BYRON: THE LAST PHASE
BYRON:
THE LAST PHASE
BY RICHARD EDGCUMBE
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
1909
TO
MRS. CHARLES CALL,
DAUGHTER OF EDWARD TRELAWNY, BYRON’S
COMPANION IN GREECE,
I DEDICATE THIS WORK AS A MARK OF AFFECTION
AND ESTEEM
PREFACE
This book has no pretensions; it is merely a record of events andimpressions which nearly forty years of close study have accumulated.There seems to be a general agreement that the closing scenes of Byron’sshort life have not been adequately depicted by his biographers. From thetime of Byron’s departure from Ravenna, in the autumn of 1821, hisdisposition and conduct underwent a transformation so complete that itwould have been difficult to recognize, in the genial, unselfishpersonality who played so effective a rôle at Missolonghi, the gloomymisanthrope of 1811, or the reckless libertine of the following decade.
The conduct of Byron in Greece seems to have come as a revelation to hiscontemporaries, and his direction of complex affairs, in peculiarly tryingcircumstances, certainly deserves more attention than it has received.Records made on the spot by men whose works are now, for the most part,out of print have greatly simplified my task, and I hope that thefollowing pages may be acceptable to those who have not had an opportunityof studying that picturesque phase of Byron’s career. I should have muchpreferred to preserve silence on the subject of his separation from hiswife. Unfortunately, the late Lord Lovelace, in giving his sanction to thebaseless and[Pg viii] forgotten slanders of a bygone age, has recently assailedthe memory of Byron’s half-sister, and has set a mark of infamy upon herwhich cannot be erased without referring to matters which ought never tohave been mentioned.
In order to traverse statements made in ‘Astarte,’ it was necessary toreveal an incident which, during Byron’s lifetime, was known only by thosewho were pledged to silence. With fuller knowledge of things hidden fromByron’s contemporaries, we may realize the cruelty of those futilepersecutions to which Mrs. Leigh was subjected by Lady Byron and heradvisers, under the impression that they could extract the confession of acrime which existed only in their prurient imaginations. Mrs. Leigh, inone of her letters to Hobhouse, says, ‘I have made it a rule to besilent—that is to say, As Long As I Can.’ Although the strain must havebeen almost insupportable she died with her secret unrevealed, and themystery which Byron declared ‘too simple to be easily found out’ hashitherto remained unsolved. I regret being unable more precisely toindicate the source of information embodied in the concluding portions ofthis work. The reader may test the value of my statements by the light ofcitations which seem amply to confirm them. At all events, I claim to haveshown by analogy that Lord Lovelace’s accusation against Mrs. Leigh isgroundless, and therefore his contention, that Byron’s memoirs weredestroyed because they implicated Mrs. Leigh, is absolutely untenable.Those memoirs were destroyed, as we now know, because both Hobhouse andMrs. Leigh feared possible revelations concerning another person, whosefeelings and inter