A Romantic poet who fled England and died for Greece
George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron Byron, lived only from 1788 to 1824, yet Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made him a Romantic giant. Lynching threats drove him from England into years in Italy; he later joined the Greek War of Independence and died of fever at Missolonghi at thirty-six.
Born 22 January 1788 on London's Holles Street—today said to sit under a John Lewis store—he was Captain John "Jack" Byron's sole child with Catherine Gordon of Gight. His Midlands line reaches Ralph de Buran, who arrived with William the Conqueror; holdings appear in the Domesday Book of 1086. Jack had already scandalously married Amelia Osborne, Marchioness of Carmarthen; after her death in 1784 he wed Catherine on 13 May 1785, largely for her fortune. Within two years an estate worth some £23,500 shrank to a £150 annual trust. Catherine fled creditors to France in 1786, returning late in 1787 to give birth. Jack died of illness, probably tuberculosis, in Valenciennes in 1791.
When the "wicked" Lord Byron died on 21 May 1798, ten-year-old George became sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and heir to ruined Newstead Abbey. He studied at Aberdeen Grammar School from January 1795, then Harrow from 1801 to July 1805—oddly representing the school in the first Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord's—before Trinity College, Cambridge. There he befriended John Edleston, later mourned in the Thyrza elegies, and lifelong Whig allies such as John Cam Hobhouse.
His first printed book, Fugitive Pieces (1806), was recalled and burned for amorous verses; only four known copies survive. Hours of Idleness drew savage anonymous criticism from Henry Peter Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, sparking English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). After graduation he wandered Europe, living seven years in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa, often visiting Percy Bysshe Shelley. Greeks still revere him as a folk hero of their war against the Ottomans.
The Byron myth mixes inheritance, exile, and martial romance—but the dates and debts are as solid as the verse.
Source: Lord Byron
