Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then fought on the King’s side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton—a loyal, valiant, and impetuous soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke Haslerig’s cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. “By Lord Byron’s improper charge,” Prince Rupert reported, “much harm hath been done.”
He had been given his peerage—with limitations in default of issue male to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies—in the midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second—a lady concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys’ Diary. She was, Pepys tells us, one of Charles II.’s mistresses—his “seventeenth mistress aboard,” who, as the diarist proceeds, “did not leave him till she got him to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be to God! she died before she got it.”
This first Lord Byron died childless, and the title passed to his brother Richard, who had also distinguished himself in the war on the King’s side. He was one of the colonels whose gallantry at Edgehill the University of Oxford rewarded with honorary degrees; and he was Governor, successively, of Appleby and Newark. He tried to seduce his kinsman, Colonel Hutchinson, from his allegiance to the Parliament, but without avail. “Except,” Colonel Hutchinson told him, “he found his own heart prone to such treachery, he might consider that there was, if nothing else, so much of a Byron’s blood in him that he should very much scorn to betray or quit a trust he had undertaken.”
The third Lord, Richard’s son William, succeeded to the title in 1679. His marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth, brings the name of the heroine of the poet’s first and last love into the story; and he is also notable as the first Byron who had a taste, if not actually a turn, for literature. Thomas Shipman, the royalist singer whose songs indicate, according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe’s criticism in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” that “the severe morals of the Roundheads were even less to his taste than their politics,” was his intimate friend; and Shipman’s “Carolina” contains a set of verses from his pen:
“My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman’s faithful friend;
And though I cannot amply speak your praise,
I’ll wear the myrtle, tho’ you wear the bays.”
That is a fair specimen of the third Lord Byron’s poetical style; and it is clear that his descendant did not need to be a great poet in order to improve upon it. Of his son, the fourth Lord, who died in 1736, there is nothing to be said; but his grandson, the fifth Lord, lives in history and tradition as “the wicked Lord Byron.” The report of his arraignment before his fellow peers on the charge of murdering his relative, Mr. William Chaworth, in 1765, may be read in the Nineteenth Volume of State Trials, though the most careful reading is likely to leave the rights of the case obscure.
The tragedy, whatever the rights of it, occurred after one of the weekly dinners of the Nottinghamshire County Club, at the Star and Garter Tavern in Pall Mall. The quarrel arose out of a heated discussion on the subject of preserving game—a topic which country gentlemen are particularly liable to discuss with heat. Lord Byron is said to have advocated leniency, and Mr. Chaworth severity, towards poachers. The argument led to a wager; and the two men went upstairs together—apparently for the purpose of arranging the terms of the wager—and entered a room lighted only by a dull fire and a single candle. As soon as the door was closed, they drew their swords and fought, and Lord Byron ran Mr. Chaworth through the body.
Those are the only points on which all the depositions agree. Lord Byron said that Chaworth, who was the better swordsman of the two, challenged him to fight, and that the fight was conducted fairly. The case for the prosecution was that Chaworth did not mean to fight, and that Lord Byron attacked him unawares. Chaworth, though he lingered for some hours, and was questioned on the subject, said nothing to exonerate his assailant. That, broadly speaking, was the evidence on which the peers had to come to their decision; and they found Lord Byron not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. Pleading his privilege as a peer, he was released on payment of the fees.
Society, however, inclined to the view that he had not fought fairly. Two years before he had been Master of the Stag-hounds. Now he was cut by the county, and relapsed into misanthropic debauchery. He quarrelled with his son, the Honorable William Byron, sometime M.P. for Morpeth, for contracting a marriage of which he disapproved. He drove his wife away from Newstead by his brutality, and consorted with a low-born “Lady Betty.” The stories of his shooting his coachman and trying to drown his wife were untrue, but his neighbours believed them, and behaved accordingly; and an unpleasant picture of his retirement may be found in Horace Walpole’s Letters.
“The present Lord,” Horace Walpole writes, “hath lost large sums, and paid part in old oaks; five thousand pounds worth have been cut down near the house. En revanche, he has built two baby forts to pay his country in castles for the damage done to the Navy, and planted a handful of Scotch firs that look like plough-boys dressed in old family liveries for a public day.”