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Dan Snow's History Hit
The Scandalous Life of Lord Byron
00:44:07
Was Byron really mad, bad, and dangerous to know?
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- [00:00]
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 historyit.com subscribe.
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- [01:18]
Contest Host
Okay, caller one wins courtside seats to tonight's game.
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Chris (Contest Winner)
What? I won floor seats.
- [01:24]
Contest Host
You did?
- [01:24]
Chris (Contest Winner)
I've been calling for 13 months.
- [01:26]
Contest Host
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- [01:27]
Chris (Contest Winner)
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Contest Host
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- [01:30]
Chris (Contest Winner)
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Contest Host
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- [01:42]
Chris (Contest Winner)
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- [01:43]
Contest Host
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- [01:50]
Dan Snow
Just a warning, this episode contains discussions that might not be suitable. If you're listening with your kids. Hi everyone. Welcome to Dance to Knows History. We're gonna be talking about one of history's greatest headline makers, the 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 starred rebel, romantic, hideous, hideous partner, and eventually freedom fighter. He appalled and titillated 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. 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 organize ourselves in this new world. Who should get the profit? Who should get the surplus value from all this labor? And whether these new workers deserved protections, deserved rights. Across the Channel, there was another revolution brewing and the French Revolution, a complete overhaul of France's society. Aristocrats losing their head, talk of freedom and equality and liberty. Byron managed to somehow come to embody all of these revolutions whilst remaining quintessentially the aristocratic Brit as well. He is an impossible tangle of contradictions. He was witty, he was brilliant. In fact, he was politically engaged, he was a best selling poet. His verses were deeply stirring to people. He was also vulnerable, cruel, anxious, traumatized, jealous, ambitious. He was all the things. And to help us make sense that and 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. So lace up your true. Pull up your stockings, buckle on your sword, 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. Kate, how you doing? Good to see you.
- [04:43]
Dr. Kate Lister
I'm doing fabulously well at the house of Byron.
- [04:46]
Dan Snow
I mean, they were all wrong UN's, weren't they?
- [04:49]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yeah, yeah, they really were. The further you go back, the madder they get.
- [04:52]
Dan Snow
Yeah, I know. And actually, weirdly, our Byron was probably the most centrist dad of them all. And that's saying something.
- [04:59]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yeah, yeah. And his mum's family, they were pretty bonkers as well as. Quite high rate. Yeah, quite 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.
- [05:12]
Dan Snow
Right. I mean, frankly, if I lived before modern medicine, dentistry, food, et cetera, I think I'd have mental instability. I genuinely, I find the ability of humans to survive in these 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.
- [05:35]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 such standard in everyday life. Yeah. It's a wonder anyone was saying, but I liked it. Maybe there was one or two sane Byrons who just never made the news.
- [05:52]
Dan Snow
Yes.
- [05:52]
Dr. Kate Lister
Who just like, you know, tended a little herb garden and were perfectly well adjusted.
- [05:56]
Dan Snow
Right. And the problem is, is we're not making the podcast about them, you know, therein lies the problem.
- [06:00]
Dr. Kate Lister
Right, I know, yeah.
- [06:03]
Dan Snow
So anyway, talk about the Byron family. We've sort of talked a little bit about it. But I mean, are they a grandfather? Were they famous before our Byron came along?
- [06:11]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 fact. 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. His grandfather, paternal grandfather was, I don't wanna 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 these legends around him and they have quite a profound impact on him.
- [06:56]
Dan Snow
His grandfather goes on Anson'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 with death.
- [07:07]
Dr. Kate Lister
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. Cause he had to flee his creditors. Yeah, it's all a mess.
- [07:27]
Dan Snow
My goodness, the misery of having dying in France. I mean, it's one thing to be.
- [07:31]
Dr. Kate Lister
And that's what you picked up from that, dying in France.
- [07:35]
Dan Snow
And so a very, very turbulent family. Very colorful, you might say, but also turbulent and colorful 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.
- [07:57]
Dr. Kate Lister
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.
- [08:29]
Dan Snow
Is dad and mum together when he was born? I mean, obviously they were together nine months before he was born, but no, no, they weren't.
- [08:35]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 shop in London. He's not there for that.
- [09:20]
Dan Snow
Okay, so his mother's been ruined by her. Her marriage to this man. Does Byron grew up in. He's upper class, he's descended from aristocrats on both sides. But does he grow up in straightened circumstances or.
- [09:31]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 skinty 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 club foot as they walk up Broad Street. So he might have had a slight
- [10:14]
Dan Snow
Scottish lilt, 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?
- [10:26]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 or 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.
- [11:03]
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.
- [11:09]
Dr. Kate Lister
You're a lord now as well.
- [11:10]
Dan Snow
You're a lord. I say he's a full lord.
- [11:12]
Dr. Kate Lister
Full lord.
- [11:13]
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.
- [11:27]
Dr. Kate Lister
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.
- [11:36]
Dan Snow
I have been. It's lovely. Yeah.
- [11:38]
Dr. Kate Lister
Got quite a Gothic Y feel to it though, doesn't it? It does, 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.
- [11:47]
Dan Snow
I'll take your word for that.
- [11:48]
Dr. Kate Lister
Would you not? No. Oh. Bit of an effort, but if you were going to, that might be the place that you would do that kind of thing. If. Big if.
- [11:58]
Dan Snow
Yes. If I was going to fictionally set these satanic orgies. Somewhere it would be there. You're right, exactly. Yeah.
- [12:03]
Dr. Kate Lister
Right, so. And when he inherits it, it's not in great shape. It's already looking like it's Gothic and kind. Byron really loves that when he goes to visit ten because it's already imprinted that Gothic crumbling, ruined 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.
- [12:28]
Dan Snow
But it's a source of income. Him and his mum can return to the south and live a life that
- [12:33]
Dr. Kate Lister
they rent it out is what they do. That's how they turn Newstead 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.
- [13:00]
Dan Snow
Well, we'll come on to some of those.
- [13:01]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yeah, we will.
- [13:02]
Dan Snow
So he moves from his school in Aberdeen to fancy schools down south. He goes to Harrow, doesn't he?
- [13:09]
Dr. Kate Lister
And Harrow. Of course he does. A young gentleman. He will go to Harrow where he is addressed as a Lord as well.
- [13:16]
Dan Snow
Right, exactly. Little Lord Byron. And I'm sure that he wasn't alone, Little Lord Byron.
- [13:20]
Dr. Kate Lister
But one thing that we should talk about him is that. Cause 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. 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 hardcore contraptions to constrict his legs. So he was in pain a lot and he's very self conscious about this.
- [14:11]
Dan Snow
Okay. And he may be using alcohol and opiates to take the edge off some of that pain perhaps.
- [14:17]
Dr. Kate Lister
Of course he is, but this also means 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.
- [14:43]
Dan Snow
Did he start writing at Harrow?
- [14:44]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 gonna be a great poet and a great scholar. That's just what young gentlemen did, is they wrote poems about things.
- [14:59]
Dan Snow
Okay, he goes up to Cambridge.
- [15:01]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yes. He wants to go to Oxford, but they won't take him.
- [15:05]
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?
- [15:16]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 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. 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. By the time he gets to Harrow and then later Cambridge, he is realizing 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. 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.
- [17:11]
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 influences who seem to despise women apart from when they want to have sex with them.
- [17:20]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yeah, that's Byron, that's him. 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.
- [17:41]
Dan Snow
He is very good looking. Is he?
- [17:43]
Dr. Kate Lister
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.
- [18:02]
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.
- [18:14]
Dr. Kate Lister
Damaged.
- [18:15]
Dan Snow
Damaged, yeah.
- [18:16]
Dr. Kate Lister
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.
- [18:56]
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 zone, 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 impressing people with his poetry at this point, his writing? So has he got it just all going on? He's got everything he does.
- [19:19]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 criticized 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.
- [20:02]
Dan Snow
We've all been there. We've all been there, right?
- [20:04]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 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 Childe 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 the world just goes nuts for this. It was called Byron Amania 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 would do that, but his does. It's like a rock star dropping an album that everybody can't stop talking about.
- [20:55]
Dan Snow
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- [22:30]
Contest Host
Okay, caller one wins courtside seats to tonight's game.
- [22:34]
Chris (Contest Winner)
What? I won floor seats.
- [22:36]
Contest Host
You did?
- [22:37]
Chris (Contest Winner)
I've been call.
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Contest Host
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Progressive Insurance Announcer
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Chris (Contest Winner)
I finally did it.
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Chris (Contest Winner)
Men's Wearhouse. They've got today's looks for any occasion and I need to look like a celebrity.
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Contest Host
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Chris (Contest Winner)
Exactly. They've got Chill Flex by Kenneth Cole, Joseph Abboud and a tailor at every store for the perfect fit.
- [22:53]
Contest Host
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Chris (Contest Winner)
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Contest Host
Hit any look for every occasion at Men's Wearhouse. Love the way you look.
- [22:59]
Dr. Kate Lister
As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more important, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs lethal Victorian makeup routines and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history. With me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts brought to you by the award winning network history hit.
- [23:54]
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 Kings 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 prurience? 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?
- [24:27]
Dr. Kate Lister
Well, when you read Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, you'll probably be a bit disappointed with it because you come to it thinking it's gonna be like some rock and roll memoir of debauchery and excess. And it's really like a meditation on the emotional experiences of traveling through Europe. You're like, where's the sex? But at the time it just lit the newspaper of this emotional backdrop that was happening in London at the time. Maybe it was that all the revolutions that had been happening, the enlightenments 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 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 homose relationships are not only not taboo, but quite open. That he writes in his letters at the time that's what he's 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 gonna go and pick as many hyacinths as he could and he was gonna cull these hyacinths.
- [26:05]
Dan Snow
Are they calling themselves the Romantics, these poems? Are there young men out there writing 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?
- [26:27]
Dr. Kate Lister
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. We're people of science and we're people of 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 that pushing back against this very. No, we want rational 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. It was merciless about absolutely everybody. He called Wordsworth Turdsworth. He said that Keats wrote piss a bed poetry. He said it was mental masturbation. He's just merciless. So I don't know if he considered him himself 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.
- [28:11]
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 Viscount Melbourne.
- [28:18]
Dr. Kate Lister
He had so many affairs, Dan, it's ridiculous.
- [28:21]
Dan Snow
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, an interesting career, she writes novels. Is it true she comes up with that unbelievably famous quote about Byron, mad,
- [28:38]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 behavior 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 behavior 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 know, I've got things in my fridge that are going to last for longer than that.
- [29:25]
Dan Snow
Oh, but Kate, we were young once. Don't you remember those? Oh, those five months were. That they were some of the best.
- [29:30]
Dr. Kate Lister
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, that 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.
- [30:16]
Dan Snow
No way.
- [30:17]
Dr. Kate Lister
So that's quite odd. 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. She 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' burning all of his poems and his books. She writes a novel, Glenarvan, about how horrible he is. 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.
- [31:14]
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 hero. In 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?
- [31:30]
Dr. Kate Lister
Do you know what? I knew I was gonna come and 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 listeners.
- [31:40]
Dan Snow
She is brandishing a great sheath of paper.
- [31:43]
Dr. Kate Lister
He's 28 years old in my list and we're at hundreds of people already. Wow, there's 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 Annabel 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 overtures to Lady Oxford's 12 year old daughter as well.
- [32:13]
Dan Snow
Oh my God.
- [32:14]
Dr. Kate Lister
So this is, is a mess. Somehow it 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.
- [32:41]
Dan Snow
Wait. Okay. My goodness me. That's a true thing. Is it?
- [32:44]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 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 August, gets pregnant and gives birth to a baby called Medora. 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, but, yeah, he is. So he needs to get married pretty quickly to get money and to calm down the rumors that are spreading about him.
- [33:37]
Dan Snow
Okay, wow. All right. And this poor girl says yes.
- [33:41]
Dr. Kate Lister
She shouldn't say yes immediately. She says 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 like, 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, he's doing things like sending his Wife to bed early and then staying up all night laughing and carousing with his sister, when eventually this wife is going to 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 realizing that your partner is most definitely having a relationship with his half sister. Wow. 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.
- [35:06]
Dan Snow
Interestingly, she is pregnant with a very important person, isn't she?
- [35:10]
Dr. Kate Lister
She is Ada Lovelace.
- [35:12]
Dan Snow
Take a sidetrack there. So Ada Lovelace is the product of that short marriage?
- [35:17]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yes. She is the famous mathematician and intellectual giant. So there's no doubt that there is genius running through this family.
- [35:26]
Dan Snow
Yeah. It just took a woman to come and manifest it in a kind of sensible way. And Ada Lovelace famously comes up the idea, the kind of concept of a computational device or a computer. So she's super smart. 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.
- [35:48]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 naughtiness and his illicit reputation as a womanizer. And this debauched poet was very exciting. But then when people start to realize that 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, Greece and Turkey, 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 sodomize 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.
- [37:01]
Dan Snow
Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Byron. More coming up.
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- [38:08]
Dan Snow
Okay, so this is now 1816, which actually is useful for him because Europe, after decades of war, even though he'd 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 PC, he can travel very widely, presumably. So where does he head off to?
- [38:26]
Dr. Kate Lister
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. 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, that 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 Claremont, who also becomes infatuated with him, enamored with him and pregnant. And she elopes with Shelley with the Shelleys. And then Byron goes to stay with them, 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. That's what I was. Well, fair enough then, mate. So off he goes again, and this daughter 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?
- [39:36]
Dan Snow
Oh, God. Okay. It's just grim.
- [39:39]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yes, grim.
- [39:40]
Dan Snow
All right. So then he continues traveling. He just keeps going, does he?
- [39:45]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yes, he does. He continues traveling. He has some time in Europe. The scandals following him. When he's staying with the Shelleys, there would be, like, crowds of people gathering to try and get a peek of what was going on inside. So that's not working for him. So he goes to Italy, and there he writes another bestseller, a poem called Don Juan. And it is Don Juan, by the way. It's not Don Juan 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. Another few hundred women have been harassing him. But he does, at this point, get into a relationship with a woman that I think he did love, Teresa Guccioni, who's 19 years old, and of course, she's married to somebody else. And as much as Byron's ever gonna do, he kind of settles down 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.
- [40:52]
Dan Snow
Well, he's gone to the right city.
- [40:53]
Dr. Kate Lister
He has.
- [40:53]
Dan Snow
Because Venice does have a reputation for that. Okay.
- [40:56]
Dr. Kate Lister
And he likes that very much. He likes. 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.
- [41:12]
Dan Snow
And does he write? Is he writing? Is he.
- [41:15]
Dr. Kate Lister
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, 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 reappropriating 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 and is Don Juan.
- [41:41]
Dan Snow
The reason we've heard of Don Juan is that because of Byron. Was he a trope before, like a famous sort of myth or story before that, or is it really because of.
- [41:49]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 Childe Harold character. I mean, Byron is the ultimate Don Juan, isn't he?
- [42:06]
Dan Snow
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?
- [42:16]
Dr. Kate Lister
He's been obsessed with Greek independence for a while. When he was a young man, early 20s, he spent a lot of time in Greece, pestering 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, because you get a sense of Byron as he's getting older, because he's in his mid-30s 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, it's 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 and you 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.
- [44:24]
Dan Snow
So he never sees any action.
- [44:26]
Dr. Kate Lister
No.
- [44:27]
Dan Snow
But he does experience that other great reality of war in that era, which is disease.
- [44:32]
Dr. Kate Lister
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, the. 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.
- [45:13]
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.
- [45:24]
Dr. Kate Lister
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 independ really raised the profile of the Greek cause and more people joined in and he is remembered as a hero. And, you know, 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 romanticize them, don't we? So he then becomes a hero in death and he was. Was quite widely mourned as well. It was a big shock when he died because he was only 36 and although he was considered 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 favor of the machine breakers in the north of England who had been breaking machines that were gonna put them out of work. And. 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.
- [46:44]
Dan Snow
He's such a curious legend in British literature and poetry. Cause his poetry isn't read anymore or it's not studied in school or anything. And yet he's just supremely famous still.
- [46:55]
Dr. Kate Lister
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.
- [47:32]
Dan Snow
I mean, that's like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger in a hundred years time, you're not gonna be like, oh, please stop talking about their biography. Let's just enjoy their music for itself. I mean.
- [47:39]
Dr. Kate Lister
Yes, exactly, exactly that. 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 no more a roving. And there's just like, he's lost his mate and he's lost his kindred spirit. And that's a really beautiful one. And then there's the famous she walked in 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 Juan and Childe Harold anymore.
- [48:41]
Dan Snow
Well, you've inspired me to go and do that. Thank you very much. Kate Lister, you 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 Cate Lister, you, they can do so on your podcast, which is called
- [48:56]
Dr. Kate Lister
Betwixt the sheets the history of sex, scandal and society.
- [48:59]
Dan Snow
Yeah, you gotta get that downloaded and it will drop into your feed every week. You'd be mad not to. Thanks for coming on, Kate.
- [49:06]
Dr. Kate Lister
Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [49:10]
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.
- [49:40]
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Dan Snow
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