Lord George Gordon Byron was as controversial a figure in death as he was in life. Death came to Byron at Missolonghi, Greece on 19 April, 1824, after spending several years in self-imposed exile from Britain. Upon his death Britain seemed to be divided into two camps; those who were affiliated to the church and held other positions in the British establishment and who distanced themselves from Byron due to his nefarious activities when alive, and those members of the general public and from the arts community who mourned and grieved for one of Britain's greatest literary talents.
George Gordon Byron was born in London on the 22nd of January 1788. Educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and then Harrow, Byron was later admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1805. Fugitive Pieces was first published in 1806, followed by Poems on Various Occasions and Hours of Idleness¸ in 1807. Between 1809 and 1811 Byron travelled through the Mediterranean and upon his return to England he took his seat in the House of Lords. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812 and it was about this time that Byron fell into a scandal involving an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. In 1815, Byron married Lady Caroline's cousin Anne Isabella Milbanke (Annabella) but the two separated in 1816 amidst rumours of adultery, sodomy, and incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Following their separation Byron left England forever and eventually died in Missolonghi, Greece in 1824.
Opinion on Lord Byron in his last few months before exiling himself from England due to the scandals involving the breakdown of his marriage, and rumours of sodomy and incest can be summed up in two articles printed in the Times newspaper following the publication of two very emotive poems in the Champion newspaper on 14 April 1816. The first poem, "Fare Thee Well", was written to Annabella shortly after their separation and showed the resentment he held for her.
“When our child's first accents flow---
Wilt thou teach her to say "Father!"
Though his care she must forego?
When her little hands shall press thee---
When her lip to thine is pressed---
Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee---
of him thy love had blessed!'”(Byron 540)
The second, "A Sketch from a Private Life", was an attack on Mary Anne Clermont whom Byron thought had guided Annabella towards the separation.
“If like a snake she steal within your walls,
Till the black slime betray her as she crawls;
If like a viper to the heart she wind,
And leave the venom there she did not find;
What marvel that this hag of hatred works
Eternal evil latent as she lurks,
To make a Pandemonium where she dwells,
And reign the Hecate of domestic hells?” (Byron 543)
The first article to appear in the Times, printed April 16, suggests that Lord Byron was already contemplating leaving England and seems to try to defend Byron by suggesting that the two poems published in the Champion were not written by him. “Two extraordinary copies of verses which have appeared in a Sunday paper, which are broadly stated to be his lordship's composition [...] We must however believe them to be an injurious fabrication calculated to render his lordship an object of no common contempt.” (Lord ByronApr 16: 3) This showed that although the public may have regarded the poet with some contempt over the rumours that surrounded him there was still room to believe that Lord Byron was not as bad a figure as to publish the two poems that he did.
However, all this was to change, and two days later the Times were forced to swallow their words and printed a following story confirming that the two poems were indeed written by Lord Byron. Public sympathy that was already teetering against Byron collapsed once the truth came out and the Times summed it up thusly; “he has degraded literature and abused the privilege of rank,” this coming after the reporter hoped that “the shafts of his satire recoil upon his own head.” (Lord ByronApr 18: 3)
After leaving England in 1816 and with several years wandering Europe behind him, Lord Byron arrived at the Greek islands of Cephalonia on the 3rd of August, 1823, swayed by stories of the Greeks' fight for independence from the Turks. Byron states in his diary that Captain Blaquiere of the London Greek Committee was “requesting me not to proceed to Greece yet - for sundry reasons, some of importance,” (Marchand 29-30) but these letters were forwarded to Byron from Genoa where he had set sail from after his arrival at Cephalonia. From Cephalonia Byron would eventually arrive at Missolonghi on the 5th of January 1824, and would die there from fever and the doctors' insistence in bleeding him, on the 19th of April 1824.
