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  JOY UNCONFINED

  Lord Byron’s Grand Tour, Re-Toured

  By

  Ian Strathcarron

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2010 by

  Signal Books Limited

  36 Minster Road

  Oxford

  OX4 1LY

  www.signalbooks.co.uk

  Digital Edition converted and published by

  Andrews UK Limited 2012

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2012 Ian Strathcarron

  The author has asserted his moral rights

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition, that no part of this book is to be reproduced, in any shape or form. Or by way of trade, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser, without prior permission of the copyright holder.

  Prologue

  LORD BYRON, PRE-TOUR

  George Gordon Byron, by now the sixth Baron Byron, our Lord Byron, was twenty-one and a half years old when he and his inevitable entourage left London on his Grand Tour on 19 June 1809. Byron being Byron, he did not travel lightly or without style: in tow were his best friend, his valet, the old family retainer, his pageboy, his Farsi translator and eight portmanteaux containing his library, his clothing and costumes, his bedding, his saddles and his shoes, as well as a campaign desk, two army beds and four camp beds. And Byron being Byron, he left for contradictory reasons: pulled by the promise of exotic rites of passage and a literary led yearning for the East, and pushed by the hope that his freewheeling debts would accrue more slowly in less expensive places in which to keep his camp following.

  He had been born those twenty-one years earlier in reduced circumstances in lodgings off Cavendish Square, London W1, circumstances reduced by his father’s determined wastage of his wives’ fortunes.’Mad Jack’ Byron had been a dashing Guards Officer and then the infamous bounder who scandalised London by eloping with Lady Carmarthen to Paris before she could become the Duchess of Leeds. When her fortune, and her life, had been spent he went to Bath determined find a new heiress and duly found one in a salon de thé, a Georgian version of Blue Rinse Cruise Lines. There he wooed and married the Scottish heiress who was to become George’s mother. He spent so profusely and borrowed so recklessly that by the time George was born he could only visit London to see his wife and son on Sundays, Sundays by English law being the only day that debtors were free from writs and harassment by the bailiffs.

  George Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon, the 13th Laird of Gight in her own right, rescued what little her husband had not squandered and repaired with her young son to even lesser circumstances in Aberdeen where George spent his early childhood and school days learning the Bible and Latin by rote. In these constrained early days George’s only birthright was a club foot, an infliction which brought him bullying at school, physical pain as various physicians tried to force it back into shape in later youth, and tenderness and sympathy from the many men and women attracted to him in later life.

  When George was six, on a battlefield at Calvi in Corsica, where Nelson lost an eye, a careless cannonball killed his uncle’s grandson, by which circuitous route George became the heir apparent to the Byron title and lands. His uncle, known as ‘the Wicked Lord’, but in reality better described as ‘the Most Batty Eccentric Lord That Ever Lived’ was by now 72, and helpfully died four years later. Thus in 1798, at the age of ten, George became Byron and for the first time his life took on some interest, where it would take root and flourish handsomely as legend until his death for the cause of Greek independence twenty-six years later.

  Unscrambling the wayward uncle’s affairs was not the matter of a moment, as he too had borrowed and loaned and mortgaged and re-mortgaged without recording exactly what went and came to whom and when, but doing so brought the young peer’s family into renewed contact with John Hanson, a lawyer thirty years Byron’s senior. For the next ten years Hanson was to become the poet’s guide and mentor, his legal guardian and father figure, and he brought Byron into the Hanson family who throughout his remaining youth and adolescence took the awkward young provincial peer under their more sophisticated Kensington wings.

  But Hanson could do nothing about the real state of Byron’s inheritance: there was Newstead Abbey and Park and over 3,000 adjoining acres, but the park had been denuded of its trees for easy cash, parts of the abbey were roofless and the rest heading towards ruin, and the Rubens, the Titian, the Holbeins and the Canaletto had all long been sold to pay off various debts. There were some potentially highly valuable coal mines in Rochdale, as well as a farm in Wymondham in Norfolk, but on closer examination these were part of an unholy mortgaged mess - a mess still not solved at the time of Byron’s death. What must have seemed like a handsome inheritance turned out to be an illusion, but the illusion was all that Byron needed to fuel his largesse. When it came to spending money he was indeed his father’s son and his uncle’s nephew.

  Hanson did manage to arrange a place for Byron at a crammer in Dulwich and then at thirteen one at Harrow, for his mother to be supported by the Civil List, and for the Earl of Carlisle to be his guardian in the House of Lords. At his grammar school in Scotland he had learned to read and write, and to read and read and read, and here he developed his first interest in the Orient. He later wrote that ‘Knolles’s Turkish History, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady Montagu, Hawkins’s translation of Mignot’s History of the Turks, Arabian Nights, all travels, or histories, or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well as Rycaut, before I was ten.’

  By the time he arrived at Harrow he had already started writing poetry and it was there that he discovered Alexander Pope who was to be such an influence on his poetic values. He continued to read voraciously: Rousseau’s Confessions, the biographies of Cromwell, Charles II, Newton, Catherine II and dozens more; books on law, books on philosophy, and poetry, more and more poetry, poetry in French and Latin, poetry in Italian and Greek. He started writing his own poetry, private poetry about the adolescent love for the pretty boys he met in the term and the pretty girls he met in the holidays. But the private poetry remained private, and all his elders agreed his main talent lay in Oratory, a talent displayed with passion and commitment on Speech Days, and a talent that sat well with a future member of the House of Lords.

  After Harrow Hanson organised a place for him at Trinity College Cambridge and in the three years there the overweight, gawky and fringed schoolboy became the reassured man, if not yet the Byronic hero, we like to think we know so well today. Yet to his surprise Byron soon became bored and disillusioned with the decadence and sloth around him at Cambridge. He found amusement in his pet bear, Bruin, acquired because the authorities forbade students to keep dogs. Furthermore he did not even study anything in particular; a chap simply didn’t. An ancient rite made it unnecessary for the peerage to take exams or even attend lectures, and not too much pressure was applied to the commoners either if they chose to follow the peers’ example, the peer group pressure.

  What he did learn at Cambridge was to spend money famously, though this was a skill entirely self-taught. He would by now have been aware of his father’s profligacy, and although he had barely met his father in person, and certainly not in living memory (his father died, by suicide it was rumoured, in poverty in France when his son was not yet three) they were reunited on the wilder shores o
f extravagance. Byron had arranged through Hanson an allowance of £500 a year to pay for all his expenses, plus a supplement for a servant, unnamed, and a horse, Oateater, but at the end of just the first term he had spent all that and run up debts of £1,000. He wanted, thought he needed, a carriage, so one he bought. Then the carriage needed horses, so these too he bought. Then the horses needed harnesses, so harnesses he bought. And all these needed stable lads, whom he hired. Byron was simply not interested in money - how it was accrued, from whom it came, to where it was going - in the same way other people are not interested in animal husbandry or Egyptian entomology. When a slice of money ran out one simply acquired some more, a bit like claret or a fresh horse. There seemed to him to be no end of people willing to give it away, although they did call it lending, and often against assets, but lending and assets were just concepts and details in which other people took some strange interest. The present needed funding, and being the present it needed funding now.

  Meanwhile he was still reading voraciously and by now writing poetry regularly, and while at Cambridge published three collections, Fugitive Pieces in 1806 and Poems on Various Occasions and Hours of Idleness (his view of day to day life at university) in 1807. He was also thinking of his future. Hanson admired the poems but believed Byron’s best talent lay in Oratory, and his best future lay in parliament. Byron himself was by now actively thinking about his travels. The traditional Grand Tour was impossible due to the Napoleonic Wars, but while ‘‘Tis true I cannot enter France; but Germany and the Courts of Berlin, Vienna & Petersburg are still open...’

  At Cambridge he also met those who would play a large part in his later life. John Cam Hobhouse, later the distinguished Whig peer Lord Broughton, who accompanied him on the first year of the Grand Tour and who was to be his closest friend; Charles Matthews and Scrope Davies, conveniently rich as well as talented wits and Whigs; William Bankes, ‘the father of all mischiefs’, who introduced Byron to the work of Walter Scott and who was later to lead such a memorable life of his own; and Francis Hodgson, the brilliant tutor in literature at King’s College.

  Of all these it is Hobhouse whose life is most intertwined with Byron’s. They shared literary aspirations, were both widely read, by nature inquisitive and complemented each other’s abilities and efforts on and off the page. Hobhouse needed Byron to give him a wing in the air, and Byron needed Hobhouse to keep a foot on the ground. They both needed Hobhouse’s energy. On the Grand Tour it was Hobhouse who recorded the journey fact by fact for his own travel book, A Journey through Albania, and other Provinces of Turkey

  in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the years 1809 and 1810, and it was Byron who turned the Grand Tour into poetry, Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage. It is often said their relationship was similar to Dr. Johnson and Boswell, or even Holmes and Watson, but it seems to the writer that it was closer to Errol Flynn and David Niven. Niven noted that the only thing you could rely on with Flynn is that he would always let you down, and loved him not for the being let down but for the friend living in another, his own, world. After Byron’s death Hobhouse said: ‘I know more of Byron than anyone else and much more than I should wish anybody else to know.’ And just as Flynn could rely on Niven’s complete discretion, so Byron knew that Hobhouse would never spread a word of his predilections, all of them surely scandalous, if not outright illegal. At Cambridge and later in London he was the greatest enthusiast for Byron’s Grand Tour, but had to drop out when he argued with his father and could not pay his part; typically Byron saw this as no obstacle at all, and simply increased his own borrowings so that Hobhouse could be there too.

  By early 1808, and now aged twenty, Byron had moved to London and was enjoying the city as young authors and peers sometimes do. He rimed and dined, debauched and gambled well into the night, every night. His health suffered, severely, and then recovered. His debts grew apace and he tried a less expensive summer spell in Brighton with a pregnant prostitute he had ‘redeemed’ for a hundred guineas and whom he dressed as a boy, a perfect metaphor for Byronic extravagance, flourish and sexuality. He went back to Cambridge to collect his degree, writing that ‘the old beldam gave me my M.A. because she could not avoid it - you know what farce a noble Cantab. must perform.’ He went back to Newstead Abbey with his Cambridge friends and committed himself to its restoration - which meant more expense. He was shocked by a hostile critique of his work in the Edinburgh Review, and revenge spurred on even more writing into the late nights.

  Yet amidst all this restless turmoil a vision of the near future was taking shape. The Grand Tour was being planned in some earnestness; he was already referring to it as the Pilgrimage. He knew that only a major break with his present wastrel life would solve the problems of debts and drift, and lately the problem of confidence in his creativity. In Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage he wrote that his later ego:

  Stalk’d in joyless reverie,

  And from his native land resolved to go,

  And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;

  With pleasure drugg’d, he almost long’d for woe,

  And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.

  Beyond the Grand Tour he saw his future as an orator in the House of Lords and as a poet in the world at large. He reasoned, correctly, that Hanson and his mother would be impressed if the Pilgrimage was seen as preparation for his seat in the Lords, and they were both so much of a view about his dissolute debauch that such a redeeming impression was now needed. Byron wrote to Hanson: ‘I wish to study India and Asiatic policy and manners... I have no interest in fashionable dissipation, and I am determined to take a wider field than is customary with travellers... a voyage to India will take me six months, and if I had a dozen attendants cannot cost me five hundred pounds; and you will agree with me that a like term of months in England would lead me into four times that expenditure.’ One can imagine Hanson exclaiming at this underestimation, for Byron had by now debts of twelve thousand pounds, and Hanson knew, even if Byron would not acknowledge it, that the inheritance would not cover these, let alone any fresh ones unless Newstead itself was sold - and Byron was determined that would never be.

  In early 1809, now of age, and six months before departing on the Grand Tour, Byron was back in London and in a less dissolute frame of mind. He had three projects: to take his seat in the House of Lords, to finish his current volume - to be called English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers - and to prepare for the Grand Tour. By March these first two had been accomplished, the first tentatively, the second triumphantly, and all thoughts on the third turned to a May departure.

  The destination was now Persia, via the Mediterranean, but the destination was really loosely East. Realpolitik played its part: with the continent largely under French control, and with the Mediterranean under British control, it was by sea that he had to tour. There just remained the running problem of money, and the wrangling with Hanson and the usurers continued through the May departure date, until at just the right and last moment Scrope Davies shared a gambling win with his friend, Hanson somehow from someone topped it up, and on 19 June Byron left London for Falmouth accompanied by his entourage, what he called his suite: his friend John Cam Hobhouse, his old retainer Joe Murray, his valet William Fletcher, his pageboy Robert Rushton, and a Farsi-speaking German called Friese, of whom more later. The Grand Tour was on.

  Chapter One

  FROM FALMOUTH TO LISBON

  2-7 JULY 1809 | 28 JUNE - 3 JULY 2008

  The Grand Tour and the re-Tour both left their respective bases, London and Beaulieu in Hampshire, on 19 June; the Grand Tour in 1809 and the re-Tour in 2008. Both headed for Falmouth in Cornwall. Byron’s packet ship to Lisbon left from there to avoid the long slog west against a prevailing English Channel and the running battle with French privateers who popped in and out of the Brest peninsula. Our much smaller ketch, Vasco da Gama, left from there to have the run south to
Lisbon in the open seas outside the short-tempered Bay of Biscay. All parties were looking for the mid-voyage full moon nearest the shortest night for the passage south: theirs was on 26 June, ours was on 30 June.

  Byron spent nearly two weeks in Falmouth waiting for fair winds. It was more diverting than he expected. By 1810 Falmouth, with its enormous natural harbour, had become an important Royal Navy base in the Napoleonic Wars as well as the main departure point for the General Post Office’s packet service. Falmouth Roads was full of frigates and packets, brigantines and fishing skiffs, as well as jolly- boats and tenders ferrying men and supplies back and forth. Ashore were inns and brothels, bakeries and chapels, the fish market and the Customs House. Byron, Hobhouse and Rushton stayed in Wynn’s Hotel (where Byron wrote he was ‘sadly flea-bitten’), now the site of a Co-op Bank with a fitness centre pounding away above it.

  Falmouth is now also a major yachting centre, and would be even more major if they had built enough berths to cope with all the visitors such a wonderful cruising area attracts. Vasco da Gama arrived after a pleasant enough jaunt up the English Channel only to find the usual Falmouth bunfight around the marinas as yachts jostle for space and raft up to each other as best they can. Ashore, the streets and lanes meander around much as they would have done two hundred years ago: the inns have multiplied, the brothels have been internetted, the bakeries have gone continental, the chapels are apartments, the fish market a Tesco and the Customs House still a Customs House. Only the shiny new, and quite excellent, outpost of the National Maritime Museum tilts a hat towards the spirit level in the builder’s toolkit.

  Originally the sole purpose of a packet ship was the delivery of parcels of post, so they became known as packets from the French paquet. The word ‘post’ arose because post- was the method of charging: only at the end of its journey could the cost of sending a letter be calculated, that is after it had passed through its various toll stages. Post-payment was the only way of charging, and thus the service became generically known as the ‘post’, Penny Post, Post Office and so on.