Byron
Augusta's half-brother, George Gordon, Lord Byron, didn't meet her until he went to Harrow School and even then only very rarely. From 1804 onwards, however, she wrote to him regularly and became his confidante especially in his quarrels with his mother. Their correspondence ceased for two years after Byron had gone abroad, and was not resumed until she sent him a letter expressing her sympathy on the death of his mother, Catherine.
Not having been brought up together they were almost like strangers to each other. But they got on well together and appear to have fallen in love with each other. When Byron's marriage collapsed and he sailed away from England never to return, rumours of incest, a very serious and scandalous offence, were rife. Some say it was because of his fear of prosecution that Byron abandoned his country.
There is some evidence to support the incest accusation. The Honourable Augusta Leigh's third daughter, born in the Spring of 1814, was christened Elizabeth Medora Leigh. A few days after the birth, Byron went to his sister's house Swynford Paddocks, Six Mile Bottom, Cambridgeshire, to see the child, and wrote, in a letter to Lady Melbourne, his confidante: "Oh, but it is not an ape, and it is worth while" (a child of an incestuous relationship was thought likely to be deformed).
Read more about this topic: Augusta Leigh
Famous quotes containing the word byron:
“Constancy ... that small change of love, which people exact so rigidly, receive in such conterfeit coin, and repay in baser metal.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage-bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)