CHAPTER ONE

Byron
Child of Passion, Fool of Fame

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By BENITA EISLER
Alfred A. Knopf

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"Shades of the Dead! Have I Not
Heard Your Voices?"

                               On Monday, May 17, 1824, near noon, six men gathered in the high-ceilinged drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, in a house that served as both home and office to the publisher John Murray. For days the group had been quarreling among themselves. Alliances shifted. Messages flew back and forth, and meetings between pairs continued through the morning. Once they were finally assembled, an argument flared between two of their number, John Cam Hobhouse, a rising young parliamentarian from a wealthy Bristol family, and Thomas Moore, a Dublin-born poet and grocer's son. Angry words threatened to turn into physical violence. Finally, the decision of the host prevailed, and calm was restored. Murray then asked his sixteen-year-old son to join them. Introduced as heir to his father's business, the boy was invited to witness a momentous event. A servant appeared, carrying two bound manuscript volumes. While the group drew closer to the fire blazing in the grate, two others, Wilmot Horton and Colonel Doyle, took the books and, tearing them apart, fed the pages, covered with handwriting familiar to all those present, to the crackling flames. Within minutes, the memoirs of George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, were reduced to a mound of ashes.

    Byron had been dead for one month to the day. The ship carrying the poet's embalmed body (vital organs removed and packed separately) had taken four weeks to sail from Greece to England. In the interval, furious debates had exposed enmities old and new among those who were to be present at the burning of the manuscript. Quarreling had flared over the ownership of the manuscript, intensifying with arguments about potential damage to the poet's already seamy reputation and the pain his unexpurgated memories would cause his former wife, their daughter, and his half sister. Each of the six men had his own stake in the dispute. John Cam Hobhouse, a Whig M.P. and Byron's executor and oldest friend, wanted only to sanitize the poet's name for posterity. In the last years of his life, Byron had given his memoirs to his fellow poet Tom Moore. The needy Moore had, with Byron's approval, promptly sold the copyright to Murray. Then, at the burning, he tried to save the manuscript. But it was too late. Finally, Horton and Doyle, the two responsible for the actual destruction of the volumes, represented the interests of Lady Byron, the poet's estranged wife and the mother of his child, and his half sister, Augusta Leigh, respectively.

    "The most timid of God's booksellers," Byron had once called Murray, his publisher and now enthusiastic host of the auto-da-fé. Still, the decision to destroy the most personal words of his best-selling author (which, in the event, Murray had not even read), weighed against the enormous profit potential of publishing the memoirs, underlines the fear that the known facts of Byron's life inspired in those who loved him—and their horror of revelations yet unknown.

Byron's fame as a poet and his notoriety as a man were one; the scandals of his life—whoring, marriage, adultery, incest, sodomy—became the text or subtext of his poems, made more shocking by the poet's cynicism shading into blasphemy. The heroes of the poems might be pirates or princes, but Byron's voice—the passionate sorrowing youth turned world-weary libertine—made his works instant bestsellers. Editions of his first advertisement for himself, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, sold out within three days. And this was not even the most frankly autobiographical of Byron's works. Penned from self-imposed exile in Italy, published in eagerly awaited installments, Don Juan delighted London gossipmongers with plentiful allusions to the scandal surrounding the poet's divorce from his young wife of one year and his subsequent flight from English "hypocrisy and cant." In the few years left to him, Byron added the glamour of revolutionary politics to his erotic and literary engagements. In exile, he joined the underground secret society called the Carbonari in the struggle to rid Italy of the Austrians, before dying at Missolonghi, bled to death by his doctors, while training troops for the liberation of Greece. Mourned throughout the world, the poet would not have shared the belief that his end was untimely. He had lived so hard and fast, he said, that before his death at age thirty-six, he felt himself to be an old man.

    Indeed, the brief arc of his life spanned an era whose turbulence mirrored the poet's own stormy existence. In 1788, the year of Byron's birth, George III succumbed to the first attack of madness, the violent symptoms of which required the appointment of his oldest son, the Prince of Wales, as Regent. The King regained his reason the following year and resumed power, but already the high living "Prinnie" and his dissolute friends had changed the tone of the court. Twenty years before he was officially declared Prince Regent, George Frederick Augustus of Hanover's indulgences in food, drink, gambling, and women, along with more durable interests in architecture and decor, ushered in the glittering froth of brilliance, luxury, and vice we know as the Regency. Its sensibility—at once restless, sensual, melancholy, and exuberant—might be characterized by a term invented a hundred years later to describe a strangely similar spirit: fin-de-siècle.

    In 1789, the year after Byron was born, the French Revolution fired the dreams—and fueled the nightmares—of all Europe. Its bloody overthrow of the old order was the crucial event that continued to haunt Byron's generation, shaping his choice of heroes and villains among his elders. Charles James Fox, the leader of the radical Whig opposition and the idol of Byron's youth, had declared the fall of the Bastille "the greatest and best event in the history of the world." For the Tory government, however, in power for most of Byron's lifetime, the French Revolution gave legitimacy to the politics of reaction. The excesses of the Terror turned fiery young republican sympathizers among the first generation of Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth and Southey, into middle-aged monarchists, reviled by Byron as turncoat opportunists.

    Fear of revolutionary contagion provided the excuse for repressive measures; in 1794 habeas corpus was suspended, the first in a series of acts amputating the civil rights of Englishmen. Censorship and spying became the order of the day; any form of association, especially among the dispossessed, could be prosecuted as a crime. Starting in 1793, when the Girondist government declared war on England, patriotism was invoked to justify further curtailing of individual freedoms. The political reality that permitted the Regency to waltz on unafraid was that England had become a police state. Byron, the newly crowned king of London drawing rooms in 1814, saw clearly that as a poet who was also a satirist and social critic, as a peer who spoke out for the rights of starving weavers or Irish Catholics, he would not long be indulged for his youth, talent, and title.

    War with France began when Byron was five years old; it would continue until 1815, when he was twenty-seven. Like that of other ardent youths throughout Europe, the poet's political consciousness was shaped by an idealized image of Napoleon as the personification of heroic conquest in the name of republican principles. Besides, for the adolescent rebel, Tory England's demonized enemy was a natural ally. Less consciously, Byron absorbed another Napoleonic lesson: The little corporal who declared himself Emperor was the herald of a new era, the age of the self-made man.

    In England, too, this new breed was increasingly prominent. The war with France had galvanized a sluggish economy, ushering in the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, which would change the face of England. The first of England's dark satanic mills helped to float the Regency extravaganza. While the poor suffered more, a new class of entrepreneur-inventors—ironmasters and coal barons, pottery manufacturers and bankers—rode to dazzling fortunes. Their sons, like the two brilliant Peel brothers (one of whom became Prime Minister), were among Lord Byron's few commoner classmates at Harrow. And there would be more. Great landowning grandees were still the most visible stars on the brilliant stage of the Regency, but new money and talent were joining the featured players.

    It was a febrile age. Social, political, and cultural certainties were shifting, like tectonic plates, under the feet of young men starting out in life. Mobility, then as now, had its price. The pressures of public life destroyed individuals as never before. Between 1790 and 1820, nineteen members of Parliament committed suicide and twenty others went mad; two of those who took their own lives, Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Samuel Whitbread, were closely associated with Byron. "In every class there is the same taut neurotic quality," the historian J. H. Plumb observed, "the fantastic gambling and drinking, the riots, brutality and violence, and everywhere and always a constant sense of death."

Byron was a child of his age and subject to all its fissures. The great Regency portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence met the poet only once, but where others found simply beauty, the painter saw all the conflicts of Byron's character: "its keen and rapid genius, its pale intelligence, its profligacy, and its bitterness; its original symmetry distorted by the passions, his laugh of mingled merriment and scorn; the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent, the eyes bright and dissimilar, the nose finely cut, and the nostril acutely formed; the mouth well made, but wide and contemptuous even in its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful expression heightened by the massive firmness of the chin, which springs at once from the centre of the full under-lip; the hair dark and curling but irregular in its growth; all this presents to you the poet and the man; and the general effect is heightened by a thin spare form, and, as you may have heard, by a deformity of limb."

    Heir to instability, Byron clung to the certainty of inherited land and ancient title, even as he vowed to seize the rewards of talent and energy.

    "The way to riches, to Greatness, lies before me," Byron wrote to his mother at age fifteen. "I can, I will cut myself a path through the world or perish."

    Heroic words proclaimed by a poor scion of the peerage, they resonate like a battle cry. Throughout a dispossessed childhood, his blood thrilled to tales of the first Byrons, Radulfus (Ralph) de Burun and his brother, reputed to have arrived in Britain as liegemen of William the Conqueror:

Erneis, Radulphus—eight-and-forty manors
* * *
Were their reward for following Billy's banners;

he wrote of his ancestors, inventing the imposing number of residences out of whole cloth; no one knows precisely where the brothers settled. For their loyalty in the service of William I, they were, however, rewarded with landholdings in the north of England substantial enough to warrant mention in the Domesday Book. By the time of Henry II, the spelling of the family name had become for all time Byron, and with the reign of Henry VIII, the Byron settlement in Nottingham was recorded. That monarch's largesse accounted for the establishment of the first Lord Byron at Newstead Abbey, the site associated with the Byrons from then on.

    Newstead Abbey had been founded four hundred years earlier by Henry II, the murderer of Thomas à Becket, for the Order of Canons Regular, known as the "black canons" after the color of their robes. In the course of the following centuries, the order had erected an elegant Gothic church of the soft, gray local granite, along with an adjoining priory, whose handsome cloister flanked an open court with a central fountain. At the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII sold the lands to John Byron of Colewyke for £810. Sir John, the first Byron proprietor, lost no time in transforming the cloistral into the baronial. He seems to have been in the vanguard of the later Romantic taste for ruins; he retained the southern side of the nave as one wall of his own residence, and using only what he needed of the Church and priory to repair his buildings, he allowed the remains to fall into picturesque disrepair.

    The same Sir John continued his sacrilegious ways by getting with child a neighbor's wife. His illegitimate son from this union could only inherit Newstead by deed of gift, but the seigneur did what was needed to wipe the bar sinister from his heir's coat of arms by marrying the boy's mother. Three years after the lands had passed to his son, in 1576, the new owner was knighted by Elizabeth I. As the second Lord Byron, he was also the first to be immortalized—as "Little Sir John of the Great Beard."

    The fourth lord married three times. His third wife was Frances Berkeley, the poet's great-grandmother. Lord Byron and Lady Frances's second-born, John, the poet's grandfather, joined the navy, rising from commodore to vice-admiral. He survived a shipwreck off Patagonia, and in his Narrative, published years later, he described the horrifying experience of being forced to eat the skin and paws of a favorite dog. Byron pillaged this last gruesome episode for the shipwreck scene in Don Juan. He predeceased his oldest son, William, the granduncle of the poet, who thus became the fifth Lord Byron at the age of fourteen. Following his father, he too joined the navy, but, after being rescued from a vessel that foundered with all other hands on board lost, he resigned his commission. Remaining on land, he soon acquired a less heroic reputation and sobriquet: the Wicked Lord. During his tenure at Newstead Abbey it became known as Folly Castle, after the model château he built on the lake, alleged to be the scene of licentious fêtes champêtres.

    In his middle forties, the Wicked Lord added the notoriety of being a murderer to his reputation as a whoremaster. On January 26, 1765, in the course of a dinner in London at a tavern in Pall Mall, the Wicked Lord fell into a dispute with a neighbor and kinsman, Viscount Chaworth of Annesley Hall. Where the fault lay remains uncertain, but it is a matter of record that in an empty upper room of the tavern, lit by a single candle, Lord Byron ran his shortened sword through his opponent's belly.

    From a brooding sense of guilt and grievance, the fifth lord descended into episodic madness. Dark tales were told in Nottinghamshire: how his lordship shot his coachman dead over a trifle, then, heaving the corpse into the carriage with his wife, took the lucklesss servant's place on the box and drove off. Other rumors claimed that, when displeased, he would throw Lady Byron into the pond.

    When he sank into debt, he stripped what was left of the forests for salable timber. Then, in an illegal act that would cast a long shadow over his grandson's life, he leased the most valuable property in the Byron family holdings, twenty thousand acres of coal mines in Rochdale in Lancashire, for £60 annual rent.

    John Byron, the first of the vice-admiral's nine children and the father of the poet, was born in 1756. Known as "Mad Jack," he seemed, from an early age, destined to turn his own father's strengths into weaknesses, and the elder's weaknesses into vices. When a few terms at Westminster proved him to be no scholar, he was sent to a military school near Paris; there he acquired the extravagant tastes that would keep him in lifelong debt. Heartless and swaggeringly handsome in his Guardsman's uniform, armed with elegant French and boundless sexual appetite and unburdened by scruples of any sort, he seduced chambermaids and countesses. Since his parents were no longer able or willing to pay his gambling debts, it was said that he turned his sexual prowess to good account, charging the better-off of his lovers for services rendered. This proved an uncertain way to finance his needs. It was time to find a rich and well-connected wife.

    In the summer of 1778 the twenty-two-year old captain of the Guards met his match in one of the reigning beauties of the London salons. The Marchioness of Carmarthen, wife of the Marquess (later fifth Duke of Leeds), was born Amelia d'Arcy, Baroness Conyers, and Countess of Mertola. A coup de foudre struck Amelia when she first saw the alluring Jack Byron. Lunch in the country was followed by overnight flight, with the outraged Marquess in pursuit. When the lovers eluded him, he locked his wife out of their house in town.

    Now that disgrace had made Amelia his responsibility, it might have been expected that Captain Byron's ardor would have cooled. His mistress, however, had attractions beyond the erotic. Only months before their first meeting, the death of her father, the Earl of Holderness, had left his only child an heiress with a lifetime income of £4,000 a year. As soon as Captain Byron found lodgings for them, the Marchioness sent for her clothes and jewels, requesting in the note to her husband that he include the new vis-à-vis he had recently given her; no gentleman would deprive even an errant wife of her carriage. After ordering his coach-maker to paint out his coat of arms, the vehicle was duly delivered along with Amelia's other belongings. The lovers settled in France, dividing their time between Chantilly and Paris, where they were married in 1779.

    Of the three children born to Amelia and Jack Byron, only the last, Augusta, the poet's half sister, born in 1783, survived infancy. Shortly after her birth, her mother died, at the age of twenty-nine. Both the cause and even the place of Amelia's death remain mysterious. She is variously held to have died of consumption, of a fever contracted from going hunting too soon after childbirth, and, more ominously, of "ill-usage" at the hands of her husband.

    Byron later defended his father, then long dead, against lingering rumors that his "brutal conduct" had been the cause of his first wife's death: "It is not by 'brutality' that a young Officer in the Guards seduces and carries off a Marchioness, and marries two heiresses. It is true that he was a very handsome man, which goes a great way," his son said knowingly.

    The widower may have been grieved by the untimely loss of his wife and the mother of his daughter, then less than a year old. More certainly, he mourned the loss of Amelia's £4,000 income, which ceased immediately on her death. Disinherited by his father and accustomed now to grand living, his most pressing task was to land another heiress. Every fortune hunter knew where the pickings were best. In the spring of 1785 the expatriate returned to England and went to Bath.

    Catherine Gordon of Gight, near Aberdeen, had been orphaned for three years. She came to Bath that spring at the invitation of her uncle, Admiral Robert Duff, and his wife, who had a house there. Now twenty, Catherine's corpulence made her look much older and gave her the rolling gait that some were unkind enough to describe as a waddle. Her education was even sketchier than that deemed necesary for most girls, and she was as socially awkward as she was plain. But as the thirteenth Laird of Gight, Catherine was the sole heir to a fortune worth close to £30,000 in Aberdeen bank shares, salmon-fishing rights, and lands, including a castle of her own.

    From its primitive past to the sixteenth century, the history of the Gordons of Gight is drenched in bloodshed. By the eighteenth century, the violence of the males of the family seemed to have turned inward, becoming black depression. In January 1760 Catherine Gordon's maternal grandfather had drowned himself in the icy waters of the Ythan River rushing just below the castle walls. Thirteen months after the death of Catherine's middle sister, Abercromby, in 1777, her father's body was found in the Bath Canal. A year later in 1780, Margaret, the youngest, too, was dead. The deaths of her two sisters were so painful that Catherine Byron never told her son of their existence. Byron always believed his mother to have been an only child. Then, in 1782, two years after little Margaret's death, Catherine's mother died. Within five years she had lost her entire family. Admiral Duff's invitation to Bath early in 1785 seemed a timely one.

    A few months after her arrival, on May 13, 1785, Catherine Gordon and John Byron were married by the rector of St. Michael's Church, Bath. Before their deaths, the bride's parents had included a clause in their wills stipulating that in the event of female succession to the Gight estates, their daughter must either marry a Gordon or her husband must take the Gordon name. Jack Byron might now be Jonn Byron Gordon, but he was, as ever, broke and hounded by creditors. For the moment, his wife could not withdraw from her inheritance the large sums needed by her husband to pay his debts. He tried dunning his father's bankers, to no avail; the vice-admiral, who was to die a few months later, had been in earnest when he disinherited his wastrel son.

    Catherine's troubles were just beginning. Without a marriage settlement, her husband's debts had now become her responsibility. Lacking ready cash, she had no choice but to pay the most pressing of Jack's creditors by selling off part of the lands of Gight. One farm was sold; forests were cut down and their timber marketed. Shares in the Aberdeen Banking Company and the salmon fisheries went next; then another £8,000 mortgage was taken out on the estate. Jack Byron still harbored delusions of being a local grandee, attempting to influence district politics; as the final humiliation, in the parliamentary election of 1786 his vote was disallowed.

    In March the following notice appeared in the Aberdeen Journal:

To be Selt
The Mains of Gight
Enquiries to Mr. Byron Gordon, Gight

Later that spring, possibly in April, the Byrons left for England.

    As soon as Jack surfaced in London, he was seized for debt and hauled off to King's Bench prison, from which he was bailed out for £176 by his tailor. In August, the couple rented a house in South Warnborough, Hampshire, where Catherine remained with her maid while Jack kept moving to stay ahead of the bailiffs while attempting to pry money from his mother's family. The following year, the earl of Aberdeen bought the castle of Gight and all its lands for £17,850. But a relative of Catherine's reported that "Every penny of the purchase price ... except £1,222.10 and £3,000 reserved for Mrs. B's own use, and put out at mortgage, was swallowed up by Capt. Byron's creditors."

    Fear of her husband seeps through Catherine's letters. "I should not wish [that] Mr. Byron should know that I wrote or spoke to anybody on this subject, because if he did he would never forgive me.

    Soon she had further reason to be anxious. In April 1787 Catherine was pregnant. By July 18, the couple had settled in a house in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. True to form, Captain Byron did not linger in his new home; in July he set off for Paris. Before leaving, he had managed to pry from Catherine £700 out of £1,000 she had just received from her estate. Eight weeks later he had spent it all, leaving a new trail of debts in his wake.

    Within months, the enormously pregnant woman journeyed to Chantilly to join her husband. Captain Byron may have welcomed his wife as a bearer of fresh supplies of cash. He also needed a stepmother for Augusta, his daughter by Amelia. And Chantilly was conveniently near Paris, making it an easy matter to leave for nightly diversions in town.

    As her time drew near, Catherine, accompanied by her maid and Augusta, made her way slowly back to England. Still in danger of arrest, Jack Byron remained in France. Arriving in London, she delivered the four-year-old girl to her grandmother, the dowager Countess of Holderness—the first of a series of grand foster homes for Augusta, motherless and with a fugitive father.

    Catherine Byron had no rich relations to welcome her and her unborn child. In mid-December, six weeks before her baby was born, she moved into a furnished first-floor back drawing room, above a perfumer's shop at 16 Holles Street, Cavendish Square. Knowing no one in London, Catherine only had her maid as company, and her condition, along with lack of space, made any prospect of social life unlikely. New Year's Day 1788, however, brought a surprise visitor, John Leslie. Describing himself as "a very near relation" (probably a first cousin), Leslie had just been appointed by the Edinburgh commissioners of the Gight estate to supply the Byrons with the minimum funds needed for their expenses, while a trust was being established to prevent further erosion of the principal. The commissioners also asked Leslie to report on the welfare of the twenty-two-year-old mother-to-be, whose finances, like the rest of her life, seemed to be in chaos. Catherine's state moved her visitor to immediate action: "She tells me that she expects to be brought to bed in two or three weeks & wished for some Money. I gave her a draft on my Banker for Twenty Guineas on your acct, ..." Leslie reported to Edinburgh, adding a skeptical postscript, "She tells me she expects Mr. Byron in London every day—and that he goes to Scotland on business with you." The next day Catherine herself wrote to the commissioners' London agent to assure but also to warn him: "I don't want much and if there was to be large sums, it would only be thrown away as it was before." The passive fatalism of her tone reveals that Jack Byron was back.

    Just before the baby's birth, a family friend from Aberdeen introduced Catherine to a London lawyer. Her association with John Hanson, a solicitor practicing at 6 Chancery Lane, was to cast a long shadow over her unborn son's life.

    On Tuesday, January 22, Catherine Byron was delivered of a son, named for her father, George Gordon. Her labor was long and difficult. The baby was born with a caul and a malformed right foot.

    For Byron, his deformed foot became the crucial catastrophe of his life. He saw it as the mark of satanic connection, referring to himself as le diable boiteux, the lame devil. At the same time, he persisted in blaming his mother for the abnormality, citing her "excess of delicacy" during the period immediately preceding the delivery. This phrase has been taken to refer either to Catherine's insistence on wearing corsets in the last stages of pregnancy or to her modesty during the final obstetrical examinations. Byron's accusation seized on the most damning charge he could find to describe the damage inflicted upon him by his mother: She had cursed, crippled, and symbolically castrated her son. Physically painful in his early years, making him an object of mockery or pity in childhood and adolescence, Byron's deformity would cause him emotional injury beyond any other psychic wound he would ever sustain. Turned inward, his rage became depression, but also something more insidious: the sense that he had a special dispensation from the moral sanctions imposed upon others and a lifelong entitlement to the forbidden.

Since the baby was not born on the sabbath, with its debtors' amnesty, his father did not risk an appearance. But Jack Byron kept in close touch with Holies Street. Four days after his son's birth, he fired off a letter to the Edinburgh agent for his wife's estate: "Notwithstanding your writing to Mr. Leslie to furnish Mrs. Byron with money, he has not done it, and she has not any to go on with.... She was brought to bed of a Son on Monday last & is far from well...."

    He might have gotten the day of his son's birth wrong, but where money was concerned, Captain Byron was ever the uxorious husband. In this instance, Catherine may have shrewdly neglected to tell him of a recent draft of £50; if Jack had gotten wind of it, there would have been nothing left to pay the midwife and doctors.

    Once again, the commissioners dispatched John Leslie to Holles Street. Catherine was too weak to see him, Leslie reported to Edinburgh, but he noted that mother and son were doing well, making no mention of the infant's malformed foot. He left Catherine a message that he had from 10 to 20 guineas for her if she would send her maid to his office. For a few days he heard nothing, then word came from the maid that Mrs. Byron needed 100 guineas. Leslie forwarded her request to the Edinburgh executors who agreed, at the same time warning her against all further expenditures not deemed absolutely essential, and demanding an itemized list of Jack Byron's debts.

    Catherine replied, in her rambling style with its uncertain grammar: "I shall make Mr. Becket [another lawyer] give you an account of all Mr. Byron's debts that we know of as soon as possible, but I hope the money wont [sic] be given to him but to have somebody to pay them for he will only pay what he is obliged to pay and there will be still more debts coming in & more demands for money. I am sorry he is getting a new carriage."

    Jack Byron, for his part, never let poverty inhibit his spending habits. A fine new carriage was a necessity for him—just as it would later be for his son. Meanwhile, Catherine promised to give Watson an itemized list of her needs for the next two months—the period of time she planned to remain in London. Believing she had to leave Holles Street within days, she had found other lodgings, while anxiously waiting for her errant spouse to come for her: "I will not go to Bath nor will I leave this till Mr. Byron gets a house & is fixed for I am tired of so many journeys," she wrote to Edinburgh. "I hope by the time my little boy is able to travel Mr. Byron will have got a house in some cheap country whether Wales or the north of England."

    None of her hopes was to materialize. Plans for the new quarters, at 2 Baker Street, Portland Square, fell through. Nor was Jack Byron ever to assume the responsibilities of a husband, father, or head of household. They never again lived together for more than a few months, and his only role in Catherine's life would be to continue badgering her for money.

On February 29, 1788, George Gordon Byron, then five weeks old, was christened at Marylebone Parish Chapel, at the top of Marylebone High Street. Seven years earlier, Hogarth had used the interior as the setting for the fifth scene of The Rake's Progress, in which the ruined spendthrift marries a rich old maid. If the rake of a father was present now, he did not emerge from hiding to risk arrest. The infant's sponsors (seemingly in absentia) were the Duke of Gordon and Catherine's cousin, Colonel Robert Duff of Fetteresso. The only official record of the event was inaccurate: The parish clerk forgot that 1788 was a leap year, noting the date as March 1 in the register.

    By the middle of April, mother and son were still in the back drawing room at Holles Street, where Jack Byron appeared for furtive visits. At two and a half months, baby "Geordie"—in the broad Scots twang of his mother—would now be taken out on a fine day for a turn in Cavendish Square. Just around the corner on Oxford Street was a shop window whose beguiling display of children's and dolls' shoes could only have summoned his mother's most melancholy thoughts. The doctor had said that before her son began to walk he would require special boots. Where would the money be found to pay for such expensive articles?

    Still, even the most rigorous demands of frugality couldn't dampen Catherine's pride in her baby. On April 19, she ordered nine yards of white lutestring, a thin, satiny fabric, from Roach and Coy, Pall Mall, silk weavers to Their Majesties, followed by an order for one yard of blue taffeta; the color and quantity of both suggest the traditional outfits of well-born young children of both sexes.

    Shortly afterward the household left Holles Street, destination unknown. For the next year there is no trace of them. Then, in early August 1789, Jack Byron reappears in a rented house on the grounds of Sandgate castle, in Folkestone, Kent. From there he made brief trips to the coast of France. A longer junket across the Channel proved ill-advised; no sooner had Jack set foot on French soil than he came close to being imprisoned for debt. By 1790 he was established in Aberdeen; whether he came there just before or after the arrival of his wife and baby son is uncertain. For a few brief unhappy months, they were a family.

(C) 1999 Benita Eisler All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-679-41299-9