married his mum. It's his second marriage. His first marriage, she dies, I think she dies, it might be in childbirth or just shortly after. The first marriage, they have a daughter together, Augusta, she will come back to this story. His second marriage to Catherine Byron's mum was pretty much exclusively for her money. He was skint, he'd spent everything, he was horribly in debt. So he marries her to get access to her fortune, promptly spends it and then runs up enormous debts again and then legs it. And he does that really, really quickly. So when Byron is born, he's not around. She gives birth, not completely on her own, because there's a midwife there and a doctor, but it's above a
7:57 Speaker 01 shop in London. He's not there for that.
8:01 Dan Snow? Okay, so his mother's been ruined by her marriage to this man. Does Byron grow up in, he's upper class, he's descended from aristocrats on both sides, but does he grow up in straitened circumstances?
8:12 Speaker 01 He does actually, he does. He's that kind of aristocratic poverty. They've got the name, they've got the title that they can sort of trade on to get money and creditors, but they are skinny poor. They really are. Like, they're living above shops, they are relying on handouts from family members. She is very much a single mother. They are on their uppers. It's not a good time, the early childhood. And he's in Aberdeen, they moved from London to Aberdeen. So it's possible that adult Byron would have had a slight Scottish lilt when he spoke to you. Certainly, there's some early poems that we have when he was about 10 or 11, and he writes in a Scottish dialect. He talks about, "Come see tway laddies with tway clubfoot" as they walk up Broad Street. So he might have had a slight Scottish lilt.
8:57 Dan Snow? Do we think this experience, we can't psychoanalyse him at this distance, but what does he tell us about this childhood? And how do you think it might have shaped him?
9:07 Speaker 01 One thing that you will notice about Byron all the way through his life is he is very conscious of not having super aristocratic background, that he does come from not poverty, because he's got the name, but this is not a salubrious upbringing. So he will have been aware of the need for money all of his life and kind of that slight inferiority complex. But it all changes when he's 10 and his great uncle dies and he inherits the title and he inherits the property portfolio, the whole lot at 10. So they go from just living in rented accommodation around Aberdeen to boom, you've got an abbey now, sunshine.
9:43 Dan Snow? That is the funny thing about the aristocracy, like some random uncle dies and you just go, oh, sorry, you're now unbelievably wealthy.
9:50 Speaker 01 You're a lord now as well.
9:51 Dan Snow? You're a lord, I mean, he's a full lord.
9:53 Speaker 01 Full lord.
9:54 Dan Snow? And we just quickly got a pause on the fact, we're introducing yet another wild character here. He's inherited from his uncle who was called the wicked Lord Byron. Anything proven gossip around devil worship, orgies, I mean, the full works?
10:08 Speaker 01 I don't know if anything's been proven, but he was clearly not a very nice man. And it's the fact, I think, that what Byron inherits from this uncle is Newstead Abbey. I don't know if you've ever been there, it's in Nottingham.
10:17 Dan Snow? I have been, it's lovely, yeah.
10:19 Speaker 01 Got quite a Gothic-y feel to it though, doesn't it?
10:21 Dan Snow? It does.
10:22 Speaker 01 Doesn't it? It's got, I mean, if you're gonna have satanic orgies, that's the place that you're gonna do these things.
10:28 Dan Snow? I'll take your word for that.
10:29 Speaker 01 Would you not? No, oh, bit of an effort.
10:33 Speaker 01 But if you were going to, that might be the place that you would do that kind of thing. If, big if.
10:38 Dan Snow? Yes, if I was going to fictionally set these satanic orgies somewhere, it would be there, you're right, exactly.
10:43 Speaker 01 Right? So, and when he inherits it, it's not in great shape, it's already looking like it's Gothic and kind of crumbling, but Byron really loves that when he goes to visit it at 10, because it's already imprinted that Gothic crumbling ruin, former glory, this is the site of many a horrendous and spooky event. He absolutely loves that and it stays with him all of his life, even though he never lived there for any great length of time.
11:09 Dan Snow? But it's a source of income. Him and his mum can return to the south and live a life that-
11:14 Speaker 01 They rent it out is what they do. That's how they turned Nisted Abbey into some money in the early days. They've got other properties that they stay at as well. Of course, the other thing that when he comes into his inheritance, it gives him the opportunity to do is get more money on credit because now money lenders will lend to him. So he's in debt most of his life. He's always fleeing creditors. If there's one thing that Byron does a lot of, it's spend. He spends a lot of money and he spends on mad things.
11:40 Dan Snow? Well, we'll come on to some of those.
11:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, we will.
11:43 Dan Snow? So he moves from his school in Aberdeen to fancy schools down south. He goes to Harrow, doesn't he?
11:50 Speaker 01 Harrow, of course he does. A young gentleman, he will go to Harrow, where he is addressed as a lord as well.
11:57 Dan Snow? Right, exactly. Little Lord Byron, and I'm sure that he wasn't alone.
12:00 Speaker 01 Little Lord Byron. But one thing that we should talk about him is that, because this is quite formative to his character and his life experience as well, is that he did have a disability. It's often referred to as a club foot. Scholars aren't quite sure if that is what it really, really was, but there was some kind of disability that meant that he limped his entire life, that when he was very, very young, his father in the letters that he was writing said that he didn't believe his son, George was Byron's name, would ever walk properly. Some biographers that I've read have thought it was a kind of dyspasia where the bones don't form quickly. He had a really, really weak leg and most scholars think that it's his right leg, although there was disagreement even when Byron was alive. So he has to wear these specially made shoes and boots that have got like really
12:44 Speaker 01 hardcore contraptions to constrict his legs. So he was in pain a lot and he's very self-conscious about this.
12:51 Dan Snow? Okay. And he may be using alcohol and opiates to take the edge off some of that pain perhaps.
12:57 Speaker 01 Of course he is. But this also makes things, so he's now a lord, but he's gone from living above a shop to being a lord. He's now throwing his weight around, but he's also very aware of this disability, which the other kids at Harrow mock him for quite mercilessly. He's been teased for it his entire life. Things like he can't play cricket. Well, he does play cricket, but he has to have someone to do the runs for him. So he's always aware of this physical disability that he has.
13:23 Dan Snow? Did he start writing at Harrow?
13:25 Speaker 01 He's writing all the time. There's sort of like juvenile verses that we have, but I don't think when he's at Harrow, he has any inkling of, I'm going to be a great poet and a great scholar. That's just what young gentlemen did, is they wrote poems about things.
13:39 Dan Snow? Okay. He goes up to Cambridge?
13:42 Speaker 01 Yes. He wants to go to Oxford, but they won't take him.
13:45 Dan Snow? Yeah, well, there you go. And so he ends up at the other place. And what's university like? I mean, does one have the sexual and other awakenings that you might associate with going to university now?
13:57 Speaker 01 Well, one of the most interesting things about university at this particular time, at least in Cambridge, was that if you're a member of the aristocracy, which he is, you didn't have to sit any exams. It didn't matter. You'd have nothing to pass. So you could just literally go there and drink and carouse your way through town and just have a jolly old time of it, which is exactly what he did. This is most certainly a time of sexual awakening for Byron, although one of the things that we should definitely mention is that he would later record his first sexual experience was actually one of abuse. A nanny that was hired to look after him called May Gray, who was this pious, religious, I think it's Lutheran, Scottish, like really went to town on all this religious stuff in his day to day life, but was sexually abusing him at night. He would later write that she
14:40 Speaker 01 would come into his room at night and play tricks with his person. He was about 10 when that was happening. So that was likely his first sexual experience. I would imagine that one of the things that he found most confusing was that this was a woman that would beat him for being a sinful boy all day long, and then at night would come in and sexually abuse him. It's difficult to say what impact this had on Byron, but reading back through all of the archive and the letters and everything that we've got surrounding him, I don't think he liked women very much. Which sounds really counterintuitive because he has this reputation for having sex with absolutely anything that would move, and that is well deserved. But I think that he liked men a lot more than he liked women.
15:25 Speaker 01 By the time he gets to Harrow and then later Cambridge, he is realising that he has sexual feelings for men, very strong sexual feelings for men as well. It must have been very confusing for him, but it's when he's at Cambridge that we get the strongest evidence of his first gay relationships.
15:44 Speaker 01 I think he'd get angry at women a lot. He often found them grotesque and I wouldn't be surprised if that could be traced back to this early abuse that he experienced.
15:52 Dan Snow? Well, that shouldn't come as a surprise. Today, we're living in this sort of avalanche of the manosphere, these strange male influencers who seem to despise women apart from when they want to have sex with them.
16:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's Byron. That's, that's him. He, he loves them. He can fall in love with them. He certainly finds them sexually attractive. I think that there are some cases in his whole life where he did love women, but he also gets very frustrated. He also finds them grotesque. He gets bored of them very quickly. I think that he wants to be around men. He much prefers the company and the sexual company of men.
16:22 Dan Snow? He is very good looking, is he?
16:23 Speaker 01 Yes, he is. He's a hottie. He's very pale in his appearance, which was considered very attractive at the time. He's got these big eyes. His face was always described as being almost cherubic and in some accounts, he's described as looking very feminine, like a woman. But he is absolutely, everyone says that he is very, very beautiful.
16:43 Dan Snow? And he actually describes himself, right? He says that he's quite moody. He is this OG kind of romantic Gothic emo figure, isn't he? Because he's sort of beautiful and complicated and very, very moody.
16:55 Speaker 01 Damaged.
16:56 Dan Snow? Damaged, yeah.
16:57 Speaker 01 And intensely emotional and he forms attachments to people very, very deeply. And everybody pretty much, apart from a few accounts of people that went, I thought he was the right poser, but pretty much everybody falls in love with this man. Men, women, it doesn't matter. He has friends that last throughout his entire lifetime, despite the fact that he treats them really badly. But everyone is enamored of this person. He is beautiful. He is intelligent. He is deeply emotional. He's highly creative, but also he's damaged and he needs help and I can save him. And it's just that catnip, that tortured artist image. He was the OG of that.
17:37 Dan Snow? And so there is a sort of, it's anachronistic, but this idea of a celebrity culture in Georgian England during the Napoleonic War, so in early 19th century, he is just a sort of, what, a dashing figure in London society that everyone knows and wants to know. A, he's got the looks and the charisma, but also is he, is he impressing people with his poetry at this point, his writing? So has he got it just all going on? He's got everything.
17:59 Speaker 01 He does. He's also a scallywag and behaves really badly to people. We often forget that in the mix because it's so easy to be bedazzled by him. But he is writing poetry. His big hit comes in 1812, when he's been off on his grand tour around Europe, which was basically him going out there for sexual tourism. But he had been publishing poetry before that. So he publishes small collections of poems, which are relatively well received apart from one or two people that slag it off. And he gets so upset that he's been badly criticised by one or two people, that his next volume of poetry is one just attacking English and Scottish critics. He just absolutely goes to town and rips them to shreds. That's, he just goes on the offensive.
18:42 Dan Snow? We've all been there. We've all been there.
18:44 Speaker 01 Right? But like, you're not supposed to respond to criticism. You're supposed to be dignified and like, rise above it. And he publishes this entire collection of just basically going, yeah, well, you're all dicks and idiots and I'm a genius. So, eh, that's pretty much what he does. And then he swans off to Europe. But it's there that he writes his big hit, and it's called Charles Harold's Pilgrimage. And it's about a young man who goes to Greece and to Turkey and explores and experiences emotional awakening, and it's all erotic. And funnily enough, people thought that that might have been semi-autobiographical. So they, the world just goes nuts for this. It was called Byron-a-mania at the time. And this collection of, it sounds so strange now, a collection of poems would do that, because I don't remember the last time a collection of poems did do that. But
19:29 Speaker 01 his does. It's like a rock star dropping an album that everybody can't stop talking about.
19:36 Dan Snow? Listen to Downstairs History. We'll talk about Byron more coming up.
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21:41 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
22:29 Dan Snow? And this might be difficult for some people listening because they think, well, hang on, we're moving into the 19th century. I associate the 19th century with quite strict moral codes and huge penalties and punishments for sex outside marriage. So is this a subculture? Is this like the 60s? Are there sort of two different versions of society at the moment? There's the stuff going on the King's Road and elsewhere, and then the vast mass of people who live by completely different rules? I mean, who's he sensation with? And is it just prurient? They're like, I can't believe what this guy's getting up to? Or is this these people who share his ideas of sort of free love and living in a different way?
23:01 Speaker 01 Well, when you read Charles Howell's Pilgrimage, you'll probably be a bit disappointed with it because you come to it thinking it's going to be like some rock and roll memoir of debauchery and excess. And it's really like a meditation on the emotional experiences of travelling through Europe. You're like, where's the sex? But at the time, it just lit the fuse paper of this emotional backdrop that was happening in London at the time. Maybe it was that all the revolutions that had been happening, the Enlightenment's being ushered in, and then suddenly there's this voice about this man that's very in touch with his emotional erotic and sexual awakening. And it was a huge hit, mostly with the aristocracy because its first edition, which sold out in days, by the way, that cost, I think it
23:44 Speaker 01 was 50 shillings to buy that, the first edition of it. So these are rich people. Who are buying this. And to answer your other question, yeah, there were very strict moral rules at the time, but who those rules applied to and how they were applied is a whole other discussion. If you are very, very, very rich member of the aristocracy, you can cover yourself pretty well because you've got the money and the space to be able to get away from scandal. But that doesn't mean you're immune to it. And Byron, when he goes on his grand tour, he deliberately goes to Greece and to Turkey and to Armenia because he knows that these are cultures where homosexual relationships are not only not taboo, but quite open. And he writes in his letters at the time, that's what he's
24:26 Speaker 01 going for. And we can't flinch away from it is that he wanted to have sex with young men. He referred to them as hyacinths in his many, many letters to his friends that he was going to go and pick as many hyacinths as he could. And he was going to cull these hyacinths.
24:40 Dan Snow? Are they calling themselves the Romantics, these poems? Are there young men out there writing sort of romantic poetry? And roughly speaking, what does that involve? I always associate it with going on long walks through wild landscapes, somehow breaking free of the moral strictures of society and getting back to an earthier, more sexual, more real sort of self. Is that roughly speaking?
25:02 Speaker 01 Yes, that's pretty much what they're doing. So you've got to imagine that Romanticism is born out of the Enlightenment movement, which leads up to the French Revolution, the American Revolution. And there's a heavy emphasis on rationality, despite the fact that these revolutions were often very irrational. But it was like, we want to do away with medieval superstition and belief in folklore and magic, where people have science and where people have rational principles. And it was really built on that. So the Romantics come along to counteract that. They are about like, okay, well, ration and reason is a great thing. But what about emotions? What about how you feel? What about your imagination? And how that is unlimited? So they're pushing back against this very, no, we want rational
25:46 Speaker 01 sense and reason of the Enlightenment. So the Romantics come in, and now there's a heavy emphasis on imagination, passion. They took a lot of solace in nature and the natural world, because the revolutions that are coming up, and it's the start of the Industrial Revolution as well, that was quite scary. So finding solace in nature, the idea that we go back to how we naturally were. And obviously, sex is in that mix as well. That's what the Romantic poets. Were largely about. There were other people writing at the time, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and Byron shits all over them. He thinks it's really funny. If you want someone to say something nasty about someone at the time, go to Byron. He was merciless about absolutely everybody. He called Wordsworth turdsworth. He said that Keats wrote piss-a-bed poetry.
26:30 Speaker 01 He said it was mental masturbation. He's just merciless. So I don't know if he considered him self-part of this movement. But he was aware he was a writer and that there was a sort of a new surge of interest in it. But he definitely thought of himself as the best.
26:46 Dan Snow? He had an affair, didn't he, with Lady Caroline Lamb, who was married to the man who would become the Prime Minister of Vicente Melbourne?
26:53 Speaker 01 He had so many affairs, Dan. It's ridiculous.
26:56 Dan Snow? But she's rather remarkable. She's an author and obviously rather, she had an affair with the Duke of Wellington, which is cool. And her brother was badly injured at the Battle of Waterloo. Anyway, so she's got an interesting family and interesting career. She writes novels. Is it true she comes up with that unbelievably famous quote about Byron?
27:13 Speaker 01 Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Yes, she did. She wrote that. To be completely fair, I'm not sure that you couldn't say that about Caroline Lamb herself. I mean, I've got a lot of sympathy for the thousands of broken hearts that Byron seems to leave in his wake. But Caroline, just like, wow, the behaviour is really quite frightening. So they meet at a party and she kind of snubs him and he finds that irresistible. That's just like catnip to him. And she's already quite an unstable person when you look into her background. Her family have had lots of concerns about her behaviour before and about her volcanic temper. And so they launch into this ridiculously passionate affair. And it only lasts about five months. So just everyone bear that in mind, five months. You
27:57 Speaker 01 know, I've got things in my fridge that are going to last for longer than that.
28:00 Dan Snow? Oh, but Kate, we were young once. Don't you remember those, oh, those five monthsers? They were some of the best.
28:05 Speaker 01 My fascination with Byron though is that I know I would have been like this. I know if I'd met him, I'd have been one of these silly girls following him across Europe going, but I can change him. But Lady Caroline Lamb absolutely loses it. Like, she is in restraining order territory because one of the things that Byron does, I've said, I'm not sure that he likes women that much. He likes the thrill of the chase and he likes validation from them. So he goes after quite unobtainable women. And once he gets them and he gets that initial like, yeah, that was amazing. Then he very quickly gets quite bored of them. And that's what happens with Lady Caroline Lamb. She is super aristocratic. She is the niece of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. She's married to this up and coming politician and she throws herself at Byron. And she's doing things like she dresses up as a page boy to sneak in his house.
28:50 Dan Snow? No way.
28:51 Speaker 01 So that's quite odds. She wakes him up in the middle of the night one time saying that they have to elope together. And it's like, Caroline, but you are, you are married. And she breaks the cardinal rule of sexual debauchery in the aristocracy, which is that she's not discreet about this. Isn't discreet and people are starting to get worried about it. Her family have this intervention and take her over to Ireland to chill out, which she doesn't. Byron's still writing to her the whole time, by the way. And then when she finally gets this letter from him, basically saying, look, it's done. You need to chill out. She goes completely mad. She has a bonfire. She hires local girls from the village to sing songs about how awful Byron is. While she's burning all of his poems and his books, she writes a novel, Glenarvan, about how horrible he is.
29:34 Speaker 01 She stalks him. She keeps turning up in his building. She mimics his handwriting to write to his publishers to get a portrait of him sent to her. It's like, wow, Caroline, just wow. It's such an unholy mess. It really is.
29:49 Dan Snow? Well, that's the Ponsonby family for you. I mean, honestly, the only thing you do with those people is wind them up and fire them in the direction of the French, to be honest. So poor her. A different era, she'd have been there with her brother on the cavalry charges. By some extraordinary quirk of fate, he manages to convince someone to marry him. I mean, how does that work?
30:05 Speaker 01 Do you know what? I knew I was going to come talk to you about this. So I thought I would try and make a list of everyone that we know Byron has had sexual contact with. And I've got it in front of me.
30:14 Dan Snow? Listeners, she is brandishing a great sheath of paper.
30:17 Speaker 01 He's 28 years old in my list and we're at hundreds of people already.
30:21 Dan Snow? Wow.
30:21 Speaker 01 This is hundreds of people. So he is a man of gargantuan appetites and he doesn't treat people very well. But he does manage to convince, her name's Annabelle Milbank, and she's the cousin of Lady Caroline Lamb. So we're keeping it in the family. He's also knocking off Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law, by the way, so we'll just throw that one out there. And having sex with one of her friends, Lady Oxford as well. And he makes overture to Lady Oxford's 12-year-old daughter as well.
30:48 Dan Snow? Oh my god.
30:49 Speaker 01 So this is a mess. Somehow, he manages to convince a young girl, Annabella Milbank, who is not his type. She's very sensible, she's very pious, she likes mathematics and puzzles. And he manages to convince her to marry him, to take the heat off this ridiculous situation with Caroline Lamb that everybody is talking about. Also to get hold of her money. And also because he is having sex with his half-sister Augusta as well.
31:16 Dan Snow? Wait, okay, my goodness me. That's a true thing, is it?
31:19 Speaker 01 That is a true thing. That is, I know that there are like some Byron scholars out there that like to sort of distance themselves. Oh, we don't really know. Yet we do. We do know, we do know that. We've got love letters that they write to one another. There's a letter that he writes her later in life saying that, "I don't regret what happened between us. The only sin was your terrible marriage." At one point Augusta, he calls Agus, gets pregnant and gives birth to a baby called Midora. And he writes a letter saying, "Well, thank God it's not a monkey." Because there was a superstition that incest would result in people giving birth to monkeys. He's talking to his friends at the time about how he's in a real mess, worse than any scrape he's been in before. He confesses to Lady Melbourne, who is Lady Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law, that he is doing this. He is. There's no smoking gun. There's no DNA test.
32:04 Speaker 01 But yeah, he is. So he needs to get married pretty quickly to get money and to calm down the rumours that are spreading about him.
32:12 Dan Snow? Okay, wow, all right. And this poor girl says yes.
32:15 Speaker 01 She didn't say yes immediately. She said no, first of all. And it's not particularly long courtship, but it's all written by letters. And it's like watching a car crash in slow motion. It's just that you know what's gonna happen here, and it's exactly what does happen. So she marries him, she falls in love with him, everyone falls in love with him. And now he hates being married. And because despite him being one of the greatest romantic poets, he seems to have the emotional bandwidth of a hemorrhoid. He can't process the fact that he's now married and now he hates his wife because he's married. So he's unbelievably cruel to her. He pulls this stunt where he takes his wife to go and stay with his half-sister Augusta. And they stay with her for a few months, and the entire time he's flaunting the affair.
32:57 Speaker 01 He's doing things like sending his wife to bed early and then staying up all night laughing and carusing with his sister. When eventually this wife is gonna file for a separation. She has lots and lots of evidence about what he's been doing. And it's quite clear that he's been having sex with his sister. She can hear them and they've been flaunting the affair. I mean, imagine marrying into this and then slowly realising that your partner is most definitely having a relationship with his half-sister.
33:23 Dan Snow? Wow.
33:24 Speaker 01 He does horrible things like he gets her pregnant and then he sleeps in the room underneath hers and throws things up at the ceiling all night long because he doesn't want her to get any sleep. He is just unbelievably cruel and mean to this young woman. And I can't excuse his behaviour at all.
33:40 Dan Snow? Interestingly, she is pregnant with a very important person, isn't she?
33:45 Speaker 01 She is, Ada Lovelace.
33:47 Dan Snow? Take a sidetrack there. So Ada Lovelace is the product of that short marriage?
33:51 Speaker 01 Yes, she is, the famous mathematician and intellectual giant. So there's no doubt that there is genius running through this family.
34:00 Dan Snow? Yeah, it just took a woman to come and manifest it in a kind of sensible way.
34:04 Speaker 01 It did.
34:05 Dan Snow? And Ada Lovelace famously comes up with the idea, the kind of concept of a computational device, so a computer. So she's...
34:12 Speaker 01 Super smart.
34:13 Dan Snow? Super smart. Okay, but her father is now getting divorced, now properly scandal. I mean, everyone knew about everything anyway, but why is this now a real scandal that's a problem for him?
34:23 Speaker 01 There's something weird that happens in social circles though, isn't there? There's like open secrets and then there's when the secret becomes properly open and everyone turns their back on him. For the longest time, everyone was very excited about Byron's naughtiness and his illicit reputation as a womanizer. And this debauched poet was very exciting. But then when people start to realise, no, that is actually true, they turn their back on him because Annabella Milbank goes back to her parents and it's just like, you have to get me out of this. We have to get separated. So they put together this huge portfolio of information as to why she should be separated from Byron. Lady Caroline Lamb turns up as well to throw her two pence in because when they'd been having this affair, Byron confessed to her that when he'd been in Greece and Turkey,
35:08 Speaker 01 he'd been having sex with lots of men and boys and that he'd been having sex with men and boys since he was at Harrow and at university. So she's got all of this information. There's claims that he tried to sodomise his wife as well. All of this is not good. They will stand for adultery. That's pretty standard, but accusations of sodomy and same sex relationships will absolutely not do at this time. So he's got to get out of town and fast.
35:35 Dan Snow? Listen to Downstairs History, we're talking about Byron, more coming up.
35:48 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
36:36 Dan Snow? Okay, so this is now 1816, which actually is useful for him because Europe, after decades of war, even though he's been on great big trips around Europe and elsewhere, despite the greatest war that Britain's ever fought going on, it's now Europe, roughly speaking, now at peace. He can travel very widely presumably. So where does he head off to?
36:54 Speaker 01 He heads off to the Mediterranean initially. Oh, he's good friends with Percy Bysshe Shelley, we should also say, another rogue who's also traipsing around Europe with a small gaggle of teenage girls with him, claiming free love for all. So I think there's a stopover in Geneva, where the famous Frankenstein incident happens. They all stay up one night writing scary stories, and Mary Shelley quite spectacularly comes up with Frankenstein. But we should say as well, during all of this mess, he has managed to find time to have another illicit affair with Mary Shelley's half-sister called Claire Clermont, who also becomes infatuated with him, enamored with him, and pregnant. And she elopes with Shelley, with the Shellys, and then Byron goes to stay with them,
37:38 Speaker 01 where this affair continues. And she gives birth to a baby girl called Allegra, who Byron, again, I'm afraid, is a complete shit. He eventually abandons Claire, saying, "Well, what could I possibly have done? She wanted to have sex with me." It's, well, fair enough then, mate. So off he goes again, and this daughter, it basically assumes custody of her, won't let Claire see the baby, and then sends the baby away to a convent, and she dies on her own when she's four. So that's not nice, is it?
38:05 Dan Snow? Oh, God. Okay. It's just grim.
38:07 Speaker 01 Yes, grim.
38:09 Dan Snow? All right. So then he continues travelling. He just keeps going, does he?
38:13 Speaker 01 Yes, he does. He continues travelling. He has some time in Europe. The scandal's following him. When he's staying with the Shellys, there would be like crowds of people gathering to try and get a peek of what was going on inside this house. So that's not working for him. So he goes to Italy, and there he writes another bestseller, a poem called "Don Duen", and it is Don Duen, by the way. It's not Don Wan, because he writes it "duen". He writes to rhyme with new one and true one in the poem itself. He writes that, but quite frankly, how he's found the time to do that is impressive because he's in another just debauched, excessive wives, women. He's writing home that, you know, another few hundred women have been harassing him, but he does at this point.
38:56 Speaker 01 Get into a relationship with a woman that I think he did love, Teresa Guccione, who's nineteen years old. And of course, she's married to somebody else. And as much as Byron's ever going to do, he kind of settles down.
39:07 Dan Snow? Wow.
39:07 Speaker 01 With her. She eventually has her marriage dissolved. And by that point, he's bored of her and he moves on, but he's in Italy, in Venice. Writing poems, being notorious and having a lot of sex.
39:20 Dan Snow? Well, he's gone to the right city.
39:21 Speaker 01 He has.
39:22 Dan Snow? Because Venice does have a reputation for that. Okay.
39:24 Speaker 01 And he likes that very much. He likes the, the.
39:29 Speaker 01 He likes the freedom that comes in Italy and in Greece. And he gets very angry and upset with the hypocrisy of the British as he saw it. So he's doing that. He spends quite a long time there, actually, a few years.
39:41 Dan Snow? And does he write, is he writing, is he?
39:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's writing, he's writing all the time. This big poem, Don Juan, which was considered very scandalous. It was unfinished at the time of his death. He was publishing cantos of it as he's going along. It tells the story of this sort of legendary Spanish lover, Don Juan, and he's kind of re-appropriating that particular narrative. Again, very, very scandalous. He had big arguments with his publishers about whether or not he should be allowed to publish it as is.
40:08 Dan Snow? And is Don Juan, the reason we've heard of Don Juan, is that because of Byron? Was he a trope before? And like a famous sort of myth or story before that? Or is it really because of Byron?
40:17 Speaker 01 I mean, Byron definitely ran with it, but Don Juan was a legendary figure before that. Byron's Don Juan definitely added some more spice to the mix. He kind of, in the same way that he identified with this child Harold character, I mean, Byron is the ultimate Don Juan, isn't he?
40:34 Dan Snow? Uh, well, sure. Yeah. But he's a restless soul as well. Does he start to head towards Greece after that time in Venice? When does he? Become obsessed with Greek independence?
40:45 Speaker 01 He's been obsessed with Greek independence for a while. When he was a young man, early twenties, he spent a lot of time in Greece, pester in the locals more than anything else. But he had a real sense of Greek identity, of Greek independence. He was really angry when Lord Elgin took the marbles from the Parthenon. He wrote quite extensively about that. He thought that that was absolutely hideous and diabolical, that these treasures would be removed from Greece just to teach English people how to do architecture. He was really angry about that. So he's already got quite a fiercely protective attitude to Greece and to Greek culture. It's something he identifies with a lot. And there's a war for Greek independence, and it's almost inevitable that he's going to get caught up in this.
41:29 Speaker 01 Because you get a sense of Byron as he's getting older, because he's in his mid thirties at this point of he's bored and he's restless and he wants something more than being a poet. There's a sense that he wants to achieve something with his life. He's never satisfied with what he's got. And he gets this idea that he wants to be a war hero, which is, again, is an odd thing for him because in his poems, he's like, he's very anti-war, but at the same time, he loved Napoleon. He identified with Napoleon very, very strongly. He collected Napoleon memorabilia, despite that being regarded as very unpatriotic at the time. So he goes off to Greece and by this time, he is a very wealthy man. Because for the first few years, he didn't take any money for his poems because he's a gentleman
42:14 Speaker 01 and he just don't pay me for to be write poems. I'm a gentleman. But eventually he starts taking money from them and then he's got a lot of money. So he goes over to Greece and invests himself in this fight for Greek independence and pours money into this. So he gets this kind of little commission in the army. But again, it's not what he thinks it's going to be. He thinks it's going to be the romantic hero charging in and saving the day. But what he's got is a sort of a ragtag band of mercenaries that endlessly need training and the weather in Greece is appalling and it's just raining and muddy. And he doesn't see any war. He's just involved in training exercises and he finds it all quite tedious. It's not what he thought it would be.
42:53 Dan Snow? So he never sees any action?
42:55 Speaker 01 No.
42:56 Dan Snow? But he does experience that other great reality of war in that era, which is disease.
43:00 Speaker 01 Disease, yeah, almost inevitable, I think, because the conditioners were so bad where he was living, trying to train these soldiers, were they, that kind of mercenaries? Yeah, these Greek recruits. Eventually, he goes out and he probably gets malaria. That's probably what he gets. But what actually kills him is the doctors trying to bleed him, which they do endlessly. They do it every day. They take so much blood from him. Screams are heard coming from his tent of him saying, "Close the veins, close the veins", and they bleed him so much that eventually he dies. So he doesn't even get this big hero's death that he was really hoping for. He's bled to death after contracting malaria but never actually sees battle.
43:42 Dan Snow? But he'd be happy to know that that has been romanticised. I mean, we all know that he falls, roughly speaking, fighting for Greek independence, even if he didn't do any fighting. You know, the branding exercise did work in the long term.
43:53 Speaker 01 Oh, it did. It absolutely did. And when he died, because he was such a big name in Britain, notorious or not, the fact that he died fighting for Greek independence really raised the profile of the Greek cause. More people joined in and he is remembered as a hero. You know, all right, he didn't see any battle, but he did go out there to try and fight for Greek independence. So it wasn't in vain. I think that he would have been very proud of the fact that his death raised the profile of this particular struggle. And as always, when people actually die, then we romanticise them, don't we? So he then becomes a hero in death. And he was quite widely mourned as well. It was a big shock when he died because he was only 36. And although he was considered
44:36 Speaker 01 a very scandalous person, when his body was brought back, you know, the streets were lined with people, everyday people, not just aristocrats, people that really saw him as a champion of the working man. And in some ways, he was, like, his first speech in Parliament as a young man was to speak in favour of the machine breakers in the north of England who had been breaking machines that were going to put them out of work. And the English government was trying to make that a capital offence. And he goes in and he sticks up for them. He did have an affinity for the underdog throughout most of his life. So there is a huge outpouring of grief when he dies. Huge.
45:12 Dan Snow? He's such a curious legend in British literature and poetry because his poetry isn't read anymore, or it's not studied in school or anything. And yet, he's just supremely famous still.
45:23 Speaker 01 I know, he's more famous for his life and his lifestyle than his poems now, I think. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I've spoken to lots of Byron scholars that get really pissed off with the mad, bad and dangerous to know reputation because they feel it detracts from his work, from what he wrote and what he said. And I can completely see why they think that. But also, I would argue that he was very aware of his reputation at the time, and he cultivated this celebrity image. And I don't think that you can have one without the other. This image that he had of the tragic, romantic Lothario was absolutely central to his work as well. And he knew that, and he cultivated it.
46:01 Dan Snow? I mean, that's like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. In a hundred years' time, you're not going to be like, oh, please stop talking about their biography. Let's just enjoy their music for itself.
46:08 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly, exactly. That's just the music. We just want to know about the music. It's that can you separate the art from the artist discussion? And I don't think Byron wanted you to. In fact, there's a sense when you're reading any of the many letters about him, that he was playing up to it in many ways, that he was trying to be as sensational as possible, because that was a reputation. Fame was very, very important to him. But no, we don't read his poems anymore, but we should. There's some crackers. He wrote, when Shelley died, he drowned young, Byron was there, and they had to burn his body on the beach because of hygiene reasons. I know, it's all very, very grim, isn't it? But he writes this amazing poem about his mate Shelley called We Go Nomura Roving. And there's just like, he's lost his mate, and he's lost his kindred spirit. And that's
46:53 Speaker 01 a really beautiful one. And then there's the famous, she walked in beauty clad like the night. And he writes that about, I think that's about Theresa, one of his last great loves. But we don't tend to read really long epic poems like Don Juin and Charles Harold anymore.
47:09 Dan Snow? Well, you've inspired me to go and do that. Thank you very much, Kate Lister. You're a absolute legend. Great to have you on the pod. Always love hanging out with you. So thank you for doing this. And if people want to hear more of Kate Lister, you, they can do so on your podcast, which is called?
47:25 Speaker 01 Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex Scandal in Society.
47:28 Dan Snow? Yeah, you've got to get that downloaded, and it will drop into your feed every week. You'd be mad not to. Thanks for coming on, Kate.
47:34 Speaker 01 Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
47:39 Dan Snow? Well, thanks so much Kate Lister, and thank you all very much for listening. It's always just great getting our history hosts together from these podcasts. And let me know if you want me and Kate to cover something else. We've done a similar episode on Casanova, which is just as fine as this. And you can find a link to that in the show notes. And please go and check out Kate's podcast. Until next time though, see ya.
48:07 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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