The poet Lord Byron wasn’t the only member of his family to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, as Emily Brand found when she wrote The Fall of the House of Byron. She tells Historia about how she tried – but failed – to rehabilitate his notorious father.
On 10 July 1823 the notorious George, sixth Lord Byron, penned a furious letter. The spark for his discontent was a new biographical essay. Like the rest it was filled with tawdry tales and the already half-mythical events of his own life – but this time, the insult was extended to his ancestors.
The Byronic ‘bizarrerie’ was a hereditary disease, it claimed. His great-uncle William – the fifth Lord – was a violent recluse driven from society by scandal, and the “vices” and “brutality” of his own father, Jack, had killed his first wife and destroyed the inheritance of his second. It was a step too far. “He may say of me whatever of good or evil please him,” fumed the poet, “but I desire that he should speak of my relations only as they deserve.”
In writing The Fall of the House of Byron I hoped to investigate and strip away these myths of domestic violence, sexual depravity, and general villainy. As it turned out, rehabilitating the poet’s father – who was posthumously dubbed ‘Mad Jack’ Byron – was made impossible not only by the accounts of those who knew him, but by his own damning words.
The earliest record for Jack’s existence is his baptism in Plymouth on 17 March 1757 – a long-awaited son for shipwreck survivor Captain John Byron and his fretful, slightly snooty wife Sophia. With his father’s growing renown in the navy, the family of six surviving children grew up comfortably at the port town before relocating to London.
Educated at Westminster School, young Jack enlisted into the army and developed into a swaggering bachelor-about-town with a penchant for over-spending on swords. When barely out of his teens he was dispatched to Philadelphia during the American War of Independence. No evidence survives of any heroics in battle, but he ran up considerable debts ‘of honour’ at the famous City Tavern. His soft-hearted mother continually persuaded the family’s financial agent to bail him out.
At 21, he was propelled to notoriety by a shocking affair that caused ripples of scandal through the fashionable world.
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It was later suggested that he met Amelia, Lady Carmarthen – the wife of the future Duke of Leeds, and a mother of three – at Coxheath military camp during the summer festivities of 1778.
She was a couple of years his senior, and had a general reputation for being beautiful but rather spoilt. Certainly, by November they were continually falling into bed. She orchestrated trysts at her house on Grosvenor Square by feigning illness while her husband attended soirees, and practically moved Jack in when he took trips into the country.
The couple were careless from the start, and her servants began to resent the position in which they found themselves. One saw Jack padding about the library in the middle of the night, “as if he had been master of the house”. Chambermaids heard giggles from behind closed doors, cleaned stained sheets and finally spied him undressed and snoring in her Ladyship’s bed.
Amelia’s subsequent pregnancy left her faced with an unenviable choice, but on 13 December the conundrum was resolved for her, as Lord Carmarthen finally caught wind of their indiscretions. A prompt escape to Brighton only deepened evidence of their guilt – her husband’s footman discovered them tangled up together in the bedsheets.
The affair exploded onto the public scene. In the new year, as her broken-hearted husband filed for divorce, the guilty pair were immortalised in gossip columns as the ‘Boisterous Lover’ and ‘Capricious Marchioness’.
Carmarthen’s letters about “this fatal business” were forlorn and respectful, offering her jewels and sentimental tokens of their “happier days” even as the sordid details of her betrayal filled the gossip columns.
The public embarrassment only heightened as transcripts of the court case, including the humiliating witness testimony, were published in full. Both Amelia and Jack suffered – some declared her a “detestable creature” and others described him as a boastful but talentless individual.
The divorce was passed in May 1779, and – for better or worse – Jack and Amelia married in Mayfair on 9 June. It was clear that the bride was heavily pregnant (gossips remarked that the “father hath not been ascertained”). Unhappily, it quickly became clear that marriage did not live up to the allure of their illicit bedchamber romps and adrenaline-fuelled elopement.
Their firstborn daughter – Sophia – died in the autumn, and Jack’s spending habits swiftly ran through Amelia’s fortune. They intermittently travelled to and from France to evade creditors, and lost another child – an unnamed son – shortly after birth. Amelia repeatedly wrote to her former husband to ask for financial help. Society chatter about her weight loss and weakening constitution was garnished with the gossip that she and Jack were separating.
In January 1784, exactly a year after the birth of their only surviving child, Augusta, Amelia died aged just 29. While her friend the queen blamed a lingering consumptive illness, the newspapers went so far as to blame her death on the “remorse” she felt for her scandalous affair: she “died literally of a broken Heart”.
All things considered, Jack emerged from this drawn-out scandal relatively unscathed – only to descend further into a career of profligacy that scorched anyone who cared for him. Finding that he would not benefit financially from his wife’s death, he deposited Augusta with relatives and embarked on a new life of pleasure. He was relentlessly pursued by creditors, imprisoned for debt in 1786 and disinherited by his father, who had been forced to relinquish his fashionable townhouse and felt that he had paid out quite enough.
Having seduced a second young heiress, Catherine Gordon, into marriage, he demolished her fortune before abandoning her and their infant son – the future poet – and fled to France.
His letters from this time paint a vivid picture of a heavy drinker and wheedling liar – he was constantly sending demands for money, bragging of physical violence towards his servants, and repeatedly alluded to an incestuous affair with his elder sister Fanny.
In this revealing stash of correspondence Jack Byron seems to display some of the very darkest traits of the poet – melancholy, aggression, misogyny – without leaving any written trace of his son’s humour, intelligence or charm.
Whether the 6th Lord Byron read these letters himself is unknown – if he did it would have taken a magnificent force of effort to heave on the rose-tinted glasses he maintained regarding his father for the rest of his life.
Though conceding that he may have been “careless and dissipated”, the poet insisted that his father “was, according to the testimony of all who knew him, of an extremely amiable and joyous character”. The chorus of struggling parents, beaten servants, and broken-hearted wives would disagree.
Emily Brand is an author, genealogist and historian of the Georgian era. Her latest book, The Fall of the House of Byron, was published in paperback on 4 February, 2021.
www.emilybrand.co.uk
Twitter: @EJBrand
Images:
George, sixth Lord Byron: via Wikimedia
Vice-Admiral The Hon John Byron (Jack’s father), 1759, by Joshua Reynolds: via Wikimedia
Amelia Darcy, 9th Baroness Conyers (Lady Carmarthen) by François-Hubert Drouais: via Wikimedia
The Capricious Marchioness. The Boisterous Lover. Amelia, Lady Carmarthen, and Jack Byron, as featured in the high society scandal column of Town and Country Magazine, February, 1779: Lewis Walpole collection, Yale University Library
Record of Amelia and Jack’s marriage on 8 June 1779, with their signatures: provided by the author
Catherine Gordon by Thomas Stewardson: via Wikimedia
