On a candlelit night in the autumn of 1808, a young lord in a half-ruined English abbey raised a cup to his lips and drank deep red wine from the polished skull of a long-dead monk. His friends laughed around him in borrowed monkish robes. He was not yet twenty-one, a baron whose family had held the house for nearly three hundred years, and within nine years he would lose nearly all of it: the house, the country, his good name, everything but the fame itself. The boy who woke up a lord had not been born to expect it.
In the spring of 1798, a lame ten-year-old in a cold Aberdeen lodging learned that a great abbey in England was now his. He had been born in London in January 1788 into a family long on name and short on money. His father, Captain John Byron, was a handsome, charming, ruinous man known as Mad Jack, who ran through one fortune, married a Scottish heiress, and ran through hers as well. He died abroad when the boy was only three, leaving his widow and son to rent rooms and count candles in Scotland.
His mother loved him and raged at him by turns. And there was the foot: Byron had been born with a deformity that left him lame for life, and the shame of it cut deeper than bone. Far to the south stood the house that would decide the whole shape of his life. Newstead Abbey belonged to his great uncle, William Byron, the fifth baron, who had outlived his own son and grandson.
When the old man died in May 1798, the inheritance ran sideways and down the family tree, coming to rest on a boy who had never set eyes on the place. Overnight, he became George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron. The story has it that he turned to his mother and asked whether she could see any difference in him now that he was a lord. The title was old and proud.
The estate, several thousand acres of Nottinghamshire country, was mortgaged, neglected, and half-wrecked. The grand inheritance, looked at closely, was a tangle of debt and decay. Behind it stood the man who had made it so: the wicked lord himself. In January 1765, the fifth Lord Byron was dining at a London tavern with a party of Nottinghamshire gentlemen, among them his kinsman William Chaworth.
After a dispute over which of them preserved and hunted game the best, the two men stepped into a dim upstairs room. In the poor light, Byron ran his kinsman through with a sword, and Chaworth died the following day. Tried by his fellow peers, the old lord was found guilty not of murder but of manslaughter, paid his fees, and walked free. He went home to Newstead a shunned man, and there, in bitter loneliness, he turned his anger upon the estate itself.
He felled the ancient oaks, slaughtered the deer, sold off the treasures in what later writers called the great sale, and let the roof fall in. He built toy fortifications along the lake and fought pretend naval battles with small cannon-armed boats. He ended his life a recluse in a corner of the wreck he had made. The abbey arrived to the boy as a carcass.
When Byron finally came of age and took up residence in the summer of 1808, he furnished one warm corner of the cold ruin and left the rest to damp and shadow. He gathered a menagerie: a wolf, a bear, dogs, a badger, tortoises, birds. As a student at Cambridge, told he could not keep a dog in his rooms, he had bought a bear instead and asked with a straight face whether it might sit for a fellowship, since the rules said nothing against bears. But the animal that mattered most was Boatswain, a Newfoundland, who died of rabies in November 1808.
Byron nursed him with his own hands, careless of the danger, and buried him in a great stone tomb on the very spot where the priory church’s high altar had once stood, carving a poem upon it and directing that he himself should one day be buried there beside the dog. And then there was the skull. Newstead had begun in the twelfth century as a priory of Augustinian canons. After the monasteries were swept away under Henry VIII, the crown granted it to an ancestor, Sir John Byron, for around eight hundred pounds.
One day a gardener turned up a large human skull, and Byron had it cut, polished, and bound with silver. On winter nights, he and his Cambridge friends put on monks’ robes and passed the skull from hand to hand, drinking the health of the living from the head of the dead. He even wrote a poem arguing it was a better fate for a skull to hold wine than to lie in the earth and feed the worms. In March 1812, a poem appeared, and by nightfall the lame young lord was the most sought-after man in London.
Out of his travels through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, and the Ottoman East came Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. His publisher, John Murray, had a surer instinct than the anxious poet, and the first part sold out, was reprinted, and sold out again. Everyone decided the melancholy, dangerous young wanderer in the verses was the poet himself, and Byron did nothing to correct them. He was twenty-four, strikingly handsome, and his very lameness, which had so tormented the boy, now read as a touch of doomed romance.
The great houses opened their doors; the famous hostesses competed for him. He was mobbed in the street, imitated in dress, and became the first true literary superstar of the modern kind. Murray grew rich on him, and the drawing-room in Albemarle Street became the most fashionable literary address in the kingdom. Behind the glitter stood a wall of debt.
The trouble began long before he was old enough to prevent it, with money borrowed at Cambridge at devouring rates. The dead weight of Newstead itself, mortgaged and drained by the wicked lord, lay beneath everything. By his own reckoning early in 1815, Byron owed hardly less than thirty thousand pounds, a colossal sum, the slow, respectable debt of a lord trying to look like a lord. One creditor alone held a charge of six thousand pounds against Newstead.
The annuity debts ran to twelve thousand eight hundred and beyond. There was another property, the manor of Rochdale in Lancashire, with coal beneath it that might have been worth a fortune, but the title was so tangled that it cost him money rather than making any. Newstead was the only asset large enough to clear the mountain, and everyone told him he would have to sell it. For years, he stalled.
Twice, he tried to sell, and twice, the sale turned to dust. In August 1812, at the height of his fame, Newstead and the whole estate went up for auction at Garraway’s coffee house in London. Byron hoped for near a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. The bidding reached a hundred and thirteen thousand and stuck there, short of his reserve, and the estate was bought in.
It did not sell. Then a Lancashire lawyer named Thomas Claughton privately agreed to buy the estate for a dazzling hundred and forty thousand pounds. The terms were staged, with large deposits to be paid down first. Claughton could not raise the money, haggled, delayed, complained of faults in the title, and after nearly two years walked away, forfeiting a deposit of some twenty-five thousand pounds.
Byron kept the money, still had the house, still had the debts, and had lost two years. And while he wrestled with lawyers, another kind of ruin gathered. A married woman wrote in her journal that he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and then proved it. Lady Caroline Lamb met him in the first flush of his fame and fell with a violence that frightened even her own set.
The affair was brief and loud, and when he grew cold, she made public scenes. Later she took revenge in a novel called Glenarvon, in which everyone could read the real names beneath the false ones. It was a rehearsal for a far greater catastrophe. In the same years, Byron formed an extraordinarily close bond with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, raised apart from him in childhood.
It was whispered, and has been argued over ever since, that the bond crossed a line, and that her daughter, Medora Leigh, born in April 1814, was Byron’s own child. It was never established as fact, but the suspicion fastened itself onto his name. Desperate for solid ground, Byron decided to marry. He chose Annabella Milbanke: serious, devout, gifted in mathematics, an heiress, genuinely good.
They married in January 1815. It went wrong almost from the start. He was moody and cruel in his black moods; she was earnest and literal, trying to understand him as a problem to be worked out, wondering whether he was wicked or mad. Within the first year, the bailiffs were in the house again, putting a price on the furniture.
In December 1815 a daughter was born, named Augusta Ada. Within weeks, Annabella gathered up the infant and left. She wrote warmly on the road, then informed her husband she would not be coming back. Her family and their lawyers assembled the case for a formal legal separation, holding material that could do far more than end a marriage: evidence of cruelty, the long shadow of Augusta, and whispers of darker things.
In the space of a single spring, the society that had worshipped him turned its back. It was said he had been monstrously cruel, that he had committed incest with his half-sister, that he had done things with other men for which the law punished with death. Not one word was ever brought before a court. He was never charged with any crime.
In the court of society, accusation was the whole of the sentence. He was cut dead in the street; women moved away from him at parties; he was hissed at the theater; the newspapers tore him down. The same London that had worshipped him in 1812 destroyed him in 1816. He was broke and shamed at once, with nowhere left in England to stand.
On the 25th of April 1816, worn down and emptied of hope, Byron signed a formal deed of separation from Annabella. Then he traveled to the coast and took ship for the continent. He was twenty-eight. He never set foot on English soil again.
He left behind his infant daughter, whom he would never see again, his loyal half-sister to bear the scandal alone, his creditors still owed some thirty thousand pounds, and the house, still unsold, waiting for a master who would never return. The long years carried him across Europe. In the summer of 1816 he settled by Lake Geneva with Shelley and Mary Shelley, during the famous wet summer when she first conceived Frankenstein. From Geneva he drifted into Italy, writing some of his finest work, forming a lasting attachment to a young Italian countess named Teresa Guiccioli, and dabbling in secret revolutionary politics.
Back in England, the house slipped at last out of his hands. The buyer was a man he knew from boyhood: Thomas Wildman, once a schoolfellow, whose fortune came from sugar plantations in Jamaica worked by enslaved men and women. On the 10th of December 1817, Wildman bought Newstead Abbey and the whole estate for exactly ninety-four thousand, five hundred and fifty-four pounds, three shillings and one penny, notably less than the hundred and forty thousand Claughton had promised and never paid, and less than the hundred and twenty thousand Byron had dreamed of. The signing came only in 1818, when his lawyer reached him in Venice with the papers.
Byron sat in a rented room in a foreign city and put his name to the end of three hundred years. Much of the price was locked in the marriage settlement, held for Annabella and Ada; much of the rest went to the creditors. After the sale, some twenty-eight thousand pounds of debt still remained. He had traded away his birthright for a little room to breathe.
Away to the east, the Greeks had risen in revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Byron, who had loved Greece as a young man, resolved to give himself wholly to the cause. He spent tens of thousands of pounds fitting out ships, arming soldiers, and trying to bind a fractured revolution together. He sailed for Greece in 1823 and made his way at the end of the year to Missolonghi, a fever-ridden little town on the marshy western coast.
The reality was grim: mud, quarreling factions, endless demands on his purse. He stayed. He never fired a shot in anger. In early 1824 he fell ill with a violent fever, and his doctors bled him again and again, draining his failing strength.
On the 19th of April 1824, in that miserable marsh town, Lord Byron died. He was thirty-six. The Greeks mourned him as their own, and have honored him as a national hero ever since, giving his name to their streets and their children. A month after he died, his closest friends gathered in a London drawing room and fed his memoirs to the fire.
Byron had written a full and famously frank account of his life and entrusted it to his friend Thomas Moore. It was known to be extraordinary and dangerous. On the 17th of May 1824, Moore, Hobhouse, Murray, and others tore the manuscript into pieces and burned it page by page in the fireplace. Byron’s own voice, telling his own story, was erased by the people who loved him best.
Then there was the matter of his body. His remains were brought home to England, and his friends asked that he be buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. The Abbey refused; his name was far too stained. Instead, on the 16th of July 1824, he was buried in the family vault in the quiet church of St.
Mary Magdalene at Hucknall, only a few short miles from Newstead, a stone’s throw from the house that was his no longer. Newstead Abbey still stands today. Thomas Wildman poured a fortune of his own, said to be around a hundred thousand pounds, into restoring it. In 1931 the estate passed to the city of Nottingham.
Today the Abbey belongs to the public, a historic house and a great green park open to anyone who cares to walk in it. Visitors tour rooms preserved as a shrine to Byron’s memory, filled with his belongings, his manuscripts, his portraits. Out in the grounds, Boatswain’s great stone tomb still stands, the one grave in all that ground where Byron once asked to be laid and never was. The skull cup vanished after the sale and has never been found; the house now shows only a replica in a glass case.
His blood, at least, did not vanish: the infant daughter he left behind grew into Ada, Lady Lovelace, honored world over as a prophet of the coming age of the computer. And in 1969, a hundred and forty-five years after Westminster Abbey had turned his coffin away, a memorial stone to Byron was laid down in Poet’s Corner at last. England forgave him in the end. It simply took the nation a century and a half to do it.
The house that he once drank to has outlived him by two centuries now, and it belongs today to strangers, keeping everyone in all the world but a Byron.