The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs

by

Doris Langley Moore

The Memoirs written by Byron between 1818 and 1821 formed a substantial though uncompleted book. They were produced in three batches, and consisted of over four hundred pages (a hundred sheets) of folio paper — some of it, according to Byron’s own description, very long and large. If it was the same as he used for certain compositions at this time, each page would probably have contained not less than three hundred words.

The theory that Byron’s friends and family were bent on the suppression of some evil secret, which they supposed he had given away, will not hold water for a moment when it is considered that some or all of the manuscripts were read by a numerous group of persons who took no vow of silence. These included among others William Gifford, Lord and Lady Holland, Richard Hoppner, Washington Irving, Lord Kinnaird, the Hon. Douglas Kinnaird, Lady Caroline Lamb (who alludes to them scathingly in her little-known novel Ada Reis), Thomas Moore, Lord Rancliffe, Lord John Russell, possibly Samuel Rogers, and certainly Mary Shelley, who was paid a hundred pounds for her recollections of them.

Byron wrote to John Murray (October 29, 1819): “If you like to read them,you may, and show them to any body you like — I care not. “ At various dates he suggested letting them be seen by critics of his conduct, and in August, 1822, he had a fleeting notion of publishing them while he was yet alive.

With Byron’s permission a second copy was begun by Dr. Williams, a friend of Moore’s, but as he had not sufficient application for the task, it was later continued by another friend, Dumoulin. After Dumoulin’s untimely death, the work was finished by a professional copyist, unnamed. The three men were employed successively on one copy, and there is unhappily no warrant for the idea that several were made. The copy and original were in John Murray’s hands at the time of Byron’s death.

Byron was one of the most notable and controversial figures in the Western world, passionately loved, passionately hated, his very name a storm center: no one who had known him would ever have the remotest possibility of forgetting him, least of all the man who would have to deal with the hundreds of problems he had left behind him his executor. And he had died at thirtysix in circumstances to draw upon him even more than the usual measure of public attention. A foreign people had gone into mourning for him.

Among the documents which his kinsman. Lord Sidney Osborne, had sent by express to John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s closest friend, was the hurriedly printed decree of the provisional government of Greece commanding that the Easter festival be suspended, the shops closed for three days, and general mourning observed for twenty days, beginning at sunrise the day after Byron’s death with the firing of thirty-seven minute guns. It was nearly a month since that melancholy tribute had reverberated along the swamps of Missolonghi. The news, though transmitted with all possible speed, could not come faster than sailing ships were able to carry it. Byron had died on the evening of April 19, 1824. The documents reached Hobhouse on May 14.

Hobhouse held a consultation with Douglas Kinnaird, Byron’s banker and trustee and holder of his power of attorney, and Sir Francis Burdett, another friend who had been concerned in business matters. Sir Francis agreed to break the news to Byron’s sister, Augusta Leigh; Kinnaird to distribute the letters from Greece to those most vitally affected, amongst whom was that very featureless Byron cousin. Captain George Anson Byron, R.N., the new lord. Kinnaird also made haste to get an accurate report to the press. Hobhouse wrote some hurried notes to members of Byron’s former London circle and, later in the day, followed up Burdett’s visit to Mrs. Leigh. She was “in an afflicting condition.”causing his own tears to flow afresh and uncontrollably. William Fletcher, who had served Byron as valet since the latter’s boyhood, had addressed a letter to her in Hobhouse’s care giving her. painfully, in ill-spelled groping phrases, with all the touching eloquence of a complete want of art, a description of her brother’s illness and death.

After it had been arranged with Captain Byron that he should go down to Beckenham in Kent and inform his cousin by marriage that she was a widow, Hobhouse was sadly reunited with Burdett and Kinnaird for dinner.

“We had a melancholy evening, recalling to mind the various excellencies of our dear friend.”

These three distinguished and well-meaning gentlemen did not confine their conversation to affectionate reminiscences. In their ardent resolution to protect the memory of the still unburied dead, they formed a plan to secure and destroy an important manuscript which only one of them had set eyes on, and about the value of which the prime mover Hobhouse (who had not read it) was by no means equipped to form any judgment. The steps necessary to this drastic and highhanded proceeding occupied a large part of the three following days.

IN THE meantime, there were expressions of an acute public and private sense of loss on every side. The newspapers, so often hostile, were full of eulogy, and even the lady at Beckenham who had spent eight years meditating on grievances was reported by Captain Byron to be “in a distressing state.” All these demonstrations gave a somber satisfaction to Hobhouse, who, during nearly half of his thirty-seven years, had coaxed, admonished quarreled with, fought for, and loved the object of them; had shared with him experiences so bizarre that they would have seemed farfetched in a novel; had seen him at his best, noble and generous, and at his worst, capricious and destructive as a fractious child.

And since the verdicts of men of questionable character whose knowledge of Byron was extremely limited have been so often quoted, it may not be irrelevant to consider the private summing up, of a man of unquestionable character, who had spent as long in his company as all the other commentators put together:

The Times of yesterday announced his death in a manner which is, I think, a fair sample of the general opinion of this event. The writer is, however, mistaken in saving that others may have been more tenderly beloved than Lord Bvron, for no man ever lived who had such devoted friends. His power of attaching those about him to his person was such as no one I ever knew possessed. No human being could approach him without being sensible of this magical influence. There was something commanding, but not overawing in his manner. He was neither grave nor gay out of place, and he seemed always made for that company in which he happened to find himself. There was a mildness and yet a decision in his mode of conversing, and even in his address, which are seldom united in the same person. He appeared exceedingly free, open, and unreserved to everybody, yet he contrived at ail times to retain just as much self-restraint as to preserve the respect of even his most intimate friends, so much f so that those who lived most with him were seldom, if ever, witnesses to any weakness of character or conduct that could sink him in their esteem.

He was full of sensibility, but he did not suffer his feelings to betray him into absurdities. There never was a person who by his air, deportment, and appearance altogether more decidedly persuaded you at once that he was well born and well bred. He was, as Kinnaird said of him, “a gallant gentleman.”

When every allowance has been made for the emotion under which such a passage was written, there is extensive testimony both from Hobhousc’s own diaries while his friend still lived and a most diverse assortment of other records that Byron did in fact have an extraordinary power of attracting and attaching people; but as is usual with those who enjoy this dangerous privilege, he also had an extraordinary power of attracting and attaching scandals. He not only appeared free, open, and unreserved, but he actually was so to an extent which gave a singular vividness to his communications: and. after a fairly complete severance from the fashionable and political circles of London in which Hobhouse himself had never ceased to mix, he had written his reminiscences. As if that were not indiscreet enough, he had annoyed Hobhouse intensely by making a practically unrestricted gift of them to the Irish poet, Thomas Moore. Being encumbered with debt, Moore had proceeded with Byron’s full approval to assign them to John Murray for two thousand guineas — a transaction Hobhouse chose to describe in these acrimonious words: “Lord Byron made a present of himself to Mr. Moore, and Mr. Moore sold his Lordship to the booksellers.”

It was this most valuable document which Hobhouse with reckless haste decided to have destroyed. His belief in his own mission to protect his friend’s posthumous fame, combined with his long-standing jealousy of Byron’s fondness for Moore, had blinded him utterly to the fact that such a measure would give detractors a firstrate start for any rumors they might care to set afloat, while even his admirers would feel that the revelations must have been deplorable.

With money which Burdett, Kinnaird, and he himself were ready to provide, Hobhouse could, if permitted, buy back the Memoirs; with moral indignation — the more persuasive because he so earnestly felt it — he could make the perfectly open and legitimate bargain between Moore and Murray seem reprehensible; finally, striking while the iron was hot and everyone in a state of tension, he could stir up Byron’s widow and sister to bring pressure to bear. He wrote to the one and went to sec the other.

That sister — or rather, half sister, the Hon. Augusta Leigh — had never seen the Memoirs, but Hobhouse, who broached the subject to her with urgency, was able to convince her that their destruction must be secured. She was a confused and malleable character, and, moreover, she had been subjected for years to an insidious undermining attack on her affection for her brother — a process giving rise to such anxieties that everything he did or said or wrote seemed fraught with awful possibilities. Like Hobhouse, she had been dismayed at his headstrong folly in persisting in the composition of Don Juan despite all sage counsels, and, like Hobhouse again, she deplored his association with Moore; so at a second interview she was prevailed upon to agree to an appointment for the purpose of receiving the manuscript as an object condemned. Since Byron’s wife had been legally separated from him, and his daughter was still in her infancy, Augusta was invariably treated as his next of kin.

Hobhouse had expected difficulties with John Murray, for it would be natural for a publisher who had in hand an asset of such great commercial potentialities to be resolved to guard it. He required a good deal from Murray: a promise to search out and destroy Byron’s indiscreet letters and papers immediately, though their literary and cash value was immense, and a further promise to hand over the Memoirs — all mounting up to a rather tall order. But instead of an antagonist, he found an eager ally; one who, for longer than Hobhouse himself, would be glad to take the blame — or, as he certainly supposed, the credit — of having been the chief actor in the drama. John Murray in fact was burning with a belief in his mission not less impassioned than Hobhouse’s own. How it had been ignited — whether spontaneously or at the prompting of Lady Byron’s friends — remains enigmatical.

Not that Lady Byron, any more than her sisterin-law, had read the Memoirs, though a very explicit offer had been made to her to do so by Byron, who had informed her that they contained a “long and minute” account of their married life and separation:

I could wish you to see, read — and mark any parts that do not appear to coincide with the truth. The truth I have always stated — but there are two ways of looking at it — and your way may not be mine. I have never revised the papers since they were written. You may read them—and mark what you please. . . . You will find nothing to flatter you — nothing to lead to the most remote supposition that we could ever have been — or be happy together. But I do not choose to give to another generation statements which we cannot arise from the dust to prove or disprove — without letting you see fairly and fully what I look upon you to have been — and what I depict you as being. If seeing this — you can detect what is false — or answer what is charged —do so —your mark shall not be erased.

But Lady Byron, whose calculating prudence had been a subject of remark some time before she had committed the one astonishing imprudence of marrying a highly strung poet, had very deliberately rejected the opportunity. Another woman might have been unable to resist the temptation to learn exactly how a husband whose bitter and eloquent verses disclosed to the world his sense of injury would set forth the mutual disaster of their marriage; but she had realized at once that she would be in a much stronger position if she refused to hear anything resembling a defense. It looked dignified and it baffled the vehement, communicative Byron. She had achieved an exemplary proficiency in this art of baffling.

LADY BYRON’S friends were not a whit less devoted than her husband’s and were honored with even more significant confidences; though unlike Byron, whose lack of reserve was obvious, she had a most discreet and guarded manner and gave the impression each time she offered revelations that they were wrung from her in spite of herself, and so she carried to her listeners the same conviction she always felt herself that she was pursuing a “policy of silence.” By the time of Byron’s death, there was a very substantial muster of people who had heard from her own lips the dreadful record of her year of married life, and who thought it grossly unfair for the other party to have left any reminiscences of his own on this topic.

Among these ardent supporters were Vice Admiral Sir William Hope of the Admiralty Board and his wife, lady Athlone. Sir William lost no time in applying himself to the urgent question: would Lady Byron’s representatives agree to repay John Murray the money Moore had been given for the Memoirs if they were handed over for burning? He had every reason to be optimistic, because he had been informed by an Admiralty secretary, John Barrow, who was familiar at 50 Albemarle Street, that Murray was full of readiness to cooperate with any members of Byron’s family who might wish to destroy his Memoirs, and it could not be doubted that the money to reimburse him would be raised, for Lady Byron was rich. Accordingly, two days after Byron’s death became known, Sir William called on her solicitor, G. B. Wharton, and not finding him at home dashed off a letter to him.

16 May 1824

My Dear Sir,
Having a most sincere esteem for Lady Byron, and considering how much she has already suffered, it would be a most cruel & lamentable circumstance, was She to undergo any further mortifications. It is to endeavour to prevent this happening, that I now commit to Paper a conversation I had this morning with Mr. Barrow one of our Secretarys. . . . You are aware, I believe, that the late Lord Byron wrote a life of himself & entrusted the Manuscript to Mr. Moore, under the injunction that it was not to be Published in his lifetime. In consequence of Pecuniary difficulties, this manuscript Mr. Moore disposed of (I think most fortunately) to Mr. Murray the Bookseller under the same injunction as to publication — that period having arrived, Mr. Murray naturally looked at it, but he found [it] written in language so horrid & disgusting, that he felt as a man of honour would do, & has refused the £2000 guineas [sic] he gave fort it [sic], from another in the Trade who at Mr. Moure’s request wanted to get it back, & yesterday he came to Mr. Barrow to state the circumstance, & to know if he could recommend him to any Relation of the Family to whom he might communicate these circumstances. Mr. Barrow did not happen to know any person but Mr. Wilmot Horton, to whom he recommended him to you [sic]. As 1 have not heard what has passed in that quarter, I am most desirous to give you this early information, and to conjure you not to lose one moment in seeing Mr. Murray, for from what Mr. Barrow told me, I am sure it would drive to distraction the amiable Lady B. was this [? unloosedj to the Publick in Print — Mr. Murray said to Mr. Barrow, that he wanted no Profit, & would give back (to be burnt I hope) this abominable manuscript to the Relations of the family upon being re-imbursed what he had advanced. . . .
Ever yours truly
Wm Johnstone Hope.

Besides the errors that may be attributed to haste, there are other curious features here not so easily accounted for. John Murray himself consistently disclaimed having read the Memoirs. How then can he have found their language “horrid and disgusting”? He was well acquainted with Byron’s family and had corresponded with Lady Byron since the separation. Why should he apply to John Barrow, a stranger to all concerned, for a recommendation to one of the relatives? Why seek Barrow’s introduction to Wilmot Horton, whom he already knew? Yet, if these were deliberate misrepresentations, Lady Byron’s lawyer was hardly the person to address them to, and we must conclude that the statements were made in good faith.

John Barrow is nowhere mentioned in the Narrative of the circumstances preceding the destruction of the Memoirs of Lord Byron as far as JIr. Wilmot Horton was cognizant of that transaction, composed within a fortnight by Wilmot Horton; but that he was very busy behind the scenes is evident from the lines to John Murray dated the same Sunday:

I enclose you a note f rom Sir William Hope, who is exceedingly interested in what concerns Lady Byron; and I have ventured to assure him that you will take no step hastily, and I have reason to believe that you have no other object than that of being indemnified for the money you gave for the manuscript. It would be well got rid of, if he would take it off your hands and consign it to the flames.

Before the morning was out he had also sent off a reassurance to the Admiralty:

My dear Sir William:
I have laid an injunction on Murray who, if I know him at all, will be ready to do what is right and what I advise him; and I am sure he wishes for nothing more than sheer indemnification for the Sum which he gave to Mr. Moore, which I believe was 2000 Guineas. I entirely agree with you that so infamous a document ought never to see the light except that of the fire, and that 2000 Guineas would be a cheap purchase in comparison to the pain and anguish the publication of it might inflict on poor Lady Byron and her friends. I am, my dear Sir William
very faithfully yours
John Barrow

These letters make it very hard to see who was taking the initiative in getting Byron’s work destroyed, The suggestion of burning it certainly seems to have originated with Sir William Hope, if we judge from Barrow’s phrase “I entirely agree with you"; but the Horton Narrative shows that, with or without Barrow’s influence, Murray was taking steps the day before any of the correspondence quoted here was in existence:

Mr. Murraycalled on Mr. Wilmot Horton on Saturday the 15th Inst, and for the 1st time informed him that lie had the memoirs of Lord Byron in his possession. He stated . . . that he had strong reason to believe, although Ire had never read them himself, that they were entirely unfit for publication — that he well knew the curiosity that would exist in the world on the subject, and that consequently as far as his pecuniary interest was concerned, he should probably gain much more than he had given for them either by publishing or disposing of them — but that he was perfectly w illing to place them in the hands of Lord Byron’s family without conditions. Mr. Wilmot Horton stated in reply, that he was taken entirely by surprise with respect to this communication — that he had no authority to act for the family of Lord Byron —but that he had no hesitation in pledging himself to Mr. Murray that ire should be indemnified for the Memoirs in question, upon placing them in the hands of the family of Lord Byron, and he requested Mr. Murray on no account to suffer these memoirs to leave iris possession, until after further communication whir him, with which arrangement Mr. Murray expressed himself entirely satisfied.

WILMOT HORTON could not have believed for an instant that Augusta Leigh, notoriously impecunious, was in a position to pay two thousand guineas to secure the papers. It was not, therefore, of her he was thinking when he pledged himself on behalf of the family, but of Lady Byron. The decision must nevertheless appear to be Augusta’s.

She was a cousin of Horton’s, and he sometimes acted as her spokesman on those occasions when, according to the code of the clay, it was unseemly for a woman to speak for herself. Normally this role was filled by a father, brother, or husband, but Augusta’s father, Captain Jack Byron, had long been dead, her surviving half brothers, the Duke of Leeds and Lord Francis Godolphin Osborne, generally kept out of Byron entanglements, and her husband, Colonel Leigh, was an idle and feckless gentleman who lived for horse racing, and no one ever expected him to show the slightest capacity for anything else.

Wilmot and his wife had been close friends oi Augusta’s, and she trusted them still, so far as she dared trust anybody, but unknown to her they had been privy since the breakup of the marriage to all that Lady Byron could tell them of her guilt and depravity, so they were not really well disposed. Like Augusta’s still more intimate friends, Thérèse Villiers and her husband, they were tacitly allies of Lady Byron’s. It was felt that Augusta never could show adequate remorse, and although she had done penances without number and abased herself to an extent that now makes profoundly uncomfortable reading, there was one gesture of submission she had refused to offer. With something almost like pride, almost like firmness, site had maintained several years before, when her brother had been expected to visit England, that she could not bring herself absolutely to shut her doors to him. This recalcitrance had not been forgiven.

The necessity of preventing any autobiographical writing of Byron’s from reaching the public might be supposed by Wilmot Horton to be a matter in which he could serve both ladies equally. Neither could wish the scandalous chronicle to circulate. Augusta was free from any fear that her brother would have betrayed her, but it was very plain that if he had written objectionably about his wife, the repercussions would be painful. Then there was the fact that Byron, always daring, had been more prone than ever in recent years to write blasphemies and indecencies. Besides Don Juan and the deplorable Cain, there was a case pendente lite at this very moment against the rash publisher of A Vision of Judgement, indicted as a seditious libel.

Augusta had rooms in St. James’s Palace and a place at court with emoluments she could not afford to renounce. She was not a brave or strongminded woman, and that she yielded to the various pressures that were brought to bear on her needs no recondite explanation.

A letter asking for the advice of her firmer, more self-reliant sister-in-law provides with the sharpness almost of caricature a picture of the writer — her contusion, weakness, silliness, prejudice, and the dangerous good nature which showed itself in a too ready desire to please and to placate. For lack of space it must be abridged:

Sunday Night

My dearest A — I know that you will forgive me for inflicting my perplexities upon you —& I feel most particularly anxious that you sd know them from myself -on Friday — during my first interview with Mr. Hobhoise — he expressed that now his first wish was to protect My poor Brother’s fame & then alluded to the Memoirs as a subject of anxiety —— I asked who had them he replied Moore—& told the story of a long squabble between Moore and Murray about them which I really could not from nervousness comprehend — however it ended in his being glad Moore had them, I sorry Murray had them not — having of one a good opinion & the other quite the contraryH—proceeded to say he did not know what to do — but must try to work on Moore’s feelings abt them, in which he appeared to think his Success doubtfulYesterday he came — said he had something to tell I should be glad to hear — that it was agreed— (& he produced a written paper with ye agreement stated in it) that Moore Murray Hobhousc & Wilmot Horton sd come here —Murray receive 2000 G from Moore & place them the Memoirs in Moores hand who wd resign them into Mine — “& I advise you Mrs. L to hum them in our presence ["] —— I started & said, but is Moore to lose £2000! who can make that up to him — upon which H flew into a fit of vehemence & never could I understand anything but that I must be a Great fool for Mot. instantly Seizing his Meaning — so I pretended I did — G said very well — but have you heard from Mr. Wilmot that he will tome — upon which I understood him to know it — he was to attend on your part — this arrangement was repeated in my presence to Gjeorge] B[yron] who probably may have told you of it — with ye addition of a suggestion that he might also be present — & that D Kinnaird had or wd advance the Money for Moore — when alone with George I exclaimed, “what ran I do?” for you may imagine my dearest A the horrid task assigned me much as I agree in the expediency of the destruction of this or any thing that may be a disgrace to poor Bs memory. . . .

I understand Mr. Moore says he will only resign them into My hands — if, at a proper time I am allowed any voice in the affair — (to which I do not pretend to have any right or claim) — but if I have, I am most irrevocably determined that not one single line or word shall ever be published, or not be burnt — & I only wish I had 3000 Gs to give Moore for them at this moment.

HOBHOUSE believing the Memoirs were under Thomas Moore’s control, had hurried to get him to an interview at Kinnaird’s house in Pall Mall in order, as he told Augusta, “to work on his feelings,”and this he did so successfully that Moore signed a paper, drawn up by Kinnaird. promising to surrender Byron’s gift to Augusta and let her do what she would with it - which meant, as he was well aware, what Hobhouse had decided she should do.

To understand the probable reason for Moore’s assent to Hobhouse’s astounding proposition, we must glance backward to early November. 1821. when Moore learned that two great bulwarks of his social life, Lord Lansdownc and Lord Holland, were united in disliking his transaction with Murray. Lord and Lady Holland had both been allowed to read tire manuscript and had found some comment adverse to Lady Holland in it. and that was what set off the unfortunate train of Moore’s misgivings. The disapproval of noblemen, and particularly ol these, to whom he was under many obligations, was unendurable to him, and lie had soon begun negotiating with Murray lor a new contract that would enable him to regain possession of the scripts.

In order to induce John Murray to turn what amounted to an outright purchase into a loan on security, Moore seems to have represented to him, misleadingly, that Byron was having second thoughts about future publication, Murray being much more likely to do a remarkably obliging thing for Byron than for Moore. What Murray believed may be given in His own words:

In November, 1821, a joint assignment of the Memoirs was made to me by Lord Byron and Mr. Moore, with all legal technicalities, in consideration of a sum of 2000 guineas. . . . Some months after the execution of this assignment, Mr. Moore requested me, as a great personal favour to himself and Lord Byron, to enter into a second agreement, by which I should resign the absolute property which I had in the Memoirs, and give Mr. Moore and Lord Byron, or any of their friends, a power of redemption during the life of Lord Byron. As the reason pressed upon me for this c hange was that their friends thought there were some things in the Memoirs that might be injurious to both, 1 did not hesitate to make this alteration at Mr. Moore’s request; and accordingly, on the 6th day of May, 1822, a second deed was executed, stating that, “Whereas Lord Byron and Mr. Moore are now inclined to wish the said work not to be published, it is agreed that, if either of them shall, during the life of tin said Lord Byron, repay the 2000 guineas to Mr. Murray, the latter shall redeliver the Memoirs.”

It is possibly this attestation which had led several biographers to state that, about the time of his mother-in-law’s death, Byron began to vacillate and, hoping for reconciliation with his wife, to wish he could reclaim what he had written about her. A number of entries in Moore’s Journal place it beyond doubt that he was resolved to ask for die new contract many weeks before January, 1822, when Lady Noel died, and at a time when Byron himself was vigorously defending Moore’s right to profit by the Memoirs and his own to have them posthumously published. Nor has anything ever come to light in Byron’s correspondence to indicate either that he regretted what he called his anticipated legacy to Moore or that he still had hopes of a reconciliation with his wife.

The only friends of Byron’s who had been actively worrying about the bargain were Holland and Hobhousc, not disinterested parties, and Douglas Kinnaird, who read the Memoirs without turning a hair but took strong exception to the original contract — the one by which “Mr. Moore sold his Lordship to die booksellers" — and who belonged to the anti-Moore faction of Byron’s friends.

Having demonstrated his anxiety to appease his exalted advisers, Moore had not the means to do anything further. The redemption of the pledge needed a large sum even measured by the standards prevailing today, when the pound has diminished to less than a fifth of the value it then had. His inability, after all the fuss he had made, to complete the act of repurchase must have been humiliating when he was confronted by Hobhouse and Kinnaird, whose disapprobation was patent.

Moore’s most persistent foibles were snobbery and the kind of defensive pride that is found chiefly in men who lack security. An Irishman in an epoch when the Irish were still an oppressed people, a grocer’s son who had magically won a foothold in the world where birth was usually indispensable to acceptance, his position was rendered still more vulnerable by his being poor — dismally poor compared with Hobhouse, a bachelor free from family cares, whose father was an affluent and indulgent baronet, or Kinnaird, a peer’s son with a partnership in a banking business. In consequence, he seemed obliged, the subject of money being raised, to make desperate gestures.

He had exposed all his weakness when, after his futile decision to reclaim the book, he had written in his Journal:

This is, I feel, over-delicate deference to the opinions of others; but it is better than allowing a shadow of suspicion to approach within a mile of one in any transaction.

“Over-delicate deference” must have been uppermost again when friends of Byron’s who were gentlemen by birth informed him what he, as a gentleman himself, ought to do now that Byron was dead. His assent was halfhearted, but it was not withheld.

He afterwards announced in the Morning Chronicle that he had “placed the manuscript at the disposal of Lord Byron’s sister, Mrs. Leigh, with the sole reservation of a protest against its total destruction — at least without previous perusal and consultation among the parties.” Hobhouse angrily challenged the existence of the reservation, and since Moore signed the paper it is manifest that he could not have made it with sufficient force; but that lie did at least attempt to make it is borne out by another entry in his Journal showing he had put forward arguments that to burn “without any previous perusal or deliberation . . . would be throwing a stigma upon the work which it did not deserve.” He had also told Wilmot Horton how great an injustice they would do to Byron’s memory “to condemn the work wholly and without even opening it, as if it were a pest bag.” Nevertheless he had somehow been brought to concede the foolish promise. When such words as “sacrifice” and “honorable feeling” were the favored currency, Moore had never let himself be outdone by anyone.

But within hours, or less, he realized that lie had gone too far and determined to retract. It is most ironical that he afterwards had to take almost the whole weight of public blame, because in reality his efforts to save the book were strenuous. Besides persuading Longmans, his publisher, to lend him money to buy the property back, and notifying John Murray of his intention, he managed within twenty-four hours to interview Samuel Rogers, Henry Brougham, Lord Lansdowne, and Henry Luttrell, all of whom were agreed that total destruction was uncalled for. Luttrell and perhaps Rogers had some knowledge of the contents of the alarming manuscript. They were both well acquainted with Byron and might be supposed to have his reputation at heart. Brougham on the other hand had been consulted on Lady Byron’s behalf in the separation, which must have seemed a good reason for hearing his counsels.

Then there were Doyle, acting for Lady Byron, and Horton, vaguely supposed to represent Mrs. Leigh. Moore succeeded in seeing them both, and after a Saturday and Sunday spent in weighty colloquies, he was able to write Hobhouse to the effect that these respectable men had concurred in a “modification” of the irrevocable course first proposed.

They had reached the conclusion that all parties should together “peruse and examine” the reminiscences and eliminate what was objectionable, “rejecting all that could wound the feelings of a single individual but preserving what was innoxious and creditable to Lord Byron.”

It was not a very satisfactory solution, but seen in perspective it had this merit — it would have given rise to such complicated and lingering disputes that time would have been gained for the outbreak of gentlemanly hysteria to subside. But Hobhouse, on receiving Moore’s note on Monday morning, was resolved not to be overborne and set forth without even breakfasting to remonstrate with the most accessible of his opponents, Henry Luttrell, whom he had known for years and who like himself lived in Albany Court.

On his way to Luttrell’s chambers, Hobhouse happened to meet Moore and, full of righteous anger, told him that “if the matter were ever publicly discussed, he must say what he thought of the whole transaction.” By playing fast and loose with his promise, Moore had increased the embarrassment of His situation, but he was nerved up now to make a stand.

The hour appointed for the final conference was almost at hand, and at Moore’s request Luttrell was invited to attend it. The engagement to meet at Augusta’s had been altered, and they forgathered in Hobhouse’s Albany rooms. Presently John Murray was announced, resolute for doing away with a sensationally interesting unpublished book as, almost certainly, no publisher in history has ever been before or since. So shocked was he when he heard Moore reiterate his suggestion for keeping at least part of the work that, having “sat down, and in a very determined voice and manner protested that the MSS should be burnt forthwith,” he launched into a speech of sheer heroics, which Hobhouse approvingly noted thus:

I do not care whose the MSS are; here am I, as a tradesman; I do not care a farthing about having your money, or whether I ever get it or not; but such regard have I for Lord Byron’s fame and honour that I am willing and am determined to destroy these MSS which have been read by Mr. Gifford, who says they would be damaging to Lord Byron’s name. It is very hard that I, as a tradesman, should be willing to make a sacrifice which you, as a gentleman, will not consent to.

This from a man who, two days before, had reminded Hobhouse that the sum due to him for redeeming the manuscript was not two thousand pounds, as written in the document Kinnaird had drawn up, but “two thousand guineas, with interest, and the collateral expenses of stamp, agreement, bond, etc.” was decidedly impressive; but Moore for the moment held out, even when accused by Murray of acting “anything but like a man of honour.” The tempers of Moore, Murray, and Hobhouse rose, while Luttrell “now and then put in a word, saying he could see no harm in reading the MSS.”

Mr. Hobhouse insisted very strongly on the impropriety of such a proceeding. Mr. Moore said that both Mr. Wilmot Horton and Colonel Doyle, friends of Lady Byron and of Lord Byron’s family, saw no objection to the perusal of the Memoirs. Mr. Hobhouse remarked that he could hardly bring himself to believe that; and Mr. Murray stated that those two gentlemen themselves were at this moment waiting at his house, in order to be present at the destruction of the Memoirs.

On hearing this, this whole party left Mr. Hobhouse’s rooms, and proceeded to Mr. Murray’s house in Albemarle Street.

THE six people who now met in the famous drawing room which had witnessed so many pleasanter gatherings fell by a natural division into the three pairs: Hobhouse and Murray, hot for destruction; Moore and Luttrell, who alone in that group knew what the book contained, anxious for at least its partial preservation; Horton and Doyle, swayed by Moore’s powerful arguments of the day before, yet on the whole favoring the solution that would appeal to Lady Byron.

What took place now was a full-scale altercation, Murray protesting that Moore was not legally entitled to recover the book, the agreement for which however could not be found; Hobhouse pressing the wishes of Mrs. Leigh; and Moore so ill-judging as to oppose him with the wishes of Byron. There was nothing better calculated to irritate a man who felt that he owned a proprietary right in Byron — who had conferred with him about his writings since their undergraduate days, interviewed his publisher, corrected his proofs, and brought out a substantial volume of notes to one of his works. To be told of Byron’s wishes on a matter both literary and personal by one whom he despised must have been an infusion of wormwood into the cup of his grief—a grief much deeper than the inveterately superficial Moore was capable of feeling.

He was provoked to retort with what he had already said in private to Augusta that Byron’s wishes had changed: at their last meeting in September, 1822, Byron had expressed uneasiness about his gift and had been restrained only by delicacy toward Moore from recalling it.

Moore did not believe Hobhouse, and the conflict reached a degree of bitterness that nearly led to a challenge. Even at the last moment, when the manuscript with the only copy that existed of it had been brought into the room and was about to be torn up and thrown into the flames, Moore “still continued his remonstrances, saying: ’Remember I protest against the burning as contradictory to Lord Byron’s wishes and unjust to me.' ”

By now a seventh person had joined the company, a boy sixteen years old, John Murray’s son, destined to be the third in the unbroken succession of John Murrays whose history as publishers begins in the mid-eighteenth century. He was introduced as the heir to the house, to share in what was recognized as a momentous proceeding. As a man of eighty he could still recall the violence of the quarrel between Moore and Hobhouse.

To put down the pretensions of Moore seems by this time to have become Hobhouse’s sole — as l think it was from the first his strongest — motive, for, when his Narrative is on the threshold of its culminating point, we find casually dropped into it this most significant passage:

Some one then asked whether or not the end proposed might not be answered by depositing the manuscripts under seals in the hands of some banker, in order to compare them with any spurious copy of the Memoirs which might afterwards appear. Mr. Hobhouse said he could see no objection to this proposal if Mrs. Leigh consented, but the proposal was overruled.

“Mr. Hobhouse could see no objection . . Then he was not opposed on principle to the preservation of his friend’s recollections, but merely, it would appear, determined that they. should not be under the jurisdiction of Moore.

The person who ventured by far the soundest idea that had yet been put forward was Wilmot Horton; and as Hobhouse was willing that they should pause and refer the suggestion back to Mrs. Leigh, we are left with John Murray and Colonel Doyle as the only possible advocates of instant burning, Luttrell having been from the first on the side of Moore.

If we accept the account contained in a letter to Horton a year later, Doyle may be ruled out. “I regarded myself,” he wrote, “only as a witness and not as a party to the proceeding.”

Persuaded as he was that His conduct had been meritorious, John Murray would not have been at pains to deny that the last word was with him; but for one who regarded himself only as a witness, Colonel Doyle’s behavior was curious. Hobhouse reports it thus:

Colonel Doyle then said to Mr. Moore “I understand then that you stand to your original proposal to put the MSS at Mrs. Leigh’s absolute disposal.” Mr. Moore replied, “I do but with the former protestation.” “ Well then” said Colonel Doyle, “on the part of Mrs. Leigh, I put them into the fire.” Accordingly Mr. Wilmot Horton and Colonel Doyle tore up the Memoirs and a copy of them, and burnt them.

Colonel Doyle’s intervention “on the part of Mrs. Leigh” was unwarrantable, seeing that he was only, according to his own claim, holding a watching brief for Lady Byron. Though his subsequent denial of being given any definite instructions by her may have been true, it is straining credulity rather far to imagine their having the discussion which sent him hurrying to London, after she had received Hobhouse’s urgent letter, without her once uttering an idea as to what the fate of the Memoirs ought to be. She had made her desire to prevent their circulation quite explicit in 1820, and must, one would suppose, have hinted an opinion in 1824. The expressions of satisfaction she wrote to at least two correspondents on hearing what had been done prove that Doyle was serving her loyally by putting the most drastic of all ends to the argument.

THE pages blazed, pages by the hand that had written Don Juan and also some of the finest prose of his century. Evidently under the impression that the holocaust was some sort of ritual, Wilmot Horton handed a batch of the papers to Hobhouse so that he might take his turn in feeding the fire. Pie declined, saying that only those empowered by Mrs. Leigh should do the work of destruction — a disingenuous excuse from the man who had said to her with so much emphasis: “Tow must burn

them.” He was writer enough to have a glimmering, if there were a lucid interval in his fever, that what was being consumed was something of Byron. As the leaves, torn by the hands of Horton and Doyle, blackened and crumbled in the flames, the familiar handwriting must, for a moment at least, have reproached him. If so, his aching conscience served but to make him cruel. He seemed to take a pleasure in every discomfiture that Moore subsequently experienced; and there were many.

The first, over and above the loss of the battle, was the arrival of a solicitor with a draft of the missing agreement, which fully confirmed Murray’s belief that, by neglecting to repay the loan during Byron’s lifetime, Moore had totally forfeited his ownership of the Memoirs; after all the high words he was forced to confess lamely that his memory had erred and that he had never properly read the documents.

Then came a crucial dilemma. Murray, as it turned out, had only burned his own property. He had had the satisfaction of making a grandiose speech declaring that he did not care about the money, and now he could do no less than support his words by refusing to have it repaid. Why should Moore, to whom the sum was much greater than it was to Murray, not take him at his word? But pride compelled Moore to argue that, when he had consented to give up the Memoirs, he had looked upon them as his own.

Hobhouse not only led the chorus of disapprobation for Moore’s vagueness in signing contracts without mastering their clauses, but implacably underlined in his Narrative Luttrell’s reminder, interposed just when it looked as if Moore would consent to let Murray bear the loss: “Recollect, Moore, you have had the money of Murray.” Thus urged, there was no other course for one on the defensive but to become more persistent; and Murray, in the customary manner of those who make fine speeches, had it both ways, gaining the credit of his magnanimous words while accepting back in full his two thousand guineas — with interest and the other items he had mentioned.

Still unsated, Hobhouse asked him before they dispersed to own “that Mr. Murray had acted perfectly well and honourably in the business,” to which Moore retorted, with a laugh that must have been rather a wry one, that he was like the Irishman who, when a judge inquired if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, exclaimed: “Oh nothing, except that by Jasus you’ve settled it all very nicely amongst you.” Still Hobhouse would not let it go, but went on telling Moore, in a jesting style that must have been unutterably galling, how much he had been in the wrong.

Not that any degree of courage on Moore’s part could have averted the ultimate folly once it was proved that he was legally dispossessed; too many wheels had been set in motion. But the fact remains that he had consented — though protestingly — to what was done while he still believed he had the right to stop it. “The conclusion cannot be resisted,” says his biographer, L. A. G. Strong, “that Moore failed his friend.”

He was determined, however, not to make an admission so damaging either in public or in the privacy of his own meditations, and on the following day, May 18, restored to something like equanimity by a happy meeting with ladies of the Royal Family, he wrote an afterthought to his account of the scene at Albemarle Street, reminding himself how Hobhouse said Byron had ultimately regretted having given away the Memoirs. “This if I wanted any justification to myself for what I have done, would abundantly satisfy me as to the propriety of the sacrifice.”

It was a spurious justification introduced as a mere postscript with the words, “I ought to have mentioned Had Byron’s wishes been genuinely in his mind, they would not have been the last consideration he alluded to.

BUT even the most incontrovertible proof that Byron changed his mind about whether the Memoirs were to be made public would not have been a justification for what was done with them, seeing that an intention to refrain from publishing a document is in no wise synonymous with an intention to destroy it, and neither Hobhouse, Moore, nor anyone who had known Byron was ever so dishonest as to pretend that lie had wished to recall his pages for the purpose of reducing them to ashes. On the contrary, all his references to them in letters and reported conversations are in a style which cannot but lead us to believe that their existence was a source of considerable satisfaction to him.

On this score testimony has come to light by a witness whose romantic and flowery mode of expression should not obscure the extremely valuable mass of firsthand evidence she has provided. This is the much underestimated Countess Guiccioli, author of two books on Byron, one of which has not yet been published except in the form of extracts. Writing the second work, La Vie de Lord Byron en Italie, in her old age and when a most sanctimonious code of morals prevailed, she was obliged to keep up a fiction that her relations with Byron had been platonic, but apart from this almost compulsory hypocrisy, her story, wherever it can be checked, proves reliable.

She recalls that when Byron gave Moore the Memoirs — that is, the first batch of them—at his villa on the Brenta in 1819, “he was beaming. His beautiful face seemed to say that he could resign himself to the injustice of the present in the certainty that these pages would one day do him justice, and that at the same time he was lightening the burden of a friend.” She goes on to comment with bitterness on the treacherous destruction of these writings, which, had they been allowed to survive, would have made impossible “the disgusting fable that has crossed the Atlantic,¹ because they contained down to the tiniest details what had passed between him and Lady Byron.”

At the date in question, Countess Guiccioli had not sufficient command of English to have read the Memoirs, but Byron must have given her some notion of their contents. “Down to the tiniest detail" tallies well with his own phrase about the description of his married life. She saw him constantly while he proceeded with the work, which he sent off to Moore in successive parcels, and she lived with him till his embarkation for Greece in July, 1823. There is one sole point on which all observers are agreed, and that is that he was little disposed to concealment of his feelings; if he had repented of his memoir writing, his daily companion would not have remained in ignorance of the fact.

We may securely conclude with her that he would never have sanctioned the irrevocable suppression of the life story to which he had so long applied himself, any more than he sanctioned the suppression of Don Juan, when a conclave of his friends pleaded with him not to print it.

That a group of responsible people should presume to destroy unread a major work by a man whom each of them held to be a genius may seem so strange as almost to defy credence. It is not surprising that the public assumed it was being protected (much against its will) from disclosures of surpassing wickedness; we only marvel that Hobhouse and Murray should completely have failed to see the immense injury they were indicting on the name they wished to glorify — injury crystallized in the following extract from the New Monthly Magazine:

h must be taken for granted that the Memoirs were utterly unfit for publication in any shape; and that Mr. Moore and Lord Byron’s other friends did not expurgate them only because they were incapable of expurgation.

The public were left unaware that, of the seven who saw Byron’s recollections consigned to oblivion, only two had read them, and theirs the voices that were raised in protest. The conclusions drawn by his detractors were inevitable; but if my synthesis of the various firsthand accounts has thrown any light on motives, the fantastic act can now be explained without any such sinister imaginings.

To sum these motives up, Colonel Doyle acted in accordance with what he presumed, having interviewed her, would be the wishes of Lady Byron. Wilmot Horton was also eager to be of service to her, and though he wavered and put forward sensible alternative proposals, he was not disposed to press them. He was ostensibly under directions from Byron’s nearest adult relative, and did not understand how completely she had been directed by Hobhouse.

Moore suffered the spoliation under duress because he was financially involved and dreaded in his vanity to be thought regardful of self-interest. Had it not been for his fatal snobbery, he might have played a part of real instead of meretricious honor, for he could see the points that Hobhouse and Murray had missed—the slur from which his friend’s memory would never recover. Luttrell was present only as a supporter of Moore. The position of these four participants, the willing and the unwilling, is not ambiguous.

Murray’s was more complicated. We must take into consideration his hearty dislike of Byron’s later works, and his having had such a deal of trouble over Don Juan and Cain that he may well have flinched from the prospect of bringing out anything more in, morally speaking, the same line. There was the report of Gifford, his trusted literary adviser, that the Memoirs were “fit only for a brothel,” and possibly he had also been influenced by his lawyer, Sharon Turner, who was opposed to his publishing Byron.

To these factors must be added his deep distress at Byron’s death and sincere desire to avert posthumous scandals, and the urgent representations of Lady Byron’s partisans. Nor should we leave out of the account his natural aptitude for a striking gesture. He was taking a stand unique in the trade of bookselling, and the same daring which had inspired him, in 1820, to buy for a huge price a work which could not be published till a man of thirty-two had died may have been exactly what brought him to the pitch of sacrificing it.

As for Hobhouse, he behaved as if he feared the explosion of grave secrets, but that is very unlikely, for he was well aware, and stated in his Journals, that many persons had already seen the manuscripts. Without any specific revelation in mind, he may well have dreaded indecency and a selfportrait in what Byron had described as “my finest, ferocious Caravaggio style” — a style that Hob-

house totally failed to appreciate. It might even be hazarded that, having been sharply rebuked for his efforts to demolish Cain and Don Juan, he was unconsciously resolved to demolish something. But no one who studies Hobhouse’s diaries and letters could doubt that, above all, he was impelled by an insensate desire for victory over Moore.

To have entrusted those pages to Moore with carte blanche to hand them round as he pleased and no stipulation that they should be shown to Hobhouse was one of the major follies of Byron’s life. Hobhouse was unsympathetic at this period to most forms of biographical writing, but he was by no means addicted to the destruction of documents. As Byron’s executor, it is actually what he kept when he had the opportunity forever of expunging it that amazes us. The book his friend had written would have been heavily censored, or its publication delayed for many years, but ultimately, his possessiveness once deferred to, Hobhouse might have proved as vigorous in protecting that ill-fated testament as he was in ensuring its oblivion.

Many years were to pass before Hobhouse would cease sniping in a peculiarly ill-natured manner at Moore. The next few days, during which the newspapers persisted in talking of the episode, were fraught with several occasions for disparagement. Though Moore had parted with a sum insanely beyond his means to pay for a measure which he had angrily opposed, and which had turned out after all to involve property not his own, Hobhouse could not bear him to be represented as having made any sacrifice. Lie viewed Moore’s situation with a ruthlessness none the less deadly because it was entirely cloaked from his own eyes in considerations of propriety and gentlemanliness.

Had he realized that Lady Byron would now be able to transmit to future generations her records of her matrimonial life in the certainty that she would be the sole authority, he might not have congratulated himself so warmly on having stifled forever the only voice that could make an answer —a voice too which lie always, publicly and privately, maintained was “true-spoken.” But there was none of Byron’s friends who guessed how busy his widow’s pen and tongue had been and would remain over the thirty-six years that lay before her.

For the use of the manuscript sources on which this paper is largely based, the author acknowledges with sincere gratitude the facilities granted to her by Sir Charles Hobhouse, Bt., and Mr. and Mrs. John Hobhouse (Journals of John Cam Hobhouse); Sir John Murray, K.C.V.O., D.S.O., and Mr John Grey Murray (Murray MSS); Professor Manara Valgimigli of the Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna (Countess Guiccioli’s MSS); and the late Lady Wentworth (Lovelace Papers).