literary lairs AthomewithDonJuan
Mad, bad and dangerous to know, butwhere did he live?Opening a newseries looking at historic architecture with links towriters and poets, Philippa Stockley focuses on Byron and his buildings – some of themin trouble
O
n a cold January 22, 1788, George Gordon Byron, later the 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale, was born in the back drawing roomof what is now 24, then number 16, Holles Street, London. Mention is firstmade of
this street, which still stands, in 1723. Captain John Byron, his father, “Mad Jack”, was absent. Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon, hadmarried himin 1785, a financially imprudentmove for the 23-year-old heiress and 13th Laird of Gight, who was worth a vast £25,000. For, before her only son was born, her feckless husband had sold her estate, Gight, in Aberdeenshire, including Gight Castle, to the Earl of Aberdeen, for £18,690, to pay off his debts. He had already squandered the fortune of his first wife Amelia, Baroness Conyers, with whomhe had a daughter, Augusta – later to be Byron’s lover. What is left of Gight Castle still stands, fourmiles
east of Fyvie on the north shore of the River Ythan, its land neighbouring the estate of the 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. The L-plan tower house, built in themid- 1500s, which undoubtedly would have been Byron’s inheritance, was now intended for Aberdeen’s son. Yet it was abandoned in 1791 when young Lord Haddo died after falling fromhis horse; and fell rapidly into decay, which was never stemmed. There is no record of Byron ever visiting, but
Gight haunted and thwarted himto the extent that he attempted to buy it back in 1821, three years before his death; and its quality of grandiloquent medieval ruination certainly infuses his poetry. The ground floor is still comparatively intact, with
stout, vaulted stone cellars and store-rooms. The small, defensible door, a few windows and the kitchen fire-place are visible, and remnants of a small spiral staircase leading up to what would have been the great hall. Little else remains of this ivy clad ruin still owned by the Haddo estate. Mrs Byronmoved with her baby son to Aberdeen,
a city that she found provincial, and where they stayed at several rented addresses. By the time Captain Jack died in debt in Valenciennes in 1791, he had exhausted her fortune. The Byron story is beset with reversals of fortune
Top, George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron, painted in 1822 by WilliamWest, when the poet was at the height of his powers. Debt was as much part of his life as dalliance, and the Byron family story was for generations bound up with the finances of Newstead Abbey (above, in the early 1700s)
and debt that also informthe history of his houses. Relatively impoverished, young, club-footed George Gordon, as he was called, schooling in cold Aberdeen, had no real expectation of inheriting Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, when he was ten – by which he also became elevated to the title of Sixth Lord Byron, and was immediately addressed as dominus at roll call. For the remainder of his life, and even when forced to sell it to pay off debt, Newstead was the
property with which Byron identified. It was to become a powerful poeticmotif; ametaphor both of his ownmuch vaunted nobility, and of failure and decaying splendour. The estate was already a capacious ruin when Byron inherited it, immortalised in 1807 in “On Leaving Newstead”: “Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow
winds whistle; Thou, the hall ofmy fathers, art gone to decay.” Newstead is also readily identifiable in both “Don Juan”, and “Childe Harold”.
NEWSTEAD Abbey – “Not an Abbey”, as Pevsner’s account crisply begins – was built as a priory for Augustinian Canons around 1170. The first church had no aisles; a North aisle was added in the 13th century, as was the superbWest Front, of three bays divided by buttresses, allmade of the local, very hard, white Mansfield sandstone which is used throughout Newstead. Despite prolonged neglect, the stone has weathered relatively well so that, according to Donald Insall’smasterful 2006 conservation plan (so far unimplemented), it is repairable – though in parts weathering has been severe, with savage loss of fine carved detail. The building is owned by NottinghamCity Council. The now famousWestWindow, certainly the
leitmotif of Newstead is, Pevsner notes, as large as any in the Perpendicular style; a Virgin and child in a niche above remains and has very recently been conserved as part of current owner Nottingham Council’s ongoing programme. The absence of a south aislemeant that the North Cloister took up that space and also helped support theWest Front. Following the dissolution of themonasteries,
Newstead priory was sold by Henry VIII to Sir John Byron of Colwick for £810. Byron tore down the church bar the façade, re-using its stone to build a substantial house around the cloister; the refectory becoming the great chamber. The fourth lordmade substantial changes and improvements while William, fifth Lord Byron, built two still extant forts next to the lake and heldmock battles on it with a 21-gun ship. Despite spending largely, he later stripped the estate of timber and deer, in order to
Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 2 2011 53
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/BRIDGEMAN
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