George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street in London, England[1] – his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the department store John Lewis.
Byron was the only child of Captain John Byron (known as 'Jack') and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice Admiral John Byron and Sophia Trevanion.[13] Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Byron's grandfather set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After he became embroiled in a tempestuous voyage during the American Revolutionary War, he became nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack' Byron by the press.[14]
Byron's father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia, Marchioness of Carmarthen, with whom he was having an affair – the wedding took place just weeks after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months pregnant.[15] The marriage was not a happy one, and their first two children – Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy.[16] Amelia herself died in 1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's half-sister Augusta Mary.[17] Though Amelia died from a wasting illness, probably tuberculosis, the press reported that her heart had been broken out of remorse for leaving her husband. Much later, 19th-century sources blamed Jack's own "brutal and vicious" treatment of her.[18]
Jack would then marry Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for her fortune.[19] To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron Gordon of Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts, and in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some £23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only £150.[18] In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son.[20]
George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London, and christened at St Marylebone Parish Church.[1] His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as her husband remained absent, his mother named him after her own father George Gordon of Gight,[21] who was a descendant of James I of Scotland and who had died by suicide some four years earlier, in 1779.[22]
Catherine Gordon, Byron's mother, by Thomas StewardsonByron's mother moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, and Byron spent part of his childhood there.[22] His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy,[22] which could be partly explained by her husband's continuously borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to support his demands. One of these loans enabled him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably tuberculosis – in 1791.[23]
When Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing state of disrepair and, rather than live there, she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.[24][25]
Described as "a woman without judgment or self-command", Catherine either spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her drinking disgusted him and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent, which made it difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated and, in a fit of temper, referred to him as "a lame brat".[26] However, Byron's biographer, Doris Langley Moore, in her 1974 book Accounts Rendered, paints a more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron, showing how she was a staunch supporter of her son and sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions 19th-century biographer John Galt's claim that she over-indulged in alcohol.[27]
Byron's mother-in-law Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, died in 1822, and her will required that he change his surname to "Noel" in order to inherit half of her estate. He accordingly obtained a Royal Warrant, enabling him to "take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point, he signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being merely the name of the peerage, in this case simply "Byron"). Some have speculated that he did this so that his initials would read "N.B.", mimicking those of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. Lady Byron eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady Wentworth".[28]
