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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We're going to be talking about of history's greatest headline makers, the original celebrity bad boy. Yes, yes, it's time, we're going there. Today, we're talking about Lord Byron. Poet, politician of sorts, lover, exile, self-starred rebel, romantic... Hideous, hideous partner, and eventually freedom fighter.
He appalled and titillated Regency Britain's polite society. He set hearts racing. He managed to keep a bear as a pet. And he just made lots of really, really terrible decisions. And yet, strangely, made them look glamorous at the same time. He was born into a Britain that was experiencing multiple revolutions.
The Industrial Revolution, huge leaps in technology, changes in the way that people lived. People were becoming subordinated to machines. People were leaving the countryside and entering these massive, dark, smoky cities. There were questions about how we ought to organize ourselves in this new world. Who should get the profit? Who should get the surplus value from all this labor?
And whether these new workers deserved protections, deserved rights. Across the channel, there was another revolution brewing, the French Revolution, a complete overhaul of France's society, aristocrats losing their head, talk of freedom and equality and liberty. Byron managed to somehow come to embody all of these revolutions, whilst remaining quintessentially the aristocratic Brit as well.
He is an impossible tangle of contradictions. He was witty. He was brilliant, in fact. He was politically engaged. He was a best-selling poet. His verses were deeply stirring to people. He was also vulnerable, cruel. Anxious, traumatised, jealous, ambitious, he was all the things.
And to help us make sense of that, because we're tackling the poster boy for sex and scandal in Regency society, there is only one person on this earth, breathing today, who can do justice to this story. And that is the inimitable Kate Lister. Dr. Kate Lister, historian, host of our sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets.
So, lace up your true, pull up your stockings, buckle on your sword, because we are heading back to the 18th century to meet the poet who lived fast, loved hard, and died young, Lord Byron. Who was he? The man behind the headlines. And did he deserve that epic reputation, one of the greatest obituaries ever written, that he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Let's find out.
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Chapter 2: Who was Lord Byron and why is he considered scandalous?
Yeah, they really were. The further you go back, the madder they get.
Yeah, I know. And actually, weirdly, our Byron was probably the most centrist dad of them all. Isn't that saying something?
Yeah. And his mum's family, they were pretty bonkers as well. Were they? Yeah, quite a high rate of suicide. He had an aunt that killed herself and then some paternal... Yeah, there's quite a lot of mental instability kicking around.
Right. I mean, frankly, if I lived before modern medicine, dentistry, food, etc., I think I'd have mental instability. I genuinely, I find the ability of humans to survive in these sort of things we're going to talk about, the kind of situations people are thrown into, you know, losing half your kids when they're in, you know, before the age of 10.
I just think the mental instability must have been endemic.
Yeah, I would have thought so. Quite how we've even made it as a race is pretty impressive. But when you look at some of the obstacles these people were overcoming and just the kind of horror that was pretty much standard in everyday life. Yeah, it's a wonder anyone was sane. But I liked it. Maybe there was one or two sane Byrons who just never made the news. Yes.
Who just like, you know, tended a little herb garden and were perfectly well adjusted. Right.
And the problem is, is we're not making the podcast about them. You know, therein lies the problem, right? So anyway, talk about the Byron family. We've sort of talked a little bit about it, but I mean, are they a grand family? Were they famous before our Byron came along?
Yeah, they were. His dad was known as Mad Jack Byron, who was a notorious scallywag. He has the title and also a bit of incest with his own sister. So that's kind of kicking around this fact.
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Chapter 3: What were the major revolutions happening during Byron's lifetime?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all a bit like that. But it was more his mother who was an aristocrat, sort of low-level aristocrat from Scotland. That's where their peerage came from. So it's really the aristocratic bit comes more from his mother. His grandfather, paternal grandfather, was... I don't want to say naval person, but he was famous for being shipwrecked a lot.
He was known as Bad Weather Byron. He was shipwrecked, and there's a story about how he had to eat his dog's paws after they'd been buried for several weeks. It's a whole thing. But Byron grows up with stories of these legends around him, and they have quite a profound impact on him.
His grandfather goes on Anson's voyage around the world, and he had a terrible reputation, Admiral Byron, Foul Weather Jack, didn't he? So they all seem to have nicknames, and they all seem to have endless scrapes of death.
Endless scrapes with death, addiction issues, mental health issues, terrible womanising, a spot of incest thrown in. There's some speculation about whether or not our Byron's dad actually took his own life or whether it was all a terrible accident. But by the time he dies, he's living in Peignery, and I think it was France, because he had to flee his creditors. Yeah, it's all a mess.
My goodness, the misery. I mean, dying in France. I mean, it's one thing to be poverty-stricken.
That's where you picked up from that, dying in France.
Yeah.
And so a very, very turbulent family, very colourful, you might say, but also turbulent and colourful times. I mean, this is the end of the 18th century. We've got all the isms coming in. We've got the French Revolution. We've got ideas around democracy and ideas, dare we even say, about feminism. We've had the American Revolution. It is a tumultuous time.
Yeah, it absolutely is. Byron is born one year before the French Revolution kicks off. And he's very much a child of the revolution, of these new ideas that are sweeping the world, that maybe we could do things differently. Maybe it doesn't have to be the way it's always been. And there's challenges to religion and religious authority and the status quo. And all of that is in the background.
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Chapter 4: How did Byron's upbringing influence his character and choices?
I mean, if you're going to have satanic orgies, that's the place that you're going to do these things. I'll take your word for that. Would you not? No, oh, bit of an effort.
LAUGHTER
But if you were going to, that might be the place that you would do that kind of thing. If, big if.
Yes, if I was going to fictionally set the satanic orgy somewhere, it would be there. You're right, exactly.
Right? And when he inherits it, it's not in great shape. It's already looking like it's gothic and kind of crumbling. But Byron really loves that when he goes to visit it at 10, because it's already imprinted that gothic, crumbling, ruined, former glory. This is the site of many a horrendous and spooky event.
He absolutely loves that and it stays with him all of his life, even though he never lived there for any great length of time.
But it's a source of income. Him and his mum can return to the South and live a life that... They rent it out is what they do.
That's how they turn Newstead Abbey into some money in the early days. They've got other properties that they stay at as well. Of course, the other thing that when he comes into his inheritance, it gives him the opportunity to do is get more money on credit because now money lenders will lend to him. So he's in debt most of his life. He's always fleeing creditors.
If there's one thing that Byron does a lot of, it's spend. He spends a lot of money and he spends on mad things.
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Chapter 5: What were the significant relationships in Byron's life?
Byron's still writing to her the whole time, by the way. And then when she finally gets this letter from him basically saying, look, it's done. You need to chill out. She goes completely mad. She has a bonfire. She hires local girls from the village to sing songs about how awful Byron is while she's burning all of his poems and his books. She writes a novel, Glenarvon, about how horrible he is.
She stalks him. She keeps turning up in his building. She mimics his handwriting to write to his publishers to get a portrait of him sent to her. It's like, wow, Caroline, just wow. It's such an unholy mess. It really is.
Well, that's the Ponsonby family for you. I mean, honestly, the only thing you can do with those people is wind them up and fire them in the direction of the French, to be honest. So poor her. In a different era, she'd have been there with her brother on the cavalry charges. By some extraordinary quirk of fate, he manages to convince someone to marry him. I mean, how does that work?
Do you know what? I knew I was going to come and talk to you about this. So I thought I would try and make a list of everyone that we know Byron has had sexual contact with. And I've got it in front of me.
Listeners, she is brandishing a great sheath of paper.
He's 28 years old in my list and we're at hundreds of people already. Wow. There's hundreds of people. So he is a man of gargantuan appetites and he doesn't treat people very well, but he does manage to convince. Her name's Annabelle Milbank and she's the cousin of Lady Caroline Lamb. So we're keeping it in the family. He's also knocking off Caroline Lamb's mother-in-law, by the way.
We'll just throw that one out there.
Yeah.
And having sex with one of her friends, Lady Oxford, as well. And he makes overtures to Lady Oxford's 12-year-old daughter as well. So this is a mess. Somehow, he manages to convince a young girl, Annabella Milbank, who is not his type. She's very sensible. She's very pious. She likes mathematics and puzzles. And he manages to convince her to marry him.
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