afterwards appointed Governor of Newfoundland, and, finally, again fought against the French in the waters of the West Indies. His passion for the sea and love of adventure are plainly discernible in his grandson. Admiral Byron had two sons, John Byron (1755-1791), the father of the poet, and George Anson Byron (17581793), who entered the Navy and distinguished himself under Admiral Rodney, and three daughters. When William Byron, the only grandson of the fifth Lord, lost his life in a skirmish in the Mediterranean (1794), the father of the poet, and on his decease the poet himself, became heir presumptive of the peerage. The mad Lord Byron' (he who killed Chaworth in the duel), who survived both his son and his grandson, could, however, never bring himself to recognise his grand-nephew, the poet, as his heir; he used to speak of him as the 'little boy who lives at Aberdeen.' The father of the poet inherited pre-eminently the darker sides of the family character. He received his education at the celebrated School of Westminster, and afterwards at a French military academy, and then entered the Guards, with whom he served some years in America. He soon gave himself up to such a dissolute life, that he fell into general disrepute, and became known as 'mad Jack Byron,' and was disowned by his father. His bad reputation attained its climax, when in the year 1778 he ran off, in a way that occasioned great scandal, with the Marchioness Carmarthen, whom after her divorce he married. Lady Carmarthen (née Lady Amelia D'Arcy) was the only daughter and heiress of the last Earl of Holderness, and the poet was, in after years, a visitor in the very house which she had brought to his father.' The couple lived in Paris, where the Captain became 1 Moore's Life, ii. 244. at Bath -1 and it was & ita a related to intimate with the old Marshal Biron, commander of the French Guard, who regarded him as a distant kinsman. His conduct to his wife is said to have been so execrable that she died (1784), after a few years, of a broken heart. The fruit of this unhappy marriage was Augusta (born 1783), afterwards Mrs. Leigh. In a short time Captain Byron ran through her fortune, a recollection which, perhaps, induced the poet to make provision in his will for his half-sister, Mrs. Leigh, and her children. Captain Byron returned to England, and as he needed considerable means for his extravagant mode of living, he soon began the search for another wife, whom he found in a Scottish heiress, Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight in Aberdeenshire, an orphan, probably, both on father's and mother's side. Her family also was not without its dark shadow. Her father, a respected, sensible, and amiable man, but subject to fits of despondency, was found dead in the Avon at Bath, having scarcely completed his fortieth year, and it was conjectured that his death was not accidental. Another near relative made an attempt to poison himself. The ancestors of Miss Gordon had served the cause of the Stuarts, especially of the Pretender, with not less zealous devotion than the Byrons. They were, besides, related to the Stuarts, George, Earl Huntly, having married Annabella, a daughter of James I. From Sir William Gordon, the third son of this marriage, Byron's mother was descended, so that on his mother's side also he had ample food for his pride of ancestry. As a boy he insisted on being called George Byron Gordon, and his mother he always called the honourable,' to which she was not, strictly speaking, entitled. At a later period, however, he spoke only of his paternal, never of his maternal ancestry. His mother exceeded him, if that were possible, in pride of birth. She was, says Byron,' as proud as Lucifer of her descent from the Stuarts, and looked down with contempt on the ducal line of the Gordons as on the younger branch. Still lower she placed, as a matter of course, the Byrons, although these, as her son so carefully points out, traced their descent uninterruptedly in the male line. There is no account of the manner in which Miss Gordon became acquainted with Captain Byron. A creature of mere impulse, she was probably won by the manly beauty of his person and especially by his fine eyes. To beauty she herself had no pretensions; she was short and corpulent, and was thoroughly Scottish in her whole nature. A strange anecdote is told of the excitability of her feelings even before her marriage. When, one evening in the year 1784, at the theatre in Edinburgh, she saw Mrs. Siddons perform the part of Isabella in Southern's Fatal Marriage,' she was so overcome that she fell into convulsions, and had to be carried out, uttering with a loud cry—an exclamation belonging to the character represented by Mrs. Siddons-'O my Biron, my Biron.'' On May 17, 1786, a contract of marriage in the Scottish form was concluded between them; and an unknown Scottish rhymester took occasion to compose a warning poem addressed to the bride, whose gloomy predictionYe've married, ye've married wi' Johnny Byron, To squander the lands o' Gight awa' That Captain was only too soon to receive its fulfilment. Byron had married her merely in order to extricate himself 2 Ibid. 1 Moore's Life, ii. 37. Ibid. i. 7, 8. [Sir Walter Scott, then in his fourteenth year, was in the theatre on this occasion, and has described the scene in his most interesting letter to Moore giving his recollections of Byron. Moore's Life, iii. 160 (note).] See • That the marriage, as Moore (Ibid.) believes, was celebrated at Bath, is extremely improbable. At any rate this could only have been a supplementary marriage, according to the English form, after the young couple had left Scotland. from the debts he had contracted, cannot be disputed; indeed, he did not hesitate to avow this as his purpose. Within the space of a year he had not only spent the ready money he received with his wife in the liquidation of his debts, but had also cut down the timber and borrowed 8,000l. by a mortgage on the estate; and in the following year the estate itself had to be sold to Lord Haddo (son of the Earl of Aberdeen), for the sum of 17,850.1 Of her whole fortune, which may have amounted to twenty-three or twenty-four thousand pounds, there remained to the poor lady the small sum of 3,000l., from the interest of which she was soon obliged to support herself and her child. In the course of the summer of 1786, Captain and Mrs. Byron left Gight, never to see it again, and went to France, for which country Captain Byron seems to have cherished a peculiar predilection; there they lived a considerable time at Chantilly. At the end of the following year they returned to England accompanied by Augusta, then about six years old, and very soon after their arrival in London, where they occupied furnished lodgings in 24 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, Mrs. Byron was delivered, January 22, 1788, of a boy, her first and only child.' This was the future poet. The false modesty of Mrs. Byron 1 Previous to the sale of the property, all the doves-so runs the legend-and a flock of herons which for many years had built their nests near a large loch there, left the house of Gight and came to Lord Haddo's. When this was told to Lord Haddo, 'Let the birds come said he and do them no harm, for the land will soon follow.' This was the fulfilment of a Scottish legendary prophecy 'When the heron leaves the tree, The Lairds o' Gight shall landless be.' Gight, the situation of which is extremely beautiful, has since remained in the possession of the Aberdeen family; at first Lord Haddo occupied it for some time, but the house afterwards fell into complete decay. 2 1 is said to have been the cause of one foot of the infant receiving an injury or twist at the birth, which laid the foundation of the deformity that threw so dark a shadow over the poet's whole life; for while Scott's lameness left his heart untouched, Byron's was ever embittered from this source, especially as he appears early to have been made acquainted with the cause to which he owed it. This unhappy circumstance was so significant for him and for his poetry, that we shall have to return to it more fully in the sequel. According to a condition imposed by will, he who married the heiress of Gight must assume the name of Gordon; as this does not appear to have been done by Captain Byron (nothing definite is ever said about the matter), in order to be just to the spirit of this provision, the name of Gordon was given to the child. The Duke of Gordon, as head of the family, Colonel Duff of Fetteresso (near Stonehaven, to the south of Aberdeen), and George Anson Byron, uncle of the infant, acted as godfathers-the two former probably by representatives, if the baptism did not take place in Scotland. The circumstances of the family were already so shattered, that Mrs. Byron soon afterwards went alone with her child to Scotland, where she was at first received at the house of a relation, until, in the beginning of the year 1790, she settled in a humble dwelling at Aberdeen. As the little Augusta was about the same time sent to her mother's relations, and henceforward appears to have been educated by her grandmother the Countess of Holderness with her step-sister, who was afterwards the Countess of Chichester, Captain Byron was again left to himself, and 1 See Lord Byron's conversation with the Marquis of Sligo, Moore's Life, i. 347. Whether the alleged cause of the deformity be the right one, so far amounts to very little, as it is transparent from Byron's own expressions he believed it was. |