Lord Byron
GEORGE GORDON, sixth Lord Byron, was born in 1788. After schooling at Harrow, and university at Cambridge, he left on the Grand Tour of Europe and the East. On his return his mother died and he assumed full control of the family’s considerable estates. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815, but the marriage quickly soured. They had a daughter Ada. After the controversy of his divorce he settled in Italy, where he had a short-lived affair with Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Shelley’s wife Mary, which also produced a daughter, Allegra. Byron entered into a long-term relationship while in Italy with the married Countess Guiccioli, which proved the most comfortable liaison of his life by far. His daughter Allegra died of an unspecified complaint in an Italian convent in 1822. Byron’s belief in the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Turks caused him to fund their cause significantly, and take a part in the fighting, from 1823. He died of a fever during the Greek campaign in 1824.
