Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

I have as dispassionately as I could – disclosed my feelings … I loved you the first day, – nay before I saw you, – you loathed and heaped on me contumely and neglect till we were about to separate – Clare I love you and do what you will – I shall remain deeply interested for you. I think you are right in withdrawing your fate from mine – my nature has been perverted by neglect and disappointment in those I loved – my disposition is unamiable. I am sullen, savage, suspicious & discontented – I can’t help it – you have sealed me so.

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Somewhere behind the grief, the mortification and the posturing at Claire’s abandonment, however, Trelawny probably knew, as he suggests here, that she was right to keep their two fives apart. There seems no need to question the intensity of his feelings for her, and yet it is difficult to resist the sense that it was her history as much as herself that attracted him, or that his love was something that could flourish more easily in absentia.

This was something Claire, despite her genuine and lasting fondness for him, also recognized. ‘I admire esteem and love him;’ she wrote to Mary Shelley eight years later, when experience had damped down those passions that had ruined her life,

some excellent qualities he possesses in a degree that is unsurpassed but then it is exactly in another direction from the centre of my impetus. He likes a turbid and troubled life; I a quiet one; he is full of fine feelings and has no principles; I am full of fine principles but never had a feeling (in my life). He receives (every) all his impressions through his heart; I through my head. Che vuol? Le moyen de se rencontrer when one is bound for the North Pole and the other for the South.

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It is characteristic of Trelawny that at the same time as he was berating Claire for her inconstancy, he was consoling himself with other affairs, but without her or the circle that had gathered round Shelley and Mary, his life threatened to lapse back into the brainless rhythms of former days. On 22 November, he wrote half-heartedly to her of his plans. Byron’s boat, the Bolivar, which he had skippered, was laid up, but he had thoughts of shooting with Roberts and then sailing among the islands in the spring in the salvaged Don Juan. It was, he told her ‘a weary and wretched existence without ties,’ his life little more than ‘dying piecemeal’.

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Almost in spite of himself, however, there was a buoyancy about Trelawny that would always assert itself, and in Shelley’s death, too, he still had unfinished business. In January 1823, Shelley’s ashes had been deposited in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, but when Trelawny visited the place in the spring he found them in a public grave, ‘mingled in a heap with five or six common vagabonds’.

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His distress at this indignity was certainly genuine, and yet a letter of Keats’s friend, Joseph Severn – complaining of Trelawny’s cavalier attitude to a memorial design Severn had done for the tomb – underlines just how far down the road to recovery he had come:

There is a mad chap come here – whose name is Trelawny. I do not know what to make of him, further than his queer, and, I was near saying, shabby behaviour to me. He comes on the friend of Shelley, great, glowing, and rich in romance. Of course I showed all my paint-pot politeness to him, to the very brim … I made the drawing, which cost us some trouble, yet after expressing the greatest liking for it, this pair of Mustachios has shirked off from it, without giving us the yea or no – without even the why or wherefore. – I was sorry at this most on Mr Gotts account, but I ought to have seen that this Lord Byron’s jackal was rather weak in all the points I could judge, though strong enough in stiletto’s. We have not had any open rupture, nor shall we, for I have no doubt that this ‘cockney corsair’ fancies he has greatly obliged us by all this trouble we have had. But tell me who is this odd fish? They talk of him here as a camelion who went mad on reading Ld. Byron’s ‘Corsair’.

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With the help of Severn, Trelawny had Shelley’s ashes disinterred and reburied in a ‘beautiful and lonely plot’

(#litres_trial_promo) near the pyramid of Caius Cestius. He added an inscription from The Tempest to Leigh Hunt’s simple ‘Cor Cordium’, and planted the grave with ‘six young cypresses and four laurels’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In a gesture which, in 1823, must have had more to do with a clinging sense of identification than inspired prescience, he then had his own grave dug next to that of Shelley – ‘so that when I die,’ as he reported back to Mary in a burst of necrophiliac chumminess,

there is only to lift up the coverlet and role me into its – you may he on the other side or I will share my narrow bed with you if you like.

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But if Shelley was gone Byron was still left, and for all the talk of death and world-weariness, the sniff of celebrity Trelawny had enjoyed in Pisa had been too intoxicating for him to face oblivion now with any equanimity. Throughout his life Trelawny would always ride the shifting thermals of their literary fame with effortless ease, but in truth it had always been the ‘sun’ rather than the ‘glow-worm’ that had warmed his youthful imagination into life, and it was to Byron now that he turned in search of a new role.

He was fortunate, too, in his timing, as events in both his and Byron’s lives now freed them from the chains of their Italian idleness. Trelawny was still writing long letters to Claire, but the first intensity of his attachment had cooled to something more honest, more in keeping with what they both wanted and needed of their friendship. In a letter written to her from Rome in April 1823, he told her that she had misunderstood his meaning, that he had never intended her staying with him. The following month he was more explict. ‘Now to proceed to your most urgent questions, which I have hitherto avoided,’ he wrote in reply to a lost letter:

As to my fortune – my income is reduced to about £500 a year – the woman I married having bankrupted me in fortune as well as happiness. If I outlive two or three relations – I shall, however, retrieve in some measure my fortunes – so you see, dear Clare how thoughtless and vain was my idea of our living together: as Keats says

‘Love in a hut, with water and a crust,

Is – Love, forgive us! cinders, ashes, dust;’

Poverty and difficulties have not – or ever will – teach me prudence or make me like Michael Cassio a great Arithmetician – all my calculations go to the devil – in anything that appeals to my heart – and this kind of prodigality has kept me in troubled water all my days: as to my habits – no Hermit’s simpler – my expenses are within even the limits of my beggarly means – but who can have gone through such varieties of life as I have – and not have formed a variety of ties with the poor and unfortunate; – I am so shackled with these that I do not think I have even a right to form a connection which would affect them – what abject slaves are us poor of fortune – enough of this hateful topic.

It is a source of great pleasure to me, your friendship – to be beloved – and Love – under whatever circumstances – is still happiness – the void in my affections is filled up – and though separate – I have lost that despairing dreary feeling of loneliness – I look forward with something of hope.

I am anxious to get to sea. Write to me here – and let me know your address – I do not like to importune you about writing. There are some pleasant women here, which induces me to go more into society than usual ….

Dear, I am not in the vein for writing –

Your unalterably

Attached

Edward.

May 15 1823

Florence

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At the time of this letter Trelawny probably had nothing fixed in mind when he spoke of the sea, but over the next months the unspoken possibility of joining Byron on an expedition took on a solid form. From the very start of their acquaintance there had always been desultory talk of travel in one direction or another, and when the idea of fighting for Greek independence suddenly became more than talk in the early summer of 1823, Trelawny was ready to join the crusade. ‘I wish Lord Byron was as sincere in his wish of going to Greece – as I am,’ he confided to Mary Shelley,

every one seems to think it a fit theatre for him … at all events tell him how willingly I will embark in the cause – and stake my all on the cast of the die – Liberty or nothing.

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By the early summer of 1823 Greece had been at war with Ottoman Turkey for just over two years, drawing men from all over Europe and America to a country that had long held a special place in the Western imagination. From the day in March 1751 when James Stuart and Nicholas Revett landed at the port of Athens to make the first accurate drawings of its ruins, travellers, painters, scholars, dilettanti, soldiers and architects had all made their way out to Greece, sketching and plundering its sites, charting its battlefields and searching the modern Greek’s physiognomy for some trace of its ancient lineaments, some link between the Greece which languished under Turkish rule and the land that had produced the poetry of Homer and the sculpture of the Acropolis.

It was in 1809 that the twenty-one-year-old Byron had first followed in this tradition, travelling with his long-suffering Cambridge friend John Cam Hobhouse through Ali Pasha’s Albania to Delphi, Athens, and on to Smyrna, Ephesus and Constantinople. In the years before this ‘pilgrimage’, Byron had gained a minor reputation in England as an aristocratic poetaster and satirist, but it was with the verses of ‘Childe Harold’, published on his return, that he not only made his own name but cast this old Philhellenism into the form that was to galvanize Romantic Europe into action.

Oh, thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,

Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye,

Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,

In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!

What marvel if I thus essay to sing?

The humblest of the pilgrims passing by

Would gladly woo thine Echoes with his string,

Though from thy heights no more one Muse will wave her wing.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,