Even before rumours of his affair with his half-sister spread, Lord Byron had a reputation for scandal. His lover Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. That did not stop women besotted with his poetry from sending letters, invitations to parties and requests for locks of his hair.
“I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war,” Byron insisted. Despite the breakdown of his marriage, he might have stayed in England, but the rumours of incest (probably true) and sodomy (also true) turned British society against him. The celebrated poet had become a monster.
In 1816 Byron went into exile. For seven years he roamed Italy, frequenting Venice’s carnival, taking lovers, and studying Armenian with monks. He then sailed to Greece to lend his support to the Greek fight for independence from Ottoman rule .
He died there, in Missolonghi, of a fever on April 19th 1824, aged 36. The Greeks, who adored him, kept his lungs and larynx in an urn; the rest of Byron was returned to England, against his wishes. (“Let not my body be hacked, or sent to England,” he had ordered.
) Westminster Abbey refused to accept a man of “questionable morality”, so he was buried at a local church in Nottinghamshire, near his ancestral home. Within a month of his death his remaining friends burned his memoirs, judging them too scandalous. Two centuries later, the poet is mostly recalled in the context of the Byronic hero: a dark, brood.