history — Lord Byron — notorious rake, celebrity poet, money in his pockets, 21 years old and far from home. Hold on to your hats, and lock up your daughters! Mad, bad, dangerous to know, and heading like a hurricane for Main Street! Few of us have personally witnessed the detonation of a damp squib, but the phrase remains useful, if occasionally inadequate. In this case the squib was not damp; it was positively sodden. Perhaps. The problem, of course, is that we don’t really know. Certainly Byron’s comments on his visit, as revealed in his letters, were brief, dull and, as noted above, uncomplimentary. But if John Murray had been shrewd, and resisted Hobhouse’s insistence that he destroy the man’s memoirs, we might have had an entirely different and racier version. Hopefully, the day may yet dawn when the archive’s immolation by the publisher is revealed as a cunning trick in which several large envelopes stuffed with newspaper were sacrificed as a sop to Hobhouse’s well-intentioned Prodnosery, while the real memoirs were stashed behind the loose panel over the Georgian fireplace in the morning room, where they remain awaiting rediscovery. On his arrival, Byron instantly reached for his pen and wrote to Francis Hodgson. Things Byron’s close friend and travelling companion to were still going well, and the expected disGibraltar, John Cam Hobhouse comforts of “those who go a pleasuring” were failing to dampen his spirits. I have just arrived at this place after a journey through Portugal, and part of Spain, of nearly 500 miles. We left Lisbon and traveled on horseback to Seville and Cadiz and thence on the Hyperion frigate to Gibraltar. The horses are excellent — we rode 70 miles a day — Cadiz, sweet Cadiz! — it is the first spot in the creation. The beauty of its streets and mansions is only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants. Given Lord Byron’s reputation, we must assume that when referring to the “loveliness” of the habitants of Cadiz, he was alluding to that of its female representatives. We should not forget that Francis Hodgson, the recipient of this and other letters, was a man of the cloth, and a certain uncharacteristic coyness may be expected. Where Hobhouse and Byron dined on the night of their arrival in Gibraltar, which bar or bars they honoured with their patronage, which, if any of the local girls one or both propositioned before or after becoming drunk we cannot say, but certainly something seems to have happened somewhere in Gibraltar’s maze of streets to sour Byron’s previously sunny mood, for the very next day he was like the place, but let us remember that just writing again; this time to his lawyer, John three weeks before he had been dismissing Hanson: diarrhoea, mosquito bites and all manner of discomfort as part of the fun. If that was still Gibraltar, August 7th 1809 his view, it follows that the rougher things ….Gibraltar the dirtiest and most detest- were in Gibraltar, the more he should have able spot in existence, Lisbon nearly as bad. revelled in it. …the English abroad very different from their But no. In another letter to his mother, writcountrymen. ten in Gibraltar on 11th August, he waxes lyrically at length about Cadiz, but devotes How to explain the sudden change of mood? only three words to the Rock. He calls it “this A massive hangover? Possibly. Rejection by cursed place”. the local ladies? Unlikely. Drawing the bad The engraver Edward Francis Finden, in prawn? Perhaps. his Illustrations of The Life and Works of Lord It may be that the man genuinely didn’t Byron referred to this period of the poet’s life
If lines such as “I loves oranges and talk bad Latin to the monks”, or “I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese” have been reported accurately and were not penned in the style of an illiterate buffoon for comic effect, we must wonder if Byron did indeed write the works attributed to him, or were bought for ten shillings from a servant
GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2009
in a memorably masterful example of British understatement. “Though he resided a fortnight at Gibraltar,” Finden wrote, “except the beautiful description of his moonlight passage through the Strait, it does not appear that he found inspiration there for his muse”. He had a ready explanation for this. After speaking of sieges and battles and other glorious episodes in Gibraltar ’s history he decided that the non-visitation of Byron’s muse was due not to indifference, still less to distaste, but to something approaching awe. “Fortunately for Lord Byron’s reputation, the omission is not singular. His poetical powers were often dormant amidst scenes associated with events that needed not his aid to immortality — scenes a thousand times more inspiring, in the estimation of common minds, than those over which his muse has shed a luster that has brightened into notice places that would, if unmentioned by him, have remained unknown”. In other words, when Byron called Gibraltar “this cursed place” and “the dirtiest and most detestable spot in existence”, what he was really trying to convey was his inability to adequately express the depth of patriotic emotion that the weight of its heroic history wrought upon his soul. I paraphrase. Their two weeks up, Byron and Hobhouse boarded the packet Townshend and headed for Malta. There, things grew far livelier and more, well, Byronesque. To use a convenient euphemism, he “fell in love with” a married woman, as he was wont to do, and very nearly fought a duel over her. Exactly the kind of thing that, had he given a thought to posterity and the struggles of future writers striving to make his stay on the Rock at least passably interesting, he would have been doing in Gibraltar. Instead, he delivered another unspoken and unwritten slur to the place by implying by omission that no married ladies on the Rock were comely enough to “fall in love with”, seduce, or fight duels over. If that doesn’t deserve a swift slap across the face with a patent leather glove, what does? After Malta, the two travellers moved on to Turkey and Greece, which Byron fell in love with as though it was a comely married woman. He returned to England in July 1811, and was soon as notorious for his sexual affairs as he was famous for his poems. In January 1815, striving hopelessly for some veneer of respectability, he married Annabella Millbanke, and although she gave him a daughter (Augusta Ada, born December 10th), the marriage was a disaster. Byron was still wild and reckless, usually drunk, up to his eyebrows in debt, and constantly evading his creditors by hiding in his publisher’s home with the curtains drawn. Only a month after the birth of their daughter, Annabella left him, taking the baby with her. Rumours had swept society of the poet’s alleged affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron fled abroad, and never set foot in England again. Sadly for us, he never set foot in Gibraltar again either. He spent his final years in Greece, where he became ill in February 1824; an illness exacerbated when he got caught in the rain and contracted a chill. He fell into a coma and died in the early evening of 19th April. He was 36 years old. n
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