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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Mr. Johnstone … who had more acquaintance with the springs and wires that move people than I had, suggested that we should wait upon Lady Oxford …
When the asterisks in the following passage of Byron's diary are replaced by the correct name, light is shed on the practically unexplored problem of Byron's political connections and ambitions during his life in London—and on the question, crucial to an understanding of the later Byron, of what was going on in the poet's mind in his twenty-fifth year.
1 W. J. Baldwin, a debtor in King's Bench Prison, desired petitions to hasten the operation of Lord Redesdale's Insolvent Debtors Act. It had been passed, but debtors had difficulty receiving its benefits. See Parliamentary Debates, xxvii, 97–103.
2 The Works of Lord Byron, rev. ed., Letters and Journals, ed. by R. E. Prothero (London, 1901), ii, 359; hereinafter L & J.
3 The Political Career of Lord Byron (New York, 1924), p. 71.
4 She had “seen little or nothing of the world.” Lord Byron's Correspondence, ed. by John Murray (London, 1922), i, 223; hereinafter Corr.—Francis Gribble, The Love Affairs of Lord Byron (1910), pp. 176–177, guessed that Byron's political development might have been due to Mary Chaworth s influence; but Gribble's evidence was a misconstruction of Augusta and Lady Frances materials since cleared up by the publication of Byron's letters to Lady Melbourne.
5 Corr., i, 102.
6 In so far as she concerned herself with other politics, it was to keep Byron out of them. See below.
7 Lady Blessington, Conversations with Lord Byron (Boston, n. d.), p. 250.
8 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London, 1824), p. 68.
9 Mentioned in L & J, v, 424 and Corr., ii, 115.—Hereinafter all quoted passages without annotation are from L & J, or Corr.
10 L & J, ii, 188.
11 André Maurois, Byron (New York, 1930), p. 206.
12 In December Lady Bessborough asked Byron to write Caroline a soothing letter. “‘Soothing!‘ quotha” he fumed, “I wonder who wants it most! I think at least some portion of that same soothing syrup ought to fall to my share.” Corr., i, 118.
13 The factor of Burdett's reappearance on the scene, even if quite ostensibly in a political capacity, must be considered; it may have had something to do with Byron's “indifference” to political intrigue.
14 “'Tis said,” scribbled Byron to Lady Melbourne, “Indifference marks the present time …” Corr., i, 182.
15 I.e., “a man/To have reached an empire: to an empire born/He will bequeath none; nothing but a name.” Sardanapalus, i.i.14 ff.
16 “… the populace are not interested,—only the higher and middle orders. I wish that the peasantry were; they are a fine savage race of two-legged leopards.” L & J, v, 184–185.
17 See L & J, vi, 210: “I need not suggest to the Committee the very great advantage which must accrue to Great Britain from the successs of the Greeks, and their probable commercial relations with England in consequence … the English people … in their present passion for every kind of speculation … need not cross the American seas …”
18 Examiner, v (June 14, 1812), 384.
19 For list of members in 1812–13 see Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright (London, 1826), ii, 380–383.
19a Among these was William Alexander Madocks, builder of the Tremadoc Embankment, an enterprise of science and philanthropy in which Shelley became interested, philosophically and financially, in September, 1812.
20 The party name Radical was not adopted by the independent Reformers until shortly after Byron left England, but historians customarily use the term for the Burdettites even of the first decade.
21 James Perry. See Michael Roberts, The Whig Party 1807–12 (London, 1939), pp. 288–289, 292.
22 See William Cobbett, History of the Regency and Reign of King George the Fourth (London, 1830), i, ch. iv, par. 177.
23 Thomas Bailey, Annals of Nottinghamshire (London, 1853), iv, 333–334.
24 G. S. Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (London, 1913), p. 344.
25 Speech at Westminster meeting August 5, 1812, reported in Examiner, v, 509.
26 W. Elliot in Commons May 8. Parl. Deb., xxiii, 110.
27 It was only “the genteel part of the reformers” that Byron deemed tolerable: “Burdett is the only one of them in whose company a gentleman would be seen, unless at a public meeting, or in a public-house.” Byron of course had been seen at the Crown and Anchor Tavern meetings.—In 1820 he scolded Hobhouse for associating with “blackguard Hunt and Cobby,” “those blackguard Reformers who made you defy, and leave the Whigs …” —Cp. L & J, iv, 411.
28 Corr., i, 161.
29 Parl. Hist., xviii, 1295.
30 See Roberts, p. 237.
31 “Lord Grey … was convinced … that reform was the alternative to revolution. But Lord Lansdowne was timid, Lord Holland tepid, Lord Melbourne merely tolerant, and Lord Palmerston frankly bored …” A. W. Tilby, Lord John Russell (New York, 1931), p. 37.
32 C. B. Roylance Kent, The English Radicals (London, 1899), pp. 91, 88n.—Kent distinguishes only two phases in the period of 1761–1832, thereby obscuring the special significance of the confusion prevalent during the transitional phase. (Kent's third period is outside the scope of the present discussion.)
33 Examiner, v, 526.
34 Thelwall, an early Reformer. See Kent, p. 153.—Compare the theme of Byron's Curse of Minerva.
35 Don Juan, x, xxxii.
36 Corr., i, 49–50, 57, 69, 88, and L & J, ii, 30.
37 Cp. Curse of Minerva, lines 239–278, and Don Juan xii, iv.
38 See Halévy, A History of the English People (London, 1937), ii, 99.
39 The “frames” of the stockingers were “tools” used in the putting-out system. The Luddites destroyed only those owned by employing hosiers who lowered wages. See F. O. Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (London, 1934), pp. 70–77.
40 Thomas Coutts. See W. J. Lawson, History of Banking (Boston, 1852), p. 132.—According to John Lord, Capital and Steam Power 1750–1800 (London, 1923), p. 232, “instead of petitioning the House of Commons … industry began to influence—if not control—the representative body. That the direct representation of industry in the House remained small, at least up to 1860, is probably due to the increasing interest in trade of the landowning party.”
41 Roberts, p. 236.
42 The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland (1791–1811) (London, 1908), i, 254, explaining why (in 1799) “Lord Holland has gone to Court.”—Lord Holland had gained some popularity among Manchester and Liverpool workmen for supporting their petitions against the Combination Act, but he was not unhappy to relinquish this popularity to more “Jacobinical” spokesmen, Burdett and Earl (“Citizen”) Stanhope. Ibid., ii, 102.
43 Brougham to Holland, April 6, 1811. Arthur Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester, 1927), p. 271.
44 Fox, in office in 1806, found it convenient to forget Reform. See Roberts, p. 173.
45 Report on the MSS of J. B. Fortesque (London, 1927), x, 240–241. Thomas Grenville to Lady Grenville.
46 First formed in 1780.—“The Radical movement was during its earlier stages essentially middle-class or bourgeois. At a later period … the agitation descended to the lower strata of society.” Kent, p. 91.
47 “Viz., Mr. Whitbread, Mr. Lambton, and Mr. Tierney.” Memoirs of the Whig Party (London, 1852), i, 13–14.—Cp. Lady Holland, i, 101.
48 Quoted in Kent, pp. 159–160.
49 Cart-wright, i, 192.
50 Lady Holland, i, 190.
51 He was dismissed, nevertheless, from lord-lieutenancy of the West Riding and from colonelcy in the militia. See ibid., i, 177, and the Annual Register, xl (January 24, 1798), 5–6.
52 Examiner, v, 384.
53 “I see nothing left for it [the government of England] but a republic now; an opinion which I have held aloof as long as it would let me. Come it must … and I am sorry for it.” Corr., ii, 203.—In 1820 Byron talked of taking the side of the “Luddites” if a revolution should come and provided he should lose all his money in the collapse of the Funds. Yet “If you but knew how I despise and abhor all these men and all these things,” he protested, “you would easily suppose how reluctantly I contemplate being called upon to act with or against any of the parties. All I desire is to preserve what remains of the fortunes of our house …”
54 This political irony is the tragic theme of Byron's Marino Faliero. “'Tis mine to sound the knell, and strike the blow/Which shall unpeople many palaces,/And hew the highest genealogie trees …”
55 Don Juan, xv, xxiii.
56 “Byron, on entering life, found himself out of the pale of this sanctum [aristocratic society], to which, by birth, he had so good a title.” Sir Egerton Brydges, An Impartial Portrait of Lord Byron (Paris, 1825), p. 53.
57 Byron to Hobhouse, November 3, 1811: “I always was, and always shall be, an embarrassed man …” Corr., i, 57.
58 Lady Holland, ii, 8–11, 136–137.
59 In the somewhat jaundiced eyes of Lady Holland. Ibid., ii, 9.
60 In 1798 Lady Holland was chagrined that “Ld. Oxford was the only person” who signed her husband's protest against the Assessed Tax Bill. Ibid., i, 170. And on the rejection of the Duke of Bedford's motion against torture and flogging of the Irish, several Whig Lords jointly signed one protest; Lord Oxford entered a separate one of his own. Ann. Reg., xl, 216–217.
61 See Lady Holland, ii, 9, and The Court of England under George IV, founded on a diary [by Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury] (London, 1896), i, 245. Yet cp. Joseph Farington, Diary (London, 1924), iii, 158; iv, 31.
62 M. W. Patterson, Sir Francis Burdett and Eis Times (1770–1844) (London, 1931), p. 128.
63 Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Life of Shelley (London, 1906), p. 426.
64 Parl. Eist., xxxiii, 172–180, 202.—Publication of Lord Oxford's story in the Oracle or Public Advertiser was considered a breach of privilege.
65 Parl. Deb., iv, 744, and ibid., 3d ser., viii, 219.
66 M. de Jaucourt to M. de Talleyrand, November 20, 1814. Correspondence of Prince Talleyrand and King Louis XVIII (New York, 1881), p. 188.
67 Lord Oxford's “mind and body were equally contemptible in the scale of creation,” said Byron. Medwin, p. 68.
68 Ann. Reg., xl (1798), [191.—A Tory had proposed, “Let us attack [i.e., tax] the capitalists.” Tierney, at the time a Reform Whig, had replied with the Whig argument mentioned.
69 The Diaries of Sylvester Douglas (Lord Glenbervie), ed. by Francis Bickley (London, 1928), ii, 81.—This is Lady Oxford's account in 1810 to Princess Caroline to Lady Glenbervie to Lord Glenbervie.
70 Patterson, p. 57.
71 Countess of Airlie, In Whig Society (London, 1921), p. 43.
72 See Lord Granville, Leveson Gower, Private Correspondence 1781 to 1821 (London, 1916), i, 365, and Correspondence of Charlotte Grenville, Lady Williams Wynn, 1795–1832 (London, 1920), p. 70.
73 Farington, iv, 31, and Rev. Samuel Parr, Works (London, 1828), viii, 432.—And see Farington, iii, 158–159.
74 And, rumor has it, to her lovers. The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley (New York, 1914), ii, 35. But compare T. D. Hardy, Memoirs of Lord Langdale [Henry Bickersteth] (London, 1852), i, 174, 177, 213.—Byron probably met Bickersteth with the Oxfords in 1813. In 1819 when he was, according to Lady Shelley, the brains of the Burdett election committee, Byron twitted Hobhouse for associating with this “man-midwife.”
75 Parr, viii, 434.—Jane confessed merrily to her old friend Dr. Parr, who was something of a radical himself.
76 In “Dr. Samuel Parr; or Whiggism in Its Relation to Literature,” 1831, Collected Writings (London, 1897), v, 75–76.
77 Correspondence of Lord Burghersh, Earl of Westmoreland (London, 1912), p. 98. February, 1815.
78 Farington, vii, 276.
79 Correspondence of Talleyrand, p. 197.—Cf. Examiner, viii (January 1, 1815), 7.
80 Journal of Henry Edward Fox (London, 1923), pp. 166–167, and Creevey's Life and Times, ed. by John Gore (New York, 1934), p. 187.
80a See Hobhouse, Recollections of a Long Life (London, 1909), i, 41: “June 24.—Dined at Lord Oxford's, met Sir F. Burdett, Rogers, Monk Lewis, etc…. Lady Oxford most uncommon in her talk, and licentious—uncommonly civil; made a push to get me into the Hampden Club. For the first time in my life knew how to put off a question and civilly say, No.”—Byron had joined June 8.—It was a year later that Lady Oxford's interest in Shelley was aroused, when she was asked to exert on him her “wise and gentle influence.” Hogg, pp. 425–426. According to Hogg, Shelley's “female friends” hoped that association with the affable Countess might lend him a degree of self assurance in “elegant society.”
81 In the Tower Burdett was visited by Bickersteth, Henry Hunt, and Lady Oxford. Farington, vi, 44, and Patterson.
82 Sir Denis LeMarchant, Memoir of John Charles Viscount Althor p Third Earl Spencer (London, 1876), pp. 120–121.
83 See Glenbervie, ii, 67.—The Tory ministers would fall with the Regent, for, as the Princess remarked, the Regent was the ministers.
84 Cp. The Court of England, i, 17.
85 Farington, vi, 44, and Glenbervie, ii, 81.
86 The Court of England, i, 13–14.
87 Those recorded in the Bury and Glenbervie diaries when Ladies Campbell [Bury] and Glenbervie were in attendance.
88 Glenbervie, ii, 65, 126.—Ward, a newcomer in 1810, was soon on a footing of suspicious intimacy with the Princess. In 1813–14 Ward was the member of this group with whom Byron became most companionable.
89 The question of the date of Byron's acquaintance with the Princess and her group is treated in my “Lord Byron as Rinaldo,” to be published in a forthcoming issue.
90 The Court of England, ii, 283–284.
91 Glenbervie, ii, 113.
92 Halévy, i, 26.
93 Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury (London, 1844), iii, 166.
94 W. D. Bowman, The Divorce Case of Queen Caroline (New York, 1930), p. 124, and Thomas Moore, Memoirs, iv, 84.
95 Either Weishaupt's revolutionary Illuminati or a Rosicrucian religious sect. Glenbervie, ii, 54.
96 Quotations in this paragraph are from Glenbervie, ii, 35, 37, 70, 56.—Cp. Farington, vi, 44. Princess Caroline backed Lord Grenville against the Tory candidate, Lord Eldon, in the election of a chancellor of Oxford. According to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, it was Shelley's active championing of Lord Grenville in this election that produced Shelley's unpopularity with the authorities of University College which underlay his later expulsion from Oxford. N. I. White, Shelley (New York, 1940), i, 87.
97 Memoirs of Sir James Mackintosh (Boston, 1853), ii, 264. April 3, 1813.
98 Sir Charles Petrie, George Canning (London, 1930), p. 138. There scarcely existed the forces in 1820 to “overthrow the monarchy itself,” but many a contemporary imagined so.
99 Op. cit., i, chap, iv, par. 166.
100 In March Burdett had been able to muster only six votes on a motion for the abolition of flogging in the army. Parl. Deb., xxi, 1292.
101 Cart-wright, ii, 2.
102 The Court of England, i, 21, early 1811.—In March, 1812, Gower protested in Parliament that the Regent would not receive him with petitions from thousands of starving constituents. Byron apparently refers to this incident in his April speech when he talks of “spurned petitions.”—In 1815 Creevey reckoned Gower as one of “the Mountain.”
103 “‘It appears to me,’ said the Princess one day, ‘that jealousy and politics are untying the knot of Lord Archibald] H[amilton]'s love for Lady Oxford. It is said that Lady Oxford visits Mr. O'Connell and Sir F[rancis] B[urdet]t every day, and Lord A[rchibal]d does not approve; but the greater reason still is, that the lady prefers Lord G[owe]r’.” The Court of England, i, 18.
104 Ibid., i, 85–86. My italics.
105 Parl. Deb., xxiii, 1271–72.
106 Op. cit., i, ch. iv, par. 166.
107 Examiner, v, 796.
108 The Court of England, i, 87–88.
109 Corr., i, 121–122.—Lady Melbourne had met Lady Campbell at Brighton when the latter heard from the Princess of the threatened publication and may have been led to question Byron by something dropped in conversation then. The Court of England, i, 87.
110 Journal of the House of Lords.
111 L & J, ii, 318; iii, 112 (Byron's response in July, 1814 on being “ordered to town to vote” on an Ireland bill); and Don Juan, viii. li.
112 The Court of England, i, 109.
113 Ibid., i, 110.
114 Lady Charlotte [Campbell] Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, ed. by A. F. Stewart (London, 1908) [additional material to that in the edition called The Court of England] ii, 375–376.—The Princess cannot help suspecting a “Mrs. B—k” who is “very busy to carry messages back and forward to Lord Grey.” “Holland House is, of course, entirely against poor me, and they have sent her as a spy to Black[hea]th.”
115 The Court of England, ii, 275. A few days after February 10, and before February 23, 1813.
116 Report in The Globe, February 19, 1813.
117 The Court of England, i, 113.
118 The Bath Archives … Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson (London, 1873), ii, 17. February 21, 1813. “Sir Francis, himself, told this to the gentleman from whom I have it.”
119 Parl. Deb., xxiv, 706.
119a Ubiquitous Samuel Rogers was present. “How I like Lord Archibald's manliness in Parliament,” he wrote to Hamilton's sister. Ironically, news of Byron's capture by the Enchantress was getting around just as Byron was beginning to have qualms at her dividing her attention with Senatorial matters. “Quite a settled thing,” wrote Ward in February, “between Lady Oxford and Lord B—–n. Poor Archy! and poor Lady Caroline!” Archy had apparently returned to her favor after the Gower affair, only to be supplanted by Byron. Rogers seems to have heard of the newest affair from Lady Oxford, rather than from Byron. He wrote to Hamilton's sister: “I most sincerely wish you joy upon the event [Jane's taking a new lover, ”Childe Harold“], though it gave some disturbance to a friend of ours [Archibald], and I believe was the cause of a gravity which I could not account for at Hamilton [Hamilton Palace in Edinburgh, where Rogers had been visiting in 1812].” Byron had referred to the same “disturbance” when he said in November, “We manage, in our infinite love of quiet, to disturb Ireland [Caroline Lamb] and Scotland [Archibald Hamilton] besides some part of England and Wales.” See Sir Herbert Maxwell, Sir Charles Murray, A Memoir (Edinburgh, 1898), p. 21.
120 Loc. cit., par. 168.
121 Parl. Deb., xxiv, 1106.
122 Letters to “Ivy” from the First Earl of Dudley (London, 1905), p. 193.
123 Loc. cit., par. 173. Cf. Parl. Deb., xxiv, 1154.—It may have been Whitbread's performance on this occasion that led Byron to remark that “Whitbread was the Demosthenes of bad taste and vulgar vehemence, but strong, and English.” L & J, ii, 197.
124 Lady Bury, op. cit. (1908), ii, 375.
125 Parl. Deb. xxv, 117.
126 Ibid., p. 277. March 23.
127 Toward the end (March 22) several lords who had been members of the Delicate Investigation of 1806 spoke to defend their names against some “malicious slanders,” but nothing more was done. Ibid., pp. 207 ff.
128 The Court of England, ii, 155.
129 Loc. cit., par. 175.—Burdett even went so far, according to Cobbett, as to endeavor to sabotage the efforts of Cobbett and Wood to send the Princess an address from the Corporation of London. Ibid., pars. 177–186, corroborated by Examiner, April 4, 11, 1813.
129a Byron was equally skeptical of the innocence of the witnesses brought against her: “I shall make you blush,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne during the week of furor over Cochrane Johnstone's motion, “by asking you if you have read the perjuries in the Morning Post with the immaculate deposition of the Lady Douglas. [Sir John and Lady Douglas had given absurd testimony against the Princess in 1806.] Much good will the publication add to the rising marriageables of this innocent Metropolis, and I doubt not that for the rest of the nineteenth century everybody will be ‘satisfied with only Sir John’.”
130 The Court of England, ii, 239.
131 “Byron's Stage Fright: the History of His Ambition and Fear of Writing for the Stage,” ELH (September, 1939), vi, 219–243.
132 “… but not in the petty politics I see now preying upon our miserable country.” L & J, vi, 33.
133 Corr., ii, 204.—Cp. Corr., ii, 216, L & J, v, 209, iv, 83, Don Juan x, lxxxiv–lxxxv, etc.
134 L & J, ii, 339.
135 See Cartwright, ii, 56–62.
136 Ibid, and Parl. Deb., xxvi, 527, 993 ff.
136a “The abuse against me in all directions is vehement, unceasing, loud—some of it good, and all of it hearty,” reported Byron. But Tom Moore's advice (“oratorical hint”) to speak out in Parliament could not rouse him.
137 See L & J, ii, 340.
138 The Court of England, ii, 6. Letter dates itself by reference to Ward's Paris trip (late April) and the fact that “Wednesday the 27th” occurred in April, not May, in 1814.
139 Lady Bury, op. cit. (1908), ii, 410. The “song which Lord Byron used to sing” was “Piangete Amabile.”
