He went on to Trinity College Cambridge and then Mediterranean travel. Not Spain or Portugal, but Lord Byron!Īt Newstead Abbey young Byron made friends with local people who enjoyed staging plays, and they encouraged him to write his first volumes of poetry. But the Wicked Lord outlived both his son and his grandson and when he died the title and the ruined estate in Nottinghamshire were passed to his 10-year-old great-nephew in Scotland. He laid waste to the house of Newstead Abbey, cut down trees and killed many deer. When his son eloped with his niece, the Wicked Lord decided to prevent him from having anything to inherit. But later a wilder streak began to emerge, and he killed his cousin and neighbour in a duel in a London tavern. The Wicked Lord had started his career as a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy and had also become a governor of a charitable hospital. It came from his grandfather’s brother, who was known as ‘the Wicked Lord’. My school friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent).”īut by now he had a title. He made firm friendships with other boys at school.

He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion.” He lacked discipline and neglected his studies – but soon managed to fall in love, to Catherine’s concern.īyron’s mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight (Thomas Stewardson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) His mother sometimes spoiled him and often kept him off school.

Byron went to Aberdeen Grammar School, and later Harrow where he represented the school in the first-ever Eton v Harrow cricket match. The worst of all maladiesĬatherine moved back to Aberdeenshire. She called him George Gordon, the George after her own father. In a little rented flat in London she nursed the little girl back to health, and in January 1788 gave birth to a son of her own – the future poet Byron. She, heavily pregnant, followed him – and all she got was his little sickly daughter Augusta. He went through her money in two years, and the estate was sold to clear his gambling debts. The Gordons were rich – until Catherine married Mad Jack. This time it was Catherine Gordon of Gight in Aberdeenshire. They lived on her money till it ran out and they fled to France to escape their creditors.Įngraving of Byron’s father, Captain John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, date unknown, source )Īmelia gave birth to a daughter, Augusta, but she herself soon died – and Mad Jack returned to England to look for another source of income. John Byron – ‘Mad Jack’ – left the army to pursue conquests of another type in London, among them Amelia, Lady Carmarthen. His grandfather was a Naval Vice-Admiral, and his father a captain in the Coldstream Guards.

That same military spirit ran in Byron’s family. The future Ada Lovelace was born in a year of European conflict, 1815 – the year Napoleon’s dreams were shattered at Waterloo.

Enchantress of numbers