Ancestry

                     

Lord Byron (1801).                                    The Author (1947).

Thank heaven for that place in Newstead Abbey Park, which stood in the shadow an old monastery, and now still older mansion, of a rich and rare mixed Gothic. Here I would spend time encapsulated in a world that remained somehow in its own history, set in the midst of forest trees, which very semblance stood petrified in yestercentury — not swaying, nor even fluttering in the night winds of war.

Yet here, too, I would become acquainted with the mysterious effect of the supernatural, which would, many years later, oblige my grandparents to quit their forest home following an unearthly spectral haunting. A malevolent ghost-like figure was believed to be responsible for my maternal grandmother’s early death.

My mother was a sweet and innocent soul who sought beauty and goodness where it seldom seemed to dwell. She sang, wrote poetry, and played the piano a little (especially her favourite composer, Chopin) when she was young, but the ultimate prize of happiness, as envisaged in her heart, seemed to elude her. So she stopped doing these, as life itself grew tiresome as the inevitability of compromise dawned. Yet a sparkle in her blue eyes remained from a time when dreams had not flown.

Dorothy, my mother, was born at a time when the previous world conflict had practically wiped out an entire generation, and was growing tired by the spring of 1918. Her paternal grandparents, both quiet by nature, had a farm in Derbyshire. The abode of her maternal grandparents, also located in Derbyshire, was the destination for Christmas holidays. These would be spent with her parents who themselves resided in close proximity to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Forest.

A semi-ruined priory: home to the Byron family for three centuries.

Once the habitat of the celebrated poet and his ancestors, Newstead would become a symbol of all that is Gothic and Romantic, which now, irrevocably, has slipped into the reservoir of fragmented memory. This is where I “played as a child in the avenues of sombre forest trees in Lord Byron’s gloomy abode where the fading twilight coupled with the moan in leafy woods to herald the filmy disc of the moon.”

I was conceived in October 1943, as the war in Europe prepared to reach its climax. Thus, nine months later, came into the world “the great, great, great grandson of the famous poet, through an illicit liaison between his lordship and a maid at Newstead Abbey.” Many years later, I would thank leading Byron scholar Professor Leslie A Marchand “for his help and comments in private correspondence about the ‘records of births and deaths of the lower (servant) class in those days’ when trying to establish facts about the poet and Lucy, my great, great, great grandmother.”

Portrait of Lord Byron (oil on canvas) by the author.

Owning this blood connection would lead to certain expectations, as reflected in the following from a gothic magazine: “He was invited to appear on Central Television’s Saturday Night Live, but only on condition that he ‘dressed like Lord Byron’.”

Author (including shield from his personal coat-of-arms).

Byron was seldom without consolation of the female kind and of the various servant maids who slipped between his sheets to keep him company at Newstead, Lucy was far and away his favourite. He called her Lucinda, but in the following lines she appears as Lucietta:

                                                Lucietta my dear,

                                                That fairest of faces!

                                                Is made up of kisses …

A letter, 17 January 1809, to John Hanson confirms that “the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish.” On 4 February 1809, Byron wrote to Hanson: 

“Lucy’s annuity may be reduced to fifty pounds, and the other fifty go to the Bastard.” He had originally provided her with an annuity of one hundred pounds. Three years after making Lucy pregnant he put her in charge as revealed in a letter to Francis Hodgson, written from Newstead on 25 September 1811: “Lucy is extracted from Warwickshire [where his and her son had been weaned]; some very bad faces have been warned off the premises, and more promising substituted in their stead … Lucinda to be commander of all the makers and unmakers of beds in the household.”

Byron’s letters might suggest a callousness in his relationships that is perhaps unwarranted, but when his illegitimate child by Lucy was born, he wrote a poem in which he hailed his “dearest child of love.” He had always wanted a son and Lucy provided him with his first and last. Surviving progeny that followed were all female. He composed To My Son when Lucy’s child was born:

                                    Those flaxen locks, those eyes of blue,

                                    Bright as thy mother’s in their hue;

                                    Those rosy lips, whose dimples play

                                    And smile to steal the heart away,

                                    Recall a scene of former joy,

                                    And touch thy father’s heart, my Boy!

                                    And thou canst lisp a father’s name —

                                    Ah, William, were thine own the same, —

                                    No self-reproach — but, let me cease —

                                    My care for thee shall purchase peace;

                                    Thy mother’s shade shall smile in joy,

                                    And pardon all the past, my Boy!

                                    Her lowly grave the turf has prest,

                                    And thou hast known a stranger’s breast;

                                    Derision sneers upon thy birth,

                                    And yields thee scarce a name on earth;

                                    Yet shall not these one hope destroy, —

                                    A Father’s heart is thine, my Boy!

                                    Why, let the world unfeeling frown,

                                    Must I fond Nature’s claim disown?

                                    Ah, no — though moralists reprove,

                                    I hail thee, dearest child of love,

                                    Fair cherub, pledge of youth and joy —

                                    A Father guards they birth, my Boy!

                                    Oh, ’twill be sweet in thee to trace,

                                    Ere age has wrinkled o’er my face,

                                    Ere half my glass of life is run,

                                    At once a brother and a son;

                                    And all my wane of years employ

                                    In justice done to thee, my Boy!

                                    Although so young thy heedless sire,

                                    Youth will not damp parental fire;

                                    And, wert thou still less dear to me,

                                    While Helen’s form revives in thee,

                                    The breast which beat to former joy,

                                    Will ne’er desert its pledge, my Boy!

The Byron family coat-of-arms.

To My Son, incorrectly dated 1807 by Thomas Moore, was first published six years after Byron’s death. Lucy’s pregnancy, of course, did not take place until early 1809. Moore misread the date. Furthermore, the housemaid did not die the early death of the young mother eulogised by the poet whose “lowly grave the turf has prest.” According to the housekeeper, Nanny Smith, Lucy overcame the “high and mighty airs she gave herself as Byron’s favourite,” married a local lad, and ran a public house in Warwick. The fate of the child enters the forlorn and forgotten realm of so many illegitimate offspring of servants, and does not resurface again until a century later when my Derbyshire maternal grandparents returned the bloodline to Newstead Abbey Park where they purchased twenty or so acres and had a comfortable lodge built almost within the shadow of Byron’s ancestral home. In the poem, Byron changed the scenario of Lucy’s end to conform to the sentimental moralising of the period, which required that the fallen woman must pay with her life: “The mother’s shade shall smile in joy, / And pardon all the past, my Boy!” 

The poem addresses Byron’s natural child, challenging the convention that would withhold from his “little illegitmate” a father’s loving concern, along with any claim to social position. Byron’s pride, along with his sense of honour, was offended by the common practice of turning out pregnant maidservants. He knew the fate of country girls who bore illegitimate children, surviving on the pittance provided by parish poor rates, the workhouse, or making their way to the nearest city and entering a life of prostitution. Along with keeping Lucy employed, Byron made provision — exceptionally generous by the standards of the day — for her and their child in his will. Lucy was to have an annuity of £100 (later reduced to £50); the other £50 was to go to the child.

The poet’s only legitimate child was born of Annabella, Lady Byron, on the night of 9 December 1815. She was named Augusta Ada. His half-sister, also called Augusta, would later tell him that while Ada resembled her mother more than Byron, “still there is a look. I never saw a more healthy little thing. It was a melancholy pleasure to see Lady B for I had suffered great uneasiness of which I had given you hints.” Well might she feel uneasy, for, on 15 April 1814, she had given birth to a daughter of her own, Elizabeth Medora, whose father was rumoured to be Byron. There was absolutely no way he could be sure that he was the father, even though at the time this was assumed to be the case, and he never acknowledged the fact. He nonetheless showed great fondness for Medora, and Lady Byron herself was struck by the child’s extraordinary beauty. Absence of proof positive allowed licence for speculation, needless to say, of which the most astonishing example was the theory advanced by Richard Edgcumbe in Byron: the Last Phase (1909) that Medora was Byron’s daughter by his boyhood’s love, Mary Chaworth, obligingly adopted by Augusta. However, his half-sister Augusta did write to him of “a likeness in your picture of Mignonne [Medora].” 

Claire Clairmont gave birth at Bath to a daughter, on 12 January 1817, whom she named Alba, after Albé, the name the Shelley family had assigned to Byron while in Geneva. Byron asked rhetorically: “Is the brat mine? — I have reason to think so.” Before leaving England with her mother, the child was baptised “Clara Allegra Byron, born of Rt Hon George Gordon Lord Byron ye reputed father by Clara Mary Jane Clairmont.” Allegra was spoilt, wilful, and undisciplined — a carbon copy of her father when he was a child. By the age of four Byron arranged for her to be enrolled at a Capucine convent at Bagnacavallo, Italy. On 20 April 1822, Allegra, aged five years and three months, was dead, to the profound grief of the nuns who regarded her a very special child. When Byron heard the news he sank into a chair, and asked to be left alone. Three years later he told Lady Blessington: 

“While she lived, her existence never seemed necessary to my happiness; but no sooner did I lose her than it appeared to me as if I could not live without her.” The body of Allegra was sent back to England to be buried at Harrow Church near Peachey Stone where the poet had spent so many hours as a boy. The rector of Harrow refused to erect Byron’s proposed tablet, and the child was buried just inside the threshold of the church. Byron had wanted the words: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”

The author's portrait hangs alongside that of Lord Byron in a room full of family heirlooms.