The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

At Smyrna, for instance, there was a Mrs. Werry, whose name and effusive proceedings are mentioned by Hobhouse:

“Mrs. Werry actually cut off a lock of Byron’s hair on parting from him to-day, and shed a good many tears. Pretty well for fifty-six years at least!”

At Athens, too, there was a second affair of which there is a full and circumstantial account in Medwin’s “Conversations of Lord Byron.” The heroine was a Turkish girl of whom Byron was “fond as I have been of few women.” All went well, he told Medwin, until the Fast of Ramadan, when Law and Religion prohibit love-making for forty days, and the women are not allowed to quit their apartments. An attempt to arrange an assignation at this season was detected. The penalty was to be death, and Byron was to be kept in ignorance of everything until it was too late to interfere:

“A mere accident only enabled me to prevent the completion of the sentence. I was taking one of my usual evening rides by the sea-side, when I observed a crowd of people moving down to the shore, and the arms of the soldiers glittering among them. They were not so far off but that I thought I could now and then distinguish a faint and stifled shriek. My curiosity was forcibly excited, and I despatched one of my followers to inquire the cause of the procession. What was my horror to learn that they were carrying an unfortunate girl, sewn up in a sack, to be thrown into the sea! I did not hesitate as to what was to be done. I knew I could depend on my faithful Albanians, and rode up to the officer commanding the party, threatening in case of his refusal to give up his prisoner, that I would adopt means to compel him. He did not like the business he was on, or perhaps the determined look of my bodyguard, and consented to accompany me back to the city with the girl, whom I discovered to be my Turkish favourite. Suffice it to say that my interference with the chief magistrate, backed by a heavy bribe, saved her; but it was only on condition that I should break off all intercourse with her, and that she should immediately quit Athens, and be sent to her friends in Thebes. There she died, a few days after her arrival, of a fever, perhaps of love.”

“Perhaps of love” is the typical finishing touch of the “fatal man;” but Medwin may have added it. To Byron, at any rate, the incident counted for no more than any of the other incidents; but it was followed, or is said to have been followed, by an incident which counted for even less—the incident of the beautiful Mrs. Pedley, related in a curious anonymous work entitled: “The life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of the Right Hon. G. G. Noel Byron,” published in 1825.

Byron met Mrs. Pedley at Malta on his way home. She was the wife of a Dr. Pedley, beautiful and frivolous—addicted, it may be, to levity, as a relief from the dulness of garrison life. Her husband, for reasons which we are left to conjecture, turned her out of his house. She came to Byron’s house, sat down on the door-step, and refused to go. Perhaps she argued that, as Byron had loved one married woman, he was prepared to love all married women; but if so, she argued wrongly. Byron begged her to return to her home, and when she declined to do so, he sent a note to Dr. Pedley to ask what he had better do with her. The Dr.’s answer was to pack up the lady’s clothes and other belongings and send them to Byron’s rooms, with a message to the effect that he wished him joy of the adventure. The upshot of it all was that Byron consented to take Mrs. Pedley to England, but gave her very little of his society, and parted with her immediately on landing.

Such, at all events, is the story as the anonymous biographer relates it, though it is impossible to say on what authority it reposes. Even if it rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride.

We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont. He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. Even in “Don Juan” there is a well-known reference to the exploit:

“A better swimmer you could scarce see ever;
He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.”

It was a considerable feat, no doubt, though he was only an hour and ten minutes in the water; but the anonymous biographer already quoted adds some details which make it, if not more glorious, at least more dramatic. Byron, according to this version of the story, was helped out of the water in a state of extreme exhaustion, and lay three days in a fisherman’s hut, nursed and tended by the fisherman’s wife. The fisherman did not in the least know whom he was entertaining, but believed his guest, whose language he could not speak, to be a needy shipwrecked sailor. On his departure, therefore, he pressed on him not only bread and cheese and wine, but also a few copper coins. Byron accepted the gift, without attempting to explain, and a few days afterwards sent his servant with a return gift: a brace of pistols, a fowling piece, a fishing net, and some silk to make a gown for the fisherman’s wife. The fisherman was so overwhelmed that he set out at once in his boat to thank the generous donor, and was caught in a sudden squall and drowned.